Though that familiar call rang out, nothing of import immediately followed. So they took a few steps forward, deeper into the cavern, and the presence eased up.
The attuned sense of danger intensified whenever they stopped, so they continued treading forward, along the path of pearlescent green moss. Until, after nearly an hour of damp moss, they reached an exit, and they were standing by the dock of a tiny village, at the crest of a hill home to a quaint beach. A setting intimately familiar to each of them.
Shomei approached one of the few fishermen dotting the shoreline and bowed deeply. “Hello, Honored Senior. Would you be so kind as to inform this humble group of our current location? We have traveled far and are in dire need of direction.”
The man looked at her blankly, horror apparent on his face.
Bo stepped up then, trying his hand. He, too, bowed. “Honored Senior, we would much appreciate any help you could offer.”
Ming just shook his head, and it came as no surprise when the man spoke in a language sounding unlike any Ming had ever heard. And yet Ming felt so close to understanding his intention, as he waved wildly and spoke in myriad tones. It was a strange feeling, as if the words were just on the tip of his tongue, and he noticed the character for Mind Like Water shivering in his heart, as if asking him to touch upon it. So he did, reaching out for the concept, and the world shuddered to a halt.
He saw the effervescence present in everything of the earth, a storm of natural qi swirling before ascetic eyes, fire qi carried by the warm sea breeze, water qi intermingled in a seemingly contradictory alignment, wood qi perforating every crevice in the form of pollen, and so much more. The sensations went far beyond sight—it was as if he could touch, smell, and even taste everything within ten paces, and his vision was augmented to an utterly incomprehensible level. The experience was both entirely overwhelming and immensely satisfying. The fisherman’s channels were laid out so plainly to Ming that he felt like some kind of voyeur. His meridians carried strangely familiar qi, much like… well, much like that of the shark and of the presence that had been guiding them so far.
“Well, this is a lot,” Hope sent at the speed of thought, which, in this state, was essentially instant.
“Can they think for themselves? Or is he like the shark?” Ming asked.
Hope didn’t have time to respond, though, because the gesticulating man’s words had finally started to click when he ran off toward the village. “...three years!” Ming heard before his comprehension faded, a tinge of mental exhaustion immediately taxing his soul as the feeling of wu wei slipped away. Though a parcel of knowledge remained even as the greater whole was stolen from him, it was like trying to drink the ocean dry before the tide receded.
Hope sent a mental blink. “A moment ago, I would have said they are not capable of higher level thinking.”
Ming paled. “What?”
“I searched my ancestral memories, and I haven’t a single record of dungeon humans speaking any recognizable language. They are assumed to be unintelligent savages, living preprogrammed lives in a constructed environment,” Hope said, guilt worming through their connection. “They are thought to be puppets of the core. Well… clearly, their language is intelligible…” Hope said.
Ming froze, thinking of the atrocities people might commit upon what they perceived as little more than lifelike dolls. Sudden nausea threatened to leave Ming indisposed.
“I must update the ancestral records so my fellow sentient trees are not led astray by our predecessors’ folly. One moment…” Hope said. “Done.”
Ming nearly rolled his eyes. “That simple, huh?”
“That simple,” the tree confirmed.
Ming proceeded to inform his companions about the two words he had understood, at which point he received a couple bemused looks, and then they were off, shortly arriving in a courtyard that housed a good fifteen modest straw huts, with a massive outdoor table in the center, next to a cooking pit. The occasional villager wandered easily through the many paths connecting the orderly placed edifices, and the whole arrangement seemed too perfect; Ming could see how dungeoneers might think them little more than pawns, playthings of a bored god… or a dungeon core.
“So… anyone want to take a guess at what our goal here is?” Bo said, playing with a grass straw.
Shomei shrugged. “I think the dungeon will let us know soon enough.”
“Or it won’t,” Ming said. “But it’s not like we could leave if we wanted to.”
