The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 10: Chapter 10

Read chapter 10 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The architect who fears the blueprint will always live in the ruins of the first draft." What lay above and around me was a titan that broke my understanding of biology. An arthropod of impossible scale. Calling it a centipede was an underestimation of geometry. It was hundreds of feet of pitch-black chitin. The segmented armor overlapped in thick plates like tectonic bedrock, strapped together by decaying, pale muscle fibers the size of bridge cables. Dozens of legs, each thick as a redwood, hung perfectly still, buried deep into hardened resin. It was an apex relic of a forgotten food chain. And it was dying. The ambient pressure crushing my lungs wasn't an attack. It was a catastrophic leak. The internal core powering a beast of this size had grown too dense, and the aging exoskeleton was cracking under the load. It was cooking inside its own armor, suffering from fusion-decay. The energy that should have powered her was rotting her from the inside out. It was a miracle the creature was still alive, though maybe the ambient necrosis was the only thing keeping the desecration stable. My eyes drifted from its buried legs up to the center of its coiled mass that wrapped around a broken column. Resting on a pedestal of petrified organic matter at the center of the coils was an egg. It was a perfect sphere, standing six feet high like an organic boulder, pulsing with a dark green light. Half of the leathery shell was choked by the same black, necrotic sludge weeping from the giant above. I stood frozen, waiting for the titan to tear me apart. It didn't happen. I forced myself to look at her head. Her mandibles were sunk deep into the hardened resin. Her massive eyes were clouded over by calcified decay. The rise and fall of her carapace was so slow it felt geological. She wasn't just resting. She was in a deep torpor—a coma forced on her by her own failing biology. The fusion-decay had locked her inside her armor just to keep her from burning out completely. I exhaled. I wasn't brave. Every instinct I had screamed at me to turn around and run. But outside was the wild hunt, and inside was a toxic gravity well that would eventually grind my bones to dust. I was trapped. Survival in the wild always came down to symbiosis. You find an apex predator, and you figure out a way to become a beneficial organism instead of a parasite. Or prey. The Queen was paralyzed. She couldn't save her own offspring. If I wanted to walk out of this mountain alive, I had to prove my existence was more valuable than the calories I provided. I looked at the pitch-black coils wrapping the column. Getting to the egg meant climbing the beast itself. The overlapping chitin plates were thick, staggered like the bark of a massive, petrified tree. I gripped the edge of the lowest plate. It was hot to the touch, vibrating with a slow, dying hum. I pulled myself up. The gravity fought me on every vertical inch. I hooked the toes of my boots into the biological grooves, treating the ascent like navigating slick, massive roots. The necrotic sludge made the carapace treacherous. I flared my Dirt-Dao, actively pinning my center of mass forward against the shell to keep from peeling backward under the atmospheric pressure. I climbed forty feet of rotting armor. My lungs burned. My forearms shook as I hauled myself over the final coil, dragging my battered body onto the flat top of the broken column. I pushed against the crushing gravity, my boots scraping the petrified organic matter, and placed my palm against the infected shell. The heat was intense. Beneath the leather, I felt a chaotic, violent stutter. My ethnobotany training and my limited medical theory finally locked together. Insects and arthropods didn't operate on a human meridian system. They didn't have a centralized spine or a primary governing vessel. They ran on ganglionic nodes—a distributed network where every segment had its own independent processing center for energy and movement. The egg was fa