AIR 122-124

Chapter 122

The forest was dark in the most literal sense.

Darkness at its core was the loss of information. It was the corrosion of senses, physical or spiritual. At the edge of the forest was an absolute blackness that threatened to consume all there was. 

“Do you have a way of seeing through it?” Forn asked me.

“Not yet, but I will in a second.”

I stuck a finger in the darkness and went to work.

The darkness here wasn’t complicated enough to engulf me. Almost everyone could manipulate laws on a lesser level, but that depended on the world around them and the complexity of the laws. 

Forn here could probably remake a universe in an instant, but that mainly depended on the strength of the world around. If she was on earth then she would be practically omnipotent. On Ah-Marin she’d have a lot less control, mainly due to the strength of the realm itself but also due to the nature of the world being at a higher level. 

And here, within the Cosmic Forest, she’d have to struggle just to cut down a tree. 

But I was different. I had studied laws and understood them at a higher level than anyone else of a similar rank. Forn could walk into the darkness and will her senses to grow stronger or create a small light and will the light to overpower the dark. It wouldn’t light up the forest but it would let her see through it. 

Her power of growth and plant life far outpaced mine. That was the fault of an array master. At the fifteenth rank, a cultivator’s general understanding of laws would be so profound that they could effectively manipulate anything aside from celestial realms, making my understanding of laws entirely useless. 

But we weren’t at the fifteenth rank, and my generalized understanding of laws gave me immense versatility. And more importantly, I could weave together lesser laws and make something even better. I could make arrays. 

My hand glowed as the small compact array came into existence. 

I was limited with what daos I could use, but I still had freedom with laws. I weaved together a small but complex array, something that ate life and turned it into life. It was only at the strength of a high ninth rank, so I expected the darkness within the forest to consume it quickly. 

I threw it into the darkness, and for a second, the entirety of the area in front of me flashed into clarity. I saw eyes, shapes, and forms, all standing and staring at me with a blank look of hunger. 

They were waiting for me to come to them. 

“Interesting, cooperation? No, it's more like mutual tolerance. They want to attack me all at once and fight over the leftovers. Is that why you haven’t left?”

Forn said nothing but just nodded. She was staring into the forest with trepidation. 

“That’s how they hunt,” she answered. “They know their natural advantages, and none of them will leave the dark to fight you. But if you step into their domain, they know they have the upper hand. They can hide, you can’t.”

I thought about what she said, stepped back for a second, then stepped forward. 

I walked into the forest, and for a single blazing instant, the animals fought to tare through me. All of them attacked with darkness and claws and such. Blood flowed, and death bloomed as carnal instinct and animal mindsets took over. 

Wolves, bats, rats, crows, and insects all tore through the spot where I stood. 

Forn’s eyes widened for just a second until she caught on. 

Then another burst of light came in, this one much stronger than the last, and it drove most of the beasts away. They were all the thirteenth-rank, but most of them had been wounded and the few that weren’t saw me standing and decided to leave anyway. 

I reached through the darkness and picked up the remaining corpses. They were all muddled and cut, and most of them had been blasted apart into pieces, but I took all I could get. 

“An illusion?” Forn asked. 

“Yep,” I replied. 

“How?”

“Gods trust their senses too much. The more powerful a being, the stronger their senses and the more complexity is required to forge an illusion, which is why we trust our senses so much.”

“Yes, I understand all that, but you don’t practice the dao of deception, so how?”

I studied my spoils. Most of it was usable. All parts contained enough dark and life nature to help me create a specific type of array. I answered Forn as I kept talking.

“Well, I do practice it a little bit. But most senses touch upon what’s there. You don’t need to mimic the complexity of the soul or anything like that, just mimic what the senses touch. Laws, daos, aura, stuff they can naturally feel. I didn’t make a false version of those things, some of them would have sensed that. I just created an array that outputs them.”

A second me appeared right next to her and for a second, she couldn’t tell who was who. 

Then her senses tried to drill even deeper, and she frowned. 

“Why is it so dense?” She asked. 

She was referring to the amount of aura the illusion projected. 

“It’s not. It’s mostly empty, it just emulates density at a surface level.”

