Alistair looked around, wondering if everyone heard the same words he did. Based on the reactions he was seeing, they did. Before he could even discuss the ramifications of this Marcus Auror’s message, a strong hand grabbed his torso.
There was no warning whatsoever. Not his ludicrous reactions nor his danger sense, not his smell or life force detection, not even the vibrations through Fate gave any foreknowledge him. In one moment he was standing on top of a mountain’s peak, and in the next, he was in the void.
The void gazed at Alistair, who gazed back at the infinite nothingness. It was boundless and meaningless, a darkness that superseded darkness in every corner of reality. Such desolation almost sent him mad. Faced with the void of eternity, he struggled to comprehend how any meaning could last against the face of permanent impermanence. Was this void always there? No matter what creation existed, it could not withstand this. It could not—
Then he was back to the normal world, in what looked to be like a very ordinary cottage. Rays of sunlight beamed through an open window, potted plants on the windowsill.
“The void between reality tends to affect those of great ambition more,” a wizened voice said. A voice familiar to Alistair. “An auspicious sign.”
The Lazarene Minister. His hand was wrapped around Alistair’s waist, who jumped back after realizing what had happened. Seeing as that appeared very rude, Alistair swiftly bowed as low as he could.
“My apologies, Elder… Minister. I did not sense you at all.”
The old man released a full-blown belly laugh. “You do not have to address me by my Dao name. Though you may, if you wish, in which case honorifics are unnecessary. My given name is Mo Duan.”
Elder Mo had a nearly perfect seal on his aura. Now that Alistair was looking for it, he could feel the tiniest energies emanating from the elderly man, but he couldn’t tell how strong he was at all. Since he was an elder of a sect, probably Visionary?
Despite the lack of aura, his features contained a hint of the Dao and his life force was out of the ordinary. With his venerable age, his lifeline should be almost over, yet he felt like a hundred meter grandfather tree instead.
Alistair nodded. “Elder Mo, then.” He couldn’t hold back his curiosity. “What was that?”
“The void between worlds,” the Lazarene Minister, or Elder Mo, said. “Not something for a Foundation level to ponder. Do not listen to its seduction. To secure eternity is the dream of every cultivator. If you put the void over that, you are lost.”
The weathered door of the cottage opened. Alistair had said before that Morgana or Gu Fuhao was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. But how could they compare to the goddess before him?
She was elegance defined. Her movements were one with the Dao, containing endless meaning with each step. She wore a simple white cultivator’s robe that accentuated her features more than the fanciest dress a mortal could buy.
Like the Lazarene Minister, her aura was suppressed to the point where Alistair could barely feel it, but she still stood out like a sore thumb with her Dao-touched appearance. Was she that much stronger than the elder, or was it some facet of her cultivation? A Skill, or perhaps a secret body cultivation? Alistair truly had no way of knowing.
Elder Mo bowed to the woman. “Sect Leader of the Clear Water, Loroa Di Boswann. Known throughout the Final Frontier Empire by her Dao name, the Perfect. A Visionary realm ranked within the top one thousand of the empire.”
Alistair copied the elder, bowing even lower. His refined body was super flexible, so he could almost get his head below his knees. More surprising, however, was that there was someone accompanying her. His sister.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that Evangeline was there. After all, the Clear Water Sect was both of their sponsors. He had forgotten about that since he didn’t get much time to talk to his sister these days. She was always off in the laboratory, or helping out the People’s Legion.
Why did she get picked up by the sect leader and not me, though? Alistair wondered.
“Don’t let your power get to your head,” Dev’rox snickered.
Speaking of Dev’rox, Alistair wondered how much such a vaunted cultivator could see. Dev’rox had mentioned before that a Profound realm could detect him, but what about spying in on conversation?
“Doubtful. I am within your soulcore. Visionaries aren’t powerful enough to mess with the soul such that you or I wouldn’t notice.”
Alistair found it hard to believe that the Perfect could lack, well, anything. She lived up to her name. He stopped his thoughts there. He had just met the woman, and he was saying these things? His heart steeled against the influence of a foreign Dao. His mind was calm. Tranquility in all things. He didn’t need for the ocean to drown him to understand how to master his thoughts.
