Hell was warm and cuddly.

It was like a cloud of pillows hugging him from all directions.

Ziyou Maque, the beheaded leader of the Free Sparrow Gang, father of an annoying teenager, and all-around slumrat, couldn’t get that thought out of his head.

“But I ain’t got a head,” the man’s disembodied thought. The ghost, it, whatever thing he was right now, was gently floating in a bed of warmth and being massaged by more warmth in the shape of jelly-like bubbly light.

If he had seen the surroundings while he still had emotions, he would think it was a heaven of white clouds trapped under an ocean of translucent rainbows.

It felt so soft and comfortable that a part of his mind went to the stories of the heavenly afterlife chattered on by the various minstrels of the Faithqi cultivating sects.

A place for the good.

But Ziyou Maque was a gangster, and gangsters were the farthest from good.

So this must be hell, the realm of eternal torment sung by those same minstrels. But of hell, the minstrels would curse it to the other cultivators when their proselytization was met with scorn, when rational thinking renyao of Spirit and Origin qi would quite logically dismiss the mere possibility of the mortal world being created by some Buddha or God as mere folktales.

In the songs, hell was like the void. It was scorching, not warm.

So where was he?

A strange buoyancy constantly pushed Ziyou Maque’s body up. He had felt this way once when he was forced to eat unknown mushrooms in the Warring Twilight Forest, weeks deep into a treacherous fiend hunt. Like his soul was achieving the so-called ‘nirvana’ sung by those annoying minstrels.

Why did he keep tying everything back to minstrels?

Right... He’d wanted to be one when his mother was alive.

It was strange.

Ziyou Maque noticed that although there was a force trying to make him fly up, there seemed to also be an opposite force holding him down from below, cancelling the buoyancy out and, in effect, keeping his body in place.

“But I ain’t got a body neither,” the ghost thought. Can his body be kept in place if he didn’t have a body to be kept in place in the first place?

Mushrooms…

Come to think of it, it was the same mushroom that the fluffy fox always tagging along with Young Yung had scavenged during their disastrous first hunt.

It had tasted nice.

But afterward, even female fiends had looked beautiful to him.

Come to think of it, didn’t he break into the meridian building realm around that time too?

Weird.

Ziyou Maque’s non-body burped. He wondered if minstrels ate mushrooms.

He then looked at his body. He didn’t have eyes though. But he could ‘sense’ using his qi.

His body, it was a sphere. Round, in the shape of one of them fun footballs, but more transparent like made of glass, with strange shapes floating inside. The shapes were obscured by a circular wall of fog clinging to the inside of his glass sphere body. This wall of fog also had strange patterns etched into it.

That was his sea of consciousness, his soul boundary, and what was definitely his dao aspect shards.

Usually, he’d have to meditate quite intensely to see them.

Ziyou Maque had an epiphany. The him right now was probably just the Sea of Consciousness half of his Spirit Root covered by a globe-like membrane of strange ectoplasm. He wondered what happened to his dantian and meridian half, the corporeal body he could usually move and twist, but then remembered he’d died and gone to hell.

And he wasn’t alone. Floating in the ocean of white jelly and transparent rainbows were a host of similar spheres. Most of them would come zooming up from below and fly up way above into whatever it was that was up there.

But a few remained, held in place like him.

Maque wondered if the six-tailed white fox sitting on the sword-shaped clump of nothingness was the one holding them in place.

He then wondered if the ocean hell he was in right now was vertical.

Can oceans be vertical?

Ziyou Maque felt himself breakthrough to the next level of cultivation, the 12th stage of the body cultivation meridian building realm.

As he was thinking, an infinity seemed to have passed.

So he was quite done thinking.

He wanted to do something else. Origin qi rushing through his strange body, and he felt warm and snuggly as though embraced by his mother. The jelly-like liquid surrounding him jiggled in delight. So did he. So did the other orbs.

He’d needed this rest. The rest of death after a lifetime of struggle.

If possible, he wanted to stay here forever.

“Wonder if one of them is Ling’er,” Maque ‘looked’ at the other spheres around him. They were spinning in strange directions.

None of them looked like his daughter, though.

They were all so round.

