Chapter 266: Workaholic Recovery Center :)

Chapter 266: Workaholic Recovery Center :)

When Mercury woke up, he found himself sitting in a hot springs, with a towel gently draped across his cloak, like a soft, warm, heavy blanket. Blearly, he blinked open his eyes, getting greeted by a flit of notification he quickly waved away, noting to check them later. Instead, he looked around himself.

And found… snow?

The air was pleasantly chilly. Enough so to make the water steam in the cold. It made him want to sink further into the bath, which was interesting. His aversion to water had reduced as he evolved his species further, but to feel like he desperately wanted to sink more was new.

“Ah, good morning, sir,” someone greeted him. It was a squeaky, quiet voice, and Mercury turned to face it. 

He found a rat.

A pristine, brown and black coated rat, with brushed fur that wore an elegant butler outfit. It stood on its hind legs, holding a silver platter stacked with tiny towels and bars of soap. Mercury blinked once, then twice, and when the rat didn’t vanish. He was forced to accept that it was, indeed, real.

Why exactly was he in a hot spring being tended to by a rat butler? 

Wistfully, he sighed, then shook his head. “No, I’m quite alright, thank you. Uh, where exactly is this?”

The rat looked at him and tilted its head. “Sir, this place does not yet have a name. In fact… ah, this might be easier to show you.” And then, the brown-black butler reached forward and tapped the air. Mercury felt one of his notifications ring in response, apparently resonating with relevant information. He opened it.

[The individual has altered the wandering Rift Sloth. Full integration into Chronagen completed. Parasitism inverted to symbiosis. Created the world’s first wandering interdimensional relaxation resort. Designation pending, temporary name: “Workaholic recovery center :)”.]

 “Oh you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Mercury said in disbelief. Then he snorted, and a moment later, he laughed. “Hahaha! Workaholic recovery center. With a smile? How do I pronounce :)?” he asked

“Just like that, actually,” the butler nodded along. 

Mercury just stared, then laughed again, then closed his eyes. He remembered everything, of course. At this point, it was harder for him to forget anything than to keep it in mind, really. He remembered what he’d done, how he’d changed this place very actively. How he’d seen that there was, perhaps, something good to be gained from here.

And then he’d made it real. In perhaps the greatest feat of weaving he had ever performed, he’d simply altered the base nature of a realm. Something that was more a dimensional tear, a wound on the world, had been turned into a working agent of good. Something to make people just a little happier when they needed it most.

For a brief moment, he glimpsed at the truth of this place again, and saw the way he had woven its mechanics. It was a detection mechanism he’d somehow made in a flow state, and looking at it again… he didn’t understand half of it. But it looked incredibly robust, so that was pretty cool.

The real question was how in the heck he managed that??

[Your Skills and Abilities have levelled up! <Greater Perceptions lv. 3 -> 4>, <Lucidity lv. 1 ->2>, <Oceanic Consciousness lv. 8 -> 9>, <Truth lv. 5 -> 6>> , <Unravel lv. 2 -> 3>]

And that was the answer to that, he supposed, giving a small smile. There was also an intrinsic understanding there that he had not quite had before, about rezil. Resonance.

It was the alignment of the purpose of a world with his own. An understanding that allowed him to meld his vision with its. There was a softness to it, one built on mutual understanding. Rezil, unless taken to its limits, would not allow him to turn one thing into something entirely different. Their concepts, their ideas, still had to be aligned.

Sloth and relaxation were, apparently, close enough, in a way. It was like… taking a trip through the dictionary, hopping from synonym to synonym, until finding a suitable one. Rezil, in a way, was using the powers of a thesaurus on a world.

Again, Mercury snickered at the thought, sinking further into the water. He was still somewhat surprised that these mental abilities he was cultivating didn’t get properly recognized by the system. There was some synergy between his ystirs and <Multitasking>, of course, but it was that: synergy.

One enhanced the other, didn’t describe it. But the system was meant to describe his capabilities in full. So, what did that mean for his mind? Was the system unable to quantify it? Was it in a hidden section he had yet to discover?

“Appy, can you summarize my current progress in the mental disciplines I am aware of?” he requested quietly, thoughts bubbling away.

[Of course.]

=

[Ystirs: 128/64/32/16/8

Zejyn: 5, Cascading

Rijn: Malleable, Adamant, Anchored

Ihn’ar: Effortless, 3rd Veil

Rezil: Alteration, Concept Synchronized]

=

Mercury blinked at the screen. The numbers were interesting, because he did notice that every time he split his mind again, it meant that he had to grow further. There were five entries for his ystirs, and five parts he could split his mind into… Surely, that wasn’t a coincidence. 

