Chapter 27

A\N the following text was added to the end of/complete edit of 26, that post has been updated if you want to see it

Meat replied before Dale could.

“My name is — ”

FENG SAI, Now

Qi is not power. It didn’t make you stronger on its own any more than fire made blades sharper. Qi is the forge through which we redesign ourself; we align ourselves with our dao and sharpen ourselves on its crucible in body and spirit. It was the fuel for our power, a whetstone dragged along our own meridians until we became the weapon.

As I doubled over alone in the memory of a desert that was surely forgotten to time, bent low by pain for the first time in years, I wondered if levels were the same.

Visualize a spinning storm. The wind circulates and pulls inward.

I pushed the pain away, bringing my mind into a state of meditation with each breath.

[Pain Resistance reached level 2!]

I didn’t know if it was increased intelligence or increased perception, but I sensed something I never had before. The world itself ablated against me. I thought it was pressed against my skin, but it was worse. It pressed against what I was, touching both my physical and metaphysical body. My qi burned the air.

I forced my eyes open, heaving, staring up.

The Titan golem was bisected in two. The world froze around it, color draining away. I watched the glowing red of its eye shift to pink and ever closer to white as color drained away. That power flowed into me instead.

The little bird that accompanied me staggered along the sand as if drunk. The sand beneath its feet began to turn to the mud of half remember memories.

I wasn’t meant to kill the Titan.

[Warning: Dungeon Chamber Stability disrupted. Evacuate Chamber immediately.]

[Warning: Dungeon Chamber power failure.]

[You have reached level ERROR]

[Inefficient REDACTED available to establish new level]

[You have reached level 30!]

On the Bloodstone continent, qi was limited. Not everyone could be a cultivator no matter how much they desired it. The game was zero sum. If one person had that qi, no one else did. Every piece of fuel had to come from somewhere. That was why the Feng clan ripped the crystallized qi embedded into the earth itself and shipped it around the world.

Flynt had said that almost every Trailblazer who crossed through a dungeon gained 10 levels. Just like drinking the qi from a spiritbeast’s core, the Titan’s power itself fueled the advancement of the Trailblazers.

I stared up into the eye of the Titan as I forced myself to my feet, clutching at my stomach. The pain lessened. The sky itself crumbled, great blue bricks dissolving to dust to reveal an expanse of black beyond it.

I saw that storm of endless black raging in the sky among a forest of white trees larger than worlds.

Then the room around me exploded.

It was the sound of a glass pane breaking to pieces.

****

I fell.

There was only silence and the sensation of weightlessness, my guts spinning in circles. I prepared to pull on my skills to slow myself, but I fell hard into wet mud a second later.

The pain dulled, but it still resided within me, a buzzsaw vibrating inside me.

Little bird rose to its feet next to me, flapping its wings in the sudden downpour of rain all around us.

A hole sundered the sky above me. There was a storm pouring rain all around it, dimly illuminated and shining with flashes of light from a mundane storm. Beyond it was that great black void outside the world. My eye twitched as I pushed myself to my feet.

Stacking my zone skills and the path I had taken through the dungeon had clearly had reverberating repercussions through the dungeon. I was either on some twisted floor or one another party had already cleared.

Ahead of me was an already open exit. Holes pock-marked reality, peering through into other chambers.

Juvenile copies of the gale Titan laid scattered on the ground. Dead. I was surrounded by corpses.

The rain carried their blood away in flowing rivulets.

“God damn it Dale.” I said, my eyes scanning the horizon. This room didn’t appear to be falling apart worse than it already had. At least, if it was, it wasn’t happening very quickly.

I sat down. I needed to get rid of this dull buzzing inside me. As if in response, a system prompt appeared.

[Warning: 10 attribute points available!]

The system had never given me a warning for that before. The feeling was the same as the moment before forming a core — every last meridian and ounce of my body overflowing with power.

The power buzzed around my dantian; I knew in my gut that if I hadn’t formed my own core, the effects would have been worse. Still, the power seared me.

I pulled open my status.

[Feng Sai][Level 30][Anti-Light Insurgent]

[Health: 80%][Spheres: 20]

[STR 24][CON 20]

[INT 14][WIL 21]

[AGI 20][PER 15]

[Cultivation:]

[Anti-Light Herald of the Last Storm] [5% Second Realm, Core Formation] [CON +10]

[Zones:]

[Slow][Accelerate]

[Carve][Slaughter]

[Skills:]

[Anti-Light Herald Martial Art X] [STR +10, AGI +10]

[Identify 4] [PER +4]

[One Cut, One Kill 3] [STR +3]

[Meditation 2] [WIL +2]

[Pain Resistance 2] [INT +4]

[Death’s Descent 1] [STR +1]

[Danger Sense 1] [PER +1, INT +1]

The power buzzed in my stomach like potential begging to be used. I briefly considered putting power into Constitution; the memory of the golem Titan firing a beam of power that nearly burned my back flashed into my mind. But cultivation would give me constitution on its own as I refined my body further.

I noticed how much I had healed. I wondered how muhc of that was the constant refinement of my body through cultivation and how much was the application of my stats. I was still sore from the fall. The Traiblazers of this world were absolutely merciless.

The thought that I might encounter Dale and his friend flashed through my head. I paused and looked around the dungeon chamber I was in. The storm above had fallen to a light trickle, allowing me to more clearly see the dozens of corpses and signs of battle. I was definitely on the trail of another adventuring party, and I had no idea which.

I had no idea what a Shadowmancer like Dale was capable of, and no way to determine if the damage here had been caused by him or anyone else. For all I knew, I was following behind Poppy’s party as she cleared the dungeon.

[Time until dimensional rebound: 66 hours]

The power fighting inside me redoubled. I bit my lip and bent forward.

