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EC Book 4, Chapter 34 - Ichoric Ascent
🕑 Added 2024-04-15 16:09:35 +0000 UTCAuthor's Notes: Been badly sick. Back to uploads!
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"This station is everything I expected it would be and I hate it," Sev groaned.
"Why?" Tinsel asked. "I think it's pretty!"
"Tinsel, you don't have a mouth. Or a nose." Sev glanced at the giant waterfall of... well, ichor. As best as he could tell, this was in fact the divine definition of ichor, as in 'the blood of the gods', which was at least marginally better than the alternatives. Golden liquid filled with divine energy pouring down a cliff was beautiful, even if it wasn't sanitary.
Also, even godly blood still smelled like blood, so there was that. Every time he opened his mouth, he was met with the immediate, coppery taste of blood from all the ichor that was just kind of floating around in the air. It made him reconsider talking. And also breathing.
...but the urge to complain was so powerful he couldn't quite stop himself.
Besides, Tinsel kept asking questions, and he didn't want to ignore it.
"What's having a mouth or a nose got to do with it?" Tinsel asked innocently.
"The ichor doesn't really taste good," Sev said tiredly. "Or smell good. And I can't really not taste or smell it when it's in the air."
"Ohhh," Tinsel said intelligently. "I get it. That sucks."
"Sure does."
"What do you think we have to do for this station?" it asked.
Sev stared up at the waterfall, and then specifically at the rocks jutting out from it. They moved in and out of the waterfall, splashing the entire zone with ichor every time a new one appeared.
"It's a physical challenge," he said. He already felt tired, and he hadn't even started yet. "We gotta climb the waterfall."
And presumably fight whatever was on top. Or maybe heal whatever was on top. Something had to be producing that enormous amount of god-blood, after all. Sev winced at the thought—he really hoped all he found up there wasn't going to be a gigantic corpse of a dead god. That... didn't sound pleasant.
And it would be difficult to explain to Tinsel, so there was that.
Tinsel peered up the waterfall. "It looks really high up," it said. "...I think I'm scared of heights."
"Tell me about it," Sev grumbled. "You and I have that in common."
He was not looking forward to this.
Not in the slightest.
—
The ascent took a lot of slipping, cursing, and falling. Sev found himself entirely drenched in ichor more than once, either because a rock burst out of the waterfall just above him and showered him in the stuff, or because the rock he was standing on suddenly retracted and left him to plummet directly into the pool of ichor below.
If nothing else, he learned a couple of things he never wanted to learn about the properties of ichor. It had mild healing properties, for instance, which wasn't surprising but was very much still disgusting. He was fairly certain that being drenched in the stuff enhanced his connection with the divine. Technically, if he wanted to do so again, he could probably perform another [Divine Mantle] now.
It took some convincing from Tinsel of all people before Sev finally and reluctantly agreed to bottle up some of the ichor for later use. He wasn't sure what drinking it would do, and he didn't want to find out—but it had proven useful enough that he couldn't really just ignore it as a resource. Not when this dungeon had already proven to be relatively prescient about what they needed.
Which was still weird.
"Nearly at the top," Sev grunted. He was doing his best not to look down, and he was balancing on one of the few rocks sticking out of the waterfall that didn't move. He was about ninety percent certain of that, because he'd watched it for a solid ten minutes and hadn't seen it move once.
There was always the possibility that it was on an eleven-minute cycle, but he was doing his best to ignore that possibility. The next rock would show up in...
Three, two, one... now.
He jumped and landed on the next rock.
He was on a timer now. This next set of rocks moved quickly, in intervals of about five seconds, and the worst part was that the next rock only appeared after the previous one retracted. He had to time his jumps perfectly to make it, and jumping was a precarious affair at best when every rock was slippery with ichor.
Sev leapt again, the rock below him disappearing back into the waterfall and a new one appearing just as he reached the apex of the jump. He was carrying Tinsel with him, but the fixture was fortunately quite light and didn't really interfere with his ability to move. It also had its eyes squeezed shut because it "didn't want to look at the heights".
And yet it had refused to stay behind.
Now. Sev jumped again. This time, it was ever-so-slightly mistimed, and the rock collided with the bottom of his feet as it emerged; he thumped into the rock with an oof and had to scramble to grab on to the sides just so he didn't fall off. On his back, Tinsel let out a small squeal of terror, its lights flickering wildly.
Five seconds to recover. Sev pulled himself to his feet with a burst of strength, then immediately leapt again. Only just in time, too. The rock had begun to retract at almost the exact moment he jumped, and the friction as it slipped away beneath his feet was almost enough to send him tumbling again. This time, he called up a quick divine barrier to steady himself.
It evaporated almost as soon as he summoned it, of course. This room didn't want him to cheat, apparently—it dispersed every attempt he made to climb it with his skills or to fly to the top. But the barriers still lasted long enough that he could balance himself with them.
Three more jumps.
Two.
One.
Sev finally, finally made it to the top, and he threw himself over to the first glimpse of solid land he could see before the rock underneath his feet disappeared again. There was, thankfully, a rather large outcropping right at the edge of the waterfall—presumably for this exact reason. The outcropping was attached to a small strip of land in the midst of all the ichor, and that strip of land in turn led to...
...some sort of island?
Though it was too small to really be called an island. It was maybe the size of a decent-sized home, or the lowest floor of the Adventurers' Guild. There was a layer of grass over it, along with small, golden flowers peeking through the grass.
