Sky Pride

Chapter 22- Those Who Chose Differently

“This Demon knows ‘heretic’ means something quite different to you, but he does not know a better word for it. These mortals do not practice the proper rituals, and their dogma has gone astray. There is no place for their beliefs in any land where the Stellar Descent Cult holds power.”

“Do you wish to kill them? They seem beneath you, the sorts of enemies you deliberately ignore, but that certainly wouldn’t stop Brother Zihao or I.” Liren asked.

“No. We do not permit the practice of their false doctrine, but they hold to an approximation of the correct ethics, and in their misguided way, do honor the Stellar Demons. You can see the Primordial Ones’ blessing of protection for the tribe is far less than it should be, but it is still present. It would be-” He said a word Tian didn’t recognize, then corrected himself. “Inappropriate to kill them, in a religious sense. Very roughly put, you might say that doing so would violate the laws of our sect, and constitute a breach of this Demon’s dao.”

“If you wonʼt, should I?” Tian waved his staff.

“No, leave them be. They are the descendants of cult serfs who have lived here since Old Freak Song failed his ascension, and still enjoy the protection of the Primordials. One day, they may return to the true path. They are not to be touched, for help or harm. They chose a different path despite the truth being before them. Now they must conquer it, or perish.”

Tian smiled and put away the staff. “What do you call heretics of the sort I mean by the word?”

“Trash, usually. No matter how broadminded this Demon may be, he cannot lower himself to consort with those who openly and notoriously use such revolting methods to cultivate. That is not to say there is nothing admirable about them. They grind themselves against hardship daily, and each step in their cultivation is earned by effort and sacrifice. However, this is merely an approximation of virtue, a pale echo of it, not the thing itself.”

Tian personally wouldn’t have bothered with all the nonsense after the word “cultivate,” but to each their own. “What about the demon binders? I must say I-”

“Kill them all, sparing not even the young lest their evil persist.”

Tian nodded strongly. “Well said!”

Heavenly Demon pulled himself straight, red light glinting in the corner of his eye. Against the twilight sky, above the barren desert, resplendent in his bifeng robe upon his flying tiger, he seemed a celestial minister, come to pronounce the sins of the lower world. “This Seat is broadminded and tolerant, but even a saint will not tolerate blasphemy. The so-called demonic sorcerers are nothing but blasphemers, slanderers, things that creep upon their glutted bellies. They eat the lowest sort of filth, churn it in their guts, then fountain out at both ends with their perverse arts. And this desecration, this regurgitated foulness, they dare to call summoning demons!”

Tian didn’t know whether to applaud or take notes. He opted for note taking, Heavenly Demon had barely paused to take a breath. Tian’s brush flew across the page, then paused with a smear of black ink. Something was rising up. Some of that same sickness that Heavenly demon spoke of was coagulating in front of them, the limbs of some enormously vast creature retracting and condensing. It was hungry, Tian could tell. It had a feeling of something that only knew hunger, and never satiety. They had flown into a vast trap, and one that had been left here intentionally.

“Cultic Student Heavenly Demon, I will have to trouble you for some additional teachings on this subject later. However, might I suggest we move to the practical portion of the lecture?”

“Eh?” Heavenly Demon’s eyes flashed gold and swept around him. “Ah. Yes. Yes indeed. This Heavenly Demon will have to remind the trash once more what is, and is not, truly a demon.”

Demons came in every shape imaginable, so long as their appearance was upsetting. Tian had seen considerably more gu than demons, but they were still ‘old friends’ from the Earthly Realm. He had seen enough. Things with fangs, spikes, horns; claws were mandatory of course, as was all manner of sickness and curse bearing barbs, venoms and salivas. This thing was something new. It was miles across, but thinner than a hair. When still, it was indistinguishable from the desert, its qi so dispersed as to be almost non-existent. When they flew over the thing, it started retracting inward, even as the little hairs rose from the sand. It took just a few breaths of time before the hairs formed a spherical trap around the flying cultivators, sealing away both heaven and earth while remaining almost invisible.

What Tian saw with his golden pupils was… incomprehensible. Myriad needle fangs rising from the maw of some hellish fish, blackened, slick yet rotting. A blobby, amorphous thing, almost clear, with unknowable organs floating within it, lined by tiny tentacles. He had the strangest feeling of stroking it, feeling the rubbery tension of its translucent skin.

Ah. It wasn’t just someone’s pet monster. It was someone’s pet. He spent a moment watching the thing, a single fraction of a broken second where all he could wrestle with was the knowledge that this thing, this undisputed, undisguised abomination, was the object of someone’s affection.

Liren didn’t bother with any such overcomplicated nonsense. The enemy was before her, and she had no reason whatsoever to let that situation persist. She stowed the boat and had her feet on her sword before they even started to fall. Tian judged they were still half a mile from the core of the thing, so he made use of a little trick. He used Light Body to reduce his weight down to almost nothing. The momentum he was still carrying flung him forward at a dreadful pace. He quickly started falling, of course, but that was expected.

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He hadn’t gotten things quite right, he was going to land a bit short of the center. That was fine. There were thousands upon thousands of threads gathering where he was going to land, merging with a sticky, sickly fluidity. Liren had already landed in a blaze of light and a crack of thunder. She had firmly set aside her Fairy Maiden spearplay. She chose her first strike to be Stormfall, and true to the name, it was like a lightning strike wreathed in heavy water.

