Unseen Cultivator

The sun was slowly charting its daily motion across the western sky as Scoria Scorn stood high within a ridge overlooking both the great eastern river and, more importantly, the vast flat landscape of the basin to the west. She stood and waited, anticipating the next battle to reach the Twelve Sister's hidden land. It was already a lengthy wait; she'd held her current position since the solstice and expected she'd be waiting till autumn unless something changed. The image she'd manage to form of the vast horde before her was incomplete, a consequence of being forced to largely remain underground as she scouted. She had access to limited overland sight only through the means of a remote viewing gem she'd placed in a large boulder.

The strike, she anticipated, would come sometime in autumn, shortly before the first snows.

A delay, but an inconsequential one. Restored to immortality once again, she had no longer had any need to rush. The prospect of missing this event because something triggered an attack early, that was not to be contemplated. She needed to be here, needed to observe this process unfold. It was, somehow, tied to her dao, perhaps even tied to the entirety of the plague, arrogant and ridiculous as that seemed.

She had come north as soon as she'd felt that Desolation Gale had departed from the frozen wastes of the southern polar continent.

What would happen next, that was a question whose answer she required.

Four mighty icy cultivators, a frozen quartet, stood alongside over one million demons, a most impressive force, among the strongest ever gathered since the conclusion of the demon war. They likely thought themselves invincible, even as they faced a force they could not possibly defeat. The Twelve Sisters would destroy them, though with that many demons it might not be clean.

Possibly, another might be able to escape through the gateway.

There was a diamond the size of a lychee in Scoria Scorn's belt. If a remnant soul came streaking out of the gateway, she intended to catch it. Such a pawn possessed a great many uses.

It was an unlikely possibly, however much she might desire such a windfall. She expected that the sisters had taken steps to prevent a repeat of her escape.

Annihilation was more likely, far more, and it was what followed that mattered. How would Bloody Roam respond to such a disaster? Ice Wraith and Desolation Gale, if those two fell, that would leave only one other demonic cultivator in the sixth layer of the celestial ascendancy realm. Most of the remaining survivors from the war were much weaker. Plundering hidden lands offered power, but it also carried risks. Suicidal stands by orthodox cultivators had claimed many of the daring. Of those who remained, only a handful were in the fourth layer or above.

A mass attack would still overwhelm the Twelve Sisters, but it would be bloody. A few lucky victors would stand atop those star-shining forms and reap a grand harvest of qi. The rest would be lost.

That tiny group of survivors, she knew, would stand forth as the earth's last, true masters. It was a group Scoria Scorn fully intended to count herself among. To that end this battle, and the reckoning that followed, could not be missed. She needed to know what would happen, what plans she might make. Several months, even a few years, confined in a dark hole was inconsequential. It barely counted as a price at all.

So she waited, watching as the demons shuffled about. Ice Wraith was presently perched to the north of the gateway, with Desolation Gale to the south. Each had claimed hilltop positions as far as possible from the other before they ran out of suitable heights.

The position in the north was covered in a perpetual whirlwind filled with ice crystals. In the south, there was only lifeless scoured sand. Scoria Scorn found both ostentatious displays prideful and wasteful. Snow Feast, in contrast, roamed about wildly, pushing every demon he could find toward the region where the growing horde revealed the gateway must be present. He never halted in one place for long, driven by his ever-hungry dao. Ocular Shard, for her part, was perched thousands of meters straight up, lounging amid the highest wispy layers of the clouds. The vengeful egoist would never descend until the battle was joined.

In such circumstances, Scoria Scorn was much closer to the basin than any of the others, and it was she who felt the changes that rippled across the landscape first. The pulsation of unleashed water as it shook the earth down to the roots of the mountains.

It began as a low rumble, shifting through the earth far faster than the liquid itself could ever move. The shifting weight of billions of liters of water moving across the landscape was potent enough to trigger waves propagating through the bedrock itself. Undulations that the carefully attuned senses of the iron-encased immortal could not help but detect.

Fearing an earthquake, for such immense crushing power that could imperil even her immortal body while pressed beneath the ground, she quickly blasted free. Magnetically empowered movement shot her to the surface, carving a path free using wide sweeps of her broad blade. There, crouching low in the hope that the horizon might prevent the nearby immortals from immediately sensing her qi, she looked to the west and saw a strange phenomenon.

Her eyes widened as she watched mist and fog rise ever higher, towering upwards minute by minute until it brushed the edge of the clouds. The sun stood high in the sky and this phenomenon made no sense.

The ground continued to rumble, and soon a greenish tinge joined to overlap the blue-white fringe. Scoria Scorn had seen many things in her long life, and lately added many new ones, and her mind possessed the quick comprehension and peerless memory recognition of an immortal. It took no longer than an eyeblink to summon a comparable motion from her memory.

Storm surge, generated by a mighty typhoon, rushing across the mangroves and throwing up spray and vegetation before it as it passed. It was not a phenomenon soon mistaken.

