NOVEL WEB Book 1 – Lesson 8: “No, seriously, Run.”
Lian Peng stopped a few hundred kilometers away from his ‘guest.’ Only a short distance in a void battle, but enough that he could react if something surprising happened. Now that he was closer and could better see what they were dealing with, he had to admit he… still wasn’t very sure what it was. Or rather, what it had once been.
Though twisted and warped by an unknown force, the gargantuan piece of wreckage still retained much of its former shape. At least enough to let Lian Peng confirm it was only part of a greater whole.
He sent a message back to the lunar base, ordering a sweep of the object’s origin point.
Scouts had been sent that way when they’d first noticed the object, but now they had a clearer picture of what to look for.
If this was only a part, then where had the rest gone? They couldn’t dismiss the possibility this thing was a distraction meant to keep their attention while other parties made their escape.
Or worse.
This possibility became even greater after a sweep of his [Divine Sense] showed no Path energy signals. In fact, there didn’t even appear to be any shielding in place, and he could scan most of the surface and interior unhindered. Strange… Wait… that… shouldn’t have been possible. No, it wasn’t just that he couldn’t detect any signals; there weren’t any at all. No Celestial Energy, no Essence, not even Psionic Force. The entire thing seemed almost… mundane?
How?! That made no sense at all!
Everything in the Sisters, the three Celestial Worlds, was illuminated by the Celestial power emitting from the Divinity Heart at the core of the local star. The Mortal Worlds — the six Children — were the only exceptions, as they were isolated and sheltered by their individual firmaments. The void itself contained no ‘mundane’ material, either. A few materials might be comparable, true, but those had their own signature and nothing that could be made into something like… this.
Had its makers developed a new cloaking method?
No, not that, either. His [Divine Sense] wasn’t being blocked or muddled; he just detected nothing he couldn’t already physically see. The only abnormality was the large, slightly warped cube at the center of the wreckage. This was the only place Lian Peng’s senses couldn’t pierce. It wasn’t shielded, per se, either. Rather, whatever the cube was made of was… dense.
Unimaginably dense.
Lian Peng had seen nothing like it before. What was he even looking at? If looking through the rest of the wreck was like peering through glass, trying to push his senses through the cube felt like peering through lead.
Did they honestly think that wouldn’t be suspicious in the slightest? Or is it a trap? Lian Peng thought to himself.
Lian Peng felt he couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on with this wreck. Something in the back of his head was sounding alarm bells, but whatever was happening, his instincts told him it wasn’t as simple as it might first appear. Some of his peers might have laughed at him for being too cautious, but that cautiousness had helped him survive all these years. He’d rather be cautious than in an unmarked grave, like many of those who’d laughed.
He floated there, a silent observer, trying to deduce the occupants’ intentions.
Were there even any occupants? Their observation arrays had picked up some strange movement, but now that he had actual eyes on the mysterious wreck, there was nothing.
Bull. He knew there was someone on board. He didn’t know how they hid from his [Divine Sense] or masked their energy signals, but he wasn’t foolish enough to believe his staff would have made such an amateur mistake.
After a few moments with no luck, Lian Peng tried a more direct method.
He spoke into the void, imbuing his voice with the [Truth of Space].
“Attention occupants of the unknown wreckage! Your presence has been noted. By order of Lunar King Lian Peng, Scion of Midnight, and Hand of the Warden, you are ordered to show yourself and submit to questioning! Cooperation will be met with leniency and fair treatment under the United Pact of the Celestial Worlds. Resistance will be dealt with by force, and survivors will be interrogated using whatever means are deemed necessary!”
His voice boomed out in Celeti, the common language of the Greater Firmament, echoing across the Vast void as it was transmitted by the very fabric of space.
As his voice died and silence once more filled the void, Lian Peng waited. When a long moment passed with no response, Lian Peng sighed. The hard way it was, then. If he had to tear the wreckage apart to find his newest guests, he would do so. Maybe not before a deep scan to look for traps, but in the Vast void, there was no escape.
Just as he moved closer, his [Divine Sense] picked up movement. A dozen objects lifted off from the side of the wreck facing away from him. As one, they flew around the circumference of the wreck and in his direction. They moved with near-perfect synchronicity, circling around from their hiding spot and hovering in the open void near the wreck’s front.
No way it’ll be this easy… what are they playing at?