Then she raised her spear and attacked it. The illusion’s eyes widened as a hole appeared on its chest. The real me faded away, as if it were the illusion and the illusion with all the realness of me fell onto the ground. 

Forn looked about in horror for a few moments before looking at where I was with piercing senses and frowning. 

“That wasn’t funny,” she commented. 

I smiled as the dead me faded into nothingness. 

“Part of the illusion is reliant on first impressions. I naturally emulate no powerful laws and that means that I have no complex nature to mimic.”

A fake version of Forn materialized next to her. She had her exact appearance with life leaves growing in her green hair and skin. Her clothing was made of wild hide and tied together with blooming vines. Everything from the earth-stained nails to the somewhat animalistic gaze in her eyes was there. 

“You can’t emulate my growth law or wild dao,” she commented. 

I shook my head. 

“Huh, I think I’ve seen something like this before,” she added. 

“A technique can probably emulate a similar outcome. As long as the laws and daos you're mimicking are just a projection of yourself, then it doesn’t matter how complex the nature is as you would always have a high level of mastery over your own nature. The more important part of the illusion is the second half.”

“The second half?” She asked. 

Then I disappeared. 

“For the illusion to take effect, the original has to be hidden.”

Forn looked around, desperately trying to find where I had crawled off to but then realized she couldn’t. Her senses pushed into everything, trying to discover me like she had last time. 

“How?” She asked. 

“A stealth technique,” I replied appearing right next to her. 

“Yes, but I have a perception technique. How did you bypass it?”

“I didn’t. You perceived me.”

She squinted for a moment, and then she sniffed. 

“Oh, I see.”

Laws varied in complexity, but the complexity of the laws here was relatively low. Forn had a growth law that was equivalent to her rank, but that was because she was a cultivator. The ambient laws and daos exuded by this part of the forest were of a lesser rank, somewhere around the tenth or ninth. I could manipulate that level of law pretty easily,y and if I operated a basic stealth technique and then covered myself with those laws, it added a whole new layer to hide under. 

I went back to poking at the spoils of the previous battle. All the insects and animals had attacked the projection, thinking it was the real me and taken out a good chunk of their own numbers in the process, though I doubted they cared much for the loss. 

No, the important part was what they left behind. I was only able to blend in with the ambient laws of the forest because it was of a low enough rank. If say I had blended in with the law of water, like the one that guarded the Grove of Life, I would be out of luck. 

I kept working at the array. While I couldn’t manipulate laws of a certain complexity, I could still use them in some ways. The laws and concepts left behind by the corpses were all of the thirteenth rank. I couldn’t control a single bit of that by myself. 

But I could still use it with an ample amount of preparation. It just took a whole lot more effort and time.

The manipulation of laws relied on two things. One was how much you understood them, and the other was how much your nature aligned with them. My nature didn’t align with any law, but that also meant it didn’t push me away from any law either. It would be hard to work with fire if you were made of water or darkness if you were made of light. 

Another factor was the action itself. A fifth-rank cultivator with a gravity-based law might be able to manipulate their own weight or the weight of their enemies, but they couldn’t turn off gravity for everybody.

It was the same here. 

I was building an array around the most complex bits of the darkness, choosing to control the natural consequences of the law rather than the law itself. My array was like a water wheel, slowing and using the force the law naturally caused. I couldn’t defeat gravity, but I could still use it to a certain degree. 

One part fed the law qi as the law itself was just an expression of power, not power itself. The other part took that tainted qi and mixed it up with a myriad of other laws until I got the specific type of law I wanted. 

There was light in that array. It worked to degrade some of the law of darkness and make it of a lesser quality, making it easier for me to work with. 

There was stealth dao, which really pushed on the hiding quality of darkness, and there was even nature dao. 

I was trying to make a cloaking array, something that fits in with the natural dark and life nature of the area I was about to step into. I could have used the ambient laws within the area, but darkness naturally had a hiding effect, and the creatures there probably had some level of countermeasure towards it. 

Using a higher level of darkness would allow me a higher level of stealth. And even if they did see through it, they would think I was one of their own and think twice before attacking me. 

“Alright, I’ll be going in now.”

