Ria's Adventures
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Godslayer Lysette: Chapter 211
🕑 Added 2024-09-20 16:37:44 +0000 UTCChapter 211: The Couple's Training
Lysette stood upon the eastern plain shortly after sunrise along Jules and Katie, her two captives turned protegees. With the start of the new year and both of their Sparks sufficiently healed, she decided it was an ideal time to commence the start of the two’s intensive training.
“Brrr!” Jules shivered. “It– It’s so-o-o cold! How are you not freezing?”
“Mirae is a master of Ice techniques,” Lysette answered. “They’ve ensured quite thoroughly that only the most extreme of cold can possibly faze me. In any case, I will be working the both of you quite thoroughly, so I’m sure you will appreciate the cold by the time we’re done this afternoon.”
Katie nodded. “So, what exactly do we have to do?”
Lysette placed a kernel of maize into each of the Terean soldiers’ hands. “What I’m going to teach you is not difficult, but it’s equally not straightforward. We are going to use the technique I have granted both of you to grow this kernel into a full-grown stalk.”
“So how do we do that? You said it wasn’t straightforward.” Katie stared at Lysette with incredulity.
“First, I want you to concentrate on the tiny bit of life that lies dormant within the kernel. Once you can feel that bit of lifeforce, you’re going to want to slowly coax it out of its dormancy with your Essence. And it needs to be slow— if you do so too quickly, the growth will be unbalanced.”
“Neither of us has that much Essence remaining after you drained us,” Katie said.
“I gave you more than enough. And it doesn’t require that much. Pure Essence is a far more effective fertilizer than anything else I know of.”
“‘Not much’ coming from you doesn’t really carry a lot of meaning,” Jules said.
“In any case, I want you to focus on identifying that lifeforce.”
The two began doing so, closing their eyes and focusing on the kernels in each of their hands. A bit of ambient Essence danced around them, with neither making a sound as their concentration intensified. A chill wind blew, but Lysette raised a small canopy of grasses around the couple to provide them a bit of warmth and ensure their concentration remained unbroken.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and finally, after thirty-three minutes, Jules opened her eyes and smiled. “I think I can feel it.”
Lysette nodded. “Now that you’ve gotten that far, you’re going to want to connect your will with that of the kernel and, more or less, ask it to wake up. And it’s going to need some energy to do so, just like whenever you’re creating a new artifact for yourself. The key difference is that instead of forcing your will onto an inanimate object, you’re just going to guide the will inherent in the seed.”
“I still have trouble imagining that this kernel of maize is alive,” Katie said.
“And that’s why you’re having difficulties. It is alive, no less so than you or I are.”
“I– I don’t know how my stomach feels, knowing that everything I eat is alive.”
“That’s the nature of the food chain. Plants harvest energy from sunlight, and we eat plants, as well as animals who eat plants, in order to sustain ourselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Though it is important to respect the life of what we consume and avoid being unnecessarily cruel or wasteful.”
Lysette and her demonic impulses understood the irony of her words. But the key difference was that, unlike humans, who needed to eat to survive, Lysette did not need the Sparks of other humans to sustain herself. And then her focus shifted back to her far less guilty pleasure, those heavenly custards she missed so much.
“I see. Well, I will get back to it and keep working while you and Jules work on the next step.”
Katie closed her eyes again and concentrated once more, while Jules and Lysette went off a few dozen paces to focus on growing the seedlings into young sprouts.
“Before you demonstrate, I have a question. You said there would be problems if I gave the plants too much Essence. What exactly do you mean by that?”
Lysette demonstrated, imparting about ten times the required amount of Essence into the kernel. It moved around on Lysette’s outstretched palm, dancing about before erupting into the air. Roots shot out in dozens of directions toward the ground as the stalk grew numerous branches, eventually towering a hundred feet into the air before the growth halted.
“Is that a bad thing? Seems like a good way to get a lot of food quickly.”
“It’s not. Look closely. There’s not a single ear on the entire stalk! And I don’t think your subordinates would be pleased eating corn stems rather than cornbread.”
“So, what went wrong?”
“Think about how many processes go on inside your own body. You’re breathing, moving blood around your body, digesting food and absorbing nutrients, coordinating your muscles to stay standing and talk to me, not to mention processing what I’m saying, looking around your surroundings, trying to keep yourself warm internally, and even more processes that even I’m forgetting about.”
As Lysette finished her speech, the giant cornstalk snapped, tumbling over toward the Terean couple before Lysette teleported over, caught the branch, and teleported it off into a field a few hundred yards further east.
“Apologies for that,” Lysette said upon returning to the couple. That’s another issue with trying to grow plants too large. They will collapse under their own weight, because they aren’t adapted to grow as large as various trees do. They lack the thick, woody barks and other structures that allow them to support such a large height and weight.”
Jules only nodded.
“And that’s another reason why it’s important that you connect with and nurture the will of the plant rather than try to dominate and force it to grow haphazardly. The plants instinctively know what they each need to do to grow properly, just like our bodies know how to keep us healthy, even if we consciously don’t know half of what our bodies are doing on that front.”
