Let's Talk About the Sun-Cutter

Alright, I kinda wanna talk about this one guy in Black Nerve --- and that's almost literal.

He is the one, the indivisible, the lord of all batkind --- the Sun-Cutter King. His signature technique was the [All-Conquering Division!]{.spell}

In later retellings of his myths, thousands of years removed, it tends to get simplified as him having a "tongue sharp enough to cut anything." (This is no metaphor; his vespers had endowed his mouth with a whip sword that was known to behead people with its lash.)

But that's not really enough to explain what his technique truly was.

First, it's worth noting that the most oldest, and still most common archetypes for the vespers' design, are breath weapons and enhanced claw attacks --- two arts that come intuitively to the bats.

Thus, it's a bit more accurate to say that the Sun-Cutter had raw slashing force as a breath weapon.

His preferred style of attack is a series of rapid cuts dividing the target into eight pieces, composed of lines that seem to radiate out from a single point, as if the rays of a bleeding sun --- this is the eponymous sun-cut.

Now, how he performs this technique bears comment. He draws one line with either of his foreclaws, and another with his tongue. You will note that this is only three lines, and you need at least four to divide something into eight pieces.

How does this work? Simple: his power level is so high he could add three ones together and get four.

But no, this leads nicely into elaboration of what makes this technique truly powerful. See, the king only does part of the work, then the technique completes itself.

Because let's be honest, cutting things really really good is powerful, but it's not "strongest in the verse" powerful.^Even [Sukuna had other bullshit going on.]

We can imagine, perhaps, the Sun-Cutter honed an enervate affinity profoundly optimized for cutting, but again, it's still just cutting.

And importantly, part of the premise of Black Nerve is that philosophically, the magic system is mere technology --- techniques from thousands of years ago just fundamentally aren't as advanced, refined, or powerful as what modern vespers are capable of. This is the mystical stone age we're talking about.

Of course, applying this reasoning depends somewhat on how the king's technique actually functions --- wheels from the stone age remain intrinsically effective.

One simple and compelling way to implement universal cutting exists through enervate mechanics: imagine creating a sheet of enervate that blocks interactions between atoms on either side of it. If you can manifest that sheet for a single moment then blow it up, the different parts would fall away as if they were different objects. (Fittingly, this really isn't cutting --- it's division.)

Still, it's not fully clear how this form of technique could be convincingly generalized to cut seminerves or enervate constructs; and it is being able to cut through any technique that makes the sun-cutter truly worth reckoning with.

But we digress.

Truth is, the base mechanics of the king's ability aren't actually important, because at the limit, what matters is the narrative around his abilities. You see, the effect of [All-Conquering Division]{.spell} extends to at least two conceptual levels.

First, there's a important epithet I left out of the my initial glaze.

He is also the Author of Arete. In a meaningful sense, he created the vespers' magic system; it was he who first divided power itself into fungible units that could be accounted and transacted.

The vespers know this, and they associate this with him so profoundly that they consider arete, endowments, and techniques themselves, a valid axis on which his division can operate.

Now, it would oversimplifying this to say he can cut you off from your vespers, but...

What you're noticing here is that the operative agent here is not any of the specific, concrete mechanics of what the Sun-Cutter is physically capable of, but the high level narrative of what vespers expect him to do.

Thus, the true power of the All-Conquering Division is that it is, by definition, a technique that cuts anything. That isn't a statement of fact --- that's a command.

The sun-cutter only needs to make three cuts for the final cut to be made for him. He draws the lines, and if the target isn't thereby cut, the vespers actively task themselves with divising a way to cut it anyway.

His is an offense that adapts to anything.

In the Sun-Cutter's era, there was not yet any notion of 'prophecy in the flesh', but it isn't altogether incorrect to think of All-Conquering Division as creating a prophecy of destruction for anything it initially fails to cut.

(Upon the Sun-Cutter's head once sat a crown of myriad fractal bone-blades growing out from his flesh. These are the antlers every elder bat boasted. It is said that every time he conquered a new foe, he grew a new blade there.)

You may wonder: who is the sun-cutter, actually? Where and why did he learn to do any of this?

