Chapter 27:

Eventually, after witnessing scenes that felt more traumatic to her than any injury, Lilijoy had snapped back to her usual self. Once she did, they began to plan.

The beautiful thing about Magpie’s idea was that they could do it from the Inside. All the major clans had extensive holdings Inside, territories they controlled where they ran their Outside organizations, harvested ingredients for their alchemists, and generally lived like kings. It was very common for clans to settle disagreements from the Outside through turf wars and assassination campaigns Inside, and even more common for such disputes to arise from clashes over limited crafting resources and land-based resources Inside.

Lilijoy really wasn’t sure which world was more important to the power dynamics of the clans, but it seemed that most of the open conflict occurred Inside, where it was tolerated, even sanctioned by the larger governing body of the Corp.

Most of the clans’ primary holdings were in the Purgatory section of the Inside, which held far more valuable and rare resources. Only a few clans had extensive holdings in the Garden, in part because the Garden's resources were more common, but also because the rules in the Garden were much more restrictive. Outsiders and tempered subsets above level fifty were severely constrained in power, and combat between Outsiders made little sense, as both sides had to declare war, and could respawn indefinitely.

Maintaining territory in the Garden against the wishes of the Insiders required a kind of obstinate cruelty that only a few clans had the stomach for. Naturally, Sinaloa possessed some of the most extensive holdings, including Averdale, the former homeland of the Garden Elves.

“I still don’t get how we’re supposed to find what we need in Averdale. It’s not like we can force someone from Sinaloa to tell us.” Lilijoy said, once she had recovered from her viewing.

“That’s the great part. Have you ever wondered how the clans move information back and forth between their holdings in the Outside and Inside?”

Lilijoy really, really hadn’t.

“I guess I assumed they just messaged back and forth, sent files through their systems, that kind of thing,” she replied.

“That’s probably what they did in the early years. But the leaders of the clans, and even more the alchemists, needed better ways to manage their resources in both realms at the same time. They built, or discovered a powerful scrying tool, called an oracle stone, that let them bridge Inside and Outside. If you ask me, it’s a bit of a cheat.”

“So they can access their files? But why don’t they...”

“To tell you the truth, it makes my head hurt a little to think about it. I guess since the Inside is a total sensory replacement, Guardian, or whatever, controls what comes in and out of their senses. Of all our senses. It’s why we can’t access the Outside data streams when we’re here.”

Lilijoy caught herself before she blurted it out.

But I can…

Magpie continued, “Anyway, oracle stones used to be really rare, lots of clan battles in Purgatory over them, that kind of thing. These days though, most of the bigger clans have a bunch of them. It shouldn’t be impossible to get our hands on one in Averdale, if we’re clever enough.”

Lilijoy could see about a thousand problems with the plan already. How would they get into Averdale at all? What if Sinaloa didn’t conveniently put Attaboy’s location on their internal network? How would they use the oracle stones? What if there was a password or something?

“What if there’s a password or something?”

“It’s just an outline of a plan at this point. We have the rest of the week to fill in the details. We can always scrap it and try something else if we have to. Besides, what’s the harm in trying? If we fail, we just respawn and try again.”

“How does that work? I only know what happens when I respawn here, and in the Trial too, I guess.”

Magpie went on to explain all the ins and outs of respawning in the Garden. In friendly territory, outside of combat, respawning was a matter of seconds. In contested territory, or during combat, respawning could either take place outside of the contested area, or after combat was concluded depending on circumstances. For those killed in enemy held territory, the respawn would happen in the nearest friendly territory, or at a friendly point previously set.

When an enemy was taken alive however, things got a little dicey. Clans and Insiders alike had perfected methods of immobilizing and weakening prisoners, what had become known on the Outside as ‘torture bans’. Logging out was often the only remedy, and logging in again would return them to the exact same location and condition. Without a rescue or extraction of some kind, it was unusual to escape. Thousands of Outsiders were torture banned, including Anda.

Insiders had it even worse, of course, since they couldn’t log out at all.

For the next few days they met in the library every afternoon to look for clues and ideas that might help their mission, as well as to familiarize themselves with the names of elves who they might seek out for more recent intelligence.

