Vol. 3 Chap. 1 It Could Be Worse (Patreon)

Starbrite’s waste filled the oceans like a latrine running into a well. One bit of Starbrite branded industrial waste was currently in agony. This did not make him unique. Lots of Starbrite’s leavings had agonizing deaths. Every minute of every day. Still, this particular bit of trash had no less than three destinies upon him. He was down now, but he would rise. He was coming home to the land and people that made him.

Truth bobbed in the water. Some tiny muscles in his eyes had sheared, and he could only stare blankly ahead. “Ahead.” It wasn’t straight ahead. Some of the muscles must have been keeping his eyes straight, as his vision was pretty rough right now. Everything looked wrong. Like he couldn’t tell how far away it was. Trapped in two dimensions between a gray sky and the gray sea. Just one more piece of flotsam.

The demon had just gutted the bird and left. The plastic packages from the inside of the bird were floating around Truth. Packages carefully wrapped in layers of plastic, with foam floaties and the occasional buoyancy talisman. These were always going to land in the water. A discreet delivery for quiet living folk.

Truth was not entirely sure how to describe how he was feeling. He hurt, but most of his body was numb. He’d been hurt enough to know that was a bad sign.

<<Not a medical expert on glands or whatever, so I’m guessing here. Looks like a lot of your fleshy bits, organs specifically, couldn’t handle the sudden deceleration of you hitting the water from a hundred meters up. They just sheared off your bones, or pulped against the bones, or ruptured or just… generally are having a bad time. Your brain should look like an overcooked custard. The fact it doesn’t is a more than minor miracle. I guess the quadriplegia and the loss of both taste and smell is stretching the term “miracle” a bit. The ability to hear most of the audible spectrum is a comparatively minor loss. And presumably, a real miracle would have prevented the bleeds and ruptures inside your skull that are definitely going to kill you. Soon.>>

Any chance of help?

<<Well, help is debatable. Would restoring enough of your nervous system to let you feel your ruptured testicles count as helping?>>

Truth felt the System shift things around inside of him, doing what it was made to do- run his magic for him. Truth tried to help it along, but nothing much came of it. His brain was struggling.

<<Just focus on healing. You want to heal. See this image? Imagine all your energy flowing into that image.>>

Truth could see a spellform pop up in front of him. He did his best to send the energy into it.

<<That’s it. Just a trickle for now. Let's start by healing your brain. Patch up some of those leaks.>>

Truth didn’t know how long he was floating in the water. His senses were all lost in the endless grey. Just bobbing along with the rest of the trash. Nothing for him to do. Underrated thing, having something to do. Nag Hamadi was right about that. His head was starting to hurt. A long, slow ache that kept building.

System…

<<I know. I can’t help it. Good news is that I’ve stopped the brain bleed and most of the things that were going to kill you in the short term. Bad news is that this might be too much spell for me.>>

Say what now?

<<This isn’t one of the cut-down healing spells provided by Starbrite or some other halfway-modern outfit. This is the full-size, luxury model spell straight out of Siphios.>>

Okay?

<<I’m a mutilated chunk of your soul, not an actual Spirit of Intellect. I’m hijacking your mind and body to run the spell. And the spell is testing us hard. Hence the headache. If you actually knew this spell, you would be totally healed by now. Probably.>>

Truth got a splash of water in his eye. He hadn’t regained control of his eyelid yet, so he got to just float there and endure. Though it wasn’t really burning the way he expected it would. Even without his body cultivation, a Level Four mage could ignore a little salt.

The spell is too much for you to process, so I can’t really handle it.

<<Like with Incisive. I could run individual parts of it, but its real value comes from the complete spell.>>

Truth tried to nod but he couldn’t manage it.

<<Yeah, I’m keeping a lot of your nerves severed for now. Partially for efficiency but mostly because you really, really don’t want to feel what your body is actually feeling. Even my usual sadism has to draw a line somewhere, and I’m thinking this is it. If I didn’t already sincerely loathe the very concept of organs before, I sure do now. This is the stuff of nightmares.>>

Truth didn’t have any good reply to that. Some unknowwable amount of time later- Any idea why the bird got taken out?

<<Other than the huge bundles of drugs floating around us? Maybe some kind of art critique? Or perhaps a philosophical statement of the consequences of humanity daring to fly in a shoddy imitation of angels?>>

I’m going to go with drugs.

<<I would. But there is good news there. Those boats must be closing in.>>

What boats?

<<You think they knocked a bird full of drugs out of the sky and aren't sending boats to collect the cargo?>>

Ah. So… how’s the healing coming?

<<Hopefully, they aren’t in a huge rush.>> The System grunted, then got back to it.

Truth floated a while longer. He felt more things shift inside of him, though his eyes were still screwed. Still locked into the endless grey.

<<Alright, so… yeah, all the major stuff should be… fine… for now. Look, you are going to need to take it real, real easy, for at least a couple of days.>>

Still paralyzed here.

<<Yeah, I want to heal you up as much as… whoops.>>

Connect my nerves right fucking now!