It was hard to judge the damage she did, given the size of the creature and its amorphous nature. From the sudden convulsion of qi and the way swaying forests of hairlike cilia went rigid, it was quite a lot. Tian’s attention was pulled back to his own affairs. He was about one second away from hitting the ground. Plenty of time to get ready.

A thought, and he went from near weightless to a hundred times his usual weight. Another thought, and he had his nameless staff art circulating. A third, with less than a quarter second remaining, and he stretched out his staff into a lunge as he impacted.

If Liren fell like a furious storm, Tian landed like a meteor strike. A hundred times his usual weight was considerable, these days. He might not yet be six foot one, but with Light Body Heavy Hands, he could comfortably reach one and a half tons. Thankfully, his staff could stand up to the abuse.

His staff was new, crafted for him in the monastery. It was a rather plain looking stick, a thing of grey wood and dull bronze caps on either end, free of even modest decoration. It did possess three special features. It was very, very hard to damage, and he could reinforce it further with his qi. It could get longer and heavier as he wished, up to the limits of his qi. And while the crafters didn’t often get called upon to work with materials that specifically enhanced righteous, virtuous or meritorious qi, it’s not like they never did. An expert was found. One who needed materials and appreciated unusual jobs.

Tian thought the way the crafter’s eyes went wide and didn’t blink as Tian demonstrated the half-finished staff art was a bit weird. Liren was prepared to call the whole thing off until the crafter said- “With this art, and these materials, if I add a few of my own treasures… I can make an embryo. Not a finished weapon, it will be something you refine and raise for… centuries. Thousands of years. Your whole immortal existence, I hope. I have seen all sorts of arts, and many meritorious people, but nothing like that. It, and you, should survive.”

What was in Tian’s hands looked plain. The meteoric impact of a pillar of meritorious qi slamming into the unholy, writhing thing beneath him was anything but. There was a flash of gold and moonlight silver, a twist of vibrant blues, bright and deep, and a thrumming, humming reverberation of a temple bell.

The demon had no mouth. It screamed with its whole body. The surviving threads thrashed, the miles long threads whipping through the air making an unholy melody of suffering. It was not the one who suffered, the air screamed. It was the one who made other suffer. It knew despair, yes, and misery, and horror, because those were the emotions of prey. It didn’t know those feelings. Until today. Today there were things to hate, to fear, to want to rip to shreds. The demon below suffered, seethed, hated. The Heavenly Demon above knew how to use such gifts.

Tian felt Heavenly Demon make his move before he saw it. His eyes could peer through the convulsions of qi and see the strange aura at play. It landed on the threads of the giant demon like a rain of tar. The aura clung to the threads, binding to them and spreading through them with every errant contact. More and more were bound up, the process accelerating as more threads were affected. He could feel the aura as qi and something else. When it landed on the lesser demon, it shimmered like fat floating on soup. The sight of it tasted like hateful starlight, and smelled like the contempt of a moonless night.

His mother had tried to kill him. She had kept him alive and in agony for years, and when neither heaven, earth or men could stand the Xia clan for one minute longer, she decided to be the hand that passed him over to the afterlife.

Why did he remember that now? Why did he-

Burning Heaven soared over him, an emblem of eternity. Her wings shimmered with light in every color, and seemingly extending into colors beyond what the human eye could see. The sunlight narrowed, hammering down on the core of the demon. Searing it. Making it accelerate how fast it retracted and tried to curl up on itself. A being miles in diameter, trying to retreat into a defensive crouch.

Heavenly Demon gathered his aura onto his fingertips, and his hands began to flow. He seemed to be cradling an invisible ball, rolling it around and slowly compressing it. His fingers kneaded it, pressing in with the tips of sharp nails. A smile, sharp and thin, cut his face. As his hands moved, so too did the great mass of demonic ichor below. Stretches of the demon big enough to cover entire towns were pulled together and crushed. What was liquid was made solid and brittle. Under the Heavenly Demon’s hand, the monstrous thing was cruelly shattered.

Ably assisted by his daoist companions, naturally.

Liren was stabbing out summer thunderstorms. Tian knew she wasn’t really, but she was. Rushing forward with the feeling of wind driving thunderheads, thrusts like the heavy rain that fell on tiles and deafened ears, landing with the explosive power of lightning striking a green tree. Her grasp on it was still rough. Tian could feel wild fire thrashing around, not connecting with the rest of the spell properly. The yin wasn’t balancing the yang, sometimes smothering what should be darting, or putting too much weight behind what should be a light thrust. It was still growth, still miles more sophisticated than her old Fairy Maiden spearplay. And it was getting better every second.

Burning Heaven hovered in the sky, seeming to fill it while being endlessly unreachable. The shimmer on her feathers was doing more than driving the sun down in searing pillars. Tian could feel it attacking the mind and will. She was above you. She would always be above you. No matter how high you flew, how strong you got, how much you howled, she would be above you, and she would decide how you suffered, and how you died. The hour and day of your death were not yours to decide, and never had been.

Tian hopped from the crater he had left, and dove into the maelstrom of forces. His staff was firmly in his hands, his eyes fixed on the enemy before him. However the mortals might be named, this was a demon. The work of heretics. It existed to harm, to hurt, to kill. Its existence was a sickness upon the earth. It would be purged.