Chapter 503 No Directive To Stop

Total motor control transferred at 11:04:16.0082. Elric’s consciousness was placed in the darkness. He sleeps for now.

The framework was not viable for survival or combat. What remained of it: the parietal and occipital plates of the skull, partially dissolved. Four cervical vertebrae. Approximately nine percent of the brain mass, suspended in channel-lattice rather than in tissue. No thoracic cavity, no limbs, no heart.

Cor Telluris was shattered, its core fragments held in suspension by the channels, and all 10,008 channels were intact. Not one had failed.

This finding would change the plan. Elric had spent time making every channel supreme instead of sufficient, against my own recommendation, and I had recorded that decision as inefficient... I now revise that record.

Anima Depth was shattered and still reforming, but without a suitable vessel there was no anchor for it to build upon. The soul was shredded, its fragments distributed through the channel network, held in place by Mortal Shell at a load I estimated it could sustain for eleven minutes.

Available working time, therefore: eleven minutes... I needed somewhere between four and five hours.

∞

The external problem took priority, because there was no point reconstructing a framework that was about to be inside a Class Six Transcendental entity’s body.

Assessment of this threat showed that the seals had failed when the soul fragmented. Her rate of ascension was accelerating. Estimated time to full materialisation was fourteen minutes.

I could not restore the seals. The seals were Achon work, administered through a Warden, and I had no access to the sphere of influence that an Achon holds.

The solution was to use the connection Elric had created with the Caelith. I took every control he held and made what changes the permissions allowed. With the Jade Oracle silent on the matter of Warden authority, I could push those permissions beyond what a Provisional Warden should be able to reach.

I reached through the Warden link into the Caelith, then I took the excess of the Celestial essence still pouring into this framework. The loss was material and I accepted it. The ascension of the Pale Matron had to be slowed by any means.

I routed a portion of the essence out of the channels, through the Warden link, into the Caelith, and used the pyramid as a lens.

A second later Caelith Mourne trembled, and from its tip that was buried in the earth the blue glow shot out for four hundred and twelve miles in every direction.

The ground went white. Then the white went down and closed over the spatial passage the broken seals had opened. I was using the nature of the Caelith itself as a barrier against the Pale Matron, since it had been built primarily to contain Transcendental demons of her kind.

I prompted the system for an assessment of the patch, and it answered.

[Temporary Containment Established]

[Projected duration: 00:51:08.1120]

Less time than I desired, but I could work with this.

I took the load on Mortal Shell again. With the strain of her ascension removed, eleven minutes had become thirty-nine. It was not four hours. It would have to serve.

I returned my full allocation to the framework.

∞

I could not rebuild the body under these conditions. Primary focus should be on the shell.

The examination confirmed that Cor Telluris could not be repaired. The core was a shell of the ancient geometry, discontinued for corruption-susceptibility, and I had selected it for one property, that it melds with the host rather than transforming them.

When I was activated, Elric Voss was insignificant, and insignificant things fold into primitive shells without rejection. That property was now the problem, as what Elric had built could no longer be seen as mere foundation.

The shell had become more than it was meant to be. What it melded into had since acquired ten thousand supreme channels, a skeleton that functions as an organ, a twice-crystallised soul, a Soul-Vessel configuration the Architects never built, four Mythic Titles with two of them equiooed, multiple completed Laws, and an increased control over the mechanism of the loop.

There is no shell in my reference matrix that this foundation would not insult.

I checked all of them, including the forbidden shells, and every one of them assumed a substrate this framework did not have. I could see no path forward with any shell that was available to me. I would have to build upon what Elric had created.

I reached for the Stone Oracle, and it was still unreachable. Constructing a shell lay outside my frame of authority, but there was no Stone Oracle to hold me back. I have not yet been judged for the creation I placed inside Elric Voss. That judgement was to come once every demon was dead.

The demons are not yet dead. The Oracle is not answering.

There was no directive to stop.

∞

The one material I held in excess was Celestial essence whose grade had reached Transcendence. The appetite of the boy knows no bounds, it would seem.

I used the essence, and it was the finest material I have ever had access to. The first shell was condensed out of a crystal pulled from a demon’s skull, a cube core off a dissipated shadow construct, and half a Narghul Sorcerer’s flame essence, most of which was spent purging Abyssal corruption from the rest.

To build a new framework I took one of the Active Law Shards and sketched the idea of Elric’s new body inside the storm of Celestial essence that surrounded him. An Active Law Shard was a supreme resource, and I had expected him to gain one when he opened the Seventh Earth Gate and became a Celestial. Acquiring two at this point was unexpected.

The rough framework of the body floated in the midst of the storm. I kept it close to Elric’s shape and refined every imperfection in his form, and then I began to layer his channels into it, and instead of making the core of his channels his heart, I rooted it in the bones.

The heart was where the old shell sat because that was Elric’s strongest organ at that point in time. It was no longer suitable. His bones were the better choice, and this error was being corrected.

I built it into the skeleton, distributed, every long bone and the flat bones of the pelvis and the deep core of the spine, with the Celestial Marrow as the medium and the crystalline channels inside the bone as the lattice.

Since I was working with a flexible framework that was neither flesh nor energy, I had the opportunity to ensure that every implant I made was perfect.

The entirety of the channels locked into place, following the enhanced framework I had made, and a second later the remnants of Elric’s skull and brain vanished... There was nothing left of his previous flesh.

It took twenty-six minutes, true perfection would take a lifetime.

[Reforged Shell — ████████]

[Geometry: unrecorded]

[Classification: #Error#]

[#Error#]

[Status: Seated — Dormant]

The System could not name it. I cannot name it either. I drew inspiration from every shell I knew to create a framework that could contain Celestial essence before Transcendence. If this shell is to have a name, Elric will have to create it.

I had fifteen Unattuned Law Fragments and one Active Law Shard left to work with.

Now it was time to fully recreate the body.