Luxire Worse
patreon
Dao of Fuck Off Chapter 11: Running a War and Running Away
🕑 Added 2024-08-03 15:00:09 +0000 UTCDinner with Rangtu was enlightening and more than a bit revealing. She was happy to catch me up on several groundwork matters regarding existing as an Immortal Spirit, from the theory of how to weave my own path among the mortals, the explanation of why I would be unable to hide myself from mortal eyes like Heavenly and Earthly spirits could, to what I quickly realized is the origin of Face culture.
The relation Immortal Spirits have with consciousness is such that, unlike mortals, they are defined in small part by the way they are perceived. Specifically, like my Qu Mo Shi identity, they could be ‘Given a Face’ by others acknowledging them, and strengthened in that identity by further earnest acknowledgement.
Rangtu cackled heartily when I explained my guess that early interactions with Immortal Spirits had given mortals the impression that this ‘Face’ was a source of power for them as well, and had wound up creating a massive weakness for themselves by trying to emulate it.
Not being a historian, she had no idea if that was what actually happened, but she declared it her new favorite explanation for the state of things.
She also found it amusing that, even though I now could draw power from what Face Culture wanted to be, I still found it distasteful.
The discussion turned at one point to gossip of relations, which I largely took note of to compare to the mortal and semi-mortal relations and amuse her with the correlations between Immortal Spirits and the mortals they resided near. Some were strong correlations, some were inverse, most were weak. But all were funny.
And then the Wind spirit who’d confirmed with the wind administration that the paperwork Rangtu’s suggestion would create was immense, but manageable with some elbow grease and bribery, brought up the fact that Rangtu and I had a correlation as well. Namely, that from his perspective, both of us were either oblivious or skillfully pretending to be as potential courtships circled us.
Thanks in part to my calming aura as Wancan, we were both able to process that he wasn’t actually offending us, even accidentally, and allowed him to explain the ridiculous claim.
On my end he named Ling Huyin, who he insisted hadn’t stalked a target for half this long before in her life, several martial sisters who had joined me over the years and -in his eyes- had a far greater interest in being social with me than studying or cultivating, and Master Ho, who he was certain was planning any day to try to coerce me into proposing despite our pre-existing relationship.
On Rangtu’s end, he had a litany of Earthly and Heavenly spirits who visited her more often than they visited her more distinguished neighbors and whom had each found themselves a reason to do so that he insisted made more sense replaced with “thin excuse to court her.”
When she turned to me to ask if men were really so shallow, I politely put my foot in my mouth and replied that while yes, they absolutely are, the discussion up to that point indicated that if the Wind spirit was correct, each of the named spirits had wonderful taste in women.
“Oh right! That too.” the wind spirit had chimed in to break the stunned silence. “The way he flirts without trying is also part of it.”
From there the conversation swung toward concepts of relationships and how differently people viewed them, the commitments involved, and the frustrations that arise when the relationships are not clearly understood by both parties. With examples drawn from the gossip we’d been derailed from.
During which, Rangtu wound up consuming nearly my entire store of meats and booze, as made sense for a mountain dining on mortal fare. I didn’t mind at all, as she properly savored the meal, and it wasn’t like I was hurting for funds.
We’d parted with her confessing that the idea of an nonbinding intimate relationship sounded worth pursuing, to snickers from both the Wind spirit and the House spirit, who’d joined for the novelty of the meal, but largely kept to himself.
I admitted the appeal of having such a lovely woman’s company more often and promised to consider the appeal of more at length while I was away.
Then I set about drafting my end of her cunning battle suggestion’s paperwork. It was a multi-stage process to get everything sorted ahead of time, but what wasn’t with a bureaucracy?
First, I had to file for temporary Rank within each court I wished to weaponize, because my ‘rankless immortal’ status allowed me to make invitations and accept consequences for them, but it wouldn’t allow me to conscript the spirits directly into my conflicts. In order to do that, I had to be formally recognized as having the temporary position of ‘Provisional General’.
In order to be allowed that rank, not only the administrators, but someone of superior rank had to sign off on it, for each Earthly court I wished to mobilize. That part, Rangtu assured me, would be trivial.
Then each spirit I wanted to conscript had to be formally conscripted. Traditionally this was done by just demanding their obedience as a general, but my methods called for each of them to submit their own volunteer paperwork, get approval, and present themselves to me with their token of assignment.
Then I had to create talismans that bore my seal as provisionary general and held explicit orders to be obeyed, as opposed to my normal methods.
Then I had to distribute the talismans, along with any standing orders, and file them as military orders, allowing the spirits to hold onto them and act on them under appropriate conditions.
All while accepting full consequences for anything that happened to any of my subordinates during the war that I was specifically aiming to be away from.
No pressure.
