Chapter 2451 (Patreon)

ToC: https://www.patreon.com/posts/23899958

Two today. Looking like 2455 will be the last chapter, with two epilogue chapters to follow. The goal was to finish before 2024, but that would mean tomorrow I write and edit three very long chapters...

Outlook not good xD. But we will see what tomorrow brings.

What Pine remembered most clearly from those early days of his existence was the hunger.

Hunger that scraped to release, to vocalize. Hunger that would cut off slivers of his insides, so demanding it consumed him simply to house it.

His first, massive cry, which he later learned had been enough to split open the fabric of space, had been a plea for sustenance. The second cry had come only a moment later, cradled in the arms of Yystrix and Elhume, fueled by panic as he belated realized that the act of crying required energy.

Every act only deepened his hunger.

So he boomed out a second, even as an existential dread had risen in Pine’s barely formed consciousness.

One detail was abundantly clear, even to Pine as a child: the food he wished for did not abundantly exist in the multiverse. At least not here. He was a broken existence, one not meant to live for long.

But Pine was like every other living being; he came equipped from birth with a powerful urge to survive. So when Elhume used the echoing cries of Pine to create an isolated universe, he did not resist. He even allowed his father’s experimentations to determine the sort of energy his physiology naturally craved. He watched as the father built a grand working to process the energy Pine released and returned it to him in a partially consumable state. It was not a simple process, and his father would stay up late most nights, cursing and scratching his head.

Those were the happiest times, despite the horrifying newness of it all. His father and mother built him a small home, a little cabin in an isolated pocket of the dimension. His mother carried him around, propped up on her hip, and whispered stories that had been passed down from generation to generation.

“Do these stories matter?” Pine had once asked. He wanted her to say yes, dreaded she would say no. “The people you talk about… they are not like me.”

His mother had taken Pine’s face in her hands. She touched so delicately, always nudging and adjusting. Never like father, who sought to carve his truth into every surface he touched. “Of course they matter, Pine. You are not the child we expected, yes. But… you are the next link in the chain of our family. That bond will never be broken.”

At long last, father’s experiments bore fruit; the processing produced a successful globule of energy. When Pine ate that energy, it tasted like sour regurgitation. It did a small amount sate his hunger, but really only had the effect of whetting his appetite. Yet he was alive. He had a father and mother, although were forced to hide Pine because of others seeking to control him. Because he was special, had provided the energy to create the Nexus.

They celebrated that night, Pine and mother whooping and cheering while Father stood arms akimbo and laughed, luxuriating in his success.

Pine remembered thinking, I wonder if all broken things are special, for so long as delay their collapse.

Pine had tried to remain positive over the next few months, even as the small consumptions made him sick and queasy. Even as he continually felt a deeper part of himself giving out vast amounts of power, fueling the rapid expansion of the Nexus. Perhaps his parents understood how insufficient their methods had become. His father’s good mood evaporated, leaving him surly and irritable, given to spending long hours sitting in front of the refinement Engraving and brooding.

In the end, it was actually his mother who struck the real blow: she suggested they would only be able to try and fix this if they adventured out through the Nexus.

“Let me come with you,” Pine had pleaded.

His mother had sighed. His father had shaken his head. “You are irreplaceable. You are proof that our family is meant for better things. I’ve waited- we’ve all- Heh. You cannot be risked, Pine. And that’s that. Remain here, we will soon return.”

For the first time, Pine became alone. Alone with his hunger. The warm cabin warped into something else, empty of other inhabitants who had acted as pillars of safety. He shivered in a dark, hidden chamber. Shadows slumped against the walls and observed his every move. Yet those isolating moments did have a single benefit; Pine discovered, in the absence of other stimuli, that he remained connected to all that energy he spread out into the Nexus.

Allowing his gaze to unfocus, he could sometimes see the whole of the universe he could create, in small snippets from the tumultuous places.

He observed the rest of the Nexus. Seeing fights, or dramatic professions of love, or harrowing chases, did a lot to distract him. Pine tried to remain positive, even as the shadows in his cabin grew more numerous. Honestly, the hunger wasn’t so bad. Pine could steadily get used to it, as the growing poison in the recycled energy became untenable.

So he sat very still and observed. Occasionally mother and father would come back, but just as quickly they would need to leave. Father to follow some new lead, and mother… well, Pine understood that mother had begun to avoid father. He could feel her guilt. Just by chance, one of the scenes he observed was his mother, alone and weeping.

