AIR Chapter 103-104

AN: I know, I know, I'm two days late. But these chapters are....dense. I was constantly referring back to old chapters and was desperately trying to flush out laws and stuff. I spent all day yesterday writing them. And sorry that it's only two chapters. But on the bright side, I spent the week plotting out the next arc and feel like I have a decent grasp on how the story will go for the next 10 to 30 chapters. Expect a couple of chapters tomorrow, more character-driven instead of world-building, so I'll blaze through them. Sorry for the delay.

Also, I will now open a Patreon chat called AIR Writing updates so that patrons can stay up to date with the progress.

Chapter 103 Doubts

I threw the baby up and up she went. Into the skies trailing high above the clouds. 

Nai’s giggles faded as she shot up and out of a mortal’s eyesight. 

“You were saying?” I asked the sect leaders. 

“Yes… well… uh… we were hoping to set up…”

His eyes trailed the clouds trying to figure out if Nai would be coming down.

“Aghem, we wanted to know if we would be allowed to make Oasis City our center of operations Honored Immortal Master, Sir,” his friend finished for him.

These were not the people of the five sects. No, they were some merchant sects whose elders would be cultivators of the third rank. They were small families and warriors who also engaged in other businesses along with cultivation. They catered to cultivators and mortals alike. Some would kill rogue spirit beasts; others would take trade along thousand-mile routes. A few would even farm spirit herbs out in fields and sell them in mass to larger sects. 

These people were merchants who specialized in trade between the five major sects. 

“Oasis City? Is that what they’re calling it?” I asked them.

“Ugh- yes, Honored Master Immortal Sir-”

“Just call me sir,” I cut in. 

“Of course sire- er- sir immortal.”

“Did you talk to the farmer?” 

“What? The mortal? No. We thought it best to get permission direct-”

“Then no,” I cut in. “You need to talk to the farmer, and the next time you try to go around him I’ll make sure your caravan never crosses the desert again.”

“But- But, he’s a mort-” His friend quickly shoved a painful jab into his ribs. 

I felt Mei Shan’s senses watching me from a distance. She had probably set all of this up, allowing them to sneak their way through me just to get a hard and firm rejection. Hopefully, they’d go around and spread my words and Chin could point to them as an example of what to not do. 

“Yes sir, we will go to the village head and work things out with him,” the smarter man commented. 

Then the two turned around and started walking back the way they came from. 

“You know this was a mistake you were allowed to make? Right?” I called out to them.

“Sir?” One of them said as the two turned around. 

“You were allowed to make this mistake, and there will be no consequences. But you might be allowed to make other mistakes, and I assure you, there will be consequences for those.”

“Yes Honored Immortal, we understand our trespass,” the smart one replied and bowed. 

The not-so-smart one followed his move and did the same, but clearly, he hadn’t heard my warning. I wish I could just spell it out for him, but I was meant to play the old mysterious cultivator role to these people, and besides, his friend would definitely explain it to him. 

Don’t cause trouble. You only got here because you were allowed to. You’re meant to serve as an example of my rules so go and tell other cultivators what happened. And if you see a chance to break another of my rules, don’t. Because if you do you won’t get away easily like last time. 

That was what my message meant. And I’m sure the smarter fellow understood that. I sighed, feeling bad for whatever bastard Mei Shan used next. 

The no-violence rule was heavily enforced, but even then, we had daily rule breakers. I’d given Mei full control over the village's administration and she had let a few attacks begin before she went in and interfered. 

 Normally, she could’ve stopped the fights before they even started. But a couple of times, she allowed the aggression to be shown, and then she brutally crippled the cultivator's meridians afterward. 

“Consequences must be real Honored Master. A lion who just roars is no different from a loud dog.”

That was what she had said to me. And so here she was showing the fangs, making examples, and enforcing the rules. I didn’t care as long as no one innocent got hurt.

These merchants seemed arrogant at worst, not evil. So I gave them a fair warning and sent them on their way. 

Someone else would be the victim of Mei Shan’s example-making quest. 

And I wouldn’t be there to intervene. 

I stretched out my hands, and a baby landed perfectly between the gaps. The sudden deceleration dragged her cheeks down for a moment and then, she laughed. Her arms went up and she smacked on my sleeves eagerly. 

“Again?” I asked. 

Nai nodded feverishly. 

This time I used one hand and winded back my arm for dramatic effect. And then, like a pitcher during the final inning, I threw. Not hard of course, just enough to get her slightly above the clouds. 

The giggling screams of a baby faded out into the sky. 

“Master Bill,” Rin Wi spoke. 

“Oh, is it already time?”

“Yes,” Rin nodded. 

I looked up and waited. 

“Ah, she’ll be fine-”

“We can wait for Miss Nai,” Rin Wi cut in urgently. 

