“Ash! Ash! Listen to me!” Celes shook me. “I don’t know what it is you did but your Saha is drawing all of your body’s Qi into itself! You have to make it stop before you pass out again!”

“Ishhh all part of the educational processsss,” I groaned out, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The myriads of ghostly echoes flailed all around her head, patterns intertwining within patterns. They were trying to tell me something.

I needed to know, needed to understand what this was.

“Gods-damn it, Ash!” Celes pushed one of my newly acquired beast cores towards my lips. “Draw Qi from the beast core before your organs start to fail! Whatever it is you’re trying to do, your body simply doesn’t have enough Qi!”

Yes. I was hungry. Hungry for power to understand. My neurons needed more processing power, more connections that simply weren’t there. I pulled power from the beast core into my brain, layering connections atop connections.

Was the beast-slaying rule about cores that Celes had mentioned earlier just hogwash, misinformation propagated to stop mundane citizens from desiring and utilizing beast cores?

Every core I had touched so far had responded to me as I wanted it to. The first one bound the Pharmacist to my soul, the second destroyed itself at my command and the third... The third was now rewiring my brain on a level beyond the possible physical and biological.

These new connections I was forging within my mind weren’t linear. They existed on a separate plane, on another dimension entirely. They were made up of fractal and non-euclidean math that arranged itself at my desire, growing in complexity. The more of these new connections built themselves in my brain, the better I understood what else needed to be done.

I suddenly understood the new world a little bit better.

Leviathan abominations, one hundred kilometer-sized cosmic entities like the Boundless Chorus had come from some distant place beyond the stars and with them they had brought something just as prodigiously aberrant - math that warped linear space-time. A new type of energy that contorted, warped every natural law that I knew - energy that the cultivators had labelled as Qi.

I knew that the deeper one went into the tunnels within the shell of the Boundless Chorus, the more horrid, impossible beasts resided within. Were these surreal, horrid creatures with their beast cores just parasites, microscopic fleas that fed off the true titan?

The underworld tunnels I had been traversing to get to the dead city were mere minute cracks within the vast shell of an impossibly large colossus that should have come apart under the weight of its own body, but simply didn’t.

Qi was to blame. Qi was able to violate, warp space and time.

If my hypothesis was correct and all Qi came from within Lord Boundless, therefore Qi patterns were how the cosmic-god-beast interacted with us.

I wanted, needed to know how Lord Boundless perceived us, but the information presented to me was unnecessarily complex, nearly infinite in its breadth. I had to simplify it for my little, meaty human brain, box it into letters and numbers, systemise the immeasurable, non-euclidean, alien, overly-complex gibberish into something algorithmic, something static that I could actually understand.

I funneled the boiling complexity in my eyes across the newly formed non-euclidean neuron patterns within my mind, systemizing and subtracting the unnecessary, repeating noise. Simplify, divide, subtract, translate. Thankfully I knew enough fraction math to get me started.

The fractal algorithm formulas folded in on themselves again and again and again at my behest until the information became linear and observable.

The core in my lips suddenly felt cold and dead. I blinked. The myriads of dancing Qi echoes coalesced themselves into something coherent that my primitive organic brain could interpret, understand and perceive. There was something... an information box floating above Celes.

[Celes Rada - LV 42 Geisha of Boundless Chorus]

[Primary weapon - Serenity]

“Ha,” I chortled. “Ha ha ha ha ha!”

“Ash, please tell me you’re okay,” Celes whispered.

“I’m okay,” I said calmly, ceasing my mad-scientist sounding laughter. “I got exactly what I wanted. I wanted to statistically define reality in a very specific way, so that’s exactly what I got.”

I glanced down at myself.

[Ash Sparks - LV 1 Observer]

[Primary weapon - Scanning]

“Pfffhhhhhaah,” I choked, blinking tears out of my eyes. “Seriously?”

“Seriously, what?” Celes asked.