And at the center of that island, surrounded by tiny rivulets of ichor that somehow expanded as they flowed down the island and churning ichor that led down the cliffside, there was a corpse.
That part wasn't very surprising to Sev.
"The question is," Sev murmured. He walked along the strip of land, careful not to fall back into the ichor—he didn't really want to repeat the experience of being dunked in blood again. "Who are you, exactly? And why are you here?"
"I don't think he can answer you, Sev," Tinsel quipped from his back. Sev groaned.
"I was talking to myself," he grumbled. "And why are you still on my back? You can walk by yourself now."
"Oh, right!" Tinsel hopped off his back cheerfully. Sev didn't know whether to be amused or disturbed by the fact that it seemed entirely fine with the leaking corpse in front of them—though he supposed it wasn't exactly close enough to see in detail yet.
And Tinsel wouldn't be particularly familiar with death in this form, would it? Its experience of death was seeing others get eaten by the Soulblossoms in Soulbloom Station. Not quite equivalent to something dying and leaving behind a corpse...
He sighed. He hoped he wouldn't regret bringing Tinsel along with him.
The living light fixture raced ahead, prompting Sev to do a little jog to catch up. Part of him was afraid to. He was unsure what he'd find. What would cause a dungeon to use the death of a god as the core of a station? All this was actual divine blood, not some poor mimickry created by a malfunctioning reality anchor—as far as he could tell, anyway. The Prime Anchor must have drawn on the true death of a god.
And this wasn't even a death caused by the Void. Nor a death caused by a reality anchor drawing on the gods to try to maintain themselves, though that particular feature wasn't one he'd had any part of. Automated systems gone rogue... He needed to try to disable it, but from what Muchen had told him, he'd already tried, a Reset or two ago. They didn't have much control over the system's automated mechanisms anymore.
No. This death was... what, caused by a war of some sort? A battle? Some conflict in the physical plane that had consequences in the divine?
Did he know this god?
Sev felt a mixture of guilt and relief as he arrived only shortly after Tinsel and found that he didn't recognize the god at all. The body had pitch-black skin and golden tattoos adorning its flesh—lightning that was the same color as the blood flowing out of the multiple open wounds...
"You know," Tinsel said thoughtfully. "I don't know much about blood and stuff. 'Cause I don't have any! But why's he still bleeding?"
"Gods have a lot of blood, I guess," Sev answered distractedly. He was trying to put a name to the god—he didn't recognize him at all, and his knowledge on them was fairly extensive. He'd done his research before picking Onyx, after all.
It was a good question, though. Why was the god still bleeding? The blood in most bodies would settle a few hours after death; things might be different for gods, but he wasn't so sure that—
"Oh god what if he's not dead." The words came out in a rush as he hurried to the side of the god that he'd previously assumed was dead. In retrospect, the first thing he should've done was a [Triage]. Not that system skills tended to work in normal ways on the divine, but it had been foolish to assume that the dungeon had just decided to use a random god's corpse as the centerpiece for a dungeon.
The test wasn't some morbid test of climbing. It was a test of healing.
The second one in a row. The thought came to him unbidden, and he froze, even as [Triage] filled his head with a list of all the injuries the god had. He was, for one, definitely still alive. He wasn't even dying. His injuries were keeping him in a state of stasis from which he couldn't heal, but that was because there was a curse of sorts overlaid on every one of his wounds.
His wounds wouldn't heal. Because his wounds wouldn't heal, he kept bleeding. Because the curse was specific to the wounds, his healing abilities were able to keep up internally, generating an endless supply of blood that immediately spilled back out.
He was producing just enough blood to stay alive, but not enough to stay conscious.
Sev immediately charged a heal and let it ripple through the body in front of him.
He wasn't surprised to see that it did nothing. Even healing the Soulblossom in the previous station had required more power than this—mostly because he could no longer rely on the spells that cost him personally. The [Memory Loss] malus had more or less faded from his status by now. Each step he'd taken on his journey as a Concept, or whatever Gregory claimed he was, had restored him.
To take that away from himself again... it would unmake him. Undo all the progress he'd made.
That meant that healing was now a process.
Specifically, he had to do manually what the system had previously done for him automatically: find the right gods to make a divine connection with, filter their strength through with his own, and channel that divinity into the patient. Laying claim over the intrinsic divinity stored in every being allowed him to modify it at will, essentially giving him the ability to command that being to heal.
The difficulty came in conflicting divine essences. Everyone was just a little bit different, and though they might not worship any god personally, they were still aligned with the concepts of different gods to different degrees. Sev had to find a way to match that alignment in order for the heal to be efficient; the farther away he was, the less efficient the heal.
It would work anyway if he packed enough divine power into the heal, of course, but his goal was not to waste the stuff.
The problem here was that he didn't know what divinity the god lying before him was, and he couldn't draw on this god's own divine power to heal him when all of it was being used to keep him alive. Sev would have to approximate it, balancing a series of adjacent divinities to try to mimic whatever divinity he thought this god was.
...Time to talk to the gods and see if anyone knew this guy.
Comments
Silver Linings
Thanks!
Douglas Miller
I'm very interested to see how all of this ultimately comes together. Great job so far! A couple small grammar corrections: > as he emerged This should be "as it emerged", because the only reference for the pronoun that makes sense in context is that it refers to the rock. > drawing on the gods and to try The "and" shouldn't be there.
