The would-be assassin plunged the claws into her own chest just as the edges of her face began to fray, sputtering out one last utterance.

“Now… The New Era… Of Cultivation begins.”

She mouthed a trigger word and slender quills of jade erupted from the assassin’s claw talismans, turning the woman to a jade hedgehog. Yet, it did not stop there - the entirety of her form turned to a jade-like substance in the span of one breath, leaving her a sorrowful statue suspended in the motion of falling to her knees. Still digesting what had just transpired, Zel looked upon the woman-become-statue for a few moments, trying to discern whether the statue would spring to life anew and come after her as some bizarre necrogolem, but there was nothing.

This place was well away from the fort’s inhabited sections, and the Fort 57’s population numbered low enough that any crowd mentality was unlikely to take place. People wouldn’t be likely to investigate such a commotion right after it happened, either, if they had a single hair of good judgment on their heads. She looked upon the tragic statue, imagining that it would likely get smashed if just left here as it was. Again and again she’d seen or heard of the Emperor’s agents maiming themselves or committing suicide by horrific means, be it out of free will, compulsion by geas, or due to simple psychological conditioning.

A pawn such as this, a slave by any other name, didn’t deserve hatred, but pity. Arcane atrocities such as this one were the fault of the Emperor and his sycophant officials, not the pawns.

Leveraging her monstrous strength and coating the Butcher’s edge in lightning, she carved a warning at the statue’s feet.

THE DIVINE EMPEROR HAS NO MERCY

EVEN FOR HIS OWN

THIS IS HIS REWARD FOR SUBSERVIENCE:

A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH

LET THIS BE AN ETERNAL EFFIGY TO THE FATE

OF THOSE WHO ACCEPT HIS RULE

Zelsys of course didn’t know or believe the figure to be anything more than a petrified corpse, but she was also not one to forgo creative embellishment for a good narrative. It wasn’t a pure lie, either; there was still the possibility that the Emperor’s accursed magics somehow destroyed the woman’s soul and prevented it from whatever natural fate the souls of the dead were fated to.

She cleared away some of the debris from cutting into stone, mulling over what he had said through the would-be-assassin’s mouth as she did so. An open acknowledgment and declaration of hostility such as that could be seen as a mark of doom hanging over her head and the heads of those she traveled with, but in her mind, the Emperor had functionally said nothing new. Zelsys had already considered herself to be his enemy, and she already took into account the possibility, nay, the inevitability of violent confrontation with any and all Occupationist or otherwise Pateiria-aligned forced they might encounter. What grabbed her attention was his statement about “Hedan’s Wall”, which she knew to be another name for the Blackwall, as well as the declaration that he would no longer keep his own people in the dark.

“Of course, where else would he want to curtail the rise of potential enemies by suppressing cultivation other than within his own borders?” she thought. If this line of thinking were at all correct, it would mean that the Emperor viewed her, the Newman Sect, and her ideology of scientific cultivation a threat to the empire at large, one which would justify creating fertile ground for subversive elements within the Empire to grow.

“He’s probably betting that we’ll be gone and done with long before his own subjects can become a problem…”

The Heavenly Palace; an imperious edifice to the power of Xiān Dì, the Divine Emperor, the palace alone held the population of a city. Its throne room alone was a marvel, the throne carved by the Emperor’s own hand out of solid stone when he was still a mortal. It was now surrounded by dozens of spindly, jade automaton arms holding scrying mirrors, allowing him to directly rule over the sprawl of his empire. It demanded only the small price of preciously rare Mantis Seers interred beneath the throne, one for each mirror, as well as the price of lesser visionary souls to fuel the array.

He was waiting for the report: The death toll. The paltry sum it had cost him to say what he had to say to Her directly, rather than as a pre-recorded message. Like clockwork, a eunuch official entered the throne room from the left and made himself known. After kowtowing and several dozen seconds of honorific ritualism, Xiān Dì commanded: “Enough with the posturing. How many died?”

“Er, well… One-hundred and twenty-one Seers have been lost. Roughly forty more suffered reversible brain hemorrhaging and light to moderate spiritual over-exertion injuries.”

A smile grew on Xiān Dì’s lips for the first time in decades. The wider it grew, the more fear he could sense from the officials arrayed to either side below his throne.

“Good, well below my expectations,” he said.

“I had expected at least two-hundred lost. The Wall truly is growing weaker by the day…” he thought.

In truth, this had not been just for his own fulfillment. It had also been an opaque means of testing the defenses of Hedan’s Wall in the wake of reports that the gates were no longer selectively stopping people from passage, but rather shutting out anyone above a certain unknown spiritual magnitude threshold.

“Before I let you go, tell me: How is progress on the Bio-”

He stopped himself, reiterating: “The Human Logic Automaton?”

Xiān Dì had nearly slipped. The first time he’d felt any real emotional investment in the last century, and it was enough to make him nearly slip up. He’d meticulously cultivated his image as a native of this world, to set himself apart from the well-known otherworlders who had been given divine gifts through their transmigration, just as he had been. It would not do to out himself before his own people by calling out a biological supercomputer.

