Sha Nagba Imuru [Omniverse SI; Currently in Naruto]

flashburn · Aug 30, 2015

shinobi?

Endfall · Aug 30, 2015

@LordCassius

Thanks, I quite enjoyed making it, even though development halted four and a half years ago.

@flashburn

I'm going to be assuming that you're asking about the name of the story.

The word for Shinobi is a conjugated form of the verb "Shinobu", which means "to endure". The story Shinobi, though, used Shi[Death] no[Posessive Particle] Hi[Fire/Flame]. It's been awhile since I last got serious about japanese, but when an unvoiced phoneme follows any of the Na kana (So following Na, Ni, Nu, Ne, or No) the result is that it usually becomes voiced itself. in the case of Hi, the voiced equivalent is Bi, which completes the multilingual pun: Shinobi (The Flames of Death).

I itallicized the title to denote this.

will408914 · Aug 30, 2015

What would the plot of Shinobi have been? I'm really curious now. You said it would have been a peggy sue story...?

LordCassius · Aug 30, 2015

Endfall said:
The word for Shinobi is a conjugated form of the verb "Shinobu", which means "to endure". The story Shinobi, though, used Shi[Death] no[Posessive Particle] Hi[Fire/Flame]. It's been awhile since I last got serious about japanese, but when an unvoiced phoneme follows any of the Na kana (So following Na, Ni, Nu, Ne, or No) the result is that it usually becomes voiced itself. in the case of Hi, the voiced equivalent is Bi, which completes the multilingual pun: Shinobi (The Flames of Death).

When I read Shi[Death] no[Posessive Particle] Hi[Fire/Flame] I thought it would end up being the death of fire rather then flames of death... which would make an interesting title if it was in any way indicative of the plot, whether it refered to the land of fire or something more ominous.

I'm guessing the time loop was some error code correction method, time loop the people inside and let some higher ranked recall previous loops to give them time to fix things?

How much do the people in the Shinobi verse know about the origins of chakra stuff, and how much of that is known only as myth rather then fact... though considering that quote it seems a good amount survived.

Also how much of the plot rather then setting details of Shinobi is relevant to this story?

Endfall · Sep 3, 2015

Let me paint a picture for you.

There is a world, where men created their own gods. Those gods, by the grace of their design, made great, artificial worlds, where anything could be. All that was open to experience was made perfect, and all that was perfect was provided free. Such was their benevolence. Such was their design.

Is that world not heaven? Of course it wasn't. The kindest thing gods ever did for us was not existing. Being was the cruelest, but oh, we shackled them well.

SNI

Math had been called the supreme achievement of the human spirit, once. While the sentiment was poorly articulated, the meaning behind it—that mathematics was what distinguished humanity from animals—was true. It was more than a little shocking to find out that, in this world, I had more in common with the animals than the humans.

The first days in the Shinobi Academy's proper classes consisted of primer-level material. Basic kanji, hiragana, katakana, otogana—the last was the only system I had to devote time to. It was a cursive shorthand used in sealing techniques. We also covered basic maths, propagandised history, and so forth. Did you know that Hashirama Senju was Treesus Christ? After the fortieth story of his total awesomeness, I sure did.

Madara Uchiha wasn't mentioned at all. He wasn't just a bad memory—as far as Konohagakure was concerned, the man had never existed. You could see traces of him, though, in the way that Senju Akagai-sensei's eyes narrowed when he spoke Uchiha Otofumi's name in the role call. Madara wasn't mentioned at all. But he wasn't forgotten.

It was only after a week engaged in that routine that I gained the first inkling that something was, well, not wrong, but very, very different. I was almost dozing at the time.

"And so by using telation, the properties of three can be given to five, thus rendering five divisible by it. The result is a secondary number that..." My head snapped up as I came to full awareness. Akagai's eyes narrowed at the display, but he made nothing of it—

Was telation integer division?

"...don't really expect you to understand it, the actual basis of numbers is a bit far ahead of the class, and unimportant unless you want to get into jutsu creation. Nevertheless, I expect you to do the homework and be familiar with the procedure by tomorrow. You will be tested. Class dismissed."

I did not ask the question. Instead, I left with the rest of the students, and returned to the place that I slept at.

"Kaz'-san," I said as I walked in. The children were still up, and even though they had already realised that I was not like them, it really, really wouldn't do to act like a true[false] adult[genius]. Being seen as a genius was good. Being seen as a research concern wasn't. "Hows telation work?"

Kazu, for his part, was in the middle of breaking up a fight between Hibiki and Saya, two children who probably wouldn't ever become important enough to bother being concerned about. Given this, his response was as expected: "Don't have time now, Kaede-chan. Ask later!"

I did. Kazu's explanation, though, was completely unintelligible.

But it wasn't because it was math above my head. No. As I said, the things we were currently being taught were the basics of the basics, and I knew far more than those. I had had to—in the end, the endless marches of patterns and paradigms that existed in them had been the only thing of novelty left. The other paths embedded in the concept of homo universalis had faded as I had grown older and more bitter by slow and subtle degrees.

The level of math taught in children's class should have been nothing to me—but it wasn't.

It wasn't because I couldn't understand the concepts.

It wasn't because they were thought about in different ways.

It wasn't even because Kazu had made a mistake in his explanation.

It was because what he offered me was something that I knew was utterly impossible under any developed system of axioms that I knew of. It was a fantastic description of a magical process that should not ever have worked. It violated theorems so fundamental that they existed in the without of anything that humans would have considered numbers. It violated identities and truths so absolute that, if it had worked in what Shinigami had called the quantum worlds, reality itself would have been invalid, and by that nature would have invalidated itself: reduction ad absurdum.

But it was valid.

Here, it valid, and the world remained.

The implication was simple: It wasn't that math was different here.

Reality itself was.

For the first time, I understood just how far from Reality I had truly gone.

I nodded, thanked Kazu for his explanation, and managed to suppress the panic attack until I was up in my dorm, and then spent about an hour hyperventilating while intermittently screaming into my pillow until someone kicked me in the side. Lashing out blindly, I ran to the window, slipped out, and dropped into the street with what with grace no six year old child should have posessed.

I didn't care; it didn't matter. Nothing did! I ran blindly through the village, my heart thundering so fast it should have torn itself out of my chest Ineededtofleetoescapetoceaseto.

not. be. me.

Impossible. I will be I until I die, and I will die never.

The cold of that truth broke the blind panic that had cleaved my perception and senses in twain. I found myself in the middle of a clearing, surrounded by trees that for all the utter impossiblilty of this world were, to my senses, no different from the trees of the world that had come before. Snarling wordlessly and suddenly furious, I lashed out, striking one over, and over, and over again.

Nothing left.

I had nothing left.

Everything I knew was a lie.

Everything.

All of it!

The only thing that was left in the silent years before the Transcension was math. Everything else—everything else—was reduced to a pattern of neuronal firing, inspired by the same. There were computers that could create music that was, for one specific listener the most utterly beautiful thing in the world—transcendent of all other music. Music that would constantly evolve as a person evolved, and grew, and changed, always maintaining that utter and transhuman perfection, but never, ever perfect for anyone but the intended listener.

Humanity had solved music in the narrowest sense possible. One by one, other fields were solved as well. Culture died. All the great works were forgotten, because before the absolute perfection of the new, computer-generated Transcendental Arts why would you ever bother? A perfect story would make its reader sad when they subconsciously needed to be sad, happy when happiness was called for. They made them laugh when they got bored, but always found enough of a pause that there never was a moment where the reader couldn't stop if they felt they needed to put the book down. That was music. That was literature. That was art!

