Defiance of the Fall

Chapter 182: Black and Gold

“What do you mean?” Zac asked confused.

“This penniless monk gained some minor insight into the Dao of Karma from his many decades of meditation. It has given me some unique skills in this new reality of ours. Karma ties you to a location to the east. However, if you leave now you will likely fail in your goal,” the monk said with a calm voice.

Zac thought it over and couldn’t find any reason the old man would lie. Still, it felt like too strong a power to be able to predict the future like that, at least for someone at level 40. That felt like something that was in the realm of gods.

“Why would I fail?” Zac asked with some skepticism.

“Because your yin and yang are currently out of balance,” the old man said as he pointed at Zac’s stomach.

“Benefactor’s wound might not look as bad as this one,” the Abbot continued as he pointed at his chest. ”But it is just as dangerous. I sense a storm inside you. Unless benefactor finds harmony, the yin outside the mountain will kill you.”

Zac grimaced, very aware of the problem. The wound in his side was calm at the moment, but that was only because there was bountiful vitality in this courtyard, almost to the point that it was like being constantly healed by a purifier.

The moment he stepped out from the mountain the process of his vitality being sapped would likely restart again. As he sat and pondered in the back of the truck he made some educated guesses about his situation. The suction of his life force likely wasn’t only because he was inside the Dead Zone, but because of the composition of the bead.

The Core was mainly created from the miasma of over a hundred thousand zombies along with a lot of ambient deathly energy. The opposing force was the ten purification pills along with his Dao of Vitality and Sui’s ministrations. However, the pills and other life-attuned energies he absorbed were far less than the total amount of miasma, to the point that at most 10% of the energy in the bead was life-based.

That meant that the absorption would likely continue even after he left the Dead Zone. His current idea was just to tough it out somehow until he found Kenzie, then hurry back to Port Atwood and hope Ogras or someone else had some idea. But perhaps the monk in front of him could provide some alternative solution.

“Do you have a way to cleanse away the miasma in me?” Zac asked with some hope.

“Why would benefactor want to remove half of his self?”

“Half my what?” Zac asked confused, afraid the monk had misunderstood him.

“If this poor monk may be blunt, I believe benefactor has not looked at the situation from all angles,” Abbot Everlasting Peace said.

“Benefactor likely looks at the yin energy on the outside as something negative, akin to poison. However, this poor monk sees it as the other half of life. This poor monk sensed benefactor walk a path of life when he ascended the stairs. One might look at death as the opposite of life, but one can also see it as its shadow,” the monk said.

Zac nodded in agreement, as that was basically what he based his latest insight of his Dao Seed around.

“One might say that the two restrain each other, but this penniless monk believes they can also nurture each other. Perhaps benefactor doesn’t need to remove the yin, but rather bolster the yang,” the monk concluded.

This was honestly something Zac had thought about before. He felt that he shouldn’t even be alive, but a series of coincidences had left him with this odd core, and perhaps it was a ticket for him to go further than the conventional cultivator. He knew that reaching the higher tiers of power was beyond hard, and unless one encountered a continuous stream of lucky encounters the road would likely end at E-Grade or even lower.

However, there were a lot of question marks about choosing this path. First of all, he wasn’t too sure if it fit his current Daos or his class. He was, in essence, an axe warrior with some nature-element skills on the side. The life-death path was something else.

He was afraid that he’d find himself at an impasse when he reached level 75. Alyn and Ogras had multiple time told him how extremely hard it was to walk the path of the elite, and that almost everyone got stuck at the bottleneck due to lacking the qualifications to go further.

Getting an epic-graded class was nigh-impossible unless you came from a high tier background who had resources that a newly integrated world could only dream of. Perhaps if he spread himself too thin he would lose everything. The situation on Earth was dire, and perhaps it was a mistake to take such a big gamble.

Like it or not, he was the main force against the Incursions and Dominators. The incursions were possible to close without evolving due to the restrictions still in place, but that didn’t hold true for the Dominators. They were already at level 100, far past the F-grade barrier.

He’d discussed the issue at length with Ogras and understood that the increase in strength from each level at E-Grade was the same as a handful of levels for an F-Grader. It wasn’t impossible to skip ranks and fight people who were at the beginning of a new rank, but the Dominators were too far past the delimiter. Even if they were trash who just had a lot of extra time there was no way for Zac to defeat them at level 75.

So if Zac got himself stuck at the bottleneck for too long the Dominators might just kill him and everyone else even if he managed to close the Incursions. The odd cultists of the Zhix were still shrouded in mystery. If they wanted they should have been able to destroy the Incursions without too much effort. Yet they were still biding their time, hiding in their burrows.

That fact only made Zac more nervous, rather than the opposite. It felt like the Dominators were a ticking time bomb that could go off at any moment, and who knew what they had planned over the past 6 months.

“It might be a good idea, but the amount of miasma in me is enormous. I had a purifier help me for over a day, and it barely put a dent in the life-attuned energy needed to reach a balance,” Zac said with a sigh.

“Well, perhaps this penniless monk can help benefactor on this front, but only if you’ve decided on your path,” the Abbot said.