“We’re still struggling with rejection, your divinity - er, both physical and spiritual. So far we’ve only been able to create a three-node unit out of identical triplets, extracted from an Ikesian border village near the research facility. Despite thorough conditioning, the ah… The composite, it…” the eunuch trailed off, once more hesitating to finish.

“What did it do? Speak!” the Emperor commanded.

“It manifested a composite astral body and proceeded to breach containment using an unforeseen magnitude of kinetic magic in the form of several translucent, monstrously strong tendril-arms. Much of the facility has been irreparably damaged and several vital researchers are dead… And the composite is still at large.”

He laughed in satisfaction, “Dear eunuch, that is not a failure in the slightest. The first Tiger-class mutant to come out of the first Chimera Farm escaped and slew its creators, yet such mutants are now a lynchpin of my forces! Continue research as normal, I will have as many resources allocated to your cause as is necessary. Use single-batch mutagen treatments to break down barriers between subjects. If all else fails, look into homunculi.”

The eunuch shrunk back at the mention of homunculi, that uniquely Ikesian art, but he dared not question the Divine Emperor, only bowing in submission: “Yes, your divinity.”

“Ah, and hold an auction for the opportunity to hunt down the subject. The reward will be any one scroll from the Forbidden Library. Away with you.”

After the eunuch had recovered from the shock of what Xiān Dì had just said and made his way out of the throne room, the emperor pulled up one of his scrying mirrors, willing it to establish a connection beyond the Blackwall. What once had demanded tens of seers to perform, the Black Mirror Array made easy, as it did not rely upon the aetherwave transmissions which were so easily spied on. They were a form of scrying mirror, the same family of artifact as the very mirrors around his own throne, but more limited and easier to use; the array’s only flaw was the disproportionate difficulty of producing Black Mirrors compared to simple aetherwave transceivers, limiting their use to high-priority applications such as this one. None of the black mirrors in use had been made by Pateirian hands, but were instead excavated from ancient Ankhezian ruins at tremendous cost of human life.

The connection was established. He was met with the face of a lieutenant, rather than the designated mirror operator; he could see the operator in the background, huddled over a table, his posture betraying that he had been caned. For what? Xiān Dì didn’t bother asking, focusing his gaze on the lieutenant instead. After a few moments of delay due to latency, the man snapped to attention and rattled off a report: “We’ve received the Dragon Eye intact. The plan proceeds apace; Cao Hu stands ready for his interment in the Walking-Machine. Furthermore, we expect to be finished with the high-priority excavation in two months.”

Xiān Dì smiled again.

“Good. Anything else?”

Shifting in place uncomfortably, the lieutenant added: “Er, the asset known as Adalbert von Wickten, he…”

“Dead, I presume?” he questioned, not surprised at all by this turn of events, since he had been informed of Newman’s presence in Arches. Wherever that woman went, his plans unraveled. Oh, how she vexed him, it was truly exhilarating to feel this again. The Sage of Fog had rejected any personal quarrel, coward that he was, instead treating the War of Fog as nothing more than a political dispute. But Newman, she was truly amusing; it had been she who had initiated conflict, and over what? A few soldiers trying to mug her. Such a tiny quarrel spiraled out into her thwarting one of his few plans to bypass the Blackwall, and later the killing of his resurrected general, Ubul.

The Emperor was pulled from thought by a nervous answer: “No, your divinity. He… He showed up at one of our outposts, or what’s left of him. He claimed that the Heretic’s Daughter force-fed him a pill said to force the body to expel all impurities as an alternative to being killed, and that he didn’t remember anything besides his name and the last several days.”

A belly-laugh erupted from the man-god’s body, much to the terror of his subordinates. The idea of such a punishment was as old as breakthrough pills themselves, to leave a truly impure creature’s fate up to chance, whether that fate might be purification or drowning in its own impurity. There was a third outcome, but to think that Von Wickten had been so utterly rotten as to suffer that fate…

“Treat him as a high-value hazardous asset, like Cao Hu. Our man has become an Impurity Elemental. Contain him for the time being, cater to his every demand no matter how degenerate. I will have restraints fashioned for the rabid dog within the week.”

Zelsys left the statue as it was. None among the small crowd which had gathered dared raise their hand to it, and she was confident enough that it would go unvandalized, at least by the inhabitants of Fort 57. Striding through the crowd unimpeded, people parting before her without so much as a look being needed, she made her way to her original intended destination in this place. When she’d returned to the fort with Lydia in tow, Zelsys had intended to visit one of the two or three merchants who made this trading post their home, hoping to buy swords in bulk to serve as ammunition. As she walked, she realized that she hadn’t even bothered to check the newborn technique’s listing to give it a name. It showed up under Beast-butchering Arts, given its use case and circumstances of inception.

Fulgarrow

She put the Tablet away, making her way to one of Fort 57’s merchants, specifically one which had a placard advertising his stock of guns, ammunition, blades, and “other tools”.