Sky Pride

Chapter 21- The Hierarchy Amongst Demons

The trip went smoothly. To the quiet shock of everyone, they were able to communicate well. This was achieved through the expedient of not talking, mostly, which meant that when they did have something to say, they weren’t talking nonsense. Tian managed to control his occasional obsessions with interrogating Heavenly Demon to learn all he could of the Northern Expanse, and the Heavenly Demon managed to control his mouth, or at least leash it to a manageable degree. Burning Heaven was only occasionally chatty, and she didn’t really talk much with Heavenly Demon. She confided in Tian that she really hadn’t met that many strangers after she awoke her wisdom, and those that she had met were ‘safe.’ Other birds, mostly, or cultivating beasts inside the Grandmaster’s Realm. She wasn’t entirely comfortable chatting with strangers.

The cultivators had, by various means, slowly taken each other’s measure, and felt no need to fill silence with empty noise. Tian or Liren generally cooked, which the Heavenly Demon flatly refused to do, but he was willing to make his Stellar Light Gathering Array large enough to include their tent along with his house. The qi was different than anything they had experienced, remarkably so. To their utter bewilderment, it really did feel like cultivating under the stars on a cold night. There was something else in it, something they weren’t reaching, but it worked well with their Sky Treading Art. They didn’t try to create a night sky within themselves, as they were still working their way through the morning sky. Still, it did go faster than cultivating under the skies normally. The strange arrays were also the first time the two companions encountered higher grade spirit stones.

“These are rough things, naturally, this Seat only learned such a menial skill as a way to sustain himself during his sojourn through the wasteland. In civilized lands, refining and condensing such energetic ore is done by convicts, or those too weak to even leave their sickbeds.”

“Refining spirit crystals is a job left to convicts? Wouldn’t there be a risk of them cultivating with them?”

“They are quite free to try!” The Heavenly Demon laughed. “The ore is too feeble to be of any use supporting a proper cultivation art, and without formations, medicines and the like, their strength is merely childish. Indeed, most convicts leave prison weaker and more emaciated than when they entered. There are penalties for not producing enough refined spirit crystals.”

“Ah. So ‘convict’ is another word for slave.” Liren’s tone was suspiciously flat, given how pointed her look was.

“In this case, yes. Slavery is officially banned in the lands ruled by the Stellar Descent Cult, though there are many practices which are functionally identical if legally different. There are competing schools of thought within the Cult. Mine does not support the practice, though truthfully this Seat barely thinks of it at all.”

“I’m willing to bet you’d care in a big hurry if someone made a slave out of you.” Liren’s voice was even more mild, and her look grew even more pointed.

“They would have to kill this Heavenly Demon first.”

“I’m sure you aren’t the first to have thought that before a collar went around their neck. I’m sure you aren’t the first one to have thought that today.” Liren shook her head.

“Why else should one become strong, if not to enforce one’s will upon the world?” Heavenly Demon shrugged again. “Life is inherently unfair. That is what gives living its meaning. I do not approve of owning slaves, but subjugating another to your will, dominating them, crushing their ambitions to advance your own? There could be meaning in such an act. Becoming an obstacle, an enemy to be overcome? There could be meaning in that too. However, this Demon feels the risks outweigh the rewards.”

“The risk of them getting stronger and avenging themselves on you?” Tian asked.

“The risk of becoming corrupted and decadent. Who gives a damn what the beaten think? Any crushed beneath this Demon need never dream of rising again, for they shall always be beneath him. To be defeated by him is to become his strength.”

Tian was a little spooked to see Burning Heaven nodding along with that.

Burning Heaven wasn’t the fastest, but she could keep flying when other, faster, birds would have died of exhaustion, and that was before she ascended. Three days in the air followed by a night of sleep was really nothing at all for her. It was easy flying as they traveled some five hundred miles to the east of Burning Flag City before crossing over the Steppes. They didn’t land during the crossing. The only spirit they saw was the little wolf Tian was carrying, but they could feel eyes on them. No one thought it would be wise to linger.