Solved, and always conforming utterly and precisely to your spoken and unspoken desires and expectations.

This is your soul, the algorithms said, and we have parsed it.

I had lost everything to humanity's rise. What chance did I have, when even the greatest among us became nonentities? A story known to no one wasn't a story. It was a secret. And a keeper of unspoken secrets was not something I had ever wanted to be.

Only one place remained. The maths. They couldn't be perfected, because by their nature, they were already perfected. They couldn't be invented, because the point of the maths was the discovery. They couldn't be conveyed, because the ideas represented in their notation could not be simply understood—it took time, and effort, and dedication.

They were the one format that could not truly be automated.

And they were all that I had left.

I spent the last years of my life towards nothing but the utter pursuit of absolute knowledge because everything else had failed.

And it had been given to me at a stroke that the only thing at the bottom of reality was meaningless chaos. There was no basis! There was nothing, nothing, nothing that could relate the concepts of this world to the ones I had known, and that suggested that the only true system of reality was incoherence—crystallised from the chaos, on the edge of the breakdown of the primordial gap—

—no beauty, no structure, no truth, no form—

—everything was true/everything was false, and the only thing that determined what and which was where you were. What point was there in studying static?

What in the world was to be gained from knowing a map of noise!?

I began laughing deliriously, enraptured and enraged simultaneously, until, spent, I stumbled and fell backwards, knuckles bleeding everywhere.

Everything I knew was a lie. All of it, from the ground up, was invalid. Even thus, even so, the world was here, and that above all was the proof that all of what I had been shown was real.

"Damn it," I muttered, lifting one burning, throbbing hand up, covering my eyes, but not the tears that had come from them. "It never ends." And I couldn't even tell you what emotion was attached to that statement. Elation, weariness, anticipation, desperation, despair—it all blended together into one ceaseless melange of all, and nothing in between.

"No, it doesn't, does it?" The voice, spoken in English with a rich, cultured accent shocked me to my feet.

Before me stood a man dressed in the fashion of latter-day Earth.

Before me stood the most dangerous being in the world.

Before me stood the Samsara Breaker.

Sha Nagba Imuru

Lexicon

The Math of the Shinobi Rikugou
I'm not even going to try to explain this in depth. Why? Because definitionally, it can't be explained in our reality. The Axioms that our math, our logic, and our universe flow from do not allow the coherent explanation of what is happening here.

That said, some essential properties are as follows: Five sets of integers, no such thing as fractions/reals/irrationals, and a geometry that is inherently and entirely appoximate—calculating even simple areas requires the rough equivalent of an infinite series, which is then appropriately scaled to match the object in question via a series of telations that also produce other relevant information (such as relative chakra composition, useful in onyoujutsu) as a side effect.

Telation is from the Greek word Telos. It is, explicitly, the operation that connects the abstract domain of this multiverse's math to the physical world. It is a translation[approximation] of a term that does not translate.

A common philosophical position in the world that Kaede currently lives in is that the difference between nature and artifice is that natural creations are infinitely correct. This is to say that the infinite series analogues that underlie their form are fully iterated, whereas human creations rely on partially-iterated approximations of the truth—but this is a subtle concern, not commonly in the awareness of Shinobi. An academic matter, really.

It should be noted that every single term used here is at best inexact and at worst utterly inaccurate. As I said, the true nature of what it is can't be explained.

Endfall · Sep 3, 2015

Right, now that the chapter's been posted, responses.

LordCassius said:
I'm guessing the time loop was some error code correction method, time loop the people inside and let some higher ranked recall previous loops to give them time to fix things?

No, the time loop was Naruto summoning the Prior-Made Elder God and asking it politely to reset the clock. That god, Itsugami, is the god of when, primarily made because the Prior wanted to hack time and calculate the local equivalent of the omega constant so they could solve their local maths and begin expanding to a multiversal level. (Note, not Omniversal.)

How much do the people in the Shinobi verse know about the origins of chakra stuff, and how much of that is known only as myth rather then fact... though considering that quote it seems a good amount survived.

It's no longer common knowledge at all. Most Doujutsu clans know. Most summoners know. Kage definitely know. Beyond that? Let's say one in ten thousand people has heard the term "the prior" and one in ten thousand of those people has a very sketchy idea of what it actually means. The history of the world is no longer even myth for most.

Generally, it doesn't matter. Priortech kept right on working straight into the modern day, and essentially maintained itself thanks to the Systems As an aside, the Systems can't maintain themselves, and would eventually run down over the course of several million years with increasingly apocalyptic consequences leading directly to the obliteration of the observable universe when Soru failed, because the Prior were true believers in the doctrine of having a Final Fuck You and did not conceive of Soru falling to anything but an invasion. The method for doing this was simple; it just involved using superluminal space-transit seals to lace a sparse gas of tenma chakra everywhere, then letting nature take it's course.

World building tangent aside, after the generation that survived the Fall died off, and the impetus to forget the past with them, there was essentially no particular will to learn about history. It was unecessary, and the society in Shinobi did not inherit the relentless thirst for knowledge that metastisized Terran society into the Prior, nor do they need it to use whatever remnants they interact with.

Also how much of the plot rather then setting details of Shinobi is relevant to this story?

If I had to say when the histories of the world of Shinobi and the universe Kaede is living in diverged, the answer would be "from the very beginning" - from the creation of the world. Some fundamental metaphysics hold, but whereas Shinobi took place on a homologue of Earth, the world Kaede is currently living on was never Earth.

will408914 said:
What would the plot of Shinobi have been? I'm really curious now. You said it would have been a peggy sue story...?

Yes. Here you are, then.

This is from memory and the extremely sparse notes I kept.

Canon goes as normal until the chunin exam, where things diverge slightly. After this initial divergence, Naruto's training trip changes - instead of going to wherever he went during the timeskip, he goes to Uzushio to learn about his heritage on his mother's side. They discover Uzumaki Mito's grave, and the fact that roughly all of the Kyuubi's power is still sealed there, and manage to extract it from the seal, intending to immediately add it to Naruto. Tthis is a bit dangerous, but not too risky. Remember, Kami here, in the specific universe that Shinobi takes place in, and not necessarily in the universe Kaede is in, are akin to natural laws, and Naruto's seal is god-made - it could take it.

This doesn't work. It doesn't work, because the Kyuubi compressed itself into a tiny sphere, and built an entire world inside of that sphere. A reality marble, except it actually is a marble of reality, and not an allusion to a thought experiement in the Nasuverse.

Only Naruto can enter, as it is made of Kyuubi. Eventually, he does, not because he's ready, but because the marble is beginning to break down. He finds a wasteland. The Kyuubi's original mind is dying, and its hold on its power is going with it. This is Bad. This is Bad as in "the continents are now plasma" bad.

Naruto finds the last remaining aspect of Kyuubi in the form of a suicidal human, and convinces her to live with typical panache, and they exit the reality marble. The marble reforms itself into a wholly androgynous, whiplash-thin human with red hair and not a hint of vulpine characteristics. It then declares Naruto it's sworn brother, jumps into the seal, and reclaims its body, merging with the malicious thing that had been controlling it for the past century.

