Why the infiltrator had committed suicide only became clear when she deigned to pry his jaw open, using her left hand as to avoid the filth of course. In the back of his throat was nestled a dead Black Rope worm.

“Note to self, Heartstopper Venom works on ancient Ankhezian bioweapons.”

Just as her investigation drew to a close, Zel saw Lydia walk into the front of the barn, only to recoil at the stench, though only briefly. Upon craning her neck and finding Zel squatting down at the loft’s edge, she questioned: “Did you find anything?”

“An infiltrator and an empty seal-jar for Black Ropes, it was an act of simple terrorism,” she remarked, jumping down with the empty jar in hand before putting it in storage. She walked past Lydia, adding: “I’m leaving, don’t fall behind if you want a ride back to the Fort.”

“Er, if you don’t mind me asking… Who do you think was behind this? I admit that I am not entirely familiar with the post-war climate, seeing as I ah… Spent most of the great mess hunting Alpes in Dammerung.”

Zel began explaining the logic behind why she thought it to most likely be either the Empire itself or Occupationist elements and thus the Empire by proxy, but she doubled back to ask: “Actually, I’ll finish my answer once you answer me this: What’s an Alpe and where is Dammerung?”

“Oh, Dammerung’s a small kingdom in the mountains, the name means “Dusk” in Old Ikesian ‘cause something fucky about the region causes the dusk to take up a third of the day for most of the year. And an Alpe is uh… It’s a sort of bear-ape. White fur, huge three-part mouth full of inward-facing teeth, lanky limbs. They “eat” livestock and people in their sleep, paralyze them with a sort of gas, and by eat I mean they somehow feed on your sleep. You wake up having slept for half a day while feeling like you’ve not gotten any rest at all. Grekuria pays through the nose for Alpe corpses to make their nonlethal grenades, so hunting the things is always good money. Now… You were talking about how the Pateirian Bureau of State Security-”

“-Brainwashes PoWs and uses them as disposable infiltrators, yes. Geasa, parasites, they even have facilities where they groom Ikesian kids from birth to be spies - that little chestnut came to light after the cunts tried assassinating Willowdale’s governor, once our friends went through the personal belongings of certain treacherous senators…”

They’d reached the Sturmgandr by now, and Zel remembered that carrying a razor-sharp magic sword without a scabbard just wouldn’t be a very good idea on a motorbike ripping down a forest dirt road at three-digit speeds.

“Let me take a look at the sword, I’m sure these came with scabbards…” she said, taking the blade from Lydia’s hands and putting it in Fog Storage. The sword’s name revealed itself when it appeared next to its corresponding scabbard in the item list.

x1 Fulgur-burned “Vysaga” (Pattern-XIIa Dragon Knight Longsword) x1 “Vysaga” Scabbard

After merging the two articles in the list and retrieving the resultant sheathed blade, she handed it off to Lydia only to realize that the sword would more or less become just a nice sword if its wielder didn’t have a means to charge the fuel gem. So, she asked: “You wouldn’t happen to have an affinity for lightning magic, right?”

“I can use Fog-breathing and some basic kineticism, but that’s it…” the mercenary answered.

“Alright…” Zel sighed, scrolling through her storage again. The Thundercharger module - which she’d named one of her own techniques after - of a Sturmgandr motorcycle ran on Fulgur cells, necessitating a Fulgur Accumulator to recharge the cells once they were spent. As such, she had decided to just give one of these devices to Lydia, seeing no real reason against it for two reasons: firstly, she still had a spare since both of the party’s Sturmgandrs came with their own accumulator, and secondly, she didn’t actually need the trinket since she could just generate her own Fulgur.

“What is this?” the mercenary questioned at the sight of the curious device, which resembled a copper bonsai tree with the charging chamber being in the base, stylized as the pot. It was quite chunky, though small enough to fit inside a backpack.

“You want a magic sword, you’ll have to power it somehow. This one runs on fuel gems, the way Inquisitor swords do, so you’ll have to recharge it somehow, and unless you can create Fulgur or Fulgur-coded Pneuma, this is your only option. It draws ambient Fulgur from the atmosphere, if you just follow the user guide plaque on the back you’ll be fine.”

