AIR Chapter 71-73

Chapter 71 Conversations 

Po Pen smiled. Po Pen found joy in his work. People found it strange, repugnant even. 

But Po didn’t care. The joy wasn’t in the work itself, but rather the result. The clean streets, the fresh soil, and even the rot of waste into life were a beautiful thing to see. He had started the job as a way to make a living. 

He was quiet, too quiet. He couldn’t work most other jobs, because he hated talking and partly, he hated listening. 

People were selfish most of the time, talking only about things that they cared for. And since they rarely understood his nonverbal rejection, they’d talk for as long as they wanted about whatever they wanted. 

Po just had that effect on people. 

But Xi Lu was different. She was quiet when he was tired and when he wasn’t, she talked to him, not at him. She spoke of things that interested him, teaching him about plants and rot, sometimes she talked about unimportant things like the food they ate or the weather in the region and even that was a fun enough thing to talk about. 

He said nothing, often nodding in reply or looking towards something in the distance, but she seemed to yank meaning from his gestures and would reply to him concisely. It was a first for the man, he not only found a person’s company neutral but pleasant as well. 

This rainy season had been the hardest one that Po had ever seen. There were easily ten times the number of people here and the same could be said for their beasts of burden, and yet they had almost no trouble accepting them all. 

And a major reason for that was the maidens. Seven capable women descended from the hermit’s home and aided the village in all their needs, it was a mythic thing. But Chin hadn’t cared, the old man had put the girls to work before they could even introduce themselves. Rin Wi was always Medin and Lin Tai was responsible for managing the forest, though Po didn’t think a forest needed much managing, but what did he know? 

And Xi Lu had been aiding him in clean-up. But the rest of the girls had been helping with the generic work and that had caused a stir with the young men of the village. The girls were stronger, more capable, and far too beautiful for their own good. 

A few men had tried to farm them, but they’d all been firmly rejected, and then later visited by Chin carrying an old stick. Everyone now understood that the women were off limits, but still, their ability to aid in anything made them stand out anywhere they went. 

All that made everyone suddenly shift their attention to three locations, where the four women were, where Rin Wi was, and where Xi Lu resided. That meant that Po had been getting stopped much more often than before and asked questions about that mysterious cultivator girl he spent so much time with. 

To which Po would shrug and try to turn away. 

Even when he enjoyed one person’s presence, the world seemed to find a way to ruin it. Though it wasn’t a bad price to pay for her information. 

“Po Pen! Hello!” Xi Lu smiled. 

She always did that, even if he had been gone for only an hour she would greet him with enthusiasm. 

It was strange at first, but Po had quickly gotten used to it. 

He nodded with a slight smile on his face. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it, it was just a small tensing at the end of his lips. But she noticed somehow, much like Mister Bill. 

“Well, how is it?”

He nodded. That was enough for her to understand his meaning. 

“Good! I’ve been talking to merchants, mainly those from Hidden Vipper’s territory and they carry an assortment of seeds we can use to add to the cleansing routine. What do you think about that then?”

He nodded again and Xi continued talking.

She went on about the nature of these plants and their various abilities and Po listened eagerly. He watched as she showed him various seeds and their effects and she even had books, books she had purchased from the trader with her own wealth. 

They had started planning and scheming about a new form of sewers. Caverns filled with streams and fresh flowing water, stuffed with underground plants that fed off of all types of waste and filth. 

And she also talked about breeding bacteria. He was aware of their existence, but he normally thought of them as bad things that caused illness. But he was wrong, apparently, these things were vital to most humans' existence. And they were just as vital outside of it.

“Well, I don’t know how they do things in places like these but I can think up of a few ways to create a good environment for them.”

Po gave her a questioning look.

“Oh well, where I’m from we never really had to deal with such… problems. People didn’t poop.”

Po gave her another look. 

“Well, they just didn’t. Maybe some did, newborns at least but powerful people are different. You don’t defecate after the fourth rank.”

Po frowned. That didn’t sit right with him. People were people and people pooped. What type of person didn’t need to poop. 

“They’re very clean back there, which was ironic when you think about the things they dealt in.”

She said things like this sometimes. Statements about her past followed by what seemed to be fear and guilt. Po had learned to stop asking. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it and Po didn’t want to talk about anything so who was he to pick and prod?

