The fifth was a copy of the third, only it checked the environment, rather than the spectators, measuring energy fluctuations.
The sixth process provided extra meaning to each word I said. Each syllable of my speech contained higher concepts, exciting the dimension’s qi with meaning and understanding. For example, I used the word ‘ocean’ in the field watering analogy, and it contained a whole lot of meaning. It meant a literal sea, a watering can the size of a mountain, a core filled with qi, rain falling on thirsty ground, etcetera.
Throwing so much meaning at people through words is a great way to sound profound. It’s like throwing a ton of shit at a wall. Eventually, something will have to stick. Otherwise, it will just heap up on the floor and cover the wall, which ends up doing the same in the end.
Together, these six processes allowed me to string all of that provided data together into coherent sentences without any effort, and let me keep an eye on the overall progress of the dimension’s will. Qi is pure potential - it only makes sense for something as big as Tree, the ground around it, and the moon to gain something more.
I check inside Tree and see half the people still sitting in front of it, in a daze. The other half of them are furiously running around, doing tests, sparring, and cultivating. I can still feel the abstract thought of ‘progress and increasing power’ resonating throughout the dimension, generating more qi with each of their thoughts.
“Are you going to tell me what that speech was really about?”
I turn in the saddle and look at Rhea. “Nope. Figure it out yourself.”
She narrows her eyes. “You met a few of the larger enforcer mutants. You thought that your students were the most powerful beings on this planet. They got beat down. I killed one. Only one. You couldn’t kill all of them without expending more power than you were comfortable with.”
She then stops suddenly and looks away. I raise an eyebrow. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Some things you don’t talk about. Not out in the open. Besides, calling out names will only draw attention.”
I smile at her. “Yeah, I thought the same thing. Finally, we have a bad guy to fight.”
“Good luck with that. Is that why you changed all the rings?”
I nod. “Leaving qi around is bad, for more reasons than just qi pollution. Only activated qi can leave our bodies now.”
“You changed your own ring?”
“Why do you think those large beasties could find us so easily?”
“And Lola’s hat?”
I glance at the pirate hat that now adorns Lola’s cute little head again. It half covers the red tuft of hair on her forehead. My bear mount now has a small black badge with a silver tree on it stuck to its shoulder. “Same. All the mounts too. Tree won’t let anyone out without a containment field now.”
“This prevents me from feeling with qi.” Rhea frowns as she looks at the modified ring on her finger. “I no longer feel comfortable without some scanning field around me.”
“You didn't figure it out yet? Just turn your qi into a delayed spell. The qi I use for spiritual sense turns into heat after ten minutes.”
I see the light go on inside her head. She sits still for a bit and I feel an airy power emanate from her. Seconds later, the wind starts whipping around us, making the grass dance.
“You don't need that much. I think that whoever is after us will still be able to see meteorological anomalies like this, even if it can no longer sense our qi.”
“Ah, didn't think of that. What about the warming of air around you?”
“It’s half a degree in a day if I stay in the same spot. Even the slightest bit of wind is enough to disperse an amount that insignificant.”
Ferah looks at us weirdly from where she is sitting behind Angeta. “Why are they talking like that?”
“Like what?” asks Angeta.
“Talking about this and that as if we are supposed to understand what they mean?”
“Teach likes being mysterious. And don’t forget that Re-Haan is a dragon, and they always talk in riddles.” Angeta snorts as she looks at the woman sitting behind me. “Every time you use qi outside of your body, it needs to be doing something. Otherwise you can’t get it through your mouth or skin. That’s all you need to know.”
Ferah bites her nails while looking at me with a pensive expression. She then shrugs and lies back on the capybara, closing her eyes as the animal’s gentle gait lulls her to sleep.
I guide my blue bear to the left, adjusting our course to avoid coming too close to the walled city in the distance. “That’s Luzden, right?”
Angeta shrugs, Ferah mumbles as she dozes, and Rhea stays silent. I check the information I’ve gathered about this planet and cross-reference it with the newly detailed map Database has been building. Yep, that’s Luzden. Goodsummer should be on the opposite side of the river, near the ocean, and quite a bit north from here.