“Kinda like an army, or a nation, don’t you think? The generals might not know all the minutiae of how food and supplies are delivered to each detachment, and they certainly aren’t directly issuing orders to every private on the battlefield. But they give the general orders to their subordinates, and those orders cascade down to whomever needs to hear them.”
“I think that’s a pretty good analogy. So why don’t you try? Let the kernel know you’d like it to wake up, and then when it lets you know it needs some energy, give it just a bit to start. You can always give it more when it asks, but you saw what happens if you give it too much, too fast.”
“Alright.” Jules closed her eyes and again pulsed the ambient Essence all around her as she formed a tiny strand bonding her hand to the seed. For a few moments, the Cultivator and the kernel were perfectly still save for the subtle vibrations of the Essence strand connecting them. After about ten minutes though, the maize seedling bounced around before growing a small root that branched into three some seconds later.
Jules barely restrained a fist pump as she turned to Lysette with glee unhidden upon her face. “It worked!”
“It did. But now you need to maintain it and continue to guide it so it can grow.”
Lysette pointed to the seedling that had jumped out of Jules’s palm and dug its way into the soil. It danced around as it took root, wiggling in the wind as though to say ‘feed me’. And with a nod of approval from Lysette, Jules dropped to a knee and continued to nurture the maize stalk with her Essence.
It grew slowly at first— an inch or so a minute, but once it had grown to a foot tall, its growth rate doubled, and then doubled again as Jules poured more of herself into the plant. Once it had reached five feet tall, its height leveled off, and new organs began to develop along the plant’s top and stalk instead. The winter air filled with pollen dust, and after a couple of minutes of stasis, the buds rapidly grew into fully-grown ears of maize with beautiful silken layers at each ear’s tip.
“It worked!” This time, Jules was unable to restrain her joyous celebration, grinning and pumping her fist twice in succession.
“That it did! Well done!” Lysette smiled and cloaked Jules in a robe of nearby grasses to shield her from the oncoming boreal gusts as they made their way back to where Katie was standing.
“Hey, Katie,” Jules said. “I managed to get it to work!” She held out three ears of corn as proof. “What about you?”
Katie sighed and panted. “No good. I keep doing as Lyse says, but I just can’t seem to forge that connection with the kernel. I think it doesn’t like me very much. Must have been when I said I didn’t believe it was alive.”
Lysette turned her focus inward as the two lovers consoled one another, searching through her Cultivation realm for the couple’s shrubs. She furrowed her brow as she realized the problem— a small wound had remained in Katie’s Spark, and it was causing complications with the tissue grafted onto it.
“Katie,” Lysette said. “Stop what you’re doing for just a few minutes. I just noticed a problem.”
“A problem?”
“I’ll explain after I fix it.”
Lysette did exactly as promised, diving into her Cultivation realm once more and focusing again on Katie’s Spark. There appeared to be some deep tissue bruising that Lysette had overlooked during her repairs fifteen days ago, deep enough not to have been noticed until inflamed by her use of Cultivation techniques. The treatment was thankfully straightforward. Some Essence injected into the wound as a healing salve, some suturing of the pinprick wound just the same as before, and a trace more of solidified Essence used as bandaging to help support the stalk. And finally, a day or two more for the repairs to take effect.
“Alright, apologies for that,” Lysette said. “It seems there was a little damage to your Spark that I didn’t notice two weeks ago. So, while I’m grateful that you’re eager to help out, I will have to ask you to hold off on this for a couple more days until the treatment fully takes hold.”
“May I stay out here with Jules while she’s helping you grow the plants for everyone? Even if I can’t help just yet, learning more about this ability by watching will certainly make it easier for me to learn it when my Spark is healthy again.”
“I have no objections,” Lysette said, handing Katie a cloak of foliage which matched her partner’s.
“One question, though,” Jules asked. “Why are you able to grow plants so much faster than I can? Doesn’t that defy every principle of what you’ve taught me?”
“As I mentioned before, the processes of life are exceedingly complicated. Even regeneration and antivenin techniques work by accelerating the body’s natural ability to repair itself. But I have a far greater understanding of all the processes that go into plant growth and development than you do. Their tissue makeup, their life cycle from germination to growth, flowering, fruiting, and ultimate decline and decay.
That, and a lot more practice with the technique. I understand how plants grow at a deep enough level that I can work toward causing them to grow in useful, but unintended ways as well. When and if you get to that level, following my rules won’t be necessary. But until then, you will use these techniques as I’ve taught.”
“Um,” Katie said. “Are those safe to eat?”
“Again, these techniques are novel and untested, so I cannot promise with absolute certainty that there are zero risks whatsoever. I also don’t want to rely on food grown with my techniques over the long run either. But not doing so will risk everyone here running out of food before winter’s end, so I’m choosing the possibility for unforeseen long-term risks over the certainty of short-term ones should we not use my abilities.”
“I understand,” Katie said.
“And thank you for giving us this opportunity,” Jules said. “We won’t forget your generosity.”
