Chapter 505 – Unwanted Guests And Troubling Turns (Patreon)

This one's kind of got a lot going on!

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The annoying thing about the world is that destruction is easier than creation. The criteria for something to be destroyed is change, and change is constant and easy to incite, or at least easier than the inverse. To create a painting takes days of effort, careful planning, trained instincts, trained talents, the right tools, the right mentality, the resources with which to craft, a vision.

To destroy it takes an idle swipe of a hand. 

There are nuances to this. Destruction is creation in its own way, and perspective transforms anything into something else. But at the default, at the base, it remains true– to make something not what it is takes little, and to make something takes much. 

But there is a joy in the world, which is that people are better at creating than they are at destroying. They practice it more. They do it more often. To ruin something, bend and break and unmake it, is a rarer occurrence than to make something, even if that something is so small as a meal or so vast as a village. 

It is easier to destroy than to create, but to create is a singular gift worth more than almost any other, and its use is far more universal.

I believe this to be a hopeful truth. A factor in favor of the inherent value of existence and the sentient beings which experience and shape it. I am not entirely certain as to the veracity of this claim, but it rings true in my heart of hearts, and that makes it true to myself, at least, even if all the rest of my peers may disagree with me. 

–Elder Bin Wei of the Watchful Fields Sect, meditating on newfound enlightenments

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The next few days pass in a blur, the time flying by with the busyness that comes from having so very much to do. Families are reassured, food is produced, harvested, stored and shared, and Qi is redistributed through those who can handle it and out of those whom it would break. The mass of dead fish upon the surface of the lake is caught in great nets, made just for this purpose by the crafters of the towns, and stores of salt are burned through at a prodigious rate in an attempt to preserve as much as possible of them. Fields are tended too with eyes even more watchful than before, the constantly dying plants either cut from the soil to be dried and stored or watered and cared for with extra effort. 

The amount of work helps, in some ways. The visage of that evergreen canopy, larger than the sky, fades day by day with time, the marks of trauma it left behind gradually diminishing in the eyes of those who suffered it. Not all are cleansed by mundanity, of course; there are those who looked up at the sky above directly during the Feng’s manifestation, and they tend to be slower, more thoughtful, lost in themselves. 

Nearly a dozen times, Raika has had to come and speak to people who stopped working altogether. Stopped eating, stopped drinking, stopped sleeping, simply mumbling to themselves or painting their walls in grass stains or babbling to anyone who will hear. It would be more, but most people are pulled out of their trances by loved ones and family members. Without that sense of community or the forewarning that this behavior might happen, who knows how well the towns would have survived the tides of madness that infected them. 

Through it all, Raika keeps working, because in spite of everything, there are benefits to what happened. 

For one, her array did isolate an area from the Emperor’s Domain, long enough for her to repair the changes it was making to Chen Tai. For another, it did minimize the impact of the manifestation of a Monarch Realm cultivator’s true ideals, even without being explicitly designed for that level of brute-force improvisation. Figuring what works and what didn’t helps her in her studies, sending the information to Pillar and its sub-minds as she uncovers it and using what they learn to modify the array piece by piece even as she continues to help the towns directly. 

For another, she got to exercise a TRANSCENDENT ART that she’s never used so overtly, and figured out more of how it works. Alongside her Supreme Body Art and her Truths, the TRANSCENDENT ARTs are her greatest tools, standing nearly at the same peak of utility and necessity as her overwhelming resources. They serve as fusions of all of her foundations, elevated to a higher tier through synergy and her own madness, and getting to practice them directly is a rare opportunity, one she can learn from. 

And for a third, it’s brought her back around to being a teacher to her students, because she got to see what a realm-advancement is like in the Empire. 

Chen Tai isn’t the only one who’s advanced here, in the opportunity she’s given them all to consolidate their gains and meditate on their understandings. In her advancement, Raika saw the way that the Imperial Domain seems to leech away some of the benefits of a bestial cultivator’s growth, poisoning their foundation and crippling their potential long-term. 

But in seeing how the Geng He, Wei Zin, and even Rai Jin advance, she sees how it interacts with orthodox cultivator’s progress. 

Only Rai Jin has stepped up another tier in his realm in the last two weeks, likely at least partially because of finding himself face-to-face between three different high-Monarch or above individuals at once, but the other two have made small and steady gains beforehand. She watched them closely, of course, to make sure everything was alright, but both seemed fine. 

It was only after Chen Tai’s transformation, juxtaposed with Jin’s, that she retroactively noticed the effects of this place. 

Chen Tai, as a bestial cultivator, doesn’t really have impurities. Her body uses every part of itself, and the whole point of bestial cultivation is adding more, not removing things which can be used for potential synergies or transformative effects down the line, acting as recessive traits that may or may not someday be useful. Orthodox cultivators, on the other hand, have long been rumored to have black sludge that leaves their bodies, shoved out by the act of refining oneself down and up into a higher version of the self. 

With hindsight, the process was visible, but even then, it was… strange. 

