Dan stood over the man who was covered in the stench of blood, yet didn’t have a single speck of the stuff on him.
The demon wrinkled his nose. ‘Xianxia logic.’ He muttered to himself.
He tilted his head as he considered the possibilities. It was probably some kind of metaphor for the act of killing people staining the killer, personified by the man’s qi, soul, body, or karma being actually physically contaminated by murder. Dan frowned as he considered, that’s what he would put money on, but it wasn’t what he knew.
It was more or less equally possible that bloodshed itself just released an aura that lasted for however long, or even that the man was simply running a technique that allowed him to make the blood of his enemies flow out faster or prevented a simple instinctive technique that most all cultivators did that Dan liked to call ‘Qi stemming’, that is stemming blood via qi, not the act of stemming qi.
That was usually called things like ‘acupuncture’, ‘gentle fist’, ‘suppression field’, or ‘qi sealing talisman’, depending on how the concept was applied.
Once again, Dan was reminded his nature as the feeling came back. It happened rarely, it felt as if someone had crossed the feeling of a back spasm with the growing anxiety of thinking you might have left the stove on at home.
But that wasn’t an exact metaphor, it felt like he was in pain, it felt like he was paralyzed, and it felt like there was a dread in his stomach, but there wasn’t. You couldn’t just ignore those things, either not in good conscious or without great effort. Dan could will away the feeling with a thought, it didn’t actually hurt him, and Dan knew that not knowing everything in the multiverse probably wouldn’t directly lead to a horrific fate.
Though, the feeling was there for a reason, and the fact that he didn’t know why only made the feeling all the more-
Dan was interrupted as the shroud of shadow qi grew stronger as he struggled to his hands and knees.
‘I wonder what I can say to this asshole to get him to fuck off…’ Dan thought to himself, taking the time to flick his hand outwards and pushing the three downed thugs into an adjacent room.
Unlike what some might think of Dan, he didn’t like solving his problems with violence, every problem had an optimal solution, and fucking shit up was rarely the optimal solution.
And equally as important, he could let this psycho go, he was more a product of culture than injustice, taking away the need for the conflict, that is, stabilizing the situation inside Earthly Empire, would likely stop him and most people like him.
Whether the dude himself would be okay, Dan didn’t know. Whether ‘magical’ people experienced syndromes such as depression and ptsd, Dan didn’t know, and could only promote mental heath care down the line in response to such concerns. It’s a problem he wished he could help directly, but he didn’t start the issue, and there was nothing he could do to stop all violence in general, At least not now.
Dan could do some research, but any proper research with moral ethics intact would require so much time and effort, not that immoral research wouldn’t, but with the whole intimidation factor of immoral research, many people would just go along with your demands out of fear.
Dan titled his head as he considered. ‘Of course, the problem isn’t feasibility, using fucked methods defeats the purpose of doing good… But I know there are a few ways of creating simulations of reality, if those can be trusted…’
The demon actually started rocking back and forth on his own feet as he considered the implications. ‘Ah, but that brings us to the age old question of if a simulated person’s misery is as important as a ‘real’ persons. Not really a pointless ethical question anymore when you can actually go out and do-’
Dan, in his fit of restlessness inspired by mind-wandering tangent and new-ish instincts, actually looked down at the cultivator he was here to fight.
‘Ah.’ Was all Dan got off before survival instincts Dan didn’t even know he had instantly dissolved his body and warped his body of personified knowledge a hundred chi above the compound.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
As Dan took another ‘glance’ at the waves of elemental qi radiating from below him, he unconsciously backed off another 400 chi.
‘How in the world did I let that get by my senses?!’
Huge amounts of shadow aspected qi surged from and into the compound, and Dan couldn’t even fault it for wasting qi, as Dan watched the shadow given form sent out seemingly absorbed energy, qi, the elements, something, and flung itself back into the growing mass of darkness.
Strands of shadow qi merged and clumped constantly, with impurities being expelled with each pulse, the elemental became darker and darker each second.A consciousness buried in the qi roiled in fits of cognizance and oblivion.
Dan, the knowledge demon that he was, realized what was happening as he watched, ‘That’s no shadow cultivator! That man had a darkness elemental sealed inside of him!’
