I felt the alchemical compound trying to kick in immediately. It was weak, and because it was weak it meant that my body, spirit, and soul would resist it.

  I slowly lowered my resistance, keeping watch on Forn as I did so. I didn’t think she’d attack me, but wild meant many things and I didn’t know what it exactly meant for her.

  Now healing was a strange process. To heal was to fix and to fix was to know what was broken in the first place. If a man had never seen a table and you gave him all the parts to build one, he would just look at you in confusion.

  Well, he’d probably figure it out. A table isn’t rocket science. But the human soul was far more complicated than a table, any soul was.

  And mine had been maimed since it was mortal, so the way it was supposed to be might not be the way it ends up after getting healed.

  But that was a complexity for the future. For now, I just needed to fuse my mortal self with my immortal self. I needed to build the bridge between Bill and Dane. It wouldn’t fix things immediately but it would begin the process. Hopefully, after some time and meditation, most of my soul would be one cohesive unit and that would prevent me from making mistakes.

  As far as I understood it, the mistakes were a misalignment in perspective. I understood peace as a mortal and that caused me to mess up the array. I immensely underestimated a God-Imperium and that almost led me to a fate worse than death. My personality was more Bill than Dane, but Dane’s ego and perspective were still necessary to operate within a world of immortals.

  I remembered both lifetimes clearly, but the mortal one was filled with emotions and experiences. Dane’s memories were empty and sterile like a picture with no emotion.

  When I looked at how little of Dane there truly was, it was easy to understand the problem. Dane was less of a person than most. He was machine-like, precise, and uncaring. His life and memory felt like nothing more than a very long list of facts.

  But I couldn’t forget him. I couldn’t just be Bill. I had to let them mix and let myself become what remained.

  I felt a shift, a small movement of absolute certainty.

  It was working.

  “Done,” I said to Forn.

  She looked me over and nodded. I knew she must have sensed some of my problems, particularly that of my nature, but that was the least concerning thing. Being an array master was a common profession but a lot of us eventually chose to abandon it to further our cultivation.

  My strength and condition made sense when you thought of it that way, but Forn seemed young in some ways. She had probably never left the forest and there weren’t many array masters here.

  “I don’t notice much of a change,” She commented.

  “I’m an array master,” I answered.

  We continued walking through the forest. The place she spoke of was up ahead now. I could see it bubbling over with life and darkness.

  “What exactly does that mean? I’ve heard of them before but I’ve never met one.”

  “Have you ever been through the void?”

  “Of course, though it's not much different from the forest.”

  “It isn’t, but the Cosmic Forest holds itself together. It's all connected even though the void exists within it. It even has its own form of time and allows for causal relations.”

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  I picked up a rock and threw it.

  “It’s because of the forest that we’re able to ‘walk’ from one place to another. In the void, there are no connections. No space for me to throw the pebble, no path for us to walk on. Array masters build self-sustaining paths of qi that reach from one realm to another, allowing people to traverse the void fully.”

  “But can’t people just move across the void on their own?”

  “Some,” I answered. “But the weaker you are, the harder it is. And the point of the qi streams is to create a connection between one realm and another. This connection allows the realms to exist closer to one another without having to change anything about themselves. You could even connect the heavens and the hells this way, not that anyone would allow that.”

  “There must be easier ways to traverse. My father once told me that you could go from the Heavens to the Hells in two steps if you wanted to.”

  “Heavens, Lynoria, Hells. Yes, you could go there with only two movements. But… your father also took only one step to leap into the depths of the forest, can you do that?”

  “No, I suppose I couldn’t but still, there must be easier paths to traverse through.”

  “There are, but no cultivator below the fourteenth rank wants to enter a God-Imperium’s realm. There are some realms that allow it but only when they have something to gain from it. To them we’re like ants at their door, they might ignore us but they might not as well.”

  “I see. So you work to bridge the void for lesser cultivators?”

  “Mostly,” I answered.

  “And your lack of nature?”

  “I need to associate with many daos and many laws to create an array. Attaching myself to any other dao or law limits me from using others.”

  “I…see,” she said with a nod. “What about your current nature?”

  “I have a dao now, but that’s because it's necessary to have one to continue my cultivation. Without it, I would remain eternally stagnant.”

  “Interesting. I’ve always seen the outside world as boring. The void is so empty and sparse when compared to the forest.”

  “You’re young,” I replied.

  “I’m a hundred thousand Lynorian years old,” she scoffed.

  “Young,” I repeated.

  “How old are you?”

  “Trillions.”

  While Lynorian time was the standard unit of measurement used across existence, it didn’t equate to years lived.

  In some realms, a hundred thousand Lynorian years would pass by in a day. In others, it would take years for even one of Lynoria’s seconds to pass. But I was older than Forn. A hundred thousand Lynorian years was about ten thousand years spent within the Cosmic Forest. That meant that she had reached the fifth step of the thirteenth rank within a span of ten thousand years.

  What talent.

  “Truly?” She whispered.

  “Do I not seem like an old man to you?” I laughed.

  “No,” she muttered. “What makes you think I’m young?”

  “Your father and your rank.”

  “What about my father and my rank?”

  “Your father is looking out for you still, meaning he doesn’t trust your experience to venture out alone. And your rank matches with your age.”

  “Aren’t you way older than me?”

  “Yes, but I cultivated from true mortality and climbed through all the ranks. You were probably at the fifth rank before you could even talk.”

  She didn’t respond to that.

  “What was it like to be mortal?”

  “Ha,” I laughed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, nothing, I just have a very clear memory of my mortal life. I find it hard to forget sometimes.”

  “Is it that important?”

  “Yes and no. It’s…it was freeing, I think. Sure, death is imminent, but when you’re born expecting yourself to die, the problems of eternity never enter your mind. You live and grow, plot a family, and then eventually die. You’re small and insignificant, so small that the rest of the universe would just pass you by without noticing. Your biggest problems are what you make them and no matter how bad things get, there’s always an end.”

  “You sound like you miss it?” She replied.

  “Do I now?”

  After a few seconds of silence, she spoke.

  “You are a very strange man.”

  I laughed at that.

  We kept walking through the forest woods. The woods seemed to get thicker here as if they were purposefully blocking something from coming through. And while there were no true barriers put up here, I could sense a living and breathing art holding pushing against something up ahead.

  “Past this is my father’s barrier, living things can come through but the nature of darkness and life are prohibited by his will.”

  His will, that’s what it was. A piece of his aura pushed back against the whole of the forest, a mere thought of his manifested into an action. That was the power of a God-King.

  “Do I have the right to trespass on the outbounds of your territory anytime I visit?” I asked.

  “I might come back and hunt more often,” I elaborated.

  “As long as you follow the rules, you can consider yourself an acquaintance of the Grove of Life.”

  “Thank you,” I said with a nod.

  Then I turned and headed into the dark forest.

  is 27 chapters ahead, but they will be getting a four chapter dump on Thursday

  And again, the new fiction. I

  New chapter of AIR coming Thursday.

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