Unseen Cultivator

"Well, I agree with you enough to admit that this is anomalous," Scoria Scorn granted while infusing qi into her words to cut through the high-altitude winds. She found that step frustrating and had little interest in holding conversations while hovering high in the sky as a result. Flying was useful, but she had never found it especially enjoyable. This was, she knew, a notably uncommon opinion among cultivators, but she had never found the wash of air lapping at every hair and pore, even when protected by qi, to be a pleasant sensation.

This opinion, in a manner that could hardly be more obvious, was not one shared by Ocular Shard. The thin woman with eyes in her hands seemed to absolutely love hovering at almost absurd heights where the air was frightfully thin and she could stare down at vast landscapes where only landforms could be resolved.

Had she her way, Scoria Scorn suspected, she would never touch the ground again.

Out of the four members of the icy quartet, the thin and spiteful woman was the least enthusiastic regarding the plan to plunder the hidden lands of the oceans. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to increase her power, for in that specific hunger she might well surpass all the others combined but sourced entirely to a visceral aversion to spending time underwater. As a result, she had taken to monopolizing the time spent in airborne scouting. She would haul captive ghouls about using a sling – she continued to avoid touching them – and drop them down from above like a gull dropping a clamshell in order to seek out the free-floating hidden lands that lay beneath the waves. The resulting insights, dependent on watching how the ghouls turned as they swiftly sank, were limited in terms of detail, but they covered vast expanses of territory. In this way, she expedited the initial stages of their triangulation process immensely.

Such high-flying antics also allowed her to keep her eyes on events on land, and it was just such high-altitude observation that had led to this most recent discovery. "You seem little concerned," the high-pitched voice of the frigid demonic cultivator accused. "That the formation covering the lands of the Endless Mysteries Sect has collapsed."

"It has been almost three thousand years," this counter came easily to the iron-coated lips of Scoria Scorn. It also allowed her to indulge in a rare moment of casual banter. "It was bound to fall eventually. There was, I believe you remember, a betting pool on when it would finally fall. I put myself down for thirty-five hundred years. As I recall, Snow Feast bet on thirty-one hundred. Considering how many of the participants have died, he might well be the winner." Not that he could collect, since that little contest had been organized by the Fuming Shade.

"The formation activated shortly prior to its collapse," the four accusative red orbs were clearly not satisfied by such glib deflections. "For several days, stone puppets battled demons all along the boundary zone. The number of demon deaths was even measurable."

"A pity." It was, and Scoria Scorn laid out this remark with as much sincerity as she invested in anything. While they had hardly reached the point where every demon life was precious, the ongoing loss of ghouls meant that it was unworthy to cheer the destruction of any quantity reaching into the four digits. "But that makes the collapse all the more ordinary. Activation would drain whatever power it retained very quickly." She was not a master of formations, but she'd learned enough of the basics to accept that principle.

"Correct," Ocular Shard's knowledge of the art of drawing and channeling qi over large areas was far greater. "That is an acceptable deduction. But my question is this: why did the formation activate at all? The demons ignored that land, dead and qi-less as it was. So did we." No one willing entered into a plague qi void, it caused severe disorientation and discomfort. That was the primary reason no one had bothered to destroy the formation centuries ago. "The only reason it would activate is if some cultivator stumbled across the boundary." Red eyes lanced out with a quadruple glare. "You are the sentinel at the gateways, and have killed many, but by your own admission there are those you have missed."

"A small number," Scoria Scorn admitted, unhappily. Blocking off all possible routes was difficult when even the lowliest of cultivators could flee through water in every direction. It had not helped that during their ongoing raiding, three realms so far but only one that hosted an immortal, she'd discovered that her combat arts were poorly suited to the viscous field of underwater combat. "None of them powerful." She had, of course, prioritized any fleeing elders. "And I subsequently hunted down almost all of them, or watched the demons take them. Only six escapees stand unaccounted for, and the ocean has likely done for them already." Three of them had been weakling initiates in the body refining realm. They were fish food.