Chapter 210: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112440650
Table of Contents: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101896170
Chapter 212: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112440675
Comments
Bielna
I understand, and I accept it. It's just been hard to process that change (took a couple of days to really process it, if I'm honest). Especially when it comes to Lysette and Serrena. For the former, I understand that she plays into the system to destroy it, but it doesn't change how people died for something so worthless and what it means for her Reciprocity. For the latter, because it was hard to accept that her efforts are focused on something shallow, even if her Ambition to do her best efforts towards her goals is still noble, the goals themselves are suddenly much less important. It's strange. It's easy to accept that power isn't something that should ever be owed or put you above others. It's harder to accept that characters you respect who have pursued power and that isn't something worth respecting. But it is right, and important, to understand and accept that my perspective was skewed, influenced by characters put on a pedestal. In my mind, all of those people are guilty. All four, and the others who weren't mentioned, are like the business people who seek to raise above others. They will all have excuses that sounds credible -one that she does it for her family, one that she's just using whoever gets the best results, one that she values the effort rather than the result, one that she wants others to benefit as well- yet all of them, in the end, seek to raise above others, to have more than anyone else, sometimes at the expense of others or at the very least without a care that they could catch up. They're all looking at an unfair system, and their feelings, if not their thoughts, is that they should be on the advantaged side of the inequality, that they're special and deserve more. It doesn't mean that I hate them, because they all have their circumstances and because those excuses I mentioned are somewhat valid, but it still puts certain characters (pretty much everyone, in fact, as most important characters in the story are Cultivators) on the wrong side of history. And it changes a lot the ending I hope to see.
Jessica
Of course not! That would be preposterous, offensive, amoral and illegal! If a godporation did that in the real world the people would surely immediately stop pruying there and force the godporation to reconsider.
Ria Corvidiva
Because there's never been a case of a multinational (read: god) which has destroyed the world to pursue greater profits (power). Definitely the sort of thing which has never happened in our world. Definitely never been cases of people being killed or allowed to die through inaction for the sake of maximizing profits either.
Jessica
Exactly! And that again brings us back to the previous question of what can you blame people for? Amalia is the case of a person born to poverty who has the chance to study business management and work to become middle management in some corporation. Saffron is the person who prefers a supermarket to multiple smaller shops because it's so much easier to shop. Serrana has a career path in front of her and doesn't question whether her company's product is actually better than what a single trade person could produce. And Lysette is the manager who really want's for her company to "go green" but can't really make the bottom line work out without polluting the environment. All of them participated and propagated a system of abuse just because they didn't know better. And we all did and still do for that exact reason.
Ria Corvidiva
Bielna, because that's exactly what it is. Mortals and deities 'playing in' a broken and unfair system created by an ancient deceased Creator deity millions of years ago. It is that very perversion of 'we have these gifts by working hard and being talented' to 'it's because of divine favor and having the right bloodline' that highlights the perversions within the system that has always been present, even in book 1 with the noble houses and how they act higher and mightier. The entire system is unfair, and that's *the point*.
Bielna
Yes, but then what does it make of the characters we know ? Amalia, who decided Cultivation was the way to help her family ? Saffron, who values Cultivators and demideities for the help they can provide thanks to their power ? Serrena, who made her Ambition to become the best Cultivator ? Lysette, who made pursuit of power her priority even when she was thinking about not murdering people for it, who did kill people for their Essence ? All those characters are redefined as those who value and pursue something shallow, something that can be ripped away from them without guilt, those who support and play in a broken and unfair system ; it's a very different interpretation from when I imagined Cultivation as nurturing one's talents. The new perspective is good, but with how much it changes, it's difficult to wrap my head around it.
Jessica
That is interesting because that is exactly how capitalists justify their outrageous wealth by claiming they worked hard for it. But if you instead of looking at the effort they put in ask for the benefit to society that came out of it the bottom line looks quite different.
Bielna
Recent chapters give an interesting new look on Cultivation, for me. I'd always treated it as something very personal, close to the nature of the Cultivator. But with how no one seemed particularly horrified by Lysette draining the prisoners, and how Jules very explicitly stated that it wasn't mistreating the prisoners (as crippling them to make them easier to handle would be) and taking their Essence isn't like forced labor (despite it representing hundreds or thousands of hours of work), I've started to see Cultivation more like a luxury, a bit like someone having a nice car. Something that can be taken away without anyone really caring about it, which is completely different from what I thought Cultivation meant, before. It's kinda strange to wrap my head around such a change of perspective, but it's interesting what it represents in how characters Cultivate, develop new techniques, or generally what it means to be a Cultivator (or to have been one and losing that ability), as well as the choice of joining the Academy in Domark. Plus, it also alters quite a bit what the healing means, both for Jules and Katie, and for Amalia, when what's given back is far less important than it might have appeared.
Ria Corvidiva
Agreed. Removed the second apology after the dialogue tag.
Ria Corvidiva
'filled with pollen dust'. Thank you again.
Ria Corvidiva
the former, yes.
Jessica
Lysette is apologizing twice to Katy. Might not be a problem, but it reads a bit odd.
Jessica
"The winter air with pollen dust" there seems to be at least a verb missing.
Jessica
"Let the kernel know you’d like to wake up" -> "you'd like it to wake up" or "for it to wake up"
