Chapter 104: [104]: Void Toxicity, A Glitch in the Meat-Suit
Sebastian let out a low victorious breath. A dark triumphant smile spread across his face.
"Thanks for the tip," he whispered to the empty void.
He had the upgrade for Sanctuary. Now he just needed to survive long enough to get back home and plant it.
Sebastian stood alone on the floating piece of wooden debris. The infinite dark purple expanse of the Juncture stretched out in every direction around him.
He had secured the Divine Iron Shard. He had violently outsmarted the System’s bounty hunters. But as the adrenaline of the one sided slaughter began to fade, the brutal reality of his physical condition violently reasserted itself.
"Guh!"
Sebastian stumbled forward, dropping to his hands and knees on the splintered wood. His chest heaved, his lungs desperately trying to pull oxygen from a vacuum that didn’t have any.
His physical body was critically low on power. He had used a massive amount of real world stamina to manually rewrite the physics of a massive scavenger ship and crush four Level 90 Warlords into a golf ball. He was a battery, and he was flashing red.
He needed mana. He needed raw unedited code to refuel his cells.
Sebastian forced himself to sit up. His hands were shaking. He looked over at the tiny hyper dense bloody marble floating a few yards away, the compressed remains of the four Warlords and their ship.
"Waste not, want not," Sebastian wheezed.
He reached out with a trembling hand, using a fraction of his Concept of Mass to pull the horrific little sphere into his palm. It was incredibly heavy and it smelled distinctly of cooked alien blood.
Buried inside the crushed metal were the digital cores of the four dead gods. Raw experience. Raw energy.
Back on Earth, he had consumed the Ocean Deity, Hydros, by literally eating her core. His glitched World Eater mechanic allowed him to process divine data directly into his own health and mana pools.
He didn’t hesitate. Survival was a math equation, and he needed the numbers to go up.
Sebastian unhinged his jaw. The terrifying unnatural stretch of his mouth was accompanied by the sickening sound of popping cartilage. He shoved the bloody dense marble past his teeth and swallowed it whole.
GULP.
He waited for the familiar rush of stolen power. He waited for the massive experience numbers to flood his vision and heal his torn muscles.
Instead, his stomach violently exploded in pain.
"URGH!"
Sebastian collapsed onto his side, clutching his abdomen. It felt like he had just swallowed a gallon of boiling battery acid mixed with shattered glass.
His body didn’t absorb the cores. It violently rejected them!
[Warning! Fatal Foreign Code Detected!]
[Incompatible Server Architecture!]
The Warlords weren’t from Earth. They were from assimilated planets across the multiverse. Their source code, their foundational physics, and their mana frequencies were completely alien to the Ethereal Plane’s Server 894 architecture.
Eating them without a filter wasn’t a meal. It was a catastrophic hardware conflict.
Sebastian’s pitch black eyes bulged. He forcefully opened his mouth and violently vomited.
SPLAT!
A horrific slurry of black sludgy code, glowing purple error strings, and his own red blood splattered across the wooden debris. The vomit sizzled and smoked, instantly eating a hole right through the wood and dripping down into the void below.
He coughed, spitting thick strands of raw static from his lips.
"Fuck," Sebastian gasped, his voice sounding like a distorted skipping audio file. "Bad... bad idea."
His hybrid green and blue UI forcefully projected itself into his vision, flashing with critical warning signs.
[Status Update: Void Toxicity Spiking.]
[Base File Corruption at 45%.]
[System Integrity Failing.]
The sickness he had caught from the Juncture’s ambient environment was rapidly accelerating, fueled by the incompatible alien code tearing through his digestive system.
Sebastian looked down at his left arm. It was a horrifying sight.
His hand was no longer solid flesh and black leather. It was aggressively glitching. The fingers stuttered in and out of reality, rapidly shifting between pale human skin, green wireframe polygons, and complete transparency.
He tried to clench his fist, but he couldn’t feel his fingers. The connection between his physical brain and his digital avatar was unraveling. The Void Toxicity wasn’t killing him, it was un-rendering him.
"I’m falling apart," Sebastian gritted his teeth. Pure panic finally threatened to pierce his cold exterior.
If his corruption hit 100%, he wouldn’t die and respawn at the Sanctuary Altar. His base files would be permanently deleted. Valerie and Wraith would be left alone on a doomed planet, waiting for a guild master who had been erased from the multiverse.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Sebastian forced himself to his feet. His left leg buckled, the knee joint momentarily turning into a block of raw un-textured static before snapping back into flesh. He leaned heavily on his right side, panting.
He needed a Server Filter. He needed the hardware to translate the foreign data and stabilize his decaying code.
He pulled up the coordinates the chained Admin had given him.
Off in the infinite chaotic distance of the void, past floating islands of ruined architecture and swirling nebulas of purple smog, he saw it.
It was massive. A colossal decaying skull of a space leviathan floating silently in the dark. Embedded within the empty cavernous eye sockets of the dead beast was a sprawling neon lit shantytown.
Outpost Rust.
It looked like a cyberpunk nightmare built entirely out of garbage and desperation. It was a lawless graveyard for scavengers, anomalies, and the scum of the multiverse.
"Alright," Sebastian wheezed, wiping the black sludge from his chin with his remaining solid hand.
He focused his mind, editing his mass down to zero one more time. The effort made his vision tear with jagged horizontal lines of static.
The ticking clock in his head was deafening. He had maybe an hour before he dissolved completely.
"Just gotta make it to the pharmacy," Sebastian muttered.
He bent his glitching knees, locked his eyes on the neon lights of the distant skull, and threw himself into the dark.