She looked down at the collapsing outline of the lifeless, once plague-free bubble. No longer. She could feel the changes unfolding even now. Even from this altitude it was possible to discern the shift, to observe the red tinge creeping forward on wind and water to claim the empty space. A strange sensation, as if she was learning of the existence of a new part of herself purely by feel, as if a blemish or mole had formed on her skin during her sleep. That was a truly difficult feeling to recall, given how long it had been since she experienced such mortal imperfections.

And yet, she knew it was not a sensation to be dismissed. That tenuous touch, the burgeoning but weak connection to the plague, it had saved her once. It was bonded to her, and she to it, alloyed in much the same way as she had reformed herself to join with her half-sister's flesh. Looking down from on high, she felt as if she could touch, could feel, the red sands where the plague reclaimed land for its dominion even as the white spaces it had yet to reach projected black blots across her awareness.

Further evidence that she had not yet delved all the way into the secrets her link with the plague, a link all demonic cultivators shared, provided. It was not something she intended to leave unexplored, but it would have to wait until her minders were gone. Potentially a very long time, at the rate they were going.

"It is possible one of the survivors managed to swim this far," she admitted in answer to Ocular Shard's unspoken question. "But if so, what does it matter? No awareness integration realm cultivator," the strongest to escape her blade had been a woman in the upper layers of that realm. "Is any threat. Nor could they possibly kill any significant number of demons. Better to let them roam, if their strength rises before they are slain, so much the better."

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Shortsighted." The nature of Ocular Shard's pitched voice conveyed this single word as a terrible insult, one Scoria Scorn had no choice but to bear stoically. "If another demonic cultivator were to find a survivor and interrogate them, we might be forced to share the undersea prize. That is unacceptable. Find out what happened to the formation. If anyone survives, eliminate them."

Silently, the metallic-skinned demonic cultivator was forced to concede the wisdom of this point. She had made a mistake, overlooking that possibility, and having it flagged before her face left her immensely chastened. It would not do to lose hold of the goal by neglecting the drudgery of each day. She'd thought her time below ground had forged that lesson into her down to the bone, but it seemed even a brief period of idleness allowed her to forget again.

She could not allow that to continue. "Very well, it will be done," she acquiesced with considerably greater grace than the rank disparity demanded, and, from the look on Ocular Shard's narrow face, considerably more than the icy flier expected. It was such that the cutting rebuke the harsh woman had surely prepared was left unsaid.

Instead, the other woman simply ascended rapidly, removing herself to totally extraordinary altitudes where the sky turned black.

Scoria Scorn did not rush forward to investigate the matter immediately. She had no more desire than any other of her kind to endure a space where the plague was absent. Instead, she descended down to the surface of the nearby islands and waited. There she stood on the waves with her eyes closed and focused on her growing sense of the plague. The collapsing formation provided an unexpected opportunity, nearly unique, to feel the plague slowly advance on its own, carried by the life of the world rather than by the demons.

Wind and water were the greatest carriers, by volume, but they were not the only vectors, not the most rapid. The plague coated everything in the world, birds, beasts, and even fish in the sea, and all of these carried it forward, spreading it to everything they touched. The existence of the boundary, of the divide between spaces where plague qi did and did not hold sway, blended together slowly. Nothing was erased. Instead, the plague coated and covered everything without harming it.

It lay atop the world, embracing it, touching nothing save for vital qi tied to humans and their creations. That it could do such a thing, to interact in only one extremely specific manner, was fascinating. It was only a pity the land within the formation's covering was dead and empty. She wished to see it overwhelm a living space, some pristine hidden land. Even with the muddling impact of the demons, that would be incredibly useful.

Perhaps Desolation Gale would allow her to observe the aftermath of the next assault. That one would not doubt her desire to simply witness the devastation the four left in their wake. It was a possibility she carefully filed in her memory for the future.