“She’s at the fifth rank, a little fall will be nothing for her-”

“I will tell Miss Medin,” she added. 

“Alright, alright, we’ll wait.”

Rin Wi nodded at my compromise. 

“How’s immortality treating you Rin?” 

“It is strange… I am new to it yet it feels like I’ve been this way forever. It feels like I can’t be any other way like I’ve solidified a piece of myself for eternity.”

“That’s immortality for you. You’ve become time-proof.”

“Is this how it always is?” Rin Wi asked. 

“For a bit,” I replied. “It’s as if you’ve just learned to walk. It feels strange now, waddling along with the support of only two limbs but eventually, you’ll wonder how you ever got anywhere with crawling. How’s your dao going? You did pick it up a bit haphazardly. And what about your law? Have you picked one?”

Rin Wi looked around like a high school senior being asked about their plans for college. 

“I- I do not know. My dao is strange and unsettled, and I chose it so lightly. I might not progress beyond this I fear.”

There was doubt in her voice, along with a strange dead tone of acceptance. 

I looked at her. 

“A dao is practiced Rin. Yes, you chose yours lightly and it is a delicate thing still. But you chose your dao and that itself is a part of your dao. Tell me, what do you think a dao is?”

“Purpose?” 

“Yes, but is that all it is?” I asked. “Purpose can change, purpose itself has a reason, a drive behind it. A dao is purpose, but it doesn’t just stop at purpose. The reason you chose your dao, the soul of your choice, is also there. The dao is like all things, a path. The path might split, it might twist and it may lead you to a crossroads, but your choice at those points will carry on. Even if you’re no longer at that crossroad, your choice in direction is still there, still present. It's as much a part of your path as the path you walk upon.”

“Then, what is my dao? Is it truly cooking? Preparing food?”

“Why did you choose food?” I asked.

“Why?” Rin Wi thought. “Because…because it was the only other choice I had.”

“Yes, but why was it the only other choice you had, Rin? Why was cooking important enough for you to even consider it as a part of your path? Not anything can be your dao, so why was cooking enough to even be considered?”

Rin thought for a moment, trying to conceptualize something she already knew. 

And perfectly timed with her enlightenment came Nai screaming down from the skies. With a soft thump, she landed in my arms. 

And Rin Wi spoke. 

“Because it gives me purpose,” she finally replied. “It's something I choose to do and it helps others. I… I’ve always helped others. I’ve always been a servant, but when I was cooking… I was choosing to serve. I was choosing to help Medin.”

I nodded along, prodding her to speak some more.

“I… when I faced her… I…She was me. She was a part of me that had been hammered by centuries of practice and punishment. She was the way I saw the world and the way I saw myself. A tool. A thing to be used to better ends. I couldn’t erase that, not all of it, so I…”

Her hand touched her chest. 

“I changed it. I chose to serve instead of being made to. I chose to be a tool of my own desire.”

Then she started to panic. 

“Honored Master, did I really defeat my tribulation? Did I really expunge her or is she still there, somewhere inside of me determining my actions?”

“Rin Wi,” I answered. “She is you. You can’t expunge her. But you did change her permanently. That was your victory. To be a total tool or a device of your own making. You didn’t just choose a new dao, Rin Wi; you altered it. You changed a small and very important part. You became your own.”

Rin Wi looked somewhat troubled.

“Did you think you could rebuild yourself from nothing? Did you imagine that tribulation would allow you to destroy and recreate yourself as you wanted? It is natural, Rin. To turn back on your path would mean to undo a major part of yourself, of your cultivation. You should not want to undo your whole being for one fault.”

Rin nodded curtly.

“Should we get going then?” She asked.

I nodded and followed into the forest. 

We had some angry beasts to meet.

Chapter 104 Laws

In a forest, there was a house. A building, and within it was the most powerful empire in all of Ah-Marin. 

Beasts.

They were everywhere, all over the floor and air, swarming the place like a mass of insects. The weakest was at the seventh rank, and the strongest was at the twelfth. Their power was beyond any within the realm aside from the man that kept them. 

But to understand the beasts, one needs to understand instinct. 

Of the four archetypes, beasts were the closest to humans. Our difference was just one thing, but that one thing defined us, and separated us from one another. 

The heart of a man is delicate. It grows and shrinks, blooms and withers at all it deems worthy. But a beast's heart is still. Instinct guides it and instinct, it does not question. If a child it must raise and nearly die for, it will do so. If its runt must die for their weakness stains the litter, the mother will slaughter them and feed their body to its kin. 

Man sees his feelings as the grand result of some fundamental inner truth. We seek truth in our internal labyrinth of morals and values. But if a lion loves its cub, it is just so. And if a lion must kill its cub, it is just so. A human will mourn the death of a child, mistaking their instinctual care for the young as some sort of higher moral truth. Innocence, childhood, purity, and youth. We place some value in these things as if that were the reason we yearn to protect the young. As if the young are somehow more valuable than the old. We build something around these instinctual feelings, making them more than they are, and less all at once. 

