Chapter 17-440: Deep and Dark Knowledge (1/2)

The edge of the Rift came up, and she went right over it without stopping.

Visibility wasn’t great, as there was a lot of junk floating in the water. She noted that she had to be careful of where she swam, as many of the things floating there were put there deliberately, and if she got too close, they would bob in her wake and literally point in her direction like an arrow if they lit up in reaction.

Clever, clever. Snuffing them would remove them from their very simple psi-net and do the same thing. However, a being of elemental water of this world, not subject to needing magic to stay here, flowed through the web without any difficulty.

How would the Waterspears have penetrated this? She considered that they’d probably just drain down parts of the net and de-power them without alerting anything. The area would remain intact but quiet as the simple minds of the floating things interpreted no news as good news, without the shock that would come with death.

Something was definitely down here...

She poured herself down the slope patiently, spiraling on her course, suppressing her wake to barely nothing with her water control until she passed twenty thousand feet down, and things started to come out of the haze below.

Pillars and buildings made for aquatic forms, entries that were doors and tunnels combined, sculpted from the basalt rock for purposes she was sure had to do with the defenses here, and probably more things she didn’t know about.

She paused as the waves of illusion hit her and tried to readjust what she was seeing to empty stone and waters. Consuming Fey and the hu hsaio had made her extremely sensitive to illusion and charm magic, especially after she ate enough of the latter to promote herself to Nine Tails. Devils were also pretty hard to fool with illusions, although still vulnerable to direct mental versions of the same.

Still, this was awfully powerful, and despite herself, she had to thank Traveler again for showing her the power of the Sun Saves.

She couldn’t equal her liege’s frankly terrifying ability to Concentrate, but as Traveler herself had said, she didn’t need to be that good, she needed to be Good Enough.

She’d put more Karma into learning the Sun Saves, consolidating her Martial Traditions, and taking the Concentration and Meditation Masteries than anything else except refining those creatures she’d Consumed for their Racial Levels.

+46 was definitely Good Enough for anything below the Shroud itself!

The number on this effect seemed to be about a 30, if the tests Traveler had set up were accurate. That was an extremely dangerous and powerful effect, which no normal mortal would be able to overcome. They’d just see an empty rift on the sea floor, and those down here could decide whether to leave them to report nothing, or surround them and annihilate them easily.

Very nasty, and since it worked at the mental level, replacing what was seen with the eyes, instead of painting over reality, something like True Sight wouldn’t see through it, and Detect Illusion would only indicate something was at work, not look past it.

Under her hyperfocused state of awareness, she saw the threads of magic trying to insinuate themselves into her mind, and broke through them with some contempt. The wavering cyclopean tower she could see in the distance below, which had been wavering and trying to vanish, solidified once again.

She continued her descent, Refocusing and ready to blow another Sun Save at any moment, certain that this would be a layered defense.

She saw the muuk before the Will-based Aversion effect swept past her, creating a wave of loathing and unsettling fear in her that wanted to make her turn aside. She would simply create excuses as to what she’d seen, and the spell even helped dredge up creatures from her memories to fill in for what was really here.

Hyperanalysis of what it was doing via the Moment of Perfect Clarity disassembled the illusion and rendered it useless.

Muuks were fish-men, like the sahaug, but they had more resemblance to groupers then sharks, and had wider fins, bigger jaws and throats, and squatter, more muscular builds than the shark-men, along with a wide, short tail to help movement in water.

Supposedly, they were mutated from any sapient species that their makers, the lethomorg, ran into, and could even mate with their parent species to make more like them.

Muuks meant lethomorg. It was a dread whisper among undersea creatures.

They were old, old Aberrant creatures, with more in common with worms and slugs then terrestrial life. They reproduced by fission, the elders splitting off parts of themselves into new individuals armed with all the memories, if not the karmic power, of the old.

Reputedly, like many Aberrant creatures, they could acquire the memories of the creatures they ate, giving them extremely good insight into the various species around them. They easily learned how to manipulate them, deal with them, enslave them, and utterly dominate if not destroy them.

They were very, very bad news. Traveler would be so thrilled to find this out. They could assimilate creatures with Class Levels, and apply their own Karma to learn and adapt to the skills to their own selves. On top of that, if an elder learned such things, any of its spawn could do the same thereafter.

They had no maximum age, just growing and splitting when they reached certain knowledge thresholds, growing bigger and fatter to hold all the memories stolen and inherited.

Consuming a muuk would probably drive her mad and slave her to the lethomorg, so she definitely wasn’t going to do that.

The Astral Ward kept her below their psychic radar, and she dove ever further down, painting every fold in the walls Pshaped by inhuman limbs over eons, letting the waves of psychic chatter flow around or through her uninhibited, and saw the numbers of the muuk and their masters increase as more huge and alien buildings congealed out of the murk around them.