Chapter 123

I hid under the array and entered the darkness. A veil of darkness came over me, hiding all that defined me underneath it. 

Forn followed for some reason, immediately attacked by a mass of dark creatures. She swung her spear and most of them scattered off into the darkness after realizing they couldn’t take her. 

She was at the fifth step of the thirteenth rank, but even then, with her bloodline and techniques, she could easily compete with a creature of the ninth step from this area. Even fourteenth ranks knew better than to attack her.

They could sense the barrier that held the darkness back, and if they were capable creatures, they would realize that Forn had a similar aura. No sensible beast would attack a cub when they could smell mama bear in the distance. 

She was still shoving her senses all over the place, making them grow temporarily and trying to find my whereabouts. 

I’d be annoyed but she was still young and eager to prove herself. She didn’t like that a random rogue cultivator had both saved her life and could hide from her. It was a bit of an insult to her, but she took it on the chin and just wanted to show me up before we parted. 

To be fair, it was my fault for teasing her like that. A scion of a celestial sect getting one-upped by some nobody four steps below her own would do that to most people. 

I shouldn’t have done that. 

Dane wouldn’t have done that. But then again, Dane wouldn’t have helped her either. 

I took a second to think about it. I didn’t know Forn and she had much more power than I did. She could probably gather enough force to kill me if she really wanted to. 

But she didn’t. She had no reason to kill, and from her actions thus far and her dao, she didn’t seem like the type of person to do that. 

I still shouldn’t have shown off like that. It was stupid and brought nothing but attention. 

I sighed inwardly and kept walking into the forest. Forn was still attracting creatures, but most of them would see the mountain of corpses around her and back away. Unless there was a dragon or some beast with an incredible bloodline of their own willing to put up a fight, most of them just wouldn’t match her. 

I still couldn’t see clearly. The ambient law of darkness was enough to suppress my senses and prevent me from noticing anything that was too far ahead of me. 

My hands weaved as I concentrated on creating something. One of the biggest problems with being an array master was the need for time. I couldn’t immediately execute the same caliber of power that those of my rank could.

That meant that most of my power was prefabricated. I had versatility in ability but I was limited by what I had already done. 

If those beasts had just attacked me when I was still out in the light, then they would have an advantage. They wouldn’t have won, but I would have had to work harder to get this much. 

I had arrays. I had arrays I’d been working on for billions of years, but all that fiddling didn’t give me more mastery over a law. But the more time I had, the more capable I could make an array. 

Given more time, I could make this array capable of sending out attacks or sensing the area around it. 

But that would take a while due to the complexity of the laws I was working with.

Besides, this was a test. 

I was here for one reason and that was to measure myself. 

I hadn’t ever been in any real combat since I had killed that Jey clan fellow, and even then, he had been several full ranks below me. The hardest part about that battle had been dodging the natural protections bestowed upon him. 

I needed to fight, not for the results or for the victory, but to prove to myself that I could. I needed to stop cowering. 

I had escape plans, many of them. And those granted me some sense of security. But now, it was time to fight something at my own rank. 

I took out an array and threw it. 

The most important part of any fight was knowing your limits and knowing your opponent's limits. Laws and daos might sound complex, but they were just concepts and interpretations that told things how to behave. 

Ranks served to give you natural resistance to laws lower than your own rank, and rank also dictated your mind and ability. Someone of the tenth rank could glance at a universe and understand its most fundamental laws and be able to control them to a degree. 

Daos however, dictated how you would behave. If anything tried to chain Forn down, it would fail, because she was wild and her wildness dictated freedom. 

I had my own understanding of daos, but they were much fickle than laws and in turn much rarer. Laws were natural while daos came only from the living soul and then for them to exist separate from that or outside of that, that was another level of rarity. 

A thousand blades of light exploded into the world of darkness, starting directly from where my array had landed. The dao of the blade and the law of light shone at its center as the array managed to continuously send out blades of light and strength. 

It was one of my stronger arrays. The law of light there was at the thirteenth rank and I had harvested from the maws of a dead dragon of the fourteenth rank. 

