Chapter 654: A Recap followed by Revelation
*Bing-Bong*
It has come to the writer’s attention that the timeline is a bit…messy, again, despite the fact that I explicitly told him not to-
|Hey! Be professional!|
Fuck you, anyways, so we’ll be doing a location by location summary of what had happened up until now, because everything these past few chapters has been happening simultaneously.
Don’t worry, there’s only three places, and we’ll start with the least eventful one.
Stampeding Bison Continent:
Archanidame and Lacerage are going about their day as usual as “Aranea” and “Lucile”, until they get a notification from Zhen Liu about needing them for a mission. This call was made around the time Zhen Liu was fighting Gao Lin, they’ll be arriving to Roaring Tide soon.
Zhen Clan Arena, Roaring Tide:
After Zhen Liu had broken the spatial barrier preventing himself and Princess Jinju Ren from fighting, all hell broke loose as a bunch of the audience members turned out to be members of the Fallen Clan, a clan of warriors that had a massive grudge against the the Blossoming Scales Kingdom as a whole, and the Zhen Clan to be more specific.
Evidently, the Fallen Clan was so bitter at the Zhen Clan, that they got their hands on an aether treasure that could produce a [Foul Blood Aether Curse] that weakened the Zhen Clan warriors wholesale.
The only Zhen Clan members that weren’t affected by this curse were most of the branch clan members, aka, the ones that had been infused with just the tiniest bit of [Chaos]. Unfortunately, three of the elders of the branch clan, including Zhen Liu’s father, had yet to get infused with [Chaos] so they were suffering the effects of the curse.
Zhen Liu had plans to resolve this issue, but there was a lot of fighting going on at the moment. The fighting was actually so intense, that Zhen Liu failed to notice that his grandfather, the Zhen Clan matriarch and the Imperial Prince his grandfather had beef, with were all currently locked in the matriarch’s skybox.
As a result of the aforementioned events above, Zhen Liu and Jinju Ren got separated from their respective family members and attendants and were forced to fight a pair of Aether Grandmasters named Gao Lin and Gao ZhiHui. During this battle, Zhen Liu had called for Arachnidame and Lacerage to come to the library, while sending Razorstella and Spring Brawler off to rescue the zako in the Zhen Clan prison. Shortly after doing so, both he and Jinju Ren defeated Gao Lin and Gao ZhiHui, respectively,
After doing so though, Jinju Ren decided to bail to go find more enemies while Zhen Liu was figuring out his game plan since he had to figure out what was causing the mist, where his family went off to and securing his captured zako from the Zhen Clan prison.
Before he could make a plan of action though, Zhen Liu was alerted by Spring Brawler and Razorstella that shit had gone sideways at the prison.
Zhen Clan Prison:
At the same time Zhen Liu was fighting with a spatial barrier, the Puppet Elder and the Gate Elder of the Zhen Clan were investigating a hypothesis the former had about the weird skeleton woman they had imprisoned the day before yesterday. He believed that the skeleton woman was actually an aether puppet under Zhen Liu’s control and wanted to test it.
They weren’t exactly wrong, but they were missing some details.
Unfortunately, before they could even try and test to see if the elder’s hypothesis was true, an explosion rocked the prison and multiple inmates were set free.
This explosion was caused by some recently incarcerated Fallen Clan warriors smuggling in explosives when they were initially arrested.
The goal of these Fallen Clan warriors was to not only rescue their imprisoned brethren, but also recruit new members from the people the Zhen Clan had imprisoned over the years. They didn’t need that much convincing to agree to the idea, inspired by their shared hatred.
It was around this point that Zhen Liu sent Razorstella and Spring Brawler to the prison to investigate.
The Puppet Elder and Gate Elder clashed with the antagonistic force of escaped convicts and Fallen Clan warriors, the former losing a lot of puppets in the process due to attrition, including a special [Ruby Eyed Dragon Cat] that was used to capture Zhen Liu’s skeletal zako in the first place.
Speaking of that skeletal zako, she had also been freed by the explosion destroying her cell, but she had opted to stay right where was until the [Ruby Eyed Dragon Cat] puppet got utterly destroyed, and the [Echo Stone] that was used to make the puppet “talk”, rolled right in front of her.
