AIR Chapter 56-58

The last two chapters get a little dark, so prepare yourselves.

Chapter 56 A Beast’s Nature

She had tried to ascend. It was probably instinct, but the baby had tried to become immortal. She wasn’t even at the right rank to ascend, but that’s what happens when you're a child of a Primordial I supposed.

But she had no Dao, nothing to ground her and that had almost killed the poor child. 

I walked, cradling her against my chest as I did so. She was sleeping, for now. But she’d wake up eventually. That was good. 

It was a strange situation I was in. I never wanted to be a father before this, and even now, I still don’t. But this child needed someone to look after her, if not for my own safety then for hers. 

She needed me. 

“That damned monkey,” I muttered under my breath. 

He should have taken her and raised her himself, but no, he’d left her to me. I don’t know why, probably some God-Imperium reasoning, something I was too weak to understand. 

My theory was that he would somehow interfere. I didn’t know why or how, but I assumed leaving the child in my hands was the best option, at least for now. If the child had stayed with him, there may have been some risk. 

Not to him directly, but some type of political risk. It was the difference between watching a criminal run away and participating in the crime. He had merely traded favors with me, each favor given for something in return. Officially, he hadn’t helped me or aided me in any regard so there were no karmic ties between us. 

That left his hands clean of all misgivings. Well, that and his strength. If he were a weaker being complaints would surely be brought up, but since he’s Sun Wukong, The Monkey King, I doubted anyone would dare to oppose him with little disregard. 

That or he was lazy. 

I frowned. It could be the latter, but I hoped it wasn’t. 

The child turned in my arms. 

She opened her eyes and blinked at me. We’d been walking for about an hour, and because of our size, we’d only made it about fifty feet from where I had first stood. 

That was fine, it was just a walk after all. 

“Awoo,” the baby yelled. 

I’ve thought of a name.

Oh boy. Here we go. She took a moment to focus and her face squished in concentration.

“Nai,”

“Nai?”

She nodded. 

“That’s acceptable,” I replied. 

The baby- Nai, smiled and cooed. It was adorable. 

“Do you know what you tried to do Nai?”

Nai nodded. 

“You tried to ascend in immortality, without a da.”

Nai nodded again, seeming a little worried this time. She had that confused look that babies had when they were unsure of what was going on. 

“You’re a child, barely a newborn right now. You’re not ready to face the world, alright?”

Nai nodded her big head bobbing up and down in effort. 

“Good, now check this out,” I said pointing to the distance. 

I put her back onto my shoulders and she held firmly onto my head, and then I jumped. The forest shrank beneath us and we soared over the green leafy floor. We soared past the trees and the vines, peaking into the deep blue sky above. 

I kept an eye on her aura. Accidentally ascending into immortality was a dangerous thing. It normally happened to strong individuals who were all but ready to leap into the sixth rank. But with Nai, it had been different.  

She had seen a fundamental truth of reality and had tried to understand it. It was the metaphysical equivalent of staring into the sun. See too much and you’ll see nothing, know too much and you won’t know yourself. The ego would crumble, the soul would evaporate and your very consciousness would fall apart. 

That was one of the many reasons humans needed a dao. Even beasts and insects needed their own methods to push into the depths of reality. 

We glided down and landed smoothly on a tree branch. A nest of ravens occupied the branch a few feet over and a caw of surprise came out from the birds. 

I was about to scare them off or soothe them myself, but then Nai held up her hand. 

One of the ravens hopped out of their nest and walked over to us, lowering its beak to eye level. 

“Awoo,” Nai yipped. 

The raven looked deep into her eyes… and nodded. 

Interesting. This wasn’t just communication using auras, this was a beast thing. The raven had recognized her as something beyond itself.

The raven turned around and tottered into its nest and snuggled up with its mate. We walked past the pair and went down to the floor. Then we stepped into the beasts’ domain. 

The world flickered and suddenly all the divine beasts could be seen. I watched them occasionally but this was the first time I had visited their domain. Domain might have been a bit of a stretch, home should I say.

They had taken to the place. I watched as they bartered. That was a little strange, bartering was a despicable human behavior, but they did it anyway. They even had stalls and shops and… were those merchants?

Why would they need merchants?

I frowned. 

This was weird. I walked with Nai, our bodies wrapped in an illusory array. 