Bo winced at that, and the abundant forest beyond the village shook as an enormous man emerged carrying a rather large boar. The fisherman they had talked to earlier approached him, speaking in a complex language that Ming was only barely starting to understand, but the fisherman’s deference gave enough away about his status anyway. A look of unrestrained fury came over the man holding the boar’s face as the other man spoke to him, his aura crashing out as the indomitable rage of waves breaking upon the shore, strong enough that Ming felt it wash over him even without dedicating a jin of focus. Ming wanted to throw up as the insidious sensation overwhelmed his senses. Then the man spotted Ming and his friends, and in an instant his anger dissolved, replaced only with cold dispassion, emotions dissipated with the sea breeze.
But Ming could still feel the dark call of the ocean, muted as it was, a terrifying force of nature. He looked at his two friends, who hadn’t seemed to have noticed anything. The man was walking toward them, and Ming was instinctively shuffling backward.
“I think that guy wants to kill us,” Ming said simply, at which Bo nodded.
“I felt something, just barely,” Shomei said, shaking her head. “A vaguely negative intent. You felt that?”
“Vaguely…?” Ming asked, trying not to laugh.
Shomei seemed to take that as confirmation, and not the question it was, but Ming didn’t bother to expound.
“As vague as a tsunami,” Hope said, chuckling. “Your sensitivity being an easy ‘benefit’ of a strong mind cultivation.”
“Can I turn it down?” Ming asked.
“Short answer: no. Long answer: well… that cultivator is about to get here, and I can only speak as quickly as you can process and remember my words; but, essentially, with stronger spirit and body cultivation you will feel less like your mind is splitting apart when merely sensing your opponent… however, I’m afraid this may turn out as more than a short-term problem, since your mind cultivation is hopelessly overleveled with the understanding of an ascendant truth, much like the most powerful Buddhist monks of legend.”
“What did they do to manage this?” Ming asked, barely coping with the fear of the entity that was merely paces away now, his very spirit screaming at him to run.
“Lived ascetic lives, swore vows of peace, embraced relativism and seclusion, didn’t dare to interact for long with typical cultivators, and merely bore the suffering of perfect awareness as they approached enlightenment and their inevitable ascension?”
“Oh.”
And with the great progress he had made earlier in just barely touching the Mind Like Water character, even the simple act of witnessing another cultivator’s emotions in his spirit sight was enough to push his mind cultivation through the next threshold, breaking through instantly to the Base Adept Thought Quickening realm, a crack resounding through the air as his mind sped up.
But the fear only intensified as his vision revealed the thick knot of water qi running as fire in that cultivator’s meridians, his easy smile useless on Ming, all revealed by the spirit sight of a sage. The very same spirit sight that had his heart caught in his throat, and soon he was curled in a ball, utterly useless and floundering on the ground.
“Wake up, boy!” Hope shouted, and Ming forced himself to acclimate, adjusting to the impossible feeling; looking at that man was like watching deadly rocks on the shore approach as he plummeted off a cliff, totally helpless.
But he stood up anyway, getting slowly used to the horrid feeling, and he pulled his knife from his storage ring, holding it covertly behind him, just in case, as he bowed, even as it felt like he was staring into the eyes of a god that could crush him with complete impunity. But his incredible sensitivity had its perks, and he saw the man's path laid out before him in incredible detail.
"Do you have any idea how terrible this is?" Ming said.
“Some idea. I honestly didn't expect you to get up,” Hope replied. "Perhaps it's something special in your unique constitution that allows you to cope with the feeling of imminent death and remain functional, or maybe the answer lies in your mastery of the Grand Dao."
Ming had mostly tuned Hope out, though, and was watching the every move of that cultivator that he could tell was only a half-step stronger than him, if that. His way was an unconventional one, compared to those of the island Ming had come from, with the man’s body cultivation at the Middle Initiate Skin Tempering realm, and his spirit cultivation that of a mere mortal. It was the path of a spirit beast, Ming realized, and one more piece clicked into place, showing further why delvers might see these humans as little more than animals.
The man started babbling in his absurd language then, and Ming had no idea what he was saying. He didn’t want to tap into the Mind Like Water character again so early, but the man was looking at them expectantly and pointing to the table with the hand not holding the massive hunk of meat, a near universal signal that even his group could understand.
“He wants us to eat with him?” Shomei said.
“I have a terrible feeling about this, absolutely horrible,” Ming replied, starting to walk toward the table anyway, the man smiling as they obeyed.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Bo said, plopping down in the chair next to the right of the one Ming was headed to.
