BXBX NOVEL Chapter 117: One done, a few billion to go
For me, however, the entire world turned into that kind of a drop of water, stunning me with the level of intricate detail that even the smallest thing in there adhered to.
A simple speck of dust turned out to be a complex structure, no less complicated than the greatest towers raised by a human hand. A single wave of sound was so complex, hiding all of the different hues and hints, from the slight trembling of the sound wave, through its distortion caused by the different kinds of air it passed through…
Even the aforementioned speck of dust would twist that wave of a sound in a tiny, but endlessly complex way, giving me enough content to wonder over for years.
But just like I could see an entire world in a drop of water, I could conversely see the whole world as clearly as I could a single drop of morning rose!
And right now, there was this monstrous presence filling the air, one that escaped everyone else's attention, spreading through the spiritual energy in the air like a virus would through scattered blood and one's veins.
'What?'
A simple question, yet nearly endless in the number of ways one could answer it.
All of those near-infinite answers, however, were both as vast and impossible for a man to comprehend… as they were simple, straightforward, and so obvious even a mere child could grasp them.
'Is this a state of nirvana?' I thought, recalling the mentions of such a state of mind, a state of being that existed only in legends, stories, and myths. And yet, right now… what else could it be? This state of omnipresence, omni-knowledge… it was limited only by how far I could imagine my strained mind to reach.
Yet, while it was a wonder all in its own right, the thing I could see in the air…
"Tim!"
A sound wave grew so loud, so intense, so direct, it turned into a physical attack, forcefully bringing my mind down from its current, lofty state, back to tread on the terms of the mortal realm. A process as painful as it was to have my mind forcefully snapped open… And judging by the feeling at the bottom of my spine, it was a state I couldn't really maintain for long.
The call of the absolute was simply too powerful for me to resist… for any longer than I actually managed to resist it.
"Claire…" I muttered as my eyes focused on the close-up of my woman's face…
Face filled with worry, panic, and terror.
"Claire…" I spoke again, stringing sounds together to make a familiar mix of various sound waves that held some profound meaning back when I was nothing more than my mortal shell. Then, I somehow raised my limb only to lightly brush it over her cheek in a gesture I could vaguely recall to be comforting. "I'm okay, you don't have to…"
Before I could even finish a single sentence, my mind fell right back to the state of experiencing reality so deeply it neared the state of drug-induced hallucination. Ϻ√%ⅬΞϺ%ƤƳᎡ
This time, however, the sight of the worry on Claire's face seared itself into my eyes so heavily, that it refused to go away even when I sank right back into my enlightened state.
And it was Claire's worry-torn face that prompted me to focus right back on my job rather than just letting my mind wonder now that it fully unlocked its ability to observe and analyze things.
'Let's see what you are made with,' I thought to myself as I turned my eyes seemingly to a totally random point in space. And, in fact, it was actually a random point in space… for as long as one meant to look into the physical state of affairs. For in the eyes of one's spirituality, what I looked at was a small point of the Qi so slightly off the norm, I would never be able to notice it normally.
It wasn't denser with Qi, for no currents of spiritual energy were created around it. It was… deeper?
'The intent hidden within it… it's too strict, too algorithmic, too… inhuman.
And that made it only all the more dangerous.
'It's like… a sense of predation enclosed within intent used for a foundation for the spirituality…' I thought, struggling not to get overly amazed by what I could see in just a single drop of the spiritual Qi.
Normally, when created out of the human's shared consciousness, the Qi would have the intent behind it be way too complex, way too mixed for this intent to even have any tangible effect on the Qi itself. But in the spiritual energy, I've noticed that the intent was simple, linear, and modular.
Just like modern software, it was nothing more but a set of strict, algorithmic instructions that even the youngest of humankind could easily follow. The magic started to happen, however, when those instructions grew longer and longer, becoming more complex with every added bit of even more instructions, soon turning into something that was simply beyond human understanding.
And right now, this was exactly the thing I had no other choice but to deal with, unless I wanted to watch it deal with all those dear to me.
'Okay, now I know what I need to do,' I thought as I gulped my saliva down and refocused my thoughts. 'The question is, what do I even do about it?'
The intent of the Qi… was something I never dared to mess with before. In fact, save for a single sentence I uttered during my negotiation with Chihiro and under the influence of my weird, innate power, this was the very first time I came in contact with the idea that there's some sort of intent behind every drop of the spiritual essence of the world!
And so, void of any better ideas, I simply pulled on the strings of my own spiritual energy before prodding the weird Qi with just the tiniest sliver of it.
!REEEEEEEEEEEE!
A pained cry of thousands of beasts rang in my ears when my intent infused itself into that foreign, weird Qi, only to suddenly adopt every last bit of how that foreign Qi operated.
This time, however, rather than that weird, ai-born intent, it was my own spiritual energy that infected the other, quickly breaking the coherence of its innate instructions, only to nearly instantly lead to the collapse of this local spot of that artificial being's consciousness.
'One down…' I thought, watching how the thicket of foreign Qi suddenly fed on the scraps of the very intent that formed it, growing just slightly stronger in the process and causing the expected currents of spirituality as the nearby Qi rushed in to equalize the spiritual pressure of this place.
'One down,' I repeated to myself only to use the very same sliver of my spirituality to suck on this collapsing energy and use it to reinforce the very core from which this sliver of consciousness and power was born out of. 'Only a few billion to go.'