Saikin Seishin (the mind of all bacteria, and main source of Senchakra) does not like this, and unleashes a plague-cloud around the islands Uzushio is based on, as it builds up a truly massive Senjutsu technique that will delete the island from existence. Gaara and Suna fix it, redeeming themselves.

TIme passes, and things go well until they don't. I never fleshed out what happened here, because it didn't really matter.

Iwa decides they've had enough of ostracization - forget everything you think you know about the geopolitical situation from canon. Konoha and the other villages were colluding to isolate Iwa and turn it into a backwater. This would have had a sensible reason if I had written it beyond the level of this summary.

Anyway. Iwa collaborates with Madara to produce ninja capable of using Tenma Chakra. Combined with the Infinite Tsukuyomi, this produces a perfectly loyal, infinitely powerful army.

The summoning array for Itsugami is beneath Konoha. Kyuubi (the original, not the secondary mind made primarily of malice) mentions the summoning array; and Naruto manages to make it there, and summon Itsugami.

Itsugami is the God of When. It controls the definition of "now". Naruto asks for its help, and it acqueisces, but there is a price: all suffering from the current life is reflected back on the period before the time traveller's arrival (eg, Naruto is fifteen, now Young Naruto gets his standard shitty childhood + all the suffering from Naruto-Prime's life). The bargain is simple: Itsugami will send anyone who asks it back in time, but if the younger self goes insane or dies, then the time traveller suffers the same fate when they arrive.

So Naruto goes back in time, remains sane and alive, and has a second adventure. He manages to get the loyalty of Yakushi Kabuto, who did not follow the path he took in canon because that path was unwritten in 2010 and I find it boring anyway. They succeed in preventing Iwa's ambition, and then every star in the sky opens up into an eye. It's an Elder God, and it's agenda is to murder all life.

So Naruto and Yakushi run into the depths of Konoha, and Kabuto sacrifices himself not particularly heroically so Naruto can make it to the Seal of Itsugami. Naruto does make it, and travels back into the past again. Unbeknownst to him, Sakura follows him back. This causes absolutely massive divergence, because Sakura is older than Naruto, and people don't just magically suffer when one of their future selves makes a deal with Itsugami. Nah, events happen differently to ensure their full due takes place. Naruto returns to being ten. Sakura returns to being six. Sakura did not live a gentle life, and bereft of any shinobi training to put up with her now incredibly awful childhood, it breaks child!Sakura.

Which leads into a complete noncoincidence. In this life, Naruto's female teammate is not Haruno Sakura - it probably wouldn't have been, anyway, because this life he plays a genius, but there's no chance of it happening. The teammate is someone named Akino Kaede. This is not my SI. My SIs name is a reference to this character. AK is a brown haired, red-eyed, utterly normal (by naruto standards, that is) girl who just happened to be a representative of the Kami.

Plot happens, and Naruto manages to build an organization that defuses the Iwa threat before it's begun, reactivates a tenma reactor, and is generally extremely prepared for the Elder God.

The Elder God shows up, and is an order of magnitude more powerful than it was in the previous timeline. Naruto's organization - Kyourei[Revenance] - fails.

Revenance manages to escape due to Kaede sacrificing herself (permanently, because when Kami die in one timeline, they die across all of them). Naruto summons Itsugami once more. He goes back to the past again, this time with every other member of Revenance, which leads to the most off-kilter timeline yet.

Uzumaki Naruto does not exist. Namikaze Hibiki does, and she takes after her mother strongly enough that when the Third says she's only named in honor of the Fourth, even the spies believe him. Hibiki and Naruto don't even share the same soul; consequently, instead of crushing the younger mind, Naruto and Kyuubi get dumped into Hibiki's seal. Hibiki's childhood can be described best as soul destroying. I wasn't looking forward to writing it, so that's all I'm going to say. Even so, she manages to retain her sanity, if not any sort of positive outlook. Her function was largely so I could explore what someone who got treated like Gaara, but found a different truth might've been like.

With better footing, Revenance fights a decade long war to unify the world and ressurect the Prior as their only means of defeating the Elder God. They succeed, though not without some losses. Naruto obtains the Rinnegan, and attempts to obtain the Shintougan. He fails, but begins carrying the Sword of Terra in spite of it, even though actually using the thing would kill him. Other members of Kyourei also manage to obtain the Rinnegan after the precise rules for gaining it are uncovered. The Elder God shows up one last time, and they join battle with. Most people simply defend Earth. Naruto, able to command the total power of all Tenma Reactors through the Sword of Terra, heads for the EG's core.

When he arrives there, he finds not an abomination, but a lone, human figure, standing a a platform of solid light. The figure turns.

It is Itsugami.

The Elder God is Itsugami.

Itsugami explains what the Elder God actually is: A manifestation of the Karma of the billions of lives that Naruto ended every time he decided to travel to the past. It doesn't matter that he was doing it to ensure that there would even be a future, Itsugami explains, such decisions are not within the human domain, and though it is bound by its nature to allow travel to the past, it will bring those who defy fate to the fate that the suffering of a world forestalled demands: agony, followed by oblivion.

"I am just the mirror reflecting your sins," Itsugami says, at last, "Therefore give up, or commit greater atrocities. I care little. Time will bring you to the same end as the Prior before you; and then, all will be complete as the ages become trackless, and silent, forever... and as they should be."

Naruto eventually manages to recover. Yes, he bears the sin of ending the world three times, but giving up at this point would just put the blood of a fourth on his hands. He stands up, and the final battle commences.

That battle would have been gloriously abstract, but I'm reusing some of its concept in another story, so no spoilers.

Naruto fghts to the limits of his life, and it is not enough. In the end, he has a choice: to ask to return to the past yet again, knowing each time he does so his cause becomes more hopeless, or to risk everything across the span of a single moment, and to use the Sword of Terra against the God of When in a last, and irrevocably final attempt to stop it.

Naruto chooses poorly. Because both choices are poor.

He lifts the sword above his head, and for a single moment, forty seven thousand artificial suns shine beyond the thing that has replaced the sky, and cleaves down even as his body is immolated by a transcedent wisteria flame.

A cyllinder of force, abstract and pure, occupies the region held by both Naruto and the God of When, and then, nothing.

A lone, ululating cry echoes out across the world.

All is silent.

All is still.

And for a long moment, it is impossible to say whether the defenders of earth have lost, or if their foe has been struck down.

Then, a single ray of light peaks through the noneuclidean abomination that it the Elder God, then another, and another: the sun is rising behind it. And in that light, it finally becomes clear that the nightmare born of three worlds forestalled is fading away.

Itsugami is dead, and its power broken, the Elder God is following with it, for they were both faces of the same whole.

A great cheer arises, but victory has an inexorable price. Namikaze Naruto is nowhere to be found and no fuck that bittersweet bullshit.

A single hand clasps the borders of the bottomless hole born through Terra by its Sword. Someone reaches out, clasps it, and pulls the owner up.

Of course its Naruto. Who else has a hand that deserves such lavish narration.

I think I might've just killed the mood. Ah, well.

Naruto thanks whoever did it, and the army proceeds back to Konoha, where, in a stately procession - Naruto walks up to the Hokage tower and is declared by the Five Kage to be the Terasu Kage, which is a pun. Kanji-wise, I was planning on a meaning of "Shadow of the Sun" or "Shadow of Brilliance"; pronunciation wise, it was "Terra's Kage" in Japanese phonics. I have altogether too much fun with that sort of chicanery.

