Luca DR
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Punishment reincarnation 71
🕑 Added 2024-04-16 10:00:02 +0000 UTC71 – Signals in the dark
As Lisette turned to leave, she first headed outside to lend Ishrin a hand with the unruly gang of children, then the small glowing blue cube followed, leaving behind a dark room with Melina looking dumbfounded. Outside, she found Sir Westys’ team, diligently sitting down on the floor with an empty gaze. She wondered what kind of savage tactics Lisette must have used to extract obedience from the four boys, especially from the Duke’s son, that left them in this state. Ishrin was simply looking at them with an amused expression, refusing to elaborate but looking smug enough to make her wonder. He looked proud of Lisette, as if she had just adopted a quirk of behavior he was trying to teach her without her noticing.
Soon, the time came to move on from their prolonged rest, and Ishrin was looking forward to putting the dull maze filled with useless trap behind him once and for all, already thinking about ways to skip this section when they finally made their way out at the end of their delve. He led the way this time, taking the brunt of the traps and disabling them with his powers, which allowed him to have some one-on-one time with Liù.
They had a lot of catching up to do. He had been put last in the pecking order by the pixie-turned-cube, but not out of spite but because they both knew that their catching up session would be the longest of them all, and neither wanted to rush it while they were still tired. Now, refreshed and walking, it was the perfect time for Ishrin to bring the little cubic pixie up to speed with the latest developments. The fact that she could talk, interact and ask questions was a nice addition, and soon enough all of Ishrin’s worries evaporated as he saw that she was still the very same creature as before. Only that she could talk, and that she looked different.
For a moment, he felt like he was on the top of the world, ready to take on any challenge head on. There was no thought of Dynastyes, of Syrmas and of dangerous Tier 15-plus powerhouses. It was just him and his team, plus his faithful companion, delving together. Then the voice of Sir Westys reached his ears, and he was thrust back into the present, with all its politics and power dynamics.
Power-wise, Ishrin had sacrificed quite a lot of it in order to power Liù’s cube. More than half of his current cultivation base was inaccessible to him, the power flowing continuously to his companion in order to keep the cube powered. He did not mind, and the new constraint was less problematic than it seemed at first glance. He had never run out of mana before, not on this planet at least, and now it would only be a matter of being more careful with his spells. No longer could he just fling them around without a care.
He could do that. Constraints and setbacks bred innovation, after all, and already his mind was thinking about all the ways he could make up for his new limitations before he took the plunge and forced his way into Tier 4. Which had to happen soon enough anyway, even though it would not be optimal. Syrma was Tier 8, and while delving in this dungeon bought them time, it would also present the danger of whatever schemes the man might have cooked up while they were holed up where they could not be made aware of them. Leaving the Chasm at a Tier lower than 4 was unacceptable, and Ishrin feared that it would be better to even go as far up as Tier 5 just to be sure.
It would mean sacrificing a lot of benefits, though. He talked about it with Liù, but the pixie knew next to nothing about cultivation, and was irritatingly smart enough not to want to offer baseless advice, instead telling Ishrin to follow his gut and play it smart. Easy for her to say, he rebuked, to which she sent him the image of a smiley face with a tongue poking out.
Still. Ishrin knew that even his crazy-fast pace of cultivation was bound to slow down soon enough. Not only did he depend on powerful monsters to fill up his core to reach the peak of every tier by stealing their power—which meant that as soon as there were no more monsters to farm he would have to resort to more mundane methods of cultivation that were much slower. But breaking through the higher Tiers was not easy even if one knew what they were doing, which was bound to give him time to earn the extra power he needed to build a strong base.
He would much prefer to do it now, but even doing it at Tier 5 or 6 or even 7 would have enormous benefits later on.
There was also the matter of materials. Most of the rituals he knew to increase his power beyond simple Tier progression required materials that would take an interstellar empire years to gather, and even with his knowledge of astral realms, demonic deals and summoning practices, the rituals he could do were very few and depended on what he found or could find in a reasonable time frame.
Then their conversation shifted to other topics, more pressing and specific than the general need for power.
