“Okay, where do we start?” I said.

Chin sat opposite me across the table. We were outside, right by my home, with a small cup of tea in each of our hands. It was a nice windy day, the kind that would cool you off but wasn’t too chilly.

I wore a simple gray robe and Chin wore his classic sleeveless shirt and vest. His skin which used to be old and tanned now seemed just tanned. The moles and blemishes had faded and the old muscles on his arm seemed to be more defined.

His wrinkled face seemed tighter and his eyes burned brighter. He was old and withered, but he looked like a tree stuck between winter and spring, both sprouting and bound.

“At the beginning,” he replied.

“The beginning of everything?” I asked.

Chin nodded.

“Chin, I have no idea as to how existence came to be,” I replied.

Chin frowned, seeming genuinely surprised.

“You don’t?”

“No, do you think I know everything?”

“You act like you do.”’

“I know a lot,” I shrugged. “But not everything.”

“Then how do you think the universe started?” Chin asked.

“The universe?”

“Everything I guess, or whatever came before it. You talk about it sometimes and it makes no sense to me, it all seems so…vast.”

I sipped my tea for a moment. I could get that. The grander multiverse seemed so wide and vast, and it was. It was infinitely immense, more so than anything else out there.

“I guess we start at the beginning then,” I started. “Or at least what we know of it.”

“In the beginning, there was a fight. A fight amongst beings so grand and terrifying that expressing their power in words wouldn’t help you understand even the shadow of their being. But there was a fight among a myriad of creatures. Not just man, beast, insect, and tree, but other lifeforms as well. Things that lived and breathed in ways we didn’t. Life itself was eternal and spanning in its forms,” I stated.

“But in the end, only four remained. A man, a beast, an insect, and a tree. Everything else had been broken and destroyed, all meaning had been depleted into something called primordial qi.”

Chin listened, that meant nothing to him, but I could tell he was trying to make sense of it. I waited for him to ask a question, but he never did.

“Well, eventually the four primordials realized they couldn’t kill each other. They were all powerful and could do anything but kill each other and peace was forced to be had. At least that’s what most cultivators believe.”

“What..happened to them?” Chin asked.

“The primordials? They’re still around, but you can’t really go asking the strongest beings in all of existence for a history lesson. They’re not nearly as gracious as I am,” I joked.

Chin took a moment to think.

“How do you compare to them?” He finally asked.

“Oh I don’t,” I answered. “I am small and no words can elaborate on that.”

Chin frowned.

“Are they dangerous?”

“In a way, like the suns or the rain,” I replied. “They just are.”

“Why were they fighting?” Chin asked.

“Who knows?” I shrugged. “There are theories, but no one really knows the true answer.”

“What are the theories?”

“You remember the ranking numbers?”

“Yes,” Chin replied sipping some of his own tea. “You build your body, mind, and spirit up every three ranks.”

“Yes,” I replied. “But what happens at the sixth rank?”

“Immortality,” he answered.

“Yes, every third rank you face tribulation, and every sixth rank there is a change of nature. From mortal to immortal, from immortal to god. Lots of cultivators believe that the seventeenth rank isn’t the end, but rather the final barrier. They believe there is something after it, the True God rank. The eighteenth rank. They believe as one pushes into immortality at the sixth rank, and into Godhood at the twelfth, that there is a hidden boundary past God-Imperium, something only one cultivator can have.”

Chin…frowned. That was his default reaction to anything. It was one of his, ‘I’m thinking’ frowns not an ‘I'm annoyed’ frown.

“Do you believe it?” Chin finally asked me.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “There are lots of things I don’t know.”

Chin’s frown deepened as if he found that thought to be strange.

“Well… what happened after that?” He asked.

“Then came the age of the first realm. The Tree-”

“The tree!” Chin interrupted. “How does a tree fight anyways and don’t they have names? I can’t keep track of beast, man, tree, and insect. Those are things, not names.”

“It’s a magical tree,” I replied. “As for the names, those words are their names, but we can use another language's names if you want to. The Tree is Iurn, the Man Adun, the Beast Drehg and the insect is Vethien. Is that better?”