The tears glittering on her cheeks, for a few minutes, dried. The salt they deposited on her skin was invisible. Pine had remained frozen until the moment that the focus began to shift. He reached out and attempted to grasp onto that vision. Rather than being able to reach his hurt mother, he simply forced the moment away. He lost the connection.

For a long time, Pine trembled. A new change developed slowly in his heart, after his actions produced the opposite effect.

If he could not do anything right, maybe it would be better if he did nothing at all.

Watching others, hiding in the dark, it was the exhaustion that began to make every moment miserable.

For weeks at a time, Pine wouldn’t move. He wouldn’t even think. He would simply lay, a being inert, his life energy slowly leaking out of his body. He looked up at the wide dome, displaying the actions of those in the Nexus. Even when the important events featured his parents, Pine couldn’t find it in his heart to care.

On one fateful day, the apparatus built by Elhume congealed a drop of energy. It wiggled like jello as it waited for Pine to devour it. The exhaustion was particularly thick at that time, so Pine didn’t move. The hunger became only a small, sad song that Pine had listened to for every moment of his life. It did not drive him to consume.

For a while, he lost himself in the laying without thought, the images of the Nexus blandly playing across the dome. When another drop condensed, Pine’s reverie finally popped. And when he looked toward the apparatus-

The previous bubble of energy had since rolled off the deposit bowl, of its own volition, and gone three-fourths of the distance to Pine. Within the depths of the drop wiggled a dark figure. The poison had animated it and sought to join the kindred hate it sensed bubbling in Pine’s stomach.

The little, corrupted organism noticed Pine’s gaze. It paused in its efforts to roll in his direction and regarded him frankly.

In the core of Pine’s being, an answering evil stretched and hissed.

Instincts kicked in. Without consciously meaning to, Pine opened his mouth and released a great cry. Such was the pulse of power that he triggered the Nexus to briefly open once again, triggering the beginning of the Second Cohort.

The next few weeks were chaotic. For the first time, it was only Elhume who rushed to Pine’s side; he informed Pine that he and his mother had a small disagreement and were addressing different threats. But that Elhume would handle everything. He adjusted the energy extraction system, focusing on the insidious darkness that crept into the energy. Instead of reusing that for the refinement, it became a buffer barrier to help purify the energy. When the new working activated, it actually created a somewhat palatable meal, able to partially sate Pine’s hunger.

He hadn’t even realized how bad the hunger had gotten until it eased its vice-like grip on him.

“Thank you, father,” Pine had whispered. “I’m feeling a bit better now, actually. Can I come with you? I promise I’ll-”

“No,” Elhume’s face had darkened. He raised his gaze and looked up at the flickering images displayed on the dome. “Now, more than ever, you will need to remain here. Obviously, you couldn’t help your instincts… but the Nexus has been opened and invaded. Until we can neutralize the threats to you, you must be kept safe.”

This is my fault, Pine shivered and watched his father leave. I caused this trouble.

Yes, you did, The poison Pine had ingested had answered. With such malice and bitterness each thought made Pine want to vomit. And he was so horrified that he began to seriously study the workings created by his father, analyzing their principles.

Alone, desperate, horrified by all the trouble he had caused, Pine began a solo project: he sought a method to cut away the recycled darkness he had already consumed. The darkness that now used his own voice to whisper to him. It took him an incomparably long time, but he had naught else to occupy his time. He didn’t bother to watch the Nexus. He just needed the voice to stop.

After almost a year, he succeeded.

He cut and shredded, pushing through exhaustion and pain and hunger. He looked down at his hand and held a squirming ball of flesh. Even after ripping it out of his body, the thing still lived. Nine small protrusions wormed their way outward, trying to make connections.

He tossed the horrible bit of flesh out of his small sanctuary. His heart felt heavy, the hunger had worsened, and he had one more absence in his core, where he should have felt full. Yet what was one more wound on a broken thing?

I will one day die, Pine had thought. And for the first time, the thought didn’t sound so bad. At least this isolation and pain would cease.

That ended up being the day Pine had, inadvertently, given birth to Fiero.

At first, he hadn’t realized the connection. The squirming bit of desperate flesh had gone through quite a transformation to become a nine-tailed fox. But Pine’s gaze kept drifting to Fiero when it appeared in the images. He saw, he envied, the easy way it could so unabashedly ‘borrow’ and take from others.

