Chương 67: Book 1, Chapter 67: Bedside Metaphysics

John tinkered away at the gauntlet, so close to finishing up the best weapon he could make on such short notice while keeping a close eye on the security tablet, watching one of the lights pulse and fade. Well, perhaps "security tablet" was the wrong term for it now. John had repurposed several of the magic sensors around the main building for new purposes.

Hall-mounted motion detectors were turned into emergency pagers for both Rin and Yosuke; a simple flip of a latch and a thumb over the aperture was all that they needed to get John's full attention. In the long run, he could replace the magic detectors with simple buttons, and then implement coded messages akin to simplified Morse, albeit adapted for a language where a character could convey a whole word.

Maybe, if he really put effort into it, he could figure out a way to have some sort of locator installed as well, so the impromptu pager could be used to find them in an emergency. But the one that held John's attention was the single light which thrummed constantly, pulsing with a steady rhythm. It had taken a few minutes, but John had managed to rig a very, very simplified heart monitor into the fort's magic infrastructure, letting him keep an eye on Yuki from a distance. If she woke, he'd know.

If her heart rate started falling, he'd be at her side in moments. Leaning back, he glanced at the open window, making sure that the wind hadn't blown it shut in case he needed to make an emergency trip to the kitsune's side. Looking back to his work, he carefully connected some brass fittings with the miniature arm of his workshop before spot-welding the two pieces together with the classic one-two combo of entropy and order. It was a shame that he was going to temporarily lose access to that tool, but needs must.

He glanced toward the half-finished coin minting machine in the corner, looming ominously in the gloom like a horror movie monster. It was almost insultingly simple in theory. Liquify iron, pour it into moulds, solidify, remove the coins from the moulds, trim, and done. They wouldn't be perfect, but John didn't need to foil modern counterfeiting rings. He still included a few security features from back home, of course, like the raised, textured rims around the edges, just in case.

Normally, he'd need a specially made press to achieve that level of quality, but being able to reduce a metal to the viscosity of thin soup without changing its volume or temperature opened a disgusting number of doors. In practice, things got a bit more complicated. He'd have to tear apart his magi-welder, as he didn't have any working foci elsewhere to scavenge for the melt-solidify process.

Then, he'd have to rig something to detect the weight of what's in the moulds to stop overfilling and to know when to fire the order beam. The mould itself was to be coated with the same magic-resistant sap he used to seal foci, which would hopefully prevent the coins from merging with the housing. Sadly, he would have to manually break the sheets of coins apart and trim minor trailings from them, but that couldn't be helped on such a rushed job. Besides, it was all easily recyclable anyhow.

The designs would be simple, but hard to replicate. With the raised bezel and the pattern next to the denomination, they should be roughly immune to coin trimming without putting in more effort than it was worth. Of course, John would ensure to include a hole in the middle so they would be slightly more familiar to the people of these lands. It didn't hurt that it saved resources, too.

He wanted to mimic the original coinage's material-based value system, but it wasn't as if he had plenty of gold and silver lying around to make money out of. It was easy to say "just make them all out of copper or iron" before he remembered the local illiteracy problem. The materials weren't only a store of direct value, but also made them easily understandable, even to those who couldn't read the characters on them.

The solution was obvious after some thought: make them different sizes and a different number of edges for each denomination. Coins didn't have to be round, after all. The smallest was to be made of copper and square, with the value on both faces. The other three were made of iron, but gained two sides for each step up in value, and a bit of extra size. That way, it would be functionally impossible to deface a lower-value coin into a higher-value one, the same way you couldn't make a dime into a quarter.

It was a shame that they didn't have a magical debit network here. If they did, Yuki could just declare that cash transactions were temporarily banned and the Nameless would implode in short order. Shaking his head, he went back to his work, secure in his knowledge that both Rin and Yosuke could get his attention in short order. As time began to blur, he drifted between his projects like some sort of overly caffeinated worker bee, relentless in his constant pursuit of progress.

John connected channels with steady hands. Moulds were cut with unerring precision. More little design problems than he expected were resolved, like when he realized that the main entropy lines in his new gauntlet were too close to the water aspected lines, leading to the latter vibrating unnervingly. Weight sensors were installed. Telekinetic weight reduction was tested. Then, Yuki's heart monitor started chiming faster. While he was no expert, he was sure it was a perfectly normal heart rate for a human.

Yuki, however, was not human, nor did he have any baseline for her. Thus, it took him all of eight seconds to fly through the window in a panic, medical supplies tucked under his arm as he landed loudly on the floor with a clunk, not bothering to set the hover disc down softly. The kitsune sat up in the bed, calmly examining the environment with an appraising eye before turning to him. A gentle smile graced her muzzle.