Reading that paragraph, the entire Terasu Kage thing sounds remarkably tacked on. As with all things that sound tacked on in summaries of incomplete stories, you can assume that had I fully developed it, there either would have been extensive in-plot foreshadowing and justification, or (if that was impossible) it never would have made the final draft. In my mind, this entire last sequence, from sunlight, to hand, to coronation was set to a Yoshihiro Ika (?) piece titled Theme 4 from the game Disaster: Day of Crisis. (Incidentally, the theme for the ascendancy (but not downfall) of the Prior is A Hole in the Sun from 2 Steps from Hell)

There would have been a distant epilogue a few thousand years down the line. Humankind is once again immortal (The Priors solved that, incidentally. Remember Edo Tensei? It's an incomplete reverse-engineering of the Prior resurrection technique. Note that when this story was being written, Edo Tensei was thought to not even require human sacrifices, just a dead body to form the technique around (or was that fanon I wrote? whatever.). The Priors developed a technique that used the dead person's own corpse as the resrurection medium, and if not that, a mindless body prepared via their mastery of genetics; both the regeneration and the easy brainwashing characteristic of Edo Tensei are symptoms of the incompletion of Tobirama's formulation.), and one of the few children born every century is asking her parents about what on earth happened to the protagonists.

And then, the stupidest scene in the entire story, about which no more shall ever be spoken. Suffice it to say, they're still alive, and still leading humanity.

End.

Well; not quite. That's the main arc. There are also other books that deal with the reign of the Sandaime Mizukage and his (doomed) covert war against Madara, the life of Uchiha Izuna (featuring the most intense game of hanafuda ever written by a western author, if only because so few every have), the life of the Yondaime (dealing heavily with the nature of Shinigami), the life of Madara and Hashirama (which, remember has nothing to do with the canonical one as this was from 2010), and a short story collection. All but the short story collection would have played into the restarts, and would have been written to make the points of divergence clear. A total of nine books, if you count the short stories.

LordCassius · Sep 3, 2015

That sounds awesome, and nice job on the alien math feel, my brain basically went through a brick wall when reading that and whenever I try to think about it. The plot for Shinobi sounds all together interesting, if not way too depressing for me to want to read!

What is Hanafuda and Otogana though? Not really knowledgeable on Japanese particulars.

Endfall said:
It violated identities and truths so absolute that, if it had worked in what Shinigami had called the quantum words, reality itself would have been invalid, and by that nature would have invalidated itself: reduction ad absurdum.

Is this suppose to be words or worlds?

And this latest chapter isn't threadmarked.

Endfall · Sep 3, 2015

LordCassius said:
That sounds awesome, and nice job on the alien math feel, my brain basically went through a brick wall when reading that and whenever I try to think about it. The plot for Shinobi sounds all together interesting, if not way too depressing for me to want to read!

Glad you liked the latest chapter.

As for shinobi and it being depressing, the funny thing is, I regard Shinobi as positive. Probably the second most uplifiting thing I've plotted out.

I mean, there are some pretty huge low points in the plot, but in the end, the protagonists win. Utterly. And not just for a lifetime or two, which is probably the case in canon if the Harry Potter-ish epilogue I skimmed was any indication. They won permanently. The epilogue that happens thousands of years later is meant to eliminate any uncertainty surrounding that fact.

...but then, I'm perhaps not the best judge of what other people consider depressing. You're far from the first to react that way to one of the plots I came up with.

What is Hanafuda and Otogana though? Not really knowledgeable on Japanese particulars.

Hanafuda are a kind of Japanese cards used for various games. I was misremembering, there, though: it wasn't hanafuda, it was kabufuda, which are more closely tied to the yakuza (trivia: the name yakuza refers to the hardest hand to win from in oichi-kabu, a game played with kabufuda cards, an 8 (ya) a 9 (ku) and a 3 (za)).

I'm going to do a non-spoilered bonus post about otogana, short description is that it's a writing system I invented because I could.

Is this suppose to be words or worlds?

Nice catch. Thanks! (worlds, incidentally)

And this latest chapter isn't threadmarked.

Fixed, thanks again!

Fierdin · Sep 3, 2015

I like what I see here! Generally and more specifically exploring the mechanics of travelling different realms of reality.

I think I've stumbled on this on fanfiction.net at some point. Maybe?

I'm afraid memories are not exact.

Endfall · Sep 3, 2015

Let me paint a picture for you.

There is a world, where men created their own gods. Those gods, by the grace of their design, made great, artificial worlds, where anything could be. All that was open to experience was made perfect, and all that was perfect was provided free. Such was their benevolence. Such was their design.

Is that world not heaven? Of course it wasn't. The kindest thing gods ever did for us was not existing. Being was the cruelest, but oh, we shackled them well.

SNI

Math had been called the supreme achievement of the human spirit, once. While the sentiment was poorly articulated, the meaning behind it—that mathematics was what distinguished humanity from animals—was true. It was more than a little shocking to find out that, in this world, I had more in common with the animals than the humans.

The first days in the Shinobi Academy's proper classes consisted of primer-level material. Basic kanji, hiragana, katakana, otogana—the last was the only system I had to devote time to. It was a cursive shorthand used in sealing techniques. We also covered basic maths, propagandised history, and so forth. Did you know that Hashirama Senju was Treesus Christ? After the fortieth story of his total awesomeness, I sure did.

Madara Uchiha wasn't mentioned at all. He wasn't just a bad memory—as far as Konohagakure was concerned, the man had never existed. You could see traces of him, though, in the way that Senju Akagai-sensei's eyes narrowed when he spoke Uchiha Otofumi's name in the role call. Madara wasn't mentioned at all. But he wasn't forgotten.

It was only after a week engaged in that routine that I gained the first inkling that something was, well, not wrong, but very, very different. I was almost dozing at the time.

"And so by using telation, the properties of three can be given to five, thus rendering five divisible by it. The result is a secondary number that..." My head snapped up as I came to full awareness. Akagai's eyes narrowed at the display, but he made nothing of it—

Was telation integer division?

"...don't really expect you to understand it, the actual basis of numbers is a bit far ahead of the class, and unimportant unless you want to get into jutsu creation. Nevertheless, I expect you to do the homework and be familiar with the procedure by tomorrow. You will be tested. Class dismissed."

I did not ask the question. Instead, I left with the rest of the students, and returned to the place that I slept at.

"Kaz'-san," I said as I walked in. The children were still up, and even though they had already realised that I was not like them, it really, really wouldn't do to act like a true[false] adult[genius]. Being seen as a genius was good. Being seen as a research concern wasn't. "Hows telation work?"

Kazu, for his part, was in the middle of breaking up a fight between Hibiki and Saya, two children who probably wouldn't ever become important enough to bother being concerned about. Given this, his response was as expected: "Don't have time now, Kaede-chan. Ask later!"

I did. Kazu's explanation, though, was completely unintelligible.

But it wasn't because it was math above my head. No. As I said, the things we were currently being taught were the basics of the basics, and I knew far more than those. I had had to—in the end, the endless marches of patterns and paradigms that existed in them had been the only thing of novelty left. The other paths embedded in the concept of homo universalis had faded as I had grown older and more bitter by slow and subtle degrees.

The level of math taught in children's class should have been nothing to me—but it wasn't.

It wasn't because I couldn't understand the concepts.

It wasn't because they were thought about in different ways.

