Chapter 437 - A Losing Battle (Patreon)

Welp, I got kinda distracted yesterday and did a crapload of driving, but now I'm here and there's a chapter! And there will be one tomorrow too!

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Our barricades are broken through. Our defenses are torn open. Our disciples lie dead and our fields are burned. I can hear screaming coming from beyond our final boundary, and the array will not survive much longer. Our remaining elders are equipping themselves, preparing for our final war. 

As Patriarch of the Invisible Burning Stone sect, I take responsibility for our end. I shall sacrifice my life on the altar of protecting the few who remain and keeping the enemy at bay long enough for them to escape. I do not imagine I will survive. 

Fifteen centuries of life, and now I face my end. A blink in the face of immortality, but an eternity to most. I find now, at the conclusion, that it was not enough. That I was not enough. I have failed in every measure, for my sect falls with me. I have not provided for its future as I should have, and have fallen to enemies I did not foresee. What they want with us, I do not know, but all that I can do is endure and move forward, even if it be into the jaws of Fate. 

I hear the screaming. When was the last time I heard the voice of a child? Of someone truly elderly? My children were born far from me, for I was too busy. Those who did not join me on the path to immortality, I left behind, to wither alone. I believed that wealth and providence were mine to offer, and worse, that they would be enough. Now I hear the cries of people who have lived for generations in my shadow, and who I cannot name, and who I believed lucky to simply exist beneath me.

Now they are wounded and dying and have lost everything, just as I have lost everything.

They hover in the sky, approaching where the air thins to nothing. Any who leave to engage them are struck down en-route or left to contend with one of them while the other four tear apart the world below. I have graced the Monarch Realm by a single step, and yet even I can guarantee I am not their match, for I can sense that which stands behind them, and it dwarfs me as I would a child. Even should I succeed, a millennia of work will be undone. Millions of lives, millions in spirit stones, artifacts, techniques, history, secrets, comprehension– I cannot protect it, and so I have no future even if I live. 

To those who see this message, I beseech you. If any good will ever existed between you and I, grant what aid you can to those of my sect you have encountered. If my face was ever true to you, then heed my words as the warning they are. 

The interlopers of the Empire are dangerous. Age and power will not stop them, not before they reach the Peaks. The violent green will come for us all unless they are stopped, and they will not offer demands or seek to negotiate. They have offered no mercy to the thousands of cultivators of my sect or of others who asked for my help and which I ignored. The threat moves quickly– it has been less than two weeks since they were first detected within our borders and already they have reaped a tally of lives uncounted. Their thirst for the Sunlit Flesh is all that is known about their motivations, and yet even surrendering it unto them did not save us. 

Heed me, and prepare yourselves. May you face better odds than I, and recognize the sky you have seen as being from a well rather than an open horizon. 

-Final missive of Tian Zedong, Patriarch of the Invisible Burning Stone sect, encoded in his Qi and stamped with his personal seal.

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“You! What are you doing!?”

The Feng’s outrage sounds real. It sounds sincere, but it’s always hard to tell when facing down a hateful mask that’s empty inside, save for some random branches.

But the death is real. The absence in existence that comes from a Warrior Realm cultivator being wiped out is impossible not to feel, like a color has vanished from out of existence from in front of one’s very eyes. His cultivation didn’t flood forth and paint the world, or detonate in a final, mountain-clearing blast, or even fade into the background of existence, it just vanished, like it was never there at all.

And where it was does not stand a man who Is Not There.

His robes are torn and bloody, painted in a dozen different colors of vitae. His face, impossible to discern or experience, is haggard though he exudes a perfect calm. Behind his head is a glow, a powerful light that seems to glow behind where light should be, that seems to whisper of future and past and what-will-be. 

If she squints, she can almost see a shape to it. A series of veils, all flowing and interweaving into an impression of a castle, ringing existence behind him in a perfect Halo. 

In his hand is a throat, torn free bloodlessly from what used to be a living body. In his other hand is the hilt of a knife, empty and EMPTY in a way that hurts to even look at. 

“You would dare to betray the Empire? To betray the Clan?”

“Your outrage is not required,” says a voice that Is Not There. 

“Not-”

The remaining Warrior Realm Feng splutters, but then stops and stares in shock as the throat is raised and lowered onto the hilt.

And then falls into it.

Falls into something that is EMPTY. 