When I’d finished drafting my requests for temporary Rank to the myriad courts, I turned in for the night, as sleep helps my thoughts despite not being strictly necessary, and awoke to my drafts missing.
Asking each of my servants if they had seen anything caused them to tremble despite knowing that I knew they were not stupid enough to touch my work. Working with me for a measly few years wasn’t going to overcome the completely justified fear of cultivator ire, after all.
Then, as the mortals hadn’t seen anything since the feast that had confirmed to them that I was truly beyond their ken, I hung up my invitation to appear and was greeted by a small blob of what appeared to be ink bowing before me.
“Forgive me, Moshui.” it began. “I failed to ask if you wished to file your papers yourself, and took it upon myself to deliver them to the administrators you addressed them to, as you gave indication of wishing to have the process completed expediently.”
“Ah! Okay!” I sighed in relief. “My concern was over not having been informed of what happened, not anger at you for helping out.”
“I deeply apologize for my negligence!”
“A simple oversight when you are otherwise correctly intuiting how to be helpful is nothing to debase yourself over, my friend.” I cut it off. “That is what mortals call a learning curve. And now you know to leave a memo on the desk if you make such an intuition again, and I know to invite you to present yourself to offer your aid if I have cause to ask it.”
Little shimmers approximating tearful eyes pointed at me. “It would be my honor to attend you, Moshui!”
“If it will not interfere with your other duties and you help me file whatever paperwork is required, I suspect I’d be happy to have such an eager attendant.” I chuckled. “Just make sure the terms of the arrangement are clear. I’m a bit of a stickler for that.”
“Of course, Moshui! I’ll spend the day with one of Shuixing’s attendants getting everything sorted out.”
“Sounds like a plan. Here, let me pen you and whoever else needs to speak to me about it an invitation to appear later so that you only need to wait until I’m alone instead of waiting for me to post the wider invitation. Have you a name?”
“I do not.”
“Alright. I’ll likely give you one so I have something to call you, so go ahead and check for paperwork regarding that too.” I smiled as I wrote a much narrower invitation for it and any administration staff that needed my direct involvement to appear while I was at my writing desk.
It seemed appropriate, given the thing’s nature.
It accepted the permission seal graciously and folded in on itself to vanish and be about the task of finding the paperwork it needed, and I gathered up my open invitation, reassured the mortals that the matter had been clarified properly, and headed off to the Pavilion.
If this all worked out and Raka and I both survived, I’d have to thank him profusely for the insight again. I might just manage to kill him with blood pressure by telling him it was his fault I was able to make proper contact with the spirits of the world.
I arrived to see about half the squad sparring with each other. It was actually kind of impressive. Kesa had accosted a Soul Core Spire disciple stirring up trouble early in the war and, when the punk refused to back down, had declared that the Spire brat wasn’t worth wasting my time with, and managed to wear him down enough that he retreated despite his victory.
This started a pattern of enemies who recognized that they were not my equal coming in and challenging ‘my’ disciples for significantly less prestige than I was personally worth.
When my crew started winning without caveat, the prestige of beating them went up enough that at any time the two medics we had on hand were flushed with practice themselves.
All without actually bothering me directly. I still shared pointers with them about how I could see their styles having room to improve, of course. But most of my time was spent pissing off people by smugly hiding behind the City Lord’s implicit threat to impose sanctions against the first sect to throw a proper threat at me, because said threat would need to be stronger than him, and that would constitute an act of war against the city.
Sweet heavens do I love technicalities.
The morning was thus spent giving pointers to my peers as they sparred and trying not to think too hard about the idea that sister Fu was improving so fast out of a misguided effort to be worthy of courting me.
Because that would just be self-defeating. That level of dedication was neatly within the ‘obsession’ category, and thus neatly beyond my interest in relationships.
After they dispersed for lunch, I went to the forge that the pavilion had graciously set aside for my use and found Master Ho waiting for me, looking positively radiant despite her trained neutral expression.
It took me a moment to realize that it was a literal radiance. Her shen, specifically, was brighter.
“Disciple is overjoyed to see Master’s good fortune!” I bowed and considered whether a celebratory meal was in order for her having escaped her restriction.
“Ha!” she barked. “A single glance! Here I thought I was being subtle about it!”
There really was no polite answer for that, so I chose the shameless one. “Disciple’s eyes have been said to see things mortal men cannot. Your subtlety is not impugned in the slightest, Master.”
“Don’t worry about it. Here, a show of my gratitude.” She pulled out a sheathed blade. “For setting me on the right track to resolving it.”
Alarms started sounding, and I could see the trap clearly. Ho marriage rites included crafting a piece of their specialty during the months leading up to the wedding and gifting it to their spouse.
