Chapter 295: Godvein
Mercury did not gouge out Kang’s eye. In the end, he was too timid for it. Despite everything, he didn’t want to hurt anyone, even if Kang was a weirdo and had dealt a genuine mental blow to him.
That was still bizarre, though. Rarely if ever did things damage Mercury’s mind. His thoughts were hardy and durable, a near-perfect sanctuary. Even when his entire body was stripped from him, his mind remained almost untouched.
And yet, one man had hurt him with just a dagger. Piercing his strong body and abusing that connection, maybe? Mercury wondered how he’d done it.
He really, really wanted to know, but even as he walked through the tunnels side by side with Kang Tae-Yoon, he didn’t ask. Instead, he observed the strangely handsome psychopath, as he clasped his bloodied hands behind his back and hummed an upbeat melody.
While his mind churned, Mercury asked an entirely different question instead. “Where are we going?”
The master of Honest Treachery turned around, smiling brightly through his glasses’ lenses. “A cultivation chamber,” he said simply. “I’ll hand you some manuals, and you can train there. Pinkie promise.” As he spoke the words, his smile grew wider, almost feral.
Of course, Mercury had some idea of what ‘training’ meant at this point. He expected to be stabbed, quite frankly, and it’d probably hurt. Breathing slowly, he felt the way his mind regenerated. It was an odd sensation, sluggish thoughts speeding up, the bleeding wound stitching itself closed in front of his inner eye.
It hadn’t hurt his inner world, nor had it significantly impacted him, but it was still noticeable, and the first time in a long while that a mental technique had any effect on him, so it was curious. He thought back to the moment, to the feeling of qi in the air when Kang plunged the dagger into his eyes.
Mercury tilted his head as he let the memories go by his inner eye. It was so odd to remember. But he traced it back, and observed. In front of his inner eye, the scene froze and rotated, a perfect image cast in monochrome preserved by his memory. He had perceived so much of the world, and all of it remained within his mind.
Slowly, he traced the structure of Kang’s qi, the way they were formed. Tiny patterns often told a whisper of an ability, Mercury thought. Bubbles encapsulated thoughts, weapon intent looked like a blade, stamina was energetic… so perhaps there was a hint in the qi?
When he looked deeper, closer, he did find something. Tiny patterns, almost like runes in a spell-circle, shaped like fish hooks. Made to latch on and tear apart on the way out.
Huh. What an odd thought. Did his head start aching when the dagger went in… or when it came out? He considered it, but didn’t yet ask the world for an answer. He just observed.
Remembering the pain made his memory blur. The brief flash of agony had his perception flicker, so it provided no insight to its cause - but that was acceptable. Mercury, after all, was a curious cat. He’d figure it out in due time.
Even while walking, he was already practicing. Twisting and shaping his qi. It was still odd to manipulate the substance. Now that he was reforged, it had gotten a lot easier, but it still wasn’t exactly easy.
Which was odd, he thought! Because, frankly, his willpower was so immense that almost any source of energy easily obeyed his erratic commands. Not so here. The qi twisted and shifted around his mental fingers, not wanting to take the shapes he desired.
Kang turned around and looked at his experiments. There was a glint in the man’s eyes. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Copying your ability to hurt my mind,” Mercury said nonchalantly. “There were little qi-fishhooks composing your ability, I think. I want to replicate them.”
At that, the peak master’s face lit up. It was a strange mixture of emotion, Mercury thought. He saw fear and respect mingle with manic excitement. Kang’s lips split into an involuntary, wide smile. It was almost snake-like, his pupils dilating and staring at Mercury as if he was a delicious morsel.
“I want to devour you,” he said, straightforwardly. “I will be honest about that, because voicing my own desires helps make them clearer in my mind, and that clarity is addictive. I will try to kill you, Mercury. To pry every bit of knowledge from your mind and take it as mine.”
The mopaaw blinked once. Then he shrugged. “Alright,” he said. “That’s about as close to calling me your friend as you’ll possibly get, right?”
“Yes,” Kang said, almost drooling. “Yes, you saw right through me. How wonderful. Ah, I wanna cut you open, you know? Pry apart your chest and pull your heart out of it just so I can see if it’ll still beat.”
Now, gruesome as it was, Mercury did find it an interesting question. The was yes, it turned out. With the current constitution of his body, it was more a conglomerate of energies linked by his mind, and his heart would have no trouble functioning without the rest of his circulatory system.
In a modern word, he would have made an excellent organ donor, but in this one, he really had plenty of other ways to heal people. In fact, his next teacher was likely to be a healer, anyway. Kang here specialized in illusions, though, so Mercury would need to wait a little.