Dangerous, was the word that came to mind first. She must have cultivated a Dao close to the heart. Alistair doubted her influence was something she could even completely shut off. It was just a natural consequence of her path.
“Thank you for the help you have given me, Sect Leader. I hope I can serve well as a disciple in your esteemed sect.” Alistair aimed to be as respectful as possible without sounding obsequious.
The Perfect waved her hand, and the cottage changed. Nothing moved in the physical world, yet to Alistair’s mind, it had reached another state of perfection. Things that seemed out of place—a cracked tile, a chipped painting—became pieces of a grand tapestry that were only fitting for a European-style cottage.
Thankfully, the Perfect seemed to restrict her Dao to some degree, as Alistair didn’t feel like there were any hidden temptations within the working. After an ivory throne appeared for her to sit on, and corresponding bone cathedra for the other three in the house, he wondered if she was just taking control of the space so she could shape it to her liking.
“Please, sit,” she said, her voice matching the harmonies of the most glorious concerto. “It is good to finally meet you, Alistair and Evangeline.”
There was a moment of silence after she spoke. Was he supposed to say anything there? She continued after a smile that could pacify the most bloodthirsty warrior. “If you want answers as to why the envoy of the Grand Imperator called this meeting, we have only guesses. Information is hard to come by here. The infrastructure for the universal Soulnet on your planet won’t be finished for a few years.”
“Could it have to do with the Crusade Against Usury?” Alistair asked.
The Perfect narrowed her eyes for the briefest of moments. “A likely theory. What do you know of the crusade?”
“The people complained about the corporations’ interest rates so much, the Emperor was forced to act. So he went after them?” Alistair only knew as much as the Pathfinder AI had told him, and it wasn’t that specific. “The sects and the corporations are natural allies, both distrusted by the nobility, who mostly side with the Emperor, the only Exalted realm in the empire.”
“More or less, you are correct,” the Perfect said. “However, you shall never call the sects and corporations allies within my ear. The corporations are a poison on cultivator society. If it were up to me, I would ban them empire-wide, like in Mai Atal. Many of my fellow sect leaders disagree, leading to your unfortunate perception.
“The Emperor forbade interest rates of higher than 5% on new loans, and invalidated any old loans at 7% or higher, liquidating the corporations’ accounts to give the money back to the people. The corporations, more specifically the triumvirate of the Akata, Feiyn, and Corylon have been investing in habitable planets for last ten millennia, and the Emperor seized a dozen planets from each, reducing the rents by half in some cases.”
“A dozen doesn’t sound like very many,” Alistair said, thinking of how he read somewhere that there were 187,212,308 inhabited planets in the Final Frontier Empire.
Considering the size of the observable universe, that didn’t sound like a lot, but the empire expanded via wormholes. Traveling via a spaceship from the core to the frontier would take thousands of years for even their fastest vessels. They hadn’t come even .1% close to fully expanding to every habitable planet. In that sense, they controlled less than the 50% they claimed, which only counted against other cultivator kingdoms.
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“The principle is most important,” she answered. “The principle and future tidings.”
There were no more questions after that. She didn’t say as much, but Alistair surmised. He wasn’t even an official member of their sect yet. Plus, there were the rules that prevented the sponsors from doing too much.
The cottage turned out to be one part of their little town. They had a few acres of land in what turned out to be former Pennsylvania. There were around fifty people in the town, all cultivators from the Clear Water Sect.
After Earth’s full initiation completed, they would begin to operate, trading goods with the populace and scouting potential recruits. The Final Frontier Empire had rules about how much the sects and other groups could invest on newly initiated worlds, and the attempts to circumvent those restrictions came to be called the predations.
The Lazarene Minister had explained the predations to him in their last meeting. The system for initiating new worlds had been taking place for some time, with the system of sponsors taking interesting in Prime Initiates.
While it wasn’t impossible to succeed staying within one’s planetary system, it was a hundred times as difficult. Cultivation was just as much about opportunity and resources as talent. The brightest stars could get bogged down in Foundation or Adept if they didn’t get could cultivation chambers or elixirs or Beast Rulers to fight.
The sponsorship system allowed Prime Initiates access to the entrenched powers who hoarded secrets and resources alike. It was a quid pro quo exchange, and one that didn’t really favor either party to a large extent. The ones who were left behind were the inhabitants of the Prime Initiate’s world.