Having had no-one of note around for the past several months, me openly carrying a new blade while her cultivation increased for the first time in at least a century would absolutely convince her family that we were wed. Likely enraging them even more than I had by revealing their incompetence.
And as my Master, she had the standing to insist that I carry it openly and make sure that they gather that misimpression. They would assume that she’d selected me explicitly because I was scheduled to die as soon as the Fist and Spire finally buckled under the weight of the war, and thus free her from the obligations that they imagined were her objection to marriage, preventing her need to explain the truth of the situation or the fact that she’d successfully wed herself.
“You’ve elected to keep them separate, then?” I ventured a guess at her ploy with a resigned sigh.
“Indeed.” she revealed a fiendish grin as she insistently gestured for me to take the blade. “And, as you’ve noted, my family’s best efforts to end you are drops in the lake for you.”
“So they are, thus far.” I dutifully accepted her trap and marvelled at how it thrummed with power. “I appreciate your effort to keep the task of surviving balanced, however.”
“Draw it. Run your qi along it.” she insisted with a proud smile.
I did so and stared as it melded almost flawlessly with not just the essence of my Fei Jiao face, but with Qu Mo Shi.
“You named it?” I gaped. Properly naming a weapon -rather, crafting a weapon and its name as a deliberate process- was a technique that so few smiths had the skill to manage that the Fang apprentices were convinced that it was a mythical technique.
“Jinghua Feng Ren. Yes.” she answered with all the humility I displayed on a daily basis.
Several more things clicked into place, not the least of which that she expected me to be fighting more demonic forces before I died.
“Ah, no wonder I couldn’t place the schemers for that.” I muttered as I continued to marvel at her handiwork. Then I felt my eyes widen. “You want them to disown you now that they’ve made that decision.”
“That too.” she admitted. “It will also help fend off any questions about why I stab future suitors if you die.”
I failed to follow for a moment, eliciting a chuckle.
“You set a high bar at everything you do. My future stabbing victims will accept that a lot more easily than my complete disinterest.”
I nodded. It was still an additional layer of drama that I didn’t really want caught up in, but the compensation for it was awe inspiring and the results weren’t strictly objectionable.
“And if I manage to survive?”
“We can put up appearances if you wish, but nothing binding has happened.” she shrugged and stepped away. “And I will still stab you if you suggest that it should.”
“I’m not possessed of that particular insanity.” I assured her. “Disciple...”
I reconsidered my word choice. If her ploy required appearances, then declaring the master/disciple relationship to still be in place would be a hole in it.
“I thank you deeply for the blade, fellow smith.”
She smirked. “Go ahead and call me Yin. It’ll piss my family off faster.”
“Very well, Yin. Thank you for the sword, I’ll likely make great use of it.”
She stepped out and I chuckled at how close the Wind spirit had come in his estimation while missing the mark.
---
“Shame we’re ending this today.” Yang Zhao grinned eagerly as we looked out upon the blighted mountains of the Red Fist sect.
“They’re that much better a fight than our peers, then?” I quipped.
“That much more lethal!” he laughed. “Bastards have laid me out half a dozen times! I finally owe our medics the respect I make everyone else give them!”
“Let’s hope our peers can entertain you better without restrictions, then.” I grinned, eliciting howling laughter.
Two months had passed since I received Yin’s gift, and the frenzy of activity had only been getting more and more intense with each day.
From her family almost literally self-destructing over whether to disown her and kill us both themselves or to calm down and try to avoid ‘my’ ploy that I’d ‘obviously’ cooked up to punish them for their attempt at betraying the Sect Master, to the administrators and generals of the Earthly courts very politely coming in and specifying what bribes I needed to provide for my ploy to be approved, to the ink spirit - now named Wuhen, to his great amusement - gaining what he described as an ‘incomparable’ mobility increase so that he could handle the bulk of my paperwork deliveries for me, to the fact that once I was done cleaning the mountains in front of us, I’d very temporarily be one of the highest ranking spirits in the land for the duration of the civil war by virtue of breadth of command.
And the nights with Rangtu, of course. I owed her my confidence that I’d survive to flee. Not to mention the confidence that I could properly exorcize entire mountains.
In fact, today’s marching orders were for me to lead the way, exorcizing as I could, and for the rest of the mobilized forces -a reasonable mix of each faction, skewed toward my allies- to intercept enemies so I could work.
I’d proposed the idea myself after refining a variation of my Flowing Dragon Realm for the purpose of taking both ki and qi and using them to fuel the exorcism art that I learned from Wind Governor Zhengfen.
His was better at area effect than the one I’d devised off of it, after all.
To best manage this, I was dressed in formal invitations to spirits of each court to provide energy that they had to spare layered over top of my robes, as well as a staff with writs of authority to exorcize from several administrators and court rulers who were elated that I was willing to stand against demonic energy.