And his daughter was shaped like a renyao, without the tail and ears…

Weird.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Maque knew she’d died. No one survives a spear through the heart at her weak cultivation levels. He would feel sad and angry if he could feel.

“Dying can’t be that bad, though. It feels so… relaxed,” Ziyou Maque thought again.

Soon, he was bored.

“Hey! Young Yung,” Ziyou Maque could see part of the ocean blob and swirl and turn into a mirror image of a bloody Ziyou Yung sitting in a cavern.

No sooner had his senses noticed something else, too. The six-tailed white fox was playing music by tapping the sword-shaped nothingness. A pulse of something gently swept past everything that existed in the oceanic hell.

With each pulse, things started to appear in the bubbly water, and he saw… writings.

Characters?

Shapes?

Tentacles?

Was the white fox a minstrel?

Maque would have been amazed if it was normal. He thought of mushrooms again.

No, he thought of that time he broke through to the meridian building realm. That’s where he’d seen these mishmash of strange shapes before, once. When his physique had ascended to the meridian building realm from the blood refining realm, he had seen illusions exactly like this.

This infinite lattice of shapes, crystals of meaning that folded into itself as far as his senses could sense.

The scrolls spoke of it, as did the tales of long-gone immortals.

As did the minstrels on the mushrooms.

For it was the Grand Dao itself, the thing beyond the veil that covered everything in its web of existence.

Sculptures of yore, twisted figurines, a tapestry of art from an unknown world. Knots of straw ropes, crowns of silver, paintings in melted glass ink. Gold markings etched into obelisks far too large to even fathom.

Beings grafted from renyao veins and fiendish bodies.

The child of a fox and an alien.

This stuff had been far less ‘impactful’ when he was breaking through. It’s so much clearer now.

These were the representations of dao principles that his mortal soul could comprehend.

Maque searched for something instinctively and soon found it.

The dao principles of earth, force, fire, and flight. Of the spear, and of the mountains.

These metaphysical ‘things’, each nestled in infinitely opposite ends of the ever-expanding Grand Dao, seemed to link together with threads of gold.

Some of these gold threads went into the image of Ziyou Yung too, but Maque ignored that.

He only looked at the threads between the dao principles. Because Maque himself had threads that connected him and them.

They exchanged letters, traded coins, and waged wars, forming in Maque’s own spherical core the Dao Aspect Shards of Earth Cracking Assault, Meteor Spear, and Mountain Lord’s Lance.

The lake of Truqi inside Maque swirled, and he realized what the jelly-like liquid in the ocean was. It was True qi!

But his thought was cut short. Because the three Dao Shards inside his glass body became one.

“By the mad heavens,” Maque thought. “I broke through.”

Dao shards no longer, they were now a full Aspect.

Maque would scratch his head if he had fingers.

He had always struggled with how to combine his three dao shards into a coherent dao aspect.

He wasn’t sect-trained nor clan-nurtured and didn’t have the scrolls, neither the masters. In fact, his dao shard of the Earth Cracking Assault was interpolated out of the Earth Cracking Fist, Earth Cracking Spear, Earth Cracking Kick, and other cheap and dubious Earth Cracking martial arts manuals that were always circulating the night bazaars since time immemorial.

It was such a common dao shard that probably most non-clan and sect-affiliated body cultivators would try to get it.

Meteor Sphere was bought in exchange for a 2nd order voidfiend core, and the Mountain Lord’s Lance was won in a duel.

Such disparate dao shards had no hopes of melding together at all.

But they did, so damn easily.

“Dao Aspect… Of the Caldera… no…” It was right there on the tip of his non-existent tongue. As he was staring at the Grand Dao, or whatever these shapes outside were, he could see a shape exactly like the Dao Aspect he now possessed.

“Dao aspect of the Pyroclastic…Calderabreaker?”

What did that mean? It sounded so fancy. Like a fox was saying it.

Inside his spherical body, the true qi moved and condensed. And sparked.

And he was in the Spark Formation Realm.

With his empowered senses, he heard a vixen giggling. There was one last pulse, one last tap of the sword. The mushrooms wore off, and his spherical body flowed down the strange, bubbly ocean of jelly-like true qi, away from the other spheres and into one of the tentacles.

No, the other spheres were moving too, each going in a separate tentacle.

