I stared at the puzzle in my hands.

It was a marble-like orb that was about the size of a closed fist, almost like a crystal ball, but shinier. Its surface blinked in repetitive action as I did my best to solve it.

In cultivation, there are three fundamental forces, a push, a pull, and a hold. They were called the three fundamental forces because that was how everybody started cultivation. You needed to be able to pull in qi from your surroundings, and then push it through your own internal meridians, converting it from heavenly qi into your own qi.

It was a complicated process, but in human terms, it was like converting food into energy. And arraycasting was, at its core, a mimicry of cultivation. You used those three fundamental forces to create an action. The most basic of arrays was a qi-gathering array. All you needed to do for that one was create a constant pull and a constant hold. The qi would get pulled into one area by the pulling force and held there by the holding force.

Now there was the problem of making those forces self-sustaining without the interference of a living being, but that was the first step to becoming an array master. Learn to cultivate outside of your body. You had to be able to gather an ambient pool of qi and make those fundamental forces use that as energy instead of your own qi pool. As soon as you were able to create those forces and make them self-sustaining, then you could call yourself an arraycaster.

At higher levels, things got a little more complicated of course, but there were a lot of simplistic uses for arrays that rarely went out of style. Qi was everything, and if you were able to incorporate the proper laws and Daos into your arraycasting, then anything was possible.

For example, the most basic illusion arrays functioned by manipulating light. They would pull and hold certain wavelengths of light and push out others, creating a neat little visual illusion. You could layer onto that illusion by making an array that cycled ambient qi into sound qi adding another layer of illusion. Of course, in most realms, no one used sense-based illusions anymore, as they were easy to see through with spiritual senses. But they were still used for message transmission and informational digests.

I rearranged the puzzle, changing some hold points out with some pull points. Arrays were generally designed with a purpose, but this little puzzle wasn’t. It was designed to be complicated. It contained a few Daos and laws but it wasn’t really functional. Just complicated.

The puzzle shined a golden hue as the metaphysical pieces clicked into place, and I dropped it on the table.

Arrays were small. They were about the pushes and the pulls, but they were also about the larger connections you could make through those individual actions.

When living beings cultivated for the first time, they would draw in heavenly qi and cycle it throughout their body. That drawing force was a pull and that cycling act was a combination of a hold and a push. You hold the qi within you while pushing it throughout your very being. By doing so, you reshape and remake some of that heavenly qi into your own and push out the parts that you didn’t use.

The most important part of this equation was the soul. The soul of the creature was the part responsible for changing that heavenly qi into the creature’s own qi. But, an array didn’t have a soul, at least most arrays didn’t have a soul. That was why array masters constantly gathered different bits of Daos and laws. We could take in heavenly qi, cycle them manually through those Daos and laws and create qi that held those same properties.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Hence creating an external cultivation cycle. Now technically, one external cycle could be called an array, but that would be like calling a puddle a body of water. Most arrays layered numerous cycles together to create whatever effect they desired. Mix in the proper Daos and laws and you could create an illusory array that trapped people in their nightmares or a floating island.

I waved my hand and pulled out a jade slip from my inventory. This was the closest anyone had ever gotten to an interdimensional internet. It was a transmission jade and it was designed to receive information from any realm containing a high enough level of ambient qi within it. It was enchanted with several interdimensional runes of privacy and connection.

This one was a bit of a jerry-rigged contraption. I wasn’t good with runes and enchantments. I was an array guy. And the difference was large too. If arrays were binary code then runes were third-level programming languages. They worked on the presumption that the runes would be understood by whatever object they were written on.

It was a hard concept to understand, but in a way, it was like gravity. Most universes had gravity, some didn’t. If you took an apple from a universe with gravity to a universe without gravity, then the apple would turn into something else. It would probably explode or disintegrate into pure energy, but the point was that gravity was a universal thing, not a multiversal thing. Only Qi was a multiversal thing.

Enchanting worked similarly, but instead of it being the law of gravity. You’d create a sort of artificial law that forced itself upon its respective realm. It was like a video game in a strange way. If you pressed Q in one game and it was a hotkey for a certain spell or attack, then that attack would happen. But if you suddenly went into a different game and pressed Q again, it would do something entirely different, if not nothing at all.

This was a harsh limitation, though most sects tended to love this flaw of enchanting. They would develop or purchase their own sets of runes that were known only to them and build all of their defensive enchantments and wards with them. It made inter-realm invasions almost impossible, but it also limited that set of runes to that one realm.

Now there are ways around this, but most of them were complicated and weren’t practical for runescripting. One of those was to inscribe the library of runes onto the object itself, and that was how this device worked.

The library on this device, however, had been damaged, purposely so. I needed a way of getting news from the grander multiverse without leading a direct trail back to me. Anything I left could be divined into and while divination usually had a hard time working outside of one particular realm, me leaving a trail would make it easier for them to track me.

I picked up the jade and circulated my qi through the thing. Information flashed through my mind. A library’s worth of text was shoved into my head, leaving my mind to process the mass of information. Thankfully, I was capable of processing it all.

There was nothing about me in there, which was a good thing, but there were some strange happenings from the Divine Beast Emporium. Movement of fortune, and a few indicators of internal politics division.

But there was nothing that indicated a search for me. Which would have been good news, if not for one other thing.

I pulled out Wriendler.

The sword looked normal, like a regular double-edged sword. Which was a strange thing for it to do. There had been times when it had gone quiet or into hibernation, but this wasn’t one of them. Right now, Wriendler was eating, or at least trying to eat.

There was something wrong with the sword, and the list of things it could be was short. Eldritch horrors don’t get sick. They don’t get old and they certainly don’t take this long to eat something.

Wriendler’s species of eldritch didn’t get indigestion. That was one of the reasons I had gotten it in the first place. Arrays could malfunction and when they did, the consequence could be anything from the array powering off to a universal scale explosion. But with Wriendler, I had always managed to have the blade eat up the array before it could blow up.

This sword could consume a universe and would be hungry by sundown. The only time this creature would ever struggle to eat something was when that something outclassed in every part of the world.

In other words, it had eaten something extremely valuable.