AIR 149-150

AN: Chapter 151-152 are still in edit jail, but they'll be released tomorrow. Also these two are a little dense, the next two should be lighter.

Chapter 149

I understood a lot of things. It was part of my job, or rather my calling to do so. 

But what I didn’t understand, at least not well enough, was the map in front of me. 

“What is this?” I asked the floating book. 

A map, a true map of existence. 

It looked like… well there wasn’t really anything I could equate it to in the third dimension, or the fourth, or even the fifth. 

It was just a mess. 

But the best way to think about it was akin to the night sky. 

The stars that shined the clearest were the ones that were closer, but the problem was that in this map,  there was no set perspective. I wasn’t looking at existence from one spot or another, but rather through a neutral look.

So there was no relative existence to balance things out. That meant that everything was everywhere, almost literally. 

It hurt my head, and I was a man who could keep track of every strand of qi within a universe. I could point out the location of every single subatomic particle with no effort. 

And I could barely even look at this. 

“There’s so much,” I said, squinting at certain areas. 

Yes. It is a collection of reality. It contains layered infinite infinitum.

“What?” I asked. 

Effectively, it contains the connected infinite realms and the infinite realms both in between them and within them. Lynoria has an infinite amount of realms and that's documented in here as well every other realm willing to be known to me. 

“Right, and why am I seeing it?”

It is a navigation tool for the multiverse and existence. When the time comes you will need to make small journeys to certain corners of existence to continue healing your soul. This map will cut down on the effort of all that significantly. 

“Is it valuable?” 

More than you know.

I closed my eyes and massaged my head, not that it helped. 

The Tome, for all its annoying blathering, was right. I needed this. It wasn’t just about healing my soul all the way through or running around existence for no reason. 

It was about growth. It was about what the Fisherman had told me.

“I don’t suppose you could give me a cultivation technique while you’re at it?”

I think you can supply yourself with one. 

I nodded and walked myself down to the basement. 

This house was mostly for show. As I was now, I didn’t need to eat or sleep, or use the bathroom. It was mostly for privacy. And all the maidens had moved out, though they came here to sleep sometimes, they mainly stayed with Chin down in the village. 

But the basement was where I kept… well everything else. 

But mainly, the Palacium. It was an uninspired name. It was a palace, and it was a little bit more than that so Dane had called it the Palacium. 

It was large, near continental on the inside but on the outside the shape could be managed. It was a portable universe in a sense, but I didn’t bother making it infinitely large because space, at my level, was such a useless resource. 

What I needed was quality, ranked strength. Just like how the cup I had given Cai could hold an ocean, this Palacium, this place, could hold a whole lot more than just things. 

It held laws, materials, daos, and natures. It was my toolbox and it contained about everything I had for making arrays. 

It also contained an amazingly lazy sword, something still in the eleventh rank, though I would change that today. 

“Wriendler,” I said, sticking my hand out. 

The eldritch blade shook in reply and flew into my hand. It churned and hummed in whatever passed for joy in its mind.

Wriendler had been my weapon since I had hit immortality. 

It was a sword, a type of eldritch known as devourers. Its specific subclass was one of the weaker ones. It was one of those babies that got eaten by other babies in the large and strange foodweb of eldritch life. 

But in its early days, I had tamed it. 

And nowadays, even in its weaker state, it still serves a purpose. 

It ate. 

Making arrays also meant making mistakes. It took a lot of trial and error to understand certain concepts and when you put the bread in the oven, only to find that it came out as hard as rock and twice as heavy, you fed it to Wriendler, the eldritch dog under the table. 

That was its main use. 

But it was a sword and for all its gluttony, it could still cut. 

It was also eldritch, which wasn’t evil per say. You had eldritch lords of virtue and strange wheels with eyes somewhere in the heavens. But it was a definition.

Eldritch essentially meant all things not of the primordials. It was a name for an archetype of life that was either as old as the Primordials or had developed independent of them. 

The array, which had been quiet and still for a while now, was technically an eldritch being. 

Wriendler was all of those things, but also a sword. Eldritch things did that often. They would take on parts of a concept and mix it in with themselves. Motherhood, Knowledge, Fire, whatever it was, they would infect it and it would infect them, mixing their qualities and natures. 

It might seem strange, but eldritch things didn’t know what they were. The definition, or echo, hadn’t really spread through existence. Oh there were eldritch beings of the Imperium Level, but they were their own thing. They weren’t archetypes like Man or Beast, but rather their own beings, and the definition of eldritch was too vast to claim. 