Then the villagers started to file out of their houses, and an eerie, incoherent chatter subsumed the silence.
In just a few short minutes, the man was carving slices of meat off the spit-roasted hog, and raising a glass in toast as qi manacles sprung from the chairs Ming, Shomei, and Bo sat at, cutting off all connection to their spirit cultivation.
“Shit,” Ming said, tapping the Mind Like Water character as if on cue, and the sensation of delicious oneness overwhelmed him as the words they spoke translated. And it came so easily, too, the character delighting in his leveled-up mind cultivation.
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“Our safety is assured, my friends,” the giant of a man who had caught the hog said.
“Why?” Shomei shouted, but they just ignored her.
“So long as we don’t acknowledge them, they think we can’t understand them,” an older man across from Ming said feverishly, looking toward Shomei. And it was then, perhaps just a few breaths after he had activated the character, that his transcendent awareness left him. But his understanding did not, and Ming could still comprehend their words even as his enlightened state dissipated. “But even if we can’t speak their language, we can remember. They think of us as no more than animals. But what is more dangerous than a wild animal backed into a corner?”
“Those cavers from before,” a boy who couldn’t be more than eight said, tears welling up in his little eyes. “They stole everything! They killed dad!”
His mother just shushed him, holding him close to her bosom and running her hand through his hair before she, too, spoke up. “We are stronger now,” she said. “Now these devil children cannot hurt us. Fitting, then, that they are three just as the ones that came for us before.”
“The great Alyx tests us. But those despicable raiders can’t hurt us anymore!” the giant man said. “Gone is Wen Xiu and his infernal ilk, and now we are blessed with the enviable qi manacles, boon of our great god Alyx himself! Who would dare stand before us? Who would dare claim our bounty now?”
The conversation continued, though he had lost the previously enjoyed clarity of understanding, and even if he hadn’t, Ming’s mind was sent whirling by the revelation that it was somehow Xiu who had been here three years ago, apparently murdering and pillaging his way through the village, and he spinned around, looking at each of his friends, certain they, too, had at least heard Xiu’s name spoken. They seemed to have understood, and their expressions were rife with fear.
And it was then that they were summarily thrown into a dark room, still bound in qi manacles, and Ming was explaining what he had heard.
“So basically they think we’re going to steal their stuff? Or harvest their cores.” Bo summarized.
“Yeah,” Ming said.
“What I don’t get is how Xiu was supposedly here three years ago,” Shomei said, leaning against the bamboo siding.
Ming shrugged. “Maybe time flows differently for them.”
“But three years? In a single night?” Shomei said, shaking her head. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
A couple hours passed in casual conversation, unsure what they were doing here or what they were waiting for. Ming played with the qi manacles, hoping to find a way to unlock them without breaking them, until a scream sounded out from beyond their prison.
“That sounds like the reason we’re here,” Bo said.
“We should help them,” Ming said, and Bo just nodded in agreement.
“Not to be too much of a downer,” Shomei said, “But they hate us. What if they attack us when we try to help?”
“That’s not the point,” Ming replied, shrugging. “We have to try.”
“Fine. Then what of these bindings?” she asked.
Ming focused on his manacles, imagining his soulforce inhabiting the fragile eddies within, the inscriptions that served to lock up a cultivator’s qi. And just as before, when he had tried to push his soulforce into anything else, they shattered, falling to the ground in a pile of wooden shards. He managed to look bereft at the loss of the artifice. Shomei just stared at him, though Bo had clearly expected him to do that, and was even now holding up his shackles so Ming could do the same to them.
They burst out of their prison in an instant, door falling to the ground in two pathetic halves, just in time to see a tree-sized wooden monstrosity devouring the fallen pieces of the woman that had spoken at the table, the mother of that little boy, as the large man that had caught the boar flailed hopelessly in its mouth. Long limbs swayed wildly as it moved, and its tentacle-like vines were covered in a clear fluid.
“A man-eating ent!” Hope said at the speed of thought. “Aim for its core, just underneath that giant maw.”
“Beneath its mouth,” Ming relayed to his party, springing into action. “Beware the toxic flaying vines,” Ming said, thoughts merging with Hope’s.
