Unseen Cultivator

It did not take long to lay out the basics of the proposal, or to spark a reaction. "You want us to kill Bloody Roam?" Ocular Shard had a high-pitched girlish voice, sharp and biting. "Idiocy."

"Such an abrupt conclusion is inappropriate," Desolation Gale raised a rag-wrapped hand to forestall further mockery. "But the proposal does seem dubious. I am not opposed to eliminating our commander and claiming leadership for myself. In truth, I do not imagine there are any among our fellowship who have failed to dream of such mastery, but I cannot derive the reason behind placing this proposal before us, or how you, Scoria Scorn, could possibly facilitate it."

Those points were exactly the ones Scoria Scorn had hoped the arrogant wasteland wanderer would raise. "We are predators," she replied, meeting the eyes of each in succession, though the puppet robbed the gesture of power. "To grow stronger, we need prey, but the supply is running out. That hidden land there," she pointed in the vague direction of the Twelve Sister's redoubt once again. "Holds more prey than the rest of the world combined. It is the last great prize."

Blue flames flickered inside Desolation gale's hood. He turned in the direction of Ocular Shard without speaking.

"It could be," the slender woman answered. "Hidden lands remain, but strength has grown very rare. It has been over a century since anyone has killed another immortal."

"She has!" Snow Feast growled. A huge claw formed of melded ice and steel nearly pierced the puppet's head after the sudden motion, powered by speed that belied huge immortal's freakish size. "She's immortal again, so she ate one."

This outburst offered a critical reminder that though Snow Feast was bound by a brutish dao that provided him with an appearance to match, he was still an immortal cultivator with all the intellectual abilities provided by that state. He also possessed keen hunter's instincts that allowed him to make grounded but piercing observations that more refined minds sometimes skipped over. It would not do to discount him purely based on his appearance. His mind was not less dangerous than that of the other three.

"I did," it was nothing difficult to admit. "A bleating coward bottlenecked in the first layer who'd been in hiding since long before the demon war." It had been almost embarrassing, that one, but cowardice and evasion were also part of the infinite dao. "It took me two hundred and fifty thousand demons and all the treasures I managed to accumulate in over a century of plundering and even then, if he'd been possessed of any real will, he still could have escaped." That would have resulted in death by other means, most likely, but it would have at least expressed some minimal pride. "But," she looked toward each of the four again. "There are other opportunities."

"Do elaborate," Desolate Gale spread his rag-covered hands wide in the air. Even the coatings that bound his limbs could not hide the motions of muscles truly seasoned in the use of a sword. Fingers twitched in the absence of a proper weapon.

"Outside of that realm there," Scoria Scorn pointed yet again. "Which would require the full strength of all remaining demonic cultivators to safely overcome, there are no more than a handful of immortals remaining on the surface of the world. But," she smiled lightly beneath her metallic mask. "The world is more than its surface. I restored my strength by exploiting a long-neglected region, the caverns that lie deep below the earth. They are many, more than I imagined, but mostly barren. Beyond the one I slew; I believe that there is at most one other immortal in the deep spaces. However," she rushed to advance the next series of words. "I know his whereabouts and will grant that to you four as a gift, the proof of my sincerity. They are stronger than me, by far. Beyond that I do not know the layer."

"A reasonable offering," the bandaged mummy murmured. "But you must have more planned. Bloody Roam is strong, and a better warrior than any of us." That second phrase, which carried a truth universally known but rarely voiced, made it clear that Desolation Gale, at least, was considering the proposal seriously.

"If all four of us were able to achieve the seventh layer, well, then an act of mutiny would seem opportune. In truth, I suspect such preemption would be necessary to prevent our erstwhile commander from demanding supplication or conducting a purge. Regrettably, a single mid-layer immortal does not nearly suffice to achieve that advancement. Nor would whatever scraps we might wrench free from beneath the grasp of our remaining comrades. At least six immortal sources of qi will be required, I suspect, depending on how many lesser cultivators and mortal mobs we might add to the tally."

Silently, Scoria Scorn counted that estimate extremely plausible. It matched her own guess very closely. "We have depleted the land. The depths hold little," she wished they held more, but had done enough searching to confirm that paucity. "The moon," she directed the puppet to stare at Ocular Shard. "Even less. But this world is covered seven parts in ten by water, and that is where the necessary strength lies."