Back in , one of the proposed explanations for the origin of vespers was that king of bats created them to tame the virulent blood plagues.

But let's go back further. Remember, weevil priestess can become immortal, eventually learning the art of transmigrating their minds into young bodies, reincarnating themselves. This is the culmination of weevil wizardry.

When there were dragonriders, the dragonrider pact was considered to be mutally exclusive with learning most arts of wizardry, including transmigration. A weevil's soul can only have one mate.

Hraal, the greatest dragonrider, so adored for her deeds and adventures, was allowed to be the exception. And what an exception she was! Her genius was said to be sufficient that she had rewritten the process of transmigration. Immortality soon went from something achieved perhaps once a century by the greatest wizard of a generation, to something any weevil could learn if they devoted decades to the task.

But you know how this story ends; Hraal learned wizardry, and so did her dragon, who tried to save a her miscarried litter through lunar divination, and weevils claim this was the origin of ichor.

The sorrow and the blasphemy was so great, that as Hraal and so many others entered the cycle of reincarnation, the elders would no longer allow weevils to take bats as mounts. All of them remembered how the first attempts to teach a bat wizardry lead to catastrophe, and an immortal loving a mortal creature was deemed too painful to allow --- even immoral.

And so there was a kind of species-wide divorce as the weevils retreated into their newly widespread immortality, and bats, once domesticated and uplifted, were left to go feral, stories of their old masters still echoing in their throats as plagues claimed them.

And then one bat rediscovered lunar divination. Perhaps he pieced it together from the stories, perhaps secrets were revealed to him by a foolish weevil.

Theogony is the ritual by which a weevil foundress first connects with the fungal core of a new gallery, binding her to the roots of the world and revealing to her her role in the cycles and machinations of ambrosia.

Lunar theogony is a dangerous, forbidden ritual of divination in which a weevil opens their mind just as intimately to the adumbrations of the black moon. It's a path that leads only to madness and atrocity.

When that one bat performed lunar theogony, they witnessed memories. They remembered dying in the womb. And before that, they remembered being Hraal's dragonmate, living a life of adventure denoued by tragedy, and dying on a soft bed, the claw of their withered wing held by a bug in a young new body.

This, be it a vision or hallucination, lead the bat to conclude they were now the reincarnated mind of Hraal's dragon --- and her stillborn child.

The weevil elders dismissed this as impossible derangement, and did not even allow them to meet the current incarnation of Hraal.

This brings us to the vespers. ^[Would it be incorrect to say vespers are the product of this bat's attempt to create a new dragonrider pact? Interesting to consider about how profound an inversion it is --- because for all the assertions of equivalence, it's not wrong to note that the dragonrider pact was created by, and therefore is designed to benefit, bugs first of all. So what might a pact designed by bats, for bats, look like?]

The vespers saved bats from the ichorplagues and granted them mastery over the bugs that had hunted and slaughtered them. And the Sun-Cutter held mastery and profound influence over the vespers.

Equipped with the All-Conquering Division, he led the bats with uncontested strength. He promised the vespers unending growth, and he promised the bats an everlasting kingdom. And people believed him; he seemed unstoppable. After all, the world itself would bend so that he always won.

Now, the weevils don't like this at all. They dislike it on a number of levels, but the biggest is probably the matter of slavery. The thrallspell, and the millions of mantids it kept like livestock, was an atrocity that needed to be stopped immediately.

The problem is, you won't win if you simply kill the Sun-Cutter (if they even possessed a way to kill the sun-cutter). That would only create more chaos; vespers exist now, and even if every brick of the Sun-Cutter's kingdom was destroyed, bats would still be able to use vespers to enthrall mantids. Short of exterminating bats or vespers, what solution was there?

This brings us to the instrumental transcendence plan.

The weevil elders wondered: what if they planted a seed and enchanted it to grow a really, really big --- a mountain of wood, a veritable world-tree --- and then feed it to ambrosia and used the resulting megafungus to cast a spell big enough to affect the whole heartlands?

What spell? One of the old stories the weevils tell in hush