I could barely cut through the chitin shell of the Sandshears

All of this — the entirety of this world — was a means to an end. And that end was to protect my own people — my own slice of the Feng dynasty. Above all else, I needed to cultivate. I dumped all 10 points into Willpower.

I knew it was a mistake the moment I did it. The buzzing power from leveling rushed outward through my entire body as I pulled in qi from the air. The qi inside me refined farther, my willpower giving me the ability to condense it with inhuman speed and power. But it was too much. I could feel it — the qi throughout my entire body behaved erratically, moving to my Willpower. But I lacked the Perception to see it and the Intelligence to process all of it.

I stood and stepped forward. My muscles twitched, my qi jumping uncomfortable as I took a step and staggered over the broken landscape.

The system gave no warnings and no explanation. I focused, having to exert my now massive Willpower just to maintain a straight line. Consequentially, my qi loosed up, suddenly a frayed thread spinning inside of me as I focused on moving forward.

My Willpower was now more than double my Intelligence.

I needed to exit the dungeon and figure out what was happening.

So far, the dungeon had pulled me through a cliff environment and a desert. But I appeared to be on an entirely different track through the dungeon now. I stepped up to the shimmering portal infront of me on half shaking legs.

Little-bird circled around the door, flapping its wings furiously to stay aloft before pecking at the door. The light in it changed colors from a bright prismatic mix to something more dim. Then the bird shot through.

I followed only a step after.

On the other side of the door, the next chamber of the dungeon pieced itself together, the ground expanding outward around me to fill in the void. I stood on a stretch of dirt a few dozen feet wide before it simply ended, opening into the sky.

It grew and skipped in sections. I frowned, trying to take in what I was seeing. At first I thought the dungeon was malfunctioning. But it was far too detailed.

A chain of floating islands far larger than any previous chamber stretched out around me. Verdant life grew from the chamber and reached to the sky. Huge abnormal trees with sky-blue bark grew up before curving back down, digging into and connecting the floating islands.

They formed great bridges. Their branches hung in a vine-like curtain underneath the arches they formed, massive blue leaves swaying in the wind.

Ahead of me, a mountain rose from one of the islands, stabbing up into clouds until it was covered in snow. Rivulets of water streaked down and splashed into mist. A forest grew at its base.

[Warning: You have reached the Core Chamber.]

I nearly jumped when Littlebird landed on my shoulder, talons loosely gripping my flesh. It flicked its head back and forth as it took the world in, suddenly alert and unwilling to fly far away.

I saw other doorways into this chamber scattered across the distant islands, but they were all dim.

Nettled plants clung to the edges of the island, flapping in the wind. Thick grasses laid almost flat across the island in rich greens, making my footing soft as I walked forward. Everything pointed toward that distant central mountain. Vast, distant shapes hovered below many of the bridges formed by the archway like trees. I started spamming identify as I moved toward the nearest tree, a feeling of awe growing inside me.

[Azure Thief, Level 39]

It was an odd name for a tree. The bark was rough and creased, red sap oozing from the cracks. Even the trees here outleveled me. Where the trees didn’t curve around to islands, they stretched out like great hooks reaching into the sky. I dug my fingers into the cracks of the one I had approached, leaning forward to stare over the edge.

Far, far below me I saw a sprawling forest landscape. Clouds hung interspersed between the island and the earth below.

With no where else to head, I dug my fingers into the side of the bark and began to climb. The tree stretched nearly fifty feet long and five feed wide, providing plenty of footing, though it was too steep to merely walk across. I scrambled up and onto the tree instead. Little bird jumped up and down ahead of me, chirping irregularly as its eyes scanned the sky.

Every movement sent the qi inside of me condensing and springing, trying to aid my movements as it raced through the meridians in my limbs. Instead of digging into the bark with the tips of my fingers, I ripped chunks out of the wood, crawling across the side.

Then a monster rose over the side of the tree.

[Cloudeater Dragon, Level 72]

I stared at the monster. It stared back, eyes blinking the wrong direction, closing from either side over gorgeous blue gemstone eyes the size of my fist. But it wasn’t a dragon at all. It was a turtle, a dozen feet across, its lower body covered in billowing clouds that rolled off of it. Its scales were a shiny, metallic white, and it’s shell was the same. It bobbed up and down in the wind.

I watched in horror as its head stretched forward on a massive neck, reaching for my sword and gripping it. The monster’s eyes didn’t leave me as its mouth gaped open, revealing a toothless beak sharpened to a deadly edge.

Then it bobbed down and stripped the leaves from the Azure Thief tree, chewing on them placidly with an open mouth.

I continued scrambling across the massive tree, nearly upside down as I reached the other side and flopped into the grass. The giant turtle continued eating placidly. I continued staring at it.

Dragons were supposed to be among the most dangerous creatures in the world. Not placid animals grazing crops. And they definitely didn’t look like turtles. If this monster was an herbivore, how did it level?

It continued to stare at me with one of its eyes as it ate.

That was probably why the memory of the gale Titan had such an easy time killing it.

I barely even processed what happened. One moment, it was staring at me, floating in the sky. Then there was a streak of black like a bolt of lightning. It’s head fell away, disappearing beneath the clouds, while its body wobbled unstably in the air, continuing to float away despite missing a head.

The memory of the gale titan circled up around the other side of the island, floating in midair as it watched the monster corpse floated away. I kept a hand on the handle of my sword, staring at the memory, but it didn’t even look at me. Its one broken wing had been replaced entirely with a storm of boiling black contained in the shape of a wing.

It watched as if savoring its kill. Its fur was a deep black, standing out completely in the sunny weather atop the floating islands. Then it turned to look at me.

[Memory of a corrupted Roc, Level 79]