Unseen Cultivator

To become immortal was to forge a body that served as a living representation of one's personal dao. Exactly why the universe and enlightenment followed this course remained a secret only the sages knew. Scoria Scorn did not much care to probe such mysteries, she simply knew that she sometimes found it frustrating. She greatly enjoyed her physical form, of course. Life as a metal-blooded beauty forged out of countless perfectly melded alloys satisfied her on a primal, visceral level. It was simply how everyone else knew her nature at a glance that she despised. Her dao was hers, her own path, she could take pride in it without needing to display it to everyone she encountered.

That hardly any other immortal felt this way – most were the reverse, flaunting as much of their bodies as they could do so without discarding all sense of decorum – only told her that the dao was a remarkably indiscriminate thing.

Throughout her immortal existence she had responded to this difficulty by covering every fragment of her skin with barriers. Others could observe her molten metal eyes. That much was enough. This approach remained her present one, but her discovery of an ancient message relay puppet deep underground had unlocked an option she found vastly superior. The little clay construct had many limitations, it was slow-moving, awkward, completely lacked facial expression, and had to be guided using a qi-tuned string. The pair of resonant lenses used to transfer sight and sound through the puppet resolved poorly, delivering detail worse than mortal limits on perception. Nevertheless, it offered a measure of security no face to face conversation possessed.

Conducting a conversation with any fellow cultivator this way, during the old world, would have signified a profound insult. While the cultivators of the old sects had mostly restrained themselves from lethal duels and raids as a response to mere offense, brutal beatings and cruel ostracism had been quite frequent. Scoria Scorn knew that if she had dispatched the puppet to speak with her own father rather than crawling across the floor of his audience chamber, he would have shattered her legs and left her unable to walk for months.

Such ceremonial devotion and prideful presentation disgusted her. She remained grateful to the plague for severing such structures from binding her existence. The devastation had brought her freedom.

The four ice-aligned demonic cultivators, for varying reasons, were disinclined to care about such lapsed protocols. Scoria Scorn initially dispatched the puppet to seek out Ice Wraith. The frightful woman was senior among the four both in cultivation and age, making her the nominal first in the group. Her string-controlled construct did not make it to the swirling wall of ice crystals the woman used as an abode unnoticed, of course.

The puppet, and the string of qi trailing it, was far too obvious to be ignored. It leaked qi with every tentative, waddling, lurch forward. The clay creation could not be said to truly walk, and it had barely managed to cross a few hundred meters of mud-caked post-flood wasteland before Snow Feast caught the scent of the artifact's qi and pounced on it.

A very literal maneuver, one that shattered all four of the puppet's bulbous limbs. Scoria Scorn, buried far below, scowled at that. She lacked sufficient mastery of the artifice of clay to repair the puppet and let it walk again. Thankfully, it need not be able to move in order to speak. If necessary, she believed she could form a replacement out of suitably malleable metals. Lead would do.

"I am here to speak to you, to all of you," she managed to squeeze the words through the link before the ogreish wintry monster smashed her minion flat. That would be highly unpleasant, linked to the puppet's senses as she presently was. Damage to it transferred to her through qi resonance. Her limbs, she recognized with a silent wince, would spasm for days.

The gluttonous brute had no delicacy.

He did, thankfully, listen well. The bizarre confrontation also served to draw in outside attention even before he signaled to his nominal allies using a transmission stone trapped somewhere under the ridiculously oversized vambraces strapped to his forearms. Once summoned, the others arrived within moments, traveling across the devastated basin with the incredible speed potent immortals habitually possessed.

They were fast indeed, though Scoria Scorn believed none had a movement technique to match the miserable lightning steps of the Twelve Sisters. All four relied on wind as the primary impetus to their motion, a swift force indeed. Even Ocular Shard, whose twisting circumlocutions unleashed a burst of color every time she bent her body through the air currents, utilized the sky as her chariot.

Landing, the four surrounded the puppet in a rough circle, though the three human-sized immortals had to make space so that Snow Feast, who easily out-massed the others combined, could loom in full fury. Staring up through the pathetic, practically mortal vision the puppet's glass eyes offered, Scoria Scorn found that the giant snow monster was, by far, the least intimidating member of the foursome.

Ocular Shard, though Snow Feast's equal in power in the fifth layer and a small woman even by the compact standards of Scoria Scorn's background, easily surpassed the towering glutton in the innate terror she invoked. The vengeful demonic cultivator wore a tightly molded silken outfight that covered her from head to toe and shrouded her head beneath a concealing hood. Her neck was fringed in a wrap made from polar bear fur and studded with the spike-like primary feathers of sea eagles, framing her face in wild fury. All of this, including the including the skin of her perfect heart-shaped face, was stained the deep crimson of color of dried blood. Remarkably ordinary, for an immortal, until the observer's gaze dropped to examine the hands.

Those grips possessed only three fingers and a thumb apiece, and they were covered in wrinkled gray skin that belonged on some long-since desiccated corpse rather than a living being. The digits themselves, frightfully elongated, had somehow acquired an additional, alien, joint beyond the knuckles. Worst of all, there was a red, lidless eye embedded in the center of each palm. Those blood-red orbs shifted back and forth constantly, searching with uncontrolled relentlessness.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Scoria Scorn shuddered to think of what they might see.

