Chương 205: Act 3, Chapter 55: Creative edge

Day in the story: 19th January (Monday) Alexandra May When we had enough fun for one night, we hit the sheets to get some sleep. Of course, since I need much less of that than they do, I woke up first and decided to do some follow-ups on the things I'd learned. I strolled lazily through the outside of my Domain, noticing that some of the stars reflected on the black lake moved—which should not happen.

Upon closer focus, I noticed that those were not celestial bodies of the firmament, but my—or rather my soul core's—little helpers. Those spiders she was granting the Authority to live were painted in a way that made them bioluminescent in the night, giving the illusion of dozens of little dots moving back and forth. Two Milky Way–like routes stretched between the woods and the Hearth.

"I don't know what you are making in there, Ali," I said, turning to my soul core and placing my open palm onto the warm crystal.

"But apparently you need something from the forest for that," I finished my thought. Depending on what I would find in this building, it might not become the meeting spot I intended it to be. A silver streak ran across the sky, adding even more moving reflection to this already very animated environment.

"You are up already," Maya said. She had so much freedom in the way she moved, but she struggled with her abilities. They were not as intuitive as I imagined them to be.

"Yes. I want to find out what those creatures are building inside the Hearth. What are you up to?"

"I am trying to learn how to use my Authority properly, but so far not so good."

"Care to join me?"

"No. Came down to say hello. I need to focus on my own path right now. I did check on the Brain Bank minutes ago, though."

"And?" I asked, already moving toward the entrance to the designated meeting-place building.

"We have around forty brains ready to roll, as soon as you let them. Stashed in a cylindrical room, hidden underneath the Art Palace. Just like you wanted." Her voice was less chirpy now, and lower—something she actively worked on to make me less nervous when I was in her presence.

"And Art-Crafters are working on more, even as we speak."

"Art-Crafters?" I asked, raising my brow.

"Can't call them spiders forever, especially since those are focused on doing art, while not all of them are. We need to differentiate them somehow."

"How many species do we have?"

"Let's see. We have the crafters I mentioned, the free-willed ones that made Ani's spiders, we have spy-ders that are eyes for you and Elle, and common minions that are moving stuff around and using tools to do more mundane things, like cutting branches or moving rocks."

"That leaves room for some combat-oriented creations in the future," I said, walking into the shadowed enclosure of the Hearth. Maya hovered by the entrance, so I stopped myself to let us finish the talk properly.

"You think we'd need them?"

"Oh, I am sure we will. Those, and something that could sneak around and steal things for me. I wonder if I could give them a power to teleport stuff around somehow."

"You think that might be possible?" [You need a will on your part to make the world move for you. Even though sending artistic creations away is possible within aura, other items or people require physical contact.]"Yes, Ani, but my intention is to steal art that would serve me better being here than in a museum. At least until I can get the resonance from that, so the proximity is not a big issue. The aura and will might be," I answered my Anima.

"We'd need you or any Persona to be present to enact the will and cover the area with an aura, but then having spider-stealers around is pointless," Maya answered.

"Yes, I know. I'd have to keep thinking on that, and maybe with so many parallel thought strands it would be easier," I said, and another freeze caught my left side in a contortion that left me unmoving for a good half a minute.

"Or more difficult. Maybe the number of things simultaneously using your bound Authority is causing those cramps?"

"Maybe," I replied when my jaw could move again in an unbothered fashion.

"But I don't think so."

"Neither do I, but we could all be wrong." She shrugged her shoulders, waved at me, and flew away to do her own things. I stayed a moment longer to compose myself, waiting for the worst of the effect to pass. My nerves were firing; my body seemed like something alien I'd been cast into. But only now did I realize that the worst wasn't the body—it was the soul itself. It felt like part of it was lagging just a second behind me, out of sync with myself.

And as I was dealing with it, hoping that it would pass, I heard some kind of music coming from deeper into the building. A note, as if played on some string instrument—a harp, a guitar, or a violin perhaps. Or even all of them together, or none. I was not a music specialist, despite my power giving me Authority over that aspect of human ingenuity. Something I could amend with a proper teacher and training.

Or maybe, if I met some virtuoso of an instrument, I could just steal away years of training, muscle memory, and proper talent ingrained in the brain—if that is where talent really resides. I focused on the notes that came to me, though, and let them move over me and through me. It felt disjointed and discordant, like there was no order to it, and yet those random notes felt nice and comforting.

As I dove into the temporal process they created, I realized that my cramps were passing and the rest of my body was ready to move again. I carefully made the first step, checking whether my assumptions were right. Then, with deliberate patience, I made the second one and the third, and continued, as my body followed my will without further protest. I wasn't alone in this walk. Dozens of paper arachnids made their pilgrimage alongside me.

