I made the mistake of reading the book on cultivation principles I stole (ahem), liberated, from the bandit leader I killed. It read a bit like Nazi propaganda. I mean every third word seemed to be purity. Pure chi, pure elemental essence, refine this, purify that, concentrate this, remove impurities, refine your body, rise above your mortal flesh.

I was working the mana cultivation that it taught, and trying to circulate my chi, forcing it was difficult. I had the celestial body, the spiritual body that the book stated as the end goal. I did not have muscles, I didn’t have lung or blood until I had unlocked my neck and belly mana gates, restoring the flesh that my soul remembered. I was essentially doing the opposite of what they told me to. I was beginning with the divine immortal pure body and putting mortal meat back into it.

I was on life two, but for all my first life I was human. I was meat. I was animal and god, I was a being of spirit, but one also of flesh, and mind. The cultivators treated mortal flesh as the source of all impurities, and sought to eliminate it.

Sure we didn’t have much magic where I came from, but I had a sliver of a god in my head laughing his ass off at this book. His words made me think.

“Prissy little incels. Too terrified of sweat and blood, shit and cum. No wonder they are dying out. Riddle me this boy, for I taught you well. Why do the living command the dead, why does a necromancer, be they a beardless boy or barely bleeding maiden compel the souls of conquerors and sages?”

Odin’s voice was a grave whisper, while my voice was only a little raspy from the hanging, his was either honey and silk, or the harsh rasp of a whetstone on a chipped steel edge. I listened for the truth in the rasp, and they lie in the sweet. Still, he had a good question. The living commanded the dead, that was the point of necromancy. Not through will, both the conqueror and sage had been so much more in life, not through knowledge, again, no stripling had more of it. Not through power because riding back the iron road from Hel you took enough power to make the weakest undead a real problem.

“Flesh.” I answered. And Odin laughed softly.

“Flesh is the root of the tree, spirit the trunk, and mind the leaves. The rootless tree is first to fall, the frail of trunk shatter at a touch, and the leafless wither in the brightest light and waste to nothing. They are nothing without the other.”

I shut the book. I didn’t get it. I picked up my spear and led my horse towards the Mountain of Maidens, there to find a spear sage monster girl who will search for her husband through spear battles. Honestly, I have heard worse dating strategies.

I made the mistake of thinking the day was going great and even begun to whistle. I should have paid attention. Music is more than music when the other souls in your head are demons trying to eat your spirit, and the god of slaughter. I was whistling “Valhalla Calling Me” when I heard the crash of lightning, the scream of a woman, and the unmistakeable sound of weapons clashing.

I ran into the clearing and stopped.

“You denied us too often, Astrella. You thought you could deny the Chu brothers? If you will not have one of us, you will have all of us. You strayed too far from your mountain. Your sisters are not here. Let us see if you can defeat all six of us!”

The speaker was a red skinned Oni, he was easily seven feet but willowy. His robes were masterworks of silks. Charms of exotic form were worked into his robes and the stole that hung from his neck. In his hand was a spear, a courting spear like I held, but he held it like a magician’s staff. A great disk of living magic swirling with magical characers each of which writhed with pure elemental chi that were bound inside strange geometries that reshaped the chi of the glade and bent the very laws of reality.

Five more just like him stood arrayed around what I gathered had to be Astrella.

You will forgive me if I go off topic. I know that six seven foot Oni bending reality and drawing the very life from the air in a solid kilometer around should be impossible to ignore. Fine. As a counter argument, I give you Astrella.

She stood seven feet like the Oni, her skin was pale as one who belonged on the snowy mountains where the sun dared not linger. Her hair was the red of a burning tank, her eyes the dangerous blue of arcing lightning, her horns and nails the deep red of clotting blood, her lips the bright red of a fresh slit throat. Her snowy white joy cliffs filled her loose robe like the empirical form of breasts, and they heaved like a ship beating through heavy seas. As massive as her breasts were, they matched her as perfectly as the hilt of the best balanced blade ever forged, her arms were easily the thickness of my thighs, and her thighs nearly as thick as my torso.

She was built like a brick shithouse. Surrounded by a half dozen Oni, each seven feet of charm covered magical powerhouses, she dominated the clearing with the natural presence of a queen, of a goddess, of an ASS WHOPPING just looking for a victim. Six ogers with spears and magic, surrounded, without hope or aid and there was no fear in her at all, no hesitation, only pure fury and such perfect grace and balance I felt ashamed to be seen moving in the same forest as her.

“Fuck me, I have seen paradise, and she can snap me like a twig.” I said to myself. Behind my single eye, I felt another presence rise. Oh, now Odin was paying attention. He looked upon her like a starving wolf upon meat, or like the Chooser of the Slain on the bravest woman either of us have ever seen.

“I gave you the grace to crawl away after your last beating worms. You are none of you, not alone, and not together worthy of me. Alone or together, I defy you all.”

She pointed her spear at the first idiot and gave her challenge.

“Any last words before the killing starts?” Astrella demanded, each of the magic circles around her glowing with enough power to make the sunlight seem dim and colourless.