And suddenly that EMPTY thing is deeper, more profound, built as an inverse of shadow. The shape of it is opposite and inverted and un-shaped in the form of a forest, whose eyes stare out at everything and bear the marks of all it sees as writing within its leaves and equations within its leaves. For a moment, there is an impression of a being, a pillar of form upon which is written all that can be known, its shape only visible through its opposite vanishing into the hilt.

The man who Is Not There smiles a smile that is gone fast enough that even Raika can’t tell how much there was to it. If it was even there at all. If his face even exists. 

What is he? She can’t sense a smell from him. She can barely even detect his presence, and if she thinks too hard about where he is he’s just instantly not there anymore. There’s a weight to the space around them, a sense of presence, but she can’t smell any Qi, can’t detect any concepts coming from him at all. 

In every way except the ways that would impede him, he simply Is Not There. 

And now his Not There-ness has been added to by the shadow of a Warrior Realm. 

The shadow is bigger than him. The hilt he is holding is more than he is. 

For the first time since she can fully remember, she feels a hint of apprehension.

“Elder Feng Ming’s contributions have been noted, and his personhood returned to the service of the Clan.”

He doesn’t say it like he’s explaining something, or even like a threat. He says it like a funeral rite.

“Under the authority of the Clan Tactical Leader, surrender yourself immediately,” says the Feng with the fan.

Then he blinks, trying to find his target. Then he coughs. Just once.

A dribble of red runs down his chin. 

He looks down at the way his armor has bent out of the way of his sternum, opening a clear path for his execution. Emerging from where his intact rib cage used to be is a hand clutching a thing that might be a heart. 

It looks too much like a tree to function like a normal heart should, but it does spasm and spurt and try to pump blood through arteries no longer connected to it, so it probably counts. 

The hand holding the heart Is Not There anymore, and the man who it belongs to is feeding it to a hilt that is a hundred times more than he is. Like a keyhole to something beyond him, the essence of what it means to be the Warrior Realm Feng leaks through it. It’s like all that the victim was is no longer, and is gone, and in leaving, it inverts backwards and inside-out in a way that hurts to think about.

The Warrior Realm Feng dies, not with world-shaking devastation, but with a sound of silence absolute.  His life-saving talismans don’t activate. His armor retreats from him. His Soul and Domain and fundamentally altered biology seem incapable of even attempting to save him.

Raika has a Warrior Realm cultivator trapped inside herself, who she has been tearing pieces off of and subverting and burning and consuming for hours, and it will take days more for it to die. In the face of an entire landscape that hates it and is alive and is actively turning itself into its antithesis, the cultivator still lives.

The man who Is Not There reached a hand forward and simply tore all that the cultivator was away. 

“Elder Feng Xinyue’s contributions have been noted, and his personhood returned to the service of the Clan.”

Raika can’t help it- she giggles at him.

The not-person turns a head in her direction from a place where Isn’t. 

“Thank you.”

She tilts her head, a multi-ton whirlwind of madness and flesh and sharpness and horror, smiling at nothing. When she speaks, the voice that emerges from her lungs is loud enough to make the air shudder. 

“That’s a weird thing to say to someone you’re trying to kill. And I’m pretty sure you got close last time, didn’t you?”

“I acknowledge you. I have ended plagues and ideas and powers that eclipse me entirely, but in my failure, I have grown. In what you have taken from me, I have found something new.”

The swirling veil-castle imagery of his Halo glows and circles, ever-so-gently. Raika thinks she might hear it whisper something to him. 

“Does gratitude mean you won’t try to kill me?” she asks.

“Acknowledgement does not overcome the authority of one beyond you. Beyond us both. Your END is inevitable.”

Raika shivers at the way he says that word, feeling a strange cold ripple out through her into every other Raika that’s listening. Still, she smiles. 

“Good. That’s nice. It would be annoying if you tried to give a reason for me not to kill you.”

She starts screaming. 

Sound explodes out of her in a wail that goes on and on and on, hundreds of lungs moving in concert. She pushes Pain into the sound, transmitting every ounce of her thorough understanding of it out and into existence. 

The air vibrates, carrying out the frequency of shattered agony into the world and breaking it. Gases recoil alongside Space which is Flesh, and what does she know better Flesh that hurts?

So she grabs onto that too, and existence bends like muscle as she pulls herself towards-

He’s Not There. 

He’s not anywhere. He’s not where her attack is, or where it could reach, or where she can see or detect. 

