Chapter 66

Chin and I sat at a table drinking tea. Medin had seen us walk into the village and since it was time for lunch, she had huddled us over, along with our new guests and two freshly awoken fourth-rank guards over for lunch. The guards had freaked out at first but quickly settled into place after the girls showed up with Nai for lunch.

I was just glad Reck was sleeping. As stubborn as Chin was, his younger brother was even more hateful of cultivators than he was. Thankfully the Light Master had to sleep during the day and mostly operated at night. But his disciple was still awake and so were Chin’s grandkids.

And they weren’t passing up the chance to study ‘real cultivators.’ I had feigned insult at the term and the kids had spent five minutes telling me that it was my fault for not using secret techniques or flying on swords or something. To them, I was just the old village hermit, not a cultivator.

“So you really come from the Raging River sect? Is it wet over there? Do you have a lot of beaches? We have a pond and a lake but it’s not that deep and you have to go into the forest for a swim and lately, there are these little animals swimming there. We try to catch them but we never can because-”

Xaio Wang just sat there, confused by the girls and the children and occasionally sipping her tea while looking at everything with curiosity. I’d already given her free roam of the area, her and Cai.

I assumed she’d leave in a bit. Cai however would have no choice but to stay. I’d already sent word of the assassination attempt to every one of the sects through way of a talisman and I was fairly certain that Tai Lui wouldn’t try to kill him again, but I told the boy to stay here regardless. He was lost and the last thing he needed was to consider his future.

And I was also a little busy finding my own dao. It was maturing quickly, though I wasn’t too sure how my present state would react to it. I had seen the grander multiverse and I wouldn’t dare consider myself special, but I was rare, if not unique.

Most humans had their dao developed before making their way through the immortal gates. If existence was a forest then a dao was the path you took, trodding through with your soul and chosen way. I had just stopped walking, at least my soul had.

I had studied insect souls and managed to make my soul act the same way by turning off very specific parts of it through lack of stimulation. I had become an unfeeling robotic shadow of a man, something barely human.

But even then I had fallen, or rather Dane had fallen. The original Dane’s death was directly connected to his lack of dao. He had killed himself, sure by accident. But the willingness to risk all of that was born from an eternity’s worth of weariness.

He had grown tired.

And now, I was here.

There was evidence of daoless humans, but not many made it past the twelfth rank, much less to the thirteenth rank. I’d been meaning to ask the book about that stuff. I’d given the Library Dane’s inheritance back then, but not my own.

I was still the Array King even if someone new would get the name in the next few years, that wouldn’t take away my knowledge or abilities. And while the peacemaking array was still in the womb, it was growing and churning.

It was something new and even before it was awake, I’d gathered a heap of knowledge the Library could take.

My tail flickered. I frowned. That was also something new. One of the gifts Wukong had left me, was a malleable piece of his own qi. It wouldn’t overpower me and was useless in terms of power, or at least I believed it was. But it was a fragment of a God-Imperium making it so that anyone trying to divine me would also have to divine him.

It gave me weight, in a metaphysical sense. Sun Wukong was more than me, his impact resounding across all of reality, his qi warming into the minds of many and becoming myth and religion.

One that I didn’t particularly want.

The tail waved, seeming to know my thoughts.

“Didn’t know you were half monkey,” Chin quipped.

He was across the room and it was loud and bustling, but he knew I’d hear it.

I shrugged and sat silently, observing Cai and Xaio as they interacted with the locals. Xaio Wang seemed to be at a loss for words, getting overwhelmed by the children’s questions and then slowly answering them one by one. She had shown them a traditional bow, one hand open and palming a fist, then bowing with a straight neck and now the kids had gone off to practice it with one another.

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She still tossed a few awkward glances towards the maiden, especially when she saw Rin Wi was the one doing most of the cooking. Her eyes had almost left her head when Rin came out with several bowls full of soup and a plate of small bread.

And the food was good, no it was great. Rin Wi had been trained to cook for literal gods and even with mortal ingredients, she was making delicious food. I was a little worried about her. Her choice of dao seemed to have been made in a rush.

And the driving force behind her dao seemed weak. She had chosen to cook merely because she could, as an act of defiance against her past self. But she had stuck to it and there seemed to be genuine love for the craft. It was strange but when I asked her about it she only said one thing.

“The choice I made was arbitrary, but it was a choice that I made and to that, I must be true.”

It was a strange approach. To cook, to live to cook. But it was the only thing she had felt connected to, and you couldn’t just pick a dao. It had to be something you understood, something you desired.

So in search of a meaning, anything besides a life of servitude she had chosen cooking.

Rin WI frowned, and then her form flickered as she instantly disappeared. She had also taken to policing the area, smacking down anyone who dared to fight within the whole desert.

Many people thought they could get away with violence at the edges of the desert. Many people were met with a slap from Rin Wi. One-fourth rank had been sent flying towards the ends of the region. The woman took face-slapping to another level.

Medin, who would normally be shoveling food down my mouth specifically because she knew I had no real limit and got some sick joy from stuffing people full of food, was sitting in a corner and cradling a small child.

“Open wide,” she cooed.

Nai smiled and opened her mouth. It was a battle of two beasts. One seemed to be able to cook a village’s worth of food in an hour and the other was able to devour that food in a minute.

This was Nai's tenth plate. I was counting. I wanted to see how far this would go, considering Medin’s need to overcook and overfeed, I wanted to see if the grandmas to rule all grandmas would fail.

And by the looks of it, she had.

Medin wasn’t frowning per se but there was a tight smile of stress on her face. Each plate she had fed Nai could have made a grown man full and then some. The poor woman wouldn’t be able to ship me off with a week’s worth of food, at least not today.

Rin Wi was smart enough to not give Nai more food. The child could eat a country’s worth of food and be ready for more in an hour. Ten minutes later everyone was full, except for Medin and Nai. I eventually yanked the little monster from Medin’s hands and freed the poor woman from Nai’s bottomless stomach.

Medin seemed sad, almost ashamed at her defeat.

“She could eat three cows and still have room for more Medin. You know how it is, cultivator stuff.”

“I understand Mister Bill, but if a child is hungry, they should be fed.”

“She’s not hungry, Medin. She just likes eating.”

“But if she’s eating then she’s hungry.”

Grandma logic. Couldn’t beat it. My own grandmother had been the same, feeding me till I was round and full. I’d been a fat kid most of my life and that was mainly her doing.

It was strange. I knew a lot and I remembered everything, but my memories, Bill’s memories, shined brighter than most.

It was interesting, warm even. Everything else was remembered and cataloged like files on a computer. Dane had done his best to rip the humanity out of his life. That was why his personality had been so easily destroyed, it was never there to begin with.

Dane. He was me and I am him, but even when he was a god, an immortal beyond a mortal’s mind. In the end, he was small. I was mostly Bill, a mortal given an immortal soul.

Maybe that was why I didn’t feel so out of place here.