It was the very opposite of Pine, who needed to constantly give of himself, and released pure waves of energy to sustain the Nexus. Still, observing Fiero eventually helped Pine understand that they definitely were connected, at least by the way everything Fiero touched began to wither and fade.

Whether it was giving or taking, a flawed being would corrupt everything around it. There were no exceptions.

Pine likely would have taken some more desperate actions then, expanding his mastery of Engraving and Nether Rituals to try and purge more of his own flaws. He was in a dark place, with his own self-hatred as the only emotion strong enough to overcome the hunger and exhaustion. But right about that time, a very clever and hungry monster named Fatia Cerulean sniffed out a method to trace back the donated energy that Pine released.

The heart of the universe didn’t have any idea what was coming. The raptor bit into Pine without warning, as soon as the connection became solid. Its jaws tore away vital energy and it happily devoured it for its own.

Pine’s first instinct was to scream. But he remembered the previous time he had ruined everything, forced his Father to constantly fight against invaders, because he had thoughtlessly screamed and let them into the Nexus. So Pine remained silent. He would not be a burden any longer. He would solve this problem on his own.

Pine's experience watching Fiero had taught him something very valuable; the poison was him too, although he hadn’t wanted to admit it at first. So as Fatia taught his bloodsoaked method to more and more subordinates, Pine accepted the poison into his body. He decisively abandoned the periphery of his existence and instead created a thick barrier of that darkness around his core consciousness.

He could still feel every bite, every tear, as they devoured him for dribbles of power. Yet Pine safely protected himself and waited, hoping Elhume would sense something was amiss. Time passed and the agony was his only constant companion. His father did not seem to notice his situation. When he next visited, he hardly even seemed to want to be there. He gave Pine orders to open the Nexus once more and then left.

This is what I am, and we both now know it, Pine trembled. I am a poison. I am broken. So… this is fine. As long as I can help father and mother…

Time passed. The layer of poison grew and grew and grew. Sometimes it would shrink, becoming more dense, but that just trapped Pine behind one more layer of darkness and death. He was alone with his hunger and exhaustion, listening as the dead whispered to him about their lives, about their regrets. He could barely feel the Nexus feeding off of him any longer.

What surprised Pine was that his damned body was much more stubborn about the survival thing than he was. He had assumed, after he had cut off nine-tenths of his body and surrendered it to the Nexus, that the universe would eventually collapse upon itself. Yet that last shred of him, the pure core, continued to radiate out enough energy.

His hunger became a constant, deafening demand. Yet the Nexus survived even when it shouldn’t, kept afloat by the worst sort of poison. He hated it. But he also felt a kinship with the Nexus, too.

The only logical explanation for its continued survival was that it was broken as well. So, in a way, Pine wasn’t alone.

Pine had isolated himself and had most of his outer connections devoured by the denizens of the Nexus. His father’s visits ceased. Without those events to delineate the passage of time, everything became fluid. He rode endless waves of suffering. He hated himself. He couldn’t look away from the small ripples he could still observe from the outside world.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had heard from his mother. Pine’s expression had crumpled when he made that realization. She must have realized what I was. She must have run away, to save herself.

A thousand years felt like so much longer. His traitorous body continued to wring itself dry, producing more energy.

Laplace’s invasion had been a relief to Pine, a sharp certainty that had cut through his blurry awareness. Once again, his instincts betrayed him. The last shrivel of himself he divided again, so his consciousness could flee the calcified remained of his energy core. He found a grand chamber that his father had constructed and hid out there.

Until Devick had showed up. Until she had bothered Pine into helping her, until she stood against impossible odds. Pine felt something other than poison festering in his heart as he watched her fight.

Yet her resistance couldn’t last forever. Laplace soon arrived and Pine felt a complex mixture of emotions as he understood the arithmetic of what was about to happen. Soon, even this small reprieve would end. And on the one hand, he was so, so tired.

Yet right before the climax, onto the stage walked Randidly Ghosthound. Who released some of the purest energy Pine had ever sensed. Who had condensed, not once but twice, pure spheres of power that Pine had been able to inhale from the periphery and handle his hunger.

Pine couldn’t help but open his mouth. “Is this Nexus worth saving? Simply move the individuals to your Alpha Cosmos, Randidly Ghosthound. Allow… this place, this body, to collapse. None will mind the switch and you will achieve a fresh start.”

Randidly Ghosthound looked at Pine. He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. This universe is worth saving.”

As the very core of this universe. Pine… didn’t believe him.

He had lived too long face to face with proof to the contrary.