No, I wasn’t going diving willy-nilly into the remaining Sect lands to scout out what was going on. That was just silly.
The Cultivators had their own ‘technology’, mostly dealing in advanced Formations and what such things could accomplish. The Void Brothers had it right, as Cultivator tech in this area had improved drastically quite recently, and things they’d simply not been capable of before were proliferating.
That meant they’d Summoned in higher Level Daoists from Outside. Well, hardly unexpected after the first one. Rather than seeing that one’s explosive death and necrofying of the Sect that Summoned her as a failure, the Daoists merely saw the Sect as idiots who got what they deserved for relying on the power of the Shroud, and went with more ‘righteous’ methods that didn’t involve bringing in a Death follower who wanted to make them all undead.
Oh, and probably ones a LOT less powerful, because they didn’t want to die instantly if their pleas for help became screams of terror. They weren’t the Mantra, who would obediently be slaves to anything they brought in as a matter of course.
Whoever they brought in was enough to get the complexity of doing so up into the 15 Ranks range, which a whole lot of not many folks on the planet could even recognize, let alone understand, design, and implement. I had enough Martial Lore Ranks to identify the shit with my modifier, but I didn’t understand the underlying principles all that much.
I wasn’t an expert in Qi manipulation. Weird, right?
Still, that was enough to understand that massive sensory Formations were in place to track magical items, spells, and beings throughout all the areas claimed by the Daoists. Any intrusions could be tracked and reacted to quickly, and if they didn’t have Marks and Blessings, it didn’t matter all that much with the equivalent of Messages and Sendings being used with the right Tokens of theirs, also proliferating.
Not all the Sects had done all this at first... until the first couple did, and the rest realized that they were just going to get dominated and absorbed unless they followed suit. The nine most powerful Sects had gone ahead and done so, and in effect sold themselves, their disciples, their civilians, and the whole damned planet out to Daoists from Outside the Shroud.
Gods, I hated Cultivators. “Oh, but you Summon in Demons and Devils, neener-neener.” And Angels, you bastards! “We only Summon in our elders! Clearly we’re better than you!” And they’re like magnified shit-head versions of you!
Fucktards. We didn’t dare bring the Shroud down with senior Cultivators here, or it would start an instant planet-wide war of Summoning and extinction. Daoists and Buddhists alike would happily slaughter all the mortals so others couldn’t have them, as they’d proven here, over and over...
That said, if I made a move into their space now, they’d sense it instantly, panic, and start doing wide-scale massacres and setting off all kinds of deadly things. Ergo, I couldn’t go scouting.
A Source couldn’t, obviously. A Void Brother technically could... except the Cultivators had stuff now that detected the trail of exuded mana a Brother left behind, and so could track them down that way. Very inconvenient.
That meant Nulls, and specifically Nulls who didn’t need to use magic items.
It meant a Nine with an almighty Null Aura, and a wickedly gleeful sense of humor at what she was about to arrange.
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Wow, it was quiet.
It was the first time in a lot of years that she was alone in her own head.
All her Marks were down. Tremble was quiet, Phased into her heart. Her Tats were not charged. She had nothing but her own hands and feet to kill things with, and no links to the outside to back her up.
Well, she could put them all back up with a few seconds of effort, but that would basically start the alarms blaring and things hunting her in massive numbers.
She was very sure of just how bloody durable she was, but thousands of Daoists didn’t seem like a wise thing to tempt.
Now, if she was next to an active Shroudzone at the same time, it sounded like real fun to see how long many of the milkmen would last. Her hands flexed, and ki sharpened the edges of her hands in reflex.
Their little Qi Formation edifices couldn’t track ki like they could magic. It was too far down the fundamental meter, and her Null covered her completely if they were trying to track life forces or something.
She was flowing across the terrain, camo-weave and ki combining to render her little more than a passing shadow as she moved with Seven Dragons lightfoot. There was no wind to mark her passage, no footsteps left behind, no scent in her wake, no broken sticks, no bent grass.
The first Sect she was checking on was Six Demon Swords Mountain.