It was actually worrying how quickly the writs were assembled. I was assured that taking on this task did not obligate me to anything further during a lunch discussion, and the writs were in Wuhen’s hands that evening.
“Everyone’s ready, Guang!” Yin called out. “Master Kong should be engaging the Spire master any minute now.”
“Wonderful!” I hopped down with brother Yang and took my place at the head of the assembled force.
Then I intoned my replacement for a normal exorcist’s prayer.
“Hear my call, Hear my command! I am Immortal Guang Qu Mo Shi!
Where my feet fall today shall be cleansed as new earth!
Where my breath flows today shall be cleansed as fresh breeze!
No stream or pool my eye falls on shall harbor demonic taint this day!
No plant along my path today shall bear the poison of demons!
Where I pass, the world is made pure again!”
Raising my staff, writs of authority rising as if declaring my validity to everyone, I felt my flesh shift slightly as my artificial Exorcism Aura flowed out of my soul, gathering volunteered energy and stabilizing it.
Then, path for the day set, I started walking.
“Well?” Yin’s voice rang out behind me, revealing that the display had stunned my peers. “Now you know he is a god! Follow in the plan with confidence!”
I felt my still-weakest ‘face’ strengthen as the assembled force fell into place behind me, drawing the faintest hint of a wry smile to my otherwise firmly determined face.
Reaching the foot of the Fist mountains, I felt resistance from the faint demonic qi that had infested them, and as I continued moving, I felt my Qu Mo Shi face strengthening further, and could feel the awe of my peers that I wasn’t bluffing.
And then I felt the terror of someone else that I wasn’t bluffing.
“Enemies have detected us!” I declared, despite only being several dozen meters up the mountain.
“Excellent!” brother Yang and others of his family cheered as some of the others were looking around trying to detect the enemy.
They didn’t need to look for long, as cultivators capable of flight rose from the higher peaks and bore down on us.
“Two and one! Intercept!” Yin yelled, and charged upward, followed beneath by two lesser disciples as other Silver and Gold core disciples copied her, each with their own support pair.
I kept walking with the rest of the landbound force behind me and only spared a little attention to note how ecstatic Master was to be able to cross blades now that the promise of growth was returned to her.
“Hell,” brother Yang commented. “Now I know why Uncle Laba calls her ‘Dancing Rage’. No wonder you improved so much under her.”
I shot him an approving smirk as we continued upward.
Half an hour later, the ground forces were finally able to come within range and the landbound Yangs were off without a command, followed by longsuffering medics who were trained in extricating them from the bloodshed.
Leaving only two Gold Core Elders calmly keeping pace with me to offer a measure of defense against the Jade Core Master of the Fist, if he decided that I was a higher priority than joining combat against Master Kong.
As I reached the first peak, I felt the deep gratitude of the Shanshen as it offered what it could spare to my aura as I started running down the other side to blitz as much of the tainted territory as I could before the enemy sect master showed himself.
After all, now that everyone else was occupied, there was no point in holding back the purifying wave I now embodied.
I was halfway up the third mountain when he finally made the decision that Master Kong could wait and a massive blood-qi fist formed above us.
The Elders both threw up barriers, one of a massive lotus of light, the other a denying palm, and I drew Jinghua Feng Ren, now tassled with a writ of invitation to Wind spirits who wished to empower my strikes, and fired a purifying Air Slash as the fist descended.
The fist, gouged by my strike, failed to break the barriers, but both Elders buckled under it’s weight.
As they took up defensive stances, a crimson skinned man with a hideously distorted face calmly stood above us and sneered.
“An exorcist. How low the Fang have stooped to pretend superiority to us.”
I grinned. “You are mistaken in your vision! The Fang is here at My behest!”
The Elders, having been informed that I would say whatever I needed to in order to throw him off his game, still balked that I’d claim that level of authority.
“You expect me to fall for such a base lie, exorcist?”
“Who provoked your disciple into beginning this war?” I countered. “Who dealt the killing and purifying blow to him to destroy your veneer of invincibility? Who inspired Kong to stand upon a war footing in the first place?”
He started to sneer, but then caught the Elders exchanging looks of shock and fell for it.
“That’s right!” I laughed. “Every step of the way, I’ve guided the Fang to where they would support me in destroying you!”
His composure cracked and we were treated to a scowl. “No matter, then. Die!”
A pair of purification blast talismans were in the air and activating as the second fist started forming, weakening it enough that the Elders were able to block it without collapsing.
“Wily Rabbit time.” I announced with a grin and started running. The Elders, even all the Elders that had been deployed here combined, weren’t a proper match for the Master of the Fist, and we all knew it.
