Born a Monster

286 186 – Void

System Type: Introspection

There are those who call void the extra element. Depending upon your philosophy, it is either the utter lack of all elements, or the perfect union of all of them.

To my philosophy, it was totally mind-numbingly boring.

I wasn’t conscious; I wasn’t unconscious. I just ... wasn’t... for a while.

I couldn’t feel a physical or even a dream body. I didn’t have eyes to rub or even eyelids to blink.

I wasn’t breathing, and had no heartbeat. Yet somehow I didn’t seem to be dead, either.

And there was nothing for my psychic or mystic senses, either. Well, as long as I was here...

It was like natural meditation; forming the spirals to refine mana were easy. Ugh, when had I last cleaned out my aura? Well, I wasn’t getting it PURE anytime soon, but I began clearing off the “dingy” spots, where magical energies had gotten where they weren’t supposed to.

Cripes, had I been using magic in this state? It was a miracle magic hadn’t just taken my body, either whole or in part. You hear rumors like that, so-and-so immolated in green flames, or turned their skeleton into water, or some such.

.....

Which would be worse, dying suddenly, or surviving having no bones?

Oh, my. The STATE of my poor skull... It showed that I’d taken multiple concussions. I filled in the worst of the bone-scars with calcium, smoothed ridges in my limbs, my ribs. My body still WORKED just fine, but... it seemed like my System should have warned me that things were getting this bad.

A ripple of anger flared through me, through my... anger-weapon. I needed a name of some kind for it. It just didn’t obey physical laws, or even keep a consistent form. I could envision it as a wing membrane, as a hand of hatred, even as the jaws of wrath.

Stupid System! Why was it always BREAKING on me? If I wasn’t supposed to be using it the way I was, why wouldn’t it just SAY something? I mean, I didn’t even use it as heavily as some other people were.

Or... was I?

I had some number of hundreds of unspent points when I had started this. Those came literally from dozens of cultivation methods. Gods, what were my siblings becoming, without my divisor to hinder them? Even WITH mine, I’d become a competent... well, survivor if not an actual warrior.

My rate of progress for being three... Oh.

I guess I had been pushing my System hard. But still, I couldn’t point to just one thing that I’d ever done that others hadn’t done with their Systems. Maybe it was the RATE of the changes? But that didn’t make sense, not with my divisor in place.

Maybe the anemic interface and flaky performance was due to generations of Titanspawn doing what I had?

But, when I looked through my memories of Vashathan, he seemed... more focused? Less versatile?

I flicked a flake of emotional/spiritual crud off into the darkness. It slid away, not affected by any manner of gravity or leyline... just fading into the nothingness.

How WOULD I fight Vashathan when that time came? I know people expect me to be weak, and complain when I’m not. Against Vashathan, I was.

Or rather, I thought I was. He had been bound with shackles and chains of steel, so his Might should be less than eight.

Eihtfuhr had once told me his Might was eight. Would steel have been enough to contain him?

No, there had to be a technique to it; Xinyi Shi had broken steel bear and wolf traps. As a human, his Might should have been capped at 5, his Strength at 6, his skills at 7, and his sub-skills at 8. But, hadn’t he been dishing out level seven base damage?

Some manner of ability, then, or perhaps multiple abilities stacking their effects.

I actually tried to open a System List to remind myself to look into it when my System was back up. My memory wasn’t non-existent; I could probably remember that until my System came back up.

Hey, would my anti-possession abilities help me resist Kumanchu’s mind control curse?

I really didn’t want to find out. Honestly, I’d spend development points on his whim, and thought it reasonable and right. I really feared him, with a cold embracing fear.

I hated him with a fiery passion. I wasn’t much for vengeance, but to reach into another being and change how they thought...

He had just knocked me over and claimed me. I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t been able to resist him...

But the twins, whatever their names were, had been pressing me hard at the time. I had been distracted.

Things HAD to be better if I healed to my full capacity... didn’t they?

