Chapter 28 — Y2: In Which Something Critical is Forgotten

Okay!  So, that’s the end of my first year.  That’s enough for you to accept my offer, right?  Riiiight?

Oh come on!  That’s a full year of sexy stories, describing my past!  Do you really want more?!  Really?!

Ugh!

Fine.

Fine.  Just.  Fine.

Haaaaa… we can get into year two, I guess.  Okay.  First off, let’s go over my status, so you know where I’m at, and how far I’d fallen already.

So, this is how I was when we last did a check in.  About… a little under five months into the year, I think.  I was just starting to ‘date-slash-be-dommed-by’ Shimizu.

Seven months ago:

…And this is how I was at the start of my second year.

2nd year start:

Hehehe.  It doesn’t look like much of a change, I know, but that’s due to how the game is set up.  The first year is actually fairly tame by the standards of the series.  It’s… how was it put… ah, yes, that’s right.

Year one is the present.

Year two is the mind.

Year three is the body.

Year four is the past and future.

Year five is the self.

So things are going to start accelerating, and they don’t slow down until it’s over.

That said, if you really want to know more, and you really want to go through all the details, then it’s time to talk about the cosmology of the Alchemical Corruption series.

The descriptions given in the games are weird and incomplete, but fans have managed to put the details together over the years.  And I have my own understanding, which I later confirmed to be accurate.  So I’ll describe it to you in the clearest way that I know how.

First thing to know:  Every system has ‘fundamental truths’.  These truths can not be proven, only observed.

It doesn’t matter what system this is.  It could be math, physics, music, even poetry or art; there are fundamental truths from which everything else is defined.

For example, in math, one plus one equals two.  Why does it equal two?  Because we say it does.  Because that is how ‘math’ is defined.

These fundamental truths are axioms.  Every reality has them.  They can not be subdivided, nor broken down; they just are.

So, then, why can’t these axioms be able to think?

That’s what the Axiomanagers are.

There are a countably infinite number of Axiomanagers, and --

-- ah.  Right.  Yes this is where math comes into it.  Feel free to just zone out until I say ‘in summary’, okay?  Okay.  Good.

So.  Countably infinite.

That means you can go ‘one, two, three…’ and theoretically reach any specific Axiomanager in that manner.  This is different from uncountably infinite, which can’t be counted like that.  This is important for -- ugh.  No, nevermind, not getting into it.

Now these Axiomanagers exist in… mmmph… it’s called a ‘void’ but it’s more like a line.  A one dimensional line, where every point is another Axiomanager.  …This isn’t a perfect example, because ‘every single point in a line’ includes fractions, which makes it uncountably infinite, but it’s the closest I’ve got.  This happens to mean that Axiomanagers can only really communicate with their neighbor, so everything that happens requires a massive game of telephone to relay to the others.  A game that never ends, because, again, there are an infinite number of them; the Left and the Right sides of any individual Axiomanager always continues.

One of these games of telephone is to inform the other Axiomangers that a specific Axiomanager has decided to ‘produce income’.

Which -- okay, look, you know how you need a positive and negative magnetism to make electricity?

They basically do that with souls.

Living and dead souls rotate in a cycle, and that somehow produces a power that Axiomanagers want.  For.  Some reason.  The details get really weird there, but I’m inclined to believe it’s something like a drug to them.

Anyway, moving on.  When an Axiomanager makes a world, they need to define the rules of that world, and in so doing, add definitions to themself.  They limit themselves, and in so doing, define the world.  That is how the world of Alchemical Corruption came into being.  One random Axiomanager decided to make a world, and in the process, discovered that it really liked sex.

Yes.  That is the literal, in-setting, canon reason.

It’s a massive disappointment.

But, here’s the thing.  Worlds are not on the same ‘line’ as Axiomanagers are.  They are, instead, orthogonal to it, for a finite distance.  This… okay, this isn’t an accurate explanation, but it should work.  Having the worlds in an orthogonal line from the Axiomanagers essentially creates a ‘triangle’ from the tip of the ‘world line’ to a bunch of other Axiomanagers, and these Axiomanagers are ‘fed’ from that world.  In return, they don’t interfere with the world itself.  They only do so if they think that something is going to happen to it that would harm it or them.

So, in summary, Axiomanagers are druggies floating in a void that are perfectly logical except for their addiction to what souls can produce in their cycle of reincarnation, which is used as a bribe to keep them from interfering.  Chief gods are Axiomanagers that decided to get off the couch and do something for a living.

When an Axiomanager translates into a world, they are then defined by the limits of that world.

…This makes the world of Alchemical Corruption a massive trap.

Axiomanagers have shown up in several of the games.  The first time was game 5, but again in games 7, 8, and 10.  And when they show up, they invariably translate in as women with slutty bodies.  And because they are forcibly defined by the additional limits of the world, uh…

…

They tend to give up their infinite cosmic power in exchange for being a sex slave or something.  No, I’m not joking.  When they accept the limitations of the world, accept the definitions it pushes on them, they lose the majority of their powers and get stuck there.

The only one that ever left the world was the one game 8; she managed to escape, but she then came back in 10 and hasn’t left since, so…

…Yeah.

This is all important, because starting year two, an Axiomanager shows up.