“Mom!” the boy cried out, running mindlessly toward the creature, and it was all Ming could do not to scream in frustration at the situation.
“Protect them,” Ming sent to Bo over a connection that had reignited in an instant in the crucible of battle. Bo had no weapons and no techniques as of yet, but he could be useful all the same in making sure no one else got hurt.
“Shomei, with me,” Ming said, pulling his knife from his ring once more and falling into the familiar steps of his most powerful fighting form. He stalked toward the ent, stopping just before, attempting to cut down the bladelike appendages swinging from its body, aimed right at Ming. He cut two of them away just before they hit him, flopping against his robes, and immediately jumped back as ten others took their place, Shomei falling into step with him.
“Can you freeze the space under its mouth, if I get you in?” Ming asked Shomei, and she nodded.
“I can try,” she said, brushing her hair back.
Thankfully their advance had bought a few precious moments for Bo to swoop in and drag the child away, kicking and screaming, but Ming knew they needed to reengage or risk more casualties. But he had a plan, even as that toxin began to burn through the parts of his robes that it had managed to spill on.
Ming drew upon the character he knew as Mind Like Ice, and the world was stripped of color, only intention remaining. The black and white was refreshing, for he was the paintbrush.
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Shomei glanced at the boy who was asking her to risk her life for a village of people she wasn’t sure existed in any real capacity and who hated them all the same, doubt creeping into her mind for an instant before being replaced with the reality of the situation. It wasn’t like she could back out now, and Ming was putting everything on the line, too, she knew. Besides, the dungeon would reward them for rising to its challenges. Who knew if they could get anything if they ran away here? From that point of view, their actions could be considered in their own best interests.
Although it wouldn’t be in their own best interests to die.
So she tore her gaze off him, but her eyes decided to stick, instead, on the flayed corpse of the man who had made her feel so utterly powerless, his organs now splayed out upon the ground like a cannibal’s feast. It was surreal.
Her thoughts began to drift to the complex artifice he had employed. She wondered even now if she could incorporate some of the tricks the qi manacles made use of into her own techniques, though her hours of playing with them, pushing her qi around within those hallowed internal walls, had come to essentially no effect.
“Shomei!” Ming yelled, and she realized her inattention had been rewarded with a nasty burn, though Ming had cut the vine before it had reached her. Focus arrived shortly, then, a natural result of the acute agony searing its way into the flesh of her leg.
“Sorry,” she muttered, but when she looked back up it was not Ming she saw, but a predator in his natural environment, and she stumbled back uncontrollably at the aura he was exuding.
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“It’s fine,” Ming replied, though the words felt so wrong in his mouth—a totally inferior method of communication, and when he reached out his hand, Shomei took it. A telepathic connection formed immediately, aided by his current, enlightened state, though its depth paled in comparison to the one he shared with Bo.
Still, impressions sped through their connection at the speed of thought, conveying his intentions effortlessly. She blinked, and he just fell back into his forms, Shomei moving behind him in perfect concert; they were as two marionettes attached by a string, their separation unthinkable.
In a single breath, they were standing within the inner guard of the man-eating ent, and they rotated effortlessly so Shomei had full access to the tree. The whiplike vines swinging around them were the real threat, and so long as the tree couldn’t grab hold of her, Shomei was safe even so close to the ent.
“Done!” Shomei said, and they rotated again, leaving Ming facing the horrified ent, who was now struggling to move, covered in crawling frost as it was, the spot directly under its maw petrified. He tossed her the knife, hoping she would be able to defend herself as he executed his plan.
For his previous plan to repeatedly jam his knife into the ent’s face, hoping the ice would shatter and he could rip its core out before it killed him, now seemed amateurish at best, and a better idea had come to him effortlessly in the meantime.
He would use a technique, a natural divergent path based on his Ten Thousand Steps to Eternity that he could only see now, bathing in the unending power of unrivaled focus.
Balanced Strike.
The knowledge tore through his mind like a storm as he executed the technique, a torrent of black and white qi rushing through his channels toward his spear-hand strike, sheathing his hand in a mystical gray energy. Before that gray qi could dissipate, as he could tell it was wont to do, his hand shot forward into that block of icy wood under the ent’s maw, shattering it into a thousand frozen splinters, allowing him to ruthlessly extract its precious wooden core.
