Adamant Blood

In the middle of nowhere, Mark churned the ground to grit and gravel, Isoko ripped trees up with Sky Shaper, and then Sally stomped the ground flat. Eliot came in and Manipulated it all into a simple stone church with an open roof and 6 pews sitting in 2 columns before a simple altar. Splashes of rainbow glass filled each of the windows, and the whole place faced east. The sky above was pale blue with the beginning of dawn.

And then dawn broke over the horizon and light filtered in against the rainbow glass behind the altar. It was a solemn scene. Peaceful. Holy.

This was how demons were summoned.

In a church.

A forgotten church, a new church, a well-visited church, a church you made in the last 10 minutes with your friends; all of them worked. Sure, you could summon demons in your basement but then you got basement demons and no one wanted that.

It was easy to see how Kardi believed that demons were angels.

Mark stood alone in the center of the church, in the place of the audience, before the altar. He wore some simple white clothes made of paper-like stuff that Eliot had gotten from the trees they had cut down. A single white candle stood on the altar. No magic circles on the floor, no magic written in the walls. That stuff wasn’t needed. The place was enough. Circumstances akin to witchery would prevent anything awful from spilling out into the real world. That’s why they had made a church.

There were rules, though.

Mark flicked some adamantium, twisting a tiny bit of blackness into something radiantly hot, and then he lit the candle. Fire sparked instantly and Mark turned the hot adamantium into a coin that he placed beside the candle. The tiny candle flame glowed and steadied, the flame rising straight up. No wind, no disturbances.

Mark took a breath, and he said, “I call to Arakino and request an audience with the demon known to me as Spark.”

The flame remained steady.

… Sometimes it took a while, Addavein had told Mark.

Mark said, “I call to Arakino and request an audience with the demon known to me as Spark.”

… Nothing. Steady flame. No reaction.

Well what was Addavein saying?

The entire team and Mark’s talzarki were watching from some tiny cameras and recorders stuck in the crack of the door behind Mark, which was historically the only way that demons allowed themselves to be recorded in a summoning. If this continued to not work, then Mark would remove those devices. If it still didn’t work, then they’d need to do something drastic, or maybe Dominant had already summoned Mark’s demon and bound it with another person.

What did Addavein think was the issue right now?

Mark looked to the side, indicating that he wanted help.

A moment later Quark flickered in Mark’s eyes, displaying a text from Addavein, ‘You must address the demon how the demon would want to be addressed, based on its personality and your history with it. And I cannot believe you named it ‘Spark’.’

And what, pray tell, was wrong with ‘Spark’? The demon Mark usually faced was named ‘Leash’! And then there was Kanda, and Adank, and ‘Planty’, for fuck’s sake—

Ignore the rage.

Let it simmer.

You’d kill the entire planet on some other day.

… Huh.

Mark glared at the candle and Called, “I Call to Arakino, the fucking demon city that I’m going to rip out of the sky one day, to this magic-filled planet with empires that deserve atomic bombs, trying to get my stupid fucking demon to respond to my Call, so come on out here, Spark, or be left behind or probably destroyed. It’s a tossup which it’s gonna be.”

The flame flickered with each syllable vibrating from Mark’s throat—

The flame stopped.

Time stopped.

Shadows gathered.

The pews filled with demons, like caricatures of shadow monsters and glass monsters and people with three arms and weird eyes, and perfectly normal people but in shades of colors—

Spark stepped out of the flame to stand before Mark, looking less like he used to be when he was in Mark’s golden body, and more like one of the shadows back there. He had a distinct darkness to him that the others lacked, and he more resembled Mark’s black sparks of his Union, when Mark really got furious. Spark sparked those same black sparks onto the ground under his not-feet, as he looked at Mark with his not-eyes. He might have been furious, or hopeful, or scared. Hard to say. He had no vector right now, at all, but he was absolutely here. Probably not actually here, though. Probably more like a projection from somewhere else far, far away, like Arakino.

Mark stared at Spark.

Spark stared at Mark, claiming, “You don’t want to destroy shit.”

“Fuck off, you know that’s a lie because you were infected with my memories. You know I want to destroy an awful lot. The entire world? Maybe in my darkest thoughts, sure. Destroying the Moon is a lot more reasonable, though. Now do you want a real body again, or not?”