And clearly, there was pain there.

But it would rot, like all bad things did. Time would take the filth and turn it into life, it always did. 

He nodded and sat down next to her, listening as she quickly changed the subject back to seeds. There was still guilt and some flashes of horror, but a little less than last time. It would always be a little less than last time. 

Mister Bill had come by a while back and spoke vaguely of the maiden’s situation. Po didn’t understand. How could he, he was a village peasant, the shit man. But for the first time in Po’s life, he felt like he wouldn’t mind just listening, even if all she wanted to talk about was herself. 

After a good amount of talking, Po went off to unload the feces. There were about twenty thousand people within the valley at any given time now. That meant there were thousands of pounds of feces produced on a daily basis. 

Chin had given him a higher budget for the clean-up work. His workforce was double what it used to be and while they wore waterproof gloves and large leather workwear, they still occasionally managed to get something on them. 

It was unfortunate, but it was a part of the job. But Xi had made this strange paste from some strong-smelling plants. When they smeared that just underneath their nostrils, they would smell that instead of the wagon of shit they wheeled behind them.

It was nice, humanizing even. 

He didn’t hate the job but the smell was always something he could do without. 

Then there was the beast dung. That was a whole work of its own, but Chin had already gotten an area cleared out for them to stay at. And since qi beasts tended to be smart on average, they were all trained in using a single area as their dump spot. 

It was downwind of the village, but even then Po was coming up with methods to fight back the smell, and so was Xi. She talked all day long about what they could do to quicken the composting process, walking by his side as he went about his daily route. 

And eventually, when evening came they said their goodbyes and went to their homes. It was a good day overall. 

Was this how other people felt when they talked? Being heard was nice and having someone who wanted to hear you was even better.

Maybe that was why people kept talking to him. 

Po Pen smiled as he used the soap to wash over his whole body. It was one of the few luxuries he consistently enjoyed, a daily shower.

He was also finding himself more tired than most days. A part of him he never really knew ached a little. Conversations drained him, even if it was with Xi, but he didn’t. 

In fact, he looked forward to being tired tomorrow too. 

Chapter 72

Babies are weird. 

Nai had been fighting with my tail for the past three hours, and the poor girl was losing. The appendage had a will of its own and as soon as Nai had recognized that fact, she had started to battle with it. 

Small balled fists grabbed onto the tail, but the limb wrapped around her hands and brought them up to her head. Then, it went for the kill striking at her pudgy little belly. Nai laughed and giggled and the tail didn’t slow down the offense. 

Eventually, when tears started to come out of Nai’s eyes, it decided to stop and release her. After taking a minute to catch her breath, she growled and attacked and the cycle repeated once more. 

The tail had been weirding me out for a while now, to be honest. It was mine, I knew it was mine, but it was also not mine at the same time. It was like having an extra consciousness attached to my own. Technically we were one and the same but we also weren’t. 

I didn’t feel threatened by it. I just didn’t understand it. It was simultaneously me and not me at the same time. And when you got to where I did, you understood the very center of your existence with no doubt in mind. 

Yet here was a strange new part of me that I couldn’t grasp. It made me feel like a kid again. 

After twenty more minutes of the tickle cycle, Nai fell asleep all weary and tuckered out. The tail gently carried her to my hands and I swaddled her up and took her to her crib. She was growing substantially, a little more each day I saw her, but children didn’t make good immortals. They could still age once they became an immortal but expecting a child to pick a dao was dysfunctional. 

She had to age before she did that, she had to believe in something. 

After putting her to bed, I made my way down to my basement. 

That was where the door was. The door was unnecessary, but I liked it. It was the way to my pocket dimension. 

And within it was the array. I would call it my array but it was starting to think. I couldn’t own something like that. 

But today would be the first movement, the first stirring of a nearly there child. 

Well, not my child, but sort of like my child. A simulated soul. 

I was giddy.

Souls were common, making a soul was common, but the nature of that soul was the same. Most beings were a reflection of one of the four primordials, human, beast, plant, or insect. And the soul, the mechanism by which consciousness operated, was based on those beings as well. 

