(IC) Chapter 330 - Behind Old Doors

Chiara magnetized the gates.

They scraped the floor in a shearing grind, as though they hadn’t moved in decades.

Stepping through, they sent EM waves towards the Xayen lighting system. It flared awake at once, flooding the small room in clean, steady light.

The place was plain. Almost bare. No ornate engravings, no intricate devices like the others had held. Just an old wooden chair, a dusty desk, and scattered scrolls—some neatly wrapped, others half-written—an odd contrast to the polished EM capsules they’d seen before.

“Not much of a lab,” Alonso muttered as he stepped in, scanning what little there was. “Feels more like a writer’s retreat.”

“A pretty extreme one,” Lukas said, drifting toward the desk with a grin. “Like some sort of palace of solitude.”

“These notes… it’s not written in Xayen,” Chiara murmured as she bent over the half-written scroll. Scrambled lines trailed into nothing, a blot where dried blood had marked the page.

“Nor Ajnal, nor Azcoyatl…” Lukas added, easing one of the dusty scrolls open. “Encrypted. Whoever wrote them thought sealing themselves in the heart of a mountain in the middle of nowhere wasn’t paranoid enough. Makes me want to know what’s inside even more.” He shot Chiara a grin. “Think you can crack it?”

“I’m on it,” she said. “Let me read them all first. It’ll be easier.”

They passed her scroll after scroll. She barely needed more than a glance at each.

When the last was in her hands, the room grew quiet. Ayu wandered along the walls, her finger tracing the dust, muttering to herself about how much of a freak someone had to be to hole up in a place like this. The thought made her shiver.

“Got it,” Chiara said less than a minute later, eyes bright. “The writing’s layered. The characters aren’t the data, they’re just placeholders. What matters is the geometry—the length of each line, its angle, and its position relative to the paper’s centroid. Each of those acts as a coordinate in a three-axis system. Together they generate a phase pattern that only resolves under EM readout. It’s essentially analog signal encoding, hidden in plain text.”

“Cool,” Lukas said with a blink. “So what does it say?”

“It’s… a diary of sorts,” Chiara answered, her gaze moving over the scattered writings on the dusty desk. “A diary of the creator of the Xok’al.”

Her words changed the air in the room. Silence fell sharp, eyes narrowing, waiting for her to go on.

“A rough translation into English would read something like this.” Chiara sent out a pulse, carrying the decrypted entries to the others.

***

First Entry:

They don’t understand.

Our path is narrow, brittle, a cage disguised as progress. The beastmen—failures, every one of them. And now the council whispers of yet another path, another detour, as though walking in circles will ever break the wall.

All paths are limited. The world itself is the limit.

The Sun God. The Winged Serpent. Chains dressed as divinity. Do they smile upon us as the prophets claim… or do they fear us? Do they press their hands upon our heads not to bless, but to hold us down?

I will not bow.

Second Entry:

Finally. At last. It breathes.

Not beast. Not man. Something balanced between—Pillar and body, mind and flesh. An existence that devours, that learns, that grows sharper with every breath.

Weak. Pathetically weak. Yet in its frailty lies promise. A seed, small but there. Potential.

How do I make them see? How do I force their old, blind eyes open?

I must rise first. They only hear power. They only obey strength. I need resources, more than this pitiful allotment. I need the High Council. And when I stand before them, I will show them what a true creation looks like.

Third Entry:

The project advances. Beautifully.

I have perfected the genetic code. Line by line, base by base. And there—yes, there!—the correlation revealed itself. The more tails, the further the threshold bends. Balance still holds, even as strength climbs. Why? Why tails? No answer yet, only patterns.

The first three-tail has emerged. Stronger than a soldier. Faster. Hungrier.

It is only the beginning. I feel it in my marrow.

Still, caution. Eyes are on me. I speak little. I show less. They need not know how far this path runs beneath their feet.

Not yet.

Fourth Entry:

Four.

No further. No matter what graft, splice, or sacrifice, four tails is the ceiling. A wall I cannot breach. I have bled resources dry, yet still it stands.

The Council mutters. They question. Parasites in robes, clinging to their own swollen egos, chanting their hollow mantras of “self-growth.” They refuse to see. They cannot admit the truth—we are the ones bound.

Our race has peaked. Shackled by gods. Cursed to stagnation.

But my creations… my children… they are free. They carry no burden of prophecy, no chains of divinity. They will grow where we cannot. They will climb where we have fallen.

And if I must strip this empire bare to feed them… I will.

Fifth Entry:

Brilliant. Brilliant! The answer was so simple—so obvious—yet I was blind.

A seed cannot emerge perfected. It must struggle. It must fight. Only through hunger and time does potential unfold. The first fifth-tail has proven it. A miracle, a masterpiece—its power gnaws at the edge of our limits, and it is still young.

They thrive on prey. On blood. On us.

I laugh at the irony. We, the masters, reduced to fodder. And yet—what better food is there than ourselves? Soldiers line up for war, priests preen in temples, metals gleam in vaults. All of it, all of it, fuel for their ascent.

The stronger the prey, the greater the leap. Imagine—imagine what one might become if it fed upon a High Priest… or a Dark Star…

I am tempted. Oh, how tempted.

Sixth Entry:

They know.

Perhaps I lingered too long, savouring the thought of Council blood, instead of seizing it outright. No matter. It is done. The six-tail rises, and with it, the price is paid. I would pay it again a thousand times.

They are perfect. No—beyond perfection. They have breached the ceiling of our kind, and still they climb.