The ent fell in a single breath, lifeless.
And so did Ming, everything spinning as he fell onto his back, the world turning from black and white to just black as he lost his grip on the Mind Like Ice character.
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Shock overwhelmed Alyx’s consciousness as it realized the real identity of that creature it had been unable to properly evaluate, his forms and the technique he had unleashed in a moment of desperate enlightenment revealing him.
Panic surged through the core, ancient shared memories of another core overlaying upon its own as a fear so base and instinctual that even a dungeon core was unable to dispel it marred its thoughts, tainting them. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
An unpleasant one.
No. No, no, no, no, no. That creature could not be allowed to exist in its realm. The core refused to be the catalyst of its own undoing.
Alyx summoned a portal, hoping desperately that the infant God Eater would go through it, leaving it and its pithy existence to sleep forevermore.
Anything to escape from that monster wearing human skin. To escape from the only thing that could truly kill it.
When Alyx saw that they had yet to step through the gate, it remembered that it hadn’t presented a reward. It stretched its abilities, creating a varied lot of spiritual treasures, every jin of creation essence the core had gained from the three and more beyond that poured into the elixirs and pills within.
Then it had a better idea. It disposed of the constructed environment itself, a whirlwind of qi surging into the creation of a treasure beyond all treasures as the fabric of the world separated itself from the remnants and creatures living inside it and they bled back into Alyx’s dominion. It created a single seed that, hopefully, would appease that creature and see that he never returned. Or kill him. And as the creation of that seed finally finished, and it flew straight into the nearest receptacle—that creature’s spirit tool—Alyx’s connection with that pocket realm dissolved.
It mentally sighed.
The danger had passed.
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Ming came to in a daze, eyes fluttering open to see… nothing. An endless sea of white surrounded him on all sides; not even the sky remained. Only his companions—Shomei was shaking him awake—as well as, an indeterminable distance away, a portal and a chest, interrupted the tranquil monotony. Through the rift was a verdant forest that Ming’s stellar eyesight could perceive even from… well, he wasn’t sure. “Is it getting further away?” Ming thought.
“Can you stand?” Shomei asked.
Ming nodded at her, still getting his bearings.
“I’m integrating the realm seed that the core created. The core must be insane. It’s no longer stable here.” Hope sent.“We have to leave now!”
That was when Ming spotted it; far off, in all directions, a wave of oblivion was rushing toward them at an incredible speed. It filled him with primal fear. Fear that sent him to his knees.
He did not want to be around when that wave hit, but he couldn’t move.
Shomei was sprinting toward the portal even now, clutching her brother’s hand in hers for dear life, and by the time she turned around to see that Ming had faltered, the distance between them was only multiplying, the world unraveling before their very eyes.
“Come on!” Shomei shouted, and Ming tried to catch up with them, but he could do little more than crawl, and even that was a grueling exercise in self-control.
Ming attempted to touch the Mind Like Ice character, hoping it would lend him bravery, but it shied away from him. He couldn’t muster the courage to force it to work, in his state. And the Mind Like Water character definitely would just make things worse, his awareness being the one thing he did not want to amplify, overwhelmed by fear as he was.
“Hope…” Ming started, staring into the distance. “Are we going to die?”
And that was when Bo broke off from Shomei, tearing his arm free from hers in a desperate bid to save Ming.
“Stop,” Hope said. “Turning back now would be pointless, only ending in your death. Leave with your sister. Take the chest. We have a chance to survive. You would not.”
Even from a distance, Ming could make out tears rolling down his face, and he heard his desperate scream as he turned back to the rift, abandoning them as he had been instructed to do.
“We have a chance?” Ming asked.
Ming forced a smile, pulling his legs into a meditative position as he tried to cope with his crippling fear of the emptiness about to plunge them into darkness.
“Realistically, no. But who knows? I’ve never forged a pocket realm before, but the Heavens never seal all exits, and what creature could know better what it means to grow a seed than a tree?” Hope said. “But, again, no. I sense that we don’t have ten thousand years to spend figuring it out.”
Ming cackled a genuine, giddy laugh. “You crazy old tree. What can I do to help?”