Lian Peng scanned the objects with his [Divine Sense], finding them as lifeless as the rest of the wreck. Yet, unlike the broken, twisted wreck, these…’things’… moved. On the surface, they looked like pitch-black ovaloids, almost featureless, like giant black eggs. All but for thin protrusions on the back and sides that occasionally pulsed with a blue light when one drifted too far from the others. Yet Lian Peng’s scans showed they were far more than they appeared at first glance.
Their black outer ‘shell’ wasn’t solid; rather, each appeared composed of an uncountable number of infinitesimal creatures, so small that mortal eyes could not see them, that swirled and moved within. On some level, it was reminiscent of the cells of an Essence Slime. Rather than a mass of cells encircling a nucleus of crystallized Essence, the nucleus these ‘slimes’ surrounded seemed more intricate to an astonishing level.
A casual scan revealed tens of thousands of tiny parts composed of hundreds of different materials, most of which he had no name for. Stranger still, they were arranged in mysterious, intricate patterns he couldn’t understand.
His shock soon gave way to confusion. Lian Peng did not know what he was looking at; there was some logic here similar to arrays, yet unlike anything he’d ever seen in other way. Even the complexity was mind-boggling; it was like looking at a Mage’s spell circle but compressed to the size of a melon. Some parts of the arrays were so minuscule that his [Divine Sense] couldn’t recognize them completely. How was that even possible?!
Lian Peng’s eyes widened at the sight. Were these even living things?! Or were they some kind of construct? A new type of Esper puppet or golem?
No, that couldn’t be right; even after looking multiple times, Lian Peng couldn’t find a single rune or sigil in the entire construct. Some markings might have held some meaning, but only a few somewhat resembled letters he knew from some mundane mortal languages. Definitely not the complex and mystical alphabet that made up the runic array language. The only thing that vaguely stood out was a small carving on each of the construct’s metal frames. While almost microscopic, each was emblazoned with an irrationally detailed carving of a flying… duck?! WHY?!
Was he going insane? Was this all some elaborate prank or test?! Was Fairy Xiàshuō still angry at him for the [Thousand Fragrance Tea] incident?! In his defense, how was he supposed to know that specific blend was known for attracting Ivory Wasps?!
He’d spend nearly three years straight kowtowing at her gate before she would even speak to him again.
Pull yourself together, Lian Peng!
The Moonlight Phoenix shook his head and refocused. He couldn’t let himself be distracted like that; it was unprofessional. No, best to treat the situation as real until proven otherwise. If it was some prank, he’d be sure the proper parties were… Well, that was best not mentioned in polite company.
Turning his attention back to the present, Lian Peng narrowed his eyes. What confused him the most was, despite the object’s obvious complexities, not a single one seemed to have any kind of energy signal. Much like the rest of the wreck, they appeared as nothing but mundane to his [Divine Sense]. No… no, that wasn’t right; the longer he observed, the more he could feel… ‘something.’ It was faint… muted even, but it was there; he was sure of it. It felt similar to the power wielded by Static Mages, but… different in a way he couldn’t place.
That made him look closer at the ‘slimes’ internal structure.
Now that he knew what to look for, he could see these small ‘sparks’ throughout the construct, dancing along the complex web of patterns like twinkling stars. A quick scan of the wreck showed many similar concentrations of ‘sparks,’ some compact and organized, others were torn and… leaking, for lack of a better term — faint… muted, but present. One thing was for certain: there was no Essence involved at all, nor any other Path energies.
The Path of Divinity: those who directly absorbed the Celestial Energy of the Divinity Heart to forge their body and soul with its light. These called themselves ‘Cultivators.’
The Path of Magic: those who instead refined that Celestial Energy into the Essence of Life, forging it into powerful spells, and thus were named ‘Mages.’
Finally, the Path of Dreams: those who rejected Celestial Energy in favor of Psionic Force, a mystic power rooted in the dreams and desires of all living things, and who were known as ‘Espers.’
These were the three major ‘Paths to Power’ within the Grand Firmament. There were a few minor ones, but those were considered nothing more than subsets of the major paths, as they all used Celestial Energy, Essence, or Psionic Force.
This, though… was… something different.
That terrified Lian Peng to his core.
Had someone discovered a new Path? That was impossible. Though Psionics had been around for tens of thousands of years, no new Path had ever been found since. Even then, the Esper’s rise to power had been very slow and very public, in part because one needed the ‘gift’ to get anywhere substantial down that path. And in part because heavy suspicion from both Cultivators and Mages had made Espers targets for the longest time.
