Chapter 832: My Dharma Vessel (Patreon)

A/N

I made slight edits to yesterday's chapter because I had forgotten to include Elder Thorn, Beric, and Lady Laelyn, however, that’s sorted now.

2 chaps combined into 1 long chap today, enjoy!

Chapter 832: My Dharma Vessel

"Good," it said, nodding at the Rank 8s before acknowledging those of us under the shade of the Eldest Tree. "Seven of you. With your souls, I should be able to make this vessel respectable."

The being was right.

There were seven of us, but I’d be a fool to think that all of us could contribute to this battle, at least in a meaningful way.

The two Rank 8s standing in the open were probably our best chance at stopping this thing.

The other Rank 8, Kal, was hidden by roots behind me. I was sure that three of his ribs were in the wrong place, and a few others were cracked. He would need a few minutes of healing before he could jump back in there. The problem was that a few minutes in a battle at this level was basically eternity.

As for the rest of us, we wouldn’t last a single second before that thing took off our heads and devoured our souls. Honestly, the Eldest Tree was literally the only protection keeping us alive at the moment.

“Elder Thorn. Beric,” I whispered to those near me. “Whatever happens, don’t step out from under this canopy.”

“Saint—” Elder Thorn began, but I cut him off immediately.

“If anyone steps one foot out of this shade, they’ll find their head separated from their body before they could even blink. Trust me. It won’t be a fight.” I gripped the bark tighter. “I don’t like it, but all we can do is support from here.”

That was true. Even me, who was a hair away from Rank 6, wouldn’t see the blow coming. Unless I activated my Dharma Vessel, but I only had a short window during which I could maintain it.

Despite hating just standing here, I had to pick the right time because I will only get once chance.

The fight continued, and it was a much faster pace than before.

The Headmaster of the Blue Sun Academy went first.

Monroe’s right hand came up and swept a horizontal line through the empty air, a hanging line of wet blue light about eleven feet long appeared, he stepped into it and came out of an identical stroke that appeared right behind the Otherworldly Being.

The lich’s eyes widened in surprise, but it was too late.

A palm struck the side of its skull, sending my master’s body sideways through the air.

Monroe wasn’t done just yet. He had already painted four more strokes along its flight path and stepped through all three, landing hit after hit. The first was a roundhouse kick, the second a straight right, and the final strike was an axe kick.

Clearly, he had understood just like Kal that physical strikes were more effective.

Unfortunately, the being didn’t just take the hits, instead, it adjusted itself mid-flight and brought forth a hexagram from its forearm that caught the axe kick.

“I must admit that you are fast,” it said, grabbing a hold of Monroe’s leg. “But your bodies are like most sorcerers in my world. Weak.”

Before it could prove its point by crushing the bone under its skeletal fingers, which were now glowing an eerie purple, Cairan made his move.

The eight arms opened in their fan, and the bowl acted first.

It swept low, scraping every bit of energy present in a two-hundred-foot radius, and even though it couldn’t digest the being’s original energy, it was able to disrupt it, causing the purple color to flicker dangerously like it was going to go out any second.

The microsecond gained gave Monroe the chance to adjust his balance and counter with his other leg, a strike aiming for the being’s jaw, which would likely decapitate it at this speed.

The lich growled as it let go in order to bring up its arm into a standard block, but Monroe didn’t continue his attack, instead, he used it as an opportunity to flash away, letting Head Monk Cairan follow up with another strike.

The massive avatar’s second arm threw out a chain which caught the being’s shoulders and locked.

“What…what is this?”

The Otherworldly Being tried to free itself by shaking its arm, but the chain was a heavenly restriction: it didn’t allow anything caught by it to move. Its eyes widened when it saw the blade with no edge come flying down.

It landed flat across the being's chest and drove it a hundred feet down into the valley floor, and the shockwave lifted every dead leaf in the Sacred Ring and held them in the air for a full second.

“They’re doing it,” Beric whispered, hope entering his gruffy voice. “They’re teaching that bastard not to invade other worlds.”

“I don’t know about that,” I murmured, not taking my eyes off the crater. “I think it’s playing with us.”

The reason I believed that was simple. This entire time it had been acting as a puncing bag. Sure, it would retaliate every now and then, but that seemed to be more of a show of resistance rather than anything with any real heat behind it.

The question was: why?

This thing didn’t seem to be foolish enough to do anything without a motive.