Their thin limbs tapped softly against the pale walls, which soon started being covered by semi-translucent webbings and silks that glistened in the artificial light created by the building, as if bathed in morning dew. When I reached the main hall, it became clear that it was no longer something human-made or created in the image of my vision of how architecture should unfold in the world. This was made by an older, more ancient mind—a melody overheard by a young universe, from its older cousin's playbook.

Over scaffolding made of branches and wood brought here from the forest, a construction made from a spider's web was being woven in real time by a number of arachnids that I could no longer easily count. It was shaped like a cocoon that devoured the majority of the space, enclosing a sphere of air inside—but it wasn't empty. Inside this sphere, dozens of silken bridges were strung between the walls like strings of some eldritch instrument.

And the air coming from a few tunnels dug into the walls brought in a delicately moving current that played upon them. It was that which created the music I heard. Through that ephemeral current, the web sang. And plenty of those little luminescent workers added to the complexity of this moving machinery that was being built in here. They skittered along those bridges, strengthening them with new strands of silk that their bodies generated.

They patched fragments of walls that were still pristinely white with marble lying underneath it all. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. All of it reminded me of my own trial, as I'd been cast into a cocoon woven by my own soul to emerge a changed being. Saying that it was beautiful would be a lie. It wasn't like that—not yet.

The music was not orchestrated and felt like something created by pure chance, and yet it also felt natural, like rustling leaves in the wind, or water crashing from a waterfall onto a bunch of jagged rocks below, or even ice cracking under the weight of the spring sun's warmth. The construction was in progress, and there was no direction to it that I could comprehend and, through that understanding, accept as worthy of artistic admiration.

It was, however, a cradle for something that could become art, given time and resources. And as I stood in it, in the process of a cathedral being built, I felt like those people who must have visited Michelangelo when he was carving away the stone from what would become his David. He had seen it long before others could. I believed myself to be others in that equation, hoping that one day the genius of this would become simple enough for me to understand—if there was one that guided it.

Gertrude Monkey I sat in the hotel's VIP lounge, drinking not to forget, but to fucking remember what seemed to have slipped my mind. Despite the warm red and golden colors Alexa would have loved, the white walls beneath it all made me feel cold somehow. I shivered with every move, which felt more and more difficult every passing hour I kept spending in this hell. Phillip paced back and forth between the bar and the desk where the last of our mercenaries lay with their faces cut off.

He didn't like that they had decided that enough was enough and would rather spend their time in here eating and drinking to their heart's desire. He'd left them with nothing to help with that dream, as he'd stated a few hours ago. People working in here had wanted to take the bodies away and clean, but after his stark protests they decided it was better to keep the faces. In both meanings of the phrase.

"I can't come up with the next move," he mumbled under his breath, as I watched Thomas fire the last of his bullets at the makeshift target practice he installed on the wall. Ramirez had warned against it, but Torque was drunk and he had to unload somehow. We all felt trapped in here for some reason, and the thought of staying in this place filled us all with dread. Our plan of killing everyone until something happened had proved unsuccessful, as the very next day the lobby looked like nothing had happened.

People filled its walls, and the same people worked at the counter, giving us new rooms for the day. That did not stop Penrose from killing everybody again. Today however, when the situation repeated, he gave up on that idea and decided it was time to go and look for other places that might be of significance. That's how we found this place. Drunk elites of society were having fun in here, until they all ran away, after the previously mentioned defacing of the people on Phillip's payroll.

"That's it…" A drunk shadow that we met on the first day gulped and declared, standing up from behind his table. He was the only one that remained of the patrons, drinking as if nothing had happened.

"Can't fucking take it… no more," he added, and, holding a bottle of whiskey, moved in a weaving, drunk pattern toward one of the corridors leading out of here. There was something odd about him.

"Stop." Phillip turned toward him while giving an order. He pointed a finger at the man, who disobeyed and kept on walking.

"I said stop, old man. Do you perhaps have a hearing impairment?" The man, with his awfully clusterfucked beard and dirty, stinking clothes, did not care one bit to entertain Penrose's wishes, waving the bottle to let him know that he heard well enough. That made Thomas look at the situation too. He supported himself by placing one hand on the nearby column. The gun he held dropped to the floor, emptied without a care. Ramirez had raised his head from a table ahead too.

The food he had ordered lay unfinished and in a mess. His glasses toppled over and the drinks spilled.

"Did… you not hear… you drunk fucking hobo?" Thomas called after the man as he walked away. It was his voice that finally made him pause and glance at his own hands—one of which still held the bottle. He offered no reply. He simply resumed walking. Penrose did not take the disrespect lightly. He caught one of his coins and flicked it toward the man's skull. It struck and bounced off in a flicker of shadowlight—then ricocheted into the ceiling, shattering part of it in the process.

