Chapter 447 – Oh, What A Wonderful World (Patreon)

This weekend felt like WEEKS. Damn but I am fucking tired! Still dancing well apart from burnout, but if I get the chance, I might force myself to write nothing at all tomorrow. Better to be preemptive, maybe even confront the anxiety of "wah wah productivity more more", than to keep going wild. I might not be pushing pushing, but I am letting myself go the pace I want which might not be the pace I can sustain! Look at me, working at all this self awareness and improvement jazz. Bweh! Suffering and Joy, babes!

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“What do you mean, the barrier’s been broken? Was it the invaders? The-

“No? It was a– oh. You’re telling me there’s a Beast Tide happening. Now. For the first time in a millenia. While we’re actively in a conflict with foreign demonic invaders. Right. And they’re headed this way. Yes. Can you excuse me for a moment?

“Ao Lin, we are so fucked.”

-A conference of Grand Elders of the Yellow Smiling Palace Sect, responding to recent updates

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Not all integrations are quite so disruptive as her first. 

There are several hidden pockets of herself that have even less mind than the pond did, and some who have a lot more. Generally speaking, they’re either easier to overpower or much more eager to rejoin with her. She’s not the exception except that she developed a lot faster than most, and fusing back together with pieces of Her that have similarly fought their way through the safeguards back into a semblance of sanity is fairly easy. 

Still, she finds herself mostly disappointed. 

Most of the pockets of herself she finds are the size of a small town or less, adding negligible amounts of Qi generation to her whole and very little insight. At least very little insight that she’s interested in. Some of them have started spreading, offering her more domain she can travel through, but for the most part, the smallest pieces of herself are in fact small pieces. 

Almost in spite of herself, though, she’s starting to run into more and more information regarding the state of things. 

Several of her pieces have had to hide so well that even knowing where they are she has trouble finding them. The ones that failed to do so are left as ruined bits of ash and forest soil, unmade by the progressive devastation of the Feng initiative. Some of them were found directly and unmade with precision, but many of them have simply become dirt beneath forests that have grown out of stone and mountainsides as much as proper ground. 

The Fengs aren’t even bothering with subtlety. They’re outright advertising their presence and their allegiance, acting as a show of force in the Jiang’hu. No sect except maybe the Peaks can deploy as many Warrior Realm cultivators as they have just wandering around, and in spite of the violence they’re demonstrating, they don’t seem like an all-out assault. They seem like roving bands of marauders, casually bored with the idea of retribution, and in defense of their perspective, no one seems to be outright stopping them.

There are corpses in some of the woods she finds, spawned with a density of ontology that bends reality around them. Defenders who found themselves on the losing end of that confrontation, surrounded by the ruins of what might have been sects or cities or places in-between. 

They’re powerful places now, maybe even more than they were to begin with. A lesser cultivator could use the density of Qi and concept in the varying but similar woodlands to go up whole realms, or at least a good dozen steps through one. Or find themselves subverted, their cultivation overwhelmed and subsumed by the identity of the all-consuming transformation. 

Maybe half of the newly-grown forests she finds are in places where she can sense lingering traces of herself. Not enough to recover, but enough to taste that she used to exist there. The other half, she tastes remnants of others, traces of battles lost. 

She doesn’t find any Feng corpses, nor does she taste their deaths in any of the forests. 

It’s a bit intimidating. Less so than it would be if she were just human-sized, but still. Some of the forests she finds are terrifyingly large, eclipsing the scale of entire cities. Trees that dwarf hills and lesser mountains crape the heavens, casting the lands beneath them into evergreen shadows and sharp leaves. Soil that once sustained whole farmlands or bustling ecosystems is dead, devoured and drained dry of every drop of life energy in a cannibalistic orgy of floral growth. 

It will take months, maybe years, maybe decades, to carve out any headway against the terraformed landscape. For mortals, these might well become permanent fixtures, lasting for generations. 

All done in moments. All done in a destructive wave of violence made to wipe out any trace of her. 

If she weren’t such a geological feature herself nowadays, it would be rather rather intimidating. As it stands, it’s not exactly encouraging.