They learned that after the Sacking the remaining members of the elven royal family tried to retake the city for years but the bulk of their forces were tier-seven, and thus did not respawn. The untempered were not easily replaced by the slow-breeding elves. Sinaloan assassins and operatives disrupted attempted alliances through fear and chaos, making it clear to all that joining with elven forces would only invite bombings and atrocities in the population centers of would-be Insider allies. Over decades, the remaining elven population withdrew and dispersed around the continent; without their connection to their homeland, they became a shadow of their former selves, bitter and angry toward all, especially Outsiders.

It didn’t help that the sacking of Averdale was only one of the atrocities perpetrated by clans. The plains orcs had been slaughtered and driven from their grassy homelands by the Maasai clan, while the dwarves had collapsed the mighty depths of Mount Misgalir, rather than allow Outsiders to possess their second largest underground city. There were dozens of similar tragedies, perhaps on a slightly smaller scale.

Many of the human nations Inside were ruled by clans, who had dispossessed the hereditary ruling classes. Somehow, Lilijoy felt less bad about that. After all, human feudal systems had a history of sudden regime change on the Outside, and as far as she could tell, the clan rulers weren’t much different from the Insiders who had preceded them.

She did wonder where the Archon was in all of this though, as well as the tier-five subsets known as Gongen. Surely, she thought, they could reverse the horrors and injustice perpetrated by Sinaloa and others, if they wanted to.

Lilijoy and Magpie considered several options to deal with the issue of respawning.

“I just don’t think it’s a big deal,” Magpie had said. “Our levels are really low. If we get caught, they’ll respawn us without even trying.”

They had come to an unspoken agreement that talking about ‘respawning’ was far preferable to talking about death.

“I don’t know much about all of this,” replied Lilijoy, “but shouldn’t we have some kind of guarantee, in case we get captured?”

“Yeah, well, we’re hardly the first to face this issue. Just about everyone who heads into a situation where they could be captured prepares some kind of fail-safe these days. There’s even a Subtle Arts class about it. Only the oldest kids can take it though.”

“I guess it’s not exactly normal for lower-levels like us to get captured.”

“It’s more common than you might think. But students are usually released pretty quickly. We’re just not that important. The clan heirs and such are usually guarded, and given respawn kits when they leave the Academy grounds.”

“They have kits?” To Lilijoy’s practical side, this made perfect sense. The part of her informed by Emily and the Internet Archive was feeling deeply uncomfortable. It’s just respawning, she reminded herself for about the hundredth time.

“Yeah, you know, pills, bombs, that kind of thing. They’ve gotten it down to a science. It’s an arms race, really, where the enemy is trying their best to keep you alive, and you are trying your best...”

“I wonder if anyone has developed an ability.”

“What, like Respawn on Command or something? If someone did, they’d be the most important person in the Garden.”

Lilijoy considered that for a moment.

“Ok, enough respawn talk,” said Magpie. “Let’s get back to planning.”

So far, the elements of the plan they had nailed down consisted of traveling to the Forest of Averdale during the next experience term. There, they would connect with a band of Averdale liberation fighters known to Magpie. Even though the elves had all but abandoned hope, there were still groups composed of a variety of races who fought to avenge the injustice and atrocity perpetrated by Sinaloa.

The clan had never been able to drive them from the outskirts of the forest, as most of them were tier-sixes, who could respawn almost as easily as Outsiders. The forest had become something of a magnet for young Insider adventurers seeking to prove themselves and strike a blow against the wicked Outsiders. It wasn’t unknown for other Outsiders to fight alongside the liberation groups, and at times the area turned into a proxy battle for other clans seeking to make life difficult for Sinaloa.

It was all very complicated, and Lilijoy hoped that she and Magpie would be able to infiltrate and get what they needed without getting sucked into the politics. She had no illusions that it would be easy to do though. She could only imagine that over a century of guerrilla war and infiltration attempts had hardened Sinaloa’s defenses to a remarkable extent. At least it was worth the attempt, as the possible consequences were relatively small. Unless they were captured alive.

***

Along with planning and training, the rest of her time was occupied with weaving and cultivating, two activities she had found to be quite similar. She often thought of Mr. Sennit’s question, where does the flower go? as she practiced weaving string together in increasingly complicated patterns.