Yet something unforeseen has bloomed. A resonance. Their minds, once singular, now braided together, all threads feeding into the six-tail. The swarm obeys, but it is not obedience—it is communion.

And when it looks at me… I feel stripped bare. A specimen under its gaze.

It understands.

It understands everything.

Seventh Entry:

All is gone.

The old ones, the frail husks of the Council, carried fire in their marrow I had underestimated. Their resistance was fierce… but futile. The swarm tore through them, flawless, inexorable, just as the six-tail commanded.

The Xayen are finished. The empire lies gutted. Yet not utterly erased. Survivors remain—chosen, preserved. I wondered why, until the truth came upon me like dawn.

They are food. Livestock. Seeds. The swarm tends them, prunes them, lets them rise again into future empires… only to harvest them when the time is right.

And still I marvel. Such patience. Such design. Their destruction is not chaos—it is art. Their creation is not accident—it is will.

Beautiful.

Last Entry:

I… I was blind. All this time, blind!

The plan was never just to grow the swarm. Not the soldiers, not the hive. That was only scaffolding, a shell, a mask. Their true design… it is deeper. Greater. Terrifying. Beautiful.

The corpses piled high, the rivers of marrow, the endless harvest of flesh and orbs—it was never waste. It was food. All of it, food for something greater.

The six-tail was never the end. It is only the womb.

The swarm itself… is building their god.

A god that will rise not in a single breath, but through iteration after iteration—birth, death, birth again. Each cycle cutting away imperfection, sharpening the design, feeding only on the finest: the Head Prophet, the Council, the Dark Stars. Every mouthful a refinement. Every slaughter, progress.

It is already forming. I can feel it breathing beneath the flesh of the world. Seven tails… seven! The number sings in my skull, a hymn to absolute balance, to absolute dominion.

Perfection. Not promised by gods, not cursed by them. Made. Crafted in bone and blood and ash.

And it lacks only one final piece.

The last offering: me.

To be consumed. To be unmade. To be folded into that rising god, polished and reforged through endless cycles of birth and ruin over centuries until no flaw remains… there is no higher honour!

So I carve these last words, my hand aflame, trembling not with fear but with ecstasy.

For my creation is birthing their god—our god.

And now I too… I too will be swallowed, broken, perfected.

I will not end.

I will become.

***

Silence pressed down as each of them finished processing Chiara’s signal. The weight of the notes lingered in the air.

Alonso’s gaze was heavy as the realisation sank in.

“So… they’ve always been there,” he said slowly. “The six-tail… watching us?”

“What!? But then why haven’t they shown themselves?” Ayu frowned. “If they destroyed the Xayen Emp—oh, ok, yeah, I just re-read that part. For food. Damn.”

Lukas exhaled sharply. “So it seems. But it’s implied they can’t just roam for centuries. Higher energy demands, stronger forms… they’d need some sort of hibernation, like bears. Only, picture a bear that thinks like a human, moves like a swarm, learns like some super AI, and farms entire empires for food.” He gave a dry chuckle, though his eyes stayed distant. “Yeah… the Xok’al may be a bit more impressive than I gave them credit for.”

“The Great War was their first harvest,” Imani said after a moment, voice steady, expression grave. “They took what they needed, then retreated to their nests.”

“But why retreat?” Wang asked, brow furrowed. “Why let empires rise again? Why not enslave mankind as cattle outright?”

Lukas tilted his head, almost smiling. “What happens to cattle if you keep them penned in? Do they grow stronger? Do they strive? Would you chase power, fight to the edge of your soul, if you knew it was pointless—if your enemy was something you could never threaten?”

“Even on modern Earth, simple cattle are shown to give better quality yields under better conditions. And the Xok’al need not just quantity, but quality,” Alonso said, remembering the push in Australia for free-range herds and all that.

Ayu folded her arms. “So the whole Ajnal, Azcoyatl, and beastmen—just free-range cattle? Living fat, happy, and strong until they come back to butcher them? That’s really messed up.”

“It’s optimal,” Chiara corrected quietly. “Stress and freedom produce higher ceilings. By letting them think they were independent, the Xok’al harvested civilizations at their peaks rather than their lows.”

“Wait… did you just say harvested—as in the past?” Alonso frowned, caught on her wording. “When? The Great War?”

Chiara fixed her eyes on him. “Why would we assume this is the first cycle?”

The realisation struck Alonso like a weight, and the others followed, silence pressing in. Only Lukas seemed unsurprised.

“The Xok’al are certainly smart enough to know how to bury history,” Chiara said, her voice calm. “Leave only villagers—no kings, no generals, no priests. Just enough to restart the cycle, stripped of memory. Or worse, leave behind people they’ve selected, reshaped to play the roles they require. Survivors as seed stock.”

Her hand hovered over the dusty scrolls as she pieced it together aloud. “That way they reset the experiment endlessly. Civilizations rise, push to their maximum potential, and then—harvest. Erased. Replaced. Repeated.”

She exhaled through her nose, the weight of it sinking in. “We might not be in the first set. Maybe before the Ajnal, Azcoyatl, and beastmen there were others. Layers of civilizations no record remains of. Centuries of cycles. Maybe… millennia.”

“…like some Matrix shit,” Alonso muttered, the thought hitting hard. “Not a scripted stage by The Tower. A scripted stage by the fucking Xok’al.”

“What a plot twist, huh,” Lukas said, trying to ease the weight with a crooked grin. “Well. Let’s see what we can do about it.” He turned to Chiara. “I’m assuming there’s more in those notes than just the diary, right?”