But as I’d been demonstrating for decades, one didn’t have to be a match for an enemy to defeat them. One only needed to wear them down by making them waste more effort than you did in the same proportion that they were your superior in matters of strength.
So as I started my run, the Elders split up and readied disruption techniques to wear down the man that none of us could compete fairly with.
A third fist formed above me and I saw a strike from my left rise to meet it and swerved left at full speed, barely escaping the crater shockwave thanks to the destabilization weakening it on the side I ran through.
A fourth formed, and the other Elder’s strike from my right saved my hide as I ran right and made it far enough that the mountain itself blocked his line of sight as I cackled like a dead man.
An easy thing to do, given the circumstances.
The wannabe demon repositioned so that he could see me rushing along his territory, deleting his blighting claim as I went, and the sky above him darkened with his qi as his dread Demonic Realm technique clawed its way across the area.
Lesser demonic cultivators relied on the miasma. He was strong enough to force the matter more directly.
Provided he was allowed to focus. Which both Elders made profoundly difficult by firing upon him with Light and Water techniques that boggled my mind in sheer might.
The partially formed hellscape faltered, but didn’t collapse as he snarled and turned his attention to one of the Elders, at which point I fired a trio of Wind Blades at him to do my part in keeping him from killing any of us.
The first two disintegrated to uselessness, purification nigh useless against his Realm’s pure demonic Qi, but the third was just a normal attack that caught him off guard and spoiled his aim from surprise that it reached him more than the scuffing of his robes.
“How long do you expect your cheap tricks to save you, Immortal?” he taunted as he swatted one of the Elders’ attacks out of the sky.
“Are you really sure you want my mouth running?” I laughed as I dashed across the barren mountainside. “That’s a good way to be eaten by your hubris!”
In truth, there was hardly anything I could say that would meaningfully impact his self-control. Especially not compared to the implication that I was toying with him instead of barely keeping my ass alive.
After all, today’s strategy was just to keep him busy long enough for Master Kong to finish his much more straightforward fight with the Spire master while wearing him out a little, and then to finish the purification work that would pay the bribes that had been demanded of me for my paperwork.
Instinct honed by assassins saw me flinging a purification blast before my senses registered the rain of demonic needles, sparing me from being murdered outright by them, but I still looked like a hedgehog as I kept moving and internally swearing.
Not that it wasn’t a lifesaving matter that my faux aura was purifying them down to nothing, but that would consume my limited reserve of energy in a way I really didn’t want to spend it.
“I see,” the jackass snarled behind me. “Any move strong enough to harm you is slow enough to disrupt. Any move swift enough to hit you is too weak to overcome your purification. Clever, for an exposed spirit.”
Killing intent alarms screamed through my head and my recently reforged and renamed Flowing Spirit Path rippled into being and I slid right as hard as I could, only to be thrown through the air by something slamming into the space my foot should have landed like a meteorite.
“However, you overlooked the matter that you are pathetically weak, and even an amateur’s Meteor Blow is enough to kill you.”
“Oh? I did?” I bluffed with a face-splitting grin. “Or did I want you to debase yourself by admitting your demonic arts aren’t good enough?”
Seeing his scowl darken as we briefly locked eyes, it occurred to me that pissing off an old monster who was not only free to, but actively trying to kill me was about as valid as enraging a noble by calling out their manners as far as ‘causes of death’ go.
Then I flung myself backwards as more demon darts started flying at me and resumed my mad dash for survival.
Hearing the Elders’ techniques harrying the monster as I ran gave me a bit of confidence that I was doing more than wasting my energy. After all, the more energy he spent trying to kill me and the more minor damage the Elders could whittle into him, the better chances Master Kong would have when he got here.
Reaching the tipping point on cleansing the diffused demonic qi in the mountain, I cackled as the shanshen started circulating its energy to stabilize itself and allow me to draw fire away from it.
A deep growl emanated from the sect master and another of his signature techniques started forming, causing both Elders to frantically throw everything that would reach him in time as I hopped on a jagged outcropping and prayed to myself that my answer for it would work.
The Ravenous Demon Blood Dragon technique was one that everyone feared with complete justification. Enough so that I bothered to remember its name, even. Formed of Blood and Demonic qi and given a superficial mind so the technique itself could adapt to its target’s movements, it was well accepted that the only answer to it was to kill the user or meet it with a similarly overwhelming technique.
Neither of which were available tactics, for evident reasons.
So I readied my sword and my Flowing Spirit Path as I watched the kilometer-long dragon of energy form. My terror, instead of causing my face to fall, locked me into a nearly rictus grin that the Fist Master clearly took as a taunt.
One advantage that the Flowing Dragon Realm had that I’d sacrificed was the way it filled out an entire space, allowing the user to shift and slide freely without planning out their motions. As the Dragon technique bore down on me, I counted that a fair sacrifice for the extended range I’d gotten in return.
