Growing Pains 306 Book 1 Chapter 39 - Epilogue (Patreon)

Ja Fiat stood before the freshly cleansed mass grave, fists clenched so tightly that she was drawing blood. She had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare this area, the culmination of which would have seen her advance two Realms.

Granted, those realms would have been powered by demonic energies and would have been the farthest she could reach, but that was much better than the Qi Gathering Realm she had been stuck in for a century.

Ja Fiat had used every advantage she had gained over the years to trap Lord Chon in a miasma of drug-induced indifference. Her efforts had paid off until the Four Element Sect had been established, and that damn Patriarch had loosened Jai Myche like an arrow from her quiver directly at Xiwang and the Lord.

She had thought herself lucky, thankful that she had never made herself a part of Lord Chon’s council or inner circle. She was a nobody as far as the people of Xiwang were concerned, and that anonymity allowed her to finagle her way into becoming a member of the Baroness’ staff.

It was the perfect position to keep an eye on the inner workings as the Baroness claimed her Fief and established her rule. Unfortunately, it had taken time to be trusted enough to earn even the lowliest of staff positions. Councilor Gwen and Cultivator Zui were simply too good at their jobs for Ja to circumvent the strict standards they implemented when it came to hiring servants and staff.

Ja Fiat had only been able to hide cultivation and real identity because of a powerful talisman that she had looted. A chance encounter she only managed because she had been forced to flee for her life from a pride of Panthera. 

The black coloring of the giant cats made their ability to hide within the shadows of the forest effective, and if it hadn’t been for falling into a pit in the ground, a pit that opened into a cave system shielded from detection, the beasts would have had her for lunch.

That cave system had been protected by a series of arrays that had kept it hidden, protecting the final resting place of a Cultivator that had used the spot to perform a demonic ritual. The man had failed, but the spatial device, talismans, and artifacts that he had amassed during his life had survived.

The knowledge of demonic cultivation, martial techniques, and esoteric knowledge had been a bounty of wealth that Ja Fiat had claimed with fevered greed.

One of those trinkets had been the artifact that allowed Ja to appear to any who looked, even someone as powerful as an Immortal Realm Cultivator as a non-cultivator. Ja Fiat had considered trying to join Jai Myche’s House or Dojo. 

She had reached Qi Gathering using the cultist cultivation techniques, and if House Myche offered a Cultivation technique that could allow her to break through the bottleneck she found herself stuck at, she would have taken that chance and abandoned her path. But House Myche only offered basic cultivation techniques. At least that is all they offered for anyone that wasn’t aligned with water or air elemental Qi.

Following the path of one of the demonic techniques would see Ja Fiat free of her current bottleneck, but it had been a path she had been loath to take. She would need to sacrifice any chance for further advancement. That mass grave and the demonic energies that were accumulating would have seen her reach the perfected stage of the Nihility Realm.

She would never be able to advance past the Nihility Realm once she absorbed the demonic energies, but the power and influence she would gain as a Nihility Realm Cultist would be formidable. Only one in a hundred-thousand Cultivators managed to reach that stage.

Ja Fiat sent a tendril of energy coursing across the ground before her. She knew it was futile, she had already tested and probed this grave a dozen times, but she couldn’t help herself from trying again. Years of planning, the cost involved, the secrecy required, all for nothing because of the Heavenly luck of Jai Myche.

And Ja Fiat had to admit to herself that the young Elf did have the Heaven’s own luck. She stumbled into opportunity after opportunity, receiving the riches, resources, and advantages that only one blessed by the Heavens might find.

Her probe into the field of lush and healthy Golden Lodoicea returned the same results as the past dozen. The demonic energy was contained and slowly being purified and siphoned off.  The souls of the dead that had been trapped, suffering the pain of demonic influence, were being freed.

No matter where she probed, how she pushed, or the amount of energy she channeled, she was unable to connect with the ritual she had forged to open a demonic rift. Each attempt to wrest back control was a wasted effort. The energy was out of reach, and the runes and arrays she had meticulously crafted or purchased had been destroyed. 

There was nothing for her here, nothing that she could salvage. It was time to accept that and move on. 

The sound of two children arguing in the adjacent field was loud enough to gain her attention. As she watched the children, a gleam of an idea began to form. Baroness Jai Myche had destroyed her plans and had cleansed the energies she needed to blast through her bottleneck, but there was more than one way to gain the energy she needed.

The cultist manuals she had found in the spatial device of that long-lost Cultivator also contained a ritual, one that used the sacrifice of children instead of demonic energy. Ja Fiat had never considered utilizing that ritual. She admitted to herself that for all the evil she was willing to inflict, the sacrifice of children had been a step too far. 

Until now.

Jai Myche had ruined her plans. It seemed only fair to use the brother and sister she loved so much to break through her bottleneck and ascend to the Nihility Realm.

Why should Ja Fiat be forced to suffer, to live a life of ignominy, hiding behind talismans and artifacts to protect herself because she wasn't powerful enough to fight those hypocrites that would see her destroyed because of the techniques she employed.

There wasn't a Cultivator alive that had reached the Nihility Realm without making choices that straddled the line between 'good' and 'evil'. Evil was subjective, and Ja Fiat was willing to embrace that evil .