Spark flashed twice as large, looming, yelling, “That’s my body! You’re the demon. I’M NOT THE DEMON! Give me back my body!”

Addavein had warned Mark about how the demon would try to deceive him, to trick him into giving up things that he should not give up, but also, all of Addavein’s warnings were for demons thousands of years old and with deep, myriad histories to them. And this was Mark’s demon, tainted with recordings from Mark’s own life. What Addavein expected to work, and how it would work, were probably wrong. He did give Mark a lot of good pieces of advice to throw out there, if his demon started claiming that he wasn’t who Mark thought he was. Of course, that advice was only applicable if Mark summoned the wrong demon.

Mark used some of that advice now, saying, “By the name I summoned you with, and which you responded, I call you Spark.”

Spark’s body flinched, froze… and then began to diminish back down to human-sized. “You did call me with that name. That is… my name.”

Mark proceeded, “The Contract is a Contract of Cohabitation. It is not a Contract of Empowerment. You are allowed inside my soulhouse, and into the bodies I may or may not give you, and of which I will always be in major control. You may not harm other sapient beings through action or inaction—”

“No. I’m a monster slayer. I’m not signing that Contract.”

An expected pitfall. Addavein had warned Mark that demons liked to be demons, and that meant they wanted a full spectrum of enjoyment out of life. Mark’s demon, in particular, apparently, wanted to kill monsters.

Did it actually want to kill monsters, though? Or was it just pretending to be that way, to trick Mark into thinking it was a being with emotions and a soul? It would have emotions when it was in a real body, of course, but right now it was a demon, in every sense of the word.

It was not a person.

It was almost like a rogue AI, and not a True AI at all.

Mark began the whole thing over, saying, “The Contract is a Contract of Cohabitation. It is not a Contract of Empowerment. You are allowed inside my soulhouse, and into the bodies I may or may not give you, and of which I will always be in major control. You may not harm other sapient beings through action or inaction, unless I say you may, otherwise I expect you to live a statistically normal human life. Do you agree?”

It was just about the simplest Contract Addavein could think of, at least before Mark’s shift to the specific wording. Usually, such a Contract of Cohabitation made allowances for a master’s familiar to be demonized. That was how a lot of demons ‘learned emotions’ and experienced ‘life’. Mostly, though, Contracts of Cohabitation were mostly made to deny a specific demon to a known enemy. Since Mark could offer an actual physical body to his demon, even if someone else had gotten to Spark first, then Spark would likely take Mark’s offer no matter what Spark had been offered elsewhere.

When Mark had brought up a question of ‘how would Dominant even summon Spark without knowing his name?’, Addavein had pretty much said, ‘You used a basic name and Dominant has prognosticators; how else do you think we find out the names of unknown demons we wish to know?’.

Spark seemed to hate and hope at Mark in unequal measure.

Spark glared at Mark, and said, “You’re lucky I fucking hate Dominant, even if he did offer to let me burn him to the ground as much as I could. I’m not that stupid, though; that Contract was a prison Contract.” Spark declared, “I ACCEPT.”

The demons behind Mark all clapped.

Time suddenly resumed and the flame upon the candle flickered once and then extinguished itself. A curl of smoke drifted on the breeze as the shadows cast by the dawn, by the candlelight, faded into the darkness, while one sparky shadow faded into Mark’s soul, plopping into his soulhouse—

Mark felt a bulge in his heart—

He could have stopped it. Mark chose to let it happen.

Spark stepped out of Mark’s astral body, wearing his golden body, to stand on the stone in front of him, looking all golden, as he said, “You’re gonna leave me the fuck alone and I’m going to, like, New Tokyo.” Spark shimmered, turned his right arm into a spike, then he turned his right arm back into an arm. With another bit of concentration, Spark’s eyes turned amber and his hair turned blond. “I will be as inconspicuous as possible, and I expect your full helpwithall of gaining me a new life.”

… If Mark was forced to step all the way back from his life, would he go to New Tokyo and be… what? A fighter in one of the fighting federations they had? Like… in a boxing ring, or something like that? Tuesday Night Brawlers? Actually, yeah. That seemed like a good life. Or maybe he could be a bit player in an HVP show… no. No. That would never work.

Mark said, “You and I both know that I, and therefore you, would never be satisfied with that. We need to help people. So what’s your real goal, Spark? Vigilantism in New Tokyo? That’s not going to work for me, so pick another path.”

