While in his sublime mental condition, there was nothing that could surprise Alistair. That there were two Daywalker Apes charging at him was a difference to the past, but the past, present, and future were all one. The swirling of the aeonic wheel was but one eternity. There was but one Dharma that has, is, and will be overcome with maitrī.
There were two Daywalker Apes, but they were each slower than the original. Their auras were weaker as well, and if he was looking closely, they were slightly smaller.
The solidity of the Zebra Stance rooted Alistair in place. There was Karmic merit for drawing away the kaiju from the others, represented by his “Deliverance of Justice” Badge granting him 6 free Attribute points. The apes leaped into view, snarling with untempered fury.
Alistair blocked a two-fisted slam from one of the beasts and kicked the other one back. They were still much faster than him, but had lacking technique. His reflexes could keep up with them, but his speed couldn’t.
Alistair’s forms were flawless, his martial arts embodying a stalwart defender. Because the Kai’tazake Mutra was split in three, no one of his triad of states was the truest representation of Zenaitsu Morogoni, but Tranquil Mind still shared some similarities. Coral energy covered his fists and he became a serene protector.
Yet this wasn’t enough. One second passed. Alistair tried in vain to move his limbs faster than they could go. One second was the amount of time he could hold the tide against the sea of strikes.
The Daywalker Apes were everywhere, their gangly limbs assaulting him from every direction. Their lack of technique did not matter. There were two of them and one of Alistair, and they were too fast.
Alistair took a palm to the chin. He braced with [Steel Body], but it rocked his brain. The mercurial fur warded the kaiju against his attempts to read the threads of Fate, but even then, it wouldn’t have mattered. Seeing and reacting was useless if he was too slow.
Five seconds passed, and Alistair could feel his allies approaching. They kept pummeling him, though he did his best to resist. In the refuge of Tranquil Mind he had no fear, but within his current state, he saw few ways to progress.
Then there were four. Alistair saw it happen this time. Both of the Daywalker Apes regurgitated a new one almost identical to the last. The four new beasts were weaker than the two, which was weaker than the one, now standing at only three meters tall instead of the original’s four.
“Aha!” Dev’rox announced. “I’ve just remembered. We used these Pathfinder AI-modified beasts all the time when I was trapped. It’s a corruption of a much greater beast lineage. It’s based on the Cyclic flow model of reality.”
Alistair [Dashed] backward and left Tranquil Mind, which tended to be unsuited to conversation with the unenlightened. The Daywalker Apes appeared to go dormant for a brief window after splitting, and he was too suspicious to attack in that window, for now. Also, his allies would get a chance to catch up.
“Cyclic flow?”
“I mentioned Fate and Time as models of the flow of reality previously. Those two are the most popular, but Cyclic and Chaos aren’t far behind. There are more than that, of course, but I wouldn’t know the obscure ones. Cyclic posits an Everlasting Pattern that, as the name suggests, repeats an infinite amount of times. All cultivators who can peer into a flow will find themselves struggling to use their powers against another flow user.”
Alistair thought back to the blizzard-like aura that surrounded the afterimages of George in his Karmic sight. That had to be another flow model, but if Dev’rox didn’t mention it at the time, then he probably didn’t know which one it was off a mere glance.
“I don’t.”
“Thanks.”
Alistair wondered if most cultivators at the peak tried to have one or more flows of reality at their fingertips. Or was there a reason that you shouldn’t? It felt like there weren’t that many downsides to him. There was also the question of if Karma merely interfaced with Fate and was separate to Fate, then why couldn’t Karma tap into the other flow models? Could it, and he just hadn’t learned how yet?
Those thoughts were for another time. His allies finally came.
Finally, was a harsh word considering it was only seven seconds since he got launched. Thanks to his Tier 4 [Ghost Whispers], him and Dev’rox could communicate at multiple times the normal speed of thought.
“Assume the formation? Is it a suitable enemy?” Caren asked with his [Paper Tongue]. Alistair felt his presence a few miles away. As one of the minds of the operation, he was too risky to have close to the enemy. He could hold his own with his Blood Hierocrat Subclass, but that wasn’t public knowledge. As far as Alistair knew, only he, Bartholomew, and Alfred knew Caren’s vampiric secret, and therefore Lucius, because they were family.
“Confirmed,” Alistair replied.
Within the Hall of Mathematics, William found a peculiar scroll. Hidden deep within the recesses of the tower, it gave off an almost taboo aura. The scroll described a formation called the “Imperial Phalanx,” which claimed to align one’s fighting formation to the Dao.