Debris rained down, along with water from a ruptured pipe, while rats that fell along scattered into the corners. The man sighed, took a slow sip from his bottle, and kept walking. Thomas was foolish enough to try to stop him. He rushed forward—if stumbling over his own feet could be called running—and still managed to catch up. He reached for the man's shoulder, only to grasp empty air and tumble forward as the man shifted, ever so slightly.

"Did you kill my men?" Penrose asked, watching this blunder unfold.

"You… did," the man replied, closing the doors behind him. Alexandra May The Brain Bank was different from what I expected. I did not pay enough attention during the moment when Maya was here. This resulted in my surprise when I finally took the trouble to connect with some of those brains. They were made from paper, like my creative brain was. Papier-mâché was a good and easy way of 'sculpting' something that looked like a brain.

With proper painting and shading, the resemblance was very uncanny—pulpy and gelatinous in presentation. Instead of using the shelves I left in this cylindrical chamber, my—well, I might as well—art crafters decided that it would be a good idea to plaster those things to the walls with webs. Yeah, right. And on top of that, a good fifteen were hanging like chandeliers from the ceiling, strung on some wide and strong webbing as well, which also connected them to the walls by other strands.

Not ominous, horror-inducing, and scary at all. Not one bit. And me, swallowing loudly and audibly, wasn't due to me realizing that I had really become something out of nightmares. Or, well, shit—maybe a little? [Too late for regrets.] Oh, is it? My mind responded, while I sat cross-legged in the middle of this towering scarehouse, my invisible shadowlight links spreading out from me toward around thirty of those thinking machines-to-be.

With my will, I had become a part of this network—this web in both a literal and metaphysical sense. I breathed out through my nose as I meditated on the nature of self. I was multiple people, and my thoughts ran simultaneously through all of them and two other brains that I had just found in this mess—plastered to the ceiling right in the middle, centrally above my own head. All of that made me question if thoughts were really who a person is. Consciousness did not constitute the boundary of me anymore.

I existed beyond the moments in which I dreamed, wondered, or planned in the old body of mine. I was also more than Elle, Gertrude, or Maya—and all of them at the same time too. Even when one stream of thought ceased, like during sleep, I remained elsewhere and would continue to do so on a grander scale when those new brains joined me in a moment. A question of whether I would ever be able to stop myself from adding more and more emerged in that moment of wonder. What is there to stop me, besides my own decision?

If one room could house hundreds of brains, what could a city store? Or a continent, a world, or a universe? I would not get that far. Never. This verged on becoming inhuman in ways that, even with my stretched thinking capabilities, I was not able to comprehend. I decided against it right as I channeled my will through the links and connected those new thirty to me.

I was a handsome man. Alex Weatherlight's body was slim but well built. While I was wider by the hips and thighs with my musculature, he had bigger and more defined pectorals and shoulders. His face had a structure similar to mine—it was, after all, derived from the mesh created after my own image. His jaw was just a tad more square, lips slimmer, and nose wider. I decided to correct him after my enlightenment.

In those aftertouches, I repainted his entire skin to be exactly the same color as mine—all but one circular fragment—down to every single natural freckle I had placed in the exact same place it would be on my own body, and in exactly the right hue. This I could not have achieved before without the computational power provided by the Brain Web.

"Bank" was not a term I decided on using anymore. It needed to be more precise than that. With so many strands of thought, I could understand, remember, and place those tiny blemishes in just the right spots, and it felt natural and unforced at the same time. I could have made him alive now and been done with it, but prompted by what happened to Sophie's necklace, I understood that there could be a deeper connection between him and me—one that ran to the core itself.

A group of worker minions brought a hand-sized crystal, cut off from the Weaver's Tree in just the right place. It would heal in time, and this fragment would grow too, as the soul-string between it and Ali's crystalline form would persist. I kneeled to retrieve that gem from the tiny, precise legs that held it up high for me to take. I held it firmly, feeling the magic of my soul run through it, undisturbed by anything, without the proxy of myself.

With a single decisive move I thrust it right into the hole I made real in Alex's chest. I held it there imagining the pulsing shadowlight as a rhythm of beats. Just a breath, then a second more. But I ultimately left the crystal heart inside by removing the Authority from the hole as my hand left the cavity. The art crafters that waited on his back, arms, and legs rushed with their sprays and brushes and repainted the black spot in proper colors once more.

His skin shone with shadowlight as they worked, and I watched. The knives I made for him lay on the floor by his feet, each and every one of them represented on the canvas of his body as a corresponding tattoo. Among them my Flying Sword of the Roses, and Ghostflame as well. Alex would be my blade. And my revenge. My edge against the world. And tonight I let him become.