Chapter 154 - [[IGNITION]] (Patreon)

This... took a turn I was not expecting. I like it better though, hehe. She's recovering all her pieces, and as it turns out, the whole isn't just additive; it's exponential.

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Raw Qi, the lifeblood of what is, lights a spark against the death of all that is, both of them infused with an ounce of the concepts of life, hunger, and growth. While she still can’t use the Qi directly, the patterns in her bloodflow make it more than precise enough to feed in just a small amount.

And then she has to brace herself as her chest very nearly detonates.

The True Flame detonates, igniting as it always does, but this time it’s trapped inside and pressured by walls of Blacksteel. It can eat through them given time, or transmute them, it’s a significantly higher-tier element than a modification of Cold Sun fragments- but it can’t yet. Instead it’s trapped inside one of the few materials she can create that would block it from spreading, and instead of muffling it by feeding it her flesh (like wet logs atop a fire, too dense and full of carrying pieces to let a flame grow) or by reducing the flow of Qi, she simply endures it. The Blacksteel core pulses, burns, acts as sharp-edged prevention, subverted from its purpose- but it’s enough. The True Flame is contained, so to speak.

So to speak, because for it to work it needs gaps for her blood and Qi to flow in and out of. And those gaps don’t hold up quite so well under the pressure.

She feels the tuning fork she wears around her neck vibrate, hum ever so slightly, and the flux of the core stabilizes for maybe a half-second. It’s not much, but it’s enough that she can strangle the bloodflow, force back into place the shards that she removed so that she could access the Core.

Except… it keeps burning.

Fuck.

Theory time. The Blacksteel strains, pushing hard, trembling and vibrating from the force inside it even as she can’t access any part of it with it shut. It literally hurts, thrumming and vibrating in tune with itself, shaking and trembling and burning inside her, heating up even through the entropic cold of the Blacksteel-

Fuck. There’s no room for it to dissolve, to dissipate! Every time she’s unleashed True Flame before it eventually burns out without enough Qi to feed on- but now it’s not in the open air. There’s no space for its energy to expand to and dissipate in, no additional flows of Qi or concepts to interfere with it, not even the ontological weight of whatever it’s consuming to push back- it just burns. Contained, starved of fuel, but existing independently because it isn’t using any of its energy to eat anything.

At first there’s a fear that she’s just made an unopenable bomb instead of a container, but as the minutes tick by and the occasional hum bounces on her collar from her jewelry, she does notice a change. It’s slow, gradual as fuck, but the Blacksteel begins to win out. True Flame can consume and transform anything, but its concepts are rebirth, renewal, consumption, while the Blacksteel is death, entropy and consumption. They try to consume each other, but the Blacksteel just has more of itself aligned to drowning out the energy it’s touching.

It takes almost an hour for the droplets of Qi she placed into the core to dim and die. In that time, the Blacksteel holds up, but she notices that something is… slightly different. Like it’s been worn down, maybe.

Well. She survived the first experiment.

She tries to add even less the second time around, shifting veins and muscles back into place and literally drip-feeding as little as she can into the core. This time, she reflects on what went wrong the first time, what she notices, and- yeah. Ok. The thought connects this time. 

She holds the tuning fork in her hand this time. It feels… the act feels familiar. The thought still doesn’t quite connect, the memory still full of cuts from her parasite, but… it did something, and it had an effect. The Mask can keep track of that, record and sustain it even without a wider memory. 

She thinks she can feel it give a little “hum” as she holds it, like a response of some kind. There’s something in her, deep down, that immediately feels a sense of calm come over it, of comfort.

Mmh. Progress.

She sparks the Qi, maybe half as much as last time, and ignites her modified core again. 

It still hurts, and still floods out. She has to produce more blood, more flesh to try and muffle it, keep it contained, but in the end, she has to “lock” the core again, slamming its openings shut and cutting off the material within them. It burns again, but between the sense of calm with the tuning fork and the proof of her last experience, she holds firm, calmer now. 

It takes almost as long to burn down again this time. It’s not directly additive, the energy produced. If anything, it feels multiplicative, expanding out and ensuring that the amount is still tremendous, aching in its intensity and its violent transformation-

But the core holds. More firmly this time, but still not firmly enough.

Blacksteel isn’t made for containment or safety, and True Flame isn’t made to be contained in turn. Their natures aren’t quite right for this, but if it was easy, then someone else would’ve already made it. And it’s working. Not as intended, but it’s spawning the Flame and containing it both. Now she just needs to figure out how to use it.

