As it turned out, I might've been giving the man too little credit. Barbarian woodsman he might be, but Esorem was terrifyingly good at it. He stalked through the forest like a predator born to it - in utter silence, with utter precision - every step bringing him a little closer to his goal, and his absolutely inevitable death.

 Mastery of the Dao of Hunting means precisely nothing when your prey can wield the force of his very Origin against the laws of reality, you see.

 It's pretty pointless. Imagine you are a bacteria metabolizing sugar into lactic acid. It's what you do, bitch! Then one day, a silent green ocean comes forward with inexorable might, and kills you and all your relatives down to the last speck. Unstoppable force, you cannot resist - the idiot whose mouth you were living in just used mouthwash.

 Can not oppose.

 It's like that.

 So, I waited for Esorem to die.

 Ten minutes later, when he found the sage, he failed to. Somehow, he managed to remain hidden, even from the transnatural senses of the Transcendent who was now only ten meters away.

 Things proceeded like that for awhile, as my incredulity slowly grew, until, finally, the bastard stood in a clearing, as Esorem watched.

 Then... things got a bit odd.

For a moment, the night was utterly normal. Then, a point of light appeared about three meters up in the air, and fluidly sliced down, drawing a crack of anbaric Worldlight in the air, shining like the heart of lightning.

Would that I had lungs, I would have drawn in an involuntary breath.

Worldslicer Sword.

I froze, in shock. Surely not - how could one of them be here? Had they come to kill the man who had tried to kill me? Why?

The sword completed its cut, and withdrew. Then, from the crack in the air that it had left behind, a man in shining plate armour that would not have been inappropriate during the Crusades1 stepped through.

"Philosopher," he greeted. Oh, the gobshite didn't come from Alchemy? Since when did Philosophy allow sociopaths to skip learning empathy?

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 "Sir Knight," the philosopher replied. The Philosopher knew what he was!?

 I waited watching as they regarded each other, waiting for the killing to start - but it did not.

 Instead, the philosopher said, "It's done. I've killed it's incarnate form."

 Motherfucker!

 "Good. Then, here is the payment we've agreed on."

 The Knight took his sword, sheathed it, and presented it to the philsopher, who took it...

 ...and promptly fell into a seizure.

 "By the way," the Knight said, "that particular sword is a bit indiscriminate. If you're not careful, it can... well, you weren't anyway, were you?"

 The Knight watched with utter dispassion as the sage continued to twitch, until suddenly, without warning, his body began to collapase. I had seen this before but, still, even if he had killed me, it was painful to watch.

The bodies of mortals support a mortal's soul. The souls of immortals support their body. The nature of a Transcendent, though, was for both to be [the same thing]. For a Sage's body to die... it could only mean that their soul had been destroyed.

 ...well, that was the nature of defiance. The greater your immortality, the more vicious the consequences of death.

Still - it was painful to watch.

Eventually, there was nothing left of the cultivator but some black dust and robes. The knight snorted coldly and bent down, retrieving the sword.

Without another word, he turned, and walked back into the crack in reality, his sword cutting it once more to seal it behind him.

Silence reigned for a long moment.

Then, Esorem came out of the thicket he had hidden in, slowly approaching the sage's robes with an overabundance of caution.

"Don't bother," I muttered. "That guy is beyond dead."

Naturally, he couldn't hear me.

After about five minutes of stalking closer, he finally closed the distance. There, he stood, staring down at the clothes, and at last muttered, "What the sundammned mere was that?"

I couldn't help it - I burst out laughing.

Only now?

Only now he was asking this?

As I chuckled, Esorem knelt down, and riffled through the robes, coming up with a small black pouch that looked like the night sky, and a few other trinkets of note. All of it was stuff that was way too profound for him to understand, but naturally, that didn't mean it was too profound for him to loot. No - not at all. Even birds know how to steal shiny things.

Curiously enough, though, he seemed only to take the profound things. The philosopher's clothes, the mundane jewels, the usual wuji talisman that marked one as a disciple of Philosophy - all of those, he left.

Only the things that were treasures to cultivators, he took. From this, I gathered that his spiritual sense must be remarkable.

So I opened myself up to it, in the same way as I had opened myself to his sight and hearing.

For a long moment, I just stared.

How could a mortal understand the world as he did, and remain sane!?

He could sense the currency - the primal substance of the world - in detail that normally only belonged to Totality Grasping experts! What a prodigy!

What a waste.

After he looted the remains, Esorem retreated back to his camp, and without another word, went to sleep.

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1: You know. Knights? Holy land? Saladin? Any of this ringing a bell, dear reader?