Chapter 427: Leisure and Learning go hand in hand
“Huh…I guess Captain Douglas was right. An exciting first day means a relaxing voyage.”
“Yeah…could do without the horn though.”
*Bwwooooom!*
“Eh, I find it charming.”
A full two days had passed ever since the incident in the cargo hold had occured and nothing as exciting had happened ever since then.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, an uneventful voyage was significantly safer than an eventful one, but that didn’t stop people from getting just a touch bored.
This in turn lead to a lot of people, namely the Zhen Clan who were essentially guests in this ship, to just wander around in order to find something to do.
Granted, this time of leisure wouldn’t be lasting for too long.
The initials estimation of time it would take for the Zhen Clan to get them to go from the Stampeding Bison continent to the Roaring Tide continent, placed the time at around a week and a half.
However, this estimation was based on the ship in question being a normal sailing vessel with its speed solely reliant on favorable weather.
The PS Nimona was a steamship, therefore, it could keep going and at much faster speeds than normal as long as the engine room was utilized correctly.
With three fully trained sailors, each armed with the necessary elemental affinities needed to produce perpetual power, the new estimate of time needed to travel between continents dropped from a week and a half to a singular week.
It was much more manageable for the people present to figure out what to do for a week instead of planning for barely two, at least in terms of leisure activities.
(This was especially the case for a group of certain individuals that were composed primarily of monstrous beings made of desires, but that’s a story for later.)
However, not all members of the Zhen Clan were lounging about the ship as they waited to arrive to their destination, some of them were using this opportunity to learn a few things.
For example,one particularly studious young master was in the middle of discerning what the fuck caused a certain cyborg rust rat to occur in the first place, after stealing it’s corpse from the cargo hold.
Granted, that particular moment happened the day after stealing the corpse.
An incident that would have caused quite a stir on the ship, had a major Ethereal art not taken it’s place.One tailored to Zhen Jin’s newly acquired insight no less, but that is a tale for later.
For now, Zhen Liu was getting busy to do something…mildly unethical.
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Apparently Pathos wanted to switch out of her usual clown get-up and “used a look from the past” this time around, which is why she now looked like a half-demon lady with purple skin and a matching dress that had a distinctly “Arabian nights” twist .
Zhen Liu gave Pathos a pointed look before rolling his eyes. He understood what the emotional based specter was talking about, that didn’t mean he liked it.
“You know how I am Pathos, you’ve been in my head. Besides, uncle Zhen Jin deserved some sort of prize for defeating this thing… especially after we stole/kidnap whatever the fuck this thing is.”
“SKREE!”
Screaming at Zhen from behind the safety of what Logos called “Lord-Proof Glass”, was a weird mechanical spider…thing. Or to be more precise, it looked like someone took the spine of a rat, replaced all the calcium with copper and then proceeded to add several wires, cables and unnecessarily large mechanical limbs that look like bent bamboo sticks until it looked like either a very long-legged centipede or a demented mechanical spider.
Zhen Liu wasn’t entirely how this came about, but the kaijin informed him that shortly after they had entered the cargo hold, they saw this thing lift itself out of the giant rat corpse like some kind of demented science experiment gone wrong. Things might have gotten worst from there, if it wasn’t for Frosttusk’s fast thinking to freeze the thing in place.
Either way, the appearance of this strange clockwork monstrostity was enough to make Zhen Liu a bit uneasy and it reminded him of a certain buggy bastard he blew up with a cannon not too long ago. In fact, they even radiated similar energies, but the thing standing before him was one decidedly more…primal.
Zhen Liu gave the machine pest another look over before releasing a sigh.
“Alright, I still don’t understand how the fuck a giant direwolf sized robotic rat turns into…what’s essentially a robotic spider spine. Where the fuck is Logos anyways? I could use some cold analysis for this.”
=I just finished milord and that’s because it’s not a spine, that’s a tapeworm.=
“A tapeworm? How the fuck-holy fuck, you’re an angel now.”
=Figured I coordinate with your demon night dancer with something a bit more…calculated.=
Calculated was a bit of an understatement, since Logos was now looking like a mathematically perfect,golden ratio shaped angelic being complete with a matching golden colored suit.
Zhen Liu couldn’t help but wonder if this look was also “old, or that Logos just made it to match better with his emotional counterpart.
Honestly, he still couldn’t tell what the fuck was the relationship between these two were exactly.
Regardless, Zhen Liu decided to focus on what Logos said and not how he looked for the moment.
“Logos, nice look, but could you repeat what you said about a tapeworm?”
=Thank you, milord and of course.=
With a wave of his hands, Logos produced a holographic screen that depicted a three dimensional model of an ordinary ship rat walking around.
=See milord, we had initially assumed that the rodent itself had absorbed [Chaos] energy and had mutated into an abomination similar to Grub.=
To demonstrate this point, Logos had the display show the rat model mutate into its weird cyborg form, and then have it walk next to a model of Grub the abomination. It was rather surreal, but it got his point across quietly pointedly.
“Okay…but you’re implying that this not the case because..”
=Well, when Pathos and I performed our own analysis of the rodent corpse, we discovered that not a lick of [Chaos] was present in it’s flesh in the slightest, instead it came from the mechanizing tapeworm specimen right in front of you.=
Logos manipulated the display yet again, getting rid of the initial model of the rat with a newer one.However, inside this rat model was a weird glowing line. Presumably, that was the tapeworm.
=When we traced the [Chaos] energy back, we found that it had all concentrated into the parasite before you and had caused it to mutate in a very unusual way.=
Illustrating this point, the display now showed what presumably motes of [Chaos], entering the tapeworm and causing it to become more rigid. This in turn lead to it affecting the rest of the rodent and causing it to mutate into a mechanical monstrosity. There was a subtle horror to watching strange tendrils suddenly thickening into copper wires in someone’s flesh, but it was also strangely fascinating.
Once this demonstration was over, Logos dismissed the screen and all eyes were back on the actual tapeworm/spine spider thing.
Granted it didn’t really notice all the looks directed at it, it just kept running around it’s glass cage and hissing at everyone.
“Horrifying…so why is it giving me a weird vibe? Because I know [Chaos] causes things to get weird, but something about this spider thing feels…wrong and I don’t know why. Well, more wrong than the average kaijin, but still.”
=Ah yes, that’s because this thing is parasite and the only desire it would have would be one of the [Ultimate Desires], which it’s body cannot handle .=
“One of the what now?”
=Life, death and time,= Logos listed off as he presented three fingers, =these are the three [Ultimate Desires] all lifeforms share, regardless of their capability to think. And if you’re curious as to why you can’t make cores based on these desires, it’s the same reason why that parasite feels wrong to you.= <=When a desire so intrinsic to existence is brought to the forefront, it unsettles the mind.=> “Oh…okay.” Zhen Liu looked back down at the mechanical parasite running around in a glass cage, and felt for it a weird sense of pity. “So…what do we do with this thing?”
