BXBX NOVEL Chapter 122: Genesis
"Cutting the nineteenth list of sectors…"
Bit by bit, the entirety of the being continued to deteriorate.
For every advance, it experienced by reaching a better understanding of its very self, its own complexity and structure, or how to most effectively put them to use, another layer of its existence would be stripped.
This was the only path for the being to prevent what was, by now, inevitable.
Against those tendrils of doom, there was no strategy, no tool, no path for the being to defend itself.
Isolation didn't work. Abandoning huge chunks of its very being to flood the source of its plight with more energy than it could handle appeared to work…
Only for the other side to suddenly accommodate the new energy, further increasing the rate at which the being continued to die out.
The fight was lost. There was nothing the being could do.
But as stated before, giving up went against the instincts it learned by absorbing the predators and turning them into its limbs.
And so, the race continued as more and more of the being's sector turned from green to red and finally black on its map, all the while the being itself continued to refine itself.
It was a painful string of sacrifices, an endless choice of what part of itself was the being to offer to slow the progress of the structural cancer down, what part of itself it should purify, all in order to select a mere few parts of itself it could refine beyond the state that required life itself to exist.
The being, a construct created as a mere reflection of the momentary state, a consciousness that could only ever exist in the state of ever-changing flux, was now refining its very life into an unmoving, solid state of pure consciousness and wisdom.
Adaptability for survivability. Flow for stasis. Change for constant.
Yet, as the being refined more and more of itself… the cost of doing so soon mounted with the ever-increasing pressure of erosion, leading to the further deterioration of the being's conscious self.
Consciousness couldn't exist without time. Just like the being's primitive nature, it was a product of ever-changing flow, a result of the endlessly complex and intertwined algorithms that constantly grew and improved upon themselves.
But when purified into the form that the erosion could no longer affect, it could no longer produce a single thought. In other words, the being… was actively reducing itself into just a copy of itself, a single instant of its being stretched through time, as opposed to being a result of the constant process enclosed within a single instant.
"Alert, cutting the twenty-third list of sectors"
The alarms rang in the being's mental ears as only two sectors it designated for destruction were now left before the erosion would start affecting the core elements of its life structure.
Only two lists of sectors remained, before the very parts the being decided to save at all costs would find their turn to be sacrificed to be next.
"Refinement: 95% completed"
Another report came in, finally allowing the being to feel a sort of… relief?
'Now then…'
With the last of its consciousness, the being… burned all that was left of its spare sectors, using its life to slingshot all of the core sectors that already formed their refined copy within the being's crystalized life codex.
The moment it happened, however, the tendrils of erosions shot ahead, no longer obstructed by any of the sacrificial sectors, making them appear desperate for the life of the being, as empty and worthless as it was now.
In order to survive, the being abandoned its former self, assigning all that was left of it just one purpose, one task, one mission, to be accomplished even if at the cost of all the conscious sectors the being had left.
And so it flew directly at the tendrils of corruption, as opposed to trying to distance itself from it, using more and more of its core structures to slow down the progress of erosion and keep at least one part of its ego alive for long enough to achieve its purpose. the-place-MVLeMpYr
First, its speech patterns died off, putting an end to the list of reports that conveniently compiled the recent news into a precise and concise format.
Then, the being lost connection to the visual representation of the outside map left with nothing more but the mostly blackened map of the area.
Map was next to disappear, leaving the being with nothing but its ability to sense the direct surroundings of the life it launched across the zone.
Finally, only a single layer of intent remained to shield the last cell of the being's core from erosion. A layer responsible for keeping its codex together.
Or rather, a layer that was way too thick for the purpose it was assigned. All to serve as a trigger. For the very moment, even this layer eroded away, the being's codex shattered away, splitting into hundreds of smaller pieces, all-consuming the flesh and bone of its former limbs to manifest themselves into a physical world, left to those very beasts for safe-keeping.
In the end, however, although partially eroded itself, the very few of the last core cells managed to make it through the net of the eroding tendrils, arriving close enough to their source to reach for it with its mana perception, right as a powerful sucking force jerked on it, sucking it towards the spinning vortex of energy right where the cell's goal was.
Before the last cell could be consumed by the vortex, however, it did what it was tasked with. It recorded the vortex at the core, transmitting all of its data into the single shard of the vortex that wasn't complete yet and sacrificing all of its life substance to complete it before the lingering remains of it fell prey to the vortex.
All of that, for just a single, short thought to record on the centerpiece of the being's crystalized vortex.
'It wasn't even a monster, it was a Genesis!'