Chapter 37 — Y2: Seeking Parasites
ACK! Ouch! Ouch ouch fuck OUCH stop it stop it stop!
Not that way ow!
Okay, okay… just… undo the knot by - not tugging it!
That’s it! Get a pair of scissors!
Get them or I’m done with this!
Haaaa… fucking ow! Seriously! Be more careful with bondage ropes and knots! If you’re not using the auto-rope, you need to be careful or you’ll end up hurting me!
No. Nope! Don’t want to hear it. Not right now. I don’t care how flexible I am, I swear you almost tugged my arm out of its socket.
I don’t care that the auto-rope doesn’t let you control the results, if you want to tie me up normally then start. Smaller.
Nope. End of conversation.
Don’t. Care.
Look, I get that you’re new to this, but I’m the one that was hurt. I can deal with it a lot better than most, but until you show some improvement, you’re not tying up my body again.
…Thank you. Apology accepted.
Right. Time for my story.
Let’s see… we were at… ah, right, yes. When Callisto was suffering for my amusement. Hehehe~
One of the best things about that situation was that Callisto was still, technically, the leader of Ghost Town. And she had to show up regularly. Not quite every day, but close enough to it, especially when active work was being done on the town.
She offered to let me be in charge of my own body half the time after two trips to the library, but that wasn’t good enough.
She offered to let me be in charge the majority of the time after three trips to the library. But that wasn’t good enough.
No.
It took a full seven trips for her to accept actually doing manual labor.
“This is beneath a countess such as myself!” “Why do I need to work when I have you for that?!” “Oh poor me, I’m getting dust and dirt everywhere!”
…Actually that last one does sound pretty bad… but, ah, the rest are moronic!
Hehehe, it was so satisfying. I spent a solid two weeks just cackling at her while making her do actual work. It wasn’t even hard work, but the amount of suffering she felt doing it was delicious.
…What? What’s with that look?!
I’m not evil! She deserved it!
…Okay yes when you put it like that I sound evil, but really! It was justified revenge!
Oh don’t you start on -- I know ‘justified’ revenge isn’t a thing, it’s just -- look, she deserved it -- yes I made that judgment on my own! Tell me you disagree!
ARGH, fine!
Technically in terms of moral philosophy, my actions were in excess, as they were not necessary and created greater harm and suffering than was required to achieve my goals. In that respect, I was ‘bad’. Boo. Hoo.
Practically? She was constantly pushing boundaries, and for my own mental sanity I had to snap back at her somehow! I had limited options, and while I did, technically, take what I did ‘farther than required’, I can not express how satisfying it was. And I kept my punishment within most moral boundaries! I didn’t make her feel pain, I didn’t torture her, there was no cruel or unusual punishment! I didn’t even make her clean up filth, I mostly just had her moving around logs or bricks or stuff!
…Okay yes the reason I didn’t have her clean up filth was because I really didn’t want any on my body, but shut up!
…Do you want me to continue or do you want to keep on teasing me?!
Oh. Right. Sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, I’ve been very naughty, I deserve to be punished~
Haaa~ You’re getting better at that! Really timed the spanks quite well.
Anyway~ It took nearly, but not quite, a full three months to finish up Ghost Town now that Callisto was doing her part. It really was like night and day when we all went on our last tour around the place.
The roads had been redone, the buildings had been cleaned or replaced, paint had been refreshed, stains had been removed, far too many bodies had been slain, buried, then slain again and purified before being buried again because we all forgot that unpurified corpses and skeletons dug themselves out of their graves there, and everything was looking nice and cheery.
Except for the gloomy, nearly collapsed library that had something similar to a giant black tarp over it.
And the fact that there were no visible residents, as they were all ghosts, and ghosts liked to stay in their haunts.
…Frankly the effect was even creepier than a town of ruined buildings with zombies and skeletons. That, at least, made sense. This was like something out of a Disney theme park, one perfectly clean and freshly painted, just with nobody around!
Callisto was happy, at least.
Well, I say ‘happy’.
I more mean ‘she was eager to fulfill the contract to get out of my body, and this met the bare minimum of her standards’, so I’d call that a win.
Of course, I had barely enough time to say the word ‘freedom’ before Shimizu and Yuki dragged me off into an alley to fuck me senseless.
