“How much longer will this take?” Auhn demanded.
The god’s pale braid was draped over his right shoulder and exposed breast, too heavy for the soft breeze blowing from the depths of the cavern to sway. The thin, tightly-interwoven strands of hair occasionally bounced against his grey skin due to the vibrations coursing through the web – usually an indication that one of their kinsmen was walking along a connected path a few kilometres away.
The flexible material bent under the weight of the Arahnians’ bulbous lower bodies, though neither Auhn nor his colleague were worried that the material might snap. They knew that it could easily support a hundred times the stress. Besides, they could just float if necessary.
“What do you want me to say? Isolating the seller’s thread is proving much harder than usual.” Kauhn clicked his chelicerae, not bothering to hide his irritation. Despite ranking lower than Auhn, the Fifteenth Circle mage was close enough to his great grandfather to speak casually in the latter’s presence.
The younger deity’s eight beady eyes were constantly cycling through every colour that their people had a name for, as well as plenty that they didn’t. Both of his hands, as well as his two hairy forelegs were flipping through countless glowing threads per second as the god tested various ideas linking the secret of the cyan powder to all sorts of unknown destinations across the universe.
Auhn was also able to perceive the colourful strands – at least momentarily – despite not possessing the affinity himself. The enormous quantities of karma mana that his descendant was pumping into the threads made them visible to others, though that only lasted for a fraction of a second before the colour faded away and Kauhn discarded the useless strands in favour of a more promising batch.
Locating the thread pointing to the fool who had auctioned the information off would have normally been trivial, but the Pavillion’s own karmic deities went through great lengths to protect their customers. The connections were obscured and tangled up, requiring a fairly experienced god and a lot of time to sift through.
“It’s been seven moon cycles already! The Pavillion’s obfuscation techniques aren’t bad, but they haven’t been updated in millennia. I came to you because I thought you knew how to see through them,” Auhn chastised his great grandson. “You’re not delaying on purpose to avoid your other duties, are you?”
Kauhn scoffed. “And what would be the point of that? Whether I’m searching for this idiot of yours or for another world for our assault team to invade, it’s the same work. If anything, looking for lesser springs with interesting resources is easier, since they rarely have gods skilled enough to hide their location. Besides, the Pavilion’s techniques aren’t the issue here – I cracked them four cycles ago.”
“Oh? Is it our target that’s giving you trouble?” Auhn asked.
He was honestly quite surprised to hear that. Due to the nature of the auctioned item, the seller had to be somebody from a greater spring by definition, though there was still a huge discrepancy between the peak factions and the worlds that had barely begun turning their Yellow-borns into gods.
Auhn had expected their target to hail from a weaker planet, since the strongest worlds weren’t desperate enough to share such a precious secret for a few million tokens. Even newly-risen greater springs usually knew better than to risk it, but this wouldn’t be the first time somebody had decided that they cared more about some easy money than potentially empowering a rival faction.
Letting a single lesser spring advance wasn’t the end of the world, but this was the kind of precedent that had to be nipped in the bud.
Auhn was planning to put the transgressor’s head on a spike and auction it off at the next event as a warning. If he didn’t, the same faction might try to sell the secret again, or others might join them in other branches. In mere centuries, the number of greater springs in the universe would grow a hundredfold.
In theory, established factions like Arahnis would still have a massive head-start over the newly risen planets, but a developing greater spring could easily shrink the gap if they got lucky with a talented titan or two. Allowing tens of thousands of potential enemies to spring into existence all but guaranteed that a few would climb through the ranks and eventually knock Auhn’s people a step or two down the cosmic ladder.
This was a fear that most powerful factions shared.
Annoyingly, he could have won the bidding war more easily if not for the representatives of other greater springs competing against him for the same reason. Sadly, the Pavilion didn’t allow the attendees to contact or coordinate with one another during the auctions, and nobody had been willing to risk letting a lesser spring win the lot.
Kauhn nodded. “I’m not even sure what I’m dealing with. Some of the threads randomly change colours, fuse together or split apart. That alone wouldn’t have been a problem, but the combination with the Pavillion’s measures causes these random changes to shuffle the whole tapestry, forcing me to start over. It’s almost like the identity of our target keeps changing in subtle ways. I can’t even tell whether we’re dealing with an individual or a group of people.”
“Interesting,” Auhn muttered as he stroked his braid. “Have you tried affixing the connection to a karmic compass?”
