“Any good ones?”
“Meh.” The True Ascendant Immortal Nightjar shrugged his fat shoulders, a movement that caused his corpulent belly to jiggle noticeably even under the once fine robes. Robes now faded, worn, and stained innumerable times over millions of years. They hung on by desperate threads covering a form once thin and fit, back when they had been new and resplendent. Back before he’d Ascended the second time. Before he’d consumed the Souls of every other Immortal in Heaven and of every living thing within the Mortal coil, in order to achieve True Ascension and to breach into the Void. Since then, he’d found few allies and many enemies. His cultivation only able to move forward through the consumption of others. His Dao of Soul Eating increasingly defining the very truth of his existence.
His companion, a sometime ally, the True Ascendant Immortal Oxblood peered down at Nightjar’s work. The man was fat, covered in age spots, jiggly in all the wrong places, and generally reeked of poor hygiene. Even so, even for a True Ascendant at the middle of the Stable Realm cultivation level, his motions with the ultrafine carving tool were deft and flawless. Each Soul was painstakingly formed into a Pill, infused with just a touch of pure Spiritual Qi, then carved directly with a cultivation method. Every 9, Nightjar made a slight variation to the method. Every 81, a variation to the Qi elements. Every 729, a variation to the Dao. So on and so forth, with each permutation and the Realm they were sent to documented in a slim notebook with greasy fingerprints and unidentified stain on one corner. Though billions of pages were filled with detailed, microscopic notes documenting the specifics of each Pill, the notebook never grew thicker looking.
The two cultivators could not appear more distinct. Oxblood wore his shimmering red armor which appeared to ripple and flow as if made from his namesake given more solid form. A matching red axe rested as always on his back, held only by the Will of its owner. Nightjar had seen that axe in action only twice in the half a million years since he’d met Oxblood. Another half a million years would be too soon to see it again in his opinion. That was even considering that he himself consumed billions of Souls every millennia or so.
They both looked at the latest Pill, watching as even now, while it was still hot and likely reeling from the pain of being carved, a bit of absolutely pure Mundane Qi began to gather. Oxblood whistled appreciatively.
“Looks like either that one’s got a heck of a Will.”
“Hmm,” was the only response Nightjar gave. After that batch of nine had been completed, with all of them exhibiting the almost instant cultivation, Nightjar introduced a minor variation in the method which should have the opposite effect. To be sure, he set the first eight in that batch on his ramshackle workbench, each in a bowl of concentrated liquid Mundane Qi. By the time the ninth was inscribed, not a single one had cultivated the slighted mote of Qi. “It seems even I can learn some things yet.” Nightjar went to pop the failed experiment into his mouth, but on a whim flicked it through a rift into a sparsely populated Realm. The other eight he crunched on to sate his hunger.
“Why even give that one a chance?” Oxblood inquired. “Seemed like a total failure of a method.”
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“On the off chance that the method is still functional, just difficult to initiate. That one in particular was very tough in the molding. A particularly strong Will.”
Oxblood just snorted. If he’d tried to cultivate a method with that variation in it, he’d never even made it to Qi Condensing before he’d died of old age. Then again…
“These Pills of yours are like artificial Nascent Souls. Given enough time, that method might actually be quite effective.” Oxblood’s eyebrow twitched a little with he realized Nightjar had simply ignored him and moved on to the next Soul, lost in his process. With a sigh, the muscular man stepped through into the Void and sought something worth feeding his axe. He’d return in a thousand years or two and see if Nightjar was nearly done with this batch. Going and finding all the little Pills and seeing their progress, and their horror as Nightjar ate them, was one of his favorite pastimes.
Second only to feeding his axe.
--
Something I learned about cultivation? It’s really damned difficult. I followed the instructions. The words of the text rang with the sense of absolute truth and authority, as if the very laws of reality were laid bare upon the smooth round surface of my tiny existence. Yet. YET. It didn’t freaking work! I mean, don’t get me wrong, wisps or motes or whatever of something started gathering. It just, it just didn’t seem to actually become part of anything. The instructions were very clear. Do that thing, then this thing, thinking those thoughts and feeling those feels and so on and shabam! The Qi stuff will merge together and blah blah, yadda yadda. Superpowers.
I’m paraphrasing a little and maybe I read ahead a tad, but I got kind of excited, OK? You would too after you read even a fraction of what this method suggested I could do. Punch through walls? How about walk through the walls like they were air. Leap the tallest building in a single bound? Why leap when you can just freaking fly? Faster than a speeding bullet? Who would ever be so slow? We’re talking, speed of light, physics breaking bullshit.
It all starts with Qi Gathering, the first stage. There seemed to be a real issue though. One, Qi was gathering, yet I couldn’t initiate the Qi Gathering stage. I was playing all kinds of Qi the Gathering games here alone by myself. Look, look, that’s Earth Qi. Lots of the guy. Probably underground or something. Given the air doesn’t hardly move it makes sense. Oh yeah, there’s Air Qi too, though not a ton. No Wind Qi, which was one of many specifically listed as common in the instructions, but probably because the air seemed stagnant, still. No wind, no Wind.
Why was the Qi gathering and yet I wasn’t Qi Gathering? Thanks to the Runes and Formations carved onto my possibly shiny behind, which was also my every side, given that I was a sphere. Qi just gathered. It built up on my surface, taunting me. I invited it in, begged it, willed it, thought the weird things about the breath of the universe and the flowing veins of reincarnation and all the other weird stuff dictated by the words, but not a damned thing happened.
That’s not… that’s not actually true though. I could move the Qi around a little. Make it swirl, wiggle, etc. It just wouldn’t form into anything like the words suggested. I just couldn’t make it mine. I was just manipulating the environmental Qi and not actually cultivating. Well. At least it wasn’t nothing. It provided a nice little break, even if I could only feel what was literally touching my surface. Like a spherescreen TV. I couldn’t recall what a TV was supposed to look like, but a sphere didn’t seem to be the right thing. Still, you get the ‘picture’. Heh. Little TV joke by the lonely pill going crazy over here.
Wherever here is.
Might as well just keep messing around as a break between trying to make this damned bullshit magic stuff happen. Even without the looming threat of being eaten… what else was there to do?