Final Core - Chapter 76 (Patreon)

For a person stuck inside the confines of civilization, it is often very easy to think that the outside world — nature — is a chaotic place of anarchy. Forests are full with swarms of violent goblins and hungry slimes, the likes of which would love nothing more than to eat you in your sleep. Caves are full of massive beasts that lumber into their dark holes to hide away until the sun starts to vanish and the night comes once again. The ocean is full of unimaginable horrors, just waiting to snatch anyone who would wander too close to the shore at the wrong time.

— But this is simply the way we have been conditioned to think about the natural world.

Yes, it is dangerous in the wilds. But that is how it is supposed to be.

Nature isn’t as chaotic as it seems; it is its own refined series of intricate, interwoven mechanisms.

The goblin tribes that hunt through the forests do so in order to protect the woodlands that they live in, under the guidance of what they refer to as a ‘wood-mother’, which is a matriarch of sorts of yet another species, the dryads, that governs over their tribe in this form of symbiosis.

The things that bite and gnash and tear do so, not because they are mindless, howling monsters, but because that is what life is.

This thing here, these walls of our cities, and these houses with doors and windows — this is the chaotic, unnatural presence in the world. Anywhere where there are no men, there are no houses — So is this chaos then not the default? Is it not the desired equilibrium that nature itself strives to achieve?

The great joke is that in our attempts to insulate ourselves from the chaos of the outside world, we ourselves are acting as the most chaotic, unnatural beings.

~A treatise on the state of nature and human life, written by a wandering nomad

______________________________

[Rorate]

Dark-elf, Female, Fighter

Location: The river, outside of the tower

Rorate sits down by the river, looking at the water, in which the melusine swims around, chasing after rays of sunlight that glimmer upon the surface of the water. The dark-elf tilts her head, watching the creature swim around.

“Hey!” calls a voice from behind her. Rorate turns to look at Beulah, who is coming her way. “Check this out,” says the man smugly, reaching into his bag to pull out a rock.

Rorate narrows her eyes, looking over the rock.

It’s a nice rock.

Damn.

She hisses, turning her head to look back at the water. She’s been beaten. “That’s a good rock, I guess,” concedes the woman.

Beulah laughs. “I got it yesterday,” he explains. “Check it out.” He leans down, showing her the rock. Rorate sighs.

“I won’t take this lying down,” says the woman, turning back his way.

“You’ll have a hard time beating this one,” says Beulah, knocking on the rock a few times for emphasis.

Rorate scratches the spot behind one of her ears, considering the prospect. It’s true. This is going to be an uphill fight.

“Anyways,” begins Beulah. “Has your uh…” He points at the water, where a shadow waits, scouring beneath the surface but not rising, now that someone else is here. “Is your friend getting… ‘smarter’ too?” he asks.

Rorate looks back at the water, considering. “I have noticed that the fakes and some of the monsters are getting a little… different.”

“Do you think it’s something weird?” he asks.

The woman considers it for a while, but then shakes her head. “No…” she replies, clasping her hands in front of her chest. “If I had to guess, I would say that this is just another work of Isaiah.” She looks around herself, picking up a journal. “I should note this down. There’s a sermon here. Oh! you’re gonna be there tomorrow, right?” she asks. “You missed the last one.”

Beulah awkwardly scratches his several days' worth of beard growth. He doesn’t really want to bother going to her sermons. But she’s asked him directly now, so he might be stuck…

“Sure,” replies Beulah. “I’ll be there.”

“Great!” says Rorate, scribbling down something into her journal.

The two of them make some small talk about this and that, about the state of the world and the state of their lives, and so on. After a while, Beulah leaves to return to his chores, still smugly triumphant about his rock-victory.

After he goes, a face pops up out of the water.

Rorate looks up from her journal at the melusine. “What’s up?” she asks. The melusine holds out a hand and grabs her wrist, lightly tugging on her towards the river. “Huh? I can’t go swimming. I have work to do today.”

The melusine hisses and tugs on her arm again. “Rock!” gurgles the creature, narrowing her gaze with venom in her eyes as she looks after Beulah, walking into the distance.

“’Rock’?” asks Rorate. “Oh, you want to find a new rock together?”

“Rock!” repeats the creature. It yanks on her arm and then lightly bites it, chewing on her wrist through her robe.

Rorate looks around.

Well… if it means finding a better rock so that she can beat Beulah in their game, maybe she can spare a little while. “Okay,” nods the dark-elf affirmatively to the melusine. She sets her journal down to the side and throws off her robe — having to pull it out of the creature’s mouth first, and then jumps into the water.

A shadow swims past her, diving down, and Rorate follows it as the two of them swim through the river, looking for a perfect rock.

That’s just what life is sometimes.

____________________________

Red

Uthra, Female, Worker {6}

Location: Floor six of the tower

Red sits there on a log stump she has dragged up onto floor six of the tower.

The uthra crosses her legs and arms, watching the golem and the shadowy-priestess — the monsters of this floor — intently. She’s been here for a few hours now, just watching, just waiting for them to slip.