The predations were what happened when larger groups bullied the new planet for resources and labor, and they came with the inherent threat of force. They could get real ugly, from what Alistair was told.
Even after the end of the initiation, the Pathfinder AI was more likely to create dungeons and Quests in the world. Resources like Natural Inheritances and build manuals spawned at higher rates, and the Dao was easier to perceive thanks to the system providing helpful hints. Chaos was known to meddle with Fate, so rich people with malignant futures often traveled to the Prime Initiates’ planets before the system could gobble up all the Chaos-touched Mana with the harvesters.
The confluence of interested parties led to violence. Entitled nobles, arrogant young sect masters, what could go wrong? Often, it wasn’t even that they targeted the populace, but regular people became collateral damage in cultivator brawls. The lives of mortals were rarely considered.
For someone like George, that wasn’t his chief concern, but the resources of the planet were still up for plunder. A united front could help prevent the worst of the piracy.
Things differed from when Atavius Meloi brought the apocalypse to the planet—they were now official citizens of the Final Frontier Empire. They had legal protections, if meager, and Karmic protection against Profound and Visionary realms who rarely committed atrocities against Foundations unless they wanted to be afflicted with enough fell Karma to spend a hundred and eight Samsaric rebirths in a sinner’s hell.
As a result, if they were going to be pushed around, it was mostly from Adepts, the second realm of cultivation. Not an unreachable goal for Alistair or his elites. If they could work together, they could help make Earth off limits for those kinds of behaviors. He also dared hope that if he rose the ranks of the Clear Water Sect quickly, they could help his home planet.
The Perfect told them to act with the utmost respect for the Grand Imperator’s manservant. Instead of a bow, they were to greet him with an imperial salute, which was like a normal military salute on Earth, except you had to keep your left hand behind your back and after the salute you tapped your fist over your heart three times.
Alistair spent the rest of the hour catching up with his sister. They were seeing each other less and less these days. He promised a family dinner with the three of them as soon as he could make it work.
The hour that Marcus Auror allotted went as slow as molasses. Near the end, he just wanted to be beamed up to whatever Sharizak was. Which turned out to be about what happened.
When it was time, a great golden light burst from him, Alexandra, and the Perfect. Alistair wanted to kneel where he stood. There was an echo of imperial might in the aura, one that chilled him to the bone. He was nowhere near qualified to understand the power struggles between Visionaries and Exalteds, but he felt that if that was a wisp of wisp of a wisp of the Emperor’s power, no one could oppose him.
The envoy chose a difference approach to when the Lazarene Minister, or Elder Mo, Alistair amended, forced open a hole in spacetime. He felt it had to be a show of power more than anything else. They were but helpless babes before the warm golden light that spoke of an eternal dynasty of omnipotent emperors.
Alistair scoffed at that. The Perfect’s beauty was alluring than that falsehood. How could the Exalted emperor of a far frontier universe have any claim to eternity, for an immortal legacy? Alistair was ignorant of the true powers of the multiverse, but even he knew this.
Even the Perfect was snatched up by the light like a helpless babe. She could obviously break it and travel herself, but to do so would be to court death. They ascended in the sky inside of the auric field, passing through solid objects without an issue.
Their flight took them above the clouds at breakneck pace, and they didn’t stop accelerating. In less than thirty seconds, he went from the inside of the cottage to in outer space before the largest satellite Alistair had ever seen.
Satellite wasn’t the right word. The orbiting structure, presumably Sharizak, was something out of a science fiction book. It was so large he couldn’t give a proper estimate. A hundred miles across? A thousand?
Sharizak was spherical, mostly made of a light gray metal. There were millions of grooves filled with glowing lights and divots and notches that all looked to serve a functional purpose. Surrounding the entire satellite was an aquamarine filter. If it was a barrier, Alistair and his compatriots flew through with an issue.
There was darkness with intermittent flashes of light as he passed through all the layers of the orbiting spaceship.
It must operate via the Dao, Alistair thought. This thing would totally be affecting our planet with its gravity otherwise.
“Astute observation, brat,” Dev’rox stated. “I’ve done some reading on frontier universes. The Final Frontier Empire has some advantage over others since they can use the blueprints of the Sublimed Machine for technological innovations. It’s much easier to copy technology than the Dao, though obviously there’s still shortcuts in a spaceship like this that rely on the Dao.”
