Sky Pride

Chapter 25- How to be Secluded

The hazy entrance to the cultivation ground was a few hundred feet in the air. From what Tian could see, there had been a mountain there at some point. The ground was scoured utterly flat, now.

“Alchemist Lord Voidcatcher said that he didn’t know how… Daoist Student Hong fused with the token to open the path to Old Freak Song’s cultivation ground.” Tian appreciated Heavenly Demon taking the time to edit the more colorful descriptors favored by the ancient toad. It really showed how traveling and fighting with someone could make them at least somewhat less of an ass.

“How did he know I had done it in the first place? Even I didn’t know that thing was an entry token to a sealed cultivation ground.” Liren asked.

“This Demon had the same question. It seems that some funguses and lichens can only be found in tombs or similar structures, and certain foodstuffs left as grave goods can change over time to have powerful medicinal properties.” Heavenly Demon’s face didn’t so much as twitch. He laid it all out as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world. Tian and Liren, however, were struggling.

“In order to bypass no-longer-relevant security precautions, the Alchemy Lord has developed his own methods of analysing talisman based entry methods, particularly in the form of manipulating energy signatures and sympathetic resonances which form the core of almost any token based entry control system.”

Tian and Liren stared at him for a second, then two. Then- “He did bloody WHAT?!” Liren didn’t quite scream. Tian was naturally more composed.

“That old bastard’s been fobbing me off with textbooks for years, and he had this in his webbed grasp the whole time?!”

“This Demon doesn’t know why you are making a fuss. Everyone has their own way of bypassing the protections on a treasury. Why should it be strange that such an esteemed alchemist has such a method? Ah, this Seat understands. You don’t have one.”

“It hasn’t come up.” Tian seethed. “Generally, we just break the elemental nodes holding wards and formations together. Sis’ Liren is talented at it.”

“And they haven’t exploded on you?” Heavenly Demon looked skeptical.

“He didn’t say that.” Liren’s voice was bone dry.

“Ah. Well, the Alchemy Lord had one of his clones investigate the changes in the Wasteland, and recorded the energy patterns on the entrance to the secluded cultivation ground. There wasn’t much likely to be of interest to him there, but since one never knows without looking, he was in the process of crafting his own token to bypass the ward. There was significant debate about whether it would be worth the cost of opening the mountain sealing ward temporarily to gamble on such a speculative venture, so it had been a low priority task. Once he learned what This Demon was after, he made it a higher priority. From there everything should be plain.”

“Still on ‘had one of his clones investigate, sorry. I knew he had a clone art, but I thought that was a short range, temporary kind of thing.” Tian had smoothed out his expression, but inside the seething had only intensified. Clone art! Was that possible at the Heavenly Realm? Had he been robbed yet again?”

“This Seat doesn’t know why you are so mad. Grow stronger, and naturally clone methods will become available to you. This Demon can think of a few dozen off the top of his head, even if he cannot yet make use of them. A cultivator of the Alchemy Lord’s stature will naturally have a clone or two running around, particularly one as gregarious and outgoing as that Lord. Is it so hard to believe that he has his clones record the energy signature of every ward and protection they find, in case he must visit to acquire urgently needed ingredients?”

Tian had to give up. Once again, he was simply no match for the old toad. The way Heavenly Demon found everything Voidcatcher did normal and reasonable made Tian a bit concerned about what life was like in the Northern Expanse. He thought things were hard enough in the kingdom. Just what sort of blood soaked hell was the Northern Expanse?

“The method to enter should be fairly straightforward. I believe that if Daoist Burning Heaven is willing, we could all ride in on her back. Merely extend your… qi… around us and then we fly through.”

Tian and Liren both nodded along, but Tian’s eyes had narrowed a bit. “We are likely to have some tag-alongs. I can see plenty of volunteers to explore the afterlife hiding nearby.”

“Yes, it is fortunate they are coming, as we would need to grab a few otherwise.” Heavenly Demon nodded. Tian and Liren gave him matching looks. He rolled his eyes. “A senior failed his ascension and as a result he shattered the geomantic energy in the reason, flattened a mountain range, dried up several river systems and perverted the natural energy over almost a sixteenth of the entire Northern Expanse. A region now known as the Wasteland of Song. His seclusion grounds were in a hidden realm. The fabric of space was already distorted in this place. How much worse must that spatial distortion be after such a cataclysm? Naturally we need disposable tools to test the path for us, lest we stumble at the final step.”

Tian felt a bit queasy at the thought. Killing a heretic was one thing, but using them for experimentation? He went back and forth for a moment, and eventually just sighed. If they wanted to throw themselves in on their own initiative, let them. Was he supposed to save them from suicide by killing them?

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“Alright. Just this once, I’ll let you ride on my back. Just this one time, mind you.” Burning Heaven grumbled.

Heavenly Demon opened his mouth, and caught three sets of side eye simultaneously. He opted for “Thank you. No time like the present. Let us be off.”

It always felt a little odd to be sitting on Burning Heaven when she changed sizes. Heavenly Demon jumped on with an easy leap, dismissing his tiger mount at the same time. Burning Heaven circled once to build momentum, then drove hard for the opening. She wasn’t subtle. All the ambushers waiting to pick off those coming to raid the hidden realm perked up, waiting for their chance. Liren meditated, her breath steady as a golden glow rose up around the cultivators.