No, really, didn’t they?

I couldn’t keep a sword; I couldn’t keep a shield. In most cases, when pressed I couldn’t even stay conscious.

There. I grasped it. It was DESPAIR, and it was mine. More like a cloud or an unbound bale of wool than a weapon. It was swollen because of some Inferiority something or other, that my System had identified as a complex.

What I knew about complexes was they were like self-reinforcing cycles of thought. Like wooden hoops that children twirled at the ends of sticks. They went round and round, like a wheel would, but they didn’t actually go anywhere.

Hey, could I even exercise in this state?

I didn’t have limbs, which implied a strong NO. Besides, with my bones healing, now probably wasn’t the best time to...

I looked at my skull again. The skull I didn’t have.

The skull I couldn’t FEEL that I had.

But I could SEE it clearly, when I wanted to. From any angle, from inside or out.

Okay, there was a spot near my right nostril, right about THERE. Well before the pits that most snakes had on the sides of their noses... I really ought to pay the biomass to evolve those...

But there was ONE SPOT, where the rivulets from multiple pores merged, soaked the entire skin-side of one of my scales, and just always ITCHED.

And so, there it WAS. Kind of odd, since there was less than a thumb-joint of space around it that was real. The rest was white bone against the blackness of nothing.

And I didn’t care, because now I felt something. That one spot itched.

I almost always scratched it, just on reflex. I knew which finger on my right hand I needed.

The hand remained invisible, untouchable. But that finger. I’d broken it HOW many times, now? I could envision the bone, twisted and...

Hmm. Not that bad. Not GOOD, but not as bad as I expected. I flooded calcium, smoothed some ridges, and worked my way slowly out to the fingertip and the conical curve claw.

It was in sad shape; when was the last time I’d properly sharpened my claws?

No, no, focus. Along the finger, there were muscles. Muscles which, when moved, could straighten the finger.

Okay, I could manipulate that finger. Oh, the muscles faded into nothing when I didn’t focus on them.

Which I wasn’t. I could see my skull from my finger, my finger from that itchy spot.

They were close; they were worlds apart.

I knew how to do this; I just hadn’t needed to think of it in this precise method before.

Somewhere. Somewhere there was an elbow, a shoulder.

Dang it. It was like reaching out and trying to manipulate someone else’s limbs. But the itch, the NEED to scratch it eclipsing my memories of hunger...

Like pushing a boulder uphill, my elbow bent, my wrist and shoulder rotated.

With the precision I should have expected, I jabbed that finger right into the edge of my chin, where my lower jaw bone contained...

When was the last time I brushed my teeth? They weren’t rotted, but still...

I backed off, brought the finger slowly around. The closer it came, the more it felt like I was pushing through an increasing resistance.

Then, the tip of the claw (Should I swap those out for talons?), the tip of the claw was in the coin-sized area surrounding the itch. I brought that tip down, slid it across scales, pushed down THERE...

And I was, again, in the light. The exhaustion hit me with the force of a flipped cargo cart.

I didn’t care. Letting each of my fingers have a turn, I scratched that itch like it was my purpose in life.

Someone had rolled me onto my left side, left me curled in a fetal position on the stone floor. I stretched out, struck the lightning line of the Five Fundamental Forces pentagram inscribed around me.

My vision was tinged with blackness, but I refused to pass out. Not again.

NO. I JUST GOT BACK HERE, AND I REFUSE.

It took many, many breaths to suppress the pain enough to open my eyes. Finding enough room to sit up, I did so.

“Gentle gods DAMN IT!” came a Daurian male’s voice.

“What is the cause of this ruckus?” came an old woman’s voice.

“He’s awake. We can’t sacrifice him.”

“I’m sorry, WHAT?” I asked.

People expect kobolds, about the size of goblins, to be equally weak and clumsy. While not the equal of a champion (until they got some levels of their own), the fact that kobolds had second level evolutions made them little dynamos of deadly competence.

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