You could change forms, become stronger, influence bloodline, and do all other manners of transfiguration. But souls were hard to change. They were complex. 

Even Dane, a being of the twelfth rank had trouble with altering his soul. He had understood it, but altering it was something else entirely. You could understand how a wheel works and you might even be able to make it, but making a new wheel, one that wasn’t a wheel but functioned one was a tough task. 

It was the same with souls. The four variants of thinking beings are human, beast, insect, and plant. But this was different, something rare. Not impossible and certainly not a new task that had never been done before. There were many thinking beings that had been made to differ from the path of the primordials, but each of those was different, their own iteration of the wheel. 

But it was something new. 

Something unique to all of reality. My own iteration of the wheel. 

The array’s heart thumped. A metaphysical web of push, pull and hold, and its soul started to breathe. Its eyes opened for a second, looking and seeing for the first time, and it breathed once more. 

Thump.

It was already at the immortal rank. 

Bump. 

Then it was beyond it. 

Thump. 

It kept going and going, pushing itself until. 

Bump. 

It hit the wall of the ninth rank. 

It struggled against that barrier for a quick moment, before seemingly settling down. 

The array squirmed and shifted, finally looking at me with what could vaguely be described as disinterest. 

It knew me and I knew it, even if it had only been awake for less than five minutes. 

It asked me one thing and one thing only. 

Let me out.

“I can’t.”

Why?

“You’d get me noticed. Too much attention and we’ll both be wiped out.”

I had enough sense of mind to tie its existence to my will, at least in part. I could control where the array went and I could see inside of it clearly, knowing every little thought that might flutter. 

It was weird. I’d seen the universe eating insects and trees that stood outside of space and time, but this was still different. 

Souls dictated nature. A plant grows and insects have no room for empathy or love, merely purpose. Beasts desired strength and humans could dictate their purpose or get consumed by it entirely. 

This thing was different. Its purpose was already predetermined, much like a dao angel but somehow still different. Dao angels were locked into their nature unless they consumed more residual daos that would slowly change their nature over time. 

Otherwise, they would like Rin Wi’s tribulation, tied to one path and forced to follow it no matter what. And she had only broken away through sheer will, tying herself to an interest she had just to defy the path her original dao would have made her take. 

This was not like that. It took all the best parts out of the four primordial natures in my view. It took the growth of a plant, the drive of an insect, the lust of a beast, and the empathy of a human. 

It had a nature all its own and that nature was still growing. 

I had intended to teach it about peace, giving it a lot of rules and boundaries. That was before I had gotten my dao. 

Now I could connect to it, and feed it directly. 

I had been the King of Arrays but I also had been an expert on souls. I had spent my whole existence trying to change mine, wiping and rearranging everything within it. 

In a way this array was what I had wanted to become, everything I had ever learned. 

And yet, instead of understanding the array and pushing me down into the depths of cultivation, it was meant to bring peace. 

I chuckled, how ironic. The very thing I had been seeking all my life stood before me, only for it to be the exact opposite of what I had wanted in the first place. 

There was stagnation, not power. Here was rest, not journey. 

The array grumbled, only in a way that an array could. Strange. Barely ten minutes old and complaining already. 

Then it moved, breathed, and condensed, shoveling itself into my shadow. 

Our existences were tied for now, at least until it matured. It would stick with me and learn, modeling itself to me. 

I smiled. There was always the threat it could become, some strange intelligence far beyond my own. But that was impossible unless it grew beyond my own rank. Cultivators were very smart and at the ninth rank, they were practically omniscient of a certain area around them. Our senses could reach deep into the very fabric of existence and untangle its tapestry. 

In other words, intelligence was tied to rank. It was no smarter than any other ninth-rank being in existence. But it was different, it could grow much faster than most other lifeforms. 

And like a realm, it would provide the area with its own growing bundles of laws and understanding as it aged. There was a light shutter in the valley as it awoke and its presence strained and stressed till it reached the very bounds of the great desert strip. 

“Keep to the immortal realm and produce the same aura as me, otherwise we’ll be found out.”

The array nodded, merely agreeing instead of obeying. It was reading me, searching for what it could take from my existence to make its own more complete. 