"People might start talking if you keep bringing me up to your room, John. Rin already thinks we're married," she teased, glancing down before removing the thin metal probe John had placed on her chest. He was caught between sputtering and letting out a dry, airy chuckle, only managing to make a noise that sounded a lot like a car's air intake catching a squirrel.

"Yuki!" he whisper-shouted, although it had no heat behind it, a tight grin spreading across his face of its own volition.

"I was worried, you know. Are you alright? Do you need food, water?" She winced, shaking her head.

"Unless you have a balm that can heal minor to moderate spirit fractures, there's little you can do to help," she sighed, before a faint smile flickered onto her face.

"Destabilizing your gauntlet to use it as an explosive was genius, before I forget to mention it."

"What… was all that, anyhow?" he cautiously asked, as if he might be stepping on some grand secret. After all, Yuki had never mentioned the ability to turn on a lightshow and pop out a sun and moon that seemed more real than reality before. It would have been extremely helpful back when they were dealing with the Nameless out in the woods, even if she collapsed after.

"Rin said it was something called 'Transcendent Alchemy,' but she couldn't provide any details." Yuki's expression darkened almost imperceptibly as she clicked her tongue.

"I was surprised that Kiku was willing to use it. It might as well have been a beacon, both in the spirit and mortal realms, screaming that someone powerful is here. We are going to have a delegation of yokai, or their agents, on our doorstep in some weeks' time." He flinched at the thought of the greater world crawling into his little, not-so-peaceful pocket of it. What terrors would they bring with them? Would they link Yuki to whoever she was before? Could they already have?

"Sounds bad," John commented, voice strained, dread gnawing at his gut at the thought of the Unbound at the edge of the forest.

"But what is it? Do we have to worry about Kiku busting it out again?" The quiet question, the one he had been too afraid to ask, went unsaid. Was Kiku still alive? Was Yuki still herself? The kitsune frowned and shook her head.

"It should take time for her to recover enough to use it again. I know not how close her relationship with the Greater Nameless is, but I suspect it'll take issue with her eating its kin enmasse to replenish her strength, even if they were close enough to be efficient." Somehow, tension bled out of his shoulders at the confirmation of Kiku's life, even if she was the reason he'd been on the verge of a heart attack for far too long.

While the terror of a shapeshifter with the power over both his flesh and mind alike remained, it was buried under the fact that his friend was still his friend.

"It's a shame you had to push yourself to the point of passing out for it. You had me worried," he quietly muttered, settling down on the bedside.

"We have no time to waste, we have to press our advantage," Yuki noted, and made to stand, but was stopped by his hand on her shoulder.

"You need to rest," he insisted, frowning deeply.

"Kiku has an army of Nameless. Do you think she's above sending a grim tide of them through the woods to round up every yokai she can to feast upon?" Yuki asked sharply.

"While my injuries might be less severe than hers, she has the means to recover faster than you'd expect." Guilt stabbed at John's gut, the image of a thousand angry limbs crawling over injured men, a popped corpse falling from the sky, and the scorched body of a poor soul in their home at the wrong time, tearing through his mind unbidden. If Kiku gave that order, there wasn't much he could do to stop it.

Most of the yokai he'd met were spread out, and although he could shelter some within his keep, he couldn't take all of them. How many souls would it take to replenish her strength? Dozens? A hundred? Perhaps she would just keep devouring until the forest ran dry, leaving a spiritless wasteland in her wake.

"Wait, wait!" John said, an idea springing to his mind.

"How long does magical medicine last? There were some jars of… something still left on the shelf when I moved in here. Whoever made them made sure they sealed pretty well. Maybe they're still good?" He knew they were foul. Perhaps in retrieving them, it would give John some time to think up a solution to this damned mess, or at least a way to keep Yuki in bed while she recovered. Maybe he could try feeding Yuki some of the Nameless parts he kept in storage?

The shadowiness aligned fairly well with half of her theming, and she didn't seem to mind the last few times she ate the soul out of one. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Yuki paused and looked him dead in the eyes. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Oh, she absolutely knew.

"Very well! I will await your medicine," she cheerfully chimed nonetheless, settling back down and peacefully crossing her arms on her lap. John blinked owlishly, staring at her smiling muzzle for a few seconds more before awkwardly spinning around and getting back onto the hover disc, flying out of the room and toward the storehouse. Well, he had no excuse but to go through with it now. He couldn't waste too much time, either, lest Yuki decide to get up and do something anyhow.

Presumably, Kiku was in the Nameless' den somewhere. Maybe he could convince her to hold back by buying them more time somehow? He strutted between the rows of shelving with no particular hurry, carefully grabbing a box to toss the old, sealed containers into, packing some cloth between each so they wouldn't clink against one another and maybe crack. There were probably about two dozen of them, each and every one covered in a thick layer of dust.

