Chapter 333: Leviathan-7 (2/2)
I set myself down from the center of a mountain formed around these craters. Giant slabs of rock bellowed out together, the eruptive clashes nearby forcing the rock higher up. Sitting there, I shifted my mana into a primordial state. The bloodlust of ascendant energy faded, and the precision and perfectionism of primordial mana engulfed me. I let out a long sigh and pinched the brow of my nose.
This simply wouldn't work.
Establishing control of this planet required strategy and finesse. I stared upwards, trying to find some map of the stars using my enhanced vision. Leviathan covered most of the sky, being bright and dark at the same time. The black hole's accretion disc ebbed out underneath the world, casting light from above and below.
The black hole covered three-quarters of the planet's surface, wrapping around it. This planet had no night and likely never would. I tapped my fingers before rolling my eyes. The best place to establish a base would be the worst place to live on this planet. The more devilish and destructive, the better.
To discover my relative location, I pulled myself into the world's upper atmosphere. My golems and I would survive the conditions no matter what, and it gave me plenty of ramp-up time before anyone investigated nearby. Giving myself this enormous momentum ensured other rulers couldn't stop me before I finished my goals here.
The air thinned before the recesses of space came in. The stars hid in a dark veil, Leviathan's glow too bright for them to be seen. Even this distance from the planet, gravitational tides ebbed in from the black hole.
I hovered myself higher, every kilometer up creating drastic differences in how gravity felt. At some point, the tide of the black hole grabbed me over the planet's own pull. I peered into the abyss, wondering what it would be like to just jump into the dark sphere. I reached out a hand before jerking it back.
A strange sensation made me do that, and it reminded me of staring at a cliff and getting the urge to jump. The oddness passed before I turned back to Leviathan-7. Only a subtle curve of the planet showed itself in the distance. I pulled myself up a bit further, having to fight the gravitational tides at this point.
Fearing the fluxes, I pulled myself back to the safety of the world, the black hole scaring me off. It stunned me how gravitational tides shifted so rapidly out here but stabilized near the actual planet. From that ascent alone, I learned this planet rested on a precise, carefully managed orbit. Even just a few kilometers in either direction would result in it being flung off into space or consumed by the abyss.
Warping was the only way out of this place, and since we didn't know the black hole's location, we were trapped. It was as I suspected - Schema imprisoned us here.
As I reentered the atmosphere, I blazed through the dense air and creeping kelp clouds. It tried infesting and gripping under my skin but ended up eaten itself. Once back on the planet's surface, I traversed over the battlefields towards the far South. The black hole surrounding Leviathan-7 showed permanent light from three different angles on its surface. I aimed for the angle with the most exposure.
While I zipped over the radioactive surface, I cooled myself. This prevented me from beaming myself out in all directions and letting far-off rulers find me. I also changed my body's shape to a much thinner, smooth line. The aerodynamic shape let me slice through the wind without making a big fuss as I did.
As I passed, I got a better vantage point of the environments of Leviathan-7. Most portions of the world carried sparse plantlife with dense clusters of eldritch. The pressure vastly exceeded Earth's, and the temperature varied depending on how much the black hole acted up. However, the temperature would've boiled blood at least.
Well, if not for the floating kelp strands in the distance. They contained most of those extraterrestrial forces, converting them into eldritch. While they smothered the planet in bloodthirsty beasts, they enabled life as well. Everything would roast under Leviathan's gaze otherwise.
As I sped past the environments, they flashed in my vision one after the other. Deserts, jungles, forests, plains, and other terrestrial locations covered most of the planet. Everything outside of oceans or lakes. Other oddities stuck out as well. In that regard, I found this planet mirrored Giess in a lot of ways.
Both planets ended up being dominated by the life forms on their surface.
However, the silvers fed on mana pollution. Here, eldritch reigned by ingesting radiation. This gave everything an ambient, gentle glow at all times as the creatures feasted on the plentiful energy source. At certain spots, these radiation sinks formed where the energy piled up into pits.
In those tunnels, dark monsters reigned and roared beneath the ground. They were the dungeons Schema talked about. I always wondered what the eldritch looked like on a planet without Schema, and this answered my question with clarity; the eldritch dominated everything. The everyday life here existed as poor feeding packs for the monsters, a stroke of luck for life here.