Tian hadn’t seen the line before, the place where the steppes turned into desert. He had a vague notion of something like the treeline on the mountain- the steppes could go thus far and no further. It was a bit more ragged than that, looking more like an undulation of red sand and yellowing grass. It was only a minute or two until the grass was gone entirely.

They were back in the Redstone Wastes. He could smell it all the way in the Heavenly Realm.

There was no peace in the Redstone Wastes. Their mastery of qi had reached the point where they didn’t need to wear head wraps anymore, but their sensitivity to it meant that they were constantly fighting to force the toxic qi out of their bodies. They hadn’t yet reached the point where they could passively ignore it. An unwelcome revelation was that the qi was even less uniform than they had believed when they were in the Earthly Realm. It was earth and fire, yes, but within those categories were seemingly endless variations- the qi of land where a forest had just burned, or the qi of drought, the qi of a graveyard. Tian knew he was just making up words to match feelings, but it was the best he could do to make sense of it.

“Oh. Now I understand.” Liren’s voice suddenly whispered in his mind. “It’s desolation. It’s a memory of death expressed in variations of fire and earth. There is wood in there too, and water, and metal is certainly hiding, that relentless pressure, that feeling of constantly defending against something pressing an attack. The need to always be sharper, more alert, more on edge. But under it all is the land itself, howling. Not mourning - screaming, and pointing at where it hurts.”

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Tian shot Liren a surprised look.

“What? You think you are the only one who thinks about things? I’m just sitting here, trying to count the vanes on the feathers on Burning Heaven’s back. Lots of time to ruminate.”

“Is it still that bad?”

“I’ve learned to live with it. I thought it would go away after I learned to fly. I guess we will see how it goes with the Sky Treading Art. Will it feel like I mastered the sky, or lost myself in it?”

Tian leaned forward, slipping his arms around her waist. “I’m the only sky you should be lost in. Don’t be afraid to fly. You will always have me. Your fixed point to navigate by.”

She leaned against him, letting the warmth fill the moment. “Who did you get those lines from?”

“Sister Mei. I wanted some advice on flirty talk. No good?”

“No. Very good.”

Flying over the Wastes was a little more intense than in the kingdom. The winds blew irregularly, hard gusts coming suddenly from behind or below. Sometimes, the air seemed determined to shake them up and down, like they were jars and some great spirit was trying to guess what was inside of them. Then there were the demonic birds and insects. Whatever restraint Tian and Liren might have felt about picking off weaker cultivators didn’t stretch that far. Liren threw rocks. Tian hopped on his flying leaf and rushed in to beat them to death with his staff, testing ideas, sorting through what he had gotten from his brothers and the scripture pavilion. He felt it would be wasteful to use his needles, when such a good chance to learn presented itself.

Heavenly Demon just looked bored by it all. Right up until they found a Heavenly Realm demonic hawk.

“AT LAST!” His hair spread outward in a rising cloud, red light throbbing around him, that strange killing intent slamming down on the bird. The hawk, for its part, saw something it very much liked, and dove towards Heavenly Demon with outstretched claws. Tian and Liren had a front row seat to what the Demon could do with aura.

It could tear a bird big enough to swallow horses into five pieces, that’s what it could do.

The black tiger spirit leapt forward, Heavenly Demon stretching out his hand like a lancer clawing for the enemy’s heart. The hawk’s claw distorted, a “claw” of wind and shadows stretching out and down. Claws big enough to obliterate a body were crushed and smashed aside by the slender hand of a far greater monster. Tian could see the aura coming from Heavenly Demon now- first looking like clouds of energy, then biting snakes, then claws even bigger than the demon, even a loving embrace.

The hawk hacked down with its beak, screaming and furious at the pain in its claws, outraged that this prey dared fight back. The enfolding aura stabbed into the bird, causing it to scream once. It took Tian a little while to process what happened next. The aura divided itself into parts, then each part pressed against the other while smoothly levering backwards. It took just a second to rip the demonic hawk into pieces. The second, final, scream of the hawk was quite brief.