It was hard to believe that merely organizing one’s soldiers in a special pattern would increase their strength. But the proof was in the pudding. There were seven slots in the Imperial Phalanx. Alistair was the Captain, the vanguard at the front. Bartholomew was the Port Shield on the left, while Whimsy was the Starboard Shield of the right. Alexandra was the Bow Sword at the front, while Oliver was the Stern Sword of the rear. William was the Strategist, protected by the Stern Sword, and finally, Pharaoh was the Champion in the center.
Together, they formed a unit that was stronger than its parts. There were downsides to the Imperial Phalanx, namely that it was weak to large-scale area of effect attacks that disrupted the geometric configuration. That made it impossible to use against opponents like George Moulin.
The four Daywalker apes charged. They were still fast, but around the same speed as Alistair’s [Dash].
The two Shields activated defensive Skills. Bartholomew outstretched his hands and let the metal melt off of his skin and into an aegis carved with equations that harmonized with the Dao of Technology.
However, the metal melted not only off his skin like Alistair had seen previously, but it looked like it took off fat and muscle, leaving the Wood brother’s body as a half-deformed anatomy cadaver, missing parts of his flesh. Whatever Natural Inheritance he consumed was transforming his body from the inside out to that of a machine.
The Starboard Shield conjured liquid affinity Mana. Instead of her usual water, she combined the particles of the technological aegis into her Skill, becoming a metallic liquid. The new liquid carried the weight of two Daos and rotated around the aegis, reinforcing its protection.
Three of the Daywalker Apes collided into the shield, creating a shockwave not quite as powerful as the one created when Alistair got hit for the first time. The last one, crafty like a beast, tried jumping over.
As the Captain, Alistair moved into action. He touched the ground and sent a [Lightning of Justice] straight down into the charging beast. While it didn’t kill the kaiju, the coursing lightning judged harshly, letting Oliver as the Stern Sword fulfill his obligations.
An enormous square of darkness split open the sky. It was the largest [Otherworld Gate] Alistair had ever seen, opening a portal to an abyssal dimension only Oliver truly understood. There was something different about this one.
The portal radiated pure death in a way that Alistair thought had to be rare for a frontier Foundation. Even Alistair felt pressure from the inside of that dimension. He had never seen Oliver use this Skill personally, but he had heard of it. Oliver’s warren.
A warren was a portal to another dimension that one could draw power from, even another cultivator’s Domain. Old monsters could make a fortune selling warrens, but it didn’t have to be a Domain, you could create a warren to a special physical area or the lower planes.
An alabaster skull emerged from the warren, cloaked in black aura. The skull shot straight for the electrocuted kaiju, consuming it in one bite. Then, the skull chewed. Each chomping of its teeth was one face of infinite death, attacking the kaiju with oblivion.
The skull faded after only eight chomps. Oliver could only hold the warren open for so long. Even the minute amount of the warren’s anchor he could access was exhausting.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to kill the kaiju. Alistair could feel its life force was diminished, but it was still alive. But the Imperial Phalanx was ready. The Champion sprung into action, leaping into the air and opening his proto-Domain.
The Dao of the Lost Sands became reality in a floating sphere. From the outside, it looked like a miniature sandstorm inside of a marble, blown up. It would be more difficult for a mindless beast to escape than a cultivator of the same strength, given their lack of complexity in the Dao.
The three Daywalker Apes that remained stopped. The Imperial Phalanx moved as one, drawing upon Alistair’s reaction time to attack. This time, there was a good opportunity for a long ranged attack. Bartholomew formed his laser sword with an even faster activation period, while Alistair used another [Lightning of Justice].
The Daywalker Apes regurgitated three more of their kind without being phased at all. It was like their attacks were violating Multiversal Law. A cultivator of a higher realm might have been able to stop their reproductive process, but to them, it was inviolable. They could not be harmed while they spat each other out.
Once again, the six clones were weaker and smaller. Alistair estimated that their auras were similar to his own.
Cyclic, Alistair thought. I wonder…
They resumed their phalanx, working as one unit. It was difficult to say whether facing the six was worse than the four or the two or the one. No, Alistair revised. The six was definitely weaker than the four. The missing member dropped dead from Pharaoh’s proto-Domain as their Champion descended, though not unharmed. He was missing the majority of his Dao energy and seven of his fourteen lives, despite only taking on a fourth of the original that was already injured.
The phalanx worked as one, shoring up each other’s weaknesses. They didn’t lose any members or take serious damage, but they were also unable to kill another Daywalker Ape. Alistair couldn’t be sure of when they split, but he suspected it had to do with how much energy they output.
