Unseen Cultivator

Scoria Scorn strode amid ruins on the bank of a great river. There had been a great city here, once, near to the mouth of the mighty waterway. It had been the home of the Endless Torrent Sect, a powerful lineage indeed, and one surrounded by a number of other equally potent sects that formed the heart of the Orthodox Alliance. Millions had lived in the highly urbanized region, supplied by the immensely fertile lands found along the coast and adjacent to the vast length of the sinuous river. Near the end of the Demon War, a great battle had been fought upon this ground.

She had been there and recalled that day clearly. The nearby lake turned to fire. Three separate tsunamis and four river floods drowned the coast and buried the city beneath mountains of mud.

Over ten thousand elders had perished during that clash, the heart torn out of the last great armies of the war, Orthodox and Demonic alike. Three of the seven Great Betrayers had fallen, crushed beneath raging walls of water, leaving only the Entwining Blight to carry their banner onward. Even that famous monster had been wounded and nearly destroyed. Only the actions of Bloody Roam had spared him.

The black armored immortal, among the last cultivators to turn to the plague and join the demonic cause, had carried the day with his strength. In so doing he drove a wedge through the demonic cultivators that would, in the final stage of the war, prevent the achievement of total victory. Yet had he not joined them, Scoria Scorn considered it likely that the Orthodox warriors would have triumphed.

History, such as there still was, called it the Battle of Fire Lake. Scoria Scorn recalled it as the day she gained immortality.

That was a bitter memory now, considering she had lost it once again, but she intended to erase that lack just as thoroughly as time had eliminated evidence of the battle and the sects that once lived here. Such ruins as still stood were little more than mounds now. The stone structures crushed and buried by floodwaters and tides. Grass and trees covered them atop thick piles of soil. Here and there fragments of bronze, unearthed and raised up temporarily by the waters, glinted in the morning light, but even those were battered by wave action such that whatever symbolism they once possessed had been pounded into oblivion.

The qi surrounding this place was entirely neutral. In the whole of the world, few places had even been so thoroughly plundered as this. The Entwining Blight went so far as to dredge the sea in order to recover every last treasure of those who'd injured him and slain his comrades. Anyone who had not lived through the war who came here might discover that humans had indeed once lived in this place, but the ruins had no stories to tell beyond that.

In time, she guessed no more than a few additional millennia, the actions of the river and the cycle of the tides would wash every last carved stone block and chunk of shaped metal out to sea. Even the limited legacy still present would be gone.

An event Scoria Scorn looked forward to with some anticipation. She had every intention of visiting again and finding nothing. Her plans were laid accordingly.

Those plans led further south to the great karst mountains north of her birthplace, and the endless caverns found there. That was the road to the underworld where she could reclaim her strength, but she would not leave just yet. One small task remained before she devoted the entirety of her focus to purely personal goals.

Walking through the floodplain in silence, surrounded by a vibrant mélange of birdsong, insect strumming, and other natural noise, she looked upriver. Over one thousand kilometers distant, near to the source of that great waterway, lay the place where she'd been killed. Thinking on that brought a reflexive grimace to her shrouded face. Regret infected every thought she composed regarding that incident.

Regret, and confusion. She remained unable to determine how those two horrible blue women got behind her so quickly. They should not have been able to anticipate her path in that way. The whole battle, every time she replayed it in her memory, only accumulated additional problems of this kind. There was some element that did not fit, that she could not understand.

This was not some idle thought. Her inability to solve that puzzle colored the entirety of her destiny. It clamped down upon her choices, all her myriad future plans.

She desired vengeance, of course, but in the long walk south it had become clear to her that she had no need to obtain that personally. The desire to see those horrid women, the legendary Twelve Sisters, perish, was a furious fire in her core, and the elimination of their whole land would follow from that, but at the same time it was oddly distant. She wanted many things more.

The achievement of that land's destruction motivated her, to be sure, but it could not even approach her drive to survive.

It seemed the old tales were indeed true. Not even death could change an immortal.

At another time that might have been amusing, if applied to someone else. Bent through the mirror of her soul it was far less funny.