And the dao of the blade came from a dao angle of blades born from a battlefield of twelfth-rank souls. Along with that, it had a living element which didn’t give it life but let it act like it was alive, sucking up all the life qi around it and refining it through many minor death laws until the qi was just unnatured chaos qi. 

Then that would feed into the light law and sword dao to create the process over and over again.

A nature of arrays was that they always ate. They ate qi, laws, or daos, and since they weren’t living, they couldn’t be expected to produce their own. The higher the rank of the laws and daos, the longer they would last me. 

This array could last hundreds of thousands of years depending on the intensity. Eventually, it would run out of death laws. If I wanted it to, I could make it move around and kill creatures and harvest the death laws from their death, and elongate its lifespan. But that would require much more time and effort and even then it would probably run bare of one of its natures. This one could only ingest life qi as well, so as soon as it leaves this forest, it would crumble. I would also have to create a sensing mechanism and a basic attack formation. And arrays were rigid, as soon as someone invoked a stealth technique it would most likely not notice them and fall for an easy attack. 

More complexity meant more points of failure, but more complexity also meant overthinking a problem that might be solved with an easier solution. 

And that was what I wanted to implement. 

Tap arrays in particular were simple. If you avoided the initial surprise or saw them coming, you could easily dodge the trap or even break it. 

The sword array had injured a beast, but it quickly got up and backed away before it got seriously injured.

But that wasn’t the reason I had thrown it out there. 

Forn was quickly attracted to the commotion and came to look at the array, her senses still blazing around the place. 

Okay, now she was getting in the way. 

I sent out a projection to talk to her. She instantly zeroed in on it and realized it for what it was. 

“Are you controlling it?” She asked. “I don’t sense any connection trailing off to it.”

“Using your divine senses to control a projection would make it easy to be discovered,” the projection answered. 

“Then how?”

“Various methods, all independent of me and my aura. It’s something only the array is designed to sense for.”

Her senses kicked into overdrive, scanning every minute fluctuations of law over the area. 

“How come I can’t sense it? If you're sending out signals then I should be able to sense the pattern no matter how hidden they are.”

“I’m not sending out signals. It’s not my intentions or senses that are controlling the illusion but rather manual subtle changes to the environment. Look at the changes in the life laws over there.”

Forn focused on the ever slightly changing set of laws in the distance and quickly rushed towards it, grabbing at the area with her sense. 

I came out of hiding, with a hefty amount of annoyance.

“Do you need something?” I asked. 

“No, I just wanted to see through your tricks.”

I nodded, then turned around. 

Suddenly, she struck out with her spear and threw it into my back. 

Chapter 124

The illusion shattered instantly. 

“I knew it,” she muttered. 

Another illusion rose up about fifteen paces away from her.

“Why are you following me?” 

She shrugged. 

“You’re interesting and weak, but somehow strong as well.”

“Well, I am trying to hunt and you’re getting in my way a bit.”

Her smile fell as if she genuinely hadn’t thought of what I just said. 

“Oh, sorry.”

I sighed. She was a scion, and she was one of the better ones when compared to all I had met before. She had probably never been socially rejected. Her life was probably filled with people seeking to make friends with her. Add that in with her wild dao, and her sense of society and individuals might have developed in a twisted way. 

Wild meant free for her, and maybe that meant free from social norms and instincts as well. Daos really could be all-consuming, but on the other hand, this probably gave her a natural defense against charm techniques and illusion as her mind was ‘wild’ and free from all influences. 

Unlike my dao and the definition of peace I had put into the array, wild here was a limited term. It obviously didn’t mean free from morals or duty. It had its limits and a definition of its own. 

It was refined, known, and unique. A dao was a path and the longer one stayed on that path, the further you’d get. At first, it would seem common, but every path had its own deviation, and given enough time, you’d find yourself in a lane all your own. 

“They don’t attack you because they know who you are and the trouble that would bring them. But I have to remain hidden, otherwise, as soon as they see and know the real me, they’ll strike.”

She nodded. 

“Yes. I understand. Apologies… I was just curious about the illusion.”

The illusion nodded and smiled. 

I understood. It was the same fascination rich kids had with homeless ones. They wanted to see how they lived, watch how they worked, and marvel at how little they needed to survive. And if a rich child saw some scrappy kid playing with a toy they didn’t already have, they might be inclined to explore it. 