It was like their bodies wanted to push something out. 

Unlike with Chen Tai, where the Imperial Domain pulled useful materials out of her, her three other disciples’ cultivations seemed to isolate and then try to push out certain things. On a physical level, they’re noticeable, but only ever so slightly. Signs of a childhood microfracture, long healed over and no longer restrictive; old scars that have faded to nearly nothing, wiped out by the gains of cultivation; individual cells, older and more fragile than the rest, ready for replacement anyways. Minor things, already long smoothed out by the improvements that are added to the whole. 

But with her other senses, the ones that see deeper and stranger things, the truth was different. 

With eyes of burning sunlight and eldritch plasma, she sees their ideals shifting, casting off doubts and confusions. 

With eyes of writhing maggots and Endless shadowlight, she sees them slowly separating bits of their Deaths from themselves, refining and shaving down their mortality.

With eyes of inverted mirrors, she sees them taking what they aren’t, and the possibilities to be those things, and dissolving them away. 

And the Imperial Domain… stops it. That same invisible, nearly indefinable force reaches into their ontological selves the same way it reached into Chen Tai’s literal cells. 

Bestial Cultivation is the consumption, digestion, and integration of all, a natural and balanced inversion of Daemonic cultivation. Craft is the isolation and elevation of a single element, removing it from the whole to re-add it to the self as something new.

Orthodox cultivation is the consumption, digestion, and integration of a chosen few elements, and the removal of the rest. Through this, the human becomes transcendent, embodying their ideals as a literal manifestation of their beliefs and journey. 

And the Imperial Domain seems to stop that in its tracks. 

What the cultivator would purge from themselves, the tiny shavings of their personhood that no longer match their higher ideals and vice versa, are instead forced to stay in place. 

…Why?

Raika has no fucking clue. The obvious assumption is that this poisons their foundations somehow, the same way that it tried to poison Chen Tai’s, but retaining their whole, entire identities rather than growing into the identities they want to have is… not as bad? Maybe?

That might be the mother in her speaking, though. The thought of Jin losing pieces of himself is scary, heart-breaking in its own way, but it’s also a natural part of growing up. She can see how a bad mentality or a harmful cultivation technique might encourage transformation into unbalanced, unhealthy forms of oneself, harder to break away from due to not having the tools or perspective to break away to / with, but… on its own, as a property, it’s understandable.

Jin casts off the mortal child he was, and becomes the adult man he has worked so hard to build himself into. Away the observer, arise the one who acts on observation. Away the one that cannot affect shades and death and who does not have the power he desires, arise the version of him that does. 

It’s… alien, but in a familiar way. She, of course, has done all of the above, really, casting aside little but refining herself into identities, even as the whole of her experiences and ontology is ever consumed and digested by itself. 

Again, though, there’s overlap. Like with Truth, Dao, and Intent, the different ideals and methods of cultivation all seem to be, at the most, a spectrum of options to each other, all different points on the same graph. Sure, the graph has a lot of different dimensions to it, but… 

Something more to think about later. Another note on a pile of them growing in her minds, puzzling out something she can’t quite see the shape of yet. 

It’s already too late to change the breakthroughs the other disciples have had, and even if she did have the time and ability to surgically sift through their ontologies one billionth at a time, it would take too much of her. The Emperor is either dealing with other shit or just unbothered by her presence here, but the moment that changed, it very casually sent over a lesser minion to basically fuck up all of the last six years of her life in this place. 

On their next breakthroughs, she’ll do what she can to ensure they happen outside the Imperial Domain. Until then, it’s… fine. 

But again– why? Maybe it keeps the cultivators more human, easier to control? Forces them to hold onto old traumas and pieces of themselves that no longer fit, destabilizing their cultivation by the tiniest possible amount of friction? 

And it begs another question; why didn’t it work on her?

Her first major breakthrough as a horrific amalgamation of flesh and Qi came with the creation of and casting-off of a shell, or cocoon, of fused biological matter, a lot of it having come from inside her. It was her first experience with a tribulation, all the way back in the woods while hunting the corpse-smith under the Division of Altered Cultivation, and it seems to have been at least similar to what impurities are. 

Was it her lack of Qi at the time? Lack of spiritual organs? Did she not notice it at other times, like at the Wall, because of how much of her was being transformed and discarded constantly in the fight? Did it get burnt away by a higher-tier, physical tribulation?

Too many questions, not enough answers. But some answers, at long fucking last. 

People don’t sweat out impurities in the Empire because the Emperor doesn’t let them. Beasts are lesser in the Empire not just because they’re hunted down, but because they are actively crippled by some function of the Emperor’s Domain. Craft users and probably even Daemons have similar effects on them, if Raika were to guess. 

Why, or how, are still unknown, but it’s some kind of progress. 

Speaking of progress.

