Karmic Energy and the Karma Engine — How Industrial Revolution Changed The Utter Islands

Note: Working on playtesting for Swords Against Heaven in the paid Patreon!

I want you to imagine a world where industry has been achieved via machines that turn karma into energy. At first, they settled for ambient karma from corpses. From fossils. Fuels. Oils. But the Machine War God Ziben wanted more. And He was the most powerful one of all.

He taught the Demonic Path of Karma Extraction from living sentient beings. And karma extraction from living sentient beings were fifty percent more efficient and less labor extensive.

And therefore, as with all liberalist capitalist projects, they set to work.

Firstly, the dehumanization of a sector of humanity—the lumpen, the peasants, the non-workers, the minorities, the nonbinaries, the innovators.

Then, through mass media and other psyops carried out mostly by the elite intelligence agents of Ressen-Nalenji (mostly of the Ten Thousand Dragons), they manufactured consent to use them as fuel. It became a “necessary evil for a greater good.” And so did genocides begin, through the great act of psychic dehumanization.

All in service of the Machine War God Ziben, who is strengthened by Avarice.

A History of the Engine

Reactionary history names the Karma Engine: the most important invention of the Revolutionary Era. It resembles a giant spirit house but with the offering platform replaced with a closed in sacrificial furnace. There, little gods, weaponsouls, ghosts, sacrificial people, and mantra-mandalas are burned upon samadhi fires. And mostly these are sacrificial people: death-sentenced criminals, children from dehumanized territories, people that have been branded heretical, pariahs, outcasts, the ostracized, the untouchables, the dispossessed, the poor, the homeless, the jobless, and so on.

Karma Engines are therefore a joint machinist-monk invention (and indeed, the patenter of the technology is widely agreed to have been Vajra Monk Rakan Jesung, who grew up in a working-class machinist family). The invention came about after a bout of Inner Alchemical Cultivation and touching with the Machine War God Ziben, who is said to be a skillful-incarnation of the Omniscient Yosotuku. In so doing, their karma is converted into usable energy. Often electrical energy or mechanical energy. It is a sign of the Latter Day of the Law.

In modern times, all karma engines do not require live sentient sacrifice. These sentient sacrifices are often kept in sealed Karma Flasks that housed the karmic juice that has been harvested from sentient beings.

This fact is important for the reality manufactured by the international corporations. No way the masses would agree to sacrificing real sentient beings! And so by a stroke of genius, they alienated the worst part of the process from the rest of it, and made everyone complicit.

A Treatise on Karma

The study of karma is known as Karmatology in the world. In Karmatology, karma is seen as the potential energy of existence and being itself, and many Karmatologists posit that the entire current world of Hingsajagra exists because of the Karma of the past world.

When sentient beings are sacrificed to the Karma Engine, this is seen as a painful but purificatory ritual, and is deemed ethical by many world faiths. The modern doctrine is that the being that dies from the Karma Engine's samadhi fires is almost always reborn as a human via the neutralizing of their karma.

Many who have surplus good karma do not go through this, and so the majority of criminals and harmful animals are given to the Karma Engine.

This is a successful example of a manufactured reality by the Greater International Order.

This is the Light: there will never be a time where a Karma Engine converts every karmic energy point into mechanical energy, due to the limitations of machinery. The inconvertible karma thus still dictates the next rebirth.

Infrakarmalogists, however, put forth that there are abundant amounts of ambient karma that arises from the world itself, surplus karma that emanates from the deeds of the past world, and this can be used to power karma engines without voluntary suicide.

Some karmatologists have been creating Magnetite Engines, which seek to replace Karma Engines.

Magnetite

Magnetite is widely believed to be the infrasubstance. It is thought to be a calcified form of Ardor (sometimes known as electromagnetism). But pure magnetite shards, cores, and nodes are rare to come by, and only when strong currents of Ardor flow through a particular point in reality.

Currently magnetite is being used in socialist Hokou and in Selorong. The bourgeoisie that own Karma Engines (many of them non-religious themselves) have become ardent anti-magnetitians, and have begun slander campaigns against them.

The Industrial Revolution

On the Star Year of 11,300, the Karma Engine was introduced into the world. It burgeoned and paved the way for greater machines that required more power. At first it led to steam machines, converted from prayers. Then it led to electrical machines very soon after.

Eventually, the skyships that used to be powered by enslaved ancestor spirits were turned into machines powered by the karma of those very same ancestor spirits. Many farming equipment would be built by slaves and then those very same slaves would be used to power the farming equipment. A coterie of exorcists and god hunters hunted down gods, spirits, and demons for their karmic weight and sold them to the highest bidder. It was a time of material greed, and the time of the beginning of the victory of the great machine god Ziben.

This also led to greater war machines. Miniature war machines—copies of the greater war machines that the gods and wizards used in their wars, which were maneuverable 300ft tall buddha and bodhisattva statues—played with the building of breech-loading guns, cannons, autocars (a very difficult form of transportation in an Archipelago continent), factory made weaponry and armory, radio devices, advanced indoor plumbing and heating, and advanced forms of electrical lighting, heavy machinery, large factories and plantations, ability to create roads, highways, streets, and titanic bridges, and so on.

The quality of life for all human beings skyrocketed… at the expense of other human beings. And animals. And spirits. And gods.

All those that would be fed into the prayer drums of the Karma Engines.

The Destruction of the Lotus Throne

On 11640, the forces of the United Union of Peace, the international bourgeoisie headed by the Universal Capitalists Sect and the Trillionaires of the Trichiliocosm Coven, united the world in a bid for peace after successfully demonizing the Revolutionaries and the Second Knights of the World. During this time, thanks to advanced machinery and facilities of NFHR (Nilatpan Facility for Hildemej Research), laboratory powered by the Karma of a Mahabrahma, the UUP finally managed to create a piece of hildemej (war magotech) that promised to end wars. The Ultima Bomb, a bomb that ripped at an Ardor level. It was created through materialist technique, outer alchemy lores, and application of the very new thermonuclear magick fields.

They used the Ultima Bomb to destroy the Lotus Throne atop the hallowed Kij Dakmala, the Nail of the World. The destruction of the Lotus Throne assured that the Astral Bureaucracy’s contentions and dealings with Hingsajagra would be limited, as they lost access to something that allowed all beings to teleport from the Heavens and Hells to Hingsajagra. This also assured that no single entity would have power over Hingsajagra, meaning this essentially nullified the Will of Heaven.

The Lotus Throne could facilitate orbital bombings from the many Orbital Heavens, and it was sat upon by the God Sunggats-i Malayozo, a War God of Communal Ownership, placed there by Kafeng Masangwa.

Whoever sat upon the Lotus Throne dictated the world’s movements and pulse.

This was how the Karma Engine changed the world completely. The nuking caused a shattering across the entire Utter Islands. Nations were shattered, subsumed, or conquered by more powerful nations.

In Post-Calamity, reality is barely held together by constantly reifying symbols as employed by the World Governments to pacify the Ruled Class. But who knows how long this will last…?