Half an hour later, I realize why it has been so peaceful. Angeta has run off towards the city. I can see her doing something near the walls, while Ferah is yammering and pulling on her sleeves. I stop my mount and wait for them.
I swing a leg over my mount and slide next to Rhea. “What is she doing? Some sort of dance?” Rhea asks. I smoothly throw an arm over her shoulder as I observe Angeta’s antics.
“Looks like some sort of tribal ritual. Maybe a rain dance?” The view is pretty nice. Tall mountains, with bases partially hidden by atmospheric perspective, frame a forest. The forest frames the stone walls on the horizon. The river is not visible from this position, so it looks like the city borders the woods.
Are the walls shrinking? Ah, no, there are trees growing around them all of a sudden. Angeta is laying across her mount - I think its name is Hotfeet - and is now hurrying back here. Ferah has to hold her to prevent the beastkin from falling to the ground.
“A growth dance, I guess.”
“Probably revenge, no?”
“Yeah. Luzden is a slave-raiding base. Makes sense that she has some issues with the place.” I smirk to myself. “She is not a core former yet. I’m looking forward to seeing her planting immortal trees everywhere as a cultivation method.”
“Can she even get that far? A lot of documents from the cultivation world talk about natural limits.” Rhea responds.
“Did you even listen to my speech? Everyone can become immortal if they follow their own path.”
“Aren’t we all following you? Can I make people follow me or guide people without putting them on a path not completely their own?”
I laugh a bit. “Don’t underestimate the stubbornness inherent in any sapient. Changing someone else's mind is not an easy thing to do.”
She pokes me in my side, making me jump. “Then what about all the data in Database? That has your path of neutrality written all over it...”
“Nope, that’s just information. It’s like reading a book. What we did when you were injured, that’s dangerous. I now have to follow a bit of your path while you will follow a bit of mine. That’s an equivalent exchange; so, it works out. I set Database to remove or sanitise any data uploads and contributions that contain a lot of personalities and personal paths.”
“Hmm.” Rhea is still and lays her head against my back. She is off to dreamland again. Curse her dragon constitution, I wish that my cultivation speed would triple anytime I went to sleep. I sigh deeply. Maybe not, though - not unless I could guarantee I wouldn’t dream.
Lola jumps to my other shoulder, to avoid being crushed by Rhea’s head. We both look out at the trees sprouting from the ground, trashing any buildings in their way. The city comes to life as yells and ringing bells sound out across the plains.
“Let’s go Teach, I’m done.”
I look back at a half-conscious Angeta. She looks exhausted, is completely empty of qi, and has a large smile on her face.
“Feel better now?”
“I really want to stay and watch them fight off the beast hordes, but i
t’s fine.” She drags herself behind Ferah, hugs the young girl and falls asleep herself.
“Shall we go then, fellow bed?” I ask her.
Ferah pushes Angeta’s head to the side, dodging the extending strand of drool. “Forward! We are not allowed to sleep on the job!”
I can’t help but grin at that. “The snuggle is real. At least we have mounts and not a carriage. We’d ‘wheely’ get more tired.”
She blinks a bit, smiling at me after a few seconds. She then gets a mischievous smirk on her face. “My first time sleeping with someone, and it's a threesome.”
I sputter. Where did she learn those things? “Rhea’s so good at sleeping, she does it with her eyes closed.”
Ferah laughs as we continue to exchange bed-puns. I faintly hear the sounds of terror-filled screams and crumbling walls coming from far away, but I just ignore it.
⁂
The rest of the trip is uneventful. Hotfeet and my blue bear - whom I really should name one of these days - are exceptionally comfortable mounts. My bear is a core former while Hotfeet is at the apex of qi condensing. Their speed and stamina is comparable to a car. Angeta and Rhea sleep through the rest of the day and the night.
Now, it is early morning and Luzden’s broken walls are far behind us. The sun is shining down on us as it climbs over the mountains to the east, its light reflecting off the calm river.
