Sky Pride

Chapter 23- Expounding on the Dao and Dinner

Tian had once asked Grandpa what virtue was. Grandpa had laughed for a solid five minutes, proving that the old ghost only had to breathe if he felt like it. When he recovered himself enough to answer coherently, he explained that the nature of virtue was one of the great questions precisely because it had many answers, and who could truly say which was the correct one? Beyond that, the Great Dao itself made use of sin and virtue alike, yet daoist ethics and daoist morality were real things. Things which very much endorsed pursuing virtue and rejecting vice. Simply imitating the heavens was not answer enough. There must be a human answer, and a personal one.

None of which helped Tian, who said as much. To which Grandpa smiled and said “It’s an energy, and an idea. Virtue, the meritorious staffplay that you are developing, is you exerting yourself and saying what it is you will and will not tolerate to make the world a kinder, healthier, better place. And if that sounds like I’ve said nothing at all, try it. Every time you fight something vile, a demon, a gu, a heretic, or even just other cultivators who carry ordinary amounts of sin but still insist on coming for your life, test the spell on them. Feel where the resistance is. Then be a daoist, and flow.”

Tian drifted over the clumping and swaying hairs of the demon, his feet suppressing them, crushing them down while he moved like moonlight on water. His senses stretched wide, looking for nodes or gathering places for the strange monster. It was trying to fight back, to grab ahold of him and drag him into hell. The little hairs slid off his robes, no matter how desperately they tried to wrap him up. His uniform covered an armory’s worth of defensive treasures, and beneath the treasures was his mermaid silk underrobes, and beneath that was a body that was explicitly built for crushing hell and all its foul denizens.

The demon was large, hungry, heart crushing in scope and natural horror for most. For Tian, the demon was simply an infection. A large infection, true, but that just required using stronger methods.

His staff rose up, bronze and grey wood wreathed in gold and silver, then struck down once more. There was still something of the willow in the flexibility of the blow, but there was a blurriness to it now, as though the image wasn’t quite so clear. It was more than a good tree striking a wicked thing, it was Wood. Healthy growth, spreading and intolerant of competition from noxious weeds. They would be choked by it, decomposed by it, and become nourishment for the next turn of the cycle.

It wasn’t the most sophisticated definition of virtue. It probably had a lot of holes in it. For now, he felt it aligned with the energy at the core of his half-constructed spell. He thought it flowed. Suppress disease and infection. Purify it. Turn it into nourishment. Then let the good things grow. In time, they too would die, but that was fine. Death itself was not evil, nor wrong. It simply had a proper time and place. It was part of a virtuous cycle. The Great Dao might have space for this demon, but Tian’s dao did not. It was a flaw in himself he was entirely willing to tolerate. The staff descended, and the virtuous qi flowed into the places where the hair clumped together, trying to form stronger, more binding vines the thickness of Tian’s torso. The impact was enough to tear them almost in half. The virtuous qi was enough to destroy them entirely, gold and silver light racing upwards and downwards from the point of impact. The unnatural flesh, oddly viscous and liquid, while still solid, disintegrated under that light.

The demon responded, forming tentacles as thick as Tian was tall. When that didn’t work, it formed tentacles ten times as thick. No matter. What couldn’t be solved with one blow would be solved with two, and if two couldn’t do it, three certainly would. It didn’t matter how long it took. The problem was in front of him, the cure was in his hands. All a doctor had to do was get his head down and fight.

Ever since he had seen Brother Tang brought into Brother Wong’s medicine hut, curses destroying the brave swordsman’s body, making that strong man weep bitter tears, Tian understood. He saw Brother Wong sweating as he inserted the acupuncture needles, saw the tendons flexed as he crushed the gaderomas and applied the medicines. He understood. This was the enemy, the embodiment of the sickness of his childhood. It was the doctors who stood out and fought that pain.

There could be no finer calling. There was nowhere he would rather be. With every swing of his staff, he testified to the heavens and the earth. This was his dao, and he rejoiced in walking it.

The cultivators, Heavenly Demon, a mystic crane and two lousy daoists, expounded upon their respective beliefs to the demon. It didn’t seem to appreciate the guidance. Tian could see it wished it could scream. The howling of the myriad hairs as they flailed through the air was proof enough of suffering. Petrified, crushed, burned, stabbed, purified, it was steadily torn apart.

The demon really only had a few methods for fighting. Up to this point, being vastly larger than everything else, wrapping them up, squeezing them, dissolving them and consuming them had been all it had needed. It wasn’t enough today.

It was a one-sided beating. Those attacking from the air had to make some ungainly dodges, and while Liren and Tian got knocked about a few times, it simply wasn’t enough. A half hour of dedicated violence was enough to see a terror of the Wasteland ruined and in very, very small pieces. The sludge and ashes of the colossus stretched for miles. Soon, even they would be ground into nothing by the flying stone dust and chaotic qi.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The core of the thing was a globe of dense corruption that Tian could have stood in comfortably, even with Burning Heaven standing on his shoulders and stretching her wings out. It was a sort of energy core, Tian supposed.

“Grandpa, can I?”

Hell yes! Fight for it if one of the others wants it. Grab this thing and gobble it up quick!

