Chapter 37 The Slient Architect
Chapter 37 The Slient Architect
The Elite in the city of Vashen who knew about the Shattered fields knew it was a dead zone that no positive soul could handle. What they didn’t know was that the shattered fields were hungry. It was a landscape of grey with pools of stagnant, oily essence that had long soured with time.
Jorren saw the space as a slow-acting poison.
After he consumed the essence from the soulwell, he didn’t see the need to go back to living with the Keeper. He planned to visit him from time to time as he progressed with his growth and ascension, but he was going to make his camp in the shattered fields. It not only kept him hidden, but was a physical attempt towards what he wanted to achieve.
He didn’t see the need to live anywhere else when the shattered field was literally his powerhouse.
He found refuge in a hollowed-out hull of a Pre-Evaluation atmospheric processor half-buried in a dune of grey ash. Though a deep cathedral of rusted iron and ed circuits, Jorren believed it was a habitation enough to hide his signature from the ridge-lined scouts.
When he arrived, he summoned the Codex from the ether for an integrity check. When the book appeared, it vibrated with a frequency that made the air around it ripple like a heat haze. He located the structural pillar of the processor and pressed his palm against it, his other hand holding the codex.
Instead of summoning power, Jorren opened the valves of his architecture and allowed the stagnant, grey essence of the shattered fields to rush into him. The experience felt like swallowing needles, but it not only strengthened him. The toxic energy went through the Codex, filtered, inverted, and released.
After a moment, he noticed something. The subtle air of dread around him that came from the shattered field was slowly lifting, letting the field of absolute neutrality take over the space. Within the sanctuary, his heartbeat stabilized, and the negative pivot here became a shield.
He stood in the center of the silence, his tactical intelligence mapping the perimeter until it detected the friction.
Something had gone wrong.
A discordant clatter of mechanical boots and a high-pitched whine of illegal Hollow salt harvesters. He spun to the entrance to see three figures before the jagged maw. Their silhouette were distorted by heavy, lead-lined resistors and scavenged Guild armor.
“Do you see the readout on this one?” a voice came through the comms unit. “The sensors are a flat lining. It’s a total blackout zone.”
“That’s impossible,” a woman’s voice echoed. “Even the dead zones in the city have a floor. If this were hitting an absolute zero, there had to be a concentrated source inside. Be sure, we are set for a life if this is a dormant core.”
The scavengers stepped into the sanctuary, their heavy harvesters humming with energy. When they saw Jorren, a pale figure standing in the midst of the rust, they saw a variable that could be sold.
“Identify yourself,” the leader of the trio leveled a rifle behind Jorren’s back. “You are sitting on a lot of illegal resonance. The silvered palm pays a heavy bounty for unregistered anchors.”
Jorren didn’t move. His tactical intelligence told him the kind of rifle pointed at him. Kinetic-pulsed weapon with a golden seal on the firing pin, the energy of a standard tier two security lock.
“If you pull that trigger,” Jorren started, “the energy would have nowhere to go. You’ll be standing in the center of an explosion because this room is a vacuum.
“He’s bluffing,” the woman said. “Look, he’s tier zero. He can’t do anything.”
“I am the reason the air is still,” Jorren said quietly. “And I’m the reason you’re still breathing.”
“No way,” the third man in their midst argued. “Let’s get this over—”
The man didn’t finish that statement. He never did.
Jorren sent the Codex back into the ether, causing the air around him to intensify and pulling air from the scavengers’ lungs. Their harvesters began to shriek violently as the Negative resonance from Jorren stripped the machines of their internal seals.
The leader clutched his neck, dropping his rifle in a noisy clatter. The woman fell to her knees, the slag hook she held dissolving into black nothingness.
“I could leave you here,” Jorren said, taking a step towards them. “The Spire would find your bodies in a month, and they would term your deaths as a neutral failure of the dead zone. But I have a use for you.”
He reached out and touched the leader’s shoulder, the woman’s harvester pack, and the forehead of the third guy. A jolt of silver-black energy rippled through their equipment. It didn’t break their machines. It hollowed them. Any spire sensor located in Vashen wouldn’t be able to detect them anymore. They were now an environmental noise.
“I’ve marked your gear,” Jorren said. “You can move through the checkpoints and the guild won’t see you, and the seekers won’t be able to detect you.”
“Why are you doing this?” the leader looked up, his voice ragged.
“You will return to the tier three markets,” Jorren said. “And you will be my eyes and ears. You will tell me every time the Guilds move a shipment of void slag, every time a new Seeker is deployed, and every time Sel Voras mentions the name Thale.”
None of the three scavengers spoke.
Jorren stepped back into the shadows of the processor, continuing. “You’re no longer scavengers. You’re now the silence that precedes me. You can leave now.”
The three figures didn’t wait for another invitation. They moved fast, scrambling out of the sanctuary into the waste, their gear now pulsing with a hollow frequency.
Jorren turned back to the pillar and lifted the codex in his non-dominant hand. It flipped open of its own accord to a new page, characters appearing in the pages before rearranging to form English words.
Observation Recorded: The system is beginning to lose its sight. Network integrity: 5%.