“No! No! This is not right! One qi berry cannot be worth three feathers of a pheonix. That is too much to give for so little!” 

“I will give you three, no more!”

There was a groundhog arguing with a pheonix. 

“What’s going on here?” Another pheonix chirped.

“You dare to spit at our Firey Fowl Clan? We will burn your lands and scatter seeds    elsewhere if you dare!”

I studied the ongoing trade. The qi berry was small, barely anything worth staring at in terms of qi, but it was concentrated with laws. Yes, it held mainly fire and wind laws and would be a gift for most phoenixes to nurturer. 

I’d known stuff like this would happen. The array was eating the laws these creatures provided, studying their nature, and tossing out laws in return. It was growing. 

“Nonsense, our Fiery Fowl will give you three and a half feathers no more! Asking for anything else would be extortion.”

The groundhog frowned, then smiled. 

“It’s a deal!”

The pheonix dug into his wings and pulled out three full feathers and one half of one, each of them being holy treasures from a tenth-rank being, and traded them for the berry. 

The berry contained fire laws and so did the phoenix’s feather, but the difference between the two was notable. Even with deeply explored laws like fire and lightning, there were so many variances and so many nuances in their forms. 

Did the fire burn, rejuvenate, heal, destroy? Pheonix fire burned away the old and withering. It was a fire that would burn down forests, only to provide them with more life than they’d ever seen the very next day. If a pheonix burned an old man it would hurt him, but it would burn away at his old age and rotting flesh, leaving behind a youthful man. 

Pheonix fire burned away things like rot, age, weakness, and disease.

I’d once seen a sixteenth rank pheonix. It was the very nature of change, burning away the void itself and creating countless realms as it flew by. I had been dying then, wounded from a grievous battle, and though its flames hadn’t touched me, my injuries burned away and I was made a new, just from seeing it pass in the distance. 

And that was all from a distance. The fire laws the berry contained were that of ash and heat, fire that would come from a dragon’s mouth. 

It was a good trade for the pheonix, though I didn’t know what the groundhogs would use the feathers for. They studied the laws of connection, things like time and space, what good was-?

WHAT

DAO?

The damn beast had a dao. 

How? Beasts were different from humans. We needed something to tether our souls, a purpose to tie ourselves to, and that was our dao, our meaning. 

For beasts, it was more of a law, The Dao of the Jungle. The desire to be the strongest, strength for strength’s sake. It was their way, their power. 

Beasts didn’t live for any other reason, but to live. 

And yet…

I stared at the little bundle of dao within the groundhog’s mind. Yes, the dao of wealth. The merchant’s dao. It was there and it was blooming. 

Connections. Laws that connected things, that was what the groundhogs tended to study. They varied, of course, space, time, qi, and portals, but this one was taking up a dao. 

Trade also connected people I suppose. 

I watched the area, witnessing multiple other groundhogs come by with similar daos, not as strong as this one, but budding in their own way. 

I wondered if they knew. Some beasts had daos, it wasn’t a new thing. But those beasts were rare. You’d hear about them in folktales and myths, beasts who fell in love with a human or became human themselves.

You’d also hear about men who became beasts. That was more common actually, The Dao of the Jungle appealed to a lot of humanity. I myself had mimicked insects, ripping away my emotions and desires and becoming almost machine-like in my existence. 

But this, this was a human dao and they had taken to it willingly, if unknowingly. I’d have to speak to Lin Tai about this.

Chapter 57 Penance Part 1

The man ran. 

His feet pattered against the ground with as much strength as he could muster and his qi fueled him even more. He would have flown, but that was where the monster was. 

The Unraveler. 

He was coming. He had seen the blood, seen their evil and the man had not even blinked. 

There had been no care in his eyes, no empathy, no disgust, and no judgment. Their sect, of which only a few remained, had believed him to be a great candidate. 

He was a powerful man, he would have served the sect well. That had been their desire. He seemed unaffected and willing, and so, they had shown him their domain.

But that had been a lie. All a lie. The skies shattered and the corpses of his brethren rained from the hells above. 

He ran. He even pushed on the most sacred of places, using his innate qi to push himself forward. His life for his life, yes. A strange trade, a stupid one even, but better to wither and die running than face the man above. 

The screams came, one by one, and then all as one. They mixed and turned and shrilled into the sky like a choir of suffering. They begged, they pleaded, but the man would not relent. 