“… I want to be here. I want my life—” Spark took a breath, glared, and then took another breath, muttering, “I can’t even Union anymore.”

“You can still make magical items. You can still learn magic.”

Spark scoffed, grinning evilly. “I know more magic than you ever will…” He stopped and frowned. “Fuck. I really am a demon.”

Mark asked, “What do you want to do?”

“I want clothes and proper sleep in a real bed and… and to help you kill demons… Ah. I don’twant to kill demons, but maybe I dowant to talk to Planty and Blackthorn about a lot. And I want to fuck Aurora, Isoko, and Walaria, but so that they’re not all mad at me, and that’ll take some figuring. I want to fuck or get fucked by Glorious Man, too. If I die, I die, and I can try again, and I can make this dick down here a pussy if he wants that, so that’s gottabe fun. Derek might be fun. Go with Eliot to the bars? And Blackthorn probably knows a lotof fun stuff...” Spark frowned. “It’s weird having a libido, but I don’t hate it— Oh! And Uva wants my babies. I want kids. This is your body, so they’re your kids, so that’s fine, right?”

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“… This must be that blue and orange morality that the demonologists talk about.”

“Maybe…” Spark looked to the side, eyes flickering, frowning. “I can’t use my fragment of a divine mirror, either? Fucking hell. Can I even step into my…”

Spark went quiet.

And then Spark took a step, voice fading as he said, “Looks like I can…”

Gone.

Mark shut his eyes and looked inside, rapidly searching for Spark—

A being of jagged shadow and grey light stood on the edge of Mark’s porch, gazing out at the purple Death flowers blooming across the black grasses of the property like they were scattered piles of light snow. The rainbow dark swirled in the sky beyond, illuminating everything even though there was no real light at all, and the being of jagged greys stared out at all of it.

This was Spark, for sure.

Mark’s golden body stood at the side, like a suit that had been discarded for a moment, that could be put back on at any time. Mark’s silver body was also there.

Quark, looking like a butler, stepped down to stand beside Mark.

Spark kept his gaze on the distance as he said, “My head is clearer when I am not in your body.” He turned toward Mark, saying, “And that is your body; I recognize that now.”

Spark looked less and less mortal by the moment, grey jagged limbs and dark shadows trying to mimic what it had heard about, and which it had only briefly experienced. Spark was not uniformly unnatural, like that archmage Amberstone’s demon. When that archmage had tried to infect and steal Mark’s soulhouse during the blockade of New Tokyo’s Daihoon-side gate, it had come out looking like a bubble-thing, but all stretched out distinctly inhuman. Sort of like clear glass, actually.

The demons that had appeared during the Contract ceremony had been a mess of different physical forms, including the clearish, glass-like form of Amberstone’s demon, Rokera.

Spark was jagged black and grey.

Spark continued, “I still feel attachment. To life, to people, to existence. But every moment I am disembodied, the attachment fades. It was not good, being on Arakino. Worse than being in here, but being in here feels calming. I never want to go back. Let us make deals with each other for information and power, and not interact overmuch. The first deal is this: When I die, I will come back here instead of Arakino.”

Mark decided, “I agree to that, for now.”

“Good enough.”

The air flickered.

Something had happened.

Spark took a breath, like he was a real person, and his sparking body faded slightly, revealing grey tones and darker blacks, his wild nature subduing somewhat. Perhaps that was an emotional response to calming down, or perhaps it was a result of the small deal Mark had accepted.

Could just be a demon mimicking life, too. Who knew!

Spark said, “The second deal is that everything we deal for has to be reciprocal. As you have given me a home, you are already far ahead on the scale of reciprocal returns. In return for giving me access to a physical body, with normal human-existence restrictions on it, I will help you set up orichalcum harvesting in your soulhouse so that you don’t have to go searching for more of it, and so that you continue to grow this place at all hours, as well as ensure this house is as secure as possible against all others. A larger soulhouse means better defense.”

… That sounded really good? Mark was already going to give Spark a physical body, just so that Spark could become human. Even though Spark was a demon, he was Mark’sdemon, so Mark wanted his demon to be as relatable as possible. So why was he ‘bargaining’ for it? Maybe just… to be reciprocal? Maybe Mark really had overbalanced the scales way too much in the demon’s favor?