“It would still beat,” the mopaaw informed the curious human, and Kang’s smile grew wider still.
“Wonderful to know,” he said with a swift clap, cupping his fist and giving a small bow. “Now, please. Follow me. If you keep talking, I won’t be able to hold myself back, and I might cut open your stomach where you stand.”
The bizarre mix of honesty and brutality washed over Mercury without much concern. He simply nodded, and gestured at the tunnel in front of him.
Then Kang cut off his outstretched hand.
Ah. Treachery. Mercury had forgotten about that part.
In the blink of an eye, the deranged man flew at him with a beautiful smile on his handsome face. It was the unabashed curiosity of someone beset with a puzzle they particularly enjoyed. There was no malice in the motion, no killing intent, and even his dagger-aura was almost surgical.
Everything Kang had was focused on control and disorientation. He used poison, illusions, swift motions, cloning techniques… To Mercury’s eyes, he might as well have been a blur. And yet, when he triggered , Mercury slipped a foot backwards.
The dagger carved through where his neck might have been a moment ago. Silvery, metallic blood poured from the stump of his hand, but never touched the ground. Instead, it shaped a new limb, one that quickly snaked into the air, grabbing Kang’s wrist.
spilled forth in a net of metal. Threads blossomed from the Storm’s Raiment, containing Kang in a cage - only for the slippery cultivator to escape that binding in moments. He simply twisted, his body rippling like water and shrunk, moving between the bars like a cardboard cutout of a person.
A moment later, his dagger drew blood again, scoring a shallow slice on Mercury’s robe. The storm contained in the Raiment poured out, faint trails of lightning licking the cultivator’s fingers, but Kang just laughed. “Show me your heart!” he demanded. “Dance with me more, Mercury. More, more!”
Tragically, however, it wasn’t meant to be. “Sorry,” Mercury said mournfully. “Today’s ball is cancelled. Bad weather, you see?” A droplet of rain landed on Kang’s nose, accompanying the announcement, except it didn’t stop.
When it fell, it dug through the man’s face. It broke skin, then cartilage, destroying some of the sensitive nostril hairs. It dug down in a perfect circle through one on his teeth and his jaw, piercing his throat next and exiting out of his upper back. A single, perfectly cylindrical hole through the man’s body, maybe three millimetres wide, Mercury thought?
It was odd to evaluate it so clinically, especially seeing the man simply laugh at the wound. But the stormclouds still held in the sky, and silvery metal encroached on the world again. In the middle of a step, Kang froze. His foot didn’t move, encased in a shell of liquid metal, crawling up his leg.
He was numb and couldn’t feel it. He was cold. A shiver of fear ran up his back.
Mercury tilted his head looking at the human in front of him. “Kang,” he said quietly, “do you need me to teach you patience? Because I will.”
The peak master leaned forward once more, pulling at the bindings with enough force to tear the limbs off of regular people. But the metal held steadfast, trapping him. The stormclouds brewed overhead, turning the air sticky with static. Kang felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
A heartbeat passed, then two and three. Kang’s pupils contracted. His splayed fingers turned relaxed and sophisticated. He gently pushed his glasses back up, not minding the hole in his skin. “Of course,” he said, the air whistling faintly as it exited his mouth through two holes. “I’m a measured and polite young man, Mercury. Surely there’s no need.”
Smiling politely, Mercury cupped his fists and gave a soft bow. “Of course,” he said, then removed the shackles. This might be a long week, he thought.
- - -
After only three more attempts of Kang to kill him, they made it to the place the peak master wanted to show him. It was a cave that had prismacolour light literally spill across the floor. In the middle of the room there was a strange thing that hurt Mercury’s eyes to look at.
Kang didn’t even look at it at all. He had his eyes closed. Which made him very different from a particular cat. “What… what is that?” Mercury asked, staring ahead of him.
Slowly but surely, his eyes started bleeding. Which really wasn’t much of a hassle anymore. The shape in front of him was odd, though.
It was a root, perhaps. Or a crack. It was a tunnel in a perpetual state of formation. It was a worm, burrowing into the world and out of it at once. Prismacolour scales covered the body of the root like glass shards, scattering rainbow light. The light turned solid when it touched a surface, leaving behind a residue that was halfway between a powder and a liquid.
The object pulsed, expanding and contracting as if with a heartbeat, more light spilling from it. Mercury tilted his head as his brain boiled, overloaded by the information, but his mind recorded it all. He watched the thing, stepped closer. The prismatic light turned his skin and Mercury felt himself sizzle.
