Chapter 456 – And The Chorus Forever Screaming (Patreon)

Alright! Fun chapter! Twas nice to go into detail about an Emperor, even if I haven't revealed all the secrets there yet. Still, gotta have some fun with the higher-realm fuckos while I can, Zhen Zixiang is looking a little rough...

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“Orders have been given. Full deployment of shadow operations have been authorized. The resources gained have been deemed sufficient, and the current disruption presents significant opportunity. We move now to–”

“Confirmed.”

“You! How– you’ve had the channel the entire time. You’ve heard–”

“My orders come from above yours. You are a branch on the trunk. I am a leaf among the bough.”

“You’ve killed multiple branch members. You’ve ensured countless disruptions in the operation. You dare–”

“I carry the wreath of your utility and wield it to the song of the Tree. Confirmed full deployment. All remaining sites of the infestation will be purged as commanded. If you have failed to complete your objectives before I have fulfilled my own, I will assist.”

“What does that entail? …Confirm, what does that entail? Hello?”

-Recorded dialogue between forward assets of the Clan’s military operation in the Republic of Morae.

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What started as a rather interesting day has become rather disruptive. 

For all his millenia, and for all that properly estimating his opponents has earned him well, Zhen Zixiang has to admit that, at times, hubris can still rear its head and threaten to slip his grasp. 

At first all seemed fine. A challenging but meritorious opportunity for his juniors to gain some favor and some contribution points, and a chance to punish those who dared to step all over the territory of the Watchful Fields Sect at once. Outsiders aplenty have flocked to the resource that his sect found, cultivated, and now has every right to lay claim to, and while there are myriad considerations in place preventing him from acting directly, the sudden presence of such a strong Dao of Pain presented an excellent opportunity for punishment. As always, the weak would fall aside for the strong to step ahead, and if he gifted the very slightest bit of his powers to protecting the members of his own sect, who could fault him? Who would so much as dare to inquire further?

But… the Beast Tide. Always a challenge, though never one that he’s seen come so far inland quite so quickly. A whole horde, clamoring across the miles of the Jiang’hu to crawl straight towards rich fruit they have not earned. Detestable, though perhaps understandable, and the source of the aforementioned opportunity. The sect is designed to endure such trials, after all. The Watchful Fields Sect may only have a single Grand Elder, but so do many of the border fortresses, and they have far less direct resources with which to hold back the madness of the outside world. 

And then the infestation reared its ugly head even further. It unveiled fresh dangers and fresh potency. Still valuable, perhaps even moreso now, but escalating.

And, admittedly, Zhen Zixiang could have taken the whole thing a bit more seriously before it escalated.

The Beast pulling apart a millenia-old defensive array with its bare hands is not his equal, but it is a danger. It is a threat, and true equality is a myth within the realms of combat; at any moment, a careless mistake or a sudden bout of good luck can turn the tides even across vast stretches of power. Beasts as well are notoriously hard to categorize and comprehend, often with inhuman ways of thinking to empower themselves with. Zhen Zixiang can hold the dome up for quite some time, and the beasts that filter through the struggle present further good opportunities for those bold enough to act properly, but he can no longer underestimate the potential dangers incoming, especially not while holding off the strangely diffuse presence of the infestation.

Either opponent could be uprooted or pushed back given a few hours of solid effort, and neither present a true threat.

Pride. Hubris. 

Handling both at the same time is not quite so clear-cut. 

And then.

[TRANSCENDANT ART: SCULPT OF LIFE AND MADNESS]

A higher echelon of enlightenment. Something previously unseen, something that Zhen Zixiang has never before witnessed. Something at or perhaps even beside his own greater techniques, distinct yet imminently dangerous, emerging from something far below him in strength. 

And the effect of it?

A serpent, if it can be called that, emerges from the tumbling veins of the ever-spreading infection of the land. Its body is festooned with grasping hands and feet, coated in eyes, its mass so dense it rivals that of the city below but compressed to a thousandth of its size, such that materials Zhen Zixiang is used to seeing as air and gases have become solid armor and shifting biology. It moves slowly to his senses, crawling up out of the flesh below into the sky, but it is relatively fast for its scale. Fast enough to ignite the air like the birth of a third sun in the sky, streaking towards the dome above.