What I was doing was unique but her sect could purchase an artifact with the same effects. My skills, my power and everything she found curious was a toy she had never seen before. 

If she wanted to really perceive me she could, like a child breaking a puzzle instead of solving it. But she was better than that, but this was the best you could expect of some scions. She was nice but did not understand boundaries very well. 

I sighed. I hoped she wouldn’t make a difference. Few beasts had been hurt up till now and one of them had died. But that was only one beast and that was an accident.

They should have been nursing their wounds now, and the ones that hadn’t attacked should be working to try and see through the illusion. Fights between thirteenth ranks were rare, but out here in the jungle and hidden within their domain I was practically asking for death. 

It was one of the many appeals of the Cosmic Forest. Danger was common out there in the void, but battle was rare. What was common was death caused by a being that surpassed you, but danger within your own rank was rare, and danger from those only a step or two above you was even more so.

But this was the Cosmic Forest where hungry beasts roamed. Instinct ruled the minds of beasts and death walked with life. 

I wondered about the life expectancy of beasts here. It was probably high, beasts still had to master laws after all and that couldn’t be done without time. But then again, they had bloodlines and could pass down their understanding through them. 

But still, they hungered for power. That was their nature. 

Some were different but most were the same. I could feel it even now, they needed to grow, to dominate. 

It was at the core of their being. Lust and hunger are so fundamental to their nature that they could do nothing but obey them. It was to them as empathy was to man. 

It was strange to think of it that way but it held true. A starving man would rarely kill another person and eat him, but a beast would. It wasn’t that beasts couldn’t feel love or kindness, it was that such things were secondary to their nature. 

In the same way a man could feel lust and hunger a beast could feel love and caring, but a man defined by lust and hunger was not a man, and a beast defined by love and kindness was not a beast. 

I studied the area around me. 

The light still surged from the array, and though few had been injured, the array had done its purpose. 

Light pierced through the darkness. The array did multiple things. First, it gathered. I couldn’t see the beasts cloaked in the dark, but I knew they’d gather just outside of the visible area. Second, it distracted them. I knew the beasts were trying to cut through to me more than anything else. 

I was the easy prey. For all my hiding, I couldn’t do a thing about the dark. I had no way to sense through it and they knew that. Once they broke my illusion, they could hunt me down. 

But like anything that was used to seeing through the dark, the light overwhelmed them. Light was pervasive, it shone through the darkness, heading forward until something stopped it. 

But they never touched it. They hated the light so they let it travel unbothered through their territory, tearing and tearing through the dark forest until it hit something, a tree or a rock, or a small hill. 

This was a game of hide and seek, one where the seekers could see and the hider couldn’t. One that would end in death or nothing. 

Anxiety came over me. This was it, this was real, a fight, a risk not even Dane would have taken. It was something quick and unreasonable, and I was fairly certain I could survive, but the chance of death was not zero.

It suddenly hit me how stupid this was, how spontaneous and unplanned my attack really was. The reality of my own inability came down on me like a mountain. 

I could die. A part of me screamed. It wasn’t mortal, surprisingly. It came from Dane, from the part of him that had stayed alive through the countless years. It came from the careful man who had endured near eternity and killed himself during the process. 

But another part felt apathy at the thought. The small man known as Bill had always assumed that death would eventually come for him. He had faced it once, and he would be willing to face it again. 

And where the two met was where I started. An immortal mortal, a broken bundle of apathy. 

This was stupid. This was dangerous. This was an unnecessary risk on my part. 

And yet,

“Drean was a good name for you,” the man suddenly spoke. “But I think prey would have been a better word.”

The man’s words echoed in my mind. The ages of worry and fear filled with nothing but planning burst into my mind. 

Yes. Something is coming. The horizon of existence glows with new light. There is something on the way and I tell you this, Bill, do not be complacent. Grow.

I remembered what the Tome had said. I couldn’t afford to sit still anymore. I couldn’t afford to be stagnant. 

This was practice. The risk was low and the danger was real. If I were to live, to truly cultivate again, I would have to grow and heal and-

Fight.