His great grandson took a fist-sized orb out of his internal world, tossing it over. At first, the sphere sported a deep crimson colour and the needle a light blue hue, but the colours shifted to green and brown respectively a few breaths later, while the needle rotated by a few degrees.
“Unless I figure out how to stop the threads from shuffling, we won’t be able to rely on the compasses,” Kauhn explained.
“Do we have to? As long as you pinpoint our target once, do we even care if the threads get jumbled up later?” Auhn asked.
“If I could guarantee that the initial location was correct, no. The problem is that the tapestry can easily take a couple of cycles to settle after each shuffle, and the changes sometimes occur hundreds of times in the same day,” the younger god said, letting go of the magical threads to tousle the short dark hair on his scalp in frustration.
Auhn couldn’t help but massage his temples.
They might be able to circumvent the problem by working with a skilled deity with a space affinity. By opening a portal to a distant galaxy in an instant, they could take their sweet time searching through each location carefully. Even if all but one in a million threads misled them, it would only take a few cycles to brute force their way to their target.
Unfortunately, Arahnis didn’t have a deity like that. Their strongest space user was merely a Fourteenth Circle mage, and the range of Gauhn’s portals should be limited to the neighbouring galaxies.
However, Auhn soon came up with another idea.
“Can you at least tell whether the thread itself is correct?” he asked his descendant.
“I can,” the younger deity confirmed. “It takes some effort to isolate the correct set of ideas, and the resulting connection is loose and unstable, so telling where it’s pointing isn’t easy. Still, locking onto the right strand is doable.”
“Then I suppose we’ll have to reach out to the horned freak again…” Auhn muttered.
Kauhn gasped. “You can’t be serious! That man has a reputation for turning on his allies the first chance he gets. He seems to derive pleasure from stabbing others in the back. Do you really want to risk him messing with our demigods?”
Auhn sighed. “I’d rather not, but he’s the only one who might be able to do something with the shaky thread. Besides, he should understand the importance of our mission. The only issue is that his spell only works on mortals, while our target is almost certainly a powerful god.”
“Well… that isn’t a huge problem,” his descendant begrudgingly admitted. “Provided that our… colleague can channel his ability through the shaky thread, and that our target returns to his home planet, redirecting the spell to the closest mortal shouldn’t be too difficult. That said, are you sure about this?”
“Just don’t insult or provoke him. In fact, it’s probably best if you let me do the talking,” Auhn replied while flying toward the Abyssal Palace.
The underground structure was located halfway around the planet, but Fifteenth and Sixteenth Circle mages could cross that gap in a couple of breaths even without using any form of spatial compression.
The Palace was almost empty, as most of their deities appeared to be either on vacation or away on missions. Auhn and Kauhn thankfully found Lehkeria in her chamber, leisurely laying yet another batch of eggs.
“Haven’t you grown tired of this?” Kauhn asked as he examined the pile of goo in the corner of the room and the hundreds of tiny black marbles floating in it.
“I have, but I won’t stop until I get a Yellow-born hatchling with the Blessing of Charge,” the Twelfth Circle goddess replied with a shrug, clearly not embarrassed in the slightest that her superiors had caught her at such a private moment.
“Didn’t you celebrate one of your hatchlings inheriting it around seventy moon cycles ago?” Kauhn asked.
“Well… my son didn’t have my mate’s bloodline, and the one before that was really bad at spellcasting. I’d rather keep trying for one with an actual shot at attaining divinity,” Lehkeria explained.
Auhn was tempted to remind the younger deity that her offspring were way too young for her to be determining how talented they were based on their half-baked attempts at spellcasting. Especially because he felt a pang of pity for the failures. Then again, breeding excessively and devouring the weaker hatchlings was an old custom on their planet, and he didn’t care enough to meddle in another deity’s private affairs.
“Is Gauhn here?” he asked instead. “I need him to send me somewhere.”
“Afraid not,” the goddess replied. “He should be back from his current mission in six to eight cycles if you’re willing to wait.”
Auhn considered it but ultimately decided against it. Gauhn could have opened a series of portals leading them to their destination within a day, but getting there by themselves would only take a cycle or two. It was a lot faster than waiting, and Auhn would prefer to capture his target before the next auction. Turning around, he gestured at his great grandson to follow as he flew out of the palace.
“Wait!” Lehkeria shouted, her voice echoing behind them as they exited the porous surface of the planet and neared the lower edge of the stratosphere. “I need to jot something down if you’re going off-world, or Sauhn will kill me. Where are you going?”
Auhn replied softly, without even bothering to pause. “Catharis.”