Zac thought it over for a good ten minutes, but finally he decided to go with it after all. If the Abbot could help he would accept it. He already was determined to walk the path of the elite, and he felt that utilizing the core rather than discarding it was the path with more potential, even though it was a large risk. Cultivation was taking risks and defying fate. Nothing ventured nothing gained.

“Amitabha, this penniless monk can see benefactor has made his choice,” the monk said with a smile as he bent down and plucked something from the lotus flower beneath him. “This lotus seed contains part of the vitality of the flower. Though it is only a part, it is nigh boundless. Benefactor can slowly absorb it in order to supplement the yang.”

The torrent of life-attuned energy swirling around the lotus flower got distinctly weaker, and Zac suspected it lost around 20% of its power. Zac understood what kind of sacrifice the old man-made as he looked at the wound in his chest.

“Why are you doing this?” Zac couldn’t help asking.

“Amitabha, do good deeds to gain merit. If benefactor wishes to look it as another way, see it as this penniless monk sowing seeds of karma,” the old monk said with a smile.

Zac said nothing more as he received the seed. He sat down and started absorbing the energy in the seed. It was as though an endless surge of pure life entered his body, and in just minutes his drained body felt like it was back in top condition.

The Core wasn’t so easily satiated though, as it greedily kept absorbing the energy from the seed. A storm of energy exited the seed as it entered Zac’s body and gathered beneath his navel. The huge amounts of energies were painful, but Zac kept pushing his body to the limits in order to finish as quickly as possible.

After roughly twelve hours the speed of absorption started to dwindle slightly, allowing Zac to once again talk with the monk who hadn’t moved the whole time.

“Benefactor’s body is truly resilient. If this penniless monk was able to absorb energy at that speed I would have been able to leave this flower weeks ago,” the Abbot said with a shake of his head.

“This gift is immeasurable,” Zac said. “I do not know how to repay you.”

Zac was regretting not buying the second Fruit of Ascension with contribution points so that he could give it to the old monk. He still was holding one, but he was planning on giving it to his sister.

Besides, it was unclear how helpful it would be to the man in front of him. The fruit didn’t really have any healing properties, and Zac suspected the old man in front of him already had improved his constitution to E-rank. It would almost be impossible not to evolve after sitting in this level of vitality for two straight months.

“Benefactor does not need to repay this old man. This penniless monk only wishes that benefactor does not give up on humanity and uses his gifts for good.”

Zac could only nod and mentally promise that he’d find some way to make it up to the Abbot as he looked inward. There were still surges of life-attuned energy entering his bead, but it had changed quite a bit since he looked at it last.

For one it had almost doubled in size, and secondly, it wasn’t pure black with some golden specks like before. It now held a much evener distribution of colors, though the black was still a majority. He guessed it would take another 12 to 15 hours before he’d reach equilibrium.

More impressively there actually seemed to be fractals naturally forming on the bead, though Zac had no idea what they meant. They were extremely intricate and written in both gold and black. It seemed there was a profundity behind them that still was beyond what Zac could understand.

As the two sat and absorbed the energies from the lotus flower the two discussed various things. The old man was a cultivator, which wasn’t surprising to Zac. What was surprising was that most of the monks who had spent their life in the monastery were cultivators as well. It clashed with what he knew about the randomness of who was a cultivator and who wasn’t.

Zac also gained some clues as to where his sister might be. The monk knew of a large town some distance away from the edge of the Dead Zone that was a drop-off zone for Caucasian cultivators. It was called Kingsbury, and it sounded like it would take Zac roughly two days to get there if he hurried.

What was worse was that the monk mentioned that the town had gotten integrated with the New World Government a few weeks ago. Zac wasn’t sure whether it was a coincidence or not, but it was cause for worry. However, he forced himself to stay put. It was as the Abbot said, rushing would only have an opposite effect.

After another 17 hours, Zac could sense that the core in his body was finally in equilibrium. He was extremely impressed with the lotus flower that the monk sat on. One single seed was able to offset the entire amount of miasma in his core, and there still was a good deal of energy left inside it.

However, when Zac made to give the seed back to the old man he refused with a shake of his head.

“Keep the seed, it might come handy,” the Abbot said. “Remember, the heart is all.”

“Thank you, I will remember this,” Zac said as he stood up and walked toward the door.

He took one last look at the small courtyard and the congenial old man who sat looking up at the clouds with a smile on his face.

Soon Zac was running through the woods toward Kingsbury. The rumors that the Abbot mentioned kept gnawing at him, making him unable to calm down. It felt too coincidental that the town was getting with the government just as he was about to arrive.

It all smelled like a setup to him. They were trying to lure him to Kingsbury, but what kind of plan they had was unknown. The problem was that Zac couldn’t understand why the government would do something like this. They had to know that if they took his sister hostage to harm him they would put themselves square in his crosshairs.

They already knew how he dealt with things by looking at the aftermath in Greenworth. The stupidity of it all made Zac doubt whether he was just paranoid. Still, he would rather be safe than sorry, so he hurried toward the town, cutting a straight line through the forest.