202. Testing Ceremony

Alistair gave Red the rundown of the Holy Ravine and Silver Comet Sect. Despite hearing about his homeworld and even people that he knew, the bronze-skinned man remained silent.

Not even a mention of Purana of the Stratospheric Flames and the mysterious Dao History of Lisorte fazed Red. Alistair told him about the assault at Nuevo Invierno by those searching for the “key,” and how it identified himself, most likely because of the lingering threads of Fate connecting him to Master Ko Pao, the current possessor of the key back on Earth.

Alistair told all this to Red not just because of their deal. Even if he had gotten nothing out of it, he would have mentioned it anyway, because he was scared.

Master Ko Pao was on Earth. Whatever polity or organization Kadeus was a part of had shown a brazen disregard for the Final Frontier Empire. What if they sent a strike team to steal away Earth, or even summoned a massive army to invade the entire Empire?

Plus, Alistair walked the path of Justice. Lisorte was Red’s home, and even though Master Ko Pao was on Earth, Lisorte was the eventual goal of those invaders. Red had a right to know what was potentially coming.

When Alistair had finished, Red had fully sat up, tossing off the covers. His gray eyes seemed to carry the weight of the world in their shallow depths.

“Thank you,” Red said. “You do not understand the gravity of what you have told me. I will train you to the best of my ability. You have my word.”

Didn’t I have your word before? Alistair wondered, though he didn’t say that out loud.

“And I appreciate that,” Alistair said, “though I think you also owe me an answer on what exactly your mission is and who you people are. Your existence is seemingly putting my home in harm’s way. I know it’s not your fault, but still.”

“If I tell you,” Red replied, “I will be drawing you further into a dangerous thread of Fate. Though I suppose you have already been thoroughly entangled in it. Very well.”

“Deep within the multiversal core, there is a faction. An ancient power that rules from the Heart of All Creation itself. Even I dare not say its name. Names have power, and this name is beyond reckoning. Instead, they are referred to merely by their purpose and status. Therefore, they are known as the rulers of the age or the suzerains of earthly creation. Even then, it is not wise to invoke those titles loosely.

“Thirteen leylines, each containing enough Mana and Dao energy to quell the appetite of a hundred Truthseekers, flow from the Heart of All Creation. The leylines split into Quintessential Streams, and universal clusters are attached to said streams. As you may or may not know, the Final Frontier Empire, as well as the Cabal, exist on the Leyline of Carnation’s Maw, the weakest of the thirteen leylines.

“In the distant past, a Divine realm of the aforementioned faction came to the frontier. The Ikanthian HalfFather.”

Alistair’s eyes widened as the name matched what Purana had said.

“What his purpose was, we cannot say. Even the average Divine realm is but a speck of dust to the true powers of the multiverse, so perhaps it was just his divine whimsy. We may never know. He imbued three dozen worlds in different universes along the frontier with portions of his Domain and Faith. Specifically, worlds along the most southern of Quintessential Streams of Carnation’s Maw—around a hundred streams to be exact. The legend states that he buried a key in one of those worlds, and whoever holds the Key of Unsealing will be granted access to their Dao History.

“I was told that involved polities within the region searched for billions upon billions of years for the planets, but nothing ever came of it, so the vast majority just gave up. No one wants to spend that many resources on the frontier. The Cabal is one of the few exceptions. The Cabal exists close enough to the frontier expeditions are less costly, and its founding purpose is related to Chaos. Six months before the beginning of your initiation, Nenna Spindoller found me as she journeyed through the Republic of Stars to escape the Final Frontier Empire’s grasp. I impressed her enough that she brought me before her masters.

“I have never once failed to exceed expectations. It is as Nenna said, I am the greatest talent the Cabal has ever seen. A recent trinket from the Topographical Society proved my origin from those sealed worlds. At first, they believed that I was a lineal descendant of the Ikanthian HalfFather, perhaps an atavism to his ancestral roots. They tested me extensively and found otherwise.”

The smile underneath Red’s collar reached his eyes. “It turns out, I’m just built different. I have no trace of that Divine’s heritage at all. Regardless, after realizing that there was a sealed world within their grasp, the Cabal sought to take it. It should have been easy to snatch it away from the Republic of Stars, but the key was missing. The threads of Fate were perfectly aligned, the timeline acted as if the past did not exist, and the Dao said nothing. Only through calling a hefty favor from a Divine realm oracle did the Cabal discover that the Sublimed Machine moved parts of the planet into the Final Frontier Empire.

