[RSM] Chapter 124. Favors (Patreon)

Tundra walked the alleys of the Luharlia's palace, and down pathways with a gait felt like habit.  The studies drained him, even if there were days he felt like they made some progress. But today, there was someone he was meant to meet.

He found Grandduke Edrian waiting. "Come. We're taking a rather unique flying ship today. Something even I almost never get to use."

Now that made Tundra wonder. Grandduke Edrian mentioned that there was someone who could provide insights into the nature of the golden dragon's remaining lifeforce. Maybe that could help him conceptualize how that interacted with the spatial and temporal energies. "And you would still not tell me who this person is?" 

"Some things are best as a surprise, Lord Fox." 

"I feel like you're doing it intentionally, just to get me off guard."

"Ah. That is not too far from the truth." Grandduke Edrian grinned, but led him into the imperial hangars where the Princess's private flying ships were stored. He passed a few rather familiar sights, the smaller 150-man and 200-man ships were parked for inspection, and these were the same variants used by Prince Kaorl's army, but the Grandduke led him deeper.

He knew something was unusual when he passed by a spatial formation that suggested that this hangar wasn't something they wanted to show the world. 

Inside was a small ship, barely 50-man and smaller than even Tundra's own flying ship, but it was made with materials that were clearly exquisite. It was as if some powerful tenth realm decided to spend all his fortune on a single small ship. 

But as his eyes looked and picked up the spiritual formations that coated the ship, Tundra's wonder only grew. Whoever did this wanted a ship that could hide really well, and still packed enough firepower for a decisive stealth attack. 

The size was not an accident. It was a deliberate choice.

"Impressive, no? But no, it does not belong to Princess Luharl. She does not have the resources for something like this. It belongs to her grandfather, the previous Emperor, and we'll be using his ship to take us somewhere." 

Tundra gulped. His earlier conjecture that the pill went to the Emperor was correct after all. 

Only one man stood there, and he was a peak ninth realm general. The Empire really hid many trump cards, Tundra thought to himself, as the 

"General Huien, supposedly dead. So these days, he goes by the name Haiyan." Grandduke Edrian introduced the man. "Lord Fox, I am sure you know what not to say."

Tundra glanced at the Grandduke and wondered what else he would see today, but General Huien was one of the previous Emperor's favourite generals, and the tales told of his glorious death in a battle with the demons. 

The Empire always fought in the shadows. He just didn't know the scale of it.

"Come in, we leave now before the spatial distortion destabilizes." General Huien said. "We need to move quickly." 

The internals of the ship were absolutely spartan. This was not a ship designed for comfort or secret trysts. It was a weapon, and the internal space for 50 was stripped out for powerful spirit beast cores, which powered even more formations.

 "So, I assume that I cannot know where I am headed?" Tundra said. 

"Correct. But you'll figure it out once you are there." The general said. The flying ship's illusionary formations kicked in, and even ninth realms would struggle to notice its presence. The ship warped space, and the environment felt like a blur. 

It is often said that higher realm ships rely on a combination of rudimentary spatial manipulation and raw force to move. It was a work of genius, and it was also why the Golden Dragon were so powerful.

It is said that the peak Golden Dragon Emperor of the ancient past could travel everywhere on a flying ship in a blink of an eye, because their mastery of the spatial realms allowed them to manipulate distances in ways others could not.

So, the ship warped, and then, the General turned. "Well, we're here. We can get off now." 

"I have not even made tea yet." Grandduke Edrian smiled. 

"There's plenty of that in the chambers."

***

Tundra felt a surreal chill the moment he stepped off the ship, and looked around to find a sea of ice and snow capped mountains. There was a spatial distortion applied to the entire mountain, and he walked in to see a familiar face.

Princess Luharl stood waiting. "Well, let's go." 

He sighed, but bowed and greeted the Princess.

"You're too smart not to know who you are meeting, so come. Let us not waste time." 

The Emperor stood at the heart of the hall, and looked absolutely delighted. It was the first time Tundra ever saw him, in his first life, he never actually crossed paths with the man. As a sixth realm sect master during this time of his life, he was a nobody, while the Emperor stood at the peak of it all. 

He knelt and prostrated himself as everyone else did. "Your majesty."

In his mind, he wondered whether Grandduke Edrian spoke the truth, or was he just making an excuse. He took a sense of the Emperor's aura, and it felt robust. There were fraying ends, parts of the spiritual energies that often spoke of one's dying spirit, but fewer than he expected. 

However, the other person in the audience was Prince Kaorl. He sat on a chair, and looked thoroughly intimidated. Princess Luharl walked to a chair on the other side of the Emperor, and sat there. 

With the Emperor, the decorum was to only speak when spoken to, and so he remained silent. His mind instead focused on the spiritual energies around, and he scanned Prince Kaorl's spiritual energies. 

It was still contaminated. 

The throne room was silent. 

"My son made life difficult for you." The Emperor declared. 

Tundra frowned. That was not the way he expected the Emperor to start the conversation. Was that a statement? Did he want him to deny it? So, he decided on something a little more diplomatic. "The Prince's army is incredibly skilled." 

The Emperor laughed. "And yet you lived. My son, would you apologize to the alchemist?"

Tundra gulped, and getting an apology from the Prince would be strange. "That- that would not be necessary, and I am not the one primarily harmed. There are better candidates, and there are those who deserve fair compensation for being at the wrong place, and at the wrong time."

"Yes, that sounds fair." The Emperor declared, and gave a look at his son.

The Prince wilted. 

Tundra wondered whether that was how his children reacted when he criticized them. 