And I let it. It fumbled through some of my memories, honing in on earth before quickly moving on to my dao. That it tasted eagerly. It took in my understanding of peace, turning it in its own mind before settling down, and…well the only term I could use to describe what it did would be digesting. 

It was digesting my experience, and understanding my peace. 

Quickly it moved on from me and ran around the whole of the Great Dessert Strip, taking from anything that would let it. Some of the more powerful divine beasts warded it off, but most of them didn’t notice. Then it went to the ants beneath the ground, the birds in the sky and the little rodents in the fields. 

It went to the villagers and the merchants, the pack animals and the mortals, and even the plants. It studied them. 

Then it went out into the desert and touched every living thing within it. From the crabs deep beneath the sand to the massive hoards of cultivators that were crossing the Great Desert Strip. Lots of them traversed the strip without coming by the valley. 

It touched upon billions of lives, mostly plants, and bugs, but animals too, but people seemed to take it the longest amount of time to understand. Eventually, it came back to me and wallowed. 

It seemed dissatisfied. 

“Did you think everyone would offer as much as I did?” I asked it. 

It shrugged and grumbled, then it fluttered, noticing my tail. Then it jumped into its shadow as well. 

Chapter 73

The array did not have a name. Why would it need such a thing? It wasn’t a man or a beast. 

It was an array. An execution, an act given life. 

It breathed, it lived, and its creator was irrelevant to its act. 

It was meant to provide peace, but what was peace? Well, peace was a concept, that it knew. And it had learned what its creator thought it was. 

A paradox, restricting freedom in three parts. And while that was true as far as the array could sense, surely there had to be more. 

Billions of lives, and it had tasted all of them, scrounging through their memories and thoughts, searching for this thing called peace. 

And yet most of them thought it was a feeling. A sense of stability, a predictable tomorrow, tranquility, social balance, a lack of war. All things that could fit in with its creator’s understanding of peace.

It was looking for something more. Something concrete larger than a feeling but consent of it. Something beyond mere definition, it was looking for an action. 

It was still an array, after all, it was within in nature to act. 

So it had seen it. The tale, something he hadn’t touched. It was his creator’s tale but it had not come from him. It was someone else's, someone different. 

Surely they had something to offer. 

“Well well well,” a voice spoke. A monkey man sat in the distance eating a peach and staring at the little array construct. 

“So you’ve woken, have you? I was wondering when that would happen,” the monkey man laughed. 

The array stared at the being. He was there but he wasn’t. The array could not feel his soul or presence. The image was there as well as the sound and the weight of the being, but the array could not perceive even a glimpse of his soul. 

“That was a joke. I knew exactly when you’d awaken.”

Humor was a human thing and so was fear. 

The array ran towards the being's shadow, trying to shove itself into its mind and read all the monkey man would allow. 

Only for the array to slump into the floor and feel… nothing. 

“Hahaha,” the monkey laughed. “What a funny little thing you are!”

The array huffed. It didn’t have pride, that was a human thing. But if it did it would be very offended right now. 

“Look around kid, you’re already where you want to be.”

The array studied the area, once in confusion and then once more in…awe. Yes, that was what it was feeling, awe. 

This was not the soul of a God-Imperium, this was the shadow of a soul, the small presence he had left behind. 

And yet it made its creator’s soul look like nothing in comparison. The array ran, searching for memories and ideas, hungering for growth and yet it found itself failing. Here was a place where it was too small. Here was the shadow of a being, an imprint of its presence, and yet the array was still too small. 

It was lost in the gaps between thoughts. A single idea from this being’s mind would overload it, redefine it, and shape its nature to its own. But the Monkey King kept his thoughts at bay. 

This was a shadow, an infinitesimal fraction meant to hide its creator. And yet that shadow overwhelmed all that the little array could conceive. 

“This would be much too overwhelming for you little fellow, how about a guided tour then?”

A door manifested and another person stepped through. Its creator walked into the world and stopped, looking squarely at the monkey man. 

There was a moment of thought in its creator’s eyes though the array could not tell what the man was thinking. 

“I see,” its creator finally spoke. 

“Do you know?”

“In a way,” its creator replied. “You are Wukong, correct? A piece of him?”

“A piece is too strong of a word. More like a footprint.”

“But you are still him, right? There is no difference.”