“What about the rest of the AI you inhabit? Is there anything left of its original programming?”
Programming, programming. It’s a hard word. Liù needs to look it up, one moment~
The lights on the cube shifted patterns.
Yes! Programming! I understand your difficult word now.
Ishrin smiled. “What about it?”
I feel something. It’s… sleeping. I poke it, but it’s like it’s dead! It’s scary though :c
“Don’t go near it, dummy!”
I was curious!
“Okay, okay. What else can you tell me?”
It’s called SPAWN. Sapient Proprietary Autonomous World Neutralizer.
Ishrin hummed. “World neutralizer? And sapient? Doesn’t sound good at all. I can see why it was sealed.” He paused, thinking about the words. “The acronym tells me that it’s definitely not a naturally occurring AI, either. Proprietary, it says… sounds like something coming from a world that has corporations.”
Of which, he knew precisely a boatload. It seemed that in every universe, a good portion of planets developed corporations, especially those whose civilizations decided to follow the mostly technological route. But of the boatload he knew, there was one that came at the forefront of his mind, one where a few AIs had control of most of the corporations.
I agree Isshi! It has something called ‘metadata’ in it, and it says it was last modified only a few days ago.
“Wait, what? Show me.”
She did so, and Ishrin noticed that the last update coincided with the moment they entered the astral realm.
“A signal must have reached the mountain when we entered, updating its original programming. Who sent it? And why? Is there anything left of it or of the original programming in the cube?”
It was important to determine where the signal came from, first and foremost. If it came from this universe, then it was a problem. But if it came from another universe, then it was not just a problem, but a potential cataclysm in the making, since only Tier 16 and beyond powerhouses could cross universes or allow other people to cross. The pixie in the cube made a chiming noise.
Don’t know! The data is all scrambly.
“It’s fine. There’s one place I know where we can get some actual help unscramble the data. Then, we might have some clues about what happened to the mountain, and why it woke up so suddenly. But that’s for later, when we can safely cross worlds.”
It was as if, Ishrin thought, someone was leaving breadcrumbs in a forest for them to follow. Back to the witch’s house they went, just like in the old tales. He hoped they wouldn’t be eaten alive, but his curiosity to follow the trail was too strong to ignore.
***
At the end of the maze was a door, and beyond the door was the real entrance to the ruins of Tiamat Azur. At least according to the rumors. The heterogeneous team of different people, a team that had come together by chance or external forces, all observed the magnificent door made of brass and pipes and giant gears carved out of stone and etched with metals like titanium or imperdurium, that had resisted the corrosion of time unperturbed. There was no mention of the door in any of the maps—which were mostly useless in the ever shifting maze—and the tales of the adventurers who made it out of here alive, and thus no way to open it.
The door also proved to be resistant to brute force and magic. Not even Ishrin’s Tier 5 Master Unlock did nothing, and nothing came out of a supercharged Tier 5 Appraisal either. The most the team could do was make the giant cogs and gears rotate by pulling on them, and their rotation moved another series of mechanisms that eventually disappeared in the walls to the side. Pistons, levers, metal strings and servomechanisms. At times, particular configurations in the shape of the gears and the mechanisms resulted in some steam being expelled from little whistles at the end of the brass pipes, producing sounds, and at first this had been taken as a good sign, but it was soon clear that it was just another piece of a riddle none of them knew how to solve.
They were getting frustrated, all of them except Liù and Lisette, the latter of which had taken a monomaniac interest in the door and its workings. Ishrin knew that Lisette’s mind did not really function like most people’s minds did, and he even had a name for the way it was, but all he could do when he saw her literally press her face on the door in her many ways to study it was watch her with a tender smile on his face.
Still, hours passed with Lisette and a floating Liù examining every inch of the door, and they made little progress. In the end, Liù got quite bored and left Lisette to her devices, with the girl barely noticing the cube’s absence. Meanwhile, Ishrin decided it was time to spend some of the limited resources he got from Lucius’ mansion to prepare for what might lay on the other side of the door.