Its jaws opened wide and I slid to the side and down its length, Jinghua Feng Ren coated in nigh-futile purification winds as it scraped against the outer layer of the technique as I traversed the 100 meters I could cover in the same instant it crashed into the outcropping.
Was it a beast that I could wear down with damage? No.
Was it a technique I could theoretically destabilize using the same methods? Absolutely.
Running down the mountain as it recovered and came at me again, I was struck by the fact that I might wind up demonizing the guy just by being hard to kill as his anger started feeling more palpable.
The jaws once again came within arm’s reach and I repeated my audacity on the other side, leaving the faintest of scratches in the qi-form of its scales before continuing my run.
“You cannot escape forever, Immortal!” he roared as he swatted another Light Tiger out of the sky.
“Who’s escaping?” I laughed. “I’m working here! You’re just trying to slow me down!”
Fortunately, while he could defend himself from the Elders with frustrating ease, he could not utilize any of his more worrying techniques while his Dragon was chasing me, so I only had to worry about zigging and zagging properly to navigate the land that I was purifying while not being eaten. The Elders could keep themselves safe from his available means, even if they couldn’t properly harm him.
Naturally, I made a point to pause my run in front of each of the buildings atop the mountains, causing the Dragon to smash them as I sidestepped and gouged a little more off it. Not because it actually mattered, but because it was funny to me. And when running for my life, keeping morale up was crucial to keeping running.
Incidentally, the similar destruction of Array anchors made the resistance I was feeling from the demonic qi lessen, and I had to shake my head at the obviousness of demonic sects reinforcing their best weapon and defense. And at the recklessness of making a technique that took up so much power and combat focus that it lowered a Jade Core’s available might to mid Gold Core, and not making an emergency termination feature.
Because that was the only real ‘weakness’ of the Ravenous Demon Blood Dragon. The user designated a target and the technique would chase them to the ends of the earth if it needed to, but it couldn’t be recalled until it had slain at least the first target.
So as long as my decades of practice keeping ahead of my death remained sufficient to outsmart a particularly persistent beast, the Fist Master was offensively crippled. And even if he had the wits left to realize that I was using his technique against him, he couldn’t stop me without closing to melee and holding me still.
And if my theory was correct, managing to wear it down enough that it collapsed from the twin gouges on its sides meant that he’d be without that power for at least a day.
If I died, however, the dragon would then wreck our entire invasion force with ease, simply because it was that much more powerful than anything we could present, and I was the only one with half my expertise at dodging. Which I’d thought would have been a non-issue, but the damn thing was adapting to my timing and making last-moment swerves that had me sucking my teeth dry as I barely got past them.
But I kept going, the skin of my teeth and the hair of my chin protesting the abrasion, driving the dragon into whatever I could to buy me precious fractions of seconds to find something new to slam it into.
Then the moment I was dreading came, and the volunteered energy for my exorcism started running dry, forcing me to count the mountains left to clean and being relieved that my frenzied run had made it onto the second to last one.
Fei Jiao, indeed.
I maneuvered to the top, where a pavilion was seated, and felt the reserves finish draining as the dragon leveled the building, leaving me with only my own qi to handle the last mountain.
The same qi that I’d been spending for the past few hours to keep me alive and whittle at the technique chasing me all across the mountain range.
My confidence faltered for a single breath, and my speed did as well. The fangs that had chased me relentlessly bore down again, and I accepted that I’d fallen short of my task.
Spite drove me to fling my last dozen purification blast talismans at it even though I knew it wouldn’t help. Any little help I could lend to the people who were about to die because I failed as a shield was something, after all.
And honestly, just fuck this stupid ass dragon.
The pure white of my blasts was joined by a massive golden blur and I was suddenly staring at clear skies as the abruptly headless dragon broke apart into swiftly dispersing qi while I stared dumbly.
“Guang! My boy!” Sect Master Kong clapped me on the shoulder as I started catching up to what happened. “I feared I’d been delayed too long by those Spire bastards, but you actually did it!”
“Sect Master has impeccable timing.” I answered without trusting myself to bow and remain on my feet. Instead I pulled out a qi recovery pill now that I had time to process it. “Disciple cannot thank you enough for your arrival.”
“Ha! I should be thanking you for surviving so much longer than we planned for! As a mere Stone-” he paused and stared at me. “How did you step into Stone Core without provoking a tribulation?”
“Heaven and its servants have no dominion left over me.” I answered while trying to figure out when I’d taken that step. “Even my agreement to purify the mountains is simply an arrangement of mutual opportunity.”
“Ah,” he nodded before starting to laugh. “So even our mightiest displays of defiance are truly nothing to your path!”