She spawns a few thousand eyes, turning to look in every direction at once. Empty sky, all around. The Manse down far below, almost blending into the landscape of other mountains that make up the Jianghu. A sea of green interspersed with hundreds of mountain ranges, all the way to the horizons, with different vales and valleys and at the very center of it all, to the north, five tall peaks that stretch into the peak of the sky. 

And he is nowhere she can see. 

Can he keep doing that? Just never be anywhere she can see? Never be anywhere she can catch or kill? 

No.

She hates him. She HATES. And she can’t reach him, and it makes her fucking furious.

She screams even louder. The sound makes the space around her shiver which makes it Flesh which means she can grab it and pull it. The sky begins to bend inwards as she coils and rolls and pulls it around her, dragging everything closer as she screams.

Not being able to kill him hurts. Not being able to kill the other two Fengs also hurt. Multiple times she’s been deprived, and she hates, and she suffers, and she searches.

And then Raika shrieks in surprise, and Raika turns back to the dome in surprise. 

The dome, still recovering from the weird alteration that the Feng did to it, shivers and breaks into clustered limbs, patting and stabbing inside itself to destroy chunks of the terrain. The campus of the Crimson Manse gets torn apart, dirt pulled up and buildings pulled open, even as the Raika in the sky hears from the rest of her what just happened.

Ten of the spouses are dead. 

Not the ones she elevated and transformed, but people in the crowd, servants and courtesans alike lying dead with pieces of themselves just gone.

And then, as her attention is drawn to the Crimson Manse and the screaming and the fallen bodies, something touches her. 

The Crimson Manse looks up as the Raika in the sky goes away. 

She is not there anymore. Everything about her is gone. In the place where she used to be, connected to all of the other Raikas, connected to their Flesh and their Pain and their Space, there’s simply nothing!

She screams, only barely remembering to throw the sound away from the interior of the dome. 

She’s already growing another body, already working to ensure that she’s got another war-body forming at maximum velocity. She’s looking everywhere, trying as hard as she can to find him-

A dozen more people die the moment she’s not looking.

Aria screams, throwing her Qi out in a wave that coats the chamber they’re in with vines. Porcelain explodes out from around the corpses, the damage becoming a portal for more greenery to spread and transform the space.

“Look everywhere!” Raika screams, forming mouths out of the walls. “Don’t look away! Keep eyes on each other! He can’t kill you if he’s there!”

“What does that mean?” Aria yells back, looking around desperately. 

“Just do it!” Raika says, expending the energy to build hundreds of thousands of eyes. It takes only a moment to optimize the process, create overlapping cones of vision, but even then it costs an insane amount of processing power to see through them all at once. She grows over miles of terrains, around every corner, into every shadow and angle she can think of and forcing space to bend into ones that she normally can’t.

And still, he’s Not There. 

“Master Raika! What the hells is happening?” Aria yells at the ceiling. 

“We’re under attack!” she yells back, scrambling to find every possible blind spot. “The enemy can appear wherever he isn’t! I can’t find him!”

“Wha– wherever he isn’t? That makes no sense!”

“It’s a Truth, I think! I don’t know, I don’t understand it! I think he’s the one who killed me the last time! He’s dangerous, just- watch everywhere to make sure that he can’t be there!”

The third war-body finishes building and Raika launches herself forward out of the ground, yanking Space to launch past the dome’s remains and up into the sky. 

“I’m here!” she yells, her voice vibrating with Pain, only made stronger by her panic. “I’m here! They’re protected! Face me if it’s my death you want!”

“Death isn’t enough,” he says, and she explodes. Dozens of bombs implanted under the skin of her current wyrm-form detonate in an omnidirectional explosion, illuminating the cloudless sky for a moment.

She’s already regenerating, moving broken pieces and replacing them almost instantaneously, filling in empty spaces with new bombs– 

The dome screams again as the war-form stops being, with no sign that she’s managed to so much as touch the assassin.

And then a quarter of the dome vanishes as well. 

The agony of something being and then just not being echoes through dozens upon dozens of Raikas, and she explodes that in every direction she doesn’t already have covered by her eyes. Still nothing.

She keeps separating bits of neural tissue, forcing awareness into malformed brains that can do little more than stare and acknowledge, filling out dozens of new segments as she regrows the dome again. Even with her upgraded Qi production she’s absolutely burning through it, starting to run a deficit rather than a surplus, but she can’t think of any other way to react. 

Eyes open up along the inside and outside of the dome as it closes shut over the campus once again, completely filling every perspective she can think of with sight. 