As if out of habit, without even thinking about it, she taps the tuning fork once to her sternum.

Dink.

Her mind stutters.

That sound. She knows it.

The thoughts don’t return, but the threads to them feel a bit brighter for a moment. There’s… there’s something there. Not like her other memories, not like how Zhoulong tore out the good and left just the bad, this one is missing, it’s context vanished… but there are pieces of it here still. 

She taps it again.

Dink.

It shouldn’t be making that sound. That part stands right the fuck out to Mask and Flesh both. In the Want, it feels right, it feels connected to something- but the Flesh notices the sound as strange, and the Mask confirms. It shouldn’t sound like that. She can feel the contours of it, the shape of it, even to the very depths of its interior, and it’s not broken. There are… not scars, that’s not right, but weird striations in the metal, like there’s a shape that used to be that is no longer True. Whatever they might mean, by rights, the sound it makes against her sternum should not be a “Dink” noise.

She taps it one more time.

Dink.

“Yeah, yeah,” she murmurs, though she’s not sure why. 

Third time’s the charm.

She re-opens the core, shifting the entry plates back into the open state, and feeds in a fresh few drops of Qi. She lets the blood holding them swirl around the ignition shard, shifting and flowing into a near-perfect sphere. Then, she fills in the central core surrounding that with bone, pulling as much Qi out of their creation as she can but still making them as dense as possible while still leaving coral-like spaces in the lacing. She fills the third layer beyond that with blood, thick and dense and flowing in a larger circle around the whole.

Slowly, she regrows the veins and structures into the core for a third time. She reinforces them with that thickly-latticed bone, making valves and channels as dense as possible, and then adding that same nanoscale weave around the interior and exterior of each.

And then, at the moment of ignition, she taps the tuning fork against her sternum a bit harder.

This time it rings, spiraling out into her, the vibration traveling through layers and layers of blood, flesh, bone and more to ring against the Blacksteel.

And then… ignition.

But this time is different.

The Flame and Blacksteel both vibrate in tune as the ringing of the tuning fork hits them, as the blood flow swirls around them, as the reinforcements and support structures lock the important bits into place and carry the ringing through them and cut Flame with Hungering End-

[[IGNITION]]

Louder, stronger, two or three times as strong as before- but in tune now, both contained and container suddenly playing the same note for just an instant, and-

That same sensation from the first time, the first ignition. Of the Flame, source of change and transformation, running up against the Blacksteel, but pushed further, a connection forged between them by the thrumming of an impossible noise that should not be.

There is a brief moment of fear, an instant of tension and explosive panic as the pressure grows and the heat magnifies and she wonders if this is it if it’s going to detonate, if this was all a mistake, if something is about to happen, if she is to be unmade by her own folly-

Fuck that.

She grits her teeth hard enough they crack, every muscle tensing and spasming and locking into place as her body struggles not to die, struggles not to come apart in a conflagration-

And then the moment is past, and there is only the pain, the tension, and the will.

And a new thing, burning impossibly hot at the core of her like a fucking star, like a screaming voice that shakes the world itself.

It takes her a while to remember she still needs to breathe. A bit longer still to remember how. 

Her skin is glowing.

It’s not some magical effect, some sudden pulse of Qi and life that alters her. It’s just that the core in the center of her chest burns so bright she can literally see it- and it’s not burning golden.

True Flame burns gold. Her version of it burns gold and white at the center, though its purest form is gold alone, the element of transmutation… but that’s not the color glowing from her.

Slowly, she disconnects structures and supports. She migrates her core to her sternum, unlocking the interlacing plates and nanoscale weave to let it emerge. She grows it out of herself on a long, fleshy limb, until its in front of her and she can see it.

There is gold in it, absolutely. Elements of that purest consumption remain, that perfect transformative Flame- but it’s not the dominant color. It’s hard to pick any one color out, really. There is silver, purple, lots of red, bright and deep. There is a steady sort of colorless burn in places, heat and energy and motion without having a specific hue, all tinged through with bits of gold and red, blue and silver, purple and even hints of green in places. An impossible, iridescent color- visible because the Blacksteel is no longer black.

The core of her looks… bronzed, maybe? Parts of it are clearly still Blacksteel, still obsidian-dark, mainly on the thicker parts and towards the centers of the different plates, but on the edges, near the openings… A reddish material, not dissimilar to blood, but sleeker, shinier, like a membrane made of something half-liquid and half-solid. The glow of this new Flame travels into it, through it, but the energy remains contained, impossible vibrance and heat reflected in something like shifting tides within it. 