As visually horrific as this bizarre departure from the standard human body shape was, its maddening distortions could not compare to the presence exuded by either of the sixth-layer immortals. Desolation Gale was, in some ways, kindred in presentation to Scoria Scorn. He wore an outfit that covered him from head to toe, including a hood and gloves, that coated every last scrap of skin. This was not elegant silk dress or refined metal armor plating, however. He draped himself entirely in ragged scraps, stained bandages, and recycled patches. These were, in turn, held together by ropes, wrapping, belts, and other bonds so numerous that even an immortal mind gave up trying to keep count after reaching one hundred.

Beneath his deeply shrouded hood there was a suggestion of ragged, oily loose hair and pitch-black wind-lashed skin, but nothing could truly be seen of the flesh. Four points of glowing blue flame, eyes, nose, and a third orifice placed where the center of the forehead should be radiated over the surface instead. This false face formed of phosphorescent brightness moved and shifted in line with the demonic cultivator's qi. His voice sounded like the final words of a man whose throat was burning away.

Compared to the others, Ice Wraith initially appeared the most human of the quartet. She had the lovely face of a beautiful human woman, pale, white-haired, and stunningly structured. A vision of porcelain perfection, marred only by the blood-red eye-shadow surrounding her dark orbs and leaving bloody streaks tearing down her throat. Her costume was exotic but elegant, a hooded cloak and sweeping dress formed of blue-green ice, intricately carved in a sculpted twisting-rune pattern. It was every bit the battle armor of an ice princess.

But there was nothing beneath it. The Fuming Shade had possessed a body formed from compressed ash, one he could dissipate and reform at need. Ice Wraith had no true body at all. There was simply a whirling storm of ice crystals at her core, one capable of materializing hands and feet should the need arise. Her armor, and even her face, could melt back into that cloud if she wished. A body perpetually trapped in the state of continual restructuring.

How she could exist in that way, her cultivation bound to the shapeless and ephemeral, Scoria Scorn did not know. Even her own experience as a bodiless spirit offered little help. There must be some core, some conglomeration of ice crystals, that formed the cultivator's true body, but it seemed solidity was not needed to sustain Ice Wraith's dao.

Overall, the gluttonous hunger monster was nothing. Fearsome though he might be, Snow Feast had clear motives. He was, in that way, predictable. The others, they might well do anything. Talking to them, including such erratic, frightful intellects in her plans, it represented a terrible risk. Even hiding behind the puppet she felt no true sense of safety.

At the same time, this boded well for her ultimate plan. The sane and cautious would never willingly turn against Bloody Roam, but those driven by the madness of alien daos could be channeled towards such rogue ambition.

"Scoria Scorn." It was Desolation Gale who spoke first. His scraped and strangled speech rasped upon the ears even at distant remove. "You live, despite being over a century dead, and it seems you have even regained immortality, if only just." He had a remarkably cultured cadence, one suited to the great sect courts of the old world. If they were in the process of crumbling to dust.

Which, Scoria Scorn realized in a flash of insight, they were, presently, actively doing. Perhaps the polar-dwelling hermit was more enlightened than his bizarre affectations implied.

"A remarkable feat," the blue-burning face continued to enunciate. "And it is only curiosity at how you managed this that stays the hand that should scourge you from the world for your various failures. You are not, I should hope, operating under the delusion that this string puppet will spare you. You are beneath the soil, and not so far distant that we could not tear the earth open and sunder you along with it."

"There are many descents." It was a perilous counter, for despite the bravado, she had little confidence in her ability to escape should these four commit to the hunt. Nevertheless, she clung to her mastery of deep spaces desperately. "And I know the great depths well."

"Reasonable," blue fire flickered in admission of this reality. "But we four are presently rather frustrated. I do not think we would shirk an opportunity for emotional release. No, I do believe that, in the present instance, we are inclined to be decidedly thorough."

Snow Feast grunted. He sounded like the world's largest, and hungriest, bear.

"You are frustrated by the flood." It was not a question. They were seething. Scoria Scorn suspected she could have roasted meat using their anger alone. It was astounding that their icy forms were not starting to melt. "You should not be. If it had not washed away your demons, you would be marching toward your deaths this very moment."

Snow Feast grunted again. The red eyes of Ocular Shard, all four of them, compressed down to points. Desolation Gale's burning-eyed countenance somehow managed to appear scandalized. Ice Wraith, surpassing the other three combined, simply smiled. Thankfully, she appended no words to that frigid expression.

"Really? No, I find I am truly curious as to why you should say such a thing." The scratching rasp grew in volume and aggravation alike. "Please, elaborate." He did not bother to append an explicit threat. It lingered within the dying squeak of his fading breath, unsaid.

"I know what waits within the hidden land you seek," Scoria Scorn did not like revealing any of her secrets, but she had little else to offer in this negotiation and was prepared to sacrifice a great many. "I was there. I lost my body mere moments after Black Howl and the Fuming Shade perished. The four of you are strong, stronger than we were then." That was an easy truth, the kind that cost nothing to admit. "But you would face the same fate. That place," she reached out her hand and pointed toward the now ruined floodplain of the still swollen great river. "Is the lair of the Twelve Sisters. I fell to a blow launched by Iay, the White Witch." This secret was far from free, but that small detail granted her invaluable veracity. "A single blow." She made certain the puppet conveyed the next phrase with absolute clarity. "She is in the seventh layer of the celestial ascendancy realm."

There was a prolonged silence. The cold wind howled over the hilltop. "Assuming you speak the truth," Desolation Gale broke though that pall in his own time. "Why have you come before us at this juncture? Why offer warning?"

"I have a proposition," Scoria Scorn told the icy quartet. "One that can make you the masters of the world."

Ice Wraith smiled a second time.