While Alistair had gotten so busy because of the initiation, he never forgot his early curiosity of the underlying science behind the multiverse. Or should he say metaphysics? No, science was better. You could form hypotheses and test them.
There was an efficiency to cultivation, where you took the natural energy of the multiverse for yourself. The boundless Dao was filled with infinite truths and infinite paths. To understand even a small piece of the Grand Dao allowed you to influence the fabric of reality.
But that didn’t mean technology was useless. As far as Alistair understood, things like antimatter bombs and Alcubierre drives weren’t science fiction, but science fact, for factions like the Sublimed Machine. Such inventions were under the purview of the Dao of Technology.
Alistair had done some reading on the Sublimed Machine. They offered almost zero information to the frontier on their origins, purpose, or organization. What he did find was a small paragraph of their origins. They were a civilization that grew so large and advanced that they discovered the Dao scientifically. In fact, those few lines, they basically claimed to have created the Dao of Technology.
Alistair wasn’t sure that Dao fit his path, but he wasn’t against some of the principles in the slightest.
Technology represented the arc of man defying the Heavens, going against the human condition. In one interpretation, you could call it nearly identical to the orthodox path, where immortality through cultivation was paralleled against immortality through technology, and the wrath of the Heavens could be compared to entropy.
Alistair didn’t think he would incorporate the Dao of Technology, but it offered food for thought. As presumably one of the more popular Daos in a frontier subsidiary of the Sublimed Machine, he had much to learn from the masters.
The trip to the meeting took half as long as the ascent out of the Earth’s atmosphere. He landed directly on a hovering orb in the night sky.
They were in some kind of observatory chamber, from what Alistair gathered. It was enormous, twenty times the size of the largest planetarium on Earth.
Each stretch of the firmament was different sector of stars. There were cosmic phenomena that he thought he recognized, like black holes or nebulae, but then others that looked completely foreign to him.
Hundreds of white orbs floated in the darkness, not all occupied. They formed a sphere, where each orb was a varied distance away from the center orb, softly glowing and far larger than others.
There was a person on that orb, a man who sat with a regal pose. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, clean-shaven, and handsome with an aquiline nose. He wore red and gold cultivator’s robe that had more of a Roman look, accompanying that outfit with a golden laurel. There were two men who flanked him on the left and right, both floating in the air. Well, perhaps only the one to his left could be called a man. The other was giant, two-and-a-half meters tall and skinny as a noodle, with pointed ears like an elf.
That laurel made the identity of the man obvious, if it wasn’t already. Marcus Auror. He felt less powerful than the Perfect or Elder Mo, but that golden laurel made him scarier.
Alistair spotted Pharaoh and Brigid on the orbs, accompanied by their sponsors. Pharaoh had a platinum automaton shaped like a wooden puppet, whereas Brigid had a blond warrior with a saber at his side.
Corylon and Di Skoro, Alistair thought.
House Di Skoro were an upstart ducal house controlling one of the largest duchies of the Disputed Shard. They were majorly important in Shard politics, and could be said to have more influence than big players like the Akata from a local perspective, when you considered that the largest sponsors were all subdivisions of their greater party. The tall blond was likely an inner member of the Di Skoros.
Still, they could hardly compare to having the actual sect leader there for them. Alistair smiled.
There was Marzhan with her sponsor, from the Flaming Sword Sect. Sally Ryder and a representative of the Ironwater Cultivation Academy. Alistair recognized Ramesh, a top 15 ranker. Jesse was there too, with his sponsor, the Disputed Shard’s Bazaar.
Alfred, Bartholomew, and their sister, Imogen, hovered beside Mishra Satharvon. The Perfect had deigned to mention her by name, a young prodigy of the Satharvon who reached Visionary in under three thousand years, though from a side branch. She held that chip on her shoulder and was known to lash out without provocation.
There were around fifty other Earthlings there as well. Most of them were from the top 100 rankers, but not everyone. Some sponsors were going to walk away, losing their investments. Such was the risk of the Prime Initiate system.
With everyone arriving in a five second time frame, the man who sat at the center stood up.
“Welcome, my sponsors and sponsees, to Sharizak.”