So, they mixed their nature with something else very often. 

And Wriendler was a decent sword, but it was weak. 

“You ready for tribulation bud?” I asked. 

The sword went quiet. All of its wriggling and excitement seemed to have run away and hidden. 

“You’ve been at this for a while now. You're at the pinnacle of the eleventh rank, you have to face the tribulation at some point.”

The sword affirmed itself slowly. 

Dao’s, for all their power, were a mostly human thing. Insects, plants, beasts, and particularly eldritch things, didn’t need them. 

But they all still had to face tribulation. They all had to be judged. 

The sword wasn’t ready yet. It needed a while to gather itself and I had some plans to set up in Ah-Marin, but the time would come eventually, after everything was done. We could go out to some rural part of existence and face its tribulation. 

But first, I had a sect to set up.

Chapter 150

How does someone of the thirteenth rank cultivate?

Good question.

Cultivation at its core was just one word, growth.

But then came the question, growth of what?

The answer was the self, but then came the question, what was the self?

The soul, spirit, and body.

This was all true, but at the ninth rank those all fused into one.

It was a part of touching godhood and becoming a demigod. The ninth rank was when the self became defined. You weren’t a being all your own just yet, but you were close to one.

The truest form of cultivation was to grow independently, at least to most creatures. At first, you grew out of death in the simplest ways. You overcame your biological limits and surpassed death at the sixth rank. Then at the ninth, you tore yourself away from the fundamental laws of existence, being able to face the emptiness of the void on your own.

At the twelfth, you lost your definition of human. The twelfth rank was where you tore yourself away from the nature of man and made yourself a thing of your own. It was why that rank was the hardest for most people to surpass, and it was generally the highest rank any Array Master could reach before needing to pick up a dao.

But in essence, cultivating was an independent act of growing yourself to rely less on the world and more upon yourself. That wasn’t to say that it drove people to independence and solitude, but that it made them self sufficient in the definitional sense. They were able to stand on their own.

Dual cultivation was often thought up as a counterpoint but it fell into those rules. Dual cultivators often cultivated as one being, growing to rely on each other meaning growing to rely on the self, like the God of Time and the Goddess of Space.

Both were separate, but both were one.

And to me, it meant a whole lot of wondering.

I technically couldn’t cultivate until my own dao had caught up to the rest of me, well I could, but that would just make recovery all that more difficult.

But there were some things I could do. At the beginning stages of cultivation, you would learn the three fundamental forces of qi. You could pull qi towards you, you could push it away, or you could hold it. And for cultivation, that never really changed.

As you grew in power, the things you pushed and pulled grew in complexity. It was no longer just qi, but higher quality qi, laws, daos, natures, everything. You took from the world and expelled everything you couldn’t make a part of you.

This was the fundamentals of cultivation, to grow from the world while separating yourself from it.

And you were only truly free from everything else at the ninth rank. That was when you truly became your own. Then you could touch upon the final frontier of existence and trespass upon the void, touching on all realities.

But cultivation changed at the ninth rank. You stopped separating yourself from the world and focused on surpassing it. If all the God-Imperiums were to suddenly die right now, only beings of the ninth rank and above would be able to live through it.

That was what it meant to be a god, it meant to be something entirely your own.

And from the ninth rank forward, you build yourself up.

From the ninth rank onward, it was about gaining power and becoming stronger. There was more to it, of course. But that was, at least philosophically, the intent.

Cultivation was broken down into threes. Every third rank one would face tribulation. The first tribulation was at the third rank, then the sixth, then the ninth, and so forth.

But that was just one view of it.

Another view saw the tribulation as the turning point, instead of the ranks themselves.

Between the second and third rank was tribulation, between the fifth and the sixth was the same, then the eighth and ninth, then the eleventh and twelfth, the fourteenth and fifteenth.

And by that view of cultivation, the tribulation between the eighth and ninth rank was seen as a sacred thing. Some cultivator sects didn’t consider anyone below the ninth rank as a person, or a living thing, but rather a shadow of an Imperium.

But that was all speculation.

Cultivation, for as well understood as it was, had varying philosophies and ideologies surrounding it. Many people had many different views on it and at higher ranks, it got more esoteric and confusing.

But there were always the fundamentals; the three forces, independent growth, and the change of the ninth rank.

These were all something to base my cultivation technique on.