The shimmering haze touched the golden glow, and stabilized.

“What? How?”

“Damn! Get them!”

“HAHAHA! MAKE WAY FOR THIS DADDY!”

Shouts rose up from the camping heretics, and those willing to consort with them. The ambushers didn’t talk any nonsense, they dove at Burning Heaven with vicious speed, some burning talismans or using light body techniques to be the first through the stable portal.

“Never be in the vanguard in the Redstone Wastes. There’s a lesson I remember from my childhood.” Tian’s voice was heavy, they were a half step behind the leading element and the results were already visible. Inside the golden aura of Liren’s qi, the passage was turbulent, but only turbulent. Outside of it was horror.

It was only a few brief seconds, suspended between the outer world and the hidden realm, but in those seconds he saw men and women pulled into strands and braided, others ground into paste, while yet more were scattered in myriad particles, or condensed into a single speck of dust. He had to close his eyes, not just from the horror - the unnatural distortions sent stabbing pain from his eyes deep into his brain. His stomach, previously placid, was whipped into convulsions and only extreme bodily control kept him from vomiting into the interstitial space.

“Huh, not bad at all. This Demon wonders what happened to the test animals. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter.”

“Yeah, a bit of shaking, and I thought maybe I heard some screaming?”

“A bit of screaming, yeah Sis. Hey, Sis, what’s wrong with Bro?” Burning Heaven asked. Tian was on his knees, head pressed to the ground and hands clenched over the back of his head. He took convulsive breaths, each too short to properly fill his lungs.

“Zihao!”

It took Tian a few minutes to compose himself. Not because he was composed, he wasn’t at all. The air was corrosive and stabbing him at the same time. It encouraged repressing emotion in favor of saving your little life.

“I’ll tell you what I saw later. Everyone else is dead, and if not dead, then all I can say is I have finally found a horror I would not wish on even a heretic. Let’s head into the chamber… What…” Tian’s voice trailed off.

There was a mountain, all bare stone, and a short path to an ancient door. There was nothing else. Literally nothing else. The sky was… his mind wanted to say blue, but also grey, there was no light coming from it, yet there was, and all was lit without shadows as though there were a million million tiny lights equally illuminating every inch of the place. Within the blue-grey void, he was sure he saw drifting streaks of blue, a shade of blue so vibrant, only the finest, freshest pigments could hope to match it. In truth, it was a blue so vivid, he had never seen the like.

He didn’t find his words again, not for a little while. Heavenly Demon explained what they were seeing. “This Seat does not understand much about the ways of hidden realms, at least, in terms of their creation and maintenance. They are like… bits of the world, almost but not quite pinched off and pulled away from the mortal dross and towards a more heavenly realm of existence. As it were.”

“Cult secrets?” Liren asked.

“Yes. Thank you. This Seat regrets he cannot speak more clearly. For what it is worth, this Seat believes daoists describe such realms in radically different terms than the Stellar Descent Cult, based on entirely different cosmologies. A more complete explanation might leave you more confused, not less. This is a piece of the material world, elevated into a higher realm of existence, with those higher-realm energies allowed to pierce the veil surrounding the world and empower the cultivators within. Or at least that is how some of them are used, and how this one was used. The veil is highly weakened and somewhat unstable, so the energy is particularly sharp and active. It will be better once we are inside, though it will not completely insulate us. We will need a ward, and soon.”

Tian grunted, and followed the others into the cave. It didn’t seem as ruined as it ought to have been. It was at the epicenter of the cataclysm that created the Wasteland of Song. He instinctively felt it should be blasted to pieces. It seemed largely fine. The damage had been done at a level he was not yet able to perceive, even with his double pupil. Those same eyes of his kept being drawn upward, and back towards that strange sky. There was something to that sky, the sky of a higher world. He would have to meditate on it later. The sky beyond the sky, the heavens beyond the heavens… He shook his head and focused on Liren’s back.

There was no remains of Old Freak Song. No artifacts, no tapestries. There were faint remains of carvings on the walls, but even they had been worn smooth. Whatever histories they might have recorded, whatever beauty they might have remembered, was lost with the old cultivator. He had staked everything on his ascension, and lost. Damning billions of lives with him. Tian could feel the echoes of pain in this place.

“The Primordial Demons do watch over their chosen. This is perfect. This is better than I… than this Seat could possibly have hoped!” In the center of the cultivation chamber was a pit, an empty place where a deep pond might have once been. Directly above it, boring through the heart of the mountain all the way to the peak, was a long shaft, open to the sky. The strange light of the void poured through it, illuminating just the empty pond below.

“We build the formations here. You two will guard me during the forging process. If you wish to explore and look for treasure while I’m undergoing transformation, well, you can see for yourself there is nothing. This Seat doesn’t care, so long as you keep the wards stable, the formations stable, and drive away anything that does manage to get through the veil of this place to interfere.”

Tian narrowed his eyes slightly. “Is that likely to happen?”

“This Demon is demanding greater power and authority from the Ancestral Demons. Can you imagine he would go untested? Why else would I want guardians. To work! I have waited for today for two hundred years, and I won’t wait a minute longer!”