The simple answer was that the pattern existed in her mind, but there were layers of understanding she was coming to appreciate as she considered the issue. For instance, she could follow instructions formulaically and produce the flower. Did that mean that the formula was the flower? Or, she could hold the flower in her mind in totality, seeing the relationships of the loops and twists of the single string.

This difference between the ‘recipe’ and the ‘meal’ often occupied her mind as her fingers performed the intricate dance routine with the cords. Often, she imagined that her thoughts were themselves the string, flowing through a linear narrative that could cross back over itself and coil around to form structures that were meaningful on a higher level. Were her thoughts following a recipe in the creation of meaning?

It was also interesting to consider where the flower went when she wasn’t thinking about. If it still existed in her mind as memory then perhaps it stayed where it was, a permanent fixture, and her conscious thought left it and returned as needed. But if that was the case, then memory was the truly real thing, and her consciousness was more like a moving window, or the beam of a flashlight in a dark room, revealing truth in passing. Or, her memory could be nothing more than chemical recipes the brain used to recreate totalities, and the true meal was the act of awareness.

Such ruminations were fascinating and frustrating. She often wished she could have more than one string of thought to weave together. True, she could juggle many ideas, or write down thoughts and then think about what she had written, but she felt like she was stuck on ‘recipe level’ for many of the important concepts she wished to understand better.

It was much the same in her cultivation. She could easily fall into a blissful state of thoughtless creation, where her will and emotions unlocked waves of molecular construction. When she did, she felt herself as a small part of something much greater. She wasn’t the writer, or even the words; she was most like the cursor, the placeholder at the moment of creation.

It wasn’t that she wanted more control. She wanted to be bigger, greater, to expand and contain and understand what she was doing as she built out thousands of crystalline mechanisms connecting and encompassing the very brain she was using to perform the act of creation.

She missed Jiannu terribly at times. She was the one who had seemed to understand what was going on at a level Lilijoy couldn’t. But now Jiannu and parts of herself and Emily were all blended and sequestered away, waiting for… well, she wasn’t really sure.

It was a problem she mostly avoided thinking about, the whole split mind thing and the fact that she had no idea how to resolve it. Over the week, she had cultivated several times, adding roots and branches with her Immortal Crystal Oak technique. She was afraid to do anything too dramatic, and had focused on building out existing structures, until the thought had occurred to her that she might be widening whatever divide there was between her Stage Two and Stage One selves by adding to Stage Two.

It wasn’t like she could gain equality by building another tree though, so she had switched her focus to building support systems, hoping inspiration would strike eventually.

The new architecture for managing heat flow during cultivation did wonders for her ability to cultivate the bugs for Ranks four and five, though it wasn’t perfect. For one, it very much favored Stage two cultivation, as the crystals being built dumped their heat directly into the branches and roots of the tree, sweeping it out of her brain with almost no resistance. For Stage one, and the other more mechanical support systems, there was still a point where the heat accumulated before reaching the areas of high thermal conductivity, so she couldn’t go all out. Even so, she estimated her build speed was about ten times faster than before, or about two hundred million bugs per hour.

The blood bugs she was making were amazingly effective at storing and transporting oxygen. Already she had made several billion, and she was looking forward to seeing just how long she could hold her breath on the Outside. Realistically, she knew that she had a long ways to go, but even a few billion should extend her oxygen carrying capability by a minute or two. It would probably take a couple more weeks to get to experience the full capabilities, including instant clotting and oxygen reserves of several hours.

The skin bugs she had received from Anda were much more complex, though thankfully she needed fewer of them. They didn’t take that long to build, but then they had to travel to her skin and take up residence there, link to their neighbors and form a multi-layered structure of flexible diamond carbon fiber and shear-thickening fluid.

She had already started reinforcing the skin of her head and abdomen, prioritizing her vital points, which she thought would take a week or so. Since it would be at least another week before she could attempt to rescue Attaboy Outside, she felt pretty good about the timing.

She had yet to hear anything from Anda, which was a growing concern. Two or three days she had expected, but a full week was pushing it, making it more likely that something other than his adaptation to a new system was at play.

She really hoped that rescuing Anda wouldn’t be her next agenda.