"The seas have been searched and plundered," Ocular Shard scoffed. "There is nothing to be found there."

"The sea floor has been searched and plundered," A small measure of will was allowed to seep down the string and into the puppet with those words. "But the sea is not solid. Hidden lands are not bounded to its bottom alone. I discovered this within the caverns, stumbling across a gateway floating in the center of a vast underground reservoir. That one was empty," she recalled the crushing disappointment that accompanied that discovery. "But the oceans have thousands of times the space."

"Demons cannot swim," Ocular Shard was not mollified yet. "How can they be used to discover lands floating amidst the ocean vastness?"

"Tediously," Scoria Scorn admitted without a hint of amusement. "But there is a method. It is slow and undignified, but it works. However, I will not reveal it without a committed agreement." They might still try to kill her. However personable Desolation Gale had been so far, no promises had been made. There was, after all, no honor among demonic cultivators. There were traitors to the last.

"Is it to be oaths on the plague then?" Blue flames flashed, almost but not quite revealing the face beneath. "Now that is surely a tedious business. I find I would rather not bother with such measures. For some matters, the informal approach remains the superior one." Blue flashes sparked and narrowed, and the thinly built demonic cultivator leaned forward. "The location of this underground immortal's refuge shall suffice as the price of your continued existence. I would count that as a most generous offer."

It was. Scoria Scorn, buried beneath the earth and holding fast to the thin cord, relaxed considerably. Many threats remained, but immediate assassination seemed to no longer be one of them.

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Desolation Gale was not, however, finished. "The seventh layer for each of us, and for you, well, you may have whatever scraps fall out in flight as we turn the hidden lands of the oceans to ice. A suitable method to avoid conflict, I surmise. Then, after the four of us slay Bloody Roam, you can have first pick of the spoils when we destroy the Twelve Sisters and eliminate the orthodox cultivators for all time. Are these terms acceptable?"

"Agreed," Ocular Shard, surprisingly, was the first to offer assent. "I never liked Bloody Roam."

There were surely deeper, and far more personal, reasons behind that declaration. Scoria Scorn did not know the thin woman's personal history well, but such hatred was ideal. Hatred, properly directed, rarely betrayed its purpose.

"He holds us back, as if the world was his," Snow Feast was almost equally swift and certain. "I would have done it long ago, had I the strength. Agreed."

That left only Ice Wraith, the most important and inscrutable of the four. With the question posed to her, she chose to voice her own for the first time. "If we kill Bloody Roam, this world shall be remade, frozen, cold, and forever brilliant. Each of us is suited to that future, but you are a hot thing of molten metal. Why side with us? How will you endure our victory?"

The true answer could not be spoken, of course, though it would be foolish to think any of those present lacked awareness of it. Even four against one, and assuming all other demonic cultivators could be persuaded or deceived into standing aside, Bloody Roam was almost certain to take at least one of his attackers to the grave with him. The Twelve Sisters might, cornered and besieged, claim one or two more.

The world would truly belong to the last cultivator in the seventh layer of the celestial ascendancy realm remaining. That has always been its destiny.

Scoria Scorn, as she imagined most did, fully intended to secure that position for herself, but she was not so blind as to plan only for that possibility. All four of these, should they achieve mastery, would freeze the world. This common outcome meant that an answer suited to that contingency was essential. Thankfully, her time without physical form had provided one. "The depths of the world are warm indeed. Freeze the surface and the deep heat will still remain, for many long millennia at least. I will take mastery of those spaces, alone. No one else desires them."

This drew another terrifying smile across the pale crystalline assembly that was the face of Ice Wraith. "The cold may reach deeper than you know, in time, but it is fine. One small thing else. This puppet lacks elegance. Come see us here and now. Then I shall agree."

Though infuriating in many ways, it was a perfectly reasonable request. In person physical appearance was inevitable anyway. There would be no acting by proxy while raiding hidden lands in the ocean. As much as Scoria Scorn might have wished to delay, she knew it was impossible to remain hidden forever.

Such knowledge did not make the slow crawl to emerge from below ground any easier to stomach. She'd wanted to let them take the prize of the buried immortal first, as a means of both earning gratitude and stoking further ambitions. That initial action was critical to ground this partnership.