“...Right, of course,” Lydia nodded along with the sort of confusion that betrayed a lack of deeper understanding, though she seemed to get the gist. After the older woman put the device away in her backpack, Zel finally fulfilled the other promise to give her a ride back to Fort 57. Both of them made their way to the bar tent immediately upon arrival, with the barman’s face poking over the counter at the woosh of a Fog vortex opening, immediately followed with the thump of Zel setting down the Alkasnail’s beak.

“Ah, it seems you’ve… Completed the contract, as promised,” the barman said, briefly glancing over to Lydia before ducking down below the counter once more. The sound of a safe’s dial turning could be heard, then the creak of a heavy door on rusty hinges. Clinking of coins in a bag followed, and soon the bulging sack of money with Zel’s payment was on the counter.

The fifty-something mercenary woman right next to her must’ve appeared like a small child by contrast, perhaps in part due to the disproportionate size of the blade which she had rested across her shoulders, resting her hands on it. It was, after all, a longsword designed for men a full meter taller than Lydia.

“That’s the base payout,” he said, ducking down again and retrieving another, smaller pouch. He counted out a few large, cold-iron coins before stacking a number of silvers and coppers. “And your negotiated bonus.”

She dropped the entire sack into the Fog vortex, checking the Tablet’s currency count to ensure the money was all there before looking over the bonus and taking it as well.

“Good, looks like it’s all there,” she nodded. “I assume the authorities intend to reclaim the homestead?”

“Dunno, probably. It’s good farming land, if it’s even one-fifth intact it’s worth the effort I’d say,” the barman shrugged. “Assuming the infestation ain’t too bad.”

“I left it more or less purged, though… You may want to pursue further investigation. The infestation wasn’t accidental,” she said.

Concern came over the barman’s face.

“Hm? What do you mean?” he asked. By the time he finished the sentence, Zel had already pulled the near-empty jar out of storage.

“I found this next to the corpse of an infiltrator in the barn loft, alongside a suicide dagger coated in Pateirian Heartstopper Venom. There was a hole in the back wall through which he had likely entered.”

“Aye, this is… Unmistakably a Pateirian sealing jar. I’ll bring it up with the higher-ups, the corpse would come into their attention if they plan to reclaim the homestead either way. I do not wish to uh… To insult you by questioning your judgment, but please, explain how you know it was an infiltrator?”

“The jar, the knife, his haircut… The way he was dressed was an easy clue. Once you see the pattern a couple times you can’t stop noticing it,” she shrugged. “Either way, my job’s done here. It’s your job to follow up on it, now.”

With these words she left, feeling the piercing gaze of hateful eyes upon her back. Fort 57 wasn’t physically large enough for anyone to follow her into a back alley, but there were plentiful hidden corners in a half-ruined military installation. She made her way to one of these on purpose, meandering about with the intent to appear lost before finally heading to an abandoned section of the fortress with a faux-misguided confidence. The whole time, she could feel that presence somewhere in her vicinity, her Slayer’s Instinct coordinating her senses to always point out the figure’s general direction from her.

As she looked out from the top of a terrace, arms crossed, the figure’s presence vanished and she felt a sudden impulse of danger in her gut. She didn’t move a muscle, but she did ignite the spark inside her brain to begin Engine Breathing. To the would-be assassin’s credit, she closed the distance before Zel could breathe two lungfuls, and made no attempt at using a weapon. Zel felt the presence re-emerge overhead, with an overwhelming flood of arcane energy rising in the same direction. The figure was approaching, freefalling. Had she not readied herself, she wouldn’t have gotten out of the way in time as something stabbed into the ground where she had stood.

She landed some fifteen meters back, briefly glimpsing the assassin: An inconspicuously-dressed, dirty-faced, and altogether far too young Ikesian woman. Between the fingers of her right hand she clutched three huge, jade claws, shining and crackling with arcane might. The patterns upon them were unmistakable, marking them as Jade Dragons. The highest currency of the Divine Empire and among the only standardized measures of arcane power on the continent. A single Jade Dragon could be made into five Emperor’s Mercy talismans, a form of arcane suicide pill that could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction that would fray the user into hair-thin ribbons. Estimating their size, each claw must’ve been carved from at least two-thirds of a Jade Dragon. Zel’s gaze was finally drawn to the object which had been targeted at her, a large milky-white, gold-inlaid spike of some sort.