By engaging them, they forced them to divide every ten seconds or so. There were soon hundreds of Daywalker Apes on the battlefield, now the size of a human and weak enough that all of his generals could take them on.
The Imperial Phalanx consistently killed the ones closest, but the apes became an unstoppable tide. They just. kept. multiplying. The other problem was that the ones at the fringes started leaving their current battlefield to go searching for easier victims.
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Alistair blasted them from afar with [Lightning of Justice], but he couldn’t stop all of them. Breaking the phalanx’s formation was too risky. The People’s Legion would have to suffice, though he worried for his soldiers. In their heavily divided form, the Daywalker Apes were weaker, but not to be underestimated.
Hours passed as they held position. The Daywalkers Apes showed no sign of stopping. The People’s Legion were taking massive losses as they struggled to contain the growing carnage. None of them wanted to use powers they hadn’t shown before. It was a risky venture, given the Devil Kings were spying on them.
With days passing, there were millions of them, and millions of ape corpses stacked as high as a hill surrounding them. They were the half the size of a human, yet still ferocious and powerful enough to be a match for the average level 40. Any of the Daywalker Apes that escaped the People’s Legion’s encirclement was bound to kill hundreds if not thousands of civilians before a cultivator strong enough to stop it appeared.
Caren turned to Land Store items, ones bought for defending against the Devil Kings. They had a massive array of artillery, including thermobaric crystal bombs and spatial laceration missiles. He unleashed the military might of the Northeast Order Freehold on the hundreds of thousands of apes that descended southward from the meadow to the city proper, but even that arsenal couldn’t cover all the escapees.
“Estimate, 3,831,290,” Caren informed him. “That should be the maximum. As long as you keep it up.”
They had broken up the phalanx now that the individual threat was low. Each member was carving through the apes as fast as they could, which is what Caren was talking about. As long as the average offspring of each kaiju was larger than one, their population size would increase.
However, they grew weaker with each generation. Once they abandoned the phalanx and turned to slaughter, the percentage of each generation that survived decreased. And once they reached fifty percent killed, the horde would stop growing.
The Daywalker Apes were a mix of different generations, the ones in the middle unable to expend enough energy to reproduce. The key was killing them before they could get off any spawn, and they were weak enough that was possible.
The culling that was required to get to the 3,831,290 maximum took place over several days. Rest was for the dead. Anyone who needed a breather could get extracted temporarily by Caren’s crew, but they couldn’t afford any weakness. Stamina pills, Health pills, and Mana pills were like candy to them. They slowed down a bit, causing the real number to exceed four million.
From then on, it was merely a matter of time. They got luck in that the escaped Daywalker Apes reproduced much less. Since their division was a matter of how much energy they expended, hunting down civilians under level 40 didn’t get them excited enough.
In fact, things felt like they were going too smoothly. The People’s Legion had only lost four colonels and forty-five captains. That was going to sting, but Alistair had expected much worse from a kaiju stated to be more powerful than the xuanwu. Civilian casualties were an order of magnitude lower than the Cursed Lands’ kaiju.
As the Daywalker Apes dwindled into the hundred thousands and then the ten thousands, he pondered this incongruence. They had only a few hours left until the third kaiju and everyone was already celebrating. The remaining beasts were as weak as a level 35 cultivator, if that, as they continued to decline in strength even though their numbers were also declining.
Alistair couldn’t get Dev’rox’s words out of his head. He couldn’t get Dev’rox out of his head, for that matter, but that was a different story.
The different models of the flow of reality. Fate. Time. Cyclic. Chaos. The Daywalker Ape was a being borne or created from the Cyclic model. His Karmic eyes could not penetrate their Fate, for they rejected that concept.
But that couldn’t be all, could it? There was overlap between the four models Dev’rox told him about, or so it seemed to him. If there was Destiny in Fate, there was small “d” destiny in Cyclic. If things were bound to happen in repeats, they were predictable, following an Everlasting Pattern.
Patterns with a small “p” could be deduced through the threads of Fate. Alistair knew if he could just see a little deeper, a little further, he could figure out what was bothering him.
When one of the Daywalker Apes died, the energy it provided to the original vanished. The overall horde was permanently weakened, the new divisions not gaining in strength to compensate. That went against the nature of a cycle. Energy was not lost or gained in a cycle, but redistributed, satisfying a law of conservation.
Then what happened to the lost energy? Alistair’s eyes narrowed. By his own logic, Fate and Cyclic were closer than the looser Time and Chaos. But he needed to perceive things differently.