To be honest, the only reason he hadn't tossed them out was that they were so utterly foul that he was afraid to open them after the first time. Besides, they might poison the area or lure in something horrible if he just tossed the intact containers into the forest. Yet, John's thoughts kept drifting back to the problems he faced with the Nameless. Hmm.

Perhaps he could rig more capacitors to his hover disc to beef up the flight time, then do a fly-by of the webbing across the Nameless structures with his heat beam? After all, it wasn't as if flight was an out-of-context problem in this world, and it would just take one yokai with pull to go a bit out of their way to blow the Nameless' operation wide open. The webbing had to be important to them, so perhaps burning it would delay them.

He had no delusions that it would cause any permanent damage to their operations, though, with how they seemed to live primarily underground. It still made him feel sick to think of how the Nameless could contort to fit themselves through a hole the size of a mailbox. Being a shadowy monster had its ups, he supposed. With 'medicine' in hand, he flew back up to Yuki, very, very carefully. He wasn't afraid of the fall.

No, his warding would take a fall from this height without complaint, even though it would leave him sore. No, the real issue is that if he dropped the box, it would create a biohazard so vile that he would have to sterilize the courtyard with fire. He only hoped that the smell wouldn't linger in his room for too long. Perhaps he should have promised something else. Thankfully, when he got to his bedroom, Yuki was still resting in bed, with not a sign that she'd moved.

He breathed a sigh of relief, placing the box down beside the bed. Curiously, her ears perked, and her nose twitched as she smelled the air, something lighting in her eyes as she gazed at the package with naked interest.

"Welcome back, John!" she greeted, eyes locking onto the box like a predator.

"I didn't know that your 'medicine' is what smelled so nice in that storeroom." Bile raced up his throat, but he swallowed it. If this was some thousand-year egg stuff and Yuki actually drank… or ate it, he was burning the building down. Before then, though, he had some questions.

"Wait. Before that, we have something to talk about." He grabbed a sealed clay pot, which he was pretty sure contained an ill-fated attempt to cook sadness, left forgotten in its clay tomb for decades, and carefully placed it on the table to the side. He also ignored the slightly pleading eyes Yuki was giving him for the sake of his own sanity. It had to be an act. It just had to be.

"I need you to explain to me, in detail, what the hell you and Kiku were doing before I got there. Whatever 'Transcendent Alchemy' is, it seems important. I need to understand what we're getting into, especially if Kiku somehow recovers and breaks it out again." The kitsune faux-pouted before dramatically sighing. It was strange to see how she was not treating it seriously. What happened earlier today was a pretty big fucking deal. Kiku was injured. Yuki passed out for hours.

Something was brewing on the horizon, and they weren't ready. Then John realized he wasn't fretting over her anymore—not nearly as much as he had been, at least—nor was he in a near panic over the future. His eyes narrowed. This lady thought she was slick, didn't she? Well, she kinda was.

"Transcendent Alchemy…" she began before trailing off, letting the silence hang in the air long enough that he thought she might be teasing him again.

"How much do you know about the Shape of All Things, John?" He perked up, locking onto his kitsune companion with an unearthly focus.

"Little," he admitted.

"Start like I know nothing and go from there."

"Where would you say magic comes from?" she politely asked, the sheer directness of the question almost punching the air from his chest.

"The world?" he hesitantly answered, wincing as he was sure he was walking into a trick question.

"I mean, it seems to be all around us at all times in various simple forms. My gauntlet wouldn't work if it wasn't. Some things tend to have a lot more power flowing through them, like the crystals I found deep in the woods or yokai, but it's hard to tell if they're pulling it in or generating it themselves." The kitsune clicked her tongue against the rough of her mouth, smiling.

"That… is not a bad conclusion, and by most measures it is serviceable, albeit lacking in nuance. Imagine, if you would, a shadow puppet." She raised her hand, and shadows around it flickered.

"No magic!" he quickly ordered. The kitsune playfully rolled her eyes, the arm dropping back down to her side.

"Spoil sport. Anyhow, imagine a shadow puppet. The shadow puppet, hunched over, tells a fake story about a monster. Is the monster less real than the puppet, or are they equally unreal?"

"They'd be equally not real, wouldn't they?" John cautiously ventured. A grin split Yuki's muzzle.

"Ah, but from the perspective of the puppet, it would be less real, wouldn't it?"

"But it isn't real… It doesn't have thoughts, right?" John confusedly answered, looking down. A gnawing sense of dread built in John's stomach as he thought of the twin pillars of broken reality tearing through the sky, showing colours with richness and depth impossible for human eyes to behold, yet burned into his memory nonetheless.