They entered into the mirage image that showed Young Yung getting brushed up quite badly.

It was quite fun.

Maque slid down a gooey pipe, and fell into a pile of stained, brain-mattered splatter on the rocky floor of the cavern.

Then his emotions returned, and he forgot what he had just seen.

What remained was an intense sense of regret and longing. And rage.

***

“LING’ER!!!!!!!!!!!” A heart-wrenching scream rang out in the cavern.

No one could immediately identify the source of the voice. But one cultist was so spooked he had jumped. He looked down, and realized with horror that the scream was transmitted with nothing but qi, not vocal cords, and was emitting from the remains of a supposed-to-be-dead-and-delivered man’s brain matter stuck to his shoes.

“Monsters!” The cultist swore, cutting the harness of his shoes and kicking it away. He hit it with a void art of fire.

The shoe burnt, but the brain matter flew out of the fire, surrounded by a green and gold glow.

“Evil Spirits! Zombies!” The cultist wept, throwing void art after void art at the flying limbs and entrails that seemed to come to life and connect together to their once alive but now dead bodies.

This cultist’s scream was followed by the gurgling sound of similarly manic words coming from the mouth of another hooded cultist.

“DIE! DIE! WHY WON’T YOU DIE AND BE DELIVERED!” This particular cultist had a serrated sword. It was made from the spine bone of a great Oceanic Wanderer, forged with the hooked teeth of the same infernal Chaosfiend and blessed by the lord’s emissaries.

He had been bestowed with the powerful artefact during his Deliverance Ceremony, when his inferior yao head was replaced with one far superior, that of a Hateborn Calamityfish. Like his father, and his father before him.

The cultist was now continuously stabbing and slashing his treasured serrated sword into the body of the walking, headless corpse. The corpse in question was running around looking for its lost top.

“DIE MONSTER!” He screamed again. His head was like an upside-down squid, the tentacles being his hair. His beady eyes were overcome by fear, and the voidgrafted blood veins under his transparent skin were gushing with a million hormones filled with stress and fear.

Beside him, surrounded by his holy brothers and sisters, he tried again and again to separate the leg of the walking corpse from the torso of the sinister animation.

But his blade would just… flow through the body as though it was made of water.

Exactly like the hateful constitution of the Su Clan Heretic now cackling hysterically even while being pelted with void arts and blessed arrows.

The sound of the laughter ached the cultists' ears. It was like a wail of a banshee, his flubbery eardrums were about to pop.

“Shut up! Shut that whore up—”

A steel sabre artefact entered the Cultist's mouth and tore through the back.

“Ugh—guh.”

The headless ren body swerved the saber left, cleaving through the side of the cultist’s head into the shoulder of another.

“You… were delivered… heret—” The cultists kicked the corpse away. The blade had missed his vitals, and the wound he had, although fatal to a mortal, was just a flesh rip to a 2nd realmer like he.

His thought was filled with hatred, and longing for his home village. To die in this plagued plane was a shame, more so if in the hands of the zombies controlled by the accursed heaven seducing vixens.

“Group up!” The cultist roared, and it was echoed by the seventeen remaining 2nd realmers in the ranks.

There were less than a hundred and fifty remaining, their once proud conclave cut to three fourths of their number.

“Retreat!” The cultist swore. With Youjin Fuqiang gone, and their formal leader, the Beheaded Bow Fiend dead, there was no point entangling with these evil death-defying spectres. The mission was a bust. “We return to Moonlight Blue Void Plane. Let the natives of the plagued land deal with the rest of these monsters.”

No one objected. And while the bodies of the zombie ren were still reforming, they moved as one towards the exit Youjin Fuqiang had moved towards.

But before they made it, the wall above the exit was blasted apart. Like a cave-in, it blocked their path of retreat.

Looking back, the cultists saw the figure of Ziyou Maque, cracking his neck with tears in his eyes, glaring at them with bloodlust that more than conveyed his menacing Spark Formation Realm Cultivation.

As if everything was just a play, all other exits of the cavern collapsed too, and the vixen’s cackling echoed louder.

The cultists sighed and gripped his sword. The tentacles on his head made blub, blub sounds, an involuntary body quirk signifying fear. He really missed home now.