Chapter 94

  Spirit Sage (I)

  Gale blew outward, the current warm as though the lid of the cauldron were lifted. The dirt parted like gates, revealing a passage embedded diagonally into the ground.

  Spirit Sage snapped his fingers and procured a mote of light that remained hovering by his side as he descended into the tunnel, his steps even and unhurried.

  The passage went further down diagonally for about forty more feet before straightening out, though it remained just barely wide and tall enough to fit a grown person. There were no beams supporting it, just strange, glimmering etchings found every twenty or so feet, carved into the stone.

  It was rather chilly yet warm at the same time, as though two contrasting energies were dancing an eternal waltz for supremacy, neither winning the battle.

  After about five minutes of casual walking or so, the passage opened up rather abruptly and with no warning--it was as though there was a veil hiding its end, and one would only know they'd reached it by reaching it. The narrow tunnel opened out into a rather colossal, domed chamber.

  Eerily, the walls here were not smooth or jagged, but rather they twisted and contorted counterclockwise, as though someone had pinned them at their core and then coiled them. Scars were etched into the rugged facade like claw marks, almost pulsing invisibly.

  Though it all appeared rather chaotic and unfocused, there was a pattern to it--the angle at which the dirt twisted and bent and twined grew increasingly aggressive as the eyes wandered the circle, eventually flattening at a near eighty degrees, forging into an eye--and within that eye was a glowing, emerald gem as though an iris, pointed directly at the center of the chamber.

  There, branches like arms undulated upwards, like in a huddled prayer, curling out and back in as though being woven by invisible hands, cocooning something within itself: a tiny, fingernail-sized seed.

  Its surface was veined and pulsating repeatedly like a heartbeat, each pulse tossing out a feeble shockwave.

  Spirit Sage slowly walked up to it, his body standing a full two feet shy of the seed itself. He craned his neck and stared at it, his slightly reddish eyes turning full crimson. Before long, trails of scarlet blood gushed out from their corners, forming a strange, symmetrical pattern across the aged skin; like someone pulled a mask off, the old face rippled back like cloth and revealed beneath a smooth complexion of a young man in his twenties, handsome if a bit unusually cruel.

  He reached out toward the seed, his fingers mere inches from the webbed cocoon before they came to a halt, a pulse of electricity pushing them away.

  "... not yet?" he mumbled, sounding strangely tired against his youthful face.

  Just then, the room shook as the ceiling began to 'bleed' odd, inchworm-colored miasma. At first it looked like a fog descending, sparse and detached and hazy, but it quickly began to coalesce into singular streams that curved out and back in, all flooding directly toward the seed.

  It seemed to come alive for a moment as it took it all in, ballooning to twice its size before returning to the original one a mere two seconds later.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The entire chamber quieted down as his eyes veered up from the seed and toward the ceiling--and further beyond it. About a hundred feet up or so, the ground ended and the small, decrepit, rundown corner of the sect came into view. Young and old lay sprawled on the streets, barely breathing, Death Qi swirling around them.

  "Not enough," he said as the youthful face began to wrinkle back up. "Soon. I'll feed you more soon."

  **

  "What about the Sect Master?" I asked cautiously. I mean, I already know that the dude's probably a Demonic Cultivator... but is there a chance that there's more to it than that?

  "He's not a Demonic Cultivator."

  "... say what now?"

  "The young girl that you've taken in on his behalf," Hua continued. "She may be a Demonic Inheritor, but Spirit Sage himself has no connection to the Demonic Cultivators--outside of wanting to use them, I suppose. Despite being young, the girl is full of Life Qi. Her breath is worth as much as the breaths of ten thousand ordinary disciples.

  "No, he is... something far worse."

  "... " Okay, I'm officially getting scared as all hell. What do you mean he's something far worse than a Demonic Cultivator?!

  "How much do you know about Alchemy?" Nothing. You know that. Why do you even bother asking?! "Ordinarily," he looked away yet again. "Alchemists use the treasures of Heaven and Earth to forge essence pills to enrich any one part of us. Our flesh, or our blood, or our Qi, or our spirit, or our soul... anything. They are vastly respected anywhere you go, as it's not just a matter of understanding the correct concoctions, but far more than that.

  "However, as with all callings under the glowing firmament, there always emerge those who desire... more. Who reach the phantom limits of the ordinary and are still not satisfied--so they push onwards. Why just use the treasures of Heaven and Earth, they asked." Oh. Wait a second. "Why confine ourselves to the conventional understanding of life and death themselves?" I kind of see where this is going.

  He paused for a moment and strangely chuckled, more so to himself than anything else.

  "They are called Inverse Pill Masters," he said. "Nì Dān Shī. Some call them 'Hollow-Qi Walkers'. Some yet 'Yearless'. And your Sect Master is precisely that--an Inverse Alchemist. He'd been so for quite a few years now. When I learned about him in my youth, he was already an ancient monster."

  "..." hmm.

  Right.

  Okay.

  Ignorance is bliss, indeed. Holy shit, is ignorance ever a bliss!

  "Rather appropriately, however," he added soon after. "His talent is... well, it's worse than yours, actually. That's how he knew precisely what to feed you and in how many doses in order to 'safely' accelerate your realm despite your rotten talent. Because he'd done it to himself--repeatedly. Even after several millennia of living, he just barely reached the Void Transformation Realm. For most of his life, he was merely a monster sacking mortal villages for the Life Qi. As he was still a rather talented alchemist otherwise, at the price of 'gifting' some pills, Holy Lands simply just ignored his actions.

  "However, he rather suddenly disappeared about a thousand years ago. Most assumed he'd finally reached the natural end of his life and forgot about him. By the time I was born, he was merely an old legend. It just so happened that his disappearance perfectly coincided with the thievery of the Soul Dao Seed. For others, the Soul Dao Seed is a powerful, powerful artifact that, with the right host, can serve as the Origin Artifact--the last bastion of protection for the sect. By drawing upon the power of all consumed souls, it can turn its host into a war machine for a brief period of time and possibly even a fully realized Emperor momentarily in the right circumstances.

  "Naturally, after the Seed is sapped of its power, the host dies, while the former goes dormant. For an Inverse Pill Master, however, the Soul Dao Seed is an elixir like no other--it can open up a path for the perfect rebirth. A full melding between the two. And, after nearly a millennium of feeding it, the Seed is just about ready. I was content merely dying, but now... I know what I must do. And what you must do," he finally looked at me again, his gaze firm and unbending. "When the day of the war comes, take the kids and run. Run as far away as humanly possible. Change your faces and your bodies and your voices, and remember that, if you are ever found, the full might of all Holy Lands will be upon you. Until you are confident in being able to take all of them on, never reveal yourself.

  "Just keep running, on and on into infinity."