The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'
Chapter 389 - One Week Of Building Ahead, One Lifetime Of Destruction Ago

Chapter 389: Chapter 389 - One Week Of Building Ahead, One Lifetime Of Destruction Ago

"These have intention behind them, don’t they?"

Madrigil’s voice carried excitement over his discovery as he traced his finger along one of the carved sequences on the basalt arch. A week of spending most of his time pouring over the giant structure along with his mental clarity in this realm had started well. Pattern recognition was slower without using his Parallel Astralism, but he was taking Elua’s advice on learning to begin using that intentionally without rushing forward.

"The symbols don’t correspond directly to the paradigm of any known sigils, but they are set up like they are expected to be functional. And there’s a base-seven mathematical progression throughout, without any deviation from that."

His hands shook at what he was finding. Elua paused in her latest blueprint work from atop the arch and looking down at the progress so far. She was genuinely surprised at his persistence, as most cultivators - sigilists or spiritualists aside - would dismiss the carvings as meaningless decoration. Especially after a relative authority declared it as graffiti multiple times.

"What makes you think they should be functional? You said yourself that they don’t match the configurations we’d expect. It could just be a language system that has nothing to do with sigilry."

"That’s exactly why they’re extra fascinating!"

His eyes were bright with the fervor of academic madness. Exactly the sort of thing she’d expect from someone that had been looking for her ever since a brooch made its way across the continent. Madrigil gestured enthusiastically at some of the specific sequences and she had to look away before she gave too much away.

"It’s like someone created a complete mathematical language with symbology from scratch in a place with no other civilization. The progression rules are internally consistent once you can parse them. Whoever did this was attempting to..."

He trailed off, his expression turning into something a lot calmer as he looked between the arch and the young teen watching him with mint eyes. An ancient cultivator who had been especially uninterested in it all this whole time, despite fielding comments when he spoke toward her about the landscape fixture.

"You did this."

"Yes. I did. I was wondering how long you’d stare at the tree without thinking of the forest, to be honest."

No movements made, a copy of all of the carvings was raised up by the illusionist. Hovering and scaled a half dozen feet away from the entire arch, her hand pointed up at the same key sequences he’d noticed as she made them glow a different shade of virulent green.

’I guess I could have altered the color more, but the memory imprint was from way back then - and I did rather think a lot in green...’

All of the higher mathematics she’d ever learned or discovered were wrote into discrete meanderings that attempted to recodify the entire cosmos. Representations of nothing and infinity, geometric constraints, all the same things that the current sigil system covered... but intentionally made in a way that they could not work - or at least should not.

"Whether you are correctly guessing what I attempted is another matter. And whether it worked depends entirely on your definition of success. Which is why I call it graffiti, you understand?"

As a precocious Defier reaching toward Demi-god, the spiritualist had a lot of time to supine on the laws of reality. Most of all, she’d been triggered a time or two by the actions of the followers of certain Divinity cults. The very realization that Mandates restructured the universe meant it was possible in the first place had made her arrogant.

’Though one could say that arrogance is a pretty defining trait for a Defier in the first place. Discontent with remaining bound by anything but our own beliefs.’

"Well, I’m going down now. Have something else to take care of."

"Wai-wait-wait!"

Madrigil called out when she hopped off into the air. The noble scrambled down the rope he’d had his ’new assistant’ make for him in a hurry. When he hadn’t been studying the pseudo-sigils, he had been teaching the scout to make it using materials she gathered and tools that an amused heiress had quickly thrown together.

Sevra was coming back from collecting more long fibers to keep practicing the skill when she saw the little chase and overheard some dangerous sounding talk. It seemed like the pair were usually engaged in discussions that mostly went over her head but left fear where it did not.

"Do sigils work because they follow universal constants... or because enough minds in the universe believe they should work? If Divine Mandates can rewrite reality through pure will of a sufficiently advanced cultivator, then it stood to reason that collective belief might have similar power."

"So your goal was testing if repeated assertion in different environments would have any sort of noticeable effect on reality. Fascinating. The scale must have been unimaginable."