<<Doing it. You poor bastard.>>

Pain. Blinding. Whiteout levels of agony. Truth spasmed helplessly as his body renewed its connection to his brain, each cell screaming. He would have lost bowel control if that hadn’t already happened hours ago. He couldn’t even scream. His lungs had seized up. By the time he had control of them again, he could hear the boats.

Truth didn’t try to swim. He floated bonelessly, drifting around with the rest of the wreckage. It took an unpleasantly long time, but he was able to pull himself together enough to cast Incisive, rendering himself even more unnoticable. He didn’t know who, or what, was on those boats. Given the state of the world, he assumed they would be true killers, and wary.

The fishing boats came with the sunset- a film of faded pink through the grey clouds. Wretched, stinking things of iron or wood, propelled by crude fetishes that pulled water in from the front of the boat and pissed it out the back. They reeked of sun bloated fish, that rot-smell that only those who grew up near water can really appreciate. Someone hadn’t cared enough to clean up. Someone who cared so little, they would rather put up with the smell than use a talisman or a bucket.

Perhaps it was intentional. You could hide things under that smell. Truth concentrated on his hearing. There were voices in the gray. They were not bothering to be quiet. They were speaking Jeongo, though accented. He must be at the extreme southern tip of the country.

The packages were slowly fished from the water by the boat crews. Very slowly. Unaccountably slowly. Truth gently eased himself onto his back and looked around. The crews were sweeping the water with spotlights, then pulling up with the boat and hooking the packages with long poles. Normal, Truth supposed, but they were so slow it should count as a white mutiny. Even for Level One-

Truth felt a tiny thrill of horror, and focused on the “fishermen.” Some of them were Level Zero. Speaking Jeongo, looking like they came from Jeon. He recognized the brand on one of their shirts. Grown adults from Jeon who were Level Zero. Nobody was giving them shit about it either, or treating them like cripples. It wasn’t weird to them. They were used to seeing Level Zero “adults.”

What the Hell happened? Was it always this bad outside Harban? Nothing he had seen during his time with Starbrite suggested it, but that didn’t mean much. This could be something new. Something that started during his five years dead. The thought had the thrill of terror grow into horror.

You didn’t need an expensive elixir to break through to Level One. You didn’t even need a deeply cursed tonic bought from a slum pharmacy. Just time and cultivation. It might take a while, and the results weren’t the best, but you would get there.

Some of these fishermen, mostly the youngest, hadn’t gotten there, and they weren’t that young. Early twenties, maybe. It wasn’t even that their apertures collapsed. They didn’t have the look of someone hiding from the world. They just never got over the line. Maybe they were still cultivating and hoping. If that was the case, then the least real, those with the least accumulation of cosmic energy, were already struggling to collect the stellar rays. Becoming too unreal to interact with the broader universe.

Truth quietly made his way over to a boat, more out of consideration for his own shoddy condition than fear of being spotted. He stopped running the scales portion of Incisive, just keeping the foresight. The Blessing of the Silent Forest was more than enough to hide him. He would lay odds that he could extract teeth out of a Level Zero without them noticing him. He collapsed up by the bow. They would be a while, and it would be the most out of the way place to rest. Not like there was a cabin on small boats like this.

Truth briefly confronted the fact that he really didn’t know much about watercraft despite growing up near a canal, concluded that this was a gap in his education he was willing to tolerate, and shut his eyes. Everything hurt.

Still running the healing spell?

<<Yes, but now might be a good time to take a break. I’m going to have to stop before I start damaging you.>>

Ah. Break time, then.

<<So, related to that topic, you are a Level Four with not one, but TWO open spell slots. That’s just absurd. And I do have a small selection of spells for you to choose from. However, before picking your next spell, maybe it’s a good time to consider our overall strategy here.>>

Truth shrugged. Hurt Starbrite enough that they pull security away from Harban and, by extension, the System Astrologica. Help snuff the system. Assist to a reasonable degree in the murder of Starbrite-the-man, aka the CEO Emeritus, as well as the current C-suite. While handling these minor matters, find the sibs, rescue the sibs, find the kidnapped Shattervoid girl, rescue the girl, cash girl in for tickets off planet for me, sibs, Etenesh, and the other kind people we met. Also, stock up on entertainment and snacks, as I understand that off-world journeys are quite long.

<<Well, you wouldn’t want to run out halfway through the shattering void between stars.>>

Exactly.

<<I was, however, you ass, referring more to our more immediate problems. Jeon is incredibly screwed up at the moment. Intel wasn’t really detailed, but it sounded like there were at least thirty rebel groups, and they mostly attacked each other instead of Starbrite or Jeon.>>

Easy. This is a drug smuggling operation. I’ll follow the drugs. Where they go, I will find gangsters. The gangsters will lead me to rebels. The rebels will lead me to Starbrite. Truth scraped together enough energy to smile bitterly. I want to see Starbrite confront all the trash it made. All the slumrats he bred. Us rats swarming up his legs and taking a bite.