Gods above but I can’t resist big titted redheads or straight lines. She was one, and offering the second.

I sprinted into the seven o clock position if you take the Oni doing all the talking as twelve o clock and Astrella as the center. No one was looking at me. I admit, I wouldn’t be looking at me either, but that was an issue for the Oger in that position.

I used all my demonic strength and all the practice I had been doing to self teach myself the spear from my half remembered staff martial arts training and my less than half remembered army bayonet training. Honestly when you are moving at about thirty kilometers an hour, weigh almost three hundred pounds and drive over a foot of magically tempered steel up under the edge of the skull to drive through the brain on an upward diagonal form and style is less important than the idiot being too focused on his incantation and ignoring anything other than the big redhead in the middle.

“Astrella is mine!” I shouted. It irritated me that my voice was the least deep and booming of everyone here. I was also shortest. Not that it bugged me. Much.

That was the signal to unleash Ragnarok, as five magics triggered as one, each of them launching chains of some form. One whip of vines, two of water, one of fire, one of living metal lashed for Astrella in a pattern that should have been unavoidable. If not for the hole I just punched in one side of it. I was pretty sure that no one had noticed, as no one even glanced in my direction. In the case of the male Oni, that was due to lack of situational awareness, in the case of Astrella, is was the opposite.

She took the whip of vines on her spear and stepped towards me, moving the vines in a half circle the opposite way, slicing them on the first whip of fire. She danced between the second fire wielders flame whip and twisted back to slap the whip of water to deflect the living metal chain to drive into the ground.

Her grin was wide and full of fangs. Nothing that big should move that fast. She was the poster girl for thicc chick, yet she moved with the speed and grace of a dancer; at no point in her dance did she look hurried or worried. She danced with an uncomplicated joy, and blood flew from her speartip as she drove it through the extended palm of one of the oger mages.

In the time it took me to kick one oger off my spear, she shattered the encirclement, forcing four of them to chase her with spear and spell. She had only a spear, no spells did she cast, and yet it was the four who seemed anxious.

I got the last one. He seemed really pissed I interrupted his planned gang rape, which honestly looked to have ended in some or all of them dead, and if she didn’t win, she wouldn’t have been taken alive. There was no way that Oger Maiden was going down anything but dead.

He seemed pissed anyway.

“Human cultivator, you think to match powers with a Spirit Realm Oni? I have mastered all five elements boy, the world reshapes at my command. You have two mana gates open, you think to stand against one who dominates the heavens? I command the LIGHTNING!” The Oni screamed, his scarlet face glowed hellishly as he made good his threat and around his spear a disk of shining symbols spun, birthing a lightning bolt that lanced towards me.

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I could not dodge, so I let my instincts take over. I flashed out my left palm to take the lightning. It burned into me, and as it arced through me, its killing power tore channels in me. It lanced into my mana channels, but there was too much to contain. I screamed, my soul unable to contain the power of a power requiring mastery of air, water, fire, and earth chi.

I was back hanging on the tree, the tree of my sacrifice in my world, the tree of my sacrifice in this world, the tree of Odin’s sacrifice in the world before both. I hung upon the tree and I felt the whisper of the World Tree flow into me. I felt the power of the elements move through the world, I felt the power of spirt born from the world itself rise and shape the elements, bending them. I saw the rise of the great spirits, the giants, each one with the elements in ways humanity only dreamed of, then I saw the rise of the gods who put their will upon the elements. They bound the world to order, placing limits on the elemental powers, carving a stable middle place where life could grow. Life could grow, and in it were woven all the elements, and from that life rose the last part of creation, the spirit that ruled them all.

Lightning seared into me, burned through my half formed mana channels more than they could contain, so I didn’t contain it. If the lightning forced itself into me like the great roots of a tree, tearing my spiritual body to make room for them, then like a tree I would make it root in me fully. Rather than resisting it tearing into my flesh, I dragged at it with my chi, I opened my mouth to scream as the lightning raped my flesh, I let it violate my spiritual purity, searing, tearing, burning new passages through the purity .

No longer did my mana channels contain the lightning, now they carried it throughout my body, profusing it into my flesh. They burned new nerves into my godly body; no more to move with demonic speed by my will alone, now I had nerves like a fleshly body.

Odin laughed in my body, he laughed out of my throat, as he directed me to rise, puppeting my body as my soul writhed in coils of power that tore and reshaped me inside. The power burned in me, it was killing me. It had reshaped me, I felt the demon in my left hand bound, and the demon in my heart burned as now blood and chi both followed the veins and capillaries of a body new made mortal, pain and power flowed along my new nerves, but it was too much. I was too new, I had just begun to walk the pathways of cultivation and this was the lightning of a Spirit Master, a power he could only call outside his body, and it was killing mine.

Odin did not care, he raised my spear and pointed at the Oni and his voice boomed from my throat so powerfully I could taste the blood that spilled down my chin.

“You command the lightning? I AM THE STORM!” Odin roared and I felt the demons scream as more power than I could ever hold tore through me. Lightning lanced down from the sky to hammer my body, but those bolts were just threads to the great rope of blue white fury that ripped through the Oni.