Alistair activated [Eyes of Truth]. The absence of evidence was often helpful to a keen eye. He didn’t focus on threads of Fate, but the Karmic web. Peering into the Karmic web wasn’t very useful in combat, which was why he never did so. It showed the connections between people understood through the lens of Karmic merit.
The immense Karmic web that connected every living thing was hard to fully fathom. Alistair’s Foundation realm mind viewed it as a spiderweb of crimson silk, spreading across all of reality.
When looking at the Daywalker Apes, he could tell something was off. Their Karma was one, which he expected. Their divisions were not true divisions. It was also cast far longer a shadow than it should have been. They had killed off 99.7% of the kaiju’s original essence.
“Shit!” Alistair exclaimed. “Pharaoh?”
But he was too far away. Plus, he had expended his proto-Domain killing thousands of the Daywalker Apes. He wasn’t in any condition. Who else had a proto-Domain? Alexandra had almost completed hers, but not quite. That was it. There still weren’t many cultivators in the world that could open a proto-Domain. That tree guy, Bark-Al, could, but he was too low-leveled. Marzhan recently acquired the ability, but she was inside of a personal trial.
“Dev’rox, will it work?” Alistair asked.
“You’re screwed if it doesn’t, so it probably does work. They’re trying to create strong soldiers, not a dead world.”
Alistair was loathe to reveal his own proto-Domain, but sacrifices had to be made. He would give the Devil Kings as little a glimpse as possible. Using his [Eyes of Truth], he identified the center of mass of the Karma. And then he waited.
The timing wasn’t as urgent as Alistair first thought. The Daywalker Apes kept splitting and splitting, and he culled them at a commensurate rate. With ten thousand left, it wasn’t the dire straits that he thought it was, but it was still too close for comfort.
Alistair called for the others to leave him alone and deal with any stragglers as he tackled the central mass alone. Ten thousand became five thousand became one thousand as he punched the Daywalker Apes into mist. {Letting of the Beast} had granted him 2 Endurance from the entire week of [Blood Hands].
When they reached a hundred in number, Alistair decided it was time. He expanded his proto-Domain.
It was as easy as tying his shoes. There was something innate about it that felt like he was becoming one with his innermost nature.
Thanks to the insight of his Spiritual Fighter’s Echo, he understood how to paint Dao energy into reality. With the Insight Vision, he had etched a portion of the blueprint into his soulcore, and his well-forged mind supplied the remaining storage. His internal space expanded, filling the world with his Mana and Dao energy, all according to his outlook.
Wherever Alistair looked, there was blood. It was almost the same as his Insight Vision, though in real life he hadn’t made it as dark and depressing. The blood flowed down from the ceiling of an invisible dome, though Alistair knew that there was no border except that of space folding in on itself.
Blood mist filled the air, churning with ghostly energy. While some of the proto-Domain was blood affinity Mana, the other was unblemished Dao energy from his Ghost Node. As his proto-Domain was unfinished, an unworthy first step of his true Domain, he didn’t have space to implement the Fist Node yet. Despite the bloodwraiths, which obviously came from ghost, the proto-Domain was split evenly between Justice and Ghost, where Justice was the oppressive force on the heart of any evildoer within.
Alistair found it likely that attacking the heart was a poor choice. Logically speaking, getting your heart swayed was one of the worst things that could happen in a fight other than death. Scratch that, most cultivators were bound to consider being converted even worse than death. At least you could die honorably in combat. Those at the peak had to have steeled hearts after millions of years of walking their path, yet Alistair couldn’t bring himself to remove that aspect of his proto-Domain. It was too central to his identity.
Alistair’s proto-Domain was on the smaller side, around the same size as a large house. But it was offensive, like Pharaoh’s, attacking one’s heart as well as the body, the Dao energy boiling those inside. The bloodwraiths descended, crashing into the Daywalker Apes and brazing them with their righteous fury.
His sinner’s lament wouldn’t be as effective on these mindless beasts as a true evildoer, but they still had accrued fell Karma. The proto-Domain quickly wiped out scores of kaiju. The cycle was complete.
What Alistair had realized was that the division was only the first part of the life cycle of the Daywalker Apes. They thought that they had been taking away the life force of the beasts with every one they killed before it could reproduce, but that energy had been stored away in the recesses of the Cyclic flow. Alistair couldn’t peer into the cycles like he could with Fate, but that was the only explanation.
Thousands upon thousands of bursts of energy tried to infiltrate Alistair’s proto-Domain from the outside. Simultaneously, the accrued Cyclic oscillations inside of Alistair’s space coalesced as the original Daywalker Ape tried to reform.