With the day’s work mostly finished, Raika is heading back to her cabin at last. It’s been a nearly twenty-hour day, helping with the harvest, with chores, traveling to each of the four other towns of the lake by boat to speak with them, checking her disciple’s cultivations, lugging around materials, talking to people and offering comfort here and there…

And that’s just what this part of her identity has been doing. Nevermind the constant micro-adjustments that Pillar and the Heart are making to the environment, or the way she and her undead self are altering the array. Or how her demi-Divine self and her Daemonic shadow are constantly putting out fires with the Pack and in Morae. Or how the flame is still currently doing… something with all those big lizards down south, most of them just as mindless as the first. 

So it is with a weary heart and a body no longer quite as adept at pulling all-nighters as she used to be that Raika stumbles into her cabin, takes a seat at the table, and picks up the cup already placed there, taking a few big chugs of the light, barely-more-than-flavored-water tea set down in front of her. 

“Ok,” she mumbles, still keeping her head tilted back and the drink close to her mouth. “Ok. Maybe there’s something to this less-is-more shit about tea.”

“In defense of traditional and unorthodox methods of flavor generation, you are, admittedly, a bit of a rare specimen. Perhaps it would be best not to use oneself as the purest metric by which to evaluate the culinary art. Though don’t we all use ourselves as our purest metrics by which to measure anything, no matter what biases we hold? Perhaps if one were to achieve the perfect ego-death of self, they might be able to properly understand the discordant mess of conflicting opinions we all determine to be ‘flavor’, though perhaps in turn it would eliminate the concept altogether.”

“Who the hell starts a conversation like that? I just sat down.”

Tao Zudong smiles, their iridescent hair flowing in a nonexistent breeze and providing the only illumination in the cottage. “I find that any way to start a conversation is a good way to start a conversation.”

“Yeah you would say that, wouldn’t you?”

“I would, have, did, and will again, for in the face of the immortal, and thus the infinite, are not all things merely cyclical?”

She takes another sip of the almost-water, emptying the cup before putting it back down at last. “I hope not.”

“Ah, hope,” says the philosopher. “Such a narrow and yet profound concept. It is heartening to see that the youth still cling to it. Tell me, do you think your prisoner-slave has it, or is it something reserved only for those who can still conceive of themselves?”

Raika takes in a long, deep breath. Really long, long enough that it takes nearly a full minute, and the exhale, twice as long. 

The philosopher, as usual, just waits patiently. 

“Is it at all possible for you to end a sentence without adding a theoretical or a question to it?” she eventually asks.

“All things are possible, given time, given the breadth and space of possibility. But will I? That is another, far finer question, one I am predisposed to dislike and enjoy due to its simplicity, for unlike most questions, it possesses an answer.”

Raika sighs. “And it seems the answer is no.”

“As with all things; for now, yes.”

She remembers every word that Tao Zudong has said. She’s carved it into crystals inside of Pillar’s memory storage. Some words seem to matter more than others, though, especially in context. 

Any way to start a conversation is a good way to start a conversation.

The philosopher is a lot, enough so that it hurts some of her more advanced senses to look at them. They are also, at least to this point, unflinchingly honest and annoyingly all-encompassing in their answers. 

Any way to start a conversation is a distressingly broad statement. One with room for a lot of possible conversations and a lot of possible actions. 

“Why are you here, in my home, speaking to me right now, instead of somewhere else?”

They smile, and it’s perfect. Perfectly shaped, at perfect speed, as if designed to be a singular, perfect smile. 

“Because you’re interesting.”

“And why do you exist freely, when the Emperor seemingly has every other existing Titan under its control?”

At that, the philosopher Tao Zudong throws their head back and laughs, their tea still perfectly untouched in the little saucer they’re holding. 

“Oh, you flatter an old thing, child of flesh and Heaven. A Titan? Me? Oh, surely you jest, if you consider my nature as I am equivalent to a Titan. Perhaps in part! In perspective, I may even earnestly claim to be an equal to one, but in power or presence, I fear I am still but a shadow, even more so than how everyone is a shadow of higher things. No, where I here in my totality, even that beastly Fool of Fools would find fit to act at last, likely against its own interests once more. A perfectionist, that one, and what a poisonous thing that can be.”

Talking with Tao Zudong is, Raika reflects, a lot easier when there’s someone else that they can play off of and annoy instead of her. 

Damnit. She really wanted to sleep tonight. 

“Alright. I’ll take your word for it. If you stay here, I promise to come back in another day or so to talk with you some more.”

The philosopher smiles wider. 

“Merely a day to wait for such scintillating engagement? You tempt an old beast with such delights. I suppose I can wait for another morn anew. Perhaps on this next one, you may even finally allow yourself to be engaged. A hope, see?”

“...Maybe. Maybe I do.”

Raika gets up, leaving her house and the sitting figure inside of it, who has frozen so perfectly and so seamlessly that she knows they will be exactly as they are the next time she comes home again. 

She can’t kick them out, and she will not be sleeping with them in her house. 

So, she goes back to walking, trudging her way out of the village towards the fields and the woods beyond, where a clipped evergreen tree waits.