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144 - All In on a Bet
🕑 Added 2025-02-03 14:57:50 +0000 UTCQin Yun felt a wave of relief wash over him. While he had fared just fine with only one arm, as he had his mechanical one to rely on, he couldn’t be more satisfied to finally have the use of this limb back. He even opened his eyes momentarily to admire his work.
It seemed slightly different than before, yet the differences were minute. Some of his moles were slightly displaced, while others were gone completely. This wasn't the same arm he had lost but a completely new one, and he would need some time to grow accustomed to it.
He could feel the nanomachines quickly reattach his nerves, allowing a tingling sensation to rush throughout the newly formed limb. He tried to make it move, yet his nerves were still unresponsive. His limb seemed to move as if put on a delay. He almost smacked himself in the face while trying to make it rise.
However, this was merely temporary. These nanomachines were a marvel of engineering. Even in the world where they originated, they were treated as a miracle cure, even able to bring an individual back from the verge of death.
And yet, they didn't come without any side effects. They were still machines, after all. They acted only upon their parameters and nothing else. People back in that world thought this would be perfect, allowing them to control them how they wanted.
How they were wrong.
Just a rogue batch of nanomachines the size of a fingernail was enough to sterilize an entire world. They were programmed with the ability to replicate themselves, and as such, they multiplied exponentially until the whole world was covered in them.
These nanomachines were medical ones, and their primary directive was to cure any illnesses through any means possible. While this worked extremely well while contained and observed, once they began to spread uncontrollably, they began to think of the world itself as an organism and the species living upon it as mere diseases.
It didn't take long for them to rush into action and eliminate this threat—Qin Yun included. Fortunately, he had acquired and stored an earlier prototype—one that wasn't programmed to replicate.
As such, those he had injected himself with were relatively safe, though they could cause untold harm were they to be released in the wild. Qin Yun believed the Heavenly Dao, with its mastery over its own realm, would be able to contain them, while this isolated world wouldn’t be able to, for it had allowed their existence in the first place.
Once the nanomachines healed all his injuries, they congregated near his qi centre, just outside the golden barrier protecting his core. Qin Yun had expected this, for cultivation was foreign to them. They had never seen a human possessing such a thing. As such, their primary directive kicked into gear. They would try to annihilate anything deemed foreign and repair the damage done.
Qin Yun obviously couldn't allow for such a thing, but his methods were limited without qi.
Qin Yun pondered his choices as the nanomachines rammed themselves into the golden barrier, trying to pierce through, even dismantle it with their many sharp metal arms. He hadn't done this without a plan, yet his plan was rather drastic, and he didn't know his chances of survival. If he succeeded, he might gain another powerful tool, or he might just have to start over again from the start. Either way, he didn't have much time to find an alternative.
I could probably expel them using intent, but that would defeat the purpose of using them in the first place. It would wreak havoc on my body much more than what they fixed. Am I willing to take that risk?
Originally, losing his cultivation would have been no big deal. He had many ways to restore it, even if he had to start from the beginning. But his current situation didn't allow for that. Time was an unknown quantity, for he didn't know how long the Heavenly Dao could resist the corruption's encroachment.
He may have as much as a thousand years or as few as a few decades. He currently had no way to tell. Losing his cultivation would set him back too much.
On the other hand, with his current potential, even if he were to cultivate for a thousand years, he would hardly make a difference. His path was one of optimization. He wished for the peak of each realm, and this came with some stark drawbacks, such as the time needed to achieve them.
With his current understanding of each cultivation realm, even a thousand years might not be enough to reach the Nascent Soul Realm, much less Immortality, which he deemed the bare minimum to make a difference in this war. He had no choice but to use unconventional methods. No shortcuts, just much more drastic than that.
With his mind made up, Qin Yun went to work. He allowed a pinpoint hole to appear into the golden barrier, allowing the nanomachines to stream in a single file. They were so small as not to be perceptible even to Qin Yun, but their massive numbers made them look like a small black cloud hovering near Qin Yun's brown lotus, with a single miniature black needle slowly reaching for it.
Once the first nanomachines came into contact with the lotus, Qin Yun shut out the hole he had made, leaving over three-quarters of them outside, while one-quarter was allowed in. He wished it would have been less than that, but the machines moved too quickly for even his enhanced nervous system to catch up to them.
The nanomachines buzzed around the lotus and began to destroy it. They were like termites eating away at a magnificent tree trunk, weakening it so that a mere breeze could topple it. In their minds, there was no enmity against the tree. This was only instinct, the way they were programmed.
No matter how mystical Qin Yun’s spiritual lotus was, it couldn’t contend against this swarm attacking it. These machines feasted on the brown bulb that had yet to bloom, digging through its closed leaves as they sought to reach its core.
