Debauchery BioTech 4 (Patreon)

Debauchery BioTech

Chapter 4

-VB-

Orianna always had work.

It was just the nature of being the volutaar of the Priesthood. She knew what she was getting into when she was summoned to this world by the karcist and accepted his offer. 

It was, after all, far more than she would have achieved on her own. And he was a very good lover. 

Who knew he could use his power over flesh to give her the best orgasms~?

Speaking of which, she would have to drag him to bed sooner or later. He always got lost in either work or laziness, and his attention was solely focused on that giant creature he was growing. 

Oh well. A wife’s gotta do what a wife’s gotta do, right? 

Speaking of wifely duties…

She turned to look at the LIC “spy” and Zend Karstein, an elderly woman who chose to keep her appearance the same while around strangers but reverted them back when she was around “family.” Considering that she no longer considered her old family as her real family after how they had abandoned her in a nonfunctional nursing home (as in the nursing home literally went bankrupt and abandoned the elderly in their care), it was a rare sight to see her as a young woman. Right now, she appeared as a hunchbacked elderly woman wearing a shawl over her yellow priestly robes. The wrinkles on her face arranged to form a smile even if she wasn’t really smiling.

In fact, she was the strictest zend. Maybe it had to do something with her being a refugee from Draconis Combine. 

“Make sure to take care of our Orin ‘Emily,’” she said while smiling behind her veil to “Karia,” who didn’t bother to hide her shiver.

And why would she bother? She knew better than to do that around the zends. 

As a volutaar, the natural world may as well be a computer program alerting her to everything happening around her. Even littlest thing as core temperature change in animals was something she would spot immediately. 

Spies? 

There were no such things as spies. They were observers allowed into the Priesthood to keep the powers-that-be to retain their sanity, lest they start dropping nukes everywhere in their paranoia.

And if that happened, then the karcist just might wipe out the Inner Sphere. 

Not that their paranoia was unwarranted. The karcist did have plans for the Inner Sphere, even if he was much more benevolent than the Great Houses of the future. 

Personally, she was happy with what they had. They helped people, people helped them, and asshole invaders and raiders got their asses kicked. 

Oh, and she got paid in power and money. Sex and love was the cherry on top.

-VB-

It’s been almost a year since he’d been inducted into the cult. 

And… he was starting to become a true believer.

How could he not? There was something of substance here. A truth that the rest of the galaxy did not know, did not see, and certainly did not care about. But just as they didn’t care for the truth, the truth didn’t care for their opinions. 

Michael Jellensky sat in a meditative seiza as he considered his position. He should be a ComStar spy. As ROM Rho/Rho, he was supposed to be infiltrating the cult to be ComStar’s hand in the future. 

But instead, he found himself questioning it all.

ComStar was the way forward for the Inner Sphere. This was only evident when when someone looked at the crucial lynchpin role ComStar played in keeping Inner Sphere civilization from going off the deep end. As part of Rho, he’s seen and done a lot of things that … had been necessary. 

Or so he thought. 

Now that he knew that the truth was far grander and indifferent … he found himself guilty. 

If his actions had not been for the greater good of all, then what was it except just more meaningless murders and destruction that the rest of the Scavenger Lords did to each other? How was he any different? 

Because here within the Priesthood, he found that he could not lie to himself. He had tried but the guilt and memories always came back. 

This could be a trick, yes… but if this was a trick that the Priesthood could pull off, then there was no way for him to fight it. 

Because the Priesthood never told him how to think or what to think beyond their tenets. 

The karcist… he seemed to know. Know what he was thinking without even talking. Seemed to be able to read his mind from afar. 

He scared him. 

“Fear is natural,” he muttered to himself. “Through fear, we grow, and without growth, we become weak and stagnant.”

It was not a tenet of the Priesthood but a fact of reality that they accepted as a tenet. 

He could not fear his past. He had to move forward. Except “moving forward” was what was causing him trouble. He didn’t know how. He could extract himself, pushing all sorts of excuse, and go back to ComStar… but would he? Did he want to? Did it help the Inner Sphere? 

He knew the answer to the last one. 

No. He would not help the Inner Sphere and its people by going back to ComStar. Knowing what he knew and the new truths, all he would do was pushing the Inner Sphere towards an end. ComStar didn’t know that they were doing that. How could they? They were of the Inner Sphere. Despite their words, decrees, and internal doctrines, they had only convinced themselves that they were doing something right.

Just because they weren’t wrong didn’t mean that they were right. 

And … He didn’t want to leave. 

He felt better here. He helped people here. He didn’t need to lie. Didn’t need to hide. He was himself, and the Priesthood accepted that while ComStar had told him to “discipline” himself. 

He sighed. 

What the hell was he to do?

He took a deep breath in and began to meditate on this.

Because the truth of the universe was that flesh was selfish and thus could not be trusted. One must rule over the flesh. By ruling over flesh, which is supreme, one gains enlightenment and freedom.

And to overcome flesh, the foundation started at discipline.

Discipline… he had plenty of.

Discipline over mind came first. Discipline over knowledge came later. Discipline over flesh came next. 

I … have control over myself. I have control over my body.

I know who and what I am.

I can make a decision for myself.

So… why can’t I?

His eyes opened. 

And then he realized why.

He had discipline over his mind. He wanted to help. That’s why he joined ComStar in the first place. He may have ended up in Rho because that’s what he was the best at but not the only thing he could do. 

He had discipline over his flesh. Though he might not have be able to control it directly, he trained his body to act as he wanted it to when he needed it to within the limited means he had.