Slow enough to react to. Slow enough that he can shift his position and redirect, erase, dance formless dances.

If not for the Beast. If not for the near-divine animal ripping apart everything in front of it by simply pulling. Its form is unobscured, visible to an Emperor’s senses even beyond the swarms of beasts crawling around it and upon it. Something like a monkey, yet fused with a million other beasts, kept only vaguely to a humanoid form. One of three sets of arms, coated in hair like needles and with claws like river-carving blades, rips at the barrier, while the other two slam great shattering blows upon it. Each blow is erased and redrawn into a new position, kept from shattering the dome outright, but as the impossible construct flies up out of the infestation, the Beast takes the opportunity.

It roars.

Its breath is a thousand corpses rotting in the sun. Fallow dirt fertilized by shit and filth. Rotten food and plagues and flies crawling in diseased tissue, spreading plague and sickness through the air and into the very magics of the sect. 

The first three steps of the Formless Dance are relatively simple. Clear The Board erases a part of what is, storing it away for later repainting or undoing it entirely, at a cost. Prepare The Paint changes the properties of that within his grasp. Know Thy Canvas is an art of perception, dedicated to letting him see and understand everything within his power.

Each step adds onto the previous. At the Emperor Realm of cultivation, each step becomes a technique capable of reshaping whole landscapes. 

None of the three are enough to completely clear away the Beast’s breath before the construct of flesh and madness hits the barrier.

Hubris.

The barrier breaks apart.

The construct exists for a single moment. It can endure no longer. Its very existence is in defiance of the Heavens and Dao, materials that cannot exist in the world as they are meeting physiks that demand rectification. The thing hits the barrier and explodes, expands, unmakes itself, enough Qi to surprise and impress Zhen Zixiang wasted on a blind detonation that unmakes all of that work.

A thousand years of defense and millions of spirit stones shatter under the combined efforts of the invading forces.

Formless Dance, Sixth Step: A Moment For Reflection

Time stops.

As an Emperor Realm cultivator, Zhen Zixiang’s senses already can perceive actions that break the sound barrier a dozen times over. With a flex of Qi both dizzying in its complexity and its scope, those senses are pushed to their highest peak, and his comprehension of the Dao of Time blends with his Qi to slow the world around him in relative pace.

The dome’s magics exist in flux, broken but not yet faded. The Divine Beast’s breath is stopped, a wall of air as solid as any stone, frozen.  Bits and pieces of the thing launched at him, its mass rivaling a small mountain and its velocity enough to escape the clouds above before it can blink, cease in the air where they have been thrown.

Even in this place of near-frozen time, the construct keeps shifting. Its decompression and transmutation are so explosive that in this space where flame itself stands still, they continue to expand and combusting.

Hubris.

Scroll Of Painted Worlds

Zhen Zixiang waves his hand, fighting past the condensed time to move almost as fast as he can normally. The fan he’s holding expands, rolling out endless streams of paper and paint, artwork expanding across miles in an instant. The streamers of painted landscapes falls over the world below, replacing it to Zhen Zixiang’s eyes, and with a push of Qi, he imbues the artifact with enough power to replace the ruins below with the view he now sees.

The fan grows heavier as thousands of beasts, many of them worthy opponents for Warrior Realm cultivators, are suddenly turned to painted figures in the scrolls of art. He notices that large parts of the paper become infested with red stains, the miniscule veins from below turned to vague tinting on the miniature perspective of the fan, and he casts aside those pieces, severing them and erasing them with his Formless Dance. 

His meridians are straining now. Three techniques, back to back, kept within this slowed time? Exhausting.

He has been through far worse, of course. It is nothing to push through the challenge. 

He adds a fourth.

Zhen Zixiang’s Soul emerges.

It forms like a bubble of squares, expanding tumorously, frothing into being. Each cube is a room, each room a hidden world, each hidden world a perfect canvas under his absolute control. 

[Endless Landscapes Demand Endless Inspiration]

The Soul pushes at him, disgruntled at being brought out into vulgar reality. He assuages it with a taste of his Qi, flavored with his comprehension of Dao and the Truths he brings to bear.

It grumbles, bubbling out freshly blank cubes, but obeys his will. 