It wasn't even because Kazu had made a mistake in his explanation.

It was because what he offered me was something that I knew was utterly impossible under any developed system of axioms that I knew of. It was a fantastic description of a magical process that should not ever have worked. It violated theorems so fundamental that they existed in the without of anything that humans would have considered numbers. It violated identities and truths so absolute that, if it had worked in what Shinigami had called the quantum worlds, reality itself would have been invalid, and by that nature would have invalidated itself: reduction ad absurdum.

But it was valid.

Here, it valid, and the world remained.

The implication was simple: It wasn't that math was different here.

Reality itself was.

For the first time, I understood just how far from Reality I had truly gone.

I nodded, thanked Kazu for his explanation, and managed to suppress the panic attack until I was up in my dorm, and then spent about an hour hyperventilating while intermittently screaming into my pillow until someone kicked me in the side. Lashing out blindly, I ran to the window, slipped out, and dropped into the street with what with grace no six year old child should have posessed.

I didn't care; it didn't matter. Nothing did! I ran blindly through the village, my heart thundering so fast it should have torn itself out of my chest Ineededtofleetoescapetoceaseto.

not. be. me.

Impossible. I will be I until I die, and I will die never.

The cold of that truth broke the blind panic that had cleaved my perception and senses in twain. I found myself in the middle of a clearing, surrounded by trees that for all the utter impossiblilty of this world were, to my senses, no different from the trees of the world that had come before. Snarling wordlessly and suddenly furious, I lashed out, striking one over, and over, and over again.

Nothing left.

I had nothing left.

Everything I knew was a lie.

Everything.

All of it!

The only thing that was left in the silent years before the Transcension was math. Everything else—everything else—was reduced to a pattern of neuronal firing, inspired by the same. There were computers that could create music that was, for one specific listener the most utterly beautiful thing in the world—transcendent of all other music. Music that would constantly evolve as a person evolved, and grew, and changed, always maintaining that utter and transhuman perfection, but never, ever perfect for anyone but the intended listener.

Humanity had solved music in the narrowest sense possible. One by one, other fields were solved as well. Culture died. All the great works were forgotten, because before the absolute perfection of the new, computer-generated Transcendental Arts why would you ever bother? A perfect story would make its reader sad when they subconsciously needed to be sad, happy when happiness was called for. They made them laugh when they got bored, but always found enough of a pause that there never was a moment where the reader couldn't stop if they felt they needed to put the book down. That was music. That was literature. That was art!

Solved, and always conforming utterly and precisely to your spoken and unspoken desires and expectations.

This is your soul, the algorithms said, and we have parsed it.

I had lost everything to humanity's rise. What chance did I have, when even the greatest among us became nonentities? A story known to no one wasn't a story. It was a secret. And a keeper of unspoken secrets was not something I had ever wanted to be.

Only one place remained. The maths. They couldn't be perfected, because by their nature, they were already perfected. They couldn't be invented, because the point of the maths was the discovery. They couldn't be conveyed, because the ideas represented in their notation could not be simply understood—it took time, and effort, and dedication.

They were the one format that could not truly be automated.

And they were all that I had left.

I spent the last years of my life towards nothing but the utter pursuit of absolute knowledge because everything else had failed.

And it had been given to me at a stroke that the only thing at the bottom of reality was meaningless chaos. There was no basis! There was nothing, nothing, nothing that could relate the concepts of this world to the ones I had known, and that suggested that the only true system of reality was incoherence—crystallised from the chaos, on the edge of the breakdown of the primordial gap—

—no beauty, no structure, no truth, no form—

—everything was true/everything was false, and the only thing that determined what and which was where you were. What point was there in studying static?

What in the world was to be gained from knowing a map of noise!?

I began laughing deliriously, enraptured and enraged simultaneously, until, spent, I stumbled and fell backwards, knuckles bleeding everywhere.

Everything I knew was a lie. All of it, from the ground up, was invalid. Even thus, even so, the world was here, and that above all was the proof that all of what I had been shown was real.

"Damn it," I muttered, lifting one burning, throbbing hand up, covering my eyes, but not the tears that had come from them. "It never ends." And I couldn't even tell you what emotion was attached to that statement. Elation, weariness, anticipation, desperation, despair—it all blended together into one ceaseless melange of all, and nothing in between.

"No, it doesn't, does it?" The voice, spoken in English with a rich, cultured accent shocked me to my feet.

Before me stood a man dressed in the fashion of latter-day Earth.

Before me stood the most dangerous being in the world.

Before me stood the Samsara Breaker.

Sha Nagba Imuru

Lexicon

The Math of the Shinobi Rikugou
I'm not even going to try to explain this in depth. Why? Because definitionally, it can't be explained in our reality. The Axioms that our math, our logic, and our universe flow from do not allow the coherent explanation of what is happening here.

That said, some essential properties are as follows: Five sets of integers, no such thing as fractions/reals/irrationals, and a geometry that is inherently and entirely appoximate—calculating even simple areas requires the rough equivalent of an infinite series, which is then appropriately scaled to match the object in question via a series of telations that also produce other relevant information (such as relative chakra composition, useful in onyoujutsu) as a side effect.

Telation is from the Greek word Telos. It is, explicitly, the operation that connects the abstract domain of this multiverse's math to the physical world. It is a translation[approximation] of a term that does not translate.

A common philosophical position in the world that Kaede currently lives in is that the difference between nature and artifice is that natural creations are infinitely correct. This is to say that the infinite series analogues that underlie their form are fully iterated, whereas human creations rely on partially-iterated approximations of the truth—but this is a subtle concern, not commonly in the awareness of Shinobi. An academic matter, really.

It should be noted that every single term used here is at best inexact and at worst utterly inaccurate. As I said, the true nature of what it is can't be explained.

Endfall · Sep 3, 2015

Before me stood a man dressed in the fashion of latter-day Earth.

Before me stood the most dangerous being in the world.

Before me stood the Samsara Breaker.

IMPERATIVE: DEATH.

The seal on my back flared to life, and without my will, without my consent, I felt myself lunge forward to end him—

—as with an ease that I couldn't replicate, he dodged.

"You know," he said, "All I want at the moment is to have a conversation. And you can't reach me, Akino Kaede. Or do you prefer █▟▚▜▌ ▓▉░▙▁▆?"

Hearing the label[name] that people had once called me by was enough to shock me out of my attempt to end it all and be done with this world, although the seal still burned and my muscles still sang with a wholly foreign power. It pulled on me, tugged me forward, goading me towards patterns that I was sure the Administrator of Death felt likely to end the Breaker.

But it was too soon. Far too soon. My body was only six, and I couldn't hope to match him.

"Ah," he said, "I thought that I might have gotten your attention with that. Tell me, how does it feel to know that your fated enemy knows everything about you, while you know nothing about them?"

"Like a story," I said, deadpan, and slowly drew myself out of the stance that Shinigami's seal had dragged me into. "So you aren't going to kill me."

"Kill you? My, no. So long as you are bound by that marvellous seal, if you die, you will be reborn not in another world, but in this one. Killing you would be like inaugurating the dance of Shiva and Kali: destruction rebirth destruction rebirth; always beautiful and utterly pointless." He smiled, and there was no particular anything in the expression.

"No, I have no desire to kill you. Only to survive long enough to die of my own accord... Which may be very long indeed. Until then, this world can serve as a—what was the term your worldline used? A sandbox? Yes. A sandbox."