“So they have names in another language?”

“No,” I replied with a shake of my head. “Not names, all those words mean those things in that language.”

“What language is that?” Chin asked.

“The first one,” I replied.

He frowned. My answers kept leading him to questions and he didn’t like that.

“After that, they looked around and found there was almost nothing left.”

“What was left?” Chin asked.

“Pockets protected by themselves. Adun had his people, Vethien had her hive, Drehg was alone, but Iurn had the most beings. Iurn is a tree and trees grow and protect after all. Within her leaves were the remnants of a thing long gone. That is what’s called the Primordial Age.”

Chin nodded and listened, he seemed resolute on listening now and not asking any more questions.

“In those days, there were no realms, no universes, just void and chaos. And once the primordials decided on peace, things started to reemerge anew. But now existence had nothing but the primordials and a few remnant beings of the past. The four primordials form echoed throughout infinity. Think of it like a clear lake having four large stones being tossed into it, or better yet. Think of existence like a giant empty farm and the four primordials as the strongest four crops left in existence. Their qi scattered into the wind and the rest of existence started to take shape.”

I then took a sip of my tea.

“Alright Chin, listen up,” I stated. “This is going to get a bit complicated.”

Chin straightened in his bench.

“Universes are like the ground beneath your feet. They are the fabric of rules and matter that hold you up and allow you to live, yes?”

We had talked about this before, and Chin nodded, having seemed to remember it.

“Good, now back then, there weren’t any. There was only void and chaos, so all things born had to reach the ninth rank under protection and no mortals existed yet.”

“What?” Chin replied. “They were just born strong?”

“Around the fifth rank, then over a little amount of time, they would work their way into the ninth rank and be able to wander the void of the multiverse on their own.”

“I see,” Chin replied. He had questions, he wouldn’t ask them.

“In those days, men and women would pop into existence and quickly push themselves into the immortal rank. They would either be lucky enough to find stable spots of qi and forge themselves into a god or they would be viciously torn apart by the void. Only the strongest survived, and they were called the first gods.”

“Now of those first gods, there was a group who sought to make a realm. A stable base for lesser existences to take shape, and that group is known as the First Keepers. Not much is known about them, except for the fact that they, together with Iurn managed to create the first realm, Eden. Shortly after that they disbanded though and a second set of God-Imperiums took their title, these are known as the Second Keepers.”

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I sighed, this part would be hard to explain.

“Here’s the main thing about the void, it's an absolute. It doesn’t have direction or meaning but rather thin lines of connections. A realm exists by itself, in its own bubble of existence. Sort of like a book, each story is contained and finished but you can flip through the story and end up at any particular moment. You see, I tell you this happened in the past as if there is a definitive past within the void. There isn’t. There isn’t time, past, present, or future. When the primordials fought, they destroyed reality as it was entirely. It wasn’t so much destruction as it was revocation. Concepts, ideas, laws, worlds, all of them erased. To us, the world before the primordials is a fiction, like a story that got written over.”

Chin took a sip of his tea, thought, then nodded. I could see his brain working on the information. It was too much and it was unimportant, so he would remember it, but he wouldn’t bother trying to understand it.

“So the First Keepers, what they did was make a stable realm, one with its own time and space, something that could exist as a total fabric. But before that, you have to understand something called relative existence. Imagine a realm like a home in the village. Each home lies next to a road or close to it, or at the very least there are ways to get there, paths to take, landmarks to follow something.”

Chin nodded, seeming more engaged than he had ever been.

“Those roads, those landmarks, and connectors, within the grander multiverse, that would be concepts. If you pulled yourself closer to the concept of hate and pain you’d end up closer to the hells, if you pulled yourself closer to the concept of joy and virtue you’d end up near the heavens. But the First Keepers came before that. Eden, the first realm, was full of its own unique concepts. It was isolated, and so it was lost. It was meant to be stable and isolated and unlike any other realm, and more than that, it was complicated. It was like a house that was the size of a mountain built thirty miles underground, and because of that it was lost from the grander multiverse, it only exists relative to itself, nothing else.”

