Depthless Hunger

Chapter 184: Beyond the Limits of the World

If they were really going to be interrogating Omilaena, they needed to do it securely. While Kai checked for any traps or other preparations, Zae Zin Nim searched her thoroughly. While his back was turned, he heard Omilaena gasp theatrically.

"You're taking such liberties!" Omilaena said with mock indignity. "Here I thought I could trust a fellow woman, but you're taking advantage of me!"

"Shut up," Zae Zin Nim said conversationally. "Are these all the needles you're carrying?"

"There are some more strapped to my thigh. Nope, inner thigh. Mmm, higher."

Kai decided to keep his back turned.

It looked as though the room was part vault and part laboratory. Some pieces of it reminded him of Juray's work table while others were completely unfamiliar. Glass containers everywhere, ranging from jars to elaborate curving tubes. Bandages and other medical supplies. Pages of notes on the tables, all written in a language he couldn't read.

He also found a pair of the blue goggles that Omilaena had worn at various points. They glistened in his spiritual sight, as if they held some power, but he couldn't quite figure it out. His experience with Rosemount had been limited, but it seemed like its inhabitants, and Omilaena in particular, could apply their power to more varied devices.

Maybe there would be some overlap with the Irunians, if he could ever get them to talk. Too bad Tusquo was on the opposite side of the continent.

"I think that's everything," Zae Zin Nim said. "Can you deal with the wound?"

"Sure." Kai turned back and saw that she had confiscated a number of weapons, including poison needles, a slender knife, and a syringe. Less than he'd expected, and not exactly the same syringe he remembered from before. An upgrade, or a trick?

In any case, he needed to bandage Omilaena's thigh where his jet of acid had gone through it. Most people might have been torn apart, but given her D-rank Physique it only left an ugly hole. She seemed to have resisted the acid as well, though that seemed to be something different. Her blood looked more bluish than he expected.

Kai used the bandages from the table to take care of the injury. Omilaena let him finish most of his work, then gave an exaggerated moan. "Ooh, don't stop."

"Can you not?" he asked.

"Come on, turnabout is fair play. Now that you've finally taken control, don't you want to have your way with me? You can both join in, I don't care."

He finished his work and pulled back. "No thanks."

"Yeah, that's probably smart. Poison vagina."

"Wait, what?"

"What?" Omilaena smiled back like she hadn't said anything.

"Enough nonsense." Zae Zin Nim stepped up beside him and glared down at the other woman. "You said you only cared about strength and talked a big game about working together. If you can't show some of that, we should just kill you and stop wasting our time."

Omilaena sighed and dropped the playful act. She made a gesture for help, so Kai eased her into the nearest chair. Once she sat down, she shifted to take weight off her injured thigh and then spoke in a lower voice.

"You both know something about the threat of overwhelming power. Kai, you've seen more powerful fighters show up time and time again. Girl who is definitely lying about her name, I think your life has been dominated by it." She raised her head to look them in the eyes. "I think that all of us are at risk. There are people out there who are as far above Cloudspire as it is above Deadwaste. We live in the shadow of the very real possibility that one of them could show up and end everything we know."

"I told you about what I saw at the Frontier," Kai said. "We're open to believing that."

"Ah, but people who stand at the top of societies aren't so happy to hear it. Rejecting the conventional paths can be isolating, and if you push hard enough, it starts to turn you into a pariah. And, as interesting as your experience was, I have believed in this for much longer."

"Why?" Zae Zin Nim asked.

"It goes back almost to my childhood - no, that's not a joke. When I was a young woman, I saw a ship fall from the sky. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before." Omilaena's eyes became unfocused and for the first time Kai wondered if she was truly unguarded. "I can't describe the mind-boggling level of technology. But the man at the helm was even worse. He was half-dead, entire limbs gone, and he was still overwhelming. There's no point explaining the local situation, because he killed all his attackers. I'm not sure they even got him in the end, he might have bled out on his own."

"So you think that there are more people like that out there?"

"I'm sure of it, and it's worse than that. I crept into the wreckage of the ship, hoping to find some power that could help me get ahead in life. Well, I found knowledge instead, and that was worse. Kai, would you be so kind as to go over to that table? You should find a number of papers..."

He went to find the ones she indicated, shuffling aside the simple notes until he found a few diagrams that immediately jumped out to him. One looked like a drawing of the human body, except with strange lines drawn on it. Another was a sketch of a strange tangle of rings that meant nothing to him.

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"Yes, those." Omilaena nodded with her head to the first. "What do those look like to you?"

"They're meridians." Zae Zin Nim hesitated, then frowned. "Except they aren't quite..."

"They're different from any I've ever seen. The rest of the book was incomprehensible to me, just symbols I never figured out. But the drawings of bodies... they seemed to imply things that shouldn't be possible."

"Why assume they're human?" Kai asked. "This could just apply to whatever type of being builds those ships."

"I don't have the drawings here, but there were others, including different species I'd never seen before. No, it seemed like they truly had knowledge that we didn't." Omilaena was silent for a time, then nodded to him. "Now there should have been a drawing... yes, that. The real thing was destroyed when the ship exploded and I only copied it down. In the ship, each point where the rings connected was a glowing sphere of power.

"You see how there are seven points? I could immediately tell that each one represented something different. One of them felt like chakra. In retrospect, I think two of the others were qi and mana... but none of them were quite right. I theorize that two of them related to Physique and Soul. And there were two others I couldn't name and still can't explain."