"What if the puppet could exist without someone guiding it?" Yuki inquired, eyes locking on his own.

"What if existing is not a simple switch, but a sliding scale? What powers might someone wield if they can tap into something more real, to scratch out new shapes upon the world, the same way a painter might paint over something?" John's hands shook, and his mouth went dry as the eldritch truth settled on his shoulders, putting facts together one by one. Unbound and Yokai were so difficult to hurt because they were… more real, wasn't it? At least, until you ground them down. Yuki could emit shadows that ate things.

It made no physical sense, but it happened anyway. She had simply never followed the rules of the world when she did that. Yet, it wasn't a godly power—at least, not as far as he could tell. Yuki harnessed it, but she bled. She didn't have control over the whole world like a painter might a canvas, nor could she stroll through the world, invincible to all things. After all, she had been sealed under a mountain.

On top of that, all these powers seemed to follow themes, which implied that those themes themselves were hyper-real in some way. On an ontological level, that meant things like darkness existed as more than just an absence of light. Hell, he had read about an Unbound with powers over "justice" at some point! Justice was physically a real thing!

Everything wasn't just tapping into some generic magic: it was people aligning themselves with some hyper-real aspect of reality and then using it to overwrite something "less real" with it. Then, if this was true, he was less than— Arms wrapped around his form and pulled him down onto the bed, nestling his half-limp form against the towering kitsune. His face was tucked into the crook of her neck, her long muzzle resting against the top of his head.

"None of that," she commanded, a blanket of fluffy ink brush-esque tails creeping over John's side.

"So, the Shape of All Things is—" he rambled, being cut off as he was squeezed just a bit tighter.

"Imagine a place where the archetypal, pure forms of what can and have existed reside. This is the home of the realest things that can exist, casting a great light over all creation, giving form and shape to all below. The gods dragged this world and the layers above it closer together and carved furrows into the Shape of All Things to shape reality, and those who dwell within it, to their wills," Yuki quietly explained, holding him tight as her soft breath crept down the back of his neck.

A bitter laugh sprang from John's mouth without his consent.

"You know, this is the type of thing that makes people go mad from the revelation, right?"

"Why do you think it's not common knowledge?" Yuki asked coyly.

"Besides, I know you're stronger than that." If you had proven this to him back when he was home on Earth, it might have shattered him, true. After five years of surviving in what might as well have been a magical hellscape, though?

"So, when you and Kiku did Transcendent Alchemy…" he trailed off, falling deep into thought as he went over what he had learned so far.

"It was blocking the Shape of All Things from working correctly, right? Then, you fill the gap somehow. With yourself, maybe?" Even though he couldn't see Yuki smile, he could feel her pride with the way she seemed to radiate immaterial warmth.

"Presence is the same, isn't it? It's a low-level application of the same thing, not changing anything, but using it to share yourself by showing a bit of that to others in a pure way," he asked, but it felt more like a statement. That feeling of warmth only grew.

"There is a reason I like your company," Yuki mused, fingers running down the center of his back. Wordlessly, John wrapped his arms around her in return. What a shitshow today was—Hell, the last few weeks were! At least he had a stalwart friend to see him through it. Against all good sense, knowing that he had too much to do, John took a moment and closed his eyes.

Minutes later, Yuki shifted him downward out of the way, but he didn't blame her; it was probably rather uncomfortable to have someone half-headbutting your throat, even if you were a superpowered fox lady. Then the smell hit him. John gagged and bolted upright, nose wrinkling as a millennium of rotten stench that he could hardly describe was unleashed upon the room.

"Ugh! What the hell is that?" he asked. And there was his friend, the kitsune, casually popping open the seal on one of those damned containers, licking her lips as she stared at the contents.

"Yuki!" he called in distress.

"You know, I think I know the oni who this flesh came from, although it smells like it's been stewing in its own resentment for a few centuries. He was a bit annoying, but I wonder if he's still around. It might be good to catch up," the kitsune casually commented. To his absolute, gut-wrenching horror, she tilted the container back and poured the lumpy black sludge inside down her throat. Such a horrible substance straddled the line between food and—well, not between food and drink.

More like between liquid and solid, as nothing like that could ever be defined as food. Except if you were a kitsune, apparently. Whatever the abomination was, it made his eyes water as he gagged, rolling up off the bed while coughing.

"Yuki! Off the bed! Off! Ugh, if you're well enough to drink that, you can do it outside!" A wide smile spread across her face as she borderline sprang out of bed.

"Why of course, John!" she cheerfully returned.

"I thought you'd never ask!" Then, she happily snagged the box of disgusting jars and cheerfully leapt out the window. John only realized a few moments later that Yuki had just completely dodged bedrest with his approval. Bloody kitsune.