Axiomanagers don’t normally show up.  They don’t like entering worlds that aren’t their own.  Sure, they keep their infinite powers… mostly… but they can only exist in a world by being defined by its limitations.  They don’t like that.

So they only show up when something really weird happens, and threatens their soul-generator.

This just happens to occur with this world more frequently than others, because this world is a mess.

In this case, what occurs is a second landmass simply appearing right next to the first one that ‘drifted’ in, attaching itself to the continent, right when we’re in the middle of the ‘congrats, you didn’t die’ ceremony for the end of the Land Grab.

We were set up with a very scenic view, one that had a lovely view over the land that we had scrabbled all over for resources, so we got a good view of this new chunk of land that appeared.

The land for Land Grabs are, historically, all natural vistas.  They might not be set up naturally, like having an arctic wonderland right next to a hot desert, but they are still areas based on nature.

Not so this time.

Instead, it looks almost like a ruined city.  A mix of medieval and outright modern architecture, with an ominous purple fog that seemed to almost… grow from the ground.  We could even see the remains of an ancient castle, its stone walls occasionally pulsing with an eerie, purple light.

The announcer, whose name I have forgotten because they, frankly, didn’t matter, stopped their dull congratulations to gape with the rest of us at this second mass of land.

And that’s when a beam of pure light appeared on the stage, in front of the announcer.

It was very annoying.  It was far too bright, and it felt like it was vibrating our bones, despite the lack of sound.  I was quite glad it only lasted for a few seconds… it felt like my body was going to vibrate apart.  As the light faded, we saw her.  Axiomanager MY-77715302.  Or ‘Sevens’, for short.

She was artificially perfect.  Her skin was marble white, and looked almost like it was made out of metal instead of flesh.  It didn’t reflect, but something about how it merged together was almost uncanny.  Her breasts were larger than my own at the time, and were jutting out like two basketballs, covered perfectly in her immaculate business dress.

Said business dress was, naturally, perfectly white, as well.  As was her hair.

The only speck of color, or even darkness, was from the shadows that her body cast on itself, and the pitch black centers of her eyes.  “Greetings,”  She said, in a voice that sang of elegance and brought up thoughts of sex and deviancy, “As per the agreement of the Left and the Right, up to four billion, two hundred ninety four million, nine hundred sixty seven thousand, two hundred ninety six moments out, this doomed reality is to be given assistance of one Axiomanager in hopes of salvaging something from this mess.”

She pauses a moment and lets everybody process that.  …And ignores all the questions they start shouting at her, instead simply speaking over them.  “I, to my… I believe this emotion is ‘displeasure’… have been chosen to be the one to aid this reality.  The agreed plan of the Axiomanagers shall be stated henceforth:

“The ‘Land Grab’ shall continue for so long as land appears.  I shall be in charge of the administration.

“That is all.”

…You might be wondering, by now, how I remember what she said so perfectly, yeah?

That’s because she wrote this speech down into our minds.

What she said will literally be the last thing I forget, if I ever do.

Yup.  They’re fuckers alright.  Karma is near for her, though!

See, after that, she continued.  She listed a few new ‘rules’.  One of which was ‘if you have knowledge of the future, don’t tell random people about it, only those on your team or those with their own knowledge.  And I don’t care if you shared it before this speech.’

This was the primary reason I hadn’t told a ton of people about the Evil God of Chastity and Purity.  That and, well… I didn’t have any proof.  I could convince a few isolated people I had knowledge from ‘beyond’, but enough to get an army on my side?  That wasn’t going to happen.

Anyway, after she was done, she announced, “The agreed upon message has been delivered.  I shall now collapse any divergent timelines.”

…see, in the game, Sevens was how you got a lot of new game plus bonuses.  Not all of them.  The chief god was behind a few.  But Sevens would recognize you as you go through the various games.  I think she had unique dialogue up to two hundred sequential playthroughs?  She even had a unique stat of ‘exhaustion’, which represented just how done she was with the nonsense this world brought upon her.  So I knew… or, well, thought I knew… what was happening next.

I was expecting Mr. Protagonist, Takeo, to have knowledge from another world.  We already had two people with similar knowledge, Shimizu and myself, so I expected Takeo to be similar.  Perhaps he played a version of the game with me in it.  The fact that he hadn’t approached us lended credence to the idea that he was against us.

So I thought that if anybody was going to have gone back in time, it would have been me.

…What’s with that look?

Hey!  I was the best alchemist of the lot of them -

I am not being arrogant!

…

Okay.  Maybe I’m being a little arrogant.  But I’m still right!

Hrmph.

The point is, I expected Sevens to not have to do any ‘timeline collapsing’ and to resume her existence as her staunch, emotionless Axiomanager for the duration of this four year period.

That is… not what happened.

She simply stared forward for what felt like a full hour, everybody chatting with each other or trying to poke her, with the latter being zapped by enough static electricity to knock them out.

Well I call it ‘static electricity’, but I consider it more ‘moron fuckoff lightning’.

And when the hour concluded, we all knew, because we heard a voice shout out in agony.  It was similar to the voice we heard before, but its perfection was gone, washed away by the sands by time.

What we heard was, “Fuck you all, not again!”

It was around then that I realized that this game was going to be a lot more complicated than I expected.