Slumrat Rising

Vol. 5 Chap. 94 Pulling Up The Ladder To Heaven

Is this all the most powerful man in the world is? Jotted notes and a compulsive need to be spiritually clean?

Truth walked through the temple, trying to find some piece of Starbrite he could grab ahold of. Everything was just guesses. Based on evidence, but still guessing. Would there be any real trace of Starbrite here? Some real, tangible thing connecting the monster and the man? Other than the man himself, of course. Assuming ‘he’ was a man.

The temple was utilitarian. Beautifully decorated, but built for a single person and a single purpose. Truth still wasn’t sure he was clear what that purpose was. If he was going to hang a name on it, he would call it a workshop. The curse had rolled through here, but it had only damaged the more fragile things from what he could see. Not that he would drink the wine or try the oil- it smelled fine, but who knows what it would do to you if you actually touched it.

It reminded him a little of the Army wagon maintenance depot he worked in at the end of his national service. The garage had been mostly empty space, with just a few fixtures and a few highly specialized tools. The more general purpose tools like wrenches and drivers were stowed in one spot, and one spot only. You used the tool, then you put it back in exactly the same spot. It had to be that way, because if it wasn’t, nothing worked. It would quickly become a cluttered mess, nobody able to find anything and no room to work on the wagons.

Well, here Starbrite had made a workshop to work on his connection with higher powers. Presumably God, but Truth had long since come to agree with Merkovah’s description of the divine. There was only one God. And there were multiple versions of them, all equally real. All existing at the same time. And yet, only one of them was real, because there really was only one God. Like the shape in the hallway. There was only one hyper-dimensional object, but it sure looked like there were dozens of them from what our limited minds could perceive.

It said something about Starbrite that he presumably knew that tidbit, but still built a workshop built around communion with the divine. Was he trying to get around the interference of the Stellar Eminence that was the world? Trying to communicate with that same being? Calling out to another power? Ultimately, there wasn’t enough to go on. He simply couldn’t tell from what he was seeing. It was like he was in the garage, but didn’t know it belonged to the Army. He could make a guess about the nature of the work based on the tools, but like Hell he could have named the specific wagons, or figured out they were war weapons.

Deeper and deeper into the temple. If he kept the workshop analogy in mind, it started to make more sense. The little nooks that looked like they should hold chapels probably did. The specific contents of them were just changed depending on the project being worked on. Same thing with the different baptismal methods, the closet with one hundred different types of candles, the racks on racks of carefully labeled oils. All available to properly venerate whichever singular truth was required.

Jeon Internal Security, and presumably their allies, believe Starbrite is sacrificing himself, to himself, for reasons unknown. Sally said that Starbrite’s soul is all wrong, grossly bloated with all the soul fragments he has stolen, and he wanted to steal her body. Somehow. Interesting that they didn’t try to bully her into taking an oath and accepting the System. After five years in captivity, with the aid of the System, she probably would have agreed to anything. The spirit in the library said he was a gambler with debts coming due, but… that just doesn’t add up. One, who does he owe? And two, it doesn’t match what I’ve seen of his personality.

Starbrite isn’t just careful, he’s paranoid. When he has to choose between maximizing his safety and maximizing his gains, he picks safety every time. As much as everyone sneers at the F, E, and D tiers, basic Starbrite Security has been consistently competent. You can really see that they are well supervised and pushed hard to excel. That’s got to come from the very top.

When was Starbrite founded? Dunno. Where did his first shop open? Dunno. What does he sound like, look like, dress like? Dunno. It was all handled by a courtier, you see. And then he would make a gesture, and things would blow up. So we believed him.

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It became easier and easier to remove himself from the public consciousness. Becoming less and less himself, and more and more the corporation. Unknowable, untouchable, not only could you not argue with him, you couldn’t even beg. You couldn’t speak to him at all. You spoke to the ministers, if you were lucky. He wasn’t the CEO, he was the weather. An oncoming storm. And we all went along with it. Aided by some very unique magic, of course.

Was it paranoia? Was it just paranoia? Truth was above average paranoid, and he was honest enough to admit he enjoyed walking through the masses unseen. This felt like more than that. Truth was hiding from the masses, yes, but really from one entity- Starbrite. And, yes, Jeon, Onis and whoever, but only because he was fighting with Starbrite. He still did the things he loved. Still had people he cared about. He was still him, just growing and changing as time passed. Starbrite, though, wanted to obliterate all traces of himself as a real person, and become, simply, a higher power.

No trace of a specific deity anywhere. No pictures of animals, or demons, or… anything recognizable, really. Just these endlessly repeating geometric shapes. And they don’t feel like sacred art. It feels more like someone just wanted a nice ceiling and budget was no obstacle to having the best.

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But why, though? Hiding out from his debts? Weird way to do it. Starbrite the person might be a ghost, but Starbrite the public persona was the most famous person on the planet, and had been for centuries. Anyone even slightly looking around would discover this. And if you were chasing Starbrite size wealth, you wouldn’t be satisfied with a quick check on local notables.