“Cross here?” asks Ferah.
“Yes, near this bend. Could you, uhm, put on some furry ears maybe? And a tail? And do Re-Haan also.”
I start forming an illusory qi construct on my body before a sudden thought strikes me. “That reminds me, why are scales seen as bad when dragons have them?” I could cover myself in a film of ‘NORMAL BEASTKIN, NOT A HUMAN’ qi, but the fine control needed to model individual strands of fur moving in the wind is a good method to retrain my qi manipulation skills.
“Lizards are failed dragons. There are no dragon-scaled people, only lizards. And you don’t want to be in that caste. They are the trash people.”
I frown at the girl. “But this race has fairly pointy teeth? That's... racism? Caste-ism?” I lift my gums and show her a raccoon's pointy chompers.
“You’d get in so much trouble. They are everywhere and take all the things that are thrown away. Nobody knows what they do with it. They are a dangerous bunch.”
No way! Racoon mafia? This world might be cool after all. “How about this race then?” My black-ringed eyes and grey-white sideburns turn white and orange with black stripes.
“Stop scaring me! That caste is all assassins. No, wait, they don't exist! Tell everyone they don't exist, that way they won't kill you. They won't kill you because they don’t exist, but...” Ferah strokes her suddenly voluminous tail back into its sleek form while looking around in a slight panic.
“Do these… castes have names? Like the animals they are based on?”
“We aren’t based on animals! The animals started to resemble us because they were jealous of our intelligence and beauty!” Ferah rubs her hands through her orange fur while sticking her chest out. “Just turn into someone like me.”
I nod and turn my fake fur orange and white. “How do I look?”
She covers her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. “Like a woman, phhhaaahahaa!”
I sigh. “What should I change?”
“What? Nothing! You look gorgeous.” She shows me her teeth as she grins while laughing. “You need a wider snout, longer teeth, and longer fur.”
I make changes to my disguise until she is satisfied. I smile at her and she nods. I look at Rhea, who is still clinging to my back. I cover her with a cloak. She can disguise herself through transformation later. Simulating the wind ruffling through my fur already takes a sizable chunk of my thinking capacity. Taking care of her disguise alongside mine would just be too draining.
“Shall we go?”
Ferah nods and wilts, her smile turning into a blank expression. She must have been trying very hard not to think about what’s on the other side of the river. I see tracks everywhere on the opposite bank, but not a single one is fresh. This riverbed must have been quite busy not too long ago.
“Let’s go, then.”
chapter nine
Reaching
Tess vomits on the grass, emptying her already empty stomach once again. She is entirely covered in the sour bile, each drop of the thick fluid leaving her mouth very slowly. “Fuuuuuu… This fucking ring...” *HUURK*
Ket hovers around her, freaking out and uncertain of what to do. He crinkles his nose but quickly schools his face back into neutrality. He stops for a moment before a resolute look comes across his face. He reaches out and holds her hair back.
“Fuck you, Teach, I’ll get you for this!” Panting hard, Tess mumbles to herself as she spits on the ground a few times. The duo is surrounded by a large number of corpses in varying states of mushiness. Ket pulls a thick cloth from his ring and hands it over. Tess takes it without daring to look at him.
“I’m not sure Teach thought of this scenario. Or if he did, he must’ve judged the likeliness of a cultivator vomiting so low that he didn't build in safeguards taking this scenario into account. The ring takes a small amount of power from our cores to project this film, try pumping in more power?”
Tess coughs a bit more before being covered in a dark sheen. The qi vanishes from her body, allowing the drops of bile and vomit to drop to the ground. She groans. “Couldn’t you have said that earlier?”
“Who knew that the field also stops vomit and that it takes a while before it strips the qi from it? Having a large ball of vomit stuck to your face is not a good look.”
“I’ll stab you if you ever tell anyone.”
Ket laughs uncomfortably at this. Tess stands back up, casting another glance at the carnage surrounding them. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. All the good stuff is still in the carriages or trampled.”