She beat one Feng. She held off another one. In a direct fight, she’s almost certain she’d win, though that’s arrogant enough to make her have to censure herself and make sure she’s not overestimating herself. Either way, it would be expensive. Too costly for a long term victory.

It’s ironic, really. In a direct confrontation, given a battle of attrition, she’d win. Given a war of attrition, she’ll lose.

One Feng, two Feng, three Feng, more Feng. 

That doesn’t mean that she isn’t progressing, though. 

There are pockets of herself that get found and added to the whole. The longer she waits, the more that the generator-obelisks and her spouses add to the flavor of her existence, deepening her ontological weight and making her resources broader, her foundation deeper. And the more she experiments, the more options she finds. 

Each new piece only adds more insight, more consciousness and perspective, more Qi-generating tissues to increase her yield. Pretty soon she’ll be big enough to add a few extra percentage points to the Republic of Morae’s overall size. 

But in a knock-out brawl against the whole of the Feng’s invasion, she’s pretty sure they could knock a few percentage points off just as easily. 

So it is that even as she spreads, collecting fresh parts of herself, growing miles wide and concepts deep, she is most excited for when her little exploratory groups finally start to approach the larger hidden realms she can sense.

In spite of their power, the Fengs seem to have been traveling around the outskirts, eliminating the pieces of her that are less well known over the ones most widely watched. Those are much more powerful, not least because there’s massive amounts of traffic of cultivators coming in and out of them. She’s not sure why they’re holding back on that front, but maybe they’re just being thorough, making sure that there’s no place she could retreat through or regrow from. 

Doesn’t matter. 

The first group of her apostles is arriving.

The Watchful Fields Sect has done well for itself. 

While they might not be the most powerful sect in the Jiang’hu, the auction held above them attracted a lot of attention and brought forth a lot of different sects close to her. Those sects, afterwards, received more than a bit of information about how She operated, and what She was, after the person she used to be collapsed and came undone and was Ended.

But when she died, there was a doorway open, to someplace deep and down far within her. 

Apparently, it didn’t close all the way when she died. 

“It didn’t reappear for a while, but when the auction closed a few weeks after the main event, a bunch of the materials that were bought were all taken out at the same time. When they did, there was a point, high in the meeting rooms above the auction hall, that unfurled, trying to hold them and keep them in place. Unlike the other hidden realms, it stays open, which makes it one of the most valuable hidden realms in the world. The Crimson Manse is nominally in charge of it, but in practice, there are too many powerful people and disparate interests to keep a hold on it, not from such a fresh group. The Watchful Fields Sect is closely allied with the Crimson Manse, so they lend weight to their claims, but with the Peak of the Crimson Phoenix and the Peak of the–”

“At some point in this conversation, are we going to discover something that might actually help us?”

Yu Guanyu laughs, smiling wide and waving his hand at the complaint. “It all helps us, my friend! The more informed we are, the better off we’ll be as we attempt to enter that holy land.”

Lei Hai grumbles, rubbing at a spot on her head like she’s trying to fight back a migraine. “That doesn’t mean I want you to wax poetic for hours every time you have the slightest thought about where we’re going. Some information is fine, but I don’t need every group and person of interest blasted into my ear every few hours.”

Yu Guanyu shrugs, still smiling. “I believe that a drop of preparedness is far more valuable than a pool of improvisation, my fellow believer. Is it my fault that your mind is your least well equipped muscle?”

“Do we have to listen to your banter the entire way there?” 

Dai Yuhan turns to the final member of their party, shaking her head. “Unfortunately, yes.”

Zhong Li lets out a breath, which is more reaction than he’s shown in most of the days of travel they’ve undertaken. 

Raika can’t help but empathize. Frankly, if not for how much she can literally feel their biologies and the chemistries between them, she would say they should fuck and get it over with. As it stands, the lack of sexual attraction between the two of them is downright impressive for two wandering cultivators with such close connections. 

