The “water-converter” turned out to be a great assembly of living flesh and machinery, with some three-quarters of its mass completely beyond Zanma’s comprehension. A series of wheels and channels guided the waters of the river into great big bone-encrusted sacs of flesh that extracted water and ejected a noticeably thicker, darker-red liquid back into the stream. Fortunately, the malfunction was in the analog machinery that managed the engineered organism, and it was thus something he could easily diagnose and repair. He had to hold himself back from snidely commenting on the work done by whomever had repaired it before him, lest he break the appearance of a wise puppetmaster. This welding and soldering was, to put it plainly, unacceptable dogshit, the cables were tangled and frayed, not properly insulated, and for some reason a length of optic fibre had been glued together rather than spliced properly. All in all, it was a primitive machine, but the meat did the bulk of the hard work, so nothing complex was needed to keep it ticking in synch. He counted himself fortunate that he didn’t have to go digging around in there with his own fingers and could just pick it apart from a distance, it was that bad. But he fixed it up alright, cleaned up the workmanship to a bare-minimum standard, and walked away richer by two full chits and some interesting organic materials before he even put on his performance.
The performances didn’t pay much, not in tiny towns like this one, but even with larger venues, the real purpose behind them was advertisement. By the time Zanma was done working on the water-converter and receiving the town elder’s heartfelt thanks in both words and valuables, the stage had already been set out for him. It wasn’t quite to his standards, but plenty good enough. Yes, this one would suffice to put on a good showing.
Money and advertising aside, at the end of the day, he was still a puppetmaster. It was only natural that he enjoyed putting on a show with his puppets.
Two weeks later. Another stop at another town, much larger, almost enough to be considered a small city, carved into the side of a mountain — a natural mountain, for once. Nothing of interest had happened for some time. Zanma had half-finished the Hadou Frame by now, and had been working on the head assembly.
It was halfway through the play. The physically easy part, setting up the narrative, was over. Zanma sighed in relief. He wouldn’t need to speak much at all for the rest of this evening, at least after this final monologue. He drew in a deep breath and began.
“We, of the idolatrous doctrine! We, who build false deities from clay and wood and metal, and animate them with our own spirits! So what if our works are falsities and imitations?! There is no supreme law that states fakes can’t surpass the originals! Now, let this builder of forgeries prove to you great ones just how wrong you are! My great works, you who know not life and thus know not death, march as an armored tidal wave, climb over the fallen so that they may rise again behind you!”
He continued with a nine-symbol incantation, performing a hand-seal for each word; the seals of the thunderbolt, great thunderbolt, outer lion, inner lion, outer bonds, inner bonds, wisdom fist, the ring of the sun, the hidden form.
“Celestial soldiers, descend and array yourselves before me!”
A great battle was unleashed upon the stage, an army of puppets dressed in archaic battle armor raging against four gigantic figures of equally demonic and god-like appearance, with horns, wings, numerous eyes, multiple sets of arms, floating weapons and fire-spewing mouths. The “Four Eradicators,” raised up on a podium at the rightmost side of the stage. Over and over, the valiant army of puppets struck against the four figures, and over and over they were thwarted, destroyed, smashed to bits, yet they kept coming as if there was an inexhaustible number of them. Zanma stood behind the army, atop a podium on the leftmost side of the stage, purposely extruding his threads from his fingertips and wildly gesturing as he operated the whole thing; the threads were visible for only a meter or so before fading out, hiding the fact they looped back and went under the floor rather than connecting to any of the puppets directly through the back. He was dressed in a simple and purposely weathered robe and conical hat, wearing a large box on his back, all to evoke the image of an “ancient” puppetmaster.