Not unlike sunlight, and yet not quite the same. Mercury quickly found himself with what modern medicine might describe as acute radiation exposure. The heat washed over his skin like lava, the prismacolour glow burning its way right through him like violent gamma rays, far more volatile than any real radiation.
Parts of his body shifted and changed under that light, overloaded with energy. His cells burst apart, spraying into light that danced and rose from his skin. His liver exploded inside his body, making blood spill from his mouth, even as its remains liquified into prismatic radiance.
Mercury took another step closer. He stared at the thing, his eyes glinting with curiosity, having left Kang behind. “What is that?” Mercury asked again, and this time, he was seeking. Seeking for an .
He sank into ihn’ar, even as the system roiled to reply. Information flooded his mind, new structures and thought patterns that hadn’t been there before. He stared, even as he felt his understanding rearrange itself. His body burned, and yet, his mind strained against its limitations.
Under the prismatic radiation, Mercury’s thoughts bloomed like a flower in spring. New thoughts sprang forth like petals, shimmering with bright radiance. They were reflections of the spectrum, of what this thing was.
A root, a vein, a heartbeat, the core of a star. It spat out energy, and Mercury couldn’t quite figure out where from, or what it was. It resonated like qi, but it didn’t nestle in his bones. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before, and even his couldn’t quite fathom it.
[ has levelled up! 4>]
Bit by bit he understood. Ihn’ar fell over his mind, and it was like a flower in a greenhouse. He peeled back the protective glass. The chill of the world crept in, and he withered. Mercury unravelled. Without the golden veil of reason, the thing was terrifying. It was unreasonable, impossible, and existed anyway.
Mercury burnt.
And then, he peeled away the iridescent veil of reality. The thing unfurled in front of him. Shapes splintered, fractals fractured outwards. Like a sinkhole, it expanded outwards, enveloping his eyes until the world went dark.
Mercury was consumed.
Despite that, though, he had to see. He was curious. Even when it made a shiver run up his back, he smiled. The kind of smile Kang might’ve worn, the curious, manic kind. He peeled back another veil. The white veil of separation. Distance turned from a fact to a falsehood, and Mercury felt himself fall.
And then, he saw past it.
Step after step, Mercury had peered into this object, a floating, crystalline shape of nestled tubes, covered in shimmering, jagged things. It was violently beautiful, and beautifully violent. It tore him apart for just looking at it. “The greatest treasure that this peak holds,” he might’ve heard Kang whisper.
The peak master still had his eyes closed, after all. The light incinerated even the noise of Mercury’s footsteps, and burnt away all qi, so Kang had no way to know whether Mercury was still next to him or walking forward. But Mercury knew.
He knew, because his hand touched upon the thing.
Distance was a lie. He wasn’t consumed by the object, he was already touching it. And he was being burnt by it, sure, but it was just a thing. It wasn’t alive.
That much he could tell. It wasn’t alive. It was more like… proof of living. A vein. Something strong, something long-dead, something carved off of something great. Something that hated him?
No, it didn’t hate him. But there was a connection there, to something that hated him. To the sun itself. Mercury tilted his head, and reached forward, touching an incinerated hand against the structure. It was only his bones that made contact, his skin and flesh stripped away in streams of beautiful rainbow lights.
Metallic gleam stood amidst a rainbow. The world was pulled threadbare in front of Mercury, turning from real to a flimsy construct. But the void didn’t encroach here, didn’t dare.
That was what the light was - Density. Reality spilled forth from this thing like water from a geyser. It was so dense with threads of reality, all aspects of it were enhanced. The air brimmed with qi and mana, so intensely that just that would hurt his skin. But it was also full of temperature, strange chemicals he had never interacted with before, and a desire for motion.
The enhanced levels of reality forced his cells into agitation. They reacted with each other, exploded at the contact with water. His skin popped like a bubble of soap, only to regrow, reforged. It was like being bathed in sulfuric acid and standing at the heart of a nuclear reactor. Like he’d drunk a full palette of energy drinks then snorted cocaine. It was a painful sort of clarity.
But he saw it. He saw the thing for what it was.
A godvein. That was the only apt name that came to mind, because it was, after all, a body part of a god.
Sometime, a god had bled here. A part of their body was cut away, a vein, and it had crystallized, and now was bleeding its condensed reality into the surrounding world. It was a violent, bright sort of existence, and Mercury burnt because nothing could be permitted to exist around the god.
For it was too real, and compared to that, he was a paper-thin imitation of a person. And yet, he lived. His fingers brushed over the odd, crystalline material, and he smiled. He saw it, the way the dreamweave nestled so densely, woven a million times tighter than he had ever seen before around this thing. It was the nexus point of so many knots that he was surprised it wasn’t falling apart.