He … did not have discipline over knowledge. He did not know what was best for the Inner Sphere. He did what he did because that’s what he had been told. But now, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

Everything he’d done up to this point had been based on things he and ComStar knew, but the karcist showed him that he did not know. That he and ComStar did not understand reality. He had been told reality as ComStar understood it, but ComStar’s faulty understanding of the universe kept him from being able to best help the people.

He had murdered people on false assumptions. 

And those false assumptions … had been that ComStar had humanity’s best interest at heart.

The truth he learned was that ComStar did not.

ComStar had best interest for ComStar. 

Flesh desired flesh.

ComStar acted for its benefit, not humanity.

Flesh sought power.

And he had been its tool.

… 

He needed to make things right. 

And the first place he needed to make things right was right here in the Priesthood. 

Michael Jellensky, known to the members of the Priesthood as Orin Johnathan Lim, stood up and took a shuddering breath in and let it out.

It felt as if the weight of the world had slid off of his shoulders. Even if he might die because of what he did next, he knew he had to.

Because he wanted to die free, and he’ll do it speaking the truth.

He left his office to go tell the nearest Zend that he was a ROM spy. As for what would happen next… he was curious. 

And happy to be making his own decisions. 

---

“We knew.”

“Eh?”

“We knew,” Karcist Croy hummed as he sat naked in the pool of blood in the center of what everyone was calling the “Ascension Chamber” because this was where he shed his mortal form.

Yes, that body that sat languidly in the blood pool was not anything “mortal” anymore. It was merely the avatar of His Holiness.

Karcist Croy opened one eye and then smiled after looking at him. “I may have been mortal when I first met you, but even then, people were already an open book to me, Michael of Rho.”

Oh. He even knew that. 

There really was nothing that could be hidden from His Holiness. 

“Then why…?” his lips spoke without prompting.

The karcist closed his eye. “Because it didn’t matter”

Nothing mattered before divinity.

Michael let out a shuddering breath.

That was another truth.

Before this … god who could mold flesh and reality alike, a being that gave life to corpses, the trivialities of humanity and its politics were meaningless.

“... Then did my actions before this all have no meaning?”

The karcist didn’t respond. At least, not immediately. 

“It is true that there are objectively more meaningful causes,” he began as he rose up from the pool of blood. Instead of hips, penis, legs, and feet, what rose out of the blood pool was a floating and lightly flowing corals that looked like fabrics and not rocks. Those “living fabric” corals formed into legs without any structure. Hell, they weren’t even connected in places and whole sections of the two legs they formed were literally vertical transparent slips that weren’t connected to anything! 

This was what he meant by “molding reality.” How did living objects that couldn’t float on its own do that? And the way the same coral “fabric” changed to human flesh at any given moment at any random location only to turn back to fabric coral?

Reality was a passing illusion to the karcist, and flesh was the means through which he broke and created that illusion. 

As the karcist cleared the blood pool, the coral fabric climbed up all over him. They changed. Shifted. Hardened. Darkened.

And then the karcist was, at the end of the transformation, wearing a yellow robe all too similar to the one Michael wore right then.

But the trail of blood was very much real. 

“ComStar, as what it has become today, is not entirely wrong.”

Michael’s head snapped up and his eyes met that of the karcist as he looked over his shoulder to look at him. 

“But the First Circuit is. Think on that, Orin Michael.” He faced forward, gave him a wave, and walked out of the chamber, leaving Michael to ponder the god’s words by himself. 

ComStar … was not wrong.

But the First Circuit was.

-VB-

Within the Triad, a woman walked down a hall. 

She was heading out of the Royal Court to visit the Royal Botanical Garden to see a specific person.

And she was going there because she was expected there for a check-up. Like the rest of the (right) Steiners on Tharkad, she no longer went to a normal doctor to get her check-up. She went to the one of two Zends of the Priesthood of Kalmaktama working within the Triad. 

To be honest, she had to convince her sister to let them in. They were harmless as long as no one attacked them and did most of the work requested of them. She actually managed to use them to get better control over the Estate Generals. 

Nondi Steiner paused before the new botanical garden before walking on through its own doors. 

The air immediately grew humid and heavy. The greenery around her rustled in the slight breeze running through the garden, and Nondi had to remind herself that despite the Priesthood’s love of the unconventional aesthetics, their control over flesh also extended to other living things like plants. 

And the Zend in charge of the Priesthood’s branch here on Tharkad had a knack for plant control. 

Zend Zyra poked her head out of the bush right next to Nondi, and Nondi had to clamp down on her instinctive desire to scream in fright. 

Zyra, the self-proclaimed Coven Witch, stepped out of the bush, and greeted Nondi with a smile. 

“Darling, what brings you here today?” she asked.

“... I am here for my bi-annual check-up,” Nondi gritted out, knowing that showing any kind of emotion would be a loss to the bitch in front of her. 

Zyra giggled and the entire garden seemed to shake in delight along with her. 

“Well, then~!” Zyra said and then touched her. And then let go afterward. “You’re good.”

“Thank you.” She looked around. “Nothing that’s hindering your work?”

“Oh no, not yet. And few idiots there were… well, they are already underneath us. Fertilizers, you understand?”

Nondi pointedly did not look at the soil she had been walking on once she entered the garden. 

“Hmm. As long as you understand who aren’t acceptable targets.”

“Of course, Orin Steiner. We don’t want to cause problems for our family and benefactor,” Zyra smiled.

Nondi hated it when Zyra smiled. The plant-obsessed woman looked like she was about to commit murder. And Zyra knew her beauty only accentuated that. 

… Not that Nondi could complain. One of the benefits to having the Priesthood was non-invasive plastic surgery. She wasn’t the ugly duckling of the Steiner family any more.