Despite not being qualified to understand the model, symbols of circularity began to appear in the sea of blood. Circles, infinity symbols, Dharmic wheels, endless knots, ouroboroi, and stranger things not found under the Earth’s sky flashed in and out of existence. Their appearance was so brief, Alistair at first wasn’t sure if they were real.
If the kaiju was allowed to complete the cycle, all was doomed. Alistair thought that the defiance of conservation was against the kaiju’s favor—he was entirely wrong. Stolen energy was converging. The cycle was structured in defiance of the Heavens, in the same way that perpetual motion machines defied the laws of thermodynamics.
The outside energy wailed upon the integrity of his proto-Domain, while the inside Daywalker Ape’s expanded. Alistair would not let his boundaries fall. Ghost and Justice worked in unison, oppressing the cycle’s renewal. He couldn’t begin to say that he understood the principles the Daywalker Ape’s abilities operated on, but that didn’t stop his Dao. Where else did Justice shine but when braving the unknown?
Alistair’s mind screamed in pain. His mental faculties held together the portions his soulcore’s blueprint could not, and the psychic backlash he received as the Daywalker Ape tore the fabric of his proto-Domain was pure agony.
Just a little longer, Dev’rox communicated with a jumbling of wordless emotion. The imp shared the burden with him. Help given and help taken. Such was the path of justice, where the ghosts of the past gave him providence for ghosts of the future.
The symbols of circularity flickered with greater frequency. It was now or never. Alistair prayed that, as a proto-Domain, his space would overrule the cyclic emergence. He believed the energies could only exist so long without a body. If the cycle couldn’t complete, it should dissipate. Should.
When his proto-Domain whittled the Daywalker Apes down to a single member, the struggle was at its zenith. While it was a pitiful display of power compared to those at the peak, Alistair imagined this kind of spiritual struggle to be what the higher realms were all about.
Alistair sought to impose his proto-Domain’s will as impermeable to the Cyclic flow. To claim the proto-Domain of a space where his laws were paramount. The Daywalker Ape sought to forever perpetuate its greedy cycle, defying the whims of a Foundation’s proto-Domain.
There was no way that he would lose. Not now. Alistair’s resoluteness was steel. He gritted his teeth and held on for what felt like an aeon. He only stopped when he felt his shoulders rocking in an unnatural motion and his neck bobbing back and forth.
Alexandra was shaking him. With her amount of Strength, it was like being in the grasp of a giant. She looked like a goddess of war, her outfit stained in the blood of the Daywalker Apes. “Stop! It’s over!”
Alistair snapped backed to reality, whereupon he fell down on account of a splitting headache. He wiped away a trickle of blood dripping out of his nostril. His mind had almost broken trying to hold the proto-Domain together. He now understood part of why nue was so effective against them.
“I did it?” Alistair asked, dropping to his knees.
“Yes,” she said. “There was a burst of energy and then nothing. The Daywalker Apes are all dead. Every one, even those super far away. I don’t know what you did, but it worked.”
“Phew,” Alistair let out. “I don’t think I could have held on much longer without destroying my mind.”
Alistair laid down on the meadow. He was not a life cultivator but the life affinity was one of of those that appealed to everyone except the deathsworn. The feeling of endless life was soothing.
The third kaiju’s ticked down like a bomb in his head. They were all exhausted from dealing with the Daywalker Apes. Alistair couldn’t handle another bout at the moment. The People’s Legion had lost thousands of members, though they had contained the kaiju damage far better than the xuanwu.
They were somewhat lucky that their kaiju was an all-or-nothing type. The lava xuanwu dealt continuous infrastructural damage and massive human casualties with its eruptions. The Daywalker Ape’s true terror would have been if it were allowed to reform.
In that case, Alistair wondered what would have happened to the world. Would the Pathfinder AI and all the sponsors allowed a brutish beast to take over the planet? He doubted even George could deal with a renewed Daywalker Ape that had stolen all of their energy.
The Northeast Order regrouped. Oliver gave Alistair a ride on one of his flying zombies. “Payback for all the times I piggybacked on you.” He couldn’t tell if payback was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe both. Even though the Necromancer was careful about not bouncing him too much, the whiplash gave him a huge headache. He had to have been seriously messed up in the brain for something minor like that to hurt, which might not have even affected a non-cultivator.
So when they returned back to the Leading Domes, Alistair munching on some [Carmela’s Happy Pies], he was rapt with attention as he looked at the Global Map.
Once again, there was utter silence as the countdown for the third kaiju broached zero. Not even the childish William dared utter a word, with everyone so exhausted from the Daywalker Ape.
Celeste was the first to announce the news, even before the map. “The third kaiju has been spotted in—”