Nexus Awakened (An Isekai LitRPG Gender Bender Story)

743. The Monarch and The Heart of The City

She was hungry before she learned how to breathe.

Hunger was all she knew whilst inside of the cocoon.

Starvation came before her own existence was determined.

The Monarch was born as a larva with six arms and two legs. An adult at birth with imprinted instincts and memories given to her by her host mother – the Heart of the City. The only color she knew in this world was red. How it could be smeared, mashed, squashed and consumed at the handful.

And blue from the wires that seemed to govern the pain in the living from what she knew. Those tiny strands of blue meticulously spread thinly so that they could take their mind off the hunger.

The Monarch remembered her life as she fell into a state of deep introspection in the face of the Amalgam. Her throat shriveled in her grasp. Her eyes could not see anything other than the darkness of their apparel, and the pair of golden eyes that stared down at her judgingly like a pair of stars.

She began her life as a larva only knowing hunger. She was one of seven hundred from a brood born beneath a city of tens of thousands. All her life she had been living in this same exact place, seeing the same red, and feeding off her own kin to sate her insatiable hunger.

Was it wrong for her to feed on loved ones? Animals like sharks feed on one another in the womb of their mother.

It was survival of the fittest.

A world where life is to become food for each other, no matter evil or good.

A crushing pain overcame her. But strangely, it was not the kind of pain that took her mind off the endless hunger, and the infinite yearning to become complete. It was the kind that opened her eyes as she felt parts of her psyche begin to slip away. A void opened within her. She could not see it, nor herself.

She could only feel what she knew immediately was her soul being destroyed. Dark fragments of herself were absorbed by the Amalgam as her entire body turned dark, like a black cutout against a world of bright red.

“Why was it that I was always seeking to become complete?”

It was an imprinted yearning that came before she existed. As a result, she never had a chance to know what she was. She knew she was an Insectid to some degree, but the names that circulated their colonies and nests said otherwise.

“Impuritas. Are we all just impurities for trying to help ourselves?”

She didn’t know. She was angry at the Amalgam. Why was she and the Crimson Hunger being persecuted when the Insectids in the north did the same to another at a far more disastrous scale? Or the eternal war in the south?

Why not them?

Was it so wrong to want to eat?

To consume?

She blamed the Amalgam with all her heart, but then she heard the Amalgam’s voice call to her.

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“You still had a choice, didn’t you?”

The voice was accompanied by the sensation of her mind being pried open by fingers. They were surgically precise, and she felt like the Amalgam had somehow entered her state of mind. This figure in blackness was not just an apparition of her encroaching insanity. They were real, and they could communicate with them like a god.

“It wasn’t a choice when it was all I knew. From the beginning, all we fed on were the hatreds, the wants, the greed – the infinite strive for something because countless in the city above us were unsatisfied with themselves.”

The Monarch confessed. If it weren’t for this, then she believed that she would not have been born alongside the Heart.

The Heart of the City was the ultimate culmination of people’s impurities. In this instance, it was not instinct. It was humanity’s hunger. The city’s desire for more despite all the riches they had. It made them spiteful, hateful, and resort to primal instincts to gain what they wanted so that they themselves could be sated.

In a way, it was so that they could be complete.

“No one heard or answered the woes of the city. No one followed the city’s ribbons. So the city was born from their trash and rubbish – their collective, impure remnants to make us – then we, as the Heart of the City, shaped them in return.”

“How does this happen?”

“It’s a natural order. Things tend to accumulate. When enough vitriol and unsatisfaction exists, then things can prop into existence… like us. Like me, who only knew how to feed. It is because of them that I am like this. That we are so hateful towards them. We want to unify them… I believed in the order that if enough is consumed, then we can escape this. And if not, then our pain can be shared. We can be unified.”

The Monarch understood that the principle of their existence – at least for the Heart of the City – was an enigma. Complex Heart did not become Hearts of the City. Hearts of the City were born in a way that seemed natural. Dungeons did the same, but they were often the result of Complex Hearts that sent them to various places.

Still, it did not change that the impurities of the living – their unsatisfaction and hatred – were ultimately what created them, and why they were so hateful.

These thoughts, while hers, were not the same as her heart. In her mind she recognized her existence. How meaningless it was now in the face of the Amalgam. Only in certain death was she able to see this, but still, she could not accept it.

Because how could she be at fault when this was all she knew? Her purpose? Her hatred? It all came from what was above. Why was the Amalgam so angry that it was the same as below?

“It’s because you revel in it. People who didn’t deserve to be turned into slimes were caught alongside you. But you, nor the Crimson Hunger, cared enough. Let me ask you this – is it wrong for the living to retaliate against you?”

“No. But we were not the ones who started this cycle of hatred. This is how and what we are. We wanted to change it… I did but knew that there was no way out.”

“But you listened to the Brightest Star. Did you believe in his promise to grant you your wish?”

The Amalgam knew of the Brightest Star’s promise. It caused the Monarch’s dark silhouette to freeze as she knelt before the Amalgam. Her withering hands groveled and clasped at the earth, pulling nothing but her own fading dust.

This world was purgatory. She knew it. It was before her inevitable departure to hell, but in her mind, she was perhaps already there. Her soul was steadily being destroyed but for some reason; after losing more digits and several arms, she entered a state of clarity.

“Marduk and the Brightest Star ushered to us this wish. The White Wing told the tales of destruction as a warning to the Beholders. Marduk spread it to us after our Tiamat’s death as a prophecy. Tiamat… was our original true ‘Heart’. The queen of monsters, usurped by Marduk, who has become our ultimate founder…”

Tiamat was a great serpent-like Dragon whose own wrath was ingrained into the Crimson Hunger. She was the original progenitor of the Crimson Hunger, long before Marduk came into existence. Her reign only extended in the ocean depths furthest away from the lands. As legends… no, as the Monarch’s memory served her – Marduk slayed Tiamat, which created what was called the Red Sea and perhaps even the Dead Sea in the distant oceans.

The Heart beneath her, which the Amalgam firmly planted a boot on, throbbed.

It imparted memories of Tiamat into the Monarch, as well as of Marduk. The Heart viewed Marduk as the legitimate ruler of the Crimson Hunger; a figure head exalted by defeating Tiamat.

This was why the Monarch – a being born from the Crimson Hunger – was called a ‘brood’ of Marduk. In some shape or form, the entirety of the Crimson Hunger bent to his own whims, but at the same time, the Hearts themselves also had their own sense of separation.

Namely in how they operated, why they operated, and their reasons for their infinite hatred.

“… but why do you shine so brightly? You are clad in the same darkness as me. We’re both consumed by it. Yet that shade of yours is nothing like the consorts of the Brightest Star. Why is it not as dark?”

These words did not come from the Monarch.

They were from the Heart itself. It used her as a vessel to speak, and for the first time, the Monarch tried to fight back. She clasped at her throat.

It seemed futile now of all times.

She wanted to know more about this Amalgam. Wanted to know more so that she could spite her with every ounce of her being, even if it meant going against her Heart.

The golden eyes of the Amalgam, which appeared like pure-yellow orbs of light on a black silhouette, stared at her judgingly.

“I’m speaking to the Monarch. Not you.”

The Amalgam conversed with the Monarch directly. She didn’t need to, but she did. In a way, it felt like this was an autonomous response from the Amalgam rather than her conscious self.

Was this an unconscious part of the Amalgam?

If so…

… then why was her agony postponed?

Indeed, she was at utter ease in the absolute presence of the Amalgam. She felt no pain, no hunger, no suffering.

Just existence.