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

Beasts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beasts accept what is while men question it.

That is our difference.

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

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

But that had started to change here.

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

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

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

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

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

Resources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Either way, all cultivating beings coveted them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laws were power, they were strength.

And beasts coveted strength above all.

“Order! Order!” Lin Tai yelled.

All the beasts stopped arguing at once.

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

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

But Lin Tai seemed to be doing well enough.

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

And the beasts obeyed.