The discovery of this somewhat relaxed approach to the need for vengeance offered a measure of internal reassurance. She had seen, in the past, the dangerous destructive spiral that an obsession with revenge could induce. The feuds of the old sects had been terrible indeed. Released from such reason-overriding needs, she could consider the fate of that hidden land and its inhabitants with proper care. Such assessments, churned through her mind many times over on the long walk south and the endless cavern explorations she had conducted during that process, had led her to this devastated place.

At least eight immortals, and perhaps the full roster of twelve or even more. A large cadre of other elders dozens strong. Devastatingly powerful formation-based defenses. Hundreds of lesser cultivators. The list of obstacles was immense, far greater than any small group of demonic cultivators could hope to overcome. She guessed it would take at least twenty immortals united in that attack to guarantee victory, and more if they did not wish to risk hideous losses. The woman who killed her had been in the seventh layer, stronger than anyone save for Bloody Roam.

Only that devastating warlord could form the necessary coalition to destroy the Twelve Sisters, and Scoria Scorn knew he would not find it easy. Most of the surviving demonic cultivators either hated, feared, or despised him in some manner. Twenty-five hundred years of being forced to bow to his strength had made even those who might have been natural allies turn to resentment.

Of course, they would need to find the gateway first. She recalled the location well enough, certainly with sufficient accuracy to locate it again, but she had no intention of telling anyone else. If Bloody Roam learned the truth, he'd be obligated to either kill her outright or torture her to madness to acquire the truth of the Fuming Shade's demise. He would probably do that regardless, simply to demonstrate his resolve in order to gather troops.

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Besides, she recognized that as matters stood, as a cultivator in the third layer of the spirit tempering realm – the caverns of the wild north had offered up a modest set of boons on the road south – she would be locked out of any harvest of the richest hidden land in existence. She'd glimpsed, in the moment when the foe counterattacked, just how rich the qi of that place truly was. It might well hold a million mortals.

Revenge would be served as a grand feast for her, or not at all.

That realization had brought her here, to set in motion the schemes necessary to make certain the wretched orthodox siblings survived long enough that she could consume their qi, at least a portion of it, herself.

Neither prize nor vengeance would be forgone, not when they could be preserved with just a little care. Bloody Roam would not be allowed to steal what she had unearthed. He had little cause to complain, being already in the upper end of the seventh layer, there was no use to which he could put such power.

The Fuming Shade had desired to replace their erstwhile general. Though she had never thought that important before, coming back from the dead had granted Scoria Scorn the realization that this was a more logical goal than she'd previously believed. The only way to truly ensure her survival was to make certain none could threaten her, and anyone stronger than she herself was automatically qualified as a threat.

Reaching the seventh layer, long a personal goal, was one part of that, and she would slaughter as many foes as it took to achieve that, but it was not enough. The strength of that layer, the peak of cultivation, would not suffice to ensure an equal rival could not bring her down. Whether it was Bloody Roam, the white-eyed monster who'd struck her with the raw power of a star, or some deep-buried old lion lost in stasis.

No one in the seventh layer of the celestial ascendancy realm could be allowed to live.

She considered it unlikely that anyone of such power was truly to be found hidden in the depths. Among the stars perhaps, legend stated old masters had sometimes flown into the heavens physically rather than attempting ascension, but she cared little for any who had withdrawn so far. That left Bloody Roam and the one who'd killed her, Iay. Recognizing this allowed her to formulate a simple plan.

The two must be made to kill each other.

Any battle would destroy one and greatly deplete the other. With proper provisions for such a betrayal, the weakened survivor could be destroyed. The ideal method would be a cataclysmic clash, similar, if distinctly lesser, to the one that had scourged this place. All dangerous piece cleared from the board in one engagement.

Even if it did not work perfectly, it would serve her ultimate needs.

There was only one small problem, one that made this current journey necessary. The demonic side was presently too strong. Over fifty demonic cultivators remained, more than twice the number that would serve to provoke a critical cataclysmic clash. Should the location of the Twelve Sisters be revealed now it would simply be a massacre, and the black-armored tyrant would reign forever.