And…you know what? This is boring.
Recaps are boring, and this part is actually interesting, so I’m going to go off-script and show you what happened from the zako’s point of view…well…I guess it’d be more accurate to say “her” point of view, but you’re not at that part yet.
|Wait, what?! You can’t do-|
The following happened around the same time the fighting broke out in the prison, and the story will pick back up after she makes herself heard.
You should also probably know that this moment is the writer’s attempt at sounding “edgy”, whatever the fuck that means, ENJOY!
|YOU MOTHER-!|
*Bing-Bong*
_____________________________________________
Zhen Clan Prison, during the point where Zhen Liu sent off Razorstella and Spring Brawler…
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*BOOM!*
[Loud…]
*BOOM!*
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<
<
<
[Too loud…]
*BOOM! BOOM!*
<
<>
[Too fucking loud!]
In the remains of a broken cell, as guardsmen and prisoners alike collided with one another, a strange skeletal warrior with a feminine silhouette was sitting in a fetal position, her back against the wall, banging her hands against the side of her skull out of pure frustration.
CLACK, CLACK, CLACK!
[Want to scream…]
This skeletal woman was the Paralust enhanced Skeleton Zako that had been sent on a failed scouting mission a mere two days ago, however her status as a zako began to change once she was captured.
[Get them quiet…]
When the main clan had initially captured her, they had attempted to use the normal methods of interrogation of torture and smooth talking. That all went to pot when they realized that she was mute and all of their torture tools kept breaking whenever they tried to use them on her.
[Make them hear me…]
However, something weird happened when the Zhen Clan attempted to use an anima wielder on her, not that they could notice such a change in the first place due to all happening on a plane of reality that was inaccessible to most mortals.
[But got no voice…]
On the Zhen Clan’s end, they had assumed that nothing productive had happened other than one of their resident anima wielders becoming horribly traumatized due to diving into the mind of something that clearly wasn’t mortal, essentially gazing into an abyss that gazed back.
In reality, that anima user had interfered with the normal process of development that all zakos go through, and had prematurely introduced the concept of [self] into it before they had time to even come around to the idea of being “her”.
[Need a voice…]
And now, to put it bluntly, she was absolutely miserable due to realizing how much she “lacked”.
The thing about zakos is that despite their humanoid shape and somewhat human-like behaviors, they’re unable to understand the concept of [self] to the point that even reality and their own senses reject them.
As beings born from [Chaos], they have no sense of individuality, no sense of structure and no sense of understanding.
They are quite literally chunks of [Chaos] loosely tethered to bodies like balloons attached to a bar via a spider’s thread.
This is why they seem to move in a weirdly wild ways, why their bodies seem to crumble into nothingness the moment they get defeated, why they needed explicit orders to do anything.
In essence, zakos have no souls or minds with a very loose attachment reality…but it doesn’t have to be like that on a permanent basis.
The longer a zako manages to hang around reality, the longer they manage to exist without getting defeated, the more the [Chaos] in them merges with their body.
At a certain point, this allows the kaijin lord to infuse the body with a [Core] and create a new kaijin, finally giving them the anchor they need to exist and finally [feel] something. This is a moment that should happen simultaneously, not one after the other.
But what had happened to her was that she had been forcefully made to develop a sense of [self] without being able to develop the full ability to [feel], so for all intents and purposes, her entire body felt “wrong” due to having nearly all of her senses except one being incredibly muted.
The one sense that she did have fully developed was the ability to hear, and the only thing she could hear right now was the sound of screams, explosions and destruction.
It’s not exactly pleasant having your one way to interact with the world being so horribly stressed out in such a manner.
*Boom!*
<
[…please let me…huh?]
As she continued to smack the side of her skull in an attempt to silence the world, a small stone rolled into her field of vision.
She didn’t know what this stone was, but something inside understood one thing.
This was what she was looking for.
[A…voice…]
Upon wobbly, stressed out legs, she proceeded to walk towards the stone.
With every step, the [Chaos] inside her began to stir.
[Need to…adjust…it.]