In actuality, there were less than a dozen puppets “fighting” at any given time, with the stage itself incorporating a larger “puppet” that produced the illusion of a writhing battle formation. Each of the actual, individual puppets concealed a “Bursting Puppet” mechanism, allowing it to be dismembered and “die” in a convincing manner. The “killed” puppets would simply be pulled under the stage through the floor and rejoin the fray once the bursting mechanism had been reset. It was nearly automatic — he could keep the battle going like this for hours without ever repeating the same sequence of events, not because he put in that much work, but because he had a fair few preset motions for the warrior puppets, with a small degree of variation for each movement. The setup of an army meant that the audience didn’t mind the similarity, they were soldiers after all. The same went for the Eradicator puppets, though there was no “corpse recycling” mechanism set up for them, since each of their deaths marked a progress point in the play. The entire stage was in fact a “puppet” of sorts, concealing a large, crude, and impractical gearbox that nonetheless facilitated the ability to manipulate numerous puppets with a high degree of apparent complexity. It was designed for this purpose and nothing else. The version of the play he performed was of the smallest scale, and this already pushed the limits of his ability in both threadcount and how many ways he could split his attention; all by design to help him push towards the Hadou Armature Method’s first breakthrough of the Schizoid Stage, and then the Hyperschizoid Stage.
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The clashing of spears and blades, puppets being smashed apart, dismembered and shot to pieces, endlessly throwing themselves in waves at the Four Eradicators — it all looked terribly impressive, and brought across not just Zanma’s skill as a puppetmaster and engineer, but also the implication of what sort of firepower he could bring to bear if he had to. Of course, he couldn’t really operate a dozen serious combat puppets. But they didn’t know that — some within the audience certainly knew that his real combat power wasn’t as great as his puppet show insinuated, but it still made them estimate his real combat power to be well beyond what it actually was. Zanma had gone to painstaking lengths to create a convincing illusion, taking the foundation of this play and adding further variations, so he could perform it multiple times and maintain the illusion he was actually doing it all on the spot. In some ways it was the same sort of illusion as a mediocre painter bleeding himself to the bone to create a few impressive portfolio pieces — the customers knew they wouldn’t receive something to that standard if they didn’t pay through the nose, but they hoped their more modest commissions would come out at least one-quarter as good. The play’s plot as a whole was straightforward. A group of four rogue “Eradicators,” effectively nature-spirits embodying natural disasters, wrongly marked out a settlement for destruction. Thus, the settlement’s sole evolver, a puppetmaster, journeyed to a remote place to find a certain time anomaly, which he used to turn his handful of puppet soldiers into an army. Its sheer scale was both the main challenge and the main appeal. It was titled “Paradox Creator.”
Zanma had been putting on at least one performance each time he stopped in a place with people. Besides Paradox Creator, he knew a handful of others. “Demon Slaying Great Saint” was the simplest in execution, more of an engineering challenge than anything else. Its main puppet, Deus Machina, was a scale model of a mythical giant machine, with the stage being a miniature-scale cityscape. The Deus Machina had an exceedingly complex design with majestic armor and a handsome, expressionless face surrounded by a mane-like headdress. It mounted numerous weapons, some fake and a fair few real, employing them to fight against monstrous puppets with flexible outer layers, designed to resemble gigantic beasts.
However, the plays were… Well, somewhat secondary. Their purpose had been to set the foundations and then give him a cover story. A mere traveling puppetmaster, so on and so forth. He had no intentions to stop performing, and even had plans to create his own plays, but he wouldn’t fall into depression if he couldn’t garner the attention of an audience for a prolonged period of time.
Travel, perform, make some money, visit local markets, buy and sell as appropriate, make a small profit in materials or currency, set it aside to spend at the next market. This cycle became his life for the next several weeks as he journeyed south-eastward along the rim of the Bleeding Mountains. There was risk, of course, there always was. Faced with the threat of banditry, or worse, treachery, some itinerant evolvers embraced the Demon Strategy — the strategy of assuming any other evolver was a potential hostile and acting accordingly, to the extent of attacking any other evolver if they approached suddenly and without making it clear they were not a threat in some way. Zanma didn’t fall into this camp. People could, at times, be dumber and more reckless than actual animals, but to such individuals, Zanma was a glowing poison frog. His appearance and behavior were those of someone with powerful backing and no reason to fear being clocked as an evolver, so this half-truth became an actual deterrent. He didn’t encounter any actual bandit attacks on his way, somewhat to his disappointment.
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