“Indeed. Though it is a bit of a shame. Sharing tea with the administrators and rulers under Heaven is wonderful, but not having the cause to share a discussion with Heaven itself is a sadness.”
“With your audacity, Guang, I have no doubt you’ll find new cause just to confound us all!”
Scanning the mountains, he finally picked out where the Fist Master was and nodded grimly. “I will kill the demon, rest assured of that. If I do not survive the process, please promise me you’ll treat the sect kindly.”
“Sect Master is too confident in my own survival. The most I can promise is that I shan’t treat it cruelly.” Cunning jerk, trying to bind me with my own word at the last opportunity.
He sighed and accepted the substitution before donning a grim face and taking off for the final deciding fight of the war.
And likely the first of our next, frankly.
I, meanwhile, began the trudge down the mountain, toward the final one of the domain.
It was kind of silly, really. Exorcizing the mountains while demonic qi was still being produced. Cruel spirits would arise from this range for decades, at least, just from the unpurified deaths of the demonic cultivators. Hell, the death of the master would probably invite a proper demon to manifest and attempt to conquer or destroy the region.
But, as Shegong Maori’s messenger explained, the difference was between ‘new corruption’ that could be fought and purged by Earthly means without objection from the bureaucracy, and ‘established’ corruption that Earthly courts were explicitly forbidden from engaging with to prevent its spread.
So once I finished prying out the old stuff, there would be a period of several months where the Earthly courts could -with extreme care, because the spread issue was real- clean up at the edges of the blighted lands while the reigning bureaucrats caught up on the paperwork of the purification and the recorruption.
A small victory, but a worthwhile one. Which contributed heavily to the sheer magnitude of support I’d received. Enough that I only needed to provide the raw qi for the last mountain’s Shanshen to be able to survive the cycling process.
A cycling process that they were only allowed to attempt with demonic cultivators so close because, in my Command at the outset, I demanded that they succeed.
Something I was allowed to do as an Immortal Exorcist, apparently. Not without consequence, sure. I’d spend centuries being tortured if the Hell Realm technique, for instance, caused one of the recovering shanshen to succumb and start forcibly spreading it. But Maori’s messengers had all provided me writs of assurance that they had measures in place to prevent that today, as a concession during negotiations that I had adamantly insisted on.
I reached the junction of the mountains and prepared myself mentally. Everyone of threat was occupied. Everyone who’d come to kill me once the first threats were dead had agreed to let me finish cleansing the mountain. I could do this. Maybe not the next part, but I could do this.
The shanshen made itself known about a third of the way up, thanking me in faint flickers of shen as I climbed.
“Hey, an exorcist has got to exorcize, y’know?” I chuckled at it. “Good for the body, good for the soul.”
It seemed to chuckle and signalled to the side, which I took to be a request for me to walk somewhere either easier to circulate or similarly useful to the task at hand, so I obliged and followed the signal.
Reaching an outcropping, I felt relief like an itch or a cramping tension point was finally addressed and had to chuckle. “Happy to help, mighty Shanshen.”
It motioned me to three more similar crux points of its surface before showing me a cave and bidding me enter.
“I cannot thank you enough, Qu Mo Shi!” it spoke almost as soon as I was inside. “Not just for myself, but for all my brethren here.”
“I am honored by your gratitude, but should you be speaking yet? I would hate to see your health fail now.”
“Further in, I’ve sealed most of my poison with a technique I stole from the demonic cultivators. Giving me a little leeway and having the worst of it in one place. Now that you’ve cleared those chakras for me, I can help you finish up swiftly enough to escape. I hope.”
I grinned and dashed down into the cave. “I like the way you think, my friend!”
In the chamber it guided me to, I found a massive chunk of Spirit Stone, easily 100,000 pieces worth in volume alone, oozing demonic qi.
I stared in bafflement for a moment at the how and the why before it clicked.
“Turning the stone into a vessel by exploiting demonic qi’s consumptive nature! Clever!”
“Exactly. Clear it up enough, and the rest that’s plaguing me should move toward it for cleansing. Freeing me to work at it as well.”
I nodded at the sense it made and stepped forward so that my purification enveloped the stone and swallowed another pill. This was going to be much more intense, but much faster than just walking over the surface.
The demonic qi within the stone was dense enough that even sitting and putting my full attention on the exorcizing I was only able to wear away about a millimeter a minute. However, true to the shanshen’s prediction, it was only about twenty minutes before the cleansed shell of the stone and the technique being used on it started drawing diffused demonic qi from the rest of the mountain, which had it being cleansed to nothingness as it tried to enter my aura.
Another ten minutes and the shanshen spoke up. “Excellent! I can finish up if you need to flee. There was a massive clash a moment ago, so I fear the battle is done.”