But she stood neither on an island nor on a coastline. The nearest shoreline was a thousand kilometers to her south and the land that stood before her was covered in forest, damp and thick, filling a vast mountain-bound basin. Save for the great ridges carved by the river and now occupied by waiting immortals, it was broad and flat. Even now, the sky was clear, the rain had stopped hours earlier.

Ridges, vast ridges carved across the land by the shifting course of the river.

Scoria Scorn cursed her foolish lack of diligence. The great and elaborate scars torn through stone at mountain range scale had been revealed to be the work of the river, carved away by the power of the waters. Huge expanses of earth scraped free by the river's power, city-sized and even mountainous rock formations erased at a stroke by the mighty torrents.

She knew the ways of stone, enough to recognize the marks of continent-shaping floods left upon the land. The old scholars said such things might come but once in a hundred millennia. Looking out over the basin, she realized once such blast had been let loose on this day.

Throwing back her head and staring blindly into the sky, Scoria Scorn laughed for whole minutes, until even the air in immortal lungs gave out.

It was too brilliant to deny. The day, the future, and the whole world were changed by this. All of it done through use of that simplest material: water. It was madness, absolute insanity, and utterly glorious.

The waves rushed across the basin, pulsing first down the rivers and then, as the leading elements crashed against the narrow aperture leading east, one far narrower than it had been a few years earlier thanks to carefully laid stone and silt, pushed back and spread wide in a terrible whirling rush.

Riverbanks burst, adding huge quantities of earth and stone to the water as it rampaged across the basin. Branches and soon whole trees were consumed by the churn, turning the white-wash into many-layered battering rams that slammed and scoured everything in its path before rolling in beneath the wavefront and doubling the pounding against the ground below and in front.

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Trees shattered. Countless animals perished in the rush and stained the front red. Birds churned in madness above the sky as their homes vanished. Some, weak fliers unable to outlast or outpace the raging waters, collapsed exhausted onto the foaming surface and were dragged beneath. Where the flood passed over only a ravaged landscape buried in mud and strewn with a chaotic collage of broken things remained.

One million demons, waiting in the basin, were no exception. Scoria Scorn saw them, distinct in their crimson stains, taken by the flood. Dense, they rarely floated, but they were swept and smashed along with the stones. Those same rocks took a terrible toll. The demons were impaled upon branches, smashed by boulders, flayed by raging sands, and hurled across cliffs to plunge into the eastern gorges through ship-shattering rapids that did not spare their plague-altered bodies.

Attuned to the plague, the demonic cultivator felt a great sucking vacuum of qi open up as demons died by the tens, the hundreds, and the tens of thousands. The red film rode the flood unharmed and slurped up the power freed from its motile extensions with supreme relish. It cared not for losses, only the equilibrium of energy. That the horde should be dispersed was simply something that happened. Instinct only, the memory-devoid plague simply moved on, adapted to the new state of affairs instantaneously.

Its servants were not so easily assuaged.

Snow Feast tried to fight the flood once he saw it. The hulking white form flew over the wavefront and froze huge blocks of ice into being in a desperate attempt to wall away the water behind a new, frigid, construction. Useless. Momentum could not be stopped in such a manner. The rush of water shattered those walls moments after they were made and propelled huge blocks of ice forward, crushing even more demon skulls as they skated atop the devastation.

Had he reinforced the riverbanks with ice instead, dispersing the force of impact slightly, he might have spared some portion of the horde, but such an indirect approach would never appeal to the mind of that fervent hunter.

Scoria Scorn laughed again as the hulking demonic cultivator raged and howled in fury as his precious horde washed away downstream.

From high above, Ocular Shard deployed a somewhat more efficacious countermeasure. She dropped great spikes of ice into the great river, forming huge craters that deepened the channels and directed a greater volume of flow eastward. This spared some demons the brutal battering of the gorges and set them on a truly lengthy journey downriver instead, but her actions came far too late to spare the balance of the horde the brutalizing impact of the flood.

Desolation Gale and Ice Wraith sat amid their whirlwinds and did nothing. Scoria Scorn suspected that the waters surrounding their fastnesses would soon be transformed into ice, but nothing more. Saving the demons seemingly never occurred to either of the polar overlords.

The flood, though massive, moved swiftly. By sunset much of the water had finished ravaging its way across the basin and begun its long descent through the gorges and out toward the ocean. More followed throughout the night as the sodden basin, scoured clean and with new deep drainage channels, emptied out all across the landscape. Months would pass before the process was fully complete and the land between the mountains found its way to a new, drier, existence. True equilibrium would not be reached for some years, decades most likely. Idly, the watching demonic cultivator wondered what form the basin might take after this devastation. A renewed forest? A grassland? Or perhaps a windswept wasteland? Not that it truly mattered. The land on the other side of the gateway would remain unchanged.

Far more important to Scoria Scorn was the singular fact that the vast demon horde had been destroyed. Based on the fluctuations she'd felt pass through the plague, supplied by her growing sense of its perturbations, she guessed that perhaps half the gathered demons had perished outright. As for the rest, they were scattered across two thousand kilometers of river course. Only a few thousand remained anywhere upon the basin, and those were spread so wide as to be an ambient population once again. Some, she suspected, would be swept all the way to the sea.