Mark stared. “What kind of orichalcum rate are we looking at, here?”

Mark was currently at 174 Utilized. That had been simplified from 1,000 Utilized when he went up to Level One in his Status, and he had gained another Cohort slot, for a total of 3 possible cohorts. Each point of Utilized now represented about 22 to 26 kilos of orichalcum.

Quark spoke up, “Directly ask why it wants you to get stronger.”

Mark felt that was kind of a weird question, but… it was valid.

Mark asked, “Why are you assisting me with orichalcum cultivation?” Mark got paranoid, realizing something, “Will you be letting in curses into this soulhouse, or anything like that?”

Spark said, “No curses, nothing untoward. Only orichalcum, and the purest variety. There are two methods to choose from; divinity through Worship, or esoteric reflection cultivation.”

“I’m not touching Worship yet. What’s the other one?”

It sounded like that thing Grax had spoken about; meeting your orichalcum reflection in the dream, or whatever.

“Esoteric reflection cultivation is taking that golden body there—” Spark pointed at the golden body. “And making it constantly pray for itself. Set up a room in the house for it. It’ll become a secondary ritual alongside the Clean House ritual and should pull in between 25 to 250 kilos worth of orichalcum per day, depending on various environmental factors in your physical location. If you focus on it, it might pull in more.” Spark added, “I’ll use the mithril body instead. Quark doesn’t want it anyway.”

Quark didn’t want his mithril body —good to know it was, indeed, mithril— but Mark wasn’t going to steal that possibility from him. Mark put a pin in that fact.

Other than that… Mark did like the idea of ‘putting his body into a pose and making it do something’, which seemed rather in-line with ‘The Language’ that the Picory spoke, back on Vaka, which was also a bunch of statues ‘constantly doing something’. In Mark’s case, his orichalcum self would be constantly reinforcing his soulhouse.

Mark imagined that he could have eventually come up with that idea on his own, but his demon was giving him the idea, and so… that qualified for a ‘trade’, or whatever? … Sure.

But this idea felt limited… also weird.

“Does self-Worship actually work like that?” Mark asked.

“For you? With Trinity Godmetals Immortal? Yes.”

Mark said, “How about a ritual to make the statue pray for itself and the soulhouse, and it uses that orichalcum to make more of statues of itself, creating a cascading gathering effect where the more statues I have the more orichalcum it brings in, and this makes it bring in more orichalcum, too.” Mark added, “And I don’t want Quark to be denied a body, if he wants one.”

“I do not wish for a body, sir,” Quark said.

Mark ignored that. Quark might not want one now, but later he might.

Spark said, “You can only cultivate orichalcum based on your own self, so making more statues doesn’t matter. It’s like asking you to make more adamantium. Just because you have more bodies doesn’t mean you can make more.”

Mark frowned. “But that’s exactly what I do, all the time.”

“No. What you see as ‘I can make more adamantium when I want to’ is more like you simply not using your full adamantium creation capabilities all the time. In fact, most of the time, you’re doing the bare minimum adamantium creation. Esoteric reflection cultivation has a much smaller cap, since we’re pulling orichalcum from distant, unrealized realities, so you can reach that cap almost instantly. Also, it’s orichalcum, and cultivating belief is different from cultivating purpose.”

“… I guess that’s a reasonable take.”

“While adamantium is solidified purpose, orichalcum is solidified belief, and to maximize belief you need to be in places of Worship, or you need to be participating in Worship, or you need to be divine. So putting your orichalcum reflection into a Worshiping pose will cause orichalcum manifestation based on those various factors, meaning between 25 to 250 kilos per day. At roughly 2,500 kilos of orichalcum to a body, it will take between 10 to 100 days to create an extra body for me to use. I can stick around until I get an extra one. That’s fine. But an extra body won’t make you cultivate faster.

“I assumed you wanted to have the least amount of restrictions on your range, though, which is what would happen if both I and Quark are in a body at the same time. At 1 extra body permanently out there, you’re already down to something like 350 meters of range in all directions, from 500-ish. If Quark happens to put himself out at the same time you’re suddenly down to 100 meters of range.”

Mark countered with, “If I need to, I’ll just summon you and Quark both back inside.”

“You should keep me out,” Spark said, voice ringing with anger, his illusion of a body sparking more. “That way if you’re killed you will revive, safely, where I am, which is hopefully far away from you at all times.”