I didn’t have to wait long to find out the answer.

A second later, the crater lit up red, and the being hovered above it.

The spell matrices stitched into its skin flared red, but instead of trying to break the restriction created by the chain using brute force, it began to rewrite the volume of air around the chain, making it believe that it wasn’t holding anything.

With its ability to move returned, it clapped both hands.

A massive spell matrix, the size of the Sacred Ring, manifested overhead.

The temperature in the valley dropped so hard that the moisture in the air fell out as frost as the overlapping hexagrams inside overlapping hexagrams exerted their will on the surroundings.

Cairan raised the open palm of the Dharma Vessel.

The matrix hit the palm.

For a second, they clashed against each other a hundred feet in the air.

Just when I thought that the monk’s overpowered avatar would be enough, the overlapping rings spun faster and bore into the golden surface.

The light of the arm went from burning gold to dull yellow to grey. It didn’t stop there though. The fingers came apart at the joints one after another, the thumb went next, then the index and middle went together.

The whole hand collapsed inward on itself, and the arm followed it up to the elbow, and eighty feet of Dharma Vessel forearm broke into pieces of drifting light that faded before they reached the ground.

“Arrrgggghhhhhh!” the Head Monk made a sound that I never wanted to hear from anyone as his avatar went down onto one knee.

The impact cracked the valley floor into a spiderweb that ran all the way to the boulders at the ring's edge, and the smoke haze that had been hanging over the fight got blown flat, but what I was focused on was the state of the Dharma Vessel.

It had seven arms now: the bowl, the chain, the brush, the book, the bell, the edgeless blade, and the lamp.

“He'll recover, right?” Lady Laelyn whispered. “He's the strongest person we have. Surely, he can regro—”

“That’s not how it works,” I cut in. “The arm was a discipline, so he lost a whole concept, he’ll need to sit down and meditate for who knows how long to rebuild it, which means he won’t be able to use it for the rest of the battle.”

Lady Laelyn’s face paled at that. She didn’t need me to tell her what that meant for our situation.

“The boy is right about the arm.” The voice came from behind me.

Kal had one hand pressed flat against his ribs, it was glowing blue, working frantically to repair the damage.

“The eighth arm.” He coughed and something in his chest sounded wrong. “The open palm. It was the only one that could absorb. That's why it went for it first. It removed the counter to its own technique." He looked up at me, and his eyes were clear even with the blood on his mouth. "I think you’re right, this thing has been playing with us from the beginning."

We all kept our sights on the enemy, wondering what its true intentions were…

“You caught me, I have been playing around with you all,” the being laughed, the sound making me feel sick in the stomach. “But do not give me that look. I had no choice. The Path of Sorcery has too many restrictions, you see, especially in a world that does not follow the same magic framework.”

My eyes narrowed as the frost that was still falling out of the air in the valley gathered in a slow spiral around the being's body.

“Every spell that I cast, it requires a price,” the being continued, turning its half-ruined face up toward the crimson sky as it spread its arms wide, and every one of the lines burned into its skin lit at once. “The price for that is health, whether it be physical health or soul health. And you all have been very helpful in that regard.”

As I took a closer look at the lich, I knew in my heart that it wasn’t lying.

The left side of the face was still Elder Molric. That was the part that hurt. The lines at the corner of the eye, the stubborn set of the jaw, even the hair standing up on the one side because he had spent the last week rubbing at his temples with both hands while he worked. It was so him that I half expected it to start complaining about apricots.

Everything else had gone.

The right side of the skull had lost its covering completely. There was bone showing through, grey and dry, and a thin residue of tissue stubbornly clinging along the cheek. The neck had split open down the side, the split had widened since the last exchange, but there was nothing bleeding out of it because there was nothing left in there to bleed. The shrunken hand was now just a bundle of finger bones held inside a sleeve, and when the being flexed it, two of the smaller bones dropped out of the cuff and fell into the frost.

The chest was worse. The robe had burned away over the sternum, showing the ribs and the spell matrices running across them that had been cut directly into the bone in lines that pulsed purple.

This was bad, really bad.

If we had never attacked it, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, it already had enough energy from Hiron’s sacrifice to kill us. On the other hand, if we kept attacking, our reserves would bleed dry while it gathered more currency, which it would use to end us.