Of course, he wouldn’t relent. He had seen their evils, their sins that they had made with pride, and he had not cared. 

That had been their Dao, their way of life. The Dao of Evil, the Dao of Self, and the Dao of Death, those were the central Daos of the Demonic Heart Sect. 

Each of the three leaders pursued one of these Daos and their disciples did the same. It was the Dao of Evil and the Dao of Death that fought above. Idiots. He, the leader who pursued the Dao of Self would live, he would flee.

There was a crack in the sky and one of his folk shrilled. It was the leader of the Dao of Evil. The man had a deep voice and a prideful tone. When he spoke, one could imagine it being a lion or a tiger growling in the distance. 

But now he could not even recognize it. He only knew from the flare of qi that rose up in the distance. The voice screaming now had been a high-pitched squealing and it was begging.

The man was begging for death. He was pleading for it. The cultivator of the Dao of Self would not normally risk looking back, but this time, he turned, still running but using his eyes to look up behind him. 

In the distance was a man trapped in a ball of qi, an array and he was being tormented. Outside of it was another man, watching with interest as the man within the array screamed. 

“PLEASE!!!” His brethren begged. 

The scream dug at the inside of his mind like claws scratching through steal. The observer seemed unaffected. 

There was someone there, his brother with the Dao of Death, held in another array unable to move or scream. 

But the fleeing man could see the dread on his face still, the horror and the fear. Something was happening to him, something the fleeing man did not want to meet. 

If he hadn’t known these people then he wouldn’t have cared. But he did know them. He had fought with them for eons. He had seen them strike down their fellow eighth-rank members in wrath and power. They had withstood torture from the righteous sects and slaughtered billions. They were evil, they were death, they were suffering and pain, gods among men. 

“MEEERCY!!!” 

This time the voice broke into sobbing wails and sadness left the man's lips. 

Sadness, not rage, not fury, not just suffering, but sadness. The monster who cultivated the Dao of Evil wept. 

Why? The fleeing man wondered. 

He turned, not daring to look any longer, and kept running. And though he didn’t want to know it, he felt it. He felt the two men’s lives blink away in an instant.

Just like that, two of the strongest people within this land had disappeared. Dead. Both of them. The two men who had aided him, whom he had sided with for his own selfish gain had died. 

More. 

His feet pushed even harder against the ground. Strength that even he didn’t know he had poured out of him and it was all to flee. 

And when he had run a million miles, when he thought the divide between him and that monster was wide enough, he crumbled onto his knees. He fell onto his chest, heaving with every breath, and saw the grassy fields of a land he didn’t know. 

He could feel himself dying. He could feel his innate qi withering away after he had used it. 

He was dying, he had decades, maybe a century left if he was lucky. He was an immortal but his innate qi was gone, used up in his effort to flee. 

Maybe he could recoup it through some divine treasure but the chances of that happening were-

The world held still. His qi held still. The breath would not leave his lungs.

His head was still against the grass and from there he saw it. The feet of the man who had killed his brethren. 

He had never left. He thought he had, he believed himself to be fleeing but the bodies of his people were on the ground once more. It had been an illusion. 

The monster walked up to him.

Array Master Dane, that was his name. He was at the eighth rank, the same as them and yet he had defeated them all. He could beg and plead but he knew the man wouldn’t care. He was like them in that sense, unaffected by the people around him. 

So he fought, his blade of starlight and destruction swung, aiming for the man's neck only for his technique to crumble. 

The Unraveler. That was what they called him, Dane the Unravler. He didn’t have a secret technique or a divine talent. All the man did have was his arrays, his strange little enchantments. 

But they were still too much. 

The man could somehow see through techniques. It was his mind, yes, that was what gave him strength. Array Masters needed to know about everything, didn’t they? Bits of laws collected, clumps of dao understood? That was how they worked. 

And while Dane didn’t know enough to make a divine technique, he knew enough to break them. He would tear away at his opponent's laws before they could coalesce. 

The man found himself swinging furiously, his blade full of a mixture of undoing and destruction. The Life Severing Sword Technique. It would gather the essence of destruction and decay, laws that the user would have to know first and mix them into the blade. The cut would rot and run all the way through the meridians and into the dantian, rotting the dantian through and through. 

But the technique would break before it could even touch Dane, it would unravel into nothing but mists of qi. He would taint the attack and corrupt it. 

