Chapter 500 – Second Of All, How Smart Do You Have To Be To Be This Fucking Stupid (Patreon)

And we're back! Physical recovery is going well, I can sit up for extended periods now, so writing is starting to flow again. Should be able to have some big ups over the weekend, especially since we got big things about to happen.

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In the beginning, the Gods spoke their words, and of these phrases, the one which defines them all is ALL THINGS HAVE MEANING.

Apologies. I shall allow my audience a moment to recover. 

But only a moment. To be here, you must be able to endure at least this much. 

Cause and effect only matter because there is meaning. Definition. Linearity, shaped by context and importance, which only exists by the value we place upon things and the ability to place value at all, given us by a higher divine billions of years before we began. 

If you’re here, then you have the clearance to understand what I’m saying, and to understand the levels of resources, time, and effort that have been spent to grasp even this single sentence. You will prove yourselves worthy of that effort, or you will become the resources the others shall spend. 

The end of time is coming, and the war is approaching faster every day. The deployment of a High Emperor of the Fengs should not alarm anyone, but to those with eyes to see, these are the signs of what is to come. Things are changing. We will provide conclusions and understanding, for that is our meaning, or we will be of use in whatever way the brutes decide. I’d much rather be the one deciding.

–Grandmaster Errath, speaking to a contingent of his research departments as an explanation for the abrupt shift in priorities and shuffling of personnel to new projects.

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“And you’re sure you haven’t heard of me?” Tao Zudong asks, frowning as he sips at his cup of sludge. “I could’ve sworn I was introducing you to some of my work the last time we spoke.”

“We’ve never spoken before,” Raika says, savoring her own too-thick beverage.

“Well not with sounds, obviously,” Tao Zudong agrees, though he seems a bit annoyed. “More’s the pity. I thought I had done better in my return. Seems there’s still much I have to do to properly reintroduce myself.”

“I believe your name is recognized amongst my clan’s archives, but I freely admit to being unfamiliar with your work, honored one,” agrees the Feng, who has yet to touch his homemade teacup full of artfully made slop.

“No one said you could talk,” Raika tells him, which does shut him up again. For a while. She’s not sure why, but the fucker just does not stop talking. 

“Honorable Raika, there’s no need for such a tone with my fellow guest,” says Tao Zudong. “Has hospitality’s law truly fallen so low in the millenia I’ve been away?” 

She glares at the visiting philosopher, who she prefers but who also doesn’t ever shut the fuck up. Perhaps sensing the ways that the land-spanning array she has shifts beneath them, Tao Zudong wisely doesn’t follow up, enjoying another drink of his thick, muck-like beverage. 

All three of them sit on the clearing that Raika created with her array, where the laws of reality were rejected and replaced outright. Along its edge, strange worms writhe, appearing and disappearing along an axis Raika can’t quite follow, while within its perimeter, everything has been transformed. States of matter have replaced each other without losing their forms or functions, making blades of grass from air and air of an unidentifiable fluid, sunlight that shines too many colors, many of which are wrong, and dirt that reacts… strangely when touched. 

From within herself, Raika has brought out two pillows for the three people sitting at the table she also produced. Simple cups have been placed before all three participants in the conversation, with all three of them filled with one of Raika’s special concoctions. 

“You might, might, be able to claim guest rights,” she tells the philosopher before turning to glare at the Feng. “You, however, arrived as an enemy. My grace only goes so far.”

“And yet, I have taken no action against you or yours,” The Feng tells her, his face still utterly neutral and nearly expressionless. 

She snorts, reaching into her robe for her pipe. “Bitch, please. Your very presence here is an action against me and mine.”

“You are within Imperial boundaries, Honored Raika. This junior merely seeks to support the commands of his seniors.”

She snorts again, louder, at the Feng calling himself a junior. Cultivation breaks a lot of the rules of reality, especially when reshaping someone’s physical forms and Qi through their breakthroughs, but it can’t entirely disguise his age. There’s something nearly ancient about the evergreen oracle, and hearing him refer to himself as a junior has a good bit of humor to it, even if he’s trying to intimidate her with his superiors. 