“Would anyone object if I ate this?” Tian said, patting the enormous sphere of shuddering black and violet, threaded with unnatural greens and blues. It faintly hummed, if you stood quite close to it. The texture of it was sticky, as though it didn’t want to let his hand go. That suited Tian just fine. He didn’t intend to let the core go either.

“This Seat will require goods of equal value. That core would make an adequate sacrifice.” Heavenly Demon didn’t sound too cranky about it. Tian had the impression that, so far as he was concerned, this was merely common sense and the core a minor matter.

On reflection, Tian thought that was reasonable, so he nodded. “If there is anything else in the creature’s nest, you can pick until you are satisfied. Otherwise, you get the first pick of the next quality loot until you are satisfied. If everyone agrees?”

There were general noises of agreement. Tian sat down and pulled out the giant wolf fang the wolf spirit was hiding in. “There might be more treasures around here. Could you please have a hunt around and see what you can find? If you find something good, bring Sis’ Liren over to ‘em, okay?”

He was never entirely sure how much the wolf spirit really understood, but he put his feelings into his words, and the cub seemed to get it. At the very least, he ran off with his ears pricked up and a fair bounce in his tail.

“Good thinking. Are you going to eat that thing right now?” Liren asked.

“No time like the present, and frankly, I don’t know that it would fit in even my biggest storage ring. Not with the stuff already in it, anyway.”

Tian got comfortable. His cheek twitched when he realized that, if he was close enough to touch the orb, he couldn’t see any of it past its equator. It felt rather like being under a cliff.

“This Demon has seen many wonders, but he still wonders if such a thing is really edible, let alone edible by a -” Heavenly Demon cut himself off. Tian’s cheek twitched harder. Should he be mad about the aborted insult, or appreciate that Heavenly Demon was trying to not be an ass? He exhaled through his nose, blowing away his irritation.

“It’s a two step process. It will be smaller when I actually swallow it. You will see.”

Tian pressed both hands firmly to the giant core and started running the Hell Suppressing Sutra, feeding it qi with the Darknorth Sea Spell. The Redstone Wastes was notably short on water qi, but that was fine. The Kun wasn’t a picky eater. The type of qi might not be the favored sort, but there was plenty of it.

“Oh, like a magic engine.” He heard Heavenly Demon Saying something off to the side, but Tian was ignoring him for now. His mind was focused on the orb. It was a demonic creation, to be sure, but he had never cared to learn how demon summoners operated. He knew they “summoned demons” but that was the extent of it. There was a limit to the amount they could summon, and killing the demon didn’t kill the summoner. Beyond that, he knew little and cared less. The demons were terribly tangible. This one had been planted in the middle of the desert for years. It had a core. It was therefore food for both his body cultivation and his energy body. And there was a lot of it.

He had never been one to waste food.

The manifold body refinements were really showing their power now. Someone else might have already lost their arms to the demonic corruption. A weaker cultivator, even if still in the Heavenly Realm, might go mad, or succumb to possession. Tian barely registered the lingering intent in the miasma within the core. He could see the vile thing. There was no terror to it, no dreadful shadows or demonic whispers. It wasn’t even prey. Prey was something being hunted. This was simply nourishment, and finishing the purification he had already begun.

Qi funnelled in through the hungry, swallowing mouth of the great fish Kun. It poured through him, through his dantians and fueled the statue in his lower dantian. The statue chanted, pulling in and grinding down the demonic taint. His fleshy body absorbed the purified vital energy like black earth absorbing a spring rain. There seemed to be no limit to how much nourishment it could hold. As it grew more powerful, Tian’s energy body grew hungrier. If a single cinder roe deer core might have filled a thousandth or a ten-thousandth of the body before, it was barely a hundred thousandth now. Perhaps even less.

“Getting through the Heavenly Realm is going to be hell, isn’t it? I’m going to be madder for resources than the other Heavenly Realm cultivators, and they are already considered worse than starving dogs!”

Grandpa just laughed one of his not-very-nice laughs and patted him on the shoulder. Tian half smiled. He hadn’t wanted to be ordinary since he first rebuilt his body. If he needed a hundred times the energy as other cultivators, so be it. It just meant he would be a hundred times stronger at the end of it all.

As the demonic taint was ripped away, the vast core shrank and condensed. All the impurity, the demonic taint was ground up, leaving the increasingly pure core within. After an hour, it was merely twice Tian’s size. After a second hour, it was only as tall as him, no longer a morass of black, blue, green and violet, but a hazy grey of hidden rainbows. By the time it was half his height, it was starting to glow, the light and dark segments separating, with rainbows dancing between both. When it was the size of his fist, it shone so brightly that it was hard to look straight at. The twisting light and dark were iridescent, the rainbows not separate things but integral to the whole.

“I don’t think I can refine it any more than that. Well, it’s more than good enough, I’d say. The Darknorth Sea will swallow it up just fine.” Tian shot Heavenly Demon a cheeky grin, opened his mouth wide enough to give a snake an inferiority complex, and popped the core in. He swallowed it in one gulp. So ended one of the demonic hunters of the Redstone Wastes. No matter how it grew, it still ended in the belly of Tian, who was, alas, still some way short of six foot one.