Such losses would not be easily recovered. The vast coastal plain that the great river wound its way through contained many hidden lands. Most were tiny and natural, empty of any human activity, and those few that remained from the old world had been shattered and plundered long ago, but that would not stop the plague from pushing demons through gateways in all directions. Attempting to drive them to this region once again would take many years of deliberate effort.

This alliance, the icy quartet of demonic cultivators, it was unlikely to sustain itself across such trials. Nor would it, even if such a move somehow succeeded, possess the power Snow Feast had hoped to gather. Mostly likely, the Twelve Sisters were safe from attack until the centuries turned and the demons gathered in naturally once more.

She wondered how the star-spawned women had managed it. The flood, as she'd felt it, had been wholly natural. It was not a construction of qi or formation-guided array. There had been no manipulation of water by massed cultivators as a weapon of war. Instead, it had been devised through some mundane means of engineering upon a vast scale, something somehow achieved under the eyes of four of the most powerful cultivators remaining in the world.

The result appeared to be mere coincidence, a terribly unlucky confluence of weather and water. The greatest stroke of ill fate since the final day of the demon war, when the heavens had seen fit to open up and let Orday step across their threshold. Perhaps this too involved heavenly intervention, some subtle manipulation of the weather by the sages. Many cultivators, faced with the inexplicable, would believe such mythic explanations.

Scoria Scorn was not among them. This had been planned and executed by means of cultivator strength and cunning, not divine intercession. She was certain of it. Recalling her glimpse of the infinitely churning flows of power deep beneath the earth, she accepted that just because she could not explain the mechanism, that did not mean a thing could not be done.

The Twelve Sisters had contrived to sweep away the horde, preventing an attack from ever occurring. The precise means was, for now, far less important than the result.

Or the motive.

Why unleash such a flood? The question followed, naturally and immediately, from recognition that this had been deliberate. From where she presently stood, it was not so hard for her to image standing in the position of the Twelve Sisters, with the enemy surrounding the gates. Were she in their place, this would not have been her move.

The four ice-attuned demonic cultivators represented a not-inconsiderable portion of the true strength left to all nominally serving Bloody Roam. To slay them, as she was sure the sisters could, would represent a great victory. What reason had they to forestall this assault when they could instead have crushed it?

She spent much of the night, while Snow Feast raged across the sky and his three allies fumed silently within their wrathful bivouacs, in contemplation of that singular inquiry. All that she knew of her fellow demonic cultivators, of Bloody Roam, of the Twelve Sisters and their mother, and of the condition of the rest of the world, she forged these together into a seamless construct of deduction.

The resulting conclusion she reached as the sun rose once more was rough, ugly, and unsatisfactory, but it revealed almost too much.

Not the next battle, but the one that would follow upon its heels, that would be the last one. The hosts of the plague, demon and demonic cultivator alike, had diminished precipitously while at the same time the disciples of the Fifth Sage had grown in strength. Not strong enough to win, no, but strong enough, nearly, to throw the matter into doubt.

And Scoria Scorn knew her own kind. She knew that, should the outcome be doubtful at all, many among the demonic cultivators would balk. The plague had attracted those who feared death at the hand of heavenly lightning. The brave were poorly represented among its ranks.

With every year that passed the orthodox cultivators reinforced themselves within their fortress. All the while, the monsters at their door grew increasingly ragged. Delay favored the star worshipers.

It also, the next piece of the puzzle slotted into place almost immediately thereafter, favored her. She simply had to induce events to play out correctly. As the sun's light washed over her back in the early hours of the morning, she realized a plan to make this future the one that came to pass.

The last great secret she possessed, a simple but powerful truth wrenched from the vaults of the one who had fueled her rebirth to renewed immortality, that would need to be used now. It was the only bargaining chip powerful enough to grant her leverage.

She needed to tilt the balance, just enough to level the scales, to ensure that both sides destroyed each other. The broad form of the scheme took shape almost instantly, though it would require much hammering to be bent into usable finality. That was fine, she had time in abundance once more. Speed was not important. It would be delicacy, not raw power, that served to turn the ice towards the service of her design.

Dawn passed, and she rose from her crouch and stepped forward to enact her plans. Not in person, of course. She hid her body well below the earth and sent forth an ingenious little puppet she'd discovered in the abandoned settlements far down in the caverns as her envoy. Crude, but she could both see and speak through it. It would serve to prevent immediate annihilation at the hands of the wrathful.

The four, spurred by frustration and fury, would never be more amenable than now. No matter how the result played out, so long as she survived the coming parley, all subsequent paths offered her greater advantage than before. An ideal measure, one that began her path to regain long lost control.

Only one niggling specter of doubt remained. She was absolutely certain the Twelve Sisters had carried out the spectacular flood. While the precise mechanism did not matter, she could not understand how such a thing had been done unnoticed. There was, she sensed, a piece missing on the board. For now, that was unimportant, but she would need to find it before all was done.