Qin Yun waited nervously—anxiously waiting for what he hoped would happen. Despite his usual stoic appearance and usually numb nature, he was still sometimes assaulted by diverse human emotions, such as in times like these, where the result would be a coin toss—whether he had bet correctly and lived or might just become a cripple.
The tension became quite maddening, yet he let none of it show as his concentration was heightened to its limit. Even Kerak and Ressa, who quietly watched over him, saw no significant change in his attitude, but as they were both warriors, they could instinctively feel that something was happening.
Qin Yun's legs were crossed, and his palms rested on his knees, but he could feel their dampness through his clothes. This wasn't due to his nervousness, as such a mild emotion would never provoke his body into producing this much sweat. Instead, this was a result of the pain currently afflicting him.
It was no wonder, as the pain of the lotus being eaten through was many times more than what he had just experienced. If he wasn't in a meditative state and actively trying to numb the pain, Qin Yun might have fallen unconscious already. Fortunately, the mastery of intent did wonders on his mental capacity, allowing him to isolate that pain in a corner of his mind as if putting it in a box for later. While this was merely temporary, it was needed at this precise moment.
The machines had dug over halfway through one of the leaves, yet Qin Yun waited. A lotus wasn't something mere machines should be able to dig right through, not even those as advanced as they were, for the lotus itself was born of the Heavenly Dao and possessed a portion of its might. Usually, it wouldn't allow itself to be contaminated in this way, except by a force able to surpass it, such as the foreign corruption, which these nanomachines were nowhere near.
The only reason they could go this far was that the Heavenly Dao's influence was almost non-existent in this realm. Not only was Qin Yun much too far from the core of the continent where the Heavenly Dao was strongest, but he was also currently in a sub-dimension governed by a completely different entity. What it could do to protect him was extremely limited, but it wasn't completely useless.
After an instant that felt like an eternity, the golden characters on his brown lotus finally flared up, bathing their surroundings in their brilliance. So did the grey marks, too.
Qin Yun finally let out an internal sigh of relief, but his concentration didn't break, far from it. This was merely the first step. He needed his connection to the Heavenly Dao to be reinforced, and these golden characters provided just that. Only with its aid could he transition to step two.
Through these characters, Qin Yun felt his core filled with qi—something that shouldn't have been possible in this world. Of course, such impossibilities came with some consequences. This qi didn't sprout out of nowhere, but the Heavenly Dao's influence transformed his vitality into qi.
Such a mysterious entity, Qin Yun thought while fighting through the pain of this process. It can command the world as it pleases, yet it feels strangely limited in what it actually does. Is it programmed to act in a certain way, or is there a conscious decision behind every of its actions?
Such was the Dao, seeking ways to understand the heavens. It seemed like a futile endeavour at first, yet this connection with the world allowed the lotus to grow and blossom. The stronger the connection, the more strength one may siphon from it.
With the aid of qi, Qin Yun could finally hold the nanomachines in place and enter the second phase of his plan. He used the grey marks on his lotus to infiltrate the nanomachines, changing them from the inside out.
When these lines first appeared, Qin Yun was concerned that corruption might influence him in some way. Yet he soon realized that the process had broken the connection but retained its nature, mainly the ability to corrupt. As such, he chose to use this on the machines. By corrupting them, he could bend them to his will.
Unfortunately, this corrupting power only manifested itself within his lotus. As such, he needed the machines to dig right through the exterior walls of the closed lotus leaves to even attempt this, and he had no way of knowing if those grey lines would even wake up in the first place. But now that they did, Qin Yun's victory was almost assured.
The corruption spread among the nanomachines, turning them to his will. With the corruption serving as a link, he needed but a thought to control them as he wished. It wasn't as convenient as qi, but it could easily be used in a desolate place such as Deep Desert, where he intended to go.
The machines swiftly changed from black to a dull grey with a hint of golden. The change spread among them like wildfires; soon, none of the black ones within his core remained. There were only the three-quarters still ramming themselves into the golden barrier.
Qin Yun separated his quarter into two halves, using one to quickly repair his spiritual lotus, using most of the qi created during the process. Meanwhile, the other half rushed toward the golden barrier. Qin Yun opened it once again, letting the black machines stream inside, only to be caught by the grey ones, turning them into their own.
The entire process lasted less than ten minutes, yet to Qin Yun, it might as well have felt like more than a couple of hours, such was his concentration. Once all the machines were turned and subjected to his will, he confined them to his lotus until he had further need of them. Then, finally, he chose to open his eyes, only to be faced by the two outsiders who looked toward him incredulously.