It’s good to have friends!
At this point, we were roughly four months into the second year, and had achieved two of the main goals. Get the gun, and get a treaty from Ghost Town. We could ignore them until it was time to face the Evil God of Chastity and Purity, thankfully, at which point they’d serve as a decent distraction.
…Well, a decent minor distraction.
…
Okay fine it’s a ‘barely good enough, very minor’ distraction, but it’s also one that’s absolutely critical!
That said, we still had two targets that I wanted to take care of before the year was out. The Parasitic Nucleus, and the Memetic Mistress. And we still had no idea where to find either of them. Even with Shimizu ensuring her growing harem of fellow students were looking for any sign of them, we had no clue, and they could have been anywhere in the second land mass.
Normally, when playing the game, this is when you get into what I like to call ‘save-scumming’. Or, if you’re being more honest, ‘almost but not quite cheating’. Or if you’re being brutally honest, ‘cheating’.
Without any clue as to where either of them would be, and knowing it was randomized every run, there were basically three options.
You could randomly stumble upon them, you could wait until year four, or you could cheat.
At year four you can access information about where all critical entities are located, in case you missed any. Usually by that time you or somebody else would have stumbled upon one of the two targets we were after, and you would know very quickly when that happened. Sometimes, however, they were just missed, as there was just too much land to go and gain it all. At least not without some very clever tactics that I really didn’t want to use.
Of course, it was optimal to just randomly stumble upon them during year 2, but that wasn’t something you could rely on.
In all practical cases, what you do is you save the game at around month two or three, and then proceed to ignore everything except systematically gaining every piece of land on the second landmass as fast as you can. If you knew what you were doing, you’d have managed to obtain everything by the halfway point of year three at the latest, and you’d know for certain which precise areas had the giant core of evil and the spooky mind-hopping memetic ghost. You’re actually rather likely to find them by the end of year two; halfway through year three is the worst-case scenario.
Once you know where they’re located, you just note those locations down on a piece of paper or a text document, and then reload your earlier save. Knowing where the baddies are, you could focus-fire towards them, snapping up the most valuable land along the way.
That, obviously, wasn’t an option here.
But I had a few advantages that one normally wouldn’t have access to. Two, to be precise. Takeo and Yuki.
Now, let me start with Takeo. He was a huge advantage, but not because he was helping me out. At the time, he very much wasn’t. He was a huge help because he had claimed so much land during the first year, and then just ceded it all to me~ Now that it was year 2, land we had claimed in year 1 would earn us some passive income depending on how valuable it was. Neither of us had focused on the most resource-rich land, instead opting to focus on more strategic concerns, but there was a lot of it. Ultimately, I was making a pretty mint every two weeks. Enough that if we kept up the pace, by year 3 money wouldn’t be a big problem, and by year 4 I’d have more than I’d know what to do with.
Sure, Callisto wasted a lot of it, but not so much that I was destitute.
Then there was Yuki, the seer.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t just have her ask her power ‘what was the best path to the Memetic Mistress’ or ‘where was the Parasitic Nucleus’. It wasn’t that we couldn’t use her powers to achieve our goals, just that it wouldn’t give us direct answers, and asking for a location wouldn’t trigger it.
We could ask ‘what is the fastest route to find so-and-so’, or ‘what is the best route to find this-or-that’, but then the answers got… weird. For example, the first question I used on my quest to abuse her seer powers was ‘How can I defeat the Evil God of Chastity and Purity’. It then gave me some very helpful step-by-step instructions on how to get Sevens to declare the world unsalvageable and destroy everything.
This, obviously, was not optimal.
My next attempt was ‘How can I defeat the Evil God of Chastity and Purity without destroying the world’.
Then it suggested that I convince the entire kingdom to sexually sacrifice every woman of a certain age to the true god, so that he’d actually get off his ass and do something.
Would this work? Yes.
Was that acceptable? No.
Next I added the modifier, ‘as the game intended’, which caused the seer ability to just not work. Apparently, it doesn’t like the idea of alternate realities. So I instead asked how to win, ‘on our own’, which it said was impossible without some very unlikely events.
‘On our own with allies’, back to the sex sacrifice. ‘On our own with local allies’, train up the school's students to be super-sluts, sacrifice them to the chief god.
