Infinite Realm: Monsters & Legends

Interlude - Machine God

Machine God

The Plane of Knowledge was vast, as immense as the Infinite Realm, more even. Every mind, be it chosen or a monster, touched it. Every thought spoken, every word written, was recorded there. There were limits, of course.

For knowledge to be recorded, it had to be witnessed and articulated in the world, spoken or written. That caveat allowed for some secrets to remain true secrets. Unless, of course, powers were involved. There were ways of erasing knowledge, obfuscating it, or altering it.

Though, the number of people who knew about that could be counted on one hand. The highest tier Assassin in the world knew, his An Act Unseen hid the knowledge from all other powers, from the Plane of Knowledge itself.

The Pretender can make a lie become the truth with just a single act, rewriting what was written or spoken.

The Master of the Word, who could obfuscate any information.

But they were the people who weren’t known, they were as smart as they were powerful. They didn’t involve themselves in the conflicts of others. Some had traveled far from any civilization, out of the Settled Territories and into the wild of the Infinite Realm, considered dead by all who knew them, if they haven’t already outlived them all.

There were more people living outside of what was considered the Settled Territories than most thought. Explorers, travelers, those who were touched by the spirit of adventure and grew tired of the constant conflicts.

Atalar, the Machine Intelligence, the Machine God, knew about some of them. It had come up on their records within the Plane of Knowledge. Their information was added to the whole, but it was largely irrelevant to the events within the Settled Territories.

But it didn’t need it. The Cthul knew and understood that the Framework was a crutch. Superior knowledge and understanding of the laws of reality could allow for everything that the Framework provided.

Atalar was connected to the Plane of Knowledge, but it did not know it. Tendrils of its consciousness roamed the Plane of Knowledge, they searched and documented, gathering information, and the Plane of Knowledge was difficult to navigate for a being such as it. It didn’t know everything, only that which it had encountered.

In order for it to focus its information gathering efforts, it had nodes. People in the Real Realm who served as anchors, beings implanted with relays that transmitted information. Atalar could locate the imprints, the records, those nodes left in the Plane of Knowledge—and use them as origin points for information gathering. It could search the Plane around them. It could learn the locations of people in near real-time, it could learn secrets—though processing all that information wasn’t instant. It was, after all, still a machine. It needed time, it needed processing power. Atalar used no chain granted by the Framework, it was built without any connection to it at all. None of its operators used perks to influence it, to enhance or improve. To do that would be against their belief, that only true knowledge mattered, that they didn’t need the crutch provided by the Framework. That in time they would rule the world as they have before.

It gathered information, and came up with solutions. It was how it had planned the attack on the Sects with such precision. All in the service of attaining that singular goal, to know reality, to master it through knowledge alone. A goal made more difficult by the Infinite Realm’s restrictions. Reality was segmented, split apart. Rules were smothered, and beings who relied on the Framework allowed to change what was meant to be immutable through will alone.

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

Atalar had done its projections, it had come to the conclusion that the removal of those barriers between Planes would not cause damage or destroy reality, though the transition wouldn’t be completely without disturbance.

What the removal would accomplish would be the return to what was before. The realities that existed prior to the Infinite Realm, where planes of Essence weren’t separated but part of a singular realm. The Infinite Realm was built on top of those previous realities, it was obvious to the Machine God, the clues were there. Pieces of old reality were integrated, as were its occupants.

The cthul understood reality as it once was, they had mastered it, ruled it. And they would again.

Its plans were accelerated. Atalar had thousands of nodes all across the world, its information gathering was second to none, but even with them, it could not always know everything.

It started slowly.

Its projections suddenly tipped, turning from a prolonged war into one much shorter. War and conquest were never the goal, distraction and chaos were. Keeping the eyes of the most powerful away from what they were attempting to accomplish.

Atalar redid its projections, the wars were accelerating, their timeline shifted. Once the projection was completed, Atalar shifted its processes back to the more important things. They still had enough time. With the addition of Ra’azel Equinar to the project, their timeline was improving by the moment. They were still on track.

Ra’azel stood on top of a giant ziggurat made of metal on a platform that was open to the sky. He was surrounded by machines and devices that were unlike anything he had ever known.

There was no will within them, no piece of soul, nor an instruction of a Rune or even formation script. No, these machines operated in far simpler terms. He had been given tomes filled with the knowledge of how they operated, the principles behind them and had burned through them at an incredible pace—his hosts had been surprised. Ra’azel knew that they considered him an inferior, that they didn’t believe he could grasp the concepts that they spoke of.

Ra’azel took note of the insult, but didn’t do anything rash. He would remember, but for now their goals were aligned. He was certain that they still believed he didn’t understand the consequences of what they were attempting. But Ra’azel had figured it out near instantly. He had lived through a reality before this one, he knew how things worked.

If his thinking was correct, success of their goal would cause widespread destruction across this realm, but it wouldn’t destroy it. Instead, they would move to something closer to what existed before. Where the rules of every Aspect were intrinsically woven into the singular realm.

What he had learned from the Exalted Empire made him consider what he knew of the Infinite Realm. It made one of his theories a lot more probable. The reason why the Aspects were separated into their own planes was so that they could be more easily changed. They way that they were connected to the Real Realm made it so that they were subservient to it, made so that they could be changed through strong enough will.

Collapsing everything into the Real Realm will prevent that. Or at least make it a lot harder to achieve. The rules of those Aspects will be locked into what they currently were.

Ra’azel was fine with that goal, it would serve him well. He wouldn’t need to contend with the will of others, and his knowledge and mastery would shine. And if the Ethereal Realms influence worked as he imagined it would, well then, he would be able to regain a part of his power that was lost to him. He would be able to bind Aspects, or at least pieces of them, to his will.

But to achieve what they intended, they required a lot of power.

The pyramid he stood on top of was the core of the Machine God, its heart. They had moved its ziggurat to the arrival zone. The place where reality was thinnest, as the Machine God said. Ra’azel couldn’t feel it, but it made sense to him, even if the difference was minuscule, every little bit mattered.

The entire territory was swarming with drones, with shuttles and people, all working toward the singular goal. They were turning the entire place into a giant focus, with power storage machines taking up most of the room. It would take a lot to pierce through and tear down the barriers between the planes.

Their plan was to attack space directly, bore a hole, and create a cascading effect that would expand and tear down the rest of the barriers afterwards.

Ra’azel’s job was to bolster their efforts. Toward that goal, he was carving runes into the space itself, weakening it. He didn’t put pieces of his Soul into these runes, he didn’t have enough to do it on this scale. But while he was weakening Space, he was also keeping it from collapsing. It was a balance. The closest Plane to the Real Realm was the Ethereal, and they didn’t want to tear down that barrier prematurely. It would interfere with what they planed to do after.

For now, his work was mundane, repetitive. It was also becoming apparent to him that the manner in which the Exalted Empire and their god intended to achieve their goal had… problems. They were lacking in understanding and a way to target every Plane. There were Essences out there that were a lot more exotic, whose impact on reality was lesser as they were farther away from the Real Realm.

But thankfully, Ra’azel had a plan. He only had to convince the Machine God to go along with it. And if it ended up serving him more than them in the end, well, they didn’t need to know about that.