So, every time his mind got twice as strong as before, he could split it into another part? And each part could hold cascadingly fewer sub-processes. How interesting… And, of course, since “cascading” was noted in the screen, he could change it.

The rat butler smacked him on the head with a little roll of towel.

“Sir,” the rat said, “you specifically created this dimension for relaxation. I will have to ask you to cease your speculation on how to strengthen your mind.”

“Surely training can be part of relaxation. Some people go to the gym recreationally, and it’s good for recovery from stress,” he argued.

The little rat, somehow, managed to furrow its brows. “I am unsure whether that argument holds,” it said slowly. “But I suppose if you do not feel inherent dimensional resistance, what you are doing is fine.”

“Inherent dimensional resistance?” Mercury asked curiously.

Squeaking with joy, the rat-butler bobbed its head. “Oh yes indeed. This spa is meant for relaxation, after all. To do something antithetical to that would be met with distaste from the realm.”

Mercury blinked. A place that made it hard not to rest properly. Yeah, he could see how some people could use this.

A moment later, Ruvah bumped her head into his side. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” the elemental said - woven from steam rather than ice, for once. Mercury blinked at her ghostly outline, trying to get his eyes to focus on her. Which they promptly did, capturing each detail of the smokey form, grasping its edges and cohesiveness in a single passing moment.

“Good morning?” Mercury asked, unsure.

“You slept a while,” Juno supplied helpfully, gracefully emerging from the water. Her fur was soaked, its usual light-grey stained a darker shade. The wet fur hanging from her face did make her look a little grumpy, but her tone betrayed the joy. She, too, seemed pleased with this place - if a little on edge.

“How long would that be?” he asked. 

Juno tilted her head back and forth, offering a wry smile that looked more than a little terrifying, baring her fangs. “Oh, a few days, nothing more.”

Mercury sighed, tilting his head back to stare into the sky, alight with fireflies and paper lanterns. “Zyl is gonna kill me,” he mourned, his breath misting in the air. “I needa get home.”

“I am not going to kill you, Mercury,” the dragon said, opening a door from a nearby sauna and stepping out. He wore a towel wrapped around his waist and a loose, white shirt. It his his muscles and skin, but did nothing to hide his handsome face or enchanting voice. Mercury just stared at him for a few seconds.

Smiling at the attention, Zyl quickly covered his body in a sheen of fire. All the sweat evaporated, and the salt boiled away, removing any lingering grime. Then, he sat down on the edge of the hot springs, dangling his feet in the water, running one hand through his own hair, and nestling another in Mercury’s fur.

The warmth of his hand was a grounding, easy weight. “How did you get here?” Mercury asked.

Zyl smiled more widely. “Oh, well. Your new resort made quite a light show of announcing itself when you finished it up. So, we went to check it out.”

“... Who’s we?” the mopaaw asked hesitantly.

With a wry chuckle, Juno responded. “All your friends, pretty much. And the city council. A few bakers… who Avery overworked,” she noted. 

“Is there no gender separation?” he asked.

“There are gender specific springs, sir,” the rat-butler helpfully provided, “but the majority are unisex. This is a place for relaxation, not lechery, and we trust our guests to uphold this, lest the realm itself discard them.”

Once more, Mercury marvelled at how… resourceful realms were. He really just had to give a nudge in the right direction, and they did all the rest. The weave was really just surprisingly robust. 

He tilted his head, then smiled faintly. Actually, he thought, that might be true not just of the weave and realms like this one. It might just be true of life in general. People were tougher than the world gave them credit for. Give them the opportunity to do good, and they usually would.

Well, not everyone, of course. Some people needed more opportunities to learn, or to unlearn their instinctive cruelties. There would always be idiots, but at the end of the day… They were all people. Most of them doing their best, or at least putting forth an effort to live decent lives. 

That was a lesson that Chronagen told him that would have been harder to learn back on Earth. Here where everything was reigned by desire - where people could realize abilities simply by wanting them enough, by trying hard enough, there was a strange harmony. People tended to, generally, help each other.

Yeah, things could get crappy. There were wars and famines, fires and death. He’d met plenty of scumbags who desired only to break others down, but if he looked at Stormbreaker, the vast majority of the population was just decent people. They shared food, they built houses, they lived their lives with each other.

People would help people.