“A sealed world without the key is utterly useless. The rulers of the age’s cage is not some mere metal wire to be removed. They sent me and Nenna to infiltrate the Final Frontier Empire and find it. The Cabal is too weak to take it by force, lest we arouse more powerful factions along these streams.”

Red looked up. “And now you tell me that the key has been on your homeworld the entire time. How funny Fate can be sometimes. Though these invaders you mentioned are troubling. If they knew about the key, they are almost certainly from an involved polity. I must consult with Nenna.”

“Where is she?” Alistair asked.

“She got herself captured again so she could gain access to the observation deck of the Palatial Satellite. I don’t even have a way to contact her. She told me it could take up to five years to complete her mission. At that time, we had no idea that there were other forces involved. Damn it. Her stupid plan was to commit enough thefts with enough skill that they’d send her to the Imperial Cages and try to recruit her, allowing her to infiltrate the Emperor’s own satellite instead. She told me to lie low in the meantime and have some fun, so I decided to come here. It appears our Fates are intertwined.”

Alistair scratched his head. “So, what are you going to do?”

Red shrugged. “What can I do? I am the most talented cultivator in this universe—”

Alistair couldn’t help but roll his eyes at the sheer hubris of the red-haired man, though if he really was the most talented in the history of the Cabal, an involved polity…

“What did I tell you, brat,” Dev'rox said. “The moment I first saw him, I knew that he wasn’t suitable for a frontier universe.”

“—but I’m still an Adept. I can’t just go by myself and take it. Ancient and powerful things operate in a different realm of comprehension. Perhaps if I were to take the key, as a foreigner to the ancestry of the HalfFather, it would set off a trigger alerting every involved polity within a hundred streams. Lisorte is still in the Republic of Stars as well, even if it's directly on the border. They aren’t friendly with the FFE. I’ll bide my time. Five years is nothing in the grand scheme of the multiverse.”

That was true, yet Red said it so casually. Alistair imagined the man was around the same age as himself—twenty-three, after his birthday passed on Nuevo Invierno. Yet when they talked, it felt more like a discussion with an old monster like the Perfect than a fellow Adept realm.

“We can exchange pointers once we get into the sect. For now, I want to sleep.”

Alistair nodded and let Red doze off. A million thoughts were racing through his head, but he knew that nothing good would come of excessive rumination. He was in control of his destiny, yet not everything could be accounted for.

If the Fates of involved polities drew him into their scheme, he would simply adapt, improve, and overcome. To cultivate was to defy the Heavens, and struggle was Heaven’s mandate. There was no reward without risk.

Feeling his Domain stir, Alistair hopped into a bed and slept for the first time in many months. His body no longer required it as an Adept realm, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable.

Spirit’s Fists Overcoming Evil, he thought as he lulled himself to sleep. He remembered his future self’s fist inside his Domain, raised up in defiance of the Heavens, and smiled.

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Alistair did not have a chance to speak to Red before the testing period. Not that they had a lot to discuss—they weren’t friends, and he wasn’t about to go swapping stories like an old war buddy.

But he didn’t have a chance to speak to anyone at all. When his eyes opened, he wasn’t in his bed at all, but underwater.

Alistair was in the depths. He felt it in his bones. There was nothing but darkness, water, and a pressure so overwhelming it threatened to squash his eyes.

“Descend the depths of Stilldrop Basin,” a voice commanded, “or die.”

“Now this, this is how a sect should operate!” Dev'rox declared. “A disciple being woken up in the dead of night to be drowned under a thousand miles of ocean!”

Alistair’s keen senses detected which was down by the slightest pull of gravity in one direction. Others, he imagined, would struggle for minutes or even hours, not knowing which way to go.

The initial pressure was sudden, but survivable. He cycled his Mana to prevent the pressure from crushing him.

After a few minutes of adjusting, it wasn’t so bad. Even without cycling, he wouldn’t have died or taken a serious injury. The pressure of the water was merely very uncomfortable.

So he swam down. And down. And down. With his mind occupied with cycling, his perfect internal clock didn’t work. Was it minutes or hours, or even days?