Over the ages, Espers had learned to refine and control their power. Psionics grew from a simple curiosity to a genuine threat that reshaped how the Grand Firmament operated. The competition between the Mages and Cultivators had been fierce for longer than anyone could remember, but it was a stable stalemate. Introducing a third power had thrown every world into chaos.
But this? It was clear whatever he was seeing was something else entirely. The complexity and sophistication displayed here rivaled even the greatest works of runecraft and spellwork he’d ever seen. As a direct subordinate to the Warden, Lian Peng was privy to knowledge that armies of Celestials would fight tooth and nail for. So how had he never heard of something like these constructs before?! How had something like this been allowed to develop unnoticed?
Whatever the answer, he would pry those secrets out with force if necessary. Such an unknown could not remain unknown, lest the chaos brought about by the rise of Espers be repeated. Maybe it was fate that brought this to him, in a way. If it had been any of the other Lunar Kings — those greedy, lazy bastards — they would have swept this all under the rug and kept the secrets for themselves. Then again, one of them might be involved, regardless.
After all, who else could have kept this hidden from him?
If they were lucky, he wouldn’t need to use force, though. If everything went as it should, the survivors aboard the wreck would surrender to questioning peacefully, and the Lunar Scouts could find out what they needed without bloodshed.
As one of the ‘slimes’ moved towards him on pulsing blue light, Lian Peng prayed everything would go according to plan.
But then, when had any plan survived first contact?
————————————————————
… Yup, that’s a chicken alright…
Alpha wasn’t quite sure what he’d been expecting. Maybe it was some kind of chicken-shaped drone. Alpha preferred ducks, personally, but hey, not everyone had good taste like him.
Or maybe it just looked like a chicken from a distance.
Or the damage to Alpha’s processor may have been greater than he thought, and he was subconsciously overlaying AR images of chickens on random objects for no reason whatsoever.
But that was not the case, according to his short-range scans, at least. The fireball floating in the vacuum of space a few hundred kilometers away was an honest-to-God, flesh and blood, biological chicken… The thing didn’t even have any bio-augmentations!
At least then, some of this might have made the slightest bit of sense!
DNA analysis, though somewhat compromised by the distance, confirmed this wasn’t a case of convergent evolution, resulting in something that just looked chicken-like. No, this creature shared a distant ancestry with a breed of chicken employed by Federation colonization efforts dating as far back as the First Era and the United Federation of Sol.
There was no carcinization going on here!
Sturdy, adaptable, and quick to multiply, the chickens in question were some of the best early test subjects to evaluate a new ecosystem’s viability.
Colonization and terraforming projects had been so effective during the subsequent Second Federation that even today, it was rare to find a populated planet that didn’t show some marks of influence. It was so common that many people argued the Third Federation’s ‘Unification Project’ was more aptly named a reclamation project instead, and they weren’t wrong — to an extent.
Almost 7 in 10 inhabited worlds that Alpha was sent to, had some connection to the Second Federation, with most being surviving colony worlds isolated for 25,000 years by the nano-plague that broke it or husk-worlds claimed by other powers. For the Third Galactic Federation wasn’t the only player on the board, even if they were the oldest and biggest, and the ones with the most rights to those planets. Of course, convincing the other party of that was often an issue — one Alpha was an expert in solving.
So finding a Federation chicken, or at least a descendant, in a new world wasn’t surprising. Except Alpha had absolutely no records of any reclamation worlds — previously visited or scheduled — matching the absurdity that was this system. His star maps couldn’t even tell him where he was. What were the chances of finding a chicken in a place the Federation had never been?
Then it talked…
In space…
After flying faster than a fighter drone…
And it appeared to be perpetually on fire?!
Well, at least he thought it spoke. Alpha was totally going to ignore the rest of that for the moment.
Its vocalizations were like the squid creatures, transmitted through space rather than a medium. The Federation had a similar ability, but it was used for point defense rather than communications; the energy requirement was massive, and there were better ways of speaking long distances in the void. Hell, plain old radio was more effective. Yet, there was a definite pattern and intent to the ‘words,’ even if he didn’t understand them.
So, a smart flaming space chicken…
Was he looking at some type of organic drone, then? The Federation had a strong aversion to organic technology in general. After the mess that was the nano-plague, it did pop up every so often in the more isolated corners of old space, though. That would explain some of the strangeness he was seeing, but his scanners couldn’t tell him at this range. So was he talking to the chicken or someone on the moon’s surface?
Alpha decided his original plan wouldn’t work. There was more going on here than he understood, and not enough time to understand it. It was time to get… creative.
After all, when had any plan survived first contact?