It was always that way. Hating concepts or ideas was easy, hating an abstract idea of something bad, but when face to face with an actual person, cruelty was more rare. Oh, it still existed, of course, but there was something disarming about simply facing another person. Someone with just as much kindness, with just as much patience.

Mercury sighed and leaned back for another few moments. He breathed in the cold air, and sank into the warm water. In the distance, he heard Avery’s laugh. He heard Lucia splash Yvette with water, and the merciless fight that ensued. Yasashiku, who got up out of a pool and instantly complained about the construction of a stone foundation, hammering away at it in only a towel.

He heard Alice dangle her legs in a tree, looking at Breeze and Ellen having a small dinner. Marcel and Bael laid on a blanket, with Kaga using her naginata to slice some bread, staring at the night sky. The sky which, Mercury noted, was identical to that of Earth. He recognized some of the star constellations - though his memories of back then were hazy, compared to the more recent ones.

In the time spent on Chronagen, he’d become a lot more present. More mindful, literally and figuratively. He didn’t forget anymore. He lived in the moment. And there was something wonderful about that.

For a few more seconds, he allowed himself to find that relaxation. To listen to the faint noises that his friends and acquaintances made. To Jirluc, carefully making sure his spear wasn’t rusting. Larash, who had somehow convinced an old man to let her benchpress him. Foss and Nira, Gilah and Esmeya, captain Rondo and Akuhl.

Gently, Mercury smiled at hearing them all. He only caught glimpses, and didn’t pry. Instead, he closed his eyes. They all lived their lives, and he lived his own. Sometimes, like tonight, they’d meet. They’d share a few moments, maybe even days. Enjoy the companionship… and then move on.

There was a bit of ephemerability to life in that way. People came and went. Reconnected and grew apart. Sometimes that was sad, and sometimes that was lovely. Keeping his eyes closed, Mercury listened to his own heartbeat, and the way that his connections with the world kept changing.

Every passing day, things were a little different. And that was alright. 

Taking a deep breath, Mercury let the moment linger.

- - - 

Once it was over, he rose from the bath, dried himself off with a momentary flicker from the Storm’s Raiment. Then he took a single, long step outside of this realm. 

<Voidwalker> triggered. He was awash in the Nothing that laid between worlds. A thrum of nonexistence so complete it should have swallowed him whole. Full of leviathans that weren’t real, ready to devour him. 

And yet, he didn’t feel too bad. Sure, it was a twisted inversion of what life was, but his <Truth> held strong. He maintained his sense of self, even when the Void wanted to swallow all that and reduce it to a base state of unconsciousness. Instead, he simply stood and waited.

He watched.

Seeing worlds from the outside was a rather bizarre experience. He saw Chronagen from the void - granted, ‘saw’ is a rather generous way to describe the process. He did perceive it, but there was no matter in the void, so Mercury didn’t really have eyes.

Eyelessly, he saw the world from the outside.

It was a little like looking at a painting of a place. From here, his perspective was different. Everything was small. It lost its depth. There was a thick sheen of difference that marked him as unreal and that place as real.

Silken threads of scintillating colour. That was the difference between a world and not one. To be real was to be woven, was to interact, to connect, to live instead of drift. He saw, from outside, what it was like to see when you weren’t.

Because it wasn’t like looking at a painting. It was like being stuck in a painting and looking outside. 

Everything had more depth than him. More colour than him. And yet, he couldn’t properly see that depth or colour. It was smudged, blurry and thick to his eyes. He could see it as splotches that felt out of reach. A world so deep he could not imagine it. As a creature of the void, he understood why they ate at the realms.

There was no hate in that action. It was a simple desire, really. A single question.

What was it like to live?

Mercury knew the answer. He didn’t want to eat the world - didn’t have that desire. But he understood why void-things might. They were nothing, after all. They were trapped outside, and he found that to be sad, too. He understood them, after all. He understood <Nothingness>.

[<Voidwalker> has levelled down. <Voidwalker lv. -1 -> -2>]

He didn’t breathe. He didn’t mourn. He didn’t feel. Mercury was a dull caricature of himself. A shadow of a shadow cast on a wall that wasn’t there by a light so faint it was nothing but a reflection in a mirror. The world from the outside was a scintillating mess of emotions and complexity that he couldn’t help but envy.

It was beautiful and ruinous, to look at something that was so conceptually different he could not even imagine being part of it. But he still remembered. He knew who he was, he knew what he was, and that he was real. The boundary came into place, and Mercury snapped back towards that side of the tightrope he was walking.

Because, in <Truth>, he saw the wonder in the void, too.