What a thought. An Emperor / Monarch Realm cultivator, wielding the names of his superiors to bully someone into letting him live. 

Because that is what this is, after all. Alone, Raika would win, but she would struggle. That would cost West Laketown, and potentially her students, some real and genuine harm. Costs she doesn’t want to pay. 

But with the arrival of a new player, one closer to Raika’s true power than the Feng’s, the equation shifted rather dramatically. The unspoken offer of parley that has the three of them sitting at the same table came not long after his arrival, as Tao Zudong sat down in the altered space of Raika’s actions and simply looked at her as if to ask her where the tea for guests was kept and why it wasn’t ready already. 

Taking a match from inside her sash, she strikes it against the table, hissing as it snaps rather than lighting. 

“Please, allow me,” Tao Zudong says, reaching forward with an open hand. She pauses, then shrugs, leaning forward. 

Without any sign of flame or the slightest twitch of Qi, her pipe lights itself, the moss and herbs packed into it quickly releasing the fragrant grey-blue smoke of her favorite blend. 

“Thanks,” Raika says, quiet. The Feng just watches, his eyes clearly tracking everything happening around him.

“Now,” she continues, “I would like to be clear. This is not Imperial property anymore. It’s mine. I live here, so the big dog can go fuck itself or ask for it back directly. You’re an insult wrapped in a shitty package, and the fact I was even willing to offer you tea is a mark of my maturation as a person. Used to be I’d kill your kind on sight. Ask the operatives in the Republic of Morae. Oh wait. You can’t. Because I killed them.”

“The majority, yes,” the Feng says, nodding politely. “But I’m afraid that my presence here is commanded by the one superior to the both of us, and so, despite your claims and potency, I must insist I remain. For observation.”

Tao Zudong laughs, the act prim, proper, and surprisingly free nonetheless. 

“Truly, the Fool of Fool’s fools have grown bold since I was away,” he chuckles, lifting the cup of mud and mixed juices to his lips for another gulp. “Though there is naught wrong with boldness alone, especially if it cannot be refuted.”

Raika narrows her eyes at him, but he doesn’t bother to react. She’s too busy moving pieces around to come up with something witty right now anyways. 

The pieces, namely, are her idiot stupid ridiculous children. They keep trying to get back here and find them. 

The moment the Feng arrived, and the self-proclaimed philosopher right after, she Moved them away, shifting the Daos of Space and multiple concepts as one to transport them “Away”. But Tao Zudong is not making any secret of his presence, soft and subtle though it may be, so of course Jin is leading the charge trying to get back here, trying to understand what’s happening, trying to help. Even Wei Zin, usually the voice of reason, is caught up, trying to care for Chen Tai as her body adjusts to itself while also keeping up with Rai Jin and his most violent junior, Geng He.

Keeping them Away is harder than it looks, especially not while keeping her Qi use to a minimum. She managed to contain most of the effects of her array and manifestations to this clearing, but it was a close call. The array, which she’s taken to calling the “Fuck Off And Leave Me Alone Grand Array”, was originally designed as a shield, blocking out the Emperor’s presence in an emergency, but much more useful at containing any Qi she decides, keeping it limited so as not to affect the environment or the villages of the lake. 

She used it to contain herself and the clash of powers, but still, some Qi was needed to activate it at the emergency level to begin with. To spend more of her Qi here would leave some pretty ridiculous effects on the local terrain, the kind that needs multiple brains to track and repair afterwards. Her oath to protect West Laketown alone makes that something she can’t allow. Still, even without using Qi in direct ways, her weight on existence is enough that she can still shift some things with her weight alone, metaphorically. Still, four cultivators at once, racing straight towards her, are a tricky thing to keep shifting sideways, upways, or backwards in reality, especially cause her kids just refuse to give up.

Buying time as she multitasks wildly, she takes another slurp of goop. It’s a good blend: mashed grasses, unripe peach, barley, river soil with pulped frog eggs, and a hint of spiced honey to round it out. Ideally it should have steeped for longer, but that’s fine. 

“Refutation comes at cost,” she eventually admits.

Tao Zudong smiles, which remains the most unnerving thing he’s done since he first appeared. 