She’s had her suspicions about the fakes for a while. They’re acting screwy. She can’t prove it, but she can feel it. The uthra narrows her eyes, glaring at the priestess who sits on the massive golem’s shoulder, entirely idle and lifeless. Her face is like a porcelain doll’s — simply blank and void of any expression or intent. She’s as much a statue as are the literal statues that adorn the tower’s grounds.

“I can stay here all day,” says Red, watching them.

The monsters do not reply.

— Steps come from down below, from adventurers who are beginning to make their way up from floor five. Red tsks, still sitting there stubbornly.

She’s never been seen by adventurers inside the tower before. All of the uthra go out of their way to always stay far from people; these were Isaiah’s orders for them, after the loss of several others — Green, most importantly.

The uthra rises to her feet, placing a hand on the log to teleport it away into the stockpile.

“This isn’t over,” she says, pointing at her eyes and then at the priestess. “I’m coming back tomorrow and then the day after that, and I’ll keep coming back until I catch you, you greasy fuck.”

— The priestess does not respond.

Red rolls her eyes and then flies away behind a pillar, just as the adventurers rise up onto floor six from floor five below, triggering the fight with the priestess and the golem, both of whom act exactly as one would expect monsters to act and not a tiny bit different.

Suspicious.

Red glares at them from the distance.

They’re almost too good at it.

____________________________________

Isaiah

Grand Icon

The name of Isaiah has been uttered in an extremely faraway place.

+877 EXP

+1118 EXP

+976 EXP

…

You are now a level {97} dungeon-core!

Isaiah hovers in the air above the tower, looking down at its winding mechanisms that churn around the top of the tower — the three connected islands with their stiff bridges, spin around the tower in asynchronous rotation, like the three hands of a clock.

It stays there for a time, simply observing in silence as the world moves past.

Grand Icon

The name of Isaiah has been uttered in an extremely faraway place.

+1133 EXP

+970 EXP

+1091 EXP

…

You are now a level {99} dungeon-core!

— The heavy tick of the clock-tower reverberates out again, rising up into the air where it flies, shaking its bones as the clock strikes twelve — noon.

The bell-tower begins to ring, as it always does at noon, and Isaiah looks around the world as the conditionless countdown of the final-core continues to make itself heard around the world.

It lifts its eyes as it flies higher; its exponentially larger radius allows it to fly many, many kilometers up into the air now that the territory has expanded so much. Yet, no matter how many kilometers it flies, it finds that it comes no closer to the reaches of heaven.

Ever since reaching floor one-hundred, the physical construction of the tower has been paused. Now that the mechanism could be activated and that they have reached the height of the global jetstreams — the ambient magical currents of the world — in order to spread its magic out over the planet.

— Perhaps it was folly.

To try and reach heaven with a construction made out of bricks, blood, and water is senseless. Heaven is a place that is made of everything except these very things. Stone and dirt and craftsmanship are concepts of the physical, material world. But the plane of the gods, where the divine reside on their undeserved thrones, is a place made solely of immaterial things.

— So does it not seem logical that the connection between these two places cannot be fully physical and tangible? It must bridge the gap between both domains, and thus far, the tower only acts in the lower plane of physicality.

Isaiah realizes that it has been foolishly thinking in terms of a mortal creature, such as a human or a blackbird.

But in its new role of power, it must think beyond those limiting terms.

The bell-tower continues to toll out the chime of noon-time as the second hand of the clock ticks away, shaking the world with every strike.

Isaiah lifts a hand, letting its talon hover over the island, over the world, which both become increasingly smaller as it rises in height.

It thinks that it understands now why the gods are so distant. From up high, where they sit, perhaps they simply cannot even see the world for what it is, any longer.

Grand Icon

The name of Isaiah has been uttered nearby.

+ 324 EXP

+ 177 EXP

 + 178 EXP

…

[Level Up!]

You are now a level {100} dungeon-core!

NEW MAX (HOLY) ABILITY - [Anti-Schism](Toggle)

• Leylines are strewn across the world, criss-crossing in all manner of directions, as would the weaving roots of a thousand trees beneath the forest floor. By manipulating these leylines and redirecting them into a single funnel of ambient magical energies, allows an extreme condensing of intense HOLY energies at one specific pin-prick point.

This serves as the first tear between the physical and the spiritual realms.

(Isaiah) has used: [Anti-Schism]

An intense light flows around its talons, converging together into a single point of energy. All around the landscape that it can see from up here, the wind shifts. To the west, the trees bow their heads, billowing their crowns towards the east. In the east, the grasses blow towards the west. The north-wind blows to the south and the south-wind blows to the north as the ambient magical forces from all of the surrounding regions move in towards Isaiah, flowing up the channeling body of the tower as the updraft rises to where it now flies — crashing past it as if it were in the center of a violent storm that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

— The light erupts and a beam spans the gap from where it now flies, down to the top of the tower.

The tiny layer of immaterial fabric between the physical and the spiritual worlds has begun to come undone.

Now, it requires just a little more time.

— The clocktower ticks out below, the bell falling silent as noon comes to pass, heralding the beginning of the end.

The top of the tower begins to glow.

[New Area Added]

Floor {101}

The one-hundred and first floor of the tower dungeon, created from the immaterial forces of prismatic HOLY magic.

It is brim full of shifting magical tides, spanning out from the physical and into the spiritual world.