Displaced

Chapter 92

Bazzalth leaned in close, watching with rapt attention as the crawler writhed, the blood that filled the vat slowly consuming the crawler's temporarily reanimated flesh. He could not be sure if the thing suffered in agony, or if the spasms were merely the last acts of decayed nerves and muscles firing haphazardly as the transcendent liquid dissolved them into nothingness, though the state of its soul suggested the latter. The ethereal sphere hovering above the body had taken on only a momentary hint of blue, the vast majority of it still the grey of death. Then, the last dots of blue vanished and the soul returned to its fully-grey state, marking the moment this experiment became a failure. Soon, the soul faded from existence as all evidence of the crawler ever being in the vat vanished, leaving nothing left inside but Bazzalth's own specially-processed blood.

Pushing away the initial frustration, Bazzalth reminded himself that there was no such thing as failure in the hunt for Knowledge. Every test, no matter the outcome, provided more data, and data was the most precious of all things. Yes, the results were suboptimal, but he had only spent the last fifteen years studying the mystery of his people's blood. The field was still in its infancy! He would figure it out given time, as he had with everything else. Time was something he had in abundance, after all.

For several thousand years, Bazzalth had endeavored to fill his hoard with all manners of Knowledge. At first his efforts had been scattershot, his attention jumping from subject to subject, but after several hundred years, he'd come to realize the benefits of concentrating on a specific area of study. With a more focused approach, he could build a broad understanding of the subject and then use that initial knowledge to identify the most intriguing mysteries and build the path to solving said mysteries. By the time he had exhausted every question, he found he had achieved a true understanding of the field as a whole.

Bazzalth's latest subject of academic interest was bioscience. After over five hundred and twelve years of diligent study, he'd decided fifteen years ago that he was proficient enough in the field to begin investigating perhaps the greatest mystery of bioscience: the blood inside him and his brethren. The multi-hued liquid was so unlike the blood of crawlers and other animals that Bazzalth hesitated to even use the same nomenclature for the two.

In his eyes, a person's blood could be considered the ultimate miracle substance, one capable of disproving the very laws of reality that he'd spent so many decades uncovering. For example, a person's blood completely invalidated the Laws of Persistent Matter:

One, matter cannot be created or destroyed except through Observation.

Two, matter created through Observation will persist after creation indefinitely. Once its full existence has been established, it is no different than any other matter and will persist indefinitely even after the Observation ends. This did not apply, of course, to reaction-based Observations such as fire, which needed either available fuel or continued soulforce to maintain their existence.

A person's blood, however, invalidated these laws. Matter that came into contact with unprocessed blood would be slowly destroyed over the course of hours until it literally ceased to exist. The matter did not corrode, it did not become dissolved into the blood, and it did not turn into a gas and float away. It simply ceased to be.

How such a phenomenon could even be possible was just one of the many questions about the blood that he still had to solve. Like the rest of the questions in this case, Bazzalth had a theory but lacked the evidence to come to a hard conclusion. His current belief was that it was related to the astounding level of lifeforce found in each drop of blood, which was somehow able to overwhelm reality itself to such a degree that absolute destruction of matter without Observation became possible. That belief was little more than an educated guess at this point, however, as he didn't have the data to support such a claim; that would change soon, as his experiments continued.