I sighed and looked at the various scrolls in front of me. I was still in the Palacium and I was reading through the numerous cultivations I had lying around. I had some that reached all the way to the fifteenth rank, but like I said, cultivation gets strange at higher realms. In a lot of ways, treading a path cleared by others was an easy way to find yourself at a bottleneck.

Carving your own path was a part of the process.

It wasn’t a bad thing. Many scions and children of Imperium did it, but that was also the reason that they failed to reach a higher rank. Beings of higher power were infectious and to walk where they had walked threatened to make you a part of them.

I racked my head for a way forward, or rather, my own way forward.

“The fifteenth rank is when one becomes omnipotent, right?” I asked.

Yes, in a sense.

“In a sense?”

Omnipotence as you think of it.

I frowned.

“What does that mean?”

What an ant imagines as all powerful wouldn’t be the same for a human, so what you think of omnipotence, wouldn’t be the same for a being of the fifteenth rank or above.

“Well then what are they?”

What do you think ranks are? The Tome asked.

“Existential weight,” I answered. “The higher the rank the greater its existence.”

Yes, but what about the specific barriers themselves? Why are there seventeen of them and why are they so ubiquitous among all lifeforms? From humans to eldritch beings, to even your arrays, everything falls within the ranks, why?

I thought about it. It wasn’t a new question, everyone considered it at one point or another. It was one of the many mysteries of cultivation.

“It has to do with the nature of life, or existence maybe.”

Yes, but that would imply that there is some deeper blueprint. An archetype so universal it is everywhere, from Imperial Laws and Daos to the small grains of sand on a beach.

“That would be my guess,” I replied.

It is wrong. Ranks change their nature based on species but the number always stays the same, as does the tribulation. Even the Primordials are not beyond them.

“I… don’t know.”

The fifteenth rank, World-King, is called that because it is the level at which you can control the world. If it is not alive and doesn’t have a will of its own, its is yours to control. Its absolute mastery over reality, over everything below the fifteenth rank. Laws, logic, and reason unravel and shape themselves to your desires.

“And that isn’t omnipotence?” I asked.

It is to you. But, at that rank there are still even greater boundaries and great limitations.

“And the ranks?” I asked. “What exactly are they?”

Up to the fifteenth rank, they were just measurements of existence as you called them. The tribulations, the trials, they all came naturally. Each rank is a shedding of skin, a qualitative change to a person’s nature, refining it in the process. The stronger the change, the stronger the refinement, the higher the chances of failure. But moreso, they are the result of a stronger reality. In Ah-Marin, a ninth rank could face the tribulation held by the realm, out in the void, there are other forces that test one’s strength. Tribulation exists as a part of the environment. The stronger the environment, the realm, the multiverse, the reality, the more inevitable tribulation becomes.

This wasn’t that new. Tribulation has always been a response of the environment. They were ready to pin down when you were within a realm. I had seen the realm testing Rin. But when you were outside of a realm it varied.

There was always tribulation. You couldn’t avoid it. Some said it came from the primordials and others said it was just the way anything would respond to a large influx of qi.

You understand the way existence echoes the powerful?

“Yes. I almost got turned into a monkey just by being near Wukong.”

Exactly, now what do you think happens when you suddenly gain existential weight, relative to your own existence?

“I suppose you’d shape the immediate existence around you,” I replied. “Is that what tribulation is?”

A large part yes. Within a realm, tribulation is you asserting your existence, your will above that of the realm. Outside of it, it is far more complex.

“Because the cultivator is more complex?” I asked.

Yes. Though the concept is still the same. You’re no longer trespassing on just a realm now, but other people’s paths. Anyone who cultivates fire trespasses upon all those who cultivated it before him, even the Imperium and they will be all the more tested for that trespass.

“I see.”

That made perfect sense. I understood the nature of cultivation in a way I never had before up till now. These weren’t new ideas, they were all theories and many had said them before and many would still say them again. But here was a being who had dominion over the concept of knowledge, a God Imperium, telling me it was true.

“A path harder to carve is a path more your own,” I whispered.

Something moved and numerous thoughts arose in my head at once.

“Is that what the Fisherman meant? Is that why you’re still here?”

I wasn’t particularly strong or powerful for my rank. I wasn’t incredibly smart either, but I was unique. From my dao to my nature, I was my own.

Partially.

“Its always partially with you.”

The truth is not so simple as to be seen by an ant.

I sighed.

It was some big news. It was important news, particularly for Wriendler who would be facing its tribulation sometimes soon.

“Alright, well I’ve got a sect to set up,” I said, finally walking away from the pile of scrolls and jade tablets in front of me.