Chin nodded, his brain turning in whatever way it could to understand my words.

“Now, we move on to the other guys, the Second Keepers. They had a much more unique idea. They wanted to create a living realm, a lifeform so strong and powerful, that its existence would be echoed throughout the multiverse, and more than that, they wanted these realms to be connected. To have some sort of shared experience.”

“Like a village,” Chin replied.

“Exactly, they wanted to create realms that would always exist relative to each other and they did. That’s when the Keeper’s Sect was born. You have the Keeper of Time, the Keeper of Earth, the Keeper of Light, any common physical property had a Keeper of sorts. Being embodying a certain law and each of them wove into each other to create the tapestry of the first realm. There were around a thousand of them and they were all God-Imperiums. Then the first Celestial Realm was born, and that Chin, changed everything.”

“Remember how I said realms are like the ground beneath your feet?”

Chin nodded.

“Well, this realm was even bigger. Think of a house so big that the roof of a room looks like the sky and so wide that the walls look like mountains in the distance. It would be its own world. That’s a celestial realm. It was wide, it was infinite and it was a thing all its own, and more than any of that, it was alive. It produced qi and resources and power and people would kill any to have it.”

I took a sip of my tea.

“Now the First Keepers had known this, and that was why they had kept their realm a secret, but the Second Keepers had a solution all their own. They created a second Celestial Realm, one that was not under their control. And all knew that fighting over the unclaimed one would be easier than trying to take the realm the Second Keepers controlled. And that Chin, that is where the history of cultivation begins. In this realm, all the weak gathered and in this realm, all the weak fought. There were other realms, but this one still dominated them all. It was home to God-Imperiums and it had been bathed in primordial qi and God-Imperium blood. That Celestial Realm was the Realm of Imperium. To this day there is no realm more powerful or more wanted than that one. But eventually, somebody broke it.”

“Somebody broke it?” Chin asked.

“Yes, the Sage who Split the Heavens and the Hells, Sun Wukong.”

My tail perked at the name.

“The Monkey King?” Chin asked.

“The one and only,” I replied.

“I thought that was just a story,” Chin replied.

“It is,” I said with a shrug.

“A story with some truths and some lies. Now listen, we’re almost done with the boring stuff. Next comes the final layer of the Grander Multiverse, the Antithesis Edge. Remember how I said there isn’t any real substance within the void, just relations and connections?”

Chin nodded.

“Well, that’s how you navigate the multiverse. When Sun Wukong broke the Realm of Imperium, he divided it into the Heavens and the Hells. Righteous and Evil, right and wrong. Instantly both halves of the realm were pushed to the very edges of reality because relative to the Heavens, nothing exists less than the Hells and the same was true for the Hells.”

I drew a small circle on the table between us and set my cup at one edge and Chin’s cup at the opposite end.

“If my cup is everything your cup could never be, and your cup was everything my cup could never be, then all other cups exist somewhere between them, does that make sense?”

Chin nodded, slowly.

“If my cup was black and your cup was white, then any other cup would be left in between them,” I reiterated.

“What if it was a red bowl?” Chin asked.

“Well, then it wouldn’t be here. A red bowl would be Eden, the first realm of the First Keepers. It exists on its own spectrum. But since all other realms exist as children of the Realm of Imperium, they have some relation to it, even the Heavens and the Hells.”

Chin nodded again, with a little more certainty this time.

“Now there are also other realms that are antithetical to each other, the Dead Sea and the Life Fire, the land of Dreams and the Halls of Order, the Yin and the Yang, essentially. And if you’re willing to, you can navigate the multi-realm by feeling where you stand in relation to these realms at the Antithesis Edge, and that’s how people navigate around the void.”

Chin leaned back, sipped his tea, and sighed.

“I don’t get it,” he replied. “But it does seem a bit more simple now.”

“Does it?”

“Yes,” Chin replied with a nod. “No matter how vast or how large this reality may be, it’s all connected. That makes it more real.”

I understood what he was saying. It was like an ant being told of an empire. The idea that there was anything beyond the hill you occupied was strange. But when you looked at an empire and thought of it as an ant colony, then it made a little more sense.