For a moment, nothing happens. 

Third war-form begins production. This one should be made with eyes everywhere except where the weapons are, try to trick him into appearing where she can hurt him. She takes the theory and starts designing, taking pieces from the landscape and from her imprisoned Feng and-

One of the mountains is gone.

One of the mountains inside her is gone.

“You cost the Clan much, and my mission remains the same,” the Feng-thing that she cannot kill says from somewhere he isn’t. 

Half of the inner landscape tears open as she spasms hard enough to cause an earthquake. In the wake of it, millions of new eyes start to form, right alongside more and more Raikas to see through them. Many of them collapse as safeguards kick in, limiting her production, crippling her self-perceptions, but there’s enough to coat the world in a sea of sight.

She can’t find him. 

One of the spouses breaks from the group, activating a defensive artifact and trying to run-

Two others that he was watching are dead, as are over a hundred servants from the ensuing panic. Gone more than corpses, pieces of them simply missing and their presences utterly erased. Then the runner dies too.

“Death did not eliminate you. It, in fact, seems to have decentralized you. Erasure is the next step.”

She emits another sonic attack, infused with Dao again. A constant stream of attacks and violence act as chaff and fill as much of reality as she can manage, but it’s no different than before. She uses it to disguise frantic processing speed with seemingly mindless attacks and panic. It’s not too hard to do as an act, as she is, in fact, very close to panic.

“I appreciate your survival. It has forced me to push past previous limits. In the space of what you stole from me, I have found deeper possibilities. My gratitude is immeasurable.”

“Your gratitude is meaningless to me, and you deserve to suffer for what you’ve done to me!”

A quiet laugh comes from somewhere inside her body. From somewhere outside of her, she feels something move just fast enough to beat her reaction time. 

One of the buildings of the Crimson manse is gone, along with all of the servants and guards and people that were inside of it.

Her people. Hers. He took them. He keeps taking.

“What is deserved is meaningless. One beyond you has spoken, and my mission shall be complete.”

“Is that why you took the other Fengs from me? Your mission?”

The entire dome, all at once, vanishes, leaving only the pieces of her inside the manse and under the ground. In the absence there is the slightest hint of a smile, even as she sees no one. 

“They are tools of the Clan. I am a tool of the Clan. Alone, they are whetstones for you, vectors for your growth. In my hands, they are your unmaking.”

The worst part is that he’s probably right. The Warrior Realm Fengs weren’t a true and existential danger, they were something she was capable enough to respond to. This? This impossible absence that keeps unmaking her?

She HATES HIM.

A pillar of herself grows, a dozen minds acting as one to raise a panopticon. Some of the Raikas keep their focus inside of her, tracking every cell of herself to ensure that there’s no space that can’t be known. Some connect to the wider systems of sight she’s set up, glaring at existence from everywhere she can reach.

She roars, more rage than Pain this time.

“Your death will bring me joy you can’t fathom, Feng! There is nothing you can do to stop that from happening! For every harm you enact upon me, I will revisit it on your entire clan, again and again and again. I will keep them alive and multiplying purely so they may suffer, so that the world can see exactly what I turn them into. The ones you serve will be nothing because I hate and it is so much more than you!”

“I doubt that.”

“Raika!”

A sound that isn’t hate, and that isn’t emptiness, and that isn’t mocking, emotionless narration of what “is”. 

Part of her attention turns to Aria, who is holding a storage ring.

“Here! I got what you asked for! Focus and stop letting him get to you!”

The ring’s contents manifest with a touch of Qi, letting fall to the floor a dozen different artifacts. None of them look complete, some of them even look mutated and twisted, like they grew in wrong. Still, they all hold a tremendous amount of Qi, and she recognizes them as herself, even if they weren’t connected directly as of yet. 

Raika touches them, and makes them a part of her. 

She pulls on close to a dozen sources of Qi, pulling from those she has transformed and from a whole landscape of Qi-generating tissues. She rips through her own minds, pulling every thought and memory at once out of all of the Raikas who were building new ideas and new modifications for the trial takers. She reaches into the inverted pyramid at her core, which is fighting back with everything it has, getting harder and harder to access. 

She pulls.

In the chamber where almost a fifth of the spouses promised to her, that she said she would defend, lie still and empty, she begins to build.

“It won’t be enough,” says the man who Is Not There, his voice calm and matter of fact. 

“Go fuck yourself.”

She grabs the unique mutations built by someone who trusts her, and makes Raika anew.