One second had passed since it struck, and already it glowed a blinding white. The would-be assassin’s face began twisting into a sad smile before a ghostly dragon of pure white erupted out of the Mutton-fat Jade Talisman, briefly spiraling around her before it dove straight into the woman’s form as she convulsed in place, screaming, beams of blinding-white shining from her mouth and eyes into the sky, even piercing the clouds.

It was over in seconds, and when it ended, the talisman had crumbled to dust; a fate which soon befell its user as well. She stood there, her head tilting down as bloody tears ran down her face and her sad smile grew into a relieved, even spiteful grin of broken teeth. Her skin was turning ashen, crumbling and cracking like the soil of a desert, starting at her fingers and rapidly moving upwards.

With her half-skeletonized right hand, she held out her jade claws and, nearly voicelessly, mouthed a phrase in unnatural Ikesian - of the accentless sort only spoken by foreigners. Moreover, it wasn’t a voice that matched her face, but one Zelsys recognized. It was the same, inhuman tone that she’d heard in the Willowdale Dungeon, but the utter boredom was gone from it, replaced by amusement.

It was the Divine Emperor, speaking through this would-be assassin’s mouth. He had to have anticipated this exact course of events to put such a contingency in place.

“But if so, why not just make the contingency something like a magic bomb?” a thought went through her head.

“That you hear this message means you’ve evaded another attempt on your life."

At this point, Zel noticed the colour of the assassin's eyes and hair shifting - a silver right eye and a golden left eye, while her hair flashed from black to pure white. The innumerable cracks covering her body shone with iridescent flame, betraying the fact her very soul was being burned as fuel.

"I, Xiān Dì, the White Dragon of the North, hereby acknowledge you as a threat to be eliminated, Zelsys Newman, Founder of the Newman Sect. Congratulations, no more are you a mere pest to me - an honor many warlords have sacrificed their lineages in pursuit of. For the truly exquisite, nostalgic amusement you’ve provided me with thus far, I shall share with you this: The gates of Hedan’s Wall grow wider by the day. Neither the machinations of the Kargareth nor those of the Grekurians go beneath my notice. Knowing full well that I as of yet do not possess the means to suppress your efforts to unearth knowledge of True Cultivation, I shall no longer keep those loyal to me in the dark. Soon, the Greater Sects shall bring to bear weapons and techniques the likes of which you cannot fathom.”

The would-be assassin plunged the claws into her own chest just as the edges of her face began to fray, sputtering out one last utterance.

“Now… The New Era… Of Cultivation begins.”

She mouthed a trigger word and slender quills of jade erupted from the assassin’s claw talismans, turning the woman to a jade hedgehog. Yet, it did not stop there - the entirety of her form turned to a jade-like substance in the span of one breath, leaving her a sorrowful statue suspended in the motion of falling to her knees. Still digesting what had just transpired, Zel looked upon the woman-become-statue for a few moments, trying to discern whether the statue would spring to life anew and come after her as some bizarre necrogolem, but there was nothing.

This place was well away from the fort’s inhabited sections, and the Fort 57’s population numbered low enough that any crowd mentality was unlikely to take place. People wouldn’t be likely to investigate such a commotion right after it happened, either, if they had a single hair of good judgment on their heads. She looked upon the tragic statue, imagining that it would likely get smashed if just left here as it was. Again and again she’d seen or heard of the Emperor’s agents maiming themselves or committing suicide by horrific means, be it out of free will, compulsion by geas, or due to simple psychological conditioning.

A pawn such as this, a slave by any other name, didn’t deserve hatred, but pity. Arcane atrocities such as this one were the fault of the Emperor and his sycophant officials, not the pawns.

Leveraging her monstrous strength and coating the Butcher’s edge in lightning, she carved a warning at the statue’s feet.