The pressure slowly built up. It became like swimming through molasses. Scratch molasses— an old memory popped up. The time that Alistair went to a science museum, where he waded in waist-high oobleck, a non-Newtonian fluid. At the time, he had felt like he was truly never going to escape the sticky pull of the oobleck.

Each stroke of his arms, each kick of his feet as he parted water, felt like moving through that oobleck as an eight-year-old.

Alistair had lost his need to breathe, but the water pressure impressed upon his lungs, still creating that unseemly sensation of suffocation.

Who knew how many miles they were under the surface? Even Selvitari’s uppermost reaches were saturated with so much Mana they practically gleamed. Here, closer to the planetary core, it was like he was swimming through pure liquid affinity Mana.

The issue was that the liquid Mana became so thick that the density was higher outside his body than inside, an impressive feat considering Adepts were chock-full of Mana. Adepts had every cell of their body refined numerous times by the Pathfinder AI and then once by the Heavens, and still, it was less dense than these depths.

Even his cycling wasn’t enough. If he were a liquidsworn or had liquid Mana in his soulcore, it would have been slightly more manageable, but as it was, the foreign Mana started slicing his meridians, which weren’t used to the shape, color, and timbre of liquid.

Alistair considered his situation carefully.

I know good-quality build manuals can give around as many stats as my old “Deliverance of Justice” Badge, Constitution is my lowest Attribute, and some of the older candidates are Middle Adepts, but I should still be better the median in overall defenses when you consider the [Steel Body]. Despite what the text of the Skill says, it works against harsh environments as well as Skills. They only accept 500 out of a million, but there’s no way that they only want guys with high Constitution.

The Mana/water became as dense as solid steel. It was a miracle that he could even swim through it at all, lactic acid building up in his arms and legs.

Alistair refused to quit, using the Dao of the Ghost to etheralize his body. Was that cheating? He didn’t care. Cultivators lived to cheat. Survival was the only thing that mattered now.

Since his Dao energy was fully contained and lived in his Domain, the Dao Node became a more conceptual existence.

It represented the ties of his Daos to the others in the Dao Organizational Map, and as a repository for the complete meaning that his Daos contained. Therefore, his Domain interfaced with the metaphysical concepts that were his Dao Nodes to bring to bear the meaning his Nodes contained through his meridians.

Concepts undergirding Dao Node -> Domain -> Meridians  

(Conceptual Interface)   (Impact on Reality)  

That meant something like punching the evil out of someone’s body or ridiculous things of that nature became more possible the higher he climbed, as his Dao energy would become far more useful than in Foundation.

One’s creativity and compatibility with other Daos mattered far more, as it became a truly conceptual battle at realms such as Visionary.

“Nothing like a lecture to distract oneself from physical pain?” Dev'rox jabbed. “Eh?”

With the Dao of the Ghost flowing through his body, he thought that he’d aced the exam, but a sudden burst of the Dao from the depths halted him.

It was as if the ocean itself gained consciousness and refused Alistair entry, specifically. His Ghost Node was nothing compared to this monstrosity. A ghost was intangible, but the depths were everlasting. He would not pass further.

Frustrated, he withdrew his Dao energy, and the ocean returned to normal. No cheating.

Another unspecified amount of time later, Alistair was at his limit. His Stamina was running dangerously low, and his meridians were receiving too much damage to heal with Dragon’s Blood Mastery. Spiritual wounds were more difficult to mend than physical wounds at his current [Peon] stage.

“There’s obviously a trick!” Alistair raged to Dev'rox. “Tell me. You’ve figured it out, I know it.”

“And if I have? How are you meant to catch up to Red or protect your home from invaders of an involved polity if you can’t pass the test of the 19th ranked sect of the Empire?”

That shut Alistair up. What defined a cultivator in the eyes of the world?

Was it their Mana? Or their nue? It definitely wasn’t their nue.

The average cultivator called it killing intent and thought that it was the property of beasts’ roars. A person with some sense might put their spare free points into Wisdom or wear a psychic-warding defensive pendant, but that was about it.

The core of a cultivator was their Dao. To discover it, defend its meaning from the world and other cultivators, and then present it as Multiversal Law. A Truthseeker’s Dao was as true as gravity or the inevitability of death. It just was.

Such a silly tribulation like descending the Stilldrop Basin tested their physique, but its purpose had to be a test of their Dao. When screening one million candidates into 500, talent in the Dao was obviously the most important.