“DEMONS BE PRAISED! Oh that feels good! This Seat was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with him.” Bloody chunks of necrotic flesh rained over a village-sized stretch of the wastes, turning the red sands black. “Instead, it was as he always knew- the hungry ghosts he traveled with were the strange ones. Ah, the Primordial Demons truly do look after their chosen people.”

Tian glanced up at the sky, then down at the radiantly smiling Heavenly Demon. For all the hazy blue, it looked as though streams of starlight were falling on him. Tian’s eyes narrowed slightly. It wasn’t coming from the hawk, it really was descending from the stars. Whatever was happening, it plainly wasn’t simple. Tian tried to make the connections, but there were still pieces missing. The Heavenly Demon cultivated, using formations that gathered “stellar energy.” Yet his cultivation needed him to overcome significant obstacles to progress, as well as having a specially refined body.

“Do you see now how insignificant the petty magics of daoism are? How mighty the ways of the Stellar Demons?”

“Mmm? Oh yes, well done.” Liren politely clapped. Tian joined in.

“Yes, yes. Well done, you worked hard. Would you like a cup of tea, perhaps? Perhaps a cool towel to help you freshen up?”

The Heavenly Demon nearly fell off his tiger. “What are- you! AH! You know what? Do it! Prepare a cool towel for this Heavenly Demon!”

“Oh, I wasnʼt offering, I was just curious if you wanted one. I expect you can figure out how to get a towel wet and wrap it around your neck, but If you can’t, I’m happy to explain the technique. Speaking of technique, your little butterfly kisses aura thingy seems to work well on big birds. That’s useful, given that you eat mostly meat.”

“Butterfly kisses?” Liren asked, eyebrow raised.

“I heard some sisters calling it that when butterflies came and bumped into you, fluttering their wings on you. It always sounded quite pretty to me, and I think you would agree-”

“Oh yes, his aura or whatever does kind of feel like that. I can tell it’s just Qi and a bit of something else, but it does feel nice.” Liren nodded, ignoring the inhuman beauty turning inhuman colors nearby. “I do somewhat wonder what it is, exactly. I mean, if it’s just a pleasant breeze to us-”

“Something not to be sneezed at in the desert,” Tian tapped his nose.

“But it can turn a demonized hawk into lunchmeat for local scavengers, there must be more to it.”

“I wouldn’t call that lunchmeat. It stinks. If he’s not going to tidy up the corpse, there is nothing to call it beyond ‘making a mess,’” Burning Heaven chimed in. “What a reek. Let’s keep moving, I don’t want the smell getting into my feathers.”

They flew off, leaving the fuming Heavenly Demon to catch up.

It was another day’s flight when they passed a mortal caravan. The mortals wore loose, flowing garments, covering themselves head to toe, even covering their eyes with thin gauze. Some walked alongside wagons pulled by mules, others next to strange animals Tian could now identify as camels. It wasn’t a merchant and his servants. Tian could see families traveling together, and while there were guards, they were dressed identically to the rest. It was a tribe, migrating. They slowed to watch the procession.

“I always wondered about them. The mortals who can cross a desert that would kill an unprepared Earthly cultivator. It’s not just earth qi, there is a whole mess of stone dust in the air too. It should be shredding their lungs. I can just about believe the gauze is protecting their eyes, but nobody is completely covered all the time.” Tian eyed them carefully, trying to see what their trick was. He really couldn’t say. All his double pupils were revealing was they were all traveling under the cool night and sweet air twisting between the fingers of children reaching up and trying to snatch the gems from the sky as he once had in this very desert.

“The mortals below?” Heavenly Demon raised a perfectly curved eyebrow. “Heretics. They are what you would term heretics, but not of the Daoist school. They are heretics of the Stellar Descent Sect.”