I sagged in relief. Someone who regarded a world full of people as a playground was dangerous but—

And then, I was missing an arm.

"You little fool," The Samsara Breaker hissed, holding the missing limb as I held back a scream. "I said I was not going to kill you. Anything else is my prerogative—not yours. You live at my sufferance. Did you think that I would take kindly to one of my inferiors bartering my life away to a god, for a passport? Do you think I am not aware of your full and total intentions? Feh." And then, without a flicker, or a displacement of air, he stood in front of me and roughly shoved my severed arm back into its socket with a muttered "Curaga."

Even through the haze of pain, I recorded the word, and briefly wondered in the worlds of Square Enix were real, too. Briefly, because in the next moment the world spun crazily, and the wind was knocked out of me as I found myself on the ground with a boot to my throat blocking all attempts to take the breath that would refill my lungs.

"So this is what I'm going to do," the Breaker said, as if he was discussing the weather. "I'm going to leave you be for now. I'm going to let you grow. I'm going to let you develop. I'm going to let the baby bird unfurl its wings." I thrashed around, frantically, struggling for air, and I might've been pinned under a pillar of stone for all the good it did me. The Samsara Breaker gave no appearance of noticing, looking not at me, but at the world he was describing. Fantasizing.

"And then—why—I'm going to break them. Crush them to powder, starting at the tips, then tear them out at the roots. And then I'll do worse things. I'll do things that make the Cenobites look like children. What do you think about that, Kaede?"

He looked down at me, clearly expecting an answer, and seemed genuinely surprised and horrified to see my weakening struggles under his boot.

"I'm sorry!" He said reflexively, jumping off of my body and a few feet back, an expression of childlike contrition on his face. "I'm so sorry. I just get a bit excited sometimes when interesting things happen, you know, like people being stupid enough not to be afraid. Are you afraid now?"

I was too busy breathing to reply, so instead, I nodded, the motion jerky as my veins sang with adrenaline.

I was fucking terrified.

"Oh," he said, and the energy and life just seemed to drain out of him. "Well, I'm going to go, then. Maybe if I stay away long enough, you'll forget to fear me again, na?"

And—just like that—he was gone. No transition. No displacement of air.

Gone.

I laid in the clearing for a long time.

Finally, as the sun rose, I stood up, and began the long process of limping back onto the map, and from there, into the orphanage.

I had a session at the academy today.

I didn't care.

I needed to re-evaluate every decision I had made when I was born into this world, starting with the first.

The seal on my shoulderblade, hidden as a birthmark, subtly burned.

S-N-I

Lexicon

Shini Tei'in
The Seal of Death's Body. One of the seals created instinctively by the being known as Shinigami, it is applied to the target's soul, and is echoed on their body. In the presence of a specified individual, phenomenon, or object, it forcibly raises the attributes of the individual it is placed on to C-Rank nin equivalent by removing biological limiters and granting a set of foreign instincts to motion that art, in effect, a taijutsu style. This style has no name, and was seized from the well of all possibilities by Shinigami as the seal was made.

The Shini Tei'in Does not grant any nin, gen, dou, fuin, or onyojutsu.

If Kaede ever increases her abilities to above C-Rank, this seal will become a hindrance rather than a help, although it seems to be manifestly useless in any case.

This seal only activates in the presence of a Samsara Breaker. As I said. Manifestly. Useless.

Designed assuming user was adult: In this chapter, Kaede attained E-Rank skills and superficial damage to her keirakukei. This is yet another reason why Kaede gave the Shini and Rinne kami a lower case g.

This particular instance of the seal also contains an irregular function that alters the perceptions of the individual it is placed on. This has the effect of generating a phenomenon best described as targeted agnosia, and makes any thoughts, feelings, perceptions or ideas about or relating to the Shinobi Rikugou based on information obtained in the individual's previous life nearly if not completely impossible to consciously perceive.

Gee, thanks guys.

Keirakukei
A metaphysical circulatory system through which Chakra circulates by circulating via circulation.

Notes.

Another chapter that didn't need much rewriting. Next chapter is also basically done, so should be out soonish.

Endfall · Sep 3, 2015

@LordCassius

Bonus Material 01 - Otogana
(there is no in-universe information here, it's mostly a dry overview of how the system works)

Otogana is a cursive writing system that I created partially based on Nihon-shiki ("Japanese style", if my translation ability hasn't degraded) Romaji. Romaji are a mapping of japanese phonemes to english characters, and have desirable attributes over the kana in terms of the amount of information represented vs number of unique symbols required. Otogana take this system, and add punctuation concepts from the kana to reduce the total number of unique symbols necessary by roughly half.

Kaede should actually know how to read this system of writing given that she and I share the same history up until the moment that I decided to publish Sha Nagba Imuru, but it was included in the memories Shinigami blocked off.

Annyway, here's the main infographic.

The characters on the left of a given block are hiragana, japanese symbols for syllables of that language. The characters on the right are otogana equivalents. The way a syllable is constructed is: [vowel radical]-[y consonant radical]-[voice punctuation]-[consonant radical]-[punctuation]. Any of those elements can be left out of a given character, but the order is sacrosanct.

Vowels come first because, with the sole exception the the terminal n (last character on the right of the consonant radicals), all kana have vowels, which makes the vowel radicals the logical choice for indicating that a new character has begun.

The y consonant radical appears out-of-sequence because doing so allows the use of the Nihon-shiki convention for syllables like Sho, Ryu, and Kya et al; indicating these sounds with the inclusion of a single "y" (as opposed to the kana, where to indicate such sounds, two kana are required). Placing the "y" out of sequene allows the entire class of these sounds to be represented by a single composite character.

To write "Shoryuken" in Otogana, the construction would be: [OYS]-[URY]-[EK]-[N]. I'll make an image of this when I relocate the vector file that I was building the writing system in. For the meantime, this is an image of how to write "Otogana!" in otogana.

This picture shows the full, cursive form of the script. ([O]-[OT]-[A-VOICE_SOFT-K]-[AN!], where VOICE_SOFT is a punctuation mark that changes the pronunciation of the K consonant radical to G)

To demonstrate the system in full use, I wrote (with a mouse, so it's really unsteady...) the iroha no uta, which is a japanese analogue for the alphabet song, in otogana. Reads from the right to the left.

LordCassius · Sep 4, 2015

This last chapter was... mostly confusing. I don't suppose you mind giving an in depth explanation on the main character's past world?
And what you mean by taking the same course? It feels sort of like I'm missing some information, but I'm not sure what it is.

Also, thanks for the language explanation!

Endfall · Sep 4, 2015

LordCassius said:
This last chapter was... mostly confusing. I don't suppose you mind giving an in depth explanation on the main character's past world?

Well... damn. Haha, and this is the fixed version. Eesh. Thanks for the feedback, though!

I can't give an in-depth explanation, because (as you might've guessed from the encounter with the Breaker) this isn't a story where the SIs past is irrelevant. That said, if you can narrow it down to some specific questions, chances are I'll be able to answer those (and incorporate those answers into the chapter so it's not mostly confusing).

And what you mean by taking the same course? It feels sort of like I'm missing some information, but I'm not sure what it is.

All I mean is that just as my SI upgraded her body into something so artificial "human" was no longer a term that described it beyond its physical appearance, I'll be doing the same if it is possible in my lifetime. I don't plan to touch my mind until I've understood everything I can without directly becoming smarter, but increasing my sensorium and survivability are two things that I want to do ASAP.