His / their hair is long and flowing, a pale white with hints of iridescence shining through it, and it highlights their face, which keeps shifting. Never in a direct way, never noticeably, but somehow the features are just different every time one acknowledges him. Save for his hair and the tan robes, he / they remain profoundly fluid, everchanging and seeming quite comfortable with that fact. 

“In which case, through differing perspectives, our reality aligns together,” Tao Zudong says. “Is this not fortune? Is this not the providence of mortal wills, struggling through the morass of an uncaring and beautiful reality? What joy, to find strangers who know they are strangers all sharing a cup of tea together.”

The Feng breaks his silence again.

“This is not tea.”

“It technically fits the definition,” Raika refutes, “and your opinion literally doesn’t matter to me on this matter. Now that you have a better idea of the consequences of your presence, are you going to leave before I unravel you? Or am I going to get to unravel you, sir ‘just following orders’?”

“...With respect, Honored Raika, my loyalty is boundless to the glory to which we are all tied to. I simply must– alright. I don’t see how laughing is particularly helpful to this conversation.”

Raika wipes a tear as she cackles. “Oh, go fuck yourself, Feng. What, do you expect me to just let you stay because you conveniently decided to stop trying to murder my children mid-act? No. Only reason you’re still here is that I’m mature enough to let you have a choice about killing yourself rather than enforcing it on you.”

“And because I forbade your conflict,” Tao Zudong says.

“You literally didn’t,” she refutes. 

“That’s true.”

She spends a moment staring at him, trying to find the lie, to examine anything at all about this strange being. 

But there’s nothing. Like trying to find shapes in the reflection of mist, distorted through trickery to make everything too large and too small. 

Raika can see the stars as what they truly are. She can taste the Qi of a million years ago in the taste of the soil. But her vision cannot even touch beneath the surface of this person. 

“Nonetheless, Honorable seniors, I–”

“I am not your senior,” Raika snarls, biting down on her pipe and letting smoke hiss out from between her teeth. “We are enemies, Feng, and your survival is a courtesy, born of oaths made to people who are not you and which only protects you so far, and–”

“But they do protect me,” says the evergreen fuck.

“...What did you just say?”

Gently, the Feng’s hand rises to his face, highlighting the symbol tattooed beneath his left eye. “While I may be below the honorable ones before me in strength, my strength does not lie in violence to begin with. I am an oracle, of the Division of Divination, and the shape of things is mine to witness. So long as I sit here and respect the boundaries you are setting, you won’t kill me. And in the futures where you try, the honorable Tao Zudong will do… something. After which your future vanishes, followed by my own.”

“Oh, that’s a lot of words to say you know me better than I know myself, kid,” Raika growls, though she’s still seated, still smoking, still not moving towards him.

“I don’t dare to make such a claim, but I am an Emperor in my own realm, great ones. I bear the marks of one who can claim a part of this existence as his own, and have not done so, for my power is in the hands of one wiser than I, who has molded me to a seer of considerable talent.”

A few continent-lengths away, the Halo behind Kai Ra starts growling too. 

“And while I acknowledge whatever tool you use to alter the skeins of probability,” the Feng continues, a bit rushed, “I believe that your skill at observing the future directly is… lacking. Enough, at least, that I can see what I must do to fulfill the purpose placed within me and perhaps maintain the peace you seem so eager to hold.”

“And isn’t that wonderful?” Asks Tao Zudong, sipping sludge and seeming entirely at ease, still smiling softly. The fucker looks almost saintly in his pose there, save for the concoction he holds in his teacup. 

“How the hells is that wonderful, then?” Raika asks him, making sure to keep any marks of respect or acknowledgements of seniority out of her voice. 

“Simple. In conflict come the grandest revelations, for we are beings of conflict and dissonance, in a world of conflict and dissonance. Here, we see your ideals and desires tested in the crucible of another’s, and together, something new emerges. A bit predictable, but a philosopher never disregards the predictable for lack of worth, as all things bear the worth they are assigned.”

Raika pinches the bridge of her nose, inhaling another long puff of smoke before exhaling a cloud around where she’s sitting.

