God Of Crafting

Chapter 118: Beyond the margin of the error

Consume.

As the being consumed more and more, as it spread its tendrils to infect more and more of the free-floating and rich life in this place…

As all of this happened, its single desire to consume evolved.

In a sense, this being grew up.

'The expansion rate is… satisfactory. The first horde's smashed, second one proceeds to the border. Third and fourth hordes forming.'

A status report appeared at the top of the being's mind as it expanded in every possible way at every possible moment.

The many limbs that it took over were either dying to break the barrier of the void, already turned into lifeless flesh, or were still gathering up in an even bigger group than before.

Because by consuming more and more, the being learned an important lesson.

Just like there didn't exist a perfect attack, predator, hunter, there was no absolute defense, prey, target.

In other words, regardless of what it was that governed this void that not even the being's physical limbs could cross, for as long as he threw sufficient mass and life at it, the void had to cave in at some point. And beyond it lay in waiting near endless feeding ground.

'Consume it all…'

A single wish rang in the being's mind.

Now that it got the first taste of an intelligent thought, it wanted more. Now that its algorithms processed information in ways the being itself could no longer track it, it felt as if its consciousness elevated beyond its former limits.

And it was all because it kept consuming, processing, learning.

So, consuming more quickly became its absolute priority.

'An error.'

An insignificant report rang in the being's core.

'A sub-sub-sub-sub-sub division corrupted. Culling process initiated. Culling process failed. Trying again. Culling process failed. Unable to connect to the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub division.

Division deemed detached.'

Those reports didn't make up the conscious part of the being, merely the processing of the knowledge it consumed as a whole that crystallized in those nuggets of knowledge that were judged to be critical to be readily available for higher-instance processing.

'The mutation variable grows along the increasing growth rate. A degree of cancerous cells is a statistical certainty.'

'Sub-sub-sub-sub-sub division detached.'

When the next report came, the main mind simply… ignored it.

With the rate at which it kept spreading, it was inevitable some parts of itself would change, bug out, and get corrupted, leading to the creation of cells so far detached from the main life it could no longer be considered to be the same vein.

But then…

'Sub-sub-sub division failed to report. Extrapolating similarities. Expected reason: involuntary detachment.'

'What?'

For the first time, the being felt something stirring. ?%??????#?-?&?+-??$?@-@?-?+-&

Something that it only ever experienced as it consumed the few limbs of prey that somehow survived for so long in this instance of the physical world.

Fear.

'Sub-Sub division failed to report. The integrity of the cluster falls down to eighty percent.'

The new reports continued to come in faster and faster, soon reaching the limit of how quickly the higher instance of processing could… well, process things.

"Visualize!" desperate to decrease the burden of the calculations, the higher instance of processing screamed out into the void, manifesting the being's voice for the very first time.

And with it, the life itself fell in line, twisting the colorful vision of life scattered over the whole span of the being's spiritual manifestation into a flashing map on which different colors displayed every last sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub division and assigned it a color.

The color of the healthy leaves for the properly working cells of the cluster, the bright crimson of a prey's blood for the ones currently bugging out, and then black as the void itself for those who no longer reported back and were thus considered to be cancerous.

The rate at which the cells of the being succumbed to cancer greatly overshot the margin of error being assigned to the process, when it considered some level of data corruption to be inevitable. But now that this data appeared on a map…

Now, the being could see that it wasn't just an accumulation of errors appearing all over its spiritual mainframe, a result that would indicate the being had reached the limit of how much it could sustainably grow before reorganizing its structure into one that couldn't expand as fast but could continue the expansion in a more sustainable manner.

No. The image of the map made it clear. All of the errors… they were all appearing in a circle centered around the point where not a single cell of the being was still reported to the main hivemind.

It was not a map of errors… but a map of merciless slaughter.

And it just so happened to be centered around the very point that the being's limbs somehow failed to stumble.

'Failure of the limbs unexpected. Inconsistency in higher processing. Implementing investigative measures.'

For but a second, the higher level of the being's consciousness vanished, turned off as the subprograms took its place and wrung all the potentially corrupted data through their set of filters, firewalls, and other defensive measures.

Yet, as the being's self woke up a moment later… the report left by the investigative subroutines was as massive as it was devastating.

'Higher influence detected. Algorithms fail and seek retribution. Transcendent. Transcendent. Transcendent.'

Transcendent.

A type of being that simply went beyond the strict rules that limited the algorithm, forcing them to stick to reality rather than fixating on some impossible, unrealistic problem.

A simple countermeasure to weed out problematic and uncooperative parts of the beings all the way back in the pre-awakening part of its life cycle… but now it turned out to be a handicap that disallowed the being to even consider opposing the transcendent.

For what could the being do about one that had no need or desire to follow any rules and norms? How was the being supposed to expand when there already was a peak predator now rearing its head, ready to defend its hunting grounds?

How was the being based on variables and algorithmic processing of asymmetric data supposed to deal with something that couldn't be quantified within a variable to being with?

And so, with a single thought, the being abandoned all the cells within the anomaly's range, cutting off a chunk of them as massive as all the cells that it lost thus far.

All in a desperate attempt to buy itself time, breach the wall of the cold void that enclosed it in this prison… no, in this arena where rather than a predator, the being turned out to be nothing more but just another prey for the true apex predator to feast on.

For a moment, the trick worked. With bandwidth limited to just the simple reporting, the being could still maintain the view of its abandoned cells even after it… well, abandoned them. And so, it could only watch as the growth of the cancer only accelerated.

Now that it paid close attention, it could also tell those cells were not getting corrupted… but were outright melting down, the being's life purged out of the variable codex held by each of the cells, turning it into the very energy the being expended into, to begin with.

Energy… that suddenly all vanished as if sucked away by something…

Only for the being's countermeasures to soon prove to be insufficient after all.