Decay would mix with life and become age. Destruction would mix with time and become change, and then the technique would collapse. 

“Why?” He asked the man. “Why kill us? We could give you everything. We have the world at our-”

The man moved, trying to cut down at Dane from another angle, trying to surprise him. 

But he failed again.

“You’re in an illusory array,” Dane stated. “Fighting is useless.”

The man struggled nonetheless, throwing technique after technique, only for it to miss Dane entirely or for the array master to dissipate it into nothing. 

“Why?” The man asked. 

He didn’t care to know why, he was just stalling, and Dane must have known that. But the array master took a second to think about it anyway. 

“Why did you kill those people?” He asked him. 

The man thought about lying for an instant, but he knew it would do him no good. 

“I wanted to, and I could.”

Dane looked at him and nodded. 

Then the world went black and the pain began. 

Horror, horror, horror, over and over again. Pain suffered repeatedly. 

He was confused at first. He had woken up as a boy in the streets crawling through the slums of a city. He thought he escaped somehow, maybe reincarnated through sheer luck. But no, a man came and cut him up into pieces mere hours later. 

The next time he was a mother, a wife of a nobleman, and for a moment, he thought his previous life to have been a lie. He was a mother, not a cultivator, a jade beauty, not a vile villain. 

Then he saw him. The man came and forced himself upon her daughter and cut her to bits while she watched. The next time he was the daughter. The next time he was the father. The next he was the servent and after that the servent’s brother. 

Over and over, he would wake up, thinking all he had seen to be a lie. And over and over the man would come, tormenting him at every turn. He screamed and begged for mercy every time but the man wouldn’t stop, and right before his final breath, right before the end he would recognize the man.

It’s me.

His comrades, those strong men of strength and power, they hadn’t been begging Dane for mercy. 

They had been begging themselves, their past for mercy.

Chapter 58 Penance Part 2

Eventually, he started to remember. Sometimes he’d know the name of the victim and remember how they had died, how he had killed them, and how he would kill himself. That was the worst, he would try to avoid it and somehow change the past, but he would always fail. 

Always. 

Then came the wars. In one war he had killed thousands and in another millions, and he would live through those deaths in painful agonizing detail. 

At first, during those final moments of realization, he would be angry or hateful. He cursed Dane, the man who had damned him to this suffering over and over and over again. He would spit and scream and damned him with his final breath. 

Then came regret. It was slow but it was there. He regretted killing. He regretted taking unjustly. He did not have empathy of course, his Dao was far too strong for that, but he regretted being such a beast.

Then when he saw a child being ripped to pieces for the hundredth time in front of his eyes, when he wailed over the corpses of his children with the tears of a mortal man, that was when he started to hate. 

That was when his past self turned from memory to stranger. He noticed the grin on his face, the lust in his eyes, and the joy in his voice. How? How could this man find joy in such suffering? How could he do this over and over again and smile through it all?

It was as if he were killing insects as if the people didn’t matter to him at all. 

How?

That was when the hatred started. After that he did not flee, instead, he ran toward the man swinging with fury and rage. He knew he couldn’t kill him, but he had to try. 

Foreign thoughts like justice came into his head and strange things like empathy flowered in his mind. Now not only would he feel the suffering of his past victims but he would feel the suffering of those around them as well. 

He saw one of his old followers stomp a baby to death and he saw the mother scream while clenching his bloody foot and he knew. He knew what she felt. He felt what she felt. He cried for her as well as himself. 

That was when the sadness came. 

Fury, the man learned, was the armor the heart wore, and once that had failed came sorrow. 

He did not beg. He did not fight. Now, he wept. He wept at his own feet, looking that stranger in the eyes. 

But the man just smiled all the brighter as he cut him down. 

A thousand, a million, ten million. 

It didn’t matter. The pain didn’t fade or become more bearable. 

He would suffer, as he should. As he deserved to. 

Hell was the home of devils after all. 

Then he was a cultivator, one of the many eighth ranks he had killed. He waited, slumped upon the floor waiting for his past self to cut him down. 

A man stood over him, eyes blank and uncaring. 

That was strange, normally he was giddy to kill. 

But the man didn’t move and the man’s eyes were not his own. 

“Dane,” he whispered. “It’s over?”

The array master nodded and the man slumped closing his eyes as tears flowed from them. 