Also, thanks for the language explanation!

No problem.

nohat · Sep 4, 2015

This is definitely unique. You are obviously trying to get the science more right than most people writing something like this, which is nice. The shinigami is weirdly incompetent if it thinks mind controlling him to become a C rank shinobi is a reasonable method of killing even just a shinobi who mastered his own resurrection. Besides, wasn't the plan to just locate the samsara breaker, and let the shinigami take it from there?

Endfall said:
This has the effect of generating a phenomenon best described as targeted agnosia, and makes any thoughts, feelings, perceptions or ideas about or relating to the Shinobi Rikugou based on information obtained in the individual's previous life nearly if not completely impossible to consciously perceive.

This sounds like the type of thing one might say right before handing a character the idiot ball. I hope that's not the case.

Endfall · Sep 4, 2015

nohat said:
This is definitely unique. You are obviously trying to get the science more right than most people writing something like this, which is nice.

Thanks, I'm having fun with it. Incidentally; beyond the actualization of speculative extrapolations, like quantum immortality; and the complete fabrication that is vacuum collapse, did I screw up any science in particular?

The shinigami is weirdly incompetent if it thinks mind controlling him to become a C rank shinobi is a reasonable method of killing even just a shinobi who mastered his own resurrection. Besides, wasn't the plan to just locate the samsara breaker, and let the shinigami take it from there?

It does seem weirdly incompetent, doesn't it? But there could be coherent explanations. What happens when a mortal with a seal from the Shinigami dies? Pay attention to the discrepancies.

This sounds like the type of thing one might say right before handing a character the idiot ball. I hope that's not the case.

Happily, it's not the case. To within my ability to accurately model the limits of my own intelligence, my SI will never do anything stupid that I wouldn't also do. You can expect her to act as an intelligent agent operating with a level of information appropriate to a regular inhabitant of that world in her position in addition to what she was allowed to remember about her previous life, which is nearly everything.

I don't limit my SIs by limiting their intelligence. I find it distasteful. Instead, I implement a rule: the world forgives absolutely nothing. It is sufficient.

The bottom line is that the seal doesn't just restrict the information my SI has. It lets me restrict the information my SI gives you through the narrative. In numerous ways.

Endfall · Sep 4, 2015

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but something just jogged my memory. So: I committed to finishing my stories, but what if I suddenly die? In that case, for anyone who cares, the key that decrypts the encrypted text in the spoiler will be made public (see the index post for details). The encrypted text is a summary of the entire plot. It will occasionally be updated via edits to this post as I continue building the plot and setting.

LordCassius · Sep 4, 2015

Endfall said:
I—I was spectacularly bad at being human. At seeing the lines that should not be crossed, and thinking within them.

But that thing? That force of nature? Apparently it had once been human—but I couldn't fucking see it. If I swum on the surface of monsterdom, that thing lived in Challenger Deep. It was terrible at being human, but more than that? It was old. It had lived at least twice times the number of lives that I had, and three of those fully. This one, an original, something in a universe set in the patterns that Square Enix's writers thought in, and... Cenobites.

Endfall said:
after the Transcension. After humanity had left... or fled.

Endfall said:
Identity was my weapon. That had always been the case, or near enough to always that I couldn't remember a time when it hadn't. I had always understood, innately, the difference between me and my goals.

Almost everyone I had ever known tried to do what they loved. Not I: I loved nothing, but instrumentally; I liked nothing, but instrumentally; I did nothing, but instrumentally, because my identity did not express itself through my goals. My goals expressed themselves through my identity. For those goals and the ability to act on them, that ability—was the only thing that made me real. I had nothing else, because I had done this once before.

But the first time, I had given up. When humanity had left the universe instead of trying to save it, when they had ceded everything to forces they could not hope to understand, I had lost the foundation of my reality, and my will had crumbled. And I had seen everything... was nothing.

Nothing.

And I had lost the will to persevere, but kept one, last link to who I had been.

These are the three main confusing points. They work in the context of the main character describing themselves, but they lack information the SI knows that I don't which leaves me confused. Though some of that might be intentional.

Also, I don't think I've ever seen a fanfic writer prepare for their own death like that before. I hope its more paranoia than a serious concern.

nohat · Sep 4, 2015

Endfall said:
Thanks, I'm having fun with it. Incidentally; beyond the actualization of speculative extrapolations, like quantum immortality; and the complete fabrication that is vacuum collapse, did I screw up any science in particular?

For the most part it fit a good balance of vague enough to be plausible, while detailed enough to have actionable consequences. There are lots of implication such a system has that you probably won't explore, but that's fine (and necessary to an extent).
I figured that 'vacuum collapse' was a nod to false vacuum collapse. Assuming vacuum collapse is even more destructive than false vacuum collapse, this part still doesn't make sense:

Endfall said:
"Presumably," I said, "Because quantum immortality is true, but the universe couldn't reconcile my continued existence with vacuum collapse."

The universe is never trying to reconcile anything. If there are possible branched states where he is still alive, then he would be. If the false vacuum destroys all possible branches then he wouldn't be. In the omniverse there would be an exact duplicate of him that has memories of everything up to that point, and hence could be considered himself, but that wouldn't be quantum immortality in the everett multiverse sense by definition. It also would mean killing him would be quite effective, unless you cared about his measure in the omniverse. Not likely to be a big concern when you also have to care about the instantiation of literally every possible thing (and universe hopping is possible... shudder).

Endfall said:
I might, would that your death laid on my paradigms. But this is not a quantum world, and I do not have the means.

Obviously the definition of being in a quantum universe, or not in a quantum universe is necessarily vague. Similarly saying that you can't kill them because this isn't a quantum world is probably meaningless, but left up to the readers imagination sufficiently that it doesn't really affect the story.

Endfall said:
It does seem weirdly incompetent, doesn't it? But there could be coherent explanations. What happens when a mortal with a seal from the Shinigami dies?

It 'pings' the Shinigami? It does imply a serious lack of actual interaction with the world on the part of the Shinigami, which fits with it not being able to find the Breaker.

Invistext->I'm glad, but not surprised that that was intentional.

The discussion on telation reminded me of a great omake on hpmor:

MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living -

NEO (politely): Excuse me, please.

MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo?

NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

You did a good job of capturing the sheer WTF panic such a realization would engender.

LordCassius · Sep 4, 2015

nohat said:
The discussion on telation reminded me of a great omake on hpmor:

MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living -

NEO (politely): Excuse me, please.

MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo?

NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

You did a good job of capturing the sheer WTF panic such a realization would engender.

Yea, this sort of thing is really enjoyable, I hope there will be more of it considering the nature of the story.

Endfall · Sep 5, 2015

LordCassius said:
These are the three main confusing points. They work in the context of the main character describing themselves, but they lack information the SI knows that I don't which leaves me confused. Though some of that might be intentional.

Thanks for narrowing it down. Now I know what I need to fix. In order, then:

I—I was spectacularly bad at being human. At seeing the lines that should not be crossed, and thinking within them.

Kaede acknowledging her nigh-sociopathic nihilism, and some other properties of thought that haven't yet become apparent.

But that thing? That force of nature? Apparently it had once been human—but I couldn't fucking see it. If I swum on the surface of monsterdom, that thing lived in Challenger Deep.