Layers upon layers of fabric showed themselves to him, the barrier that kept the void out even when he pried apart the lie that was existence. Even if he invited in the leviathans of , they didn’t approach the glow of this thing. So Mercury wondered.
He . Just his hand - and it turned to ash. The of his inverted self was incinerated within a moment. It fell apart into prismarine sparkles and nothing else. He blinked, smiled, and nodded. Then, he sat down, satisfied, still staring.
“Okay, what am I meant to learn from this?” he asked Kang.
The peak master tilted his head. “I was meaning to show you a spirit spring. Spirit stones grow on the wall of the cave. You were meant to look at those.”
Mercury had not, in fact, seen the spirit stones. Now, though, he did. The prismacolour light would spill forth as a powder-liquid, then crystallize, and slowly have its colours mix until only white remained. Those plain, milky-white rocks were spirit stones - the ultimate currency of cultivators. Distilled qi.
“Oh,” Mercury said. “Whoops.”
“You touched it, didn’t you?” Kang asked. He cracked one eye open, only to instantly have it turn blind as his cornea was incinerated. “Yeah you did.”
Innocently, Mercury shrugged. “Whoops?” he suggested.
The peak leader shook his head. “Get out of the cave now. Too much enlightenment is unhealthy for you.”
“No,” Mercury said.
“No?” Kang asked. “I am meant to teach you.”
“You brought me here as another attempt to kill me,” Mercury protested.
Kang smiled. “True enough,” he said. With a gentle step forward, his skin started blistering. “But it was an experiment. You live. You’re real. I’m an illusion cultivator. I must believe my own lies. But you’re not a lie, this thing burns my lies away.”
He steps forward again. The light washes over him, and the tips of his hair begin to turn paler, losing their colour as it's washed away. Sun-bleached.
Mercury tilted his head. “Is that your greatest worry?”
“It is,” Kang nodded. “My fear is that I, too, am a lie. But if you’re real, and you survived,” he whispered, then stepped forward. Slowly, he stretched out a hand. It was agony. He was still steps away, but his body was already failing. He shrivelled up, then lost cohesion, His body turning thin and ethereal. “If you’re real, then maybe I am, too.”
He stepped forward, only to crash into something solid. Kang didn’t see with his eyes. Not with his divine sense, either. He walked into Mercury, then fell backwards onto his butt. The mighty peak master, perhaps one of the most skilled assassins in the world, blinked. In front of him stood Mercury, framed by rainbow light.
His hair was silver, his robes still surrounded him, even as his skin melted from his bones, turning to prismatic radiance. The mysterious man regarded Kang with a strange emotion the peak master couldn’t even decipher. “Don’t throw yourself into that,” Mercury said, his voice almost sad. “You will die.”
Kang’s heart broke a little. “I’m a lie, then? I don’t exist?” The peak master looked at the godvein with want. A desire to be more real than it.
Mercury shook his head. “You’re real,” he said. “You have flesh and bones. You have nerves, you are made from chemicals. You think, you act, you hurt, you heal. That’s all real.”
“How do I know?” Kang asked.
At that, his student smiled, and extended a hand to the man still stuck on the floor. “You’ll just have to trust me,” Mercury said with a smile. “I’m honest, after all. If I were lying, I’d tell you.”
Honest Treachery. Kang tilted his head. It had been the leading principle of his life, hadn’t it? To be honest with himself. Why, then, was he so afraid of a lie? If he was a lie, a falsehood, then he was the most straightforward, honest falsehood there ever was. He snickered at that, smiling in a human way for once.
Kang took the offered hand, and the two of them stepped out, until prismacolour dust was nothing more than a coating on the ground, and the qi density wasn’t enough to almost instantly crush Mercury’s dantian. That’d have been uncomfy, so he avoided it until now.
There, the peak master took a moment to compose himself. It had been an intense day, emotionally, but he still had a job to do. With measure motions, he withdrew a cultivation rug, a simple, brown thing with a bit of red woven in, and spread it across the floor. He sat down, his hair sparkling and glittering beautifully in the multicolour light.
“Sit with me,” he told Mercury, gesturing at the opposite end of the mat.
His student did as he asked. A simple motion, calm and safe. Kang didn’t feel like murdering him, for once. He had already seen so much in one day, his curiosity was screaming to see more, but he held it in. After all, he’d see far more if this new student of his kept living.
“Your next stage is the Gilded-Realm,” Kang said simply. “To get there, you’ll have to consume a piece of the heavens.”
“Alright, no prob,” Mercury said. His back was blistering with radiation sickness from the divine body part behind him, but he didn’t let that distract him. “How do we start?”