Feeling the plague advance in this way also meant she did not have to waste any effort searching. Instead, she was able to watch the red wave advance down through the veil of sand and into the hidden underground space that lay on one tiny little island. This clearly unearthed the former center of the formation without any crawling about on her part required. Once the plague breached that barrier she followed, seeking to see the truth for herself.

The resulting investigation of the remains offered few answers and numerous mysterious suggestions. The complex, though vast by the scale of most ruins, was mostly empty. The destruction of the formation's core had left the central chamber heavily damaged by qi backlash. Echoes of extremely rare forms of metallic qi, which she knew came from ores normally found only in meteorites, suffused the room, but that unexpected residue existed without a source. There was no sign of a star stone, and Scoria Scorn had handled more than a few in her years. Enough to never overlook such a rare resource.

That was a pity. She could have made excellent use of such materials. Even though she had never been trusted with the deepest secrets of the smiths of the old world, her knowledge sufficed such that she could have fashioned a number of useful surprises with a supply of iridium and its kindred.

It appeared most likely that whoever had provoked the formation's activation had reached this place, shattered the core, and taken the meteorite as their prize. A most stirring reason to track down that individual and retrieve the metallic treasure. Unfortunately, too many other things challenged such a simple rendering of events.

There had been a confrontation of some sort in the chamber, the strikes of qi blades marking the walls were both unmistakable and clearly recent, but its pattern refused to resolve properly. Two corpses, battered by qi backlash and sporting skilled sword cuts but otherwise perfectly preserved, lay in the middle of the chamber. Similarly, a massive and carefully decorated quartz crystal lay against the far wall, slowly leaking out a residue of vital qi that made her certain it had housed a remnant soul.

A single woman in the awareness integration realm should not have been able to defeat those two elders. Nor did the injuries to their forms possess anything like lethal depth despite broken spears. Scoria Scorn assumed they were long dead, the bodies preserved under stasis formation, and the injuries sourced to panic by the new arrival. She had certainly launched similar attacks more than once during her century underground. Though she found no candle stubs or glowing jewels, wear patterns on the wall sconces suggested that those too had been carried away.

The looting of such pitifully minor artifacts struck her as pathetic, but her nominal icy allies had noted that the ocean dwellers were almost ludicrously poor in their realms below the waves, so perhaps such pack-rat like activity made sense. Polished metals and gemstones had a powerful impact on untrained minds. No doubt the thief would eventually get tired of carrying such things and drop them somewhere, probably the next time she needed to flee from the demons, but the impulse was plausible in the context of the moment.

Slowly, she assembled the pieces into a story that, while far from entirely satisfactory, seemed to more or less match the physical signs she observed.

The survivor had found her way to the center of the formation, probably by simply seeking to get as far from any sense of the plague as possible. The remnant soul in the quartz, surely some mighty figure of the old world long forgotten, had attacked her then, seeking to claim her body just as Scoria Scorn had seized her half-sisters. And, just as she had then, that fallen immortal had underestimated the incredible difficulty of the process, but rather than correct and triumph as she had, this one had failed and been obliterated.

Reasonable, no awareness integration realm cultivator would ever be overcome, certain not when awake and aware. Not that she blamed whoever had been lodged here for trying. After twenty-seven hundred years the temptation to live again would have been overwhelming. The survivor had then destroyed the formation out of desperation or spite, it made little difference which, before resuming her flight.

Only one important question remained. Where had the woman gone?

South, back into the embrace of the ocean, Scoria Scorn decided. It seemed the most likely route for a water cultivator, which almost all these ocean children were. She resolved to continue searching there. Ocular Shard was regrettably correct, allowing any survivor to roam free was a mistake, and she crushed down the small measure of sympathetic admiration that had been growing in her core unconsciously in recognition of this. She had made an error, but one that should be easily corrected.