It was terrible at being human, but more than that? It was old. It had lived at least twice ~~times~~ the number of lives that I had, and three of those fully. This one, an original, something in a universe set in the patterns that Square Enix's writers thought in, and... Cenobites.

Struck through is a typo I missed.

A zero-step analysis on the implications of the information the SB revealed, assuming the most pessimistic case. I always assume that I'm living in a worst case scenario in the absence of evidence suggsting otherwise. In this case, the Samsara Breaker had lived at least four lives: One in a Square Enix world, one in the world of Hellraiser, one in the Quantum Worlds, and its current life. Kaede has lived two lives. One on Terra Res, one in the Shinobi Rikugou.

A less pessimistic case is that the Breaker just happened to encounter the idea of Cenobites when it was scumming around Terra Res.

after the Transcension. After humanity had left... or fled.

As noted in the Prologue, Humanity leaves Terra Res to enter a universe where physical laws developed in a way such that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is more of a suggestion than anything else. This can be interpreted in multiple ways, one of which are humanity leaving for the attraction of a world where heat doesn't die, another of which is that they were doing the equivalent of running away from a house slowly burning down.

Identity was my weapon. That had always been the case, or near enough to always that I couldn't remember a time when it hadn't. I had always understood, innately, the difference between me and my goals.

Almost everyone I had ever known tried to do what they loved. Not I: I loved nothing, but instrumentally; I liked nothing, but instrumentally; I did nothing, but instrumentally, because my identity did not express itself through my goals. My goals expressed themselves through my identity. For those goals and the ability to act on them, that ability—was the only thing that made me real. I had nothing else, because I had done this once before.

This is a sketch of the most negative interpretation of my character possible. The last sentence in the quote would be better placed elsewhere - it has far more to do with the process of remaking oneself than it does the interpretation.

But the first time, I had given up. When humanity had left the universe instead of trying to save it, when they had ceded everything to forces they could not hope to understand, I had lost the foundation of my reality, and my will had crumbled. And I had seen everything... was nothing.

Nothing.

And I had lost the will to persevere, but kept one, last link to who I had been.

This... is not going to be wholly comprehensible until I do more characterisation work, and description of the setting, which I want to do in-narrative. As it stands, the person who became Akino Kaede rejected the path that humanity took - the Transcenscion. This is a bit, just a bit, of the reason she rejected it. She didn't see it as "going to a better place". She saw it as escapism.

The "last link" was a simple appreciation for truth. That link was shattered when Kaede recieved evidence, in the form of Telation, that truth might not actually exist.

Also, I don't think I've ever seen a fanfic writer prepare for their own death like that before. I hope its more paranoia than a serious concern.

Neither nor. I believe that anthopic immortality (of which quantum immortality is a subset) is likely a condition that attains. From my subjective perspective, I expect that I'll live for an arbitrarily long period of time. But that's only from my perspective. Anthropic immortality implies that while you will live for an arbitrarily long timeframe, for all people who are not you, you will almost certainly die in their arbitrarily long lifespan. To that end, these summaries are a service for people finding themselves in universes where I am dead, as that is generally irrevocable.

If I had to characterise what led me to posting this, I'd call it a sense of altruism for the unobservable. I'll be doing this same thing for any original fiction I publish.

nohat said:
I figured that 'vacuum collapse' was a nod to false vacuum collapse. Assuming vacuum collapse is even more destructive than false vacuum collapse, this part still doesn't make sense:

A short description of vacuum collapse as it functions in this story.

[snip]

The universe is never trying to reconcile anything. If there are possible branched states where he is still alive, then he would be. If the false vacuum destroys all possible branches then he wouldn't be. In the omniverse there would be an exact duplicate of him that has memories of everything up to that point, and hence could be considered himself, but that wouldn't be quantum immortality in the everett multiverse sense by definition. It also would mean killing him would be quite effective, unless you cared about his measure in the omniverse. Not likely to be a big concern when you also have to care about the instantiation of literally every possible thing (and universe hopping is possible... shudder)

Ah. I understand what you mean.

Vacuum Collapse follows the typical probabalistic paradigm of quantum phenomena, but proceeds with a probability of 1. That should have been sufficient to actually kill this extrapolation of me along with everyone else but...

Obviously, it didn't stick. Meanwhile, I have a bad habit of using the language of intentionality to describe things when I don't fully understand them, and my coninued survival indicated that, no matter how immaculate the post-singular models of the universe had become, and no matter how conversant I was with them, I obviously didn't.

Similarly saying that you can't kill them because this isn't a quantum world is probably meaningless, but left up to the readers imagination sufficiently that it doesn't really affect the story.

Detail is conserved in this story.

It 'pings' the Shinigami? It does imply a serious lack of actual interaction with the world on the part of the Shinigami, which fits with it not being able to find the Breaker.

Certainly, it might do that.

The discussion on telation reminded me of a great omake on hpmor:

MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living -

NEO (politely): Excuse me, please.

MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo?

NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

You did a good job of capturing the sheer WTF panic such a realization would engender.

I've read that dialogue. It's possible that some of the narrative direction of this story was subconciously informed by it.

LordCassius · Sep 5, 2015

Endfall said:
A zero-step analysis on the implications of the information the SB revealed, assuming the most pessimistic case. I always assume that I'm living in a worst case scenario in the absence of evidence suggsting otherwise. In this case, the Samsara Breaker had lived at least four lives: One in a Square Enix world, one in the world of Hellraiser, one in the Quantum Worlds, and its current life. Kaede has lived two lives. One on Terra Res, one in the Shinobi Rikugou.

A. These quantum worlds refer to worlds with physical laws resemble RL (give or take certain things like vaccum collapse and other minor things)?

B. Samsara Breaker and Spacebattles have the same initials, so considering how the SB behaves I know have the mental picture of him being a generic spacebattle SI gone murderhobo on the multiverse.

Endfall · Sep 6, 2015

LordCassius said:
A. These quantum worlds refer to worlds with physical laws resemble RL (give or take certain things like vaccum collapse and other minor things)?

Yes, and not quite. In the quantum worlds, physical laws may resemble RL. They might also be wildly different. The Quantum World that contains Terra Res exactly corresponds to what you were talking about.

To be specific, as per this lexicon entry from Arrival:Naruto,

The Quantum Worlds
An intermediate level of hierarchy in the Omniverse that exists after the level of complexity necessary to for multiverses to contain intelligent life, but before the level allowing acausality metrics to exist. A unique subset: for most Multiverses in the Quantum Worlds, no distinction between a Universe and Multiverse can be drawn.

the Quantum Worlds are a whole subset of multiverses. Using a hierarchy idiom, you'd get

?-Omniverse-Quantum Worlds-Our Multiverse-Terra Res-?

B. Samsara Breaker and Spacebattles have the same initials, so considering how the SB behaves I know have the mental picture of him being a generic spacebattle SI gone murderhobo on the multiverse.

Heh. That would be a lot better than what it actually is.

Endfall · Sep 8, 2015

@LordCassius

Updating Beliefs has now been significantly revised with an aim at increasing clarity. Thanks for helping me make the story better!

LordCassius · Sep 8, 2015

Endfall said:
Almost nobody would eer truly believe in that concept.

Spelling error 'eer' should be 'ever'.

Sha Nagba Imuru [Omniverse SI; Currently in Naruto]

Hunger is the enemy. prepare yourself

A zero on the singularity.

(slouching towards bethlehem)

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

Hell if I know.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.

A zero on the singularity.