Which was why it was hilarious that after Alistair discovered this fact, he broke through to the end of the endless water through nothing but his physical prowess.

Alistair splashed onto solid ground, water settling into a puddle at his feet. He had never even gotten a chance to navigate the Stilldrop Basin with the Dao, as he had somehow breached even the thickest liquid affinity Mana at the bottom of the trench with just pure muscle.

Taking a breather with his hands on his knees, he didn’t need his eyes pointed up to perceive where he was. [Reality Sense] was awesome.

Alistair was at the bottom of a dimly lit arena. The almost black water of Stilldrop Basin sat a hundred feet above, suspended by an invisible barrier that rippled with faint cerulean sigils. Looking around, he saw thousands of other aspirants standing in similar states of exhaustion—some bent over, gasping for breath, others scanning the crowd with predatory focus.

No one moved an inch, and when he tried even taking one step forward, he realized why. A powerful interdiction forbade all movement in the arena. He couldn’t even move his lips to speak. Only his eyes were spared.

“Likely a Dao Command issued by a Profound or Visionary,” Dev'rox offered.

The arena was truly gargantuan. Even focusing all his effort with [Reality Sense], he found no limit. Each person seemed to be a thousand feet apart, so if thousands of people made it, the space could have stretched for dozens of miles.

Ancient stone columns inscribed with cultivation histories lined the perimeter, each depicting a past leader’s journey. The floor beneath their feet wasn't simple stone, but a mosaic of Dao-infused obsidian tiles that felt solid as the foundations of a mountain.

A tremor passed through the arena floor. The obsidian tiles flickered with internal light, and complex arrays of runes spread outward from the center like rippling water. Then, high above them, a single figure appeared on a hovering platform of jade.

He looked to be at the center—the worst place to start in a battle royale—because the figure replicated himself in every direction from his position over Alistair.

The figure was cloaked in the flowing azure robes standard to the Clear Water Sect, but these were different from those worn by the outer disciples who had guided him to his temporary dorm room. His robes undulated with actual liquid, as if the fabric itself was composed of flowing water that somehow maintained perfect form.

The cultivator let all in the arena feel the weight of his aura. Even for ten thousand Adepts spread across 300 square miles, he could have easily killed them all by flexing his aura. Instead, he just let them feel the difference in their power.

This was the terrifying aura of a bona fide Visionary. The Dao Path of the elder trickled from his aura. Violence. Nature. Struggle. Beast. His was the path of the rancorous beast that dominated the jungle. One who overjoyed in dominating weaker creatures, as the elder did just now.

“I am Elder Yan,” the figure announced, his voice carrying effortlessly despite speaking at conversational volume. “Those who stand before me have passed the first trial—navigating the Stilldrop Basin’s resistance. This is merely the beginning.”

He gestured broadly, and the obsidian tiles beneath them pulsed with deeper luminescence.

“Look around you,” Elder Yan continued. “Ten thousand young men and women of the Adept realm who wish to be admitted to my Clear Water Sect. Most of you are wastrels, arrogant nobles with little talent, or general incompetents. I should strike you down where you stand, yet our matriarch has ordered me to spare you. You shall do your own culling until five hundred remain.”

If they could talk, murmurs would have rippled through the crowd.

Constant use of [Reality Sense] on Nuevo Invierno had brought the Skill to 200/2500 Upgrade Points. Unlike most Skills, it continuously improved with every point, his accurate approximation zone extending to 1,250 feet, while his omniscience zone grew to a 33-foot radius. His Skill felt the eyes of those candidates closest to him, watching. Waiting.

“The rules are simple,” the Elder's voice cut through the growing tension. “The last five hundred remaining will be accepted as outer disciples of the Clear Water Sect. You will be removed from contention if you die or are rendered incapacitated.”

His gaze swept the arena, cold and calculating.

“Lethal methods,” he paused, letting the word hang in the air, “are therefore permitted.”

The obsidian floor beneath them suddenly cracked into countless geometric patterns, each section beginning to rise or fall at different rates, transforming the flat arena into a chaotic landscape of platforms and pits.

“The trial begins now.”

As the elder's final word echoed through the arena, Alistair felt a sudden surge of killing intent from behind him—someone had already chosen their first target.