"Now, my brother tells me that you were the one making these strange pills. Tell me about them."

Tundra knew this was performative, but he had to act his part. This was part theatrics and setting the scene, and the Emperor has already done his research. But he narrated just as he did with Princess Luharl. 

"So, this is the part where I can be of value." The Emperor said. "You believe that the Golden Dragon devours our time, which is why we die much faster than others?"

"Yes."

"But what the Golden Dragon does, is actually hollow out our time? Time is a flexible thing and infinitely compressible. That compression has energy. By giving away compression-"

Tundra blinked. Grandduke Edrian looked lost. Princess Luharl and Prince Kaorl looked thoughtful. "Life is not losing its length, but density?"

"Yes, and thus time eats more of it." 

Tundra sat as he contemplated the explanation. In some ways, it was the same, as if just playing with words. Time eats the same units of time, but if each unit of time was less, time needed to eat more. But the shape of the time is different. To everyone else, the Golden Dragon's time looks the same, and yet it was clearly less.

"Or think of it another way. Imagine each of us is a candle, and the candle's flame burns at a steady clip. Our flames are larger. Our candles' wax are softer. Lighter." 

"But you start dense, and somehow it turns lighter."

"Yes. If the pill is structured to add density, add weight? There is little one can do with the burning of time, but what materials are burning can be fixed. There were rather conflicting tales in our history, of one of my ancestors' relatives transferring and stealing the life of others to extend their own. Though it ultimately ended in failure, that cultivator still lived a few decades longer than we expected."

Tundra frowned. "I would not recommend going down that path."

"Good." The Emperor retrieved a scroll that was clearly older than a few thousand years old. "These were his writings and observations. This ancestor is a scar on our reputation, a blight on our honorable ways, but his genius in the concepts of life and times were unmistakable. I need to know that you are not one to be swayed by the darkness."

The scroll floated over. 

"There is a lot of darkness in that scroll, but those who read it can still glimpse the man's sharp observations." 

***

The Emperor's definition of darkness was perhaps a little too gentle. 

Tundra considered it to be an abhorrent piece of work. 

Tundra read the unnamed ancestor's accounts and records of his experiments on living cultivators. How he cut up their souls and made experiments. How he manipulated families to experiment on whether a sibling's soul could be used to reinforce each other. He used his powers to dissect their souls, keep them barely alive and see how it affected their behavior. He would kidnap twins and triplets and conduct experiments just to see how different things affected these twins and triplets.

He could feel the mad genius of the man. The work of a genius who cared little for the lives of others, and cared little for the supposed nature of cultivators. Heartless. Cold and calculating. This was the work of a man with all the mind and none of the heart. 

It was not that far off from many geniuses that dabbled in demonic arts. 

Yet, there were moments as he read the scroll, and wondered to himself whether the others looked at him the same way. When he was in the tenth realm, he may not have dabbled in such moves, but every action's morality was subjective. 

He sat and read the entire scroll over and over, trying to digest the many observations of the unnamed ancestor. 

As Tundra read and reread it, slowly trying to grasp the concepts captured, he realized that this unnamed ancestor described the time of their bloodline as a flexible ball of string, and those strings, woven together formed their 'time'. Each time the golden dragon used power, it took one of these strings. Overuse it, and the entire structure collapses, and the cultivator dies. But even if they didn't, their life is less. 

He looked at the various diagrams drawn within the scroll, and realized he could shape the pills' effects to better match the shapes within. 

Still, it was highly conceptual, and it was hard to know what effects it would have on the bloodline. 

But some things could only be made in tests. 

"I ask that you document down your findings." Both Grandduke Edrian and Princess Luharl said as he began to make the first of the improved pills. 

Tundra turned to briefly greet the Princess, but she quickly waved him off and chased him to resume his task. As if they were all running out of time. 

"How many pills has the Emperor taken?" Tundra asked. 

"Two."

"So I have three more."

"He will only take one more, and only if it is good." Princess Luharl said. "But you will make at least five for now. Two of them will be taken by myself and my uncle."

"These things can't be kept for long." Tundra said, and then realized he was dealing with the resources of the Emperor, so he quickly backtracked. "I misspoke, very well."

He thought and realized maybe the Emperor wanted to wait for him to be more powerful, where he can make more powerful versions of the pill. The soul's ability to absorb these pills are highly questionable, and Tundra didn't know whether the usual spiritual limits applied to a less dense soul.

It was the balance he finally settled on. One more pill just to live a little longer, and hold out for something truly special. A few centuries could mean a significant improvement to his abilities, and so the Emperor's future. 

"My father needs them, so I ask that you put your heart into it." Though the Princess wore a mask that covered parts of her face, he could still glimpse concern in her eyes. 

Need. That was a particularly interesting choice of words. He also didn't know why he briefly wondered whether his children would say the same things on his behalf.

Still, those were minor concerns. 

Tundra briefly wondered whether he had permanently enslaved himself to the Emperor, but also knew that such pills are three parts easily replicated skills, seven parts works of art. An alchemist who made them under coercion could sabotage them in ways no one could even know until they consumed it. 

So, that meant alchemists should be fairly well treated. 

"I will do my best."

"Do it well, and my father promises you will have the right to ask him for a favor."

Tundra blinked. An Emperor's favor?

Could he- wait- could he ask the Emperor to gather resources and strike at the Zuja?

***

[ AN : I spent the one month off mostly writing the end of my other story, tree. It's a nice feeling to write the ending. Once that ends, I'll focus my attention here and try to wrap this one up too. ]