“The sooner you’re completely cleared, the better my allies’ chances of making my flight successful. I’ll help until Wuhen can file your exorcism and then be on my way.”
“I understand. I’ll direct it all toward you while I work, then you can take the stone.”
“You won’t need it?”
“Not at all, I actually hate using the technique, and cleaning the stone myself would take centuries.”
“Then I’ll thank you for the gift and the understanding.” I grinned. It may only be a massive spirit stone, but it was still a massive spirit stone. I was bound to be able to find a use for it later.
Another twenty minutes and two more qi recovery pills as the flow of demonic qi was accelerated by the mountain’s ki, and Wuhen appeared, out of breath, and offered up a stack of writs.
I accepted them and felt the strangest sensation of True Authority fill my being and flow outward, presumably legitimizing the orders I’d spent the last month and a half giving out to the Earthly spirits that signed on with my ploy.
“Wonderful, thank you Wuhen!” I grinned and stood. “And you, again, my mountain friend. I’ll get this stone out of your way and be about my escape.”
“Come by again sometime!” the shanshen laughed, tone revealing exhaustion “I could use pointers on growing things again after so long!”
“Sure thing! I’ll bring some seeds I think you’ll like!” I answered as I sucked the massive stone into one of my backup spatial rings where the demonic qi wouldn’t impact anything else and started running again.
One never gets lucky without trying, after all.
---
Sect Elder Raka Shetou had been having a good day.
The war that had disrupted the peace of the land was finally ending. The Sect Master and the upstart behind it had agreed to nearly suicidal tasks in the name of ending it. He had a detailed list of everyone that needed to be executed to bring the sect into proper harmony.
Sure, boorishly fighting and killing Silver Spire Elders was a distasteful necessity, but it went well enough. A whispered doubt amplifying their already dissonant techniques into as much useless noise, and their famous curses faltered against him. Another whisper and their false strength faltered as well.
The reinforcements that they called on from the island sects they ruled over were irksome, but after dealing with Guang for so long, the fools who needed taught how to spell death were a welcome breath of mundanity.
Sect Master Kong and his closest allies faced off against Spire Sect Master Yuni and were stymied by the latter’s clever use of the Ho traitors’ information for a full three hours. During which time, the conspicuous absence of Fist Master Fennu indicated that Guang was likely earning himself a slow and painful death.
Yuni finally fell, and Kong chose not to delay long enough for his supporters to recover before rushing off, leaving the last of cleaning up of the Spire to the assembled Elders.
Raka arranged for his old friend Tong to be in charge of sorting out the corpses, slaves, and treasure once the enemy Elders were all dead, and set off with the remaining Fang Elders to clean up the messes at the Red Fist.
Upon arriving, he’d thought his good day was going to be pleasantly better, as they arrived just in time to watch the Fist Master activate a suicide technique while Master Kong, visibly exhausted, tried to protect the rest of the Fang forces instead of himself.
A nod to Elder Ling She, and everything looked to be going correctly.
And then it wasn’t.
Their ambush of their exhausted peers went off flawlessly, blades and poisons striking true. And then the poisons were extracted by an unseen force. Like the poison itself refused to kill its victims.
Battle was joined for the civil war, and Raka’s calm composure was tested to an extreme as the light tried to play tricks on him, making sure strikes look guarded and ready guards look shaky. The winds he stood upon shifted underfoot, giving him the illusion that he was being attacked from angles reserved for the Ling.
Glancing around the battlefield, he watched his allies and subordinates making blunders that were far beneath them. The exhausted, half-dead disciples and Elders that should have been falling like cattle were surviving with lucky slips and-
The stone under one disciple rolled, spoiling his finishing blow on another.
Raka scowled, and the fool he’d been fighting froze in justified terror.
“I don’t have time for you.” Raka announced. “Ling! Where is Guang?”
“Last sighting was atop that mountain, heading to the north!” Ling pointed as his opponent evaded a liver strike. “My daughter is tracking him!”
“Good. He needs to die first.” Raka nodded and flew off, ignoring the protests of the man he’d been fighting.
A scan of the mountain revealed none of Guang’s energy, but he did detect the Ling Heiress and moved to intercept her.
“The world itself is hiding his path.” she announced as he arrived. “But I’m reasonably sure he’s gone this way.”
“Lead. I’ll deal with the spirits. You can even have his head.”
Guang was not going to survive the day and lead the earth itself to defend his impudent nonsense. Not if Raka had anything to say about it.
Comments
Xodarap4
Hot damn I was not expecting a earth and cultivator war effort against the demons especially goading the Fist into chasing him. Guess Demonic Influence rotted his brain though seeing cultivator corruption being avoided by Heaven so they don't spread it accidentally due to possible spirit techniques in favor of quarantine of spiritual corruption that they have paperwork and contingencies for is interesting