The Monkey King nodded. 

“And the tail, I’ve been trying to understand that for a while.”

“A shadow of a shadow of a shadow of a shadow, I’d say. If you were to look up to what’s casting it, you’d see me. I see you’ve gotten your bearings.”

“You let me live,” its creator replied. “I doubt there’s anything I can say that would change that.”

“Yes yes, there are things you could have done, but not now. Not anymore. Not with the path you’ve chosen.”

Its creator smiled. 

“I figured.”

Then the monkey king turned to the array. 

“Now where were we young thing? You were looking for something right?”

The array agreed and though it had no voice or head to nod, the Monkey King seemed to understand it anyway. 

“Peace is it?”

The array agreed once more. That was its purpose, its sole reason to exist. It was meant to bring peace, to protect it. And while peace was simple in the vaguest of terms, it was also complicated. 

Bringing all those things together, the feeling, the state, the security, and even the peace that came after a struggle was something it couldn’t bring together. 

“Well, peace is a bad word for it, don’t you think,” the Monkey King asked. “Who would tie your existence to such a vague word?”

The array looked toward its creator with false disdain and Sunwukong smiled. 

“You see little thing, the man who designed you is not the man who stands before you. The person who designed you had no dao, no experience with the concept he wanted you to achieve. So instead of choosing a feeling or a path like the dao angels or making you pursue a certain state of dominant rule like a beast, he designed you to look for peace, a word filled with different meanings.”

Then the Monkey King turned to its creator. 

“Do you know why the dao of peace is so rare?”

“It’s too vast and unrefined. More than that it’s paradoxical. Things like virtue and love, or even the path of strength or freedom focus on pure concepts, paths that do not fight themselves,” he replied. 

“Yes,” Wukong nodded. “Peace is justice, yet peace is also freedom. Peace is in the mind and yet peace is also within a land. Peace is rest and yet peace is also struggle. It is an end and a process. It is the sky and the earth. It is a lifetime and a moment. It is a thing unique to every living thing and somehow all the same, and yet you’ve burdened this poor fellow with protecting it, how can it do that now?”

Its creator looked down at it. 

“I thought it was a simple thing,” he replied. 

“For a human yes. You humans are quite blind to that lying mind of yours and it allows you some strangely fictional things. Peace, what a useless word. You see little fellow, for mortals words like peace and justice, while meaningful are not clear. They are not real, merely ideas. To cultivators, their daos are much more than those words, they are paths. And when your creator made you, he had not touched that path of peace yet, so he left a lazy substitute, a word.”

The array knew this already and agreed. 

“I can redefine it-”

“You can not, changing its soul now would be the same as killing what it currently is and you cannot kill it.”

The array knew this as well. What the Monkey King said wasn’t a command but a description. Its creator had a dao, a path, and that path would not allow the murder of innocent life. 

That had been the original plan. The creator had planned to configure it after its creation. In truth, the array would have preferred that. 

“But your creator has also fallen for the same trap. He has chosen the dao of peace as well and though that dao can change and get whittled down to one direct uncontradictory path, he has not done that.”

Both array and creator stood there in silence.

Peace. They both sought it and while one could find it, it would be only one part, one element cut from the rest. And the other stood there fastened to the whole world, an amalgamation of ideas that fought over each other. 

“Do you know why I fought the Buddha?” Wukong asked. 

“It was done to rebel against the two factions,” its creator answered. “The war between good and evil took countless lives. Every cultivator within existence had to fight for one side or another, it was an eternal war raging across existence.”

“True,” Wukong said with a nod. “But, I also could not live under them. I could not be defined by either side. I wanted my own power and the freedom to be my own. And yet I still aided the Buddha, creating a middle ground that would grow stronger than either side. While good did not win, evil was averted, and while evil still thrives, good was restricted. In this was freedom, something good that allowed for the existence of evil. A paradox.”

Wukong looked towards both man and array. 

“Daos are not so small to be defeated by such a thing. To reach for a dao that folds in on itself is a daring move, but not an impossible one. It will be difficult to tie your existence to such a thing, but it will also be rewarding.”

Then the Monkey King started fading along with all the world around him.

“But I will tell you this, where there is peace, suffering ends. Start there."