If they presented better meals, the eldritch would've eaten the life here to extinction long ago. They hadn't, making this a rich land smothered with cancerous creatures. It left me solemn, finding so many typical life forms trembling under the radiation that fed the eldritch. The regular life here persevered with silent suffering, their hunched backs and deformed limbs telling their story for them.
It left me saddened.
As I entered the far South, the planet's environments ramped up in intensity. The deserts held radioactive grains like tiny bits of colored glass in their red dunes. These colored bits condensed into giant, crystalline clusters between dunes. Curious about them, I landed and tested one of them out. They mirrored the bones of the behemoths spread across Leviathan-7's surface.
I took a few of these clusters with me before moving further on. The forests here let out a permanent glow at all times, becoming irradiated pits. Every creature cranked up its mobility, speed, and power. Trees grew miles high, overcoming the limits of gravity and presenting strange colors. Some plants even grew condensed radiation fruit.
I took a few pieces, trying them out. They tasted like fruity blood and sweetened meat. Grotesque at first, the flavors grew on me after a while, though I preferred an apple or banana if I had a choice. Also, the fruits warmed my skin and stomach when I swallowed them. It was like ingesting a campfire. If I had to guess, the radiation was the cause.
Covering thousands of miles in less than hours, the glow of the black hole increased in intensity as I got further South. It evolved into a blinding blaze in the sky. Overbearing, oppressive, and permanent, it radiated out with a vast accretion disc in the sky. The kelp kept growing in density above until it formed a canopy that contained most of the light leaking in.
A forest formed beneath this cover, the fleshy kelp letting some ambient rays peak through. Those streaks of blinding brightness leaked between these vast shaded areas. This created a multilayered ecosystem. Above, the algae converted radiation into eldritch monsters. Behemoths fell down from the algae at random intervals, fighting in a forest below the algae.
This irradiated battlefield grew at an unreal pace, life-expanding in real-time. The Behemoths wrestled and fought over the growing life, keeping it trimmed. On the surface, the monsters displayed a feast of primordial forces. So much movement, vitality, and chaos, it almost overwhelmed my senses.
I killed quite a few behemoths as I passed, no longer worried about a ruler finding me. This landscape seethed at some absurd temperature. Every square inch of the ground and much of the air smothered in eldritch and dangerous spores. No one in their right mind would want to live in this hellish place.
You know, besides for me.
Crossing to the deepest part of this jungle, I found the harshest part of this planet. This southernmost portion of Leviathan-7 pointed directly at the accretion disc's origin - the brightest chunk of the black hole. This planet seemed tidally locked that way, the black hole remaining a constant in the sky.
No oceans pooled here. They'd evaporate. The water locked into the endless, abundant, and flourishing life here. Above me, multiple layers of the algae forest formed into a four-tiered hell cake. Each section of depth resulted in more energy and carnage. This made Giess look like a peaceful land, and Earth might as well have been dead by comparison.
Thousands of behemoths raged in all directions. Patches of the algae forest exploded and regenerated at all moments. If several of those patches lined up, rays from the black hole stung down like laser beams. The sheer radiation melted the stone at the deepest section, leaving cooling pits of magma interspersed far from each other.
It was...A lot to wrap my head around. The ground at the deepest part acted like a graveyard, the behemoth's broken bones piling up. In a glorious display of beauty, these multicolored shards created rolling, opalescent hills. They piled up like mountains made of prismatic opals, and in this apex of the eldritch, their final forms took root.
But instead of turning into Spatial Fortresses, they condensed into god-like creatures.
They incarnated as different elemental forms. Some radiated like stars, shining into the distance. Others raged as blizzards of ice, no longer corporeal. Featureless, shifting storms of metal feasted on the multicolored bones below. All of these titans did. One of them could've conquered Earth.
But they were in for a rude awakening.
My many elemental furnaces fueled into action, and many of my minds took on different roles for combat. I set up a line of targets, preparing a battle plan. I shifted back to Event Horizon, and I readied several minds for a psionic battle as well. Once my body saturated with mana, a plasma of energy formed around me, melting anything nearby. It was time.
I stared at these horrific monsters, and I pounded my chest to get their attention. They peered at me, and I peered at them. A silence passed over us where I mused where to put the start of my colony.
And so, the roaring began.