Truth entered a small courtyard within the temple. It was essentially an empty square with a gravel floor and an artificial sky overhead. There was a double row of plants and dwarf trees leaning up against a wall, stuck in plastic pots. There were a number of pre-dug holes scattered around the courtyard. It was a sacred grove- assemble as needed. You could alter the sky above the courtyard. Did your ritual require it to be noon, or dawn, or the first full moon after the vernal equinox? No problem. Another room to try and fool God.

Leaning against the trees was a corpse. Truth didn’t notice at first, the body blended very well. It was mummified, rigid, holding itself straight like a soldier standing at attention. Truth took a closer look. Female, no visible cause of death, intact corpse. It looked like they just… died. And then were washed, dried, treated with some sort of preservatives or enchantments, and left out in the sun to cure. He could see a few more stacked in with the trees, hidden in the foliage. The corpses were props too. Sometimes, you just need a body. Apparently. Not his department.

The door out of the courtyard was wood, weathered and sun-bleached. Truth opened it, and nearly screamed. On the other side of the door were dozens of the eyeless homunculi. The Tongue was out and reaching for the first head when his brain caught up with his instincts. The homunculi weren’t looking at him. Weren’t moving at all. Incisive wasn’t going off. The creatures had been deactivated or killed by the curse. If you could kill such a thing. Rendered inoperable.

Truth hesitated, then slowly reached out to grab one of the shiny freaks. Smooth latex under his fingers. Room temperature. Whatever they were, they only acted alive. He dragged one out into the courtyard, ignoring what was in the rest of the room. If it wasn’t hostile, he would deal with it later.

Alright, time to figure out just what kind of monster you are.

Truth used the fangs of Incisive along one finger, trying to slice open the rubbery exterior. There was a strange resistance to it. It couldn’t stop him, but there was a vague tugging feeling on the spell, like he was trying to cut through a rubber mat with an unfathomably sharp pocket knife. He ran his fingertip from the clavicle to the bottom of the ribs, then made a Y-shaped incision over the belly. Finally he pulled back all the flaps of latex. Time to see what had been troubling him all this time.

The skin was the first minor marvel- black and rubbery on the outside, the inside was inscribed with thousands of tiny lines of calligraphy. It appeared to be a recitation of mighty names, invoking some and forbidding others, forming a dense coating of spells over the exterior. When the little monsters were active, they would be essentially invisible and, like Truth, largely imperceptible to Level Zero’s. He was sure there was more going on with the skin than that, but even figuring out that much made him smug.

The bones, by comparison, were basically trash. Quite literally unwanted leftovers. They were human bones plainly manipulated to reach a uniform size. He could see the sloppy way nubs of plastic or porcelain had been glued on, the way tendons were attached with haphazard screws or yet more glue… it wasn’t jank, it was junk. Its creator just needed it to be able to stand up and move around slowly, not do anything fancy like ‘run’ or ‘jump.’

Or. Well. Not do those things well, at any rate. No real musculature there. Everything runs off enchantments. Some clearly witchcrafted organs filling the chest and guts, things that blurred the lines between biology, alchemy and necromancy. He hadn’t the faintest idea what they did. Sophia would know.

The skull was a lot more interesting. The brain case had been hollowed out and coated with spells, forming an enchanted space with room for a tiny… something… to be housed in the middle of it all. It didn’t quite look like a demon summoning, but a lot of the elements were similar.

The holes where the eyes should be were the big prize. The sockets had been covered with more of the black latex, though here it was left blank on the inside. The bone was etched at a near-microscopic level with spells. Truth had not the first idea what they all did. The way they interacted gave him a headache. Literally a headache. Truth jerked back with surprise. The spell wasn’t active right now. So why?

The spells twisted and writhed on him. He could swear he saw some of them vanish and reappear elsewhere in the socket.

There is no way. No way.

He stared a while longer, letting his focus on the secular reality slip a bit. He bit back a swear.

He was looking at a rather ordinary Jeon woman. Not a great beauty, nor terribly ugly, not old, nor very young. Average. Everything that made her her, that made her more than an abstraction, had been extracted, rebuilt or removed entirely. As for her eyes, the whisper thin sacks of saline had been etched with spells so profound, they pressed on the edges of the real.

The Homunculi still had their eyes. You just had to be standing at a slightly higher level of reality to see them. That was their reliance against Incisive and similar spells. You want to hide by adjusting local reality? Starbrite can play that game too, and at industrial scale. Truth had evaded them by literally turning himself into a corpse. They saw right through his magic, to the reality below. And the reality had been meat on a hook.

Meet increasing complexity with increasing simplicity. He swore he would never leave that righteous path ever again.

He dragged the mess over into a corner, half hidden behind the trees. Not that he expected anyone else to be down here, but… just in case.

He walked into the room with all the watching corpses, gently shoving through their ranks. It was more of a storage room than a site of veneration. Like the closet with the candles or the shelves of oils. The homunculi might be needed for something, so here they were, tidily organized and to hand.

The next room was bare concrete. No decoration. No furniture. An empty room with a long sarcophagus in the middle of it, and against the back wall, an enormous stone stele. Etched on the stele were the words “HEAVEN SEALING ORDER.” There were no other doors.