Ket nods and they both stride off. Ket doesn't even glance at the corpses they are stepping over, which causes Tess to glance at him oddly. “How are you so desensitized to this stuff?”
Ket looks at her, nearly stepping on a soldier’s flattened chest. “How come you aren’t? You ran through the Tower for years. You must have seen all this before, right?” Ket waves at their surroundings. Spread across a few kilometres lay the trampled remains of the small convoy. The bloody trail of trampled and upturned ground leads through a small forest before it veers off towards the east.
“I was a sneak! The Tower had eaten everything by the time I got close enough. As soon as the last person dies, everything vanishes.” Tess rubs the cloth over her face while drinking from a bottle of water.
“Ah… Where were you ten years ago?” Ket allows his face to look pained and haunted for a few seconds.
“I’d never have taken the worst baggage carrier under my wing anyway. The delvers would probably have hated that unsocial stick of a boy even more, had they known that you wanted to sneak.” Looking anywhere but at the ground, Tess eyes go glassy as she recalls memories. Then she feels Ket’s hand on her shoulder, stopping her.
“Unsocial? Why do you think I barely got any work?”
Tess also ignores the squishy sound her boot makes when she nearly stumbles. “What? Being a baggage carrier is just carrying stuff. It would take incredibly bad social skills to be the worst at this.”
Ket stares her in the eyes. Tess watches as an emotion unknown to her flashes across his face. They stare into each other's eyes for a full minute as the bloody stench around them slowly seeps into their clothes.
“Who is the first to die?”
“What?” Tess looks back into his eyes, confused at the intense stare.
“Of a delver team, whose duty is it to die first?”
“The big guy with armour in front?”
Ket shakes his head, his eyebrows in a sad slant. “The carrier. New loot can be gotten another day. Getting a new front liner or mage is worth more than a si
ngle day’s work. They avoided me because I was fast. A good carrier doesn’t live long. A good carrier does not avoid a hamstringing blow when things go south.”
Ket releases her and walks on. Tess stands still for a moment, bewildered at the intensity of the previous moment.
Not sure what to feel, Ket just walks for a moment, trying hard to keep his head clear of thoughts. A sound breaks his morose mood. He hears a faint gasp coming from further in the woods. He jumps over a pile of splintered trees with a burst of qi through his legs, nearly landing on another unfortunate servant.
He follows the sound a bit deeper into the forest and comes across a blood trail. Following this trail, he finds a figure slumped against a tree. The bloody and terrified eyes of the convoy’s noble stare at him, terror and relief intermingling.
“Ahh… you! K-Ket Kardel, I n-need your help. You shall be rewa-” Here the noble devolves into a coughing fit, spitting up blood. Both his hands hold onto a leg that is completely purple and too flat. Multiple cuts and scrapes paint a bloody picture.
“Why did you go?”
“Will give you all the m-money… what? Why did I g-go where?” The boy starts shivering.
“Why did you decide to go and raid the beastkin villages in beast season?”
“Why not? My grandfather is a council member, you will be rewarded grea-”
“Why did you put all these people at risk? Do you have a good reason?”
“S-stop whining. I wanted to have some fun, t-those beastkin girls are soft. And the l-last one just died. And they were out of stock. Now help me, you petty dimwit! My grandfather is a duke! HELP ME!” Coughing once again, he covers his mouth. Blood starts dripping through his fingers as he struggles for air.
“Thanks. Another data point advocating the trustworthiness of auras. I hope your soul didn't get too tarnished from this life.” Ket bows slightly and turns around.
Gathering his strength, the noble tries to stand up, tears rolling across his face as he struggles to stay upright. “HELP ME YOU BASTARD! I COMMAND YOU! I WILL BE AN ARCHDU-” A metal knife punches through the young man’s heart and the tree he is leaning against. The grey string it's attached to stretches taught. Ket pulls. The knife explodes through the tree and the pierced chest of the dead man on its way back to Ket.
The Dao of Magic: Book 3: A Western Cultivation Series Page 8