But by the time it’s cleared, she’s holding her teacup, taking and enjoying a gulp of sludge to center herself. Her rage doesn’t leave, but she’s not as defined by it as she might once have been, and whatever Tao Zudong is changes the equation drastically. An equation that already didn’t favor her, even though it was that fuckass bitch on its throne that broke the rules first by affecting her kid’s breakthrough.

Even though it probably does that to everyone’s breakthroughs here. There’s some theories that are coming together for her, but aren’t quite proven yet. 

“Feng, what is it going to take for you to leave without me having to make a mess of you?”

“This Feng Gaolang will–”

“Oh my Gods, I didn’t ask for your name. No one cares about your name, cog. You’re a tree, or a bosque, or a little copse or whatever the fuck you forestry freaks call yourselves, not a person. That much I can taste from here.”

“...Regardless, this Feng Gaolang will remain within two thousand miles of this… lake, so that this part of the Emperor’s Domain may be better understood and protected from true invasion or transformation.”

“Why two thousand miles? Why not watch this place from Central, over in the Division of Divination’s pools.”

The Feng gives her a look she supposes might serve as chastisement from someone she respects. As he’s a Feng, it just makes him look stupid. 

“I have been ordered to this place. If I may theorize, I am likely here to disrupt you in some way, as the games we higher-realm beings play can possess many subtleties and spend decades, or even centuries. I cannot remain idle when commanded by my god to act.”

“And is two-thousand miles the closest you can be without me murdering you?”

“The probability falls rather drastically around that marker, yes.”

She sighs. Takes another sip. 

“Fine. On one condition.”

He nods, then frowns, then turns to stare at her in apparent surprise.

“Yup. You gotta do it.”

“You would risk true war over this? The lives of your children, your disciples?”

“What do you think, future-seer?” she asks him, leaning on the table and propping up her head to smile at him. 

It is not a friendly smile. 

He grimaces, but she catches a little glint of something in his eye. A flash, perhaps, of some sort of technique he needs to activate to truly see all the potential futures he’s talking about. 

With grim determination, he takes the teacup from in front of him and takes a prolonged, dramatic, unpleasant series of gulps, drinking it down one chunky blob at a time.

He sets it back down after, his face set in a grimace. “I have consumed poisons that would kill nations more palatable than… whatever that is.”

Raika’s smile grows wider. “One of my favorite recipes. I’m sure I’ll find opportunities to visit you at your post, neighbor. It’s only kind to bring tea.”

Whether or not he can see the future entirely or if he just hears it in her voice, the message remains clear. He might be just far out enough to be politically difficult to murder right now, but he’s not exactly guaranteed safety just because he’s managed to weasel his way out of a fight and into a negotiation. Whatever Tao Zudong did to convince him to change his mind doesn’t–

Huh. What did Tao Zudong do? One moment he wasn’t there, and the next, he was asking about his writings, which–

Something shifts in her a different continent away, and she lets out a sigh.

“Oh, and this day was going so well.”

The Feng politely doesn’t comment, deciding instead to stay right where he is as the future comes calling. Though he does wipe at his lip with a little napkin, even though she knows she felt him erase the tea from his mouth near-instantaneously.

Tao Zudong just remains where he is, holding his still-full cup, smiling softly. 

“Ah. Conflict and discord. The song of enlightenment. I really should make a poem on the subject sometime.”

Raika turns her metaphorical head, part of her attention diverted to the fuckers annoying her half a world away. She almost makes it in time, dozens of minds built for this purpose turning to act, but sometimes, stupidity is just a teensy bit faster. 

A roar shakes the heavens. Literally. The sky shakes, even across the world and behind the Wall. 

“AT LAST! WE BEGIN!”

Apparently, the Emperor wasn’t the only one who noticed her work.

Fucking overgrown snakes and birdbrains and stupid fucking tigers I swear to the gods who I hate so much I’m going to beat you all with a stick, she thinks as she works.

With a flex of will and the acknowledgement of a few other parties, Raika forms a neutral mindscape to meet in even as her mortal form continues listening to and studying the new factors seated across from her. 

In a shared mental domain, she stares down the seven Apexes of the Pack.

“Will you please just have one bit of patience?” she asks, ready for another exhausting conversation.