It feels… 

She takes a while. Meditates there as impossible light hangs over the pond in front of her, reflected back by its still waters.

The Blacksteel, now something else, has… changed. The property of “consumption and predation” feels… gone. Entropy remains, but changed too, like… like instead of it being an end, it’s just another form of transformation, energy moving into a new, more diffused state. 

The vibration. The hum between the tuning fork, Flame and Blacksteel, aligning them together, both of them holding transformative properties. It aligned them, somehow. Was it instinct? Buried memory? Some other intent, leading her to the conclusion it would be able to help, be able to synchronize them? Was it pure luck?

The core of her shines.

She feels the heat, feels the burning, the transforming… feels it dim, ever so slightly, as it consumes her Qi. True Flame just ate and burned, and when there was nothing to do either on, it stayed, immortal and pure. This, though… it thirsts. It hungers.

Slowly, she takes a few pieces of Blacksteel and lowers them through the openings.

Immediately the flame begins to dim, Hungering Death acting like a sort of neutralizing agent. The flame begins to die, losing some of its color, some of its luster…

She removes the cores and feeds in a few drops more Qi.

It spins back up immediately, pieces of flesh, blood and bone within the core shifting and turning in tune to properly dispense Qi to different parts of the Flame. Not consumed, not burned, the structures she put inside the core are instead whole, changed but still in her senses. The flame grows again, glowing brighter again.

She pulls on it, just a bit. Pulls some of that flame into herself, and-

Oh.

Oh.

She’s so small.

She is so impossibly vast.

Blind consumption and mindless energy is transformed into something hers. A screaming, depthless thing, as shallow as it is vast.

She pulls that multi-hued, radiant fire into her blood, into her body, in the core of her and immediately feels the difference.

There is… there’s so much.

She’s in the fire. The fire is in her. 

She can feel it, but she can feel deeper. Not muscle fibers, not ligaments, but little pieces further, like interlocking puzzles or flowing clusters of life, organized into impossibly small things. Smaller yet, these micro-pieces of herself have pieces of their own, twitching organelles, vibrant, strange little functions, so many she cannot name, each so active, so constant-

She is taller than a human, yes. She is no longer biologically human at all. But she’s still person-shaped. Still sized like something made to walk on two legs without being crushed by its own weight- but as the flame fills her, she can feel that she is so much. Infinite complexity, so much that she can barely comprehend a fragment of it at a time. 

And every part of her drinks of that flame. Her body, forced against nature and against common logic to feed on Qi without digesting or altering it, drinks of this new flame, and is remade. She feels herself come awake, like every piece, every room of the thousands on thousands on thousands multiplied again of every piece of her body is suddenly alight and full and burning and changing. Her second Truth burns, touched directly by impossibility, and-

She breathes again.

She can feel the pollen seeds in the air.  The taste of the dirt, a hundred yards away. The breath of wind that holds the flavor of a bird’s feathers from days away.

She shuts the core down, hard, slamming Blacksteel into it.

For a moment, she is divided again, but realizes it was the Flesh that did it. The Mask and the Want both were overwhelmed, but instinct screamed and acted.

She is spread out across half the clearing. Parts of her are in the pond, sucking up its water, even as newformed nerves and spinal cords and arcing columns of flesh that does not look like flesh spiral out behind her in interwoven, fractal tendrils. She didn’t incite them, didn’t create them, but…

Well.

It… would seem that the Core works.

It lies inert now, but the changes have been made. At its center, embers of True Flame drift, hints of those other colors flickering in and out. The Blacksteel is now edged in quicksilver-bronze membrane. She’s fairly certain she could reactivate it, but…

She stares down at herself. Slowly, slowly reshaping the impossible growths that spawned from her, not even trying to understand how they’re made, just melting them away into blood to soak into the ground or absorbing what she needs.

And she pulls the core back into her chest. 

Inert now. Quiet, but flickering, ready and hungry. Eager. There is something in it that feels achingly hers, and she feels the patterns of veins in her body shift and thrum, the Qi in them vibrating ever so slightly in tune with the new furnace at the core of her.

It is only when she opens her eyes again that she sees the kid awake, staring at her, wide eyed and terrified- and feels the impossibly cold thing sitting beside her.