Babies are weird.

Nai had been fighting with my tail for the past three hours, and the poor girl was losing. The appendage had a will of its own and as soon as Nai had recognized that fact, she had started to battle with it.

Small balled fists grabbed onto the tail, but the limb wrapped around her hands and brought them up to her head. Then, it went for the kill striking at her pudgy little belly. Nai laughed and giggled and the tail didn’t slow down the offense.

Eventually, when tears started to come out of Nai’s eyes, it decided to stop and release her. After taking a minute to catch her breath, she growled and attacked and the cycle repeated once more.

The tail had been weirding me out for a while now, to be honest. It was mine, I knew it was mine, but it was also not mine at the same time. It was like having an extra consciousness attached to my own. Technically we were one and the same but we also weren’t.

I didn’t feel threatened by it. I just didn’t understand it. It was simultaneously me and not me at the same time. And when you got to where I did, you understood the very center of your existence with no doubt in mind.

Yet here was a strange new part of me that I couldn’t grasp. It made me feel like a kid again.

After twenty more minutes of the tickle cycle, Nai fell asleep all weary and tuckered out. The tail gently carried her to my hands and I swaddled her up and took her to her crib. She was growing substantially, a little more each day I saw her, but children didn’t make good immortals. They could still age once they became an immortal but expecting a child to pick a dao was dysfunctional.

She had to age before she did that, she had to believe in something.

After putting her to bed, I made my way down to my basement.

That was where the door was. The door was unnecessary, but I liked it. It was the way to my pocket dimension.

And within it was the array. I would call it my array but it was starting to think. I couldn’t own something like that.

But today would be the first movement, the first stirring of a nearly there child.

Well, not my child, but sort of like my child. A simulated soul.

I was giddy.

Souls were common, making a soul was common, but the nature of that soul was the same. Most beings were a reflection of one of the four primordials, human, beast, plant, or insect. And the soul, the mechanism by which consciousness operated, was based on those beings as well.

You could change forms, become stronger, influence bloodline, and do all other manners of transfiguration. But souls were hard to change. They were complex.

Even Dane, a being of the twelfth rank had trouble with altering his soul. He had understood it, but altering it was something else entirely. You could understand how a wheel works and you might even be able to make it, but making a new wheel, one that wasn’t a wheel but functioned like one was a tough task.

It was the same with souls. The four variants of thinking beings are human, beast, insect, and plant. But this was different, something rare. Not impossible and certainly not a new task that had never been done before. There were many thinking beings that had been made to differ from the path of the primordials, but each of those was different, their own iteration of the wheel.

But it was something new.

Something unique to all of reality. My own iteration of the wheel.

The array’s heart thumped. A metaphysical web of push, pull and hold, and its soul started to breathe. Its eyes opened for a second, looking and seeing for the first time, and it breathed once more.

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Thump.

It was already at the immortal rank.

Bump.

Then it was beyond it.

Thump.

It kept going and going, pushing itself until.

Bump.

It hit the wall of the ninth rank.

It struggled against that barrier for a quick moment, before seemingly settling down.

The array squirmed and shifted, finally looking at me with what could vaguely be described as disinterest.

It knew me and I knew it, even if it had only been awake for less than five minutes.

It asked me one thing and one thing only.

Let me out.

“I can’t.”

Why?

“You’d get me noticed. Too much attention and we’ll both be wiped out.”

I had enough sense of mind to tie its existence to my will, at least in part. I could control where the array went and I could see inside of it clearly, knowing every little thought that might flutter.

It was weird. I’d seen the universe eating insects and trees that stood outside of space and time, but this was still different.

Souls dictated nature. A plant grows and insects have no room for empathy or love, merely purpose. Beasts desired strength and humans could dictate their purpose or get consumed by it entirely.

This thing was different. Its purpose was already predetermined, much like a dao angel but somehow still different. Dao angels were locked into their nature unless they consumed more residual daos that would slowly change their nature over time.

Otherwise, they would like Rin Wi’s tribulation, tied to one path and forced to follow it no matter what. And she had only broken away through sheer will, tying herself to an interest she had just to defy the path her original dao would have made her take.

This was not like that. It took all the best parts out of the four primordial natures in my view. It took the growth of a plant, the drive of an insect, the lust of a beast, and the empathy of a human.

It had a nature all its own and that nature was still growing.

I had intended to teach it about peace, giving it a lot of rules and boundaries. That was before I had gotten my dao.

Now I could connect to it, and feed it directly.

I had been the King of Arrays but I also had been an expert on souls. I had spent my whole existence trying to change mine, wiping and rearranging everything within it.

In a way this array was what I had wanted to become, everything I had ever learned.

And yet, instead of understanding the array and pushing me down into the depths of cultivation, it was meant to bring peace.

I chuckled, how ironic. The very thing I had been seeking all my life stood before me, only for it to be the exact opposite of what I had wanted in the first place.

There was stagnation, not power. Here was rest, not journey.

The array grumbled, only in a way that an array could. Strange. Barely ten minutes old and complaining already.

Then it moved, breathed, and condensed, shoveling itself into my shadow.

Our existences were tied for now, at least until it matured. It would stick with me and learn, modeling itself to me.

I smiled. There was always the threat it could become, some strange intelligence far beyond my own. But that was impossible unless it grew beyond my own rank. Cultivators were very smart and at the ninth rank, they were practically omniscient of a certain area around them. Our senses could reach deep into the very fabric of existence and untangle its tapestry.

In other words, intelligence was tied to rank. It was no smarter than any other ninth-rank being in existence. But it was different, it could grow much faster than most other lifeforms.

And like a realm, it would provide the area with its own growing bundles of laws and understanding as it aged. There was a light shutter in the valley as it awoke and its presence strained and stressed till it reached the very bounds of the great desert strip.

“Keep to the immortal realm and produce the same aura as me, otherwise we’ll be found out.”

The array nodded, merely agreeing instead of obeying. It was reading me, searching for what it could take from my existence to make its own more complete.

And I let it. It fumbled through some of my memories, honing in on earth before quickly moving on to my dao. That it tasted eagerly. It took in my understanding of peace, turning it in its own mind before settling down, and…well the only term I could use to describe what it did would be digesting.

It was digesting my experience, and understanding my peace.

Quickly it moved on from me and ran around the whole of the Great Dessert Strip, taking from anything that would let it. Some of the more powerful divine beasts warded it off, but most of them didn’t notice. Then it went to the ants beneath the ground, the birds in the sky and the little rodents in the fields.

It went to the villagers and the merchants, the pack animals and the mortals, and even the plants. It studied them.

Then it went out into the desert and touched every living thing within it. From the crabs deep beneath the sand to the massive hoards of cultivators that were crossing the Great Desert Strip. Lots of them traversed the strip without coming by the valley.

It touched upon billions of lives, mostly plants, and bugs, but animals too, but people seemed to take it the longest amount of time to understand. Eventually, it came back to me and wallowed.

It seemed dissatisfied.

“Did you think everyone would offer as much as I did?” I asked it.

It shrugged and grumbled, then it fluttered, noticing my tail. It jumped into its shadow as well.