True trust was impossible, of course, there was only strength and interest, little different among demonic cultivators than it had ever been among immortals. These four had no particular reason to kill her that she could imagine, but that meant little enough. Her survival relied upon a singular calculation, that they all hated Bloody Roam more than her. It was a reliable feeling. No one loved their warlord, the forces under him had been deliberately structured in that way from the start, and the time that had passed since had not improved circumstances.

Rational choices, unfortunately, could not be depended upon in such company. She might, with her present strength, survive and escape from a momentary burst of furious anger, but a sustained attack would end her. And if she lost her body again, there would be no climbing back a second time. That ladder of corpses had been most thoroughly cut away.

To act now, in this manner, was a grave risk. The path before her was fraught with danger, but it tantalized with the prospect of immense rewards. She would still have rejected it, had it not been so necessary. Having regained her immortality, it was maddening to have to claw and scrap for additional strength. To live in safety forever, that ought to have been enough.

But safety was nothing but an illusion so long as Bloody Roam survived. She could feel him, somehow, some reddish link of pestilence and resonance cast about to the other side of the world. A mystery bound up in the nature of the plague, one that she was, ever-so-slowly, gathering the clarity to unravel.

Knowing her body, rebuilding it from nothing to her dao, had unlocked something new, something essential. Hauling ghouls through the darkness expanded it. They were all tied together, those bound to the plague, their daos subordinate to its own.

In the end, only one could remain. These four cast in ice would need to perish as well, and a civil war was the perfect place to begin. Between that and the Twelve Sisters, it might just be enough.

A terrible, terrible risk indeed, but though Scoria Scorn was immortal, she had come to believe, absolutely, that time was running out. It was, on this day, two thousand six hundred and eighty-three years since the demon war supposedly ended. This lengthy interregnum was not likely to act much beyond three millennia. A few centuries more and it would all explode.

To be ready, to face the coming forging in strength, she had to rush. If that approach carried risks, so be it. She took some small solace in the belief that, as things currently stood, any attack upon her would likely tear the quartet apart. Playing carefully, that tension could keep her alive.

"It is agreed," she told Ice Wraith in her last transmission through the puppet. Only then did she emerge onto the surface.

The other four were forced to wait. It seemed that, despite their potent qi senses, they had not quite grasped how far down she'd been. The length of the upward journey appeared to impress. At the least, Ocular Shard and Snow Feast silently acknowledged it. The other two remained unreadable.

Snow Feast was, close up, absolutely terrifying. The hulking frame might seem juvenile and arrogant from a distance, but once within reach the most basal, animal portions of the mind continually shouted out that this thing was a hungry predator seeking its next meal and screamed to run away.

Bad as that primeval impulse was to endure, it was nothing compared to Ice Wraith. An empty shell of a soul that wore qi as its clothing, she manifested a hollow dao. Every nerve in the body quivered to look upon that hideously gorgeous pale smiling face, knowing that the façade was the totality.

"It seems you do not like the cold," the seductive void at the heart of the ice woman pulsed in amusement. "But you do have courage, at least. Consider the agreement made. Where shall we begin?"

"East," Scoria Scorn did not refuse the offer to take the point position. The others might stab her in the back, but not until her guidance had run its course. All she needed to do was point them at a more tempting target first. The oceanic hidden lands were many, if what she'd calculated held true, but scattered. It would work; she would make it so.

"We should gather some of the battered demons and lead them downstream. The first target can be reached by following the coast. After that, east again, past the clustered islands and their volcanoes. There, where the terrain is most challenging for demons, is the greatest prize."

"Plausible," Desolation Gale agreed to this course. "You are not wrong as to the topography, and there is nothing of consequence hidden in the polar seas. We did trouble to make a search, long ago." The blue flames over his eyes briefly acknowledged Ice Wraith. "Do not think you are the first to derive this deployment."

A terrifying prospect, but Scoria Scorn was steel. She betrayed nothing of her fear. Centuries serving beside the Fuming Shade had taught her how to be subservient. "I believe it is easier to sustain mortals in regions where the waters are warm. Formations can do much, but it is always better to work with that which already exists."

"We shall find out if you speak true soon," Ice Wraith whispered, seeming to stand directly beside her ear. "Either way, I will be amused."

Scoria Scorn could not wait until they would throw themselves at Bloody Roam. It was all the motive she would ever need.