"You could say that. Forty-nine installations of such a wall of graffiti in different forms. Seven each on six different worlds with seven more still in hidden places like this. Each using the same invented language and all of them were monitored for the development of functional effects over a millennium."

The girl’s voice remained fairly conversational, but her spiritual presence began to weigh the area down. Vast distances and centuries of work that amounted to ’balling up the paper’ and throwing it in the trash bin. She gestured to the basalt arch above them.

"This was actually one of the first test sites. It would have no interaction from anyone’s consciousness because I was about to lock access to this Exclave by borrowing its realmshard."

"What were the final results?"

Spirit pressed down harder, stifling the listeners further.

"Absolute failure, here. As you can see. Complete inability to develop any functional effects despite centuries of exposure to relatively natural essence flows."

Disappointed but not surprised, the exiled noble nodded as that would be the expected outcome... if sigils required an adherence to universal constants. There were plenty of experiments he conducted of his own primarily to make sure they would fail - a lack of success could have its own value.

"However, two of the installations showed disturbing signs of emerging functionality."

The casual way she added that made Sevra’s blood run cold. ’Disturbing signs’ from someone who had casually showed them just how she had boiled an ocean with her power. From a cultivator who showed off her ability to clutch pressurized air into a sort of cannon burst that leveled a cluster of trees.

And also from the young looking girl who clutched her head and pouted for over an hour. Claiming that she calculated wrong - and was trying to show off to the Air Element wielder something neat she was trying out to help them bond more. How she had not meant it to be *that* scary to the woman.

’I still do not know if it was a trick. How I felt forced to console the very person who just made me jump out of my own skin.’

"So the experiment was a success?"

"No. I destroyed both immediately. Along with the worlds they were on."

Silence was deafening between them until Elua picked up one of the small sized mining constructs she was working on finishing. Many of the materials she needed could be gathered on land - or by traversing the cave system below herself - but when it came to refining the amount of metals to make a new gateway to send Sevra through... and there was also after that to think of.

’Some of it I can leave unfinished and bring materials back some day. But my spiritual constructs are still what’s going to make the timeline I have in mind possible.’

"The entire worlds?"

Madrigil’s enthusiasm had dimmed gravely as he processed what she’d just admitted. His voice was neither calm, excited, or anything like he usually expressed. He’d finally let out that thread of fear into a form on the surface.

"One was uninhabited, I thought - a failed colony world where the settlers had died out centuries before my installation. When the sigils began showing functional effects with seemingly no conscious observers, I thought it was interesting."

The woman she was then had found it incredible. For all of a week.

"I’d been wrong about no inhabitants. A tiny, spore-like fungal creature had developed a spiritual shielding that a First Echelon Demi-God could not pierce. When I realized what was happening, I flooded a spot on the planet with so much acid that it breached through to the core."

Hesitantly, her hand raised and a window into what she saw was shown. The ground heaving and buckling when the geyser of white hot metal bursting upward was still vaporizing everything for thousands of miles. The vary land squeezing back down into its own molten center from the compression shockwave.

"But even this didn’t feel like enough, so I carved a massive array on its surface. Then shoved it into the local stellar body rather than risk even some of them surviving and propagating."

"W-what? Was ridding the risk that imperative?"

"I would say so. An entity capable of symbiotically achieving a translatory effect to the real sigil paradigm, scanning my thoughts in real time, and essentially giving anyone in their presence the power of a pseudo-cultivator..."

While it might feel wrong to gatekeep power to most, Elua er Goltbred understood that the cosmos had been molded over time to conserve energy in certain ways for a reason. Mostly because some of the Divinities who she had bugged with connection rituals in her time had told her so.

"Well, lets just say that cultivators are born as we are for a reason and leave it at that. I’m certain the threat and thanks that a certain Divinity gave me in that life is still in effect, even in this one. And I am not risking myself for your curiosity."

The scout finally sat down the bundle of fibers in her arms and started to walk away. She had heard more than enough to serve as tonight’s nightmares. But Madrigil, even through his fear, wanted to know everything. After all, he could only know how scared he should be if he knew the details!