All of the Sects had reputations, and the Dao of this one was based on domination, overbearing power, and slaughter. Thankfully for the civilians, they were too weak to provide any benefit to the disciples, but their massacring of the Powered was a given, and they had a grim reputation along the Korean border.
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Well, had. Then Briggs and Shvaughn had shown up with some elite Chinese, and the two of them had shown the vaunted Daoists and their flying swords what-for in brutally efficient and very disrespectful fashion. Then the Tomb Clans under The Mick had arrived and turned them into cattle, strung up and bled for profit.
The Six Demons Sect wasn’t feeling like ruling demon princes that much anymore, and they took it out on anyone who defied them. A lot of civilians had been butchered for no reason, more had fled, and the Sect had tried to slip assassins in among the refugees.
The Void Brothers enjoyed removing such assassins smoothly, no matter how well they thought they’d hidden themselves.
The mountain forest she was moving through was filled with the rank odor of Qi, further spoiled with the odor of fresh blood. The trees and leaves were often dyed crimson by the remnants of fights and slaughter that had gone on here, and the vicious nature of the local spirit creatures, whipped into frenzied growth and continual rage by the intense Blood Qi here, hung in the air, while their cries of challenge rang out frequently around her.
How they sustained such growth rates she had no true knowledge of, but absolute slaughter of non-spirit creatures in the area was part of it, and likely mass consumption of human corpses. After all, there was no Shroudzone close by, despite the air of slaughter and bloodshed all around.
Still, the beasts of all types didn’t feel her coming, and when she passed, well, speed and strength are the things predators react to. Moving as fast as she did, they had no desire to pursue her, especially with how fast she disappeared.
The walls of the Sect rose up out of the mountainside. Qi arts had been used to Shape the stones, bathing them in blood and mixing it into the bricks. The whole place exuded violence and simmering anger, and would likely go up like a vivic torch.
Damn, it smelled bad, too.
The guards were apparently used to relying on their ‘Divine Sense’, which swept over her uselessly. They also had default keener senses than normal humans, and could do things like smell blood and hear heartbeats and sense killing intent.
Darkstalker didn’t give a shit what kind of alternate senses they had; it was stack modifiers or go home.
9 Ranks, +3 Class Skill, +17 Dex modifier, +8 Racial modifier, +5 Mastery, +6 Skill Feat Mods, +2 alchemical camo-ninja Sama-suit, +6 Favored Terrain mod, +3 Favored Enemy mod, +3 Cunning, +2 Discipline in Training, Skill Mastery to take 10, Hide in Plain Sight, no Stealth Penalty for moving at full speed, untraceable in Favored Terrains...
Yeah, she wanted to see how these fuckers or their snappity growling guard-beasts were going to hit a 72.
There were tales coming out with the survivors that many of the Daoists seemed incredibly frustrated by their resource limitations. It seemed that they instinctively expected the world to be much bigger than it was, spirit beasts should be limitless in number, and there should be no end to the humans for them to slaughter to get stronger. They raged that their Sect should command this entire continent, not a swathe of land they could trot across in mere hours, if not minutes...
No, there weren’t unlimited spirit beasts to capture and enslave for use as guards, mounts, and battle fodder. No, there weren’t unlimited humans to draw from for more disciples. No, the world wasn’t full of auspicious fruits, plants, and beasts they could grab to advance themselves readily.
There were only the Powered to plunder of their lives and magic, and the Powered were now forewarned and killing them right back... as were the more common people they’d dismissed as useless.
But if they didn’t have normal people, they wouldn’t be able to eat. Someone had to run the farms and harvest the rice...
She flowed up the wall with Tiger Walk, more than fast enough to get to the top before the lightfoot effect wore off. As she flitted up it like the shadow of a passing grey cloud, she measured the footsteps of the guards atop it: bored bastards with red paint and crimson uniforms of needless complexity, patrolling with scarlet-headed Blood Wolves as tall as their shoulders.
She whispered past less than ten feet behind one of those pairs, and neither felt her go by.
It took only a glance at the inner arrangements of the Sect to