Death had discharged Scoria Scorn of any notions of sides in a conflict between immortals. There was no longer the demonic versus the orthodox, not to her. There was only the one versus the all. For now, the balance of strength lay with the demonic cultivators. That might change, in a few thousand years, assuming loses continued to accrue, but she was little inclined to wait that long.

The process needed some acceleration.

Her newfound comfort moving in the deep places of the world offered an advantage in scouting. Caverns abounded here, though still less than the multitudes found further south, and she was able to survey far up the river without ever spending more than a few minutes at a time above ground. This provided a shield against casual discovery and allowed her to discover who now controlled the lands once claimed by the Fuming Shade despite her presently inferior cultivation.

Rust Reaper now patrolled the inland forests.

Scoria Scorn knew him, better than most demonic cultivators. Though they were from lands far apart, their original sects had been close allies. He was skilled, but a follower. He had turned to the plague at the orders of his sect master, and after that man's death had allied himself to the strongest cultivator he could find.

It was, she considered, a respectable strategy. As a survival method there was nothing wrong with ceding leadership to a being of superior power.

Unfortunately, that approach created a problem for her. Rust Reaper would never attack the Twelve Sisters on his own. He would wait until a horde formed and then he would summon his master. Bloody Roam would put together a mighty army and make an end of it.

An outcome that would not come about for a least a century, certainly. Even here, over a thousand kilometers distant, the depletion from the horde lost to the Twelve Sisters remained evident. Few ghouls could be found wandering about.

But that was still too soon.

Rust Reaper needed to be removed. Thankfully, as one whose advancement was tied to the scraps dropping from his master's table, he was weak, barely in the second layer of the celestial ascendancy realm. Far too powerful for Scoria Scorn to overcome in her current state, of course, but easy prey for many other demonic cultivators. All that she needed could be achieved by tricking one of sufficient power into attacking, and such a deadly agent was conveniently at hand. It was simply a matter of putting the correct scheme into place.

Thankfully, she had buried tools beneath this once-great city that supplied her with additional options.

The Battle of Fire Lake had made it clear that the war was about to end, one way or another. She had made provisions accordingly. A place as thoroughly plundered as this, one ravaged by shifting waters, was unlikely to be searched ever again. It made for an excellent hiding place.

Retrieval was not easy, given the protections necessary to resist thousands of years of tide, but sensing things beneath the earth had long been her specialty, and that ability was now disproportionately strong. The great stone pillar she'd hollowed out to serve as a chest and buried deep in the mud far below the waterline remained in place. She had capped the hole with a block of black mineral of strange composition and equally strange fundamental qi. Normally, such things faded away, their signal lost against the noisy qi of the mixed bedrock, but here there was only soil and the remnants of the white limestone the Endless Torrent Sect had used exclusively for construction.

That was enough for her to latch onto, a signal that could be felt at distance. Though the frustrating triangulation necessary to find the exact point of burial made Scoria Scorn lament the lost abilities of her immortal body yet another thousand times.

It took seven days of almost ceaseless walking and three days of extremely miserable muddy excavation to unearth the pillar. From within the carved cavity, she extracted three items. The first was a concealment array designed to suppress all signal of an individual's qi.

The second was a pouch full of qi-dampening pills intended to augment the impact of the first. They would have accomplished next to nothing while she remained an immortal, but in her present state they ought to be very effective, for a short time.

The third was a pair of silk gloves, kept inside a brass box. She unsealed the wax coating holding the lid closed long enough to make certain they remained intact, and then immediately shuttered them again. Deadly items of wartime manufacture, they were a weapon specifically designed to fight the plague, capable of burning away demonic qi upon contact. They were horrible things, anathema to her very existence, but Scoria Scorn knew their value.

Her intended plan would require that she wear those gloves, placing the pale white fabric over skin that would burn away in seconds. Mere minutes would leave only blackened bones in the place of her hands. A terrible prospect, one that set her trembling to contemplate, but also possessed of inestimable value.

The soft gloves would allow her to kill another person without draining away their qi, something normally impossible for a demonic cultivator. An absolutely essential tool to provide her with that most critical of the schemer's resources: an intact corpse.

A corpse that would allow her to ensnare Snow Feast and trigger a civil war.