The ripple intensified and changed direction, as if… Bouncing? No, that couldn’t be right. And yet, that was exactly what seemed to be happening. The ripple had taken a substantial time to traverse the whole diameter of the dome, and now, it was not only moving faster, but was more intense and less uniform, more unstable.
Another bounce.
Another.
A concerned message came. It was from a direct disciple of the Fourth Truthseeker, one Rosa Diettberg. Neither Roderick nor anyone else he knew had never met any of the Six besides Three or Four, and the same went for their disciples. The seat of the First was an empty throne situation, while the Second, Fifth, and Sixth had all “gone into seclusion” roughly around the same time as the Emperor’s initial extermination of cultivators. They weren’t dead, that much was known, but Roderick was almost certain they had been crippled in some way that forced them to become glorified administrative officials. So, in reality, the Order had two active elders.
As for Rosa, she was a horrid, shrill, cruel-natured woman well-known for turning subjects into abominable living weapons and wasteful “living art”. Her pretentious “artworks” rarely survived more than a few years, poor imitations of Fourth’s human bonsai that they were. She had been sold to the sect by her own family as a Subject-Disciple, and, just like Roderick, she had managed to advance quickly enough to become a proper disciple. She still held a grudge over it hundreds of years down the line, demanding only obviously-Ikesian subjects as material for her works. Roderick didn’t understand it himself; not the grudge-holding, and not how she had advanced this far while obviously holding onto such a pathetic, mortal grudge this long. Then again, the Emperor had toppled the Three Kings for a similarly petty, mortal reason, so what did he know.
She was sending out an alert to all defensive formations, to be ready for intrusion. With two of his bodies currently leading sacrifice retrieval squads, he had them just immobilize the mortals with simple paralytic venom and drag them into the street for later processing. The dosages on his non-lethal throwing needles would probably leave them disabled for life, but that wasn’t his problem, and it wouldn’t be their problem for very long either.
Roderick gathered his four puppet bodies and had them ready their longer-ranged weapons. There were normal throwing weapons, flesh-sculpted living crossbows that could fire dozens of venomous bone barbs before being spent, and innumerable others.
This was his pride. His combat arts of choice originated in the Stinger Eye Sutra. Contrary to the name, it didn’t involve housing insects within one’s own flesh; that was the Human Hive Scripture. No, the Stinger Eye Sutra was a hybrid of low-level daemonic cultivation and extreme hidden weapon arts. A daemon of wind - a Galegod by any other name - was captured, and its powers would be used to confer great speed and accuracy upon hidden weapons, while also allowing them to be propelled with minimal motion. This combined with the core of the Stinger Eye Sutra, allowed someone to be completely naked and still have an arsenal of hidden weapons. Indeed, it was a method for hiding innumerable hidden weapons inside the practitioner’s own body, from actual needles in the throat, stomach, hands, and so on, to more complex mechanisms grafted to the skeleton, roof of the mouth, and once again so on. The eponymous Stinger Eye, for instance, involved replacing one’s tear ducts with parts from a rare beetle found only on one island to the far east, allowing them to fire the beetle’s stingers from their eyes. Since the host was inoculated ahead of time, the venom would also work as a substitute for tears. In this case, the flaw was that maintaining the glands required the practitioner to eat the same things the beetle did - extraordinarily revolting grubs that themselves consumed specific poisonous plants.
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The problem, of course, was that with all the poisons and pointy bits and mechanisms, many of which would damage the body as part of their operation, practicing the art was not just absurdly painful and precarious, but it also destroyed the practitioner’s ability to function as a person at an advanced level. It made perfect sense given its creators and first users, an order of hermetic assassins who severed themselves from their own humanity and effectively became puppets to their own ideals.
Roderick’s method of dealing with the Living Hive Sutra’s flaw was similar. The flesh-puppets had been living people, once, and they still were, by some rather low standards. It was the highest form of the Flesh Puppet Sutra, with lower-level techniques creating crude puppets that had huge flaws, from acting as literal flesh-puppets to rotting away in mere weeks or requiring verbal commands and occasionally turning on the puppeteer. These, however, were true proxy bodies, the True Puppet Body Art - they could even be made to cultivate after a fashion, each having its own galegod, but Roderick had to actually put them through the motions, so they couldn't use cultivation techniques that Roderick himself couldn't. They had been put through a rigorous regimen of elixirs meant to break down the mind and leave a hollow, but still-living shell - a vegetable, with a maimed, but still-present soul, stabilized by an artificial core that turned their half-souls into extensions of Roderick’s own. Their spiritual cores, what might well be considered the astral counterpart to the brain, had been excised, replaced by that aforementioned artificial core, slaved to a similar implant in Roderick’s own brain. He himself lacked the skill and resources to carry this out, it had been Elder Fourth, in an uncharacteristic show of favour that Rosa had taken as a slight and still held against him.
The ripples bounced back and forth, back and forth, rising to a fever pitch, and it rapidly became obvious that it was no mere coincidence. There would be a serious intrusion; either some other sect, or a small handful of powerful individuals. Either way, it was a black mark on the Order’s foresight. Sure, this was a trading city… But it wasn’t a truly important place like Rigport down south, or Willowdale in the west. It just happened to be on a crossroad of the Great Ankhezian Causeway. What did they care if the mortals that lived around it went? Mayflies that they were, they would just spawn and swarm again in a few years, the same way they would in the wake of the Fog-War.