The only solution was to inflict enough damage where it wasn’t capable of moving to pay for its spells, but at the same time not enough where the vessel was completely destroyed. But I knew the brutal truth: it was very likely that the only way to winning this fight was to reduce my master to nothing.

I just…I just didn’t know if I could go forward with it.

After all, I knew that he was still in there.

The lich-like being had proved it when it slapped its own skull and complained about a voice that would not shut up. Which meant that if we did this, Elder Molric would be awake for all of it, the same as Xie Junhao had been awake for all of his.

But sometimes it didn’t matter what I wanted…

“This was fun while it lasted,” the being said, looking directly at Cairan’s kneeling vessel while it said it. “But it is time I put an end to all of this. I have more pressing matters to attend to.”

With those words, it moved, heading straight for the Headmaster of the Blue Sun Academy.

Even though Monroe was the fastest thing born in this world, it didn’t make a difference.

The being appeared in front of him before he could even blink, its fingers closed around the front of his coat, and it catapulted him straight down through the valley floor. The stone cracked as the ground swallowed the old man whole.

“Headmaster!” Lady Laelyn took a half-step forward, but Beric got his arm around her waist before her foot could clear the shade.

“He’s alive,” I said immediately. “But if you go out there, you won’t be.”

I looked back out at the field.

The lich’s attention was focused on the Dharma Vessel that was rising to its feet.

Even though it only had seven arms, it was still the most dangerous threat to it.

The bell had begun to ring in a low tone that made the fissures in the ground close over, but the light coming off that hundred- and eighty-foot figure was thinner than it had been ten minutes ago.

Floating in front of it, the being lifted one hand, and this time the matrix that unfolded was bigger than anything that had preceded it, it was the size of the vale, and I realised that if connected, there wouldn’t be a Dharma Vessel left.

Hell, there probably wouldn’t even be a Head Monk left standing.

We no longer had a choice. It was time for us to get involved in this battle. It was time for me to act.

“Beric,” I said.

The old soldier’s head came round fast. “Lad?”

“Get your strongest strike ready.”

“I’ve been working on something.” He rolled his shoulder as the mark under his ear flared bright enough to throw a shadow. “I’ve been practising stacking my attacks, pouring all of them into a single release. Haven’t managed it clean yet, but I can do it once.”

“Perfect, hold it until I give you the word.”

“Understood.”

“Elder,” I turned to Thorn. “I need you to give every drop of golden sun energy you have to the Eldest Tree.”

Fortunately for me, the elder didn’t argue. I was the Saint of the Golden Sun, and that was enough for him to trust me completely, for better or worse. With a nod, he dropped to his knees and pressed both hands against the trunk, giving it everything he had, which was something that I desperately needed.

With a mental command, the Eldest Tree’s roots came up through the soil and found my ankles first, then my calves, then wrapped my forearms where the leaves already grew, and something in my chest opened as a continent’s worth of golden sun energy poured into me.

“Sorry, Tomas,” I whispered through gritted teeth as I tried to accept the barrage of energy without damaging my body.

“Don't be,” he said. “Do it.”

The golden aura came out of me in a detonation that flattened the grass for two hundred paces in every direction and threw everyone around me on their backs. The light went up past the canopy of the Eldest Tree and kept going, causing dust to roll outward in a wall, and when it cleared, there was something towering over the Sacred Ring.

The mere presence of this being caused the world around to correct itself.

Every debt needed to be paid.

A sharp exhale behind me informed everyone of Kal’s surprise as his ribs pulled themselves back into their proper places. The cracks along the arms of the Blue Sun Headmaster as he crawled out of the crater sealed themselves and his coat settled clean around him again. Then the golden light that had drifted off Cairan's ruined arm came back up off the stones, gathering at the elbow, rebuilding the forearm, then the thumb, then every finger, until the eighth hand opened its palm toward the sky once more.

But no one was paying any attention to the three Rank 8 beings.

Everyone’s gaze had settled on my Dharma Vessel.

The figure wore the plain dark robes of a Cultivation World sect head; sleeves bound at the wrist, hair drawn back in a simple pin, with a face that was calm, middle-aged, and unimpressed with everything in front of it.

Nobody knew who this person was, but I knew that face. I had knelt in front of it.

It was my master. It was the leader of the Azure Peak Sect. It was Yuan.

A/N

Comment below what you think the ability of Ke Yin's Dharma Vessel is!

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