Man takes instinct and makes it something more. That is our ability. Because we question instinct, we make it into something greater, like morals and laws. And because we question instinct, we make it into something weaker, like self-control and compromise. 

Beasts accept what is while men question it.

That is our difference.

That was a quote from one of the old scholars of the Tome.

The nature of beasts was well-documented. It was speculated to be the reason fas to why beasts didn’t need a dao. They who trusted instinct never questioned themselves. They lived because they lived and they sought power because it was their nature to do so. 

But that had started to change here. 

Here, there were beasts with daos. Not the common dao of beasts, which would be them embracing that which they already were. But human daos, human paths. There were small merchants and creatures of various paths. 

This had been noticed by the leaders and this was something they wanted to address, so they called for a grand gathering, consisting of every divine beast’s representative and the keeper of the forest, Lin Tai. 

I was also here, but I was just there to watch. This was Lin Tai’s domain. 

She sat on a chair in front of a large circular table. The other maidens sat around her, and I sat at the opposite side. On the table was the governing body of the empire. 

A dragon, a phoenix, a groundhog, and several other beasts sat in a large circle. 

Resources. 

That was the thing responsible for this behavior, and to understand what the beasts sought, one needed to understand laws. 

Laws were the rule of things. They were concepts that had been made in one way or another but had eventually become a thing of their own. There was an argument among scholars as to where exactly laws were derived from. Existence, in the beginning, had no consistency. It was all primordial qi, strange and undefined. But primordial qi sought form, and while everything decayed, the more stable forms became more dominant. 

Well, stable was a bad word for it. It was sort of like God-Imperiums. They existed more than we did. They had more weight than we did. In the Realm of Imperium, Gods had died. Wars had been waged and the heavens and the hells had been birthed. 

The concepts of that realm, the laws that kept it. They had become more real then. Along with existence reflecting the Realm of Imperium, it reflected the rules that governed it. 

Fire had been birthed with the dragon and phoenix, for example. One could burn all things and the other cleansed and renewed. Fire held both natures. 

That wasn’t to say these things were defined by the beings who made them, no, the opposite was true. Laws were laws because they stood on their own. 

They were strange. While daos were at the core of a person, laws were almost outside of them. A dragon’s nature was pride and greed and a phoenix’s nature was renewal and rebirth. Fire was just the expression through which it manifested. 

Beast’s first child had hatched and it was the first dragon. In its greed and pride, it burnt at its younger siblings, and all but one survived the phoenix. The first fire had belonged to the dragon. But it was not fire then, only destruction. Only pain. 

But the phoenix was born in the flames and the phoenix remade them in birth. Warmth, healing, power. 

Then fire was no longer the dragon’s and no longer the phoenix’s. It was its own. Something made of both yet neither. 

If universes were like stories then laws were like letters. They were things that someone might have created at one point but truly belonged to no one. Whereas a dao can only thrive within a mind, a law could thrive outside of one. 

They were like God-Imperiums in that way, eternal and echoing, yet they lacked a mind. 

While a lot of laws were derived from the Realm of Imperiums, others were a mystery. 

Either way, all cultivating beings coveted them.

Laws were simple for me. Understanding them was pivotal to being an array master, though I never went to the deep end with my studies. 

To cultivators, laws were weapons. Means by which to make their ideas a reality. 

Laws were greater than cultivating beings. They were more real, more impactful. A man without a law was like a mortal trying to cut down a tree with their bare hands. A cultivator's dao, while it guided them, was not strong enough for them to shape the world.

Daos were enough for non-immortals. They could strengthen you, but for higher levels of cultivation, laws were important. That was why The Raging River, The Hidden Viper, and The Hallow Echo didn’t need daos. Their techniques revolved around bloodlines and laws. Whereas the Bloody Fist Sect and the Blossoming Sword Sect relied on dao. 

But daos were necessary to step into immortality. Laws were a cultivator's outer strength, and daos were a cultivator’s inner strength. 

If a dao was the action, then the law was the tool. If a dao was the punch, then the law is the fist. 

Laws were power, they were strength. 

And beasts coveted strength above all.

“Order! Order!” Lin Tai yelled. 

All the beasts stopped arguing at once. 

The girl looked tired and annoyed. It occurred to me that out of all the jobs the girls had taken, Lin Tai, by far had the hardest one. Rin Wi cooked. Mei Shan governed. Xi Lui hung out with Po Pen all day, but Lin Tai had to manage gods. 

I looked around at all the small calm animals around me. Nai looked over my shoulders and did the same. 

But Lin Tai seemed to be doing well enough. 

“Representatives, gather and announce yourself. Then we shall start,” Lin Tai spoke. 

And the beasts obeyed.