Dan, for perhaps the first time in this life, felt fear. All thoughts of fighting the thing disappeared from the demon’s mind.
He had to run, get away from the force of nature that was undoubtedly about to rage with the power of several human masters, but as Dan was considering his options, he attention was captured by Mistvale, the smallish town sitting some five li away from the criminal compound, and the only thing of note within several dozen li.
In the space of a few milliseconds, Dan looked from the town to the compound several times.
‘Everything that thing does could hurt my immaterial form!’
‘People are in danger.’
‘That thing is stronger than me! I don’t know how much stronger, but if that’s the level of a core formation cultivator, I’m fucked in the long run anyway!’
‘People are in danger.’
‘Inherent stealth, inherent qi absorption, inherent corruption abilities, inherent resistance to chaos!’
‘People are in danger.’
‘People are in danger down there, too.’
Dan had to put up an instinctive barrier ward around his self to protect himself from the grasping darkness as he appeared before the core of radiant energy.
Dan did his best. His utmost peak, a level he hadn’t yet shown in this lifetime.
Forgoing the normal pleasantries, Dan formed a fleshly metallic abomination of an arm sprouting from and rooting into the ground. The body/robot horror appendage was over 8 chi long and glowed with a variety of qi aspects and enchantments to meant to maximize thrust and mass.
With a swing that could tear through reinforced steel like a handgun could tear through a sheet of A4 paper, the clawed hand impacted into the center mass of the conglomerate of darkness energies.
Safely inside the muffling presence of the darkness, Dan let loose.
A level of qi that was comparable to a flamethrower throwing nuclear fire, the chaotic energies welled up withing the darkness.
What was Dan thinking while wielding enough power too simply plough through the entirety of Mistvale?
‘I hope it’s enough.’ Dan prayed. When the chaos energy within the darkness reached critical mass, a point where Dan would have no control over the demonic qi if he waited any longer, he willed the power to change into directional momentum.
And by all that is good, when someone tells demonic power to change, it does.
As Dan stared out the still shattering and spontaneous combusting wall that surrounded the hole he created, he realized he couldn’t sense the darkness qi in the slightest, despite it theoretically being enough to sense from thousands of li away.
But that was no matter, the elemental had his qi in it, and as a knowledge demon, he knew.
Dan was following behind the force of nature thundering through the sky several dozen li above ground in an instant.
Dan considered the location he was at and he trajectory of the elemental, and gritted his metaphorical teeth. The elemental was likely to collide with a local mountain near the location of a few sects.
Dan was already weaving a complex formation of glyphs using his utmost qi generation rate before he could even consider the pros and cons of dipping and letting the cultivators deal with this.
The risk of high casualties was far to large, Dan would rather have not have that on his consciousness when he died, even if it caused him to die much sooner.
And so the self-propelling, self-repairing force-ward array was born.
Dan slammed it into the entity, it cracked into pieces, and the elemental was thrown a couple degrees off course. And so, feeling a fatigue that Dan didn’t even know he could feel, the array collided and reformed dozens of times.
Eventually, however, as the elemental finally reached the outskirts of Spiritual Wings province, a series of woods, canyons, and small mountains overtaken by wilderness due to the strong spirit beasts inhabiting the place and general lack of value in the land, the elemental crashed through a tree, which caused a collision at an inopportune time, breaking the array instead of the ward.
As Dan watched the waking elemental crashing into the sides of a gorgeous canyon, the demon, couldn’t help but marvel at how neat of a place he picked to die. The elemental hadn’t stopped growing in power during the entire ordeal, and Dan would have bet that this place would have been a total tourist attraction in his old life.
Although Dan himself had given up, demon’s existences are far more resilient than anyone, even the demons, give them credit for. Before he even knew what was happening, Dan was attempting something he didn’t even know he could do.
A plethora of knowledge cloned itself onto some of Dan’s qi, which then divorced itself from his being, before Dan instinctively jettisoned it off into low orbit.
‘Huh,’ Dan wondered to himself, ‘why did I do that? It’s not like I can undergo mitosis or be revived by that…’
Dan sat there, puzzling his decision in exhaustion for a moment, then two, then…
‘That was rude, little demon.’
‘...Fuck.’