This particular Raika, the one currently tasking herself with examining her missionaries and acting as a last-ditch security support for them, is bored. She’s very bored. All these people do is walk or run, all slow and boring and incapable of traversing a thousand miles in a day. They don’t fuck, they don’t kill anything, they hide out a bunch whenever there’s danger, they barely even test out their new limits. Well, they do, but not enough. They don’t push themselves properly, just feeling out the limits of where things don’t get damaged or cause major discomfort, which is incredibly boring. 

“There it is! We’re almost there.”

Through their eyes and the tools she has gifted them, she sees it. 

The upper part of the mountain has been removed. It spirals into a point, like paint curling up into an impossible whirlpool. It glows with color and majesty and complexity, like sunlight and sunrise, like radiation and flame and the glow of flesh ever-alive, hovering impossible in the air where the spaghettified mountain falls up into it. 

Beneath the point where the mountain begins to warp is what’s left of the auction hall, partially disassembled and added to by vast tracts of newly developed buildings, arrays, housing and pavilions. Thousands of cultivators fly about, traveling atop flying swords, enchanted boats, magical leaves or under their own powers, filling the air with the glow of power and the flavor of thousands of different energies. Down below, the Watchful Fields Sect and the miles of farmland under its authority spread out across the world. Caravans crawl in, palanquins of mighty cultivators and traveling bands of nomadic ones, different cultures dressed in power and concept wandering in towards that impossible sun atop the mountain. 

“If they attack us now, they will have to do so stealthily. Direct assaults on another would be a direct insult to the face of the Watchful Fields Sect and the alliances above it.”

“As if that’ll stop anyone properly dedicated,” Lei Hai grumbles.

“It won’t, but every advantage is a valuable advantage.”

She grunts, but Dai Yuhan pats her on the shoulder, and she sighs, shaking her head. 

“Alright then. Do we know how we’re going to get in? I doubt our mission is going to allow for months worth of waiting in line.”

“Oh, probably years at this point!” Yu Guanyu says with his implacable optimism. “Especially considering the other hidden sites are being taken down by the invaders, this one is only going to get more popular as it goes. I hear it has unique resources that no other sacred site has generated. But! Getting up there will be a challenge, but entry should be viable.”

With a grin, he pulls a jade token from out of his storage ring, the jade a startling blend of different reds. On its surface, the kanji for the Crimson Manse.

“If an invitation from one of the sacred site’s erstwhile masters isn’t enough to help us forward, we’ve already lost, and are going to have to do terrible stupidities to enter that place.”

Well that’s annoying. If they take too long, Raika might have to risk it and spawn a branch of herself here, speed through the process of entry into that place.

It calls to her.

She’s holding it back, keeping herself hidden, but she can feel the pieces of her inside her acolytes pulling towards it. Like gravity, bending her existence in towards that spiraling sun-void that paints the world in carmine and gold and orange and blue and green and-

So many colors. 

She can almost feel herself trying to fall out of their bodies and tumble up into that abominable, malformed, impossible dawn. 

Yeah, she won’t be able to wait very long.

“Either way, first step is to get close enough,” Zhong Li says, his voice quiet and out of place compared to the others. Without waiting for anyone else, he keeps trecking forward, his steps steady and listless. 

“Yeah, yeah. Come on, we–”

Yu Guanyu turns, raising an eyebrow at the silence. Lei Hai is not the sort of person to stop a sentence, no matter how poorly designed. 

Then he sees her eyes widening, and follows her gaze. 

“Do you hear that?” she asks. 

“Hear what?” Dai Yuhan says. 

Lei Hai raises a hand and points out to the west. 

A cloud is approaching. It grows from the earth rather than the sky. 

Even to cultivator senses, it’s still far enough to be unclear, but there’s a quiet rumbling to it. 

At the edge of the farmer’s fields, the end of the Watchful Field’s sect direct ownership and authority, arrays begin illuminate. Shapes of powerful magic begin to change the shape of the space, becoming a slow-forming but dense bubble of Qi that begins to encompass miles and miles of land.

“We should hurry.”

She’s not sure which of them said it, but Raika agrees. 

She can taste the horizon through their flesh. It smells of animal-flesh and violence, and it feels very familiar.