Like a fractal, it spreads itself out and emerges from within itself, room-cubes flowing backwards and into it to allow room for new ones to emerge. As they progress, they get larger, heavier, richer in color and density. 

Eventually, they rival the size of the breach in the sky above, rivaling the size of the sect itself below him. 

One of them detaches, floating forward and inverting its dimensions.

There are an infinity of ways to grow in the Divergent Paths. As a Warrior, Zhen Zixiang chose to combine his Soul and Domain, blending them into a single impossibility rather than two distinct ones. As an Emperor, this combination grew deeper, grabbing hold of that which defines the next step to the Heavens, that secret all Emperors must discover to become what they are.

It was a costly fusion, and one which has left him lingering behind some that used to consider him a rival, but he does not regret it. Especially not in moments like this.

The room that is a Soul that is a Domain that is a truer expression of power inverts, replacing the world around what used to be inside itself. 

The defensive array is repaired. The air is free of the ionized plasma and falling supermaterials of the construct. The breath of the Beast is erased, replaced by something truer.

Zhen Zixiang feels a drop of blood leak from his lips, his body struggling to withstand the strain he’s putting it under. Much longer like this and he’ll take serious damage, the anatomy he’s replaced his biology with only able to endure so much.

One more.

From a ring on his finger, he retrieves a small pill, glowing a brilliant green-blue and swirling with dense energies. He crushes it in his palm, then spreads the resulting powder over his opposite arm, painting a pattern on his skin.

His flesh sizzles, but he endures, his expression focused and distant. 

He raises the painted hand, the arm behind it spasming and burning, and forms a seal with his fingers.

Watchful Fields Sect Supreme Technique: Bind The Trees And Till The Earth

Bands of Qi and comprehension form from out of nothingness. In an instant, the crimson forest beneath the landscape he’s painted is fused into place, the climbing mass of flesh trying to reach the peak of the mountain stopping in their tracks. Outside the barrier, the Divine Beast’s limbs are suddenly chained to each other, restricting their movement to almost nothing.

His skin splits. His right eye turns crimson as blood vessels burst. 

But the technique holds.

He goes to drop the technique–

There is a woman in the room with him. 

She has one arm and one leg. Half of her face is an empty cavern, filled with malformed neural tissue shaped like tumors. Her flesh is darkest crimson and silver, glowing with ionized plasma from its sheer velocity, and it’s deforming actively, shifting violently as if struggling not to explode beneath a lack of impossible pressure.

There is no Qi in her. 

She is as blank as the air around her. She is less real than even the empty spaces within his [Endless Landscapes Demand Endless Inspiration]. Her weight on reality is almost nonexistent, in spite of the way her biology glows with impossible compression, with unbelievable heat, with near-divine levels of contained force. 

He does not know how she arrived, how her eyes are locked onto him perfectly, but it’s irrelevant. Time is still slowed to near stillness, and he has the strength for another technique still. 

The woman smiles. 

She takes a step towards him, balancing on a leg that isn’t there. 

Formless Dance, Seventh Step: WHITEOUT

The room stops existing. In another chamber, relative days of travel away, Zhen Zixiang paints a new body out of his Soul-Domain, choking on the loss of Qi and cultivation it costs, but vindicated.

The room he was in becomes painted in colors of absolute devastation. 

He drops the formless dance, and time resumes, coughing violently to clear the blood in his throat, struggling to fix the small imperfections in his new body. His Emperor Realm senses tell him of the Beast screaming outside his rooms, outside the mountain, outside the defensive array, struggling to understand what’s happened to it. They tell him of a screaming agony, restrained by his techniques to perfect stillness. 

It tells him of a half-dozen new constructs emerging anyways.

Sculpted of life and madness.

The barrier is repaired. He has a moment. A second, to an Emperor, is months or years to a mortal, and–

Zhen Zixiang feels a vein twitch in his forehead as a fresh chunk of the screaming sun above him stops being. 

In its place, for a picosecond, there is a man in green rags, bleeding from uncountable wounds, holding the hilt of an inverted absence in the world, large enough to swallow a world.

The roaring of violence, of shifting flesh, of screaming madness and of endless chaos starts to echo as time speeds back up to its usual norm.

Hubris, Zhen Zixiang reflects. It’s a bitch.