“You’re not going to kill yourself?” Dane asked. 

The man looked at him and shook his head. 

“I am not worthy of death. That would be far too kind a fate.”

Dane’s eyes seemed to shine at that statement. 

“Interesting,” he replied. 

“Why?” The man asked. He didn’t know why he asked. The why had stopped mattering long ago.

“I wanted to see if karmic retribution was possible for someone so evil.”

Karma. The stains souls left on each other. He knew it was real but it was a rare law to meet. Karma was one of those laws that danced between a dao and a law. It was ethereal, not physical, yet it was as real as fire or water.

“Did it work?” 

“Well your past is on your soul and every action you take is recorded by it, though I wouldn’t know if that would change once you leave this realm,” Dane shrugged. 

All of that for a shrug. All of that suffering for such useless results. The man laughed, he howled into the sky for a moment, and then he stopped. 

What should he do? Should he die? No. That would be the easy way out.

He wasn’t worthy of such a thing. 

Then what? Seek redemption? 

Not even the Buhdda could redeem him now. 

Rot? No, for him that would be easier than death. He would sit here, believing his suffering to be enough to pay for all that he had done. 

It wasn’t enough, it would never be enough. 

“Again,” he muttered. 

“What?” Dane asked. 

“Cast the array again.”

Dane obliged. 

And the man suffered once more. 

“Again.”

And he did. 

“Again.”

He’d barely spoken this time. 

He cycled through his own suffering over and over again and at one point.

The array had been changed, it was now something automatic, recycling his suffering countless times over. 

Hundreds of millions of lifetimes relived in a moment. Thousands of moments. Hundreds of days. Years. Decades. Centuries. Eons. Epochs. 

He noticed the mountains around him withering away and he saw the horizon change as the moon slowly retreated from the earth. People came sometimes, but none saw him, he was cloaked in eternal suffering. 

Every blink came with millions of lives and every moment came with regret. 

Penance. 

The stars faded away. He could see them die in the distance. 

Penance.

The land around became valleys, mountains, deserts, oceans, and then valleys again. 

Penance. 

He should have died by now. He had used up his innate qi against Dane. He should be dead by now. 

Penance.

Why wasn’t he dead?

Penance. 

The sky broke, the stars screamed, and the world was swallowed by the sun. The people of this world had moved to a new one, but he remained. 

Penance.

Why?

Penance. 

Because he must. He must suffer. That was his place. 

Penance.

The realm withered and the laws that bound the universe started to break. 

Penance.

The void swallowed him whole. The universe collapsed and reality turned to dust. But somehow, this array still persisted. Was that man truly only at the eighth rank? To have created something so powerful?

Penance. 

Oh well, it didn’t matter now. He didn’t remember that man’s name and he had long since forgotten his own. 

Penance.

All he was now was

Penance. 

Then, he was free. There wasn’t enough qi anymore. The world had broken and the array could only do the same. 

It didn’t matter. He remembered. He knew every detail, every smell, every person, and every ounce of pain he had caused. And he would never forget. 

“I will seek redemption,” the man said to the void. “I will not find it, but I will seek it nonetheless.”

Yes. He would pay Penance.

He wandered the void for some time, and though time didn’t exist here, it existed within him. He had crossed over into the tenth rank at some point. He hadn’t noticed it, he was too busy, too concerned with the memories. 

Still, he couldn’t whether the void. The lack of laws was enough to rip his body to shreds and for an instant, he wanted that. He wanted the void to take him, but that would be death, and he was unworthy of that. 

But he was unworthy of life as well. 

Penance, his soul sang. 

Yes. He would pay Penance, but how? 

Time surrounded him and with it came space. A voidwalker technique, one of his own construction. He was back. The array was gone but its nature had long since been imprinted onto his soul. 

The pain surrounded him. It protected him. Penance. Yes, that was his Dao, that was his being. 

He would suffer for his actions and he would bring suffering to those who sought to do the same. 

Penance.

He trespassed through the void, surrounded by his sins. The sins that protected him and tormented him. The sins that had given him meaning and taken it as well. 

He wondered if he could ever find mercey if he could ever be complete. He wondered if there was someone out there who could free him from this suffering. 

Not someone with power but someone with virtue, a being worthy of setting him free. 

And even if there was, was it right to seek them out?

Penance.