"So it's some sort of map of power?" Kai looked over the drawing, trying to derive any meaning from it. "Like they're all connected, and this object is using them together, or saying something about how they're connected."

"That's exactly what I thought, and I'm afraid that I haven't found a true answer." Omilaena slumped back into her chair. "But the further I travel, the more I'm convinced that the 'pure' paths we know are wrong. There's greater power to be found in fusion and synergy, and there are people out there holding that power. I have to find out what all this means."

Her words left him with a strange sense of unease. Ever since the Frontier, he'd known that there were impossibly powerful people in the world and that some of them had abilities he couldn't understand. Yet the god-like beings he saw then hadn't all been using multiple powers, they had specialized. No wonder Omilaena had been so interested in the specific details he remembered.

"Do you understand now?" she asked them. "I can't just aim for the top of the world, the top of the world is too low. For years I thought I might be misguided, then I felt that power and knew that I'd been right. We're all one cosmic coincidence away from being swept aside like flecks of dust."

Kai wasn't sure what to say to a speech like that. Before he could pull his thoughts together, Zae Zin Nim spoke up quietly. "That's why you wanted samples from me. More of your synergy."

"I can't rely on another ship to crash and give me answers, can I? Fate already gave me one lucky break and I'm probably not getting another. The powers and systems everyone knows are just toys. I want the real thing."

It might have seemed insane if not for what he'd seen. Accepting that, however, didn't allow him to truly understand her. He could try to comprehend how that fear of an overwhelming foe might have driven her, but he wasn't sure he saw how it looked to her. Could all her actions have been driven by that nihilistic impulse?

Having said her piece, Omilaena sagged back in her chair. For a moment she looked human, not the dreaded Maneater of New Laeneria. He couldn't be certain that this was true either. Even though it was compatible with what she'd said and done, he wouldn't put it past her to be manipulating them in some far longer game, or even just led by a highly intelligent madness.

"It makes sense." He was so startled to hear Zae Zin Nim's tone that he swiveled toward her. She stood with her eyes drifting over the ceiling, not really seeing anything. "The Insanities."

"The Insanities," Omilaena agreed. "Isn't this interpretation a more coherent world?"

"I'm not sure. It would be nicer to think the world simply contained wonders that can't be explained."

Kai glanced back and forth between them. "This makes absolutely no sense to me. Is this another one of those things that everybody else knows but don't exist on Deadwaste?"

"If I'm right," Omilaena said with a bitter smile, "we're all Deadwaste. But yes, you'd have no way of hearing about them. Basically, the Insanities are a small group of phenomena that can't be explained by any known power. Not simply mysterious, not without full explanations, utterly impossible. Some call them the Eight Insanities, others give different numbers, but the endpoint is the same."

"I've seen a lot of crazy things. You're going to have to give me a better idea than that."

"One is called the Slumbering Colossus. It's sleeping on a mountain in Rosemount and, as far as anyone can tell, it's completely invulnerable. Fire, chakra, qi, poison injected into its mouth... none of it has any effect. Nations have gathered all their strongest and not put a scratch on it. All the attempts are idiotic, in my opinion, because if anyone did manage to wake it up, how would we stop it?"

"Damn." It was just a few sentences, but now Kai was imagining the mountain-sized monster. "How do we know it's actually alive?"

"It has been breathing slowly for centuries, and its heart beats once per day. Before you ask, spiritual sight can't determine anything about it, which is true of almost all the Insanities. People theorize that it's a monster, not a dragon or an intelligent being, but I don't know what they're basing that conclusion on."

"They aren't all like that," Zae Zin Nim said. "One of the greatest sects on Cloudspire possesses something called the Impossible Elixir. A single drop of it makes someone immortal, and not just any kind of immortality: eternal youth with perfect health. Of course, it's so valuable it hasn't been used in centuries. They claim that a great alchemist in their past created it, but it's so far beyond anything anyone has ever accomplished..."

"And there are eight of these?" Kai asked. "Or around that, anyway?"

"Some are historical." Omilaena leaned forward, warming to the subject. "Did you know there used to be a fourth continent? A disease called the Whispering Death arrived one day and killed everyone. Now, plague is common enough, but this was unstoppable. Immortals, cultivators, monks with perfect health, monsters... everything died. A thousand years later, we still call the continent Lostwreck and everyone refuses to go near its shores."

"What happens if two meet? Say... an immortal made by the Impossible Elixir and the Whispering Death?"

The two women looked at one another, and at least this time it didn't seem like he was asking a remedial question. Zae Zin Nim shook her head slowly. "I wasn't sure if Lostwreck was actually real before now. There are always rumors of some other continent."

Omilaena responded more enthusiastically. "It's never been tested. None of the Insanities is a weapon, and any that are controlled are far too valuable to risk."

"Got it." Kai knuckled his eyes as his view of the world changed again. "So the battle on the Frontier... that's in the Insanity category too, right?"

"It is as far as I'm concerned, but that's not the important part." Omilaena looked between them carefully. "I don't believe these are singular, inexplicable phenomena. They're hints of the truly great powers, the ones you saw fight. Compared to that stage, nothing we do matters. Not at all."

Kai didn't agree, in theory or in practice. Even if there were far greater powers out there, he still needed to do what he could to help the people in front of him. There were things he needed to do, from catching up with Zae Zin Nim to interrogating Omilaena to waging a war for Krysal. Soon enough he'd get to work on all of them.

But for now, in the silence of the dying conversation, he spent a while just feeling very small.