“I understand the universe a little more now,” I answered after a bit of a pause to recollect my thoughts. “You see, the scientific method... unlike cultivation isn’t about knowing the absolute truth, the axiom of all things. It’s about being less wrong. It’s about finding patterns in chaos, presenting a hypothesis based on these patterns and then building something new from the result that takes full advantage of it. It’s about building a foundation atop another foundation, combining, multiplying, growing knowledge. It’s how we build machines based on pure chemistry that put men in orbit, beyond the atmosphere of the earth. It’s how we went to the moon, walked upon its surface and returned back to earth.”

“Less wrong?” The geisha repeated my words. “...the ancients had walked on the moon?”

“That’s right,” I nodded. “I’ve seen pictures of the surface of the moon and rocks from its surface. We were figuring out how to touch the stars and how to calculate infinity. We would have gotten there eventually, were it not for the arrival of things like Lord Boundless.”

“So… what did you learn exactly?” Celes asked.

“I had systemized Qi observation using the power of the beast core you had so kindly shoved into my face!" I announced. "How did you know that it would help, by the way? I thought that it would be a lot harder to use random-ass beast cores."

"Administrator Han told me that these cores were cleansed of all their impurities. They were prepared for sale to another god-city cult. I was hoping it would help you."

"Gotcha. Anyways, you are a Level 42 Geisha and I’m a Level 1 Observer. Your ‘weapon’ is Serenity and mine is Scanning.”

“What…?” Celes muttered. "But I'm a geisha, I do not kill things!"

“Exactly. Serenity is not a weapon. Neither is Scanning. These are specialized tools of relaxing and learning... but I digress, since even a microscope can be used like a hammer. There is reason, logic within everything."

"Such as?"

"High-cultivators are weapons, Celes. They drink poisoned tea for breakfast and ingest questionable, addictive pills for lunch all for the purposes of becoming deadlier. They slay fearsome creatures dredged from the depth of Lord Boundless and grow stronger. Think, Celes - for what purpose?”

“To become… better weapons?” The geisha followed my trail of thought.

“That’s right. In my world we had this cute little game,” I pointed at my black shirt with the drawing of Pikachu on it. “Pokemon. It means pocket monsters. It was a story of teenagers going out into the world carrying all sorts of monsters inside balls which were in their pockets for the purpose of collecting all of the monsters and becoming the very best.”

“Uh… and?”

“The cultivators are pocket-men, Celes,” I said, pointing at the ground. “What if colossal beings like Lord Boundless travel the universe, collecting life for the purposes of weaponizing it? For the purposes of creating new, better weapons ad infinitum?”

“I… but that’s…” Celes hyperventilated.

“It’s just a hypothesis,” I said. “Less wrong, remember?”

“What...” She fretted. “What could we possibly do if you are right?”

“We learn more, we become smarter. We break the cycle,” I told her. “I have no plans of becoming a human-weapon. Do you?”

Celes shook her head.

“That’s right,” I stood up, readjusting my geisha robe. “Every system no matter how complex has a flaw, a loophole that can be utilized. Even the cleverest merchant can be robbed of their wares. No matter how well guarded and warded something is… there’s someone out there that can break its security pattern.”

“You… you’re talking about stealing power from the gods themselves?” Celes trembled.

“Pfff... right. I’m a real modern Prometheus,” I muttered to myself, looking up at the ruin of the shattered moon.

“I’ve already infiltrated one system, thanks to you - this compound,” I turned to the kitsune. “Now I can see what Lord Boundless sees through my eyes, albeit in an extremely simplified form. We keep one foot inside of the system designed to create the very best weaponized-human and continue to observe, try to fully understand every pattern, every algorithm of the grand game these colossal fuckers are playing.”

Celes nodded.

“It won’t be easy and we might die along the way, but if we get lucky… if we persist and magnify our knowledge base, we will eventually find a perfect loophole and then we use it to break the game,” I concluded.