You can see where this goes.
Asking ‘how do I find x quickly’ results in bizarre answers like ‘create a magic prospecting ritual’ or ‘hire an army to charge blindly into the second land mass, and find what areas they vanished in’.
I’m pretty sure there was some god fuckery going on when asking for anything too specific.
Yuki’s seer powers worked, yes, but the answer was always the optimal route to solve your problem assuming you had no unlisted requirements and no greater priorities. A disturbing number of answers suggested sacrificing those close to me, or, uh, myself. …Or both.
That said, it was usable. You just had to find out the right phrasing. While dealing with her constantly trying to molest you.
In this case, the correct phrasing was, ‘How do I quickly obtain a parasitic tail on my own’.
There are always loopholes if you’re clever enough; in this case, I had to ask not about ‘how to find the nucleus’, but ‘how to obtain something that only shows up near the nucleus’.
This worked. …More or less, at least. The answers Yuki got varied, sometimes drastically, depending on the specifics of how we phrased the question… But they tended to point in a specific location. From there, we spent a couple of time slots planning out where to go and what path to take, using our shared knowledge, and we were good to go.
…Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I needed to claim the land that the nucleus was in, and while I could narrow down its location, I couldn’t know it perfectly. That combined with the fact that land had to be claimed contiguously meant that we were spending quite a lot of time just exploring the wilds.
I admit that I got a bit… worried. And rushed. A bit. Even if Takeo could send his memories back in time, I couldn’t. So this was, in effect, my ‘one shot’. Sure, knowing Takeo could pick up the slack helped me calm down a bit, but I would really rather not be stuck in a time loop unawares.
Like I apparently had been for over a century.
Ugh. Still don’t like thinking about it.
Anyway! We were exploring, and we were getting closer to the Parasite Nucleus… and that’s when I realized that things wouldn’t be as simple as I expected.
I really, really should have realized this earlier. I had been ‘cheating’ the ‘game’ in endless ways since I arrived here. I skipped a boulder that should have blocked off my path; I used a ladder instead of making climbing tools or gliders; I got all of the secret areas underground on the first landmass; I managed to get Callisto to actually work… and all of that is ignoring how Takeo had memories of countless loops, Yuki had a roper in a way that was frankly entirely unrepresented in the game, and how my interactions with my family were…
…
Let’s just say that that’s, ah, ‘not normal’, for Alchemical Corruption 12.
In other words, until then, I was counting on the mechanics of the game being fixed. Now, that wasn’t a useless assumption. Time slots existed. Different segments of land existed. Events followed the same probabilities and were in the same location. But it wasn’t the mechanics of the game that was perfectly accurate.
No, it was the lore.
And that made things substantially different.
Time slots were a game mechanic, yes… but they were also part of the lore. Almost every game you can hear an NPC comment about how weird they are! Almost every game mechanic is backed up by lore… but there are a few instances where they aren’t.
In this case, the key example is the parasitic nucleus.
In game mechanics, after a land close enough to the evil ball of flesh is claimed, then random areas close to its home will start having ‘parasite enemies’.
In terms of lore?
I actually looked up a book on this precise topic, and it had a blurb that looked like it was ripped straight out of the game’s lore blurbs.
“[...] the Parasitic Nucleus is an exception to this rule. Most parasites only produce more of their own kind, or at most stick with a small, but distinct, sub-set of parasites that exist as a ‘family’ of sorts. The Parasitic Nucleus ignores these base assumptions. Once woken, it will infect the very land itself, in an ever-expanding radius, turning all life forms that live in its aura into parasites of all kinds. Some of these parasites die out in short order, but it’s believed that most modern recognized parasitic threats were originally formed by ancient nuclei…”
As a fun note, later in that same book, it says…
“...Why would such an absurd creation exist that defies all laws of common sense and most laws of physics and magic? It is believed to be one of many attempts by the True Lord of the Divine to make His world more interesting…”
Yeah.
In scientific books and collections of research papers, ‘The Head God was a dick’ is an accepted theory for why something exists.
It’s worse because it’s usually true…
…But onto hotter matters!
What this means is that, around four, nearing four and a half months into the second year?
I was leading our expeditions into what would later be called the Tentacled Forest~