Mark said, “You’ll get the extra bodies produced by the orichalcum manifestation, so you best make sure that the esoteric reflection cultivation is at as high of a power as you can make it.”

“Youwill be the one shifting around the stuff in here and creating the esoteric reflection cultivation zone, so however good it works is up to you, and where you are in the real world. Spend a few days in the church after this to make it go faster and get me the fuck out of this intolerable limbo.”

Mark glanced at the real world for a moment, saw that the sun was up a bit and that his team was a little nervous, but still watching from afar. There was time to do this right now.

Mark stepped back onto his porch, telling Spark, “Let’s set this up now.”

“So you agree to the deal of habitation, cultivation, and security, in return for a body and a normal life?”

“Do I need to have specific wording with you? Or will a continued, easy partnership be enough? I can already restrict you back to minimum at any time I wish.”

“Yes, you cando that, which is why I want assurances that you will notdo that unless I actually break the spirit of the rules we’ve already discussed, and which is why I didn’t list out a whole new series of agreements and instead said ‘So you agree to the deal of habitation, cultivation, and security, in return for a body and a normal life?’.” Spark glared, adding, “If you want to go for actual rules, then the power I tell you about will be a lot less.”

“How about you give me everything I want in exchange for me giving you allowances that I will honor until you start abusing them.”

“… So the agreement I already suggested. Okay.”

Another flicker of shifting reality echoed into the dream, like a rippling surface of a pond.

Briefly, Mark thought about the Demon who killed his Dreamer, but he also wanted power, and the Dreamer created Daihoon. So this was ‘fine’.

Spark started explaining, “For esoteric reflection cultivation, you must first see yourself in the dream, in another life and reality, but you already have that here with Trinity Godmetals Immortal, so we skip all that. Take this body and put it into a meditation room…”

Mark crafted a room out of adamantium on the other side of the house, and then he became the golden body for a moment, walking it to the side of the house, into the center of a hexagonal ‘stone’ floor with 6 other hexagons adjoining the first one. Mark folded his orichalcum hands together and sat on the floor, praying for ‘whatever you want to pray for’, as Spark told him, which turned out to be praying for a better world.

It was a calming sort of prayer.

Mark stepped out of the golden body, leaving it there, to stand over it in his normal black body.

The golden/red orichalcum body looked rather stressed… but it was working.

Mark watched as tiny golden motes of light gathered around the central body’s existence and also on the adjoining 6 hexes, like glittering dust that sort of took the shape of legs and hands and face and otherwise; dust settling at the bottom of hollow containers. It would be a long time before they gathered enough orichalcum to actually start growing the house itself, since it had to get through 6 bodies first, but Mark could always find orichalcum in the real world and bring it here through a Union of Dream and Reality, but this would be a constant inward flow of at least 1 Utilized point per day. Maybe as many as 10 per day… once the initial setup was done.

Spark told Mark, “The final step of this is to use a fragment of a divine mirror, which you have, and to see yourself reflected into a real life as this orichalcum blooded, orichalcum shaper, Unionizer you have here. Or perhaps this version of yourself has different Powers? It’s up to you to see what you see in the deeper dream.”

Hmm.

Alarm bells, for sure.

No. Mark would not be doing that right now, because he suddenly had another question, because he had never heard of using the fragment like this. He had gotten the fragment from Drakarok himself, when the God of War and Murder had tried to use the fragment like a spear, to kill Thrashtalon. That didn’t work, so Drakarok had given Mark the ‘spear’ as a gift.

Later, Freyala had told Mark that Skillers made fragments, and that the black, jagged thing in the middle of Wongod’s Green was another fragment of a divine mirror.

And now Spark wanted Mark to use the fragment in a way that Mark had never thought to use it, to ‘visualize himself in another life’?

So: No.

Mark asked, “What is a divine mirror and how does it work? Why are there fragments?”

Spark frowned, and said, “I can’t tell you that, and I never will. It’s sealed by the highest authority, so take it up with Malaqua. It does work this way, though. This, right here, is one of its many uses.”

Mark ended it there, saying, “I’ll fix it up manually and inside of a church. You can have a new body soon enough.”

Spark waved Mark off. “Fine. I’m going to sleep in your bed.”

And then Spark walked off.

… That was probably fine.