That scintillating, endless nothing. It was so wonderfully quiet, and so bizarrely alive. There were no dreams out here, no real wants, and yet, the creatures were undeniably alive. He watched nothing-whales covered in scales darker than night brush him by, their enormous not-eyes gazing at him. Some made things that weren’t quite noises, as much as they were ripples in the primordial ocean of nonexistence.

Faint dreams rang against Mercury’s ears. They were greeting, curiosity, hunger, and envy all at once. Somehow, these creatures knew he was their kin, and yet knew he was different. They saw his spark, that he was a light cast into the darkness, and it was as attractive as it was repulsive.

They gazed, they greeted, and they basked in the light. They, too, were shadows of shadows, and Mercury was both a light and a wall to be cast on. When perceived, they were just a little more real, a little less hungry. When dreamt of, they were conceived, and that, too was beautiful.

And when they drifted out of sight - and they always, always did - they were gone again. Lost, forever, back into that deep, unending darkness that swallowed up things that had never existed in the first place. It was a strange swirl of experience, right at the edge of not being, and the only things that he could describe as being stranger was seeing the gaps in the world move.

Chronagen was gigantic. It was a dream of a million dreamers, a sphere of existence borne from millions, maybe billions of sapients, trillions of sentients all thinking. Experiencing. It was a place that was enormously vast, full of varied experiences, from the most powerless to the most powerful. It was a world of gods and demons, of tiny, pitiful bacteria and world-ending titans.

It was also a world of wounds.

Among that tightly-woven, colour-blending, twisted-dimensional fabric that was the Weave of the world from the outside, there were scars. Scabbing, bleeding, ripping, growing wounds. Places where the threads have thinned, broken, cut. 

Places where dreams go to die.

He sighed. Three wounds moved towards him. They reached for him with bloody tendrils of scabbing, dried world-blood reaching for him in rippling patterns that draw from nothingness to reality. Three wounds that melted into each other, that allied and wove and grew and thrived in their festering hurt.

Mercury dove in headfirst. This would hurt, he knew. It would not be fun. 

Three sins. Pride, Lust, Greed. They wove into each other, a growing world-wound where their edges bled, where reality and irreality mingled. Festering pustules that expanded outwards from the tapestry of the world in a cruel, parasitic expansions. They were worms that ate from the Weave and gave nothing in return. 

And Mercury easily entered their domains.

Reality washed over him in a violent torrent. He was a shadow, suddenly ripped and made to stand on its own. Colour washed over his skin. Mercury suddenly existed again. He had fur, bones, flesh, eyes. He saw, he breathed, and the changed from nonexistence to the deluge of things that rattled in on him would have been enough to shatter someone else.

But he didn’t shatter. He breathed. He walked. His <Truth> shone, and loudly screamed that he existed. The tightrope between real and unreal snapped, and all of Mercury was returned to just himself. A shadow merged with the person that cast it into one living, breathing creature, woven from memory and dreams. 

His body <Resolved> itself. The wounds of irreality washed off him like dirt under the shower, staining the ground of the realm - or, perhaps, realms - he stood in. <Nothingness> dripped from his fur, dripped through the weave, and then flowed back outside, leaving the festering pustules, and Mercury breathed.

The air was fetid. It was thick with a stench of debauchery. Greed reeked of alcohol, Lust smelled of sweat, and Pride carried the scent of lies. Avatars were arrayed before him, an army of things that were twisted beyond their base selves.

Amalgamations. They tugged at his mind. Demanded he kneel, demanded he want, demanded he desire. It was funny, the overlap between lust and greed, contrasted with pride, but Mercury only made that observation distantly. Because, despite everything, this state revealed something to him.

Somehow, the sins had communicated.

These wounds - which is what they were. Festering, bleeding wounds on the world - somehow had made a plan. They had talked. And that means that before Mercury shattered them, turned the Weave whole once more, he needed to ask a question. He needed to hear their <Truth>.

He looked upon the leading avatar. It was a thing cast from gold, a thing of perfection meant to be wanted, to be worshipped. It was beautiful, and resplendent, and something that could twist mortal hearts. It was a miserable thing that seemed tortured at having ever been conceived, an obelisk of perfection so grand it broke under its own purpose.

Mercury needed it to speak, needed to hear it. 

“Are you a person?” he demanded. The question was unavoidable. It rippled across this place, this realm of faux gold, of imposed perfection, in a violent demand. An unavoidable thing, tearing at the very foundations of what the sins were.

But he demanded an <Answer>. And so, the golden statue parted its lips, and spoke.