His shield held just long enough for each and every one of the runes and sigils in it to explode. As they did, the Oger’s flesh erupted in spurts of flame and flesh as if each failing sigil burst like a bomb in the cultivator’s body.

Then the bolt hit the oger and ripped through his chest. I don’t mean it hit his chest and he got electrocuted, I mean it tore a hole in him. The Oger died, but as he slumped the lighting was still driving through him like a river of destruction, and his neck and head exploded in a rain of meat as his corpse sank through the bisecting beam. Beyond the Oger a tree shattered into bits too small to qualify as kindling.

Odin had finished his temper tantrum about a mere mortal claiming to tell the Storm Rider who was master of lightning, and without his control, my body could not quite stand. I half spun trying to clutch my spear and stay upright.

It was a good move, because it let me see the last half of Astrella’s battle with the last four Oni. Well, not all four. One was already dead. I wonder how she got him?

Her robes were torn by the wind blades that two of them were throwing at her from each sweep of their spears, while the third had wrapped himself in living stone, wrapping his spear in the same until he was a living golem of stone almost ten feet tall.

The stone was proof against the wind blades his brothers were casting from each sweep of the spear, some of which had cut much of Astrealla’s robe away and left her with a dozen shallow cuts. The stone was also making the Oni unbelievably powerful, as he swung the spear which must way upwards of a ton at this point like it was a feather. Each strike drove a crater into the earth, but only the earth.

She flowed around his strikes like a sea plant in the current, he body swaying gently, her hair whipping swiftly, yet her eyes remained fixed and blazing like a laser designator on its target. One of those strikes pounded into the ground beneath where she had just stood, and she hopped lightly upon the stone spear and ran up it for the great glowing eyes of the stone golem, her spear before her like the crest of of a tidal wave.

Sweeping the spear up in a desperate attempt to dislodge her, the unfortunate Oger simply accellerated her by adding gravity to her charge and she drove her spear through the stone surrounding the skull deep enough to hammer the flesh and bone concealed beneath. The living stone died and began to come apart.

Leaping in a graceful double pike, Astrella dodged the crossing wind blades until she was behind the shower of stony debris that had shielded the now deceased Chu brother. The wind blades exploded stone and cut apart the falling body of their brother, but failed to catch the now disarmed Astrella.

I worried about how she would face the magic without a spear. I would be better off worrying If I might miss the ground when I fell down. She ran at the far one, never taking her eyes off him. She would turn to one side, allowing fire or lightning to just brush past her. Leaping over walls of stone, under whips of vine. Diving into a somersault to pass below and between two streams of icy and stone shards from the two ogers, she never took her eyes off her target.

Thick and muscled like a great bear, yet she moved with a grace and speed that would shame a hunting leopardess, she flowed over the land like the incoming tide, sometimes this way, sometimes that, but each wave taking her closer, inevitably, irresistibly. It could not last. Her target’s will broke and he stabbed out with his spear to keep her away from him.

She directed the tip into the ground, spun to double kick him in the face. The impact drove him backward, and her into a roll away. A fireball exploded in the space she was in. Turning to the last armed brother, she deflected three more fireballs with flicks of the spear, then lunged left and away to avoid a spike of stone that shot up from the ground. As she came down on her bent lead leg, she pivoted and lanced the spear in full extension to punch through the open mouth of the desperate oger mage, ending his flurry of spells and life.

The remaining Oger mage begged for his life as he crawled backwards away from Astrella, she stalked slowly towards him with a puzzled expression on her face, as if wondering what strange creature she was looking at. With a shrug and sigh, she drove the spear through him, twisted and pulled it out.

She stalked towards me, looking like a Franz Frazeeta poster. Clad in scraps of rags from the wind blades, her heaving white breasts covered in blood, most of it not hers. Her skin glowing with sweat, her body radiating heat like a furnace, a proud fire burned in her eyes, and her dark horns and claws gave her an inhuman, almost primordial beauty. Seven feet of pure feminine power, skill that I couldn’t even fully catalogue let alone imitate, power that made my own demonic strength look weak.

And a redhead.

I was cultivating the wood element pretty hard, even if I was mostly ready to keel over from my lightning driven internal remodelling.

“I did not need your aid stranger, yet I will not say I did not use it. You clearly were not with them. For what reason does a human approach the Mountain of Maidens. You are no Oger.” She asked, her challenge ringing as she threw back her great horned head and her red hair flared in the wind that seemed to be called up by the goddess of dramatic pronouncements for just such occasions. Her scraps of clothes did not hang off her in shame of nakedness, but streamed off her in the wind like the banners of a conquering army.

I raised my head to meet her the fire in her eyes with the lightning in my one.

“I come to claim a Maiden from the mountain. I come for the challenge of the spear. I COME FOR SNU SNU!” I roared, raising my spear in salute and challenge.

Without the spear support, I fell and completed my journey to unconsciousness.

As I fell and lay at her feet, I watched the pride and challenge in her face turn to confusion. She bent down to poke me to see if I was alive, and I smiled back at her. As she poked me one last time as I faded, she asked me.

”What is snu-snu?”