THE DIVINE EMPEROR HAS NO MERCY

EVEN FOR HIS OWN

THIS IS HIS REWARD FOR SUBSERVIENCE:

A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH

LET THIS BE AN ETERNAL EFFIGY TO THE FATE

OF THOSE WHO ACCEPT HIS RULE

Zelsys of course didn’t know or believe the figure to be anything more than a petrified corpse, but she was also not one to forgo creative embellishment for a good narrative. It wasn’t a pure lie, either; there was still the possibility that the Emperor’s accursed magics somehow destroyed the woman’s soul and prevented it from whatever natural fate the souls of the dead were fated to.

She cleared away some of the debris from cutting into stone, mulling over what he had said through the would-be-assassin’s mouth as she did so. An open acknowledgment and declaration of hostility such as that could be seen as a mark of doom hanging over her head and the heads of those she traveled with, but in her mind, the Emperor had functionally said nothing new. Zelsys had already considered herself to be his enemy, and she already took into account the possibility, nay, the inevitability of violent confrontation with any and all Occupationist or otherwise Pateiria-aligned forced they might encounter. What grabbed her attention was his statement about “Hedan’s Wall”, which she knew to be another name for the Blackwall, as well as the declaration that he would no longer keep his own people in the dark.

“Of course, where else would he want to curtail the rise of potential enemies by suppressing cultivation other than within his own borders?” she thought. If this line of thinking were at all correct, it would mean that the Emperor viewed her, the Newman Sect, and her ideology of scientific cultivation a threat to the empire at large, one which would justify creating fertile ground for subversive elements within the Empire to grow.

“He’s probably betting that we’ll be gone and done with long before his own subjects can become a problem…”

The Heavenly Palace; an imperious edifice to the power of Xiān Dì, the Divine Emperor, the palace alone held the population of a city. Its throne room alone was a marvel, the throne carved by the Emperor’s own hand out of solid stone when he was still a mortal. It was now surrounded by dozens of spindly, jade automaton arms holding scrying mirrors, allowing him to directly rule over the sprawl of his empire. It demanded only the small price of preciously rare Mantis Seers interred beneath the throne, one for each mirror, as well as the price of lesser visionary souls to fuel the array.

He was waiting for the report: The death toll. The paltry sum it had cost him to say what he had to say to Her directly, rather than as a pre-recorded message. Like clockwork, a eunuch official entered the throne room from the left and made himself known. After kowtowing and several dozen seconds of honorific ritualism, Xiān Dì commanded: “Enough with the posturing. How many died?”

“Er, well… One-hundred and twenty-one Seers have been lost. Roughly forty more suffered reversible brain hemorrhaging and light to moderate spiritual over-exertion injuries.”

A smile grew on Xiān Dì’s lips for the first time in decades. The wider it grew, the more fear he could sense from the officials arrayed to either side below his throne.

“Good, well below my expectations,” he said.

“I had expected at least two-hundred lost. The Wall truly is growing weaker by the day…” he thought.

In truth, this had not been just for his own fulfillment. It had also been an opaque means of testing the defenses of Hedan’s Wall in the wake of reports that the gates were no longer selectively stopping people from passage, but rather shutting out anyone above a certain unknown spiritual magnitude threshold.

“Before I let you go, tell me: How is progress on the Bio-”

He stopped himself, reiterating: “The Human Logic Automaton?”

Xiān Dì had nearly slipped. The first time he’d felt any real emotional investment in the last century, and it was enough to make him nearly slip up. He’d meticulously cultivated his image as a native of this world, to set himself apart from the well-known otherworlders who had been given divine gifts through their transmigration, just as he had been. It would not do to out himself before his own people by calling out a biological supercomputer.

“We’re still struggling with rejection, your divinity - er, both physical and spiritual. So far we’ve only been able to create a three-node unit out of identical triplets, extracted from an Ikesian border village near the research facility. Despite thorough conditioning, the ah… The composite, it…” the eunuch trailed off, once more hesitating to finish.

“What did it do? Speak!” the Emperor commanded.

“It manifested a composite astral body and proceeded to breach containment using an unforeseen magnitude of kinetic magic in the form of several translucent, monstrously strong tendril-arms. Much of the facility has been irreparably damaged and several vital researchers are dead… And the composite is still at large.”

He laughed in satisfaction, “Dear eunuch, that is not a failure in the slightest. The first Tiger-class mutant to come out of the first Chimera Farm escaped and slew its creators, yet such mutants are now a lynchpin of my forces! Continue research as normal, I will have as many resources allocated to your cause as is necessary. Use single-batch mutagen treatments to break down barriers between subjects. If all else fails, look into homunculi.”

The eunuch shrunk back at the mention of homunculi, that uniquely Ikesian art, but he dared not question the Divine Emperor, only bowing in submission: “Yes, your divinity.”

“Ah, and hold an auction for the opportunity to hunt down the subject. The reward will be any one scroll from the Forbidden Library. Away with you.”

After the eunuch had recovered from the shock of what Xiān Dì had just said and made his way out of the throne room, the emperor pulled up one of his scrying mirrors, willing it to establish a connection beyond the Blackwall. What once had demanded tens of seers to perform, the Black Mirror Array made easy, as it did not rely upon the aetherwave transmissions which were so easily spied on. They were a form of scrying mirror, the same family of artifact as the very mirrors around his own throne, but more limited and easier to use; the array’s only flaw was the disproportionate difficulty of producing Black Mirrors compared to simple aetherwave transceivers, limiting their use to high-priority applications such as this one. None of the black mirrors in use had been made by Pateirian hands, but were instead excavated from ancient Ankhezian ruins at tremendous cost of human life.

The connection was established. He was met with the face of a lieutenant, rather than the designated mirror operator; he could see the operator in the background, huddled over a table, his posture betraying that he had been caned. For what? Xiān Dì didn’t bother asking, focusing his gaze on the lieutenant instead. After a few moments of delay due to latency, the man snapped to attention and rattled off a report: “We’ve received the Dragon Eye intact. The plan proceeds apace; Cao Hu stands ready for his interment in the Walking-Machine. Furthermore, we expect to be finished with the high-priority excavation in two months.”

Xiān Dì smiled again.

“Good. Anything else?”

Shifting in place uncomfortably, the lieutenant added: “Er, the asset known as Adalbert von Wickten, he…”

“Dead, I presume?” he questioned, not surprised at all by this turn of events, since he had been informed of Newman’s presence in Arches. Wherever that woman went, his plans unraveled. Oh, how she vexed him, it was truly exhilarating to feel this again. The Sage of Fog had rejected any personal quarrel, coward that he was, instead treating the War of Fog as nothing more than a political dispute. But Newman, she was truly amusing; it had been she who had initiated conflict, and over what? A few soldiers trying to mug her. Such a tiny quarrel spiraled out into her thwarting one of his few plans to bypass the Blackwall, and later the killing of his resurrected general, Ubul.

The Emperor was pulled from thought by a nervous answer: “No, your divinity. He… He showed up at one of our outposts, or what’s left of him. He claimed that the Heretic’s Daughter force-fed him a pill said to force the body to expel all impurities as an alternative to being killed, and that he didn’t remember anything besides his name and the last several days.”

A belly-laugh erupted from the man-god’s body, much to the terror of his subordinates. The idea of such a punishment was as old as breakthrough pills themselves, to leave a truly impure creature’s fate up to chance, whether that fate might be purification or drowning in its own impurity. There was a third outcome, but to think that Von Wickten had been so utterly rotten as to suffer that fate…

“Treat him as a high-value hazardous asset, like Cao Hu. Our man has become an Impurity Elemental. Contain him for the time being, cater to his every demand no matter how degenerate. I will have restraints fashioned for the rabid dog within the week.”

Zelsys left the statue as it was. None among the small crowd which had gathered dared raise their hand to it, and she was confident enough that it would go unvandalized, at least by the inhabitants of Fort 57. Striding through the crowd unimpeded, people parting before her without so much as a look being needed, she made her way to her original intended destination in this place. When she’d returned to the fort with Lydia in tow, Zelsys had intended to visit one of the two or three merchants who made this trading post their home, hoping to buy swords in bulk to serve as ammunition. As she walked, she realized that she hadn’t even bothered to check the newborn technique’s listing to give it a name. It showed up under Beast-butchering Arts, given its use case and circumstances of inception.

Fulgarrow

She put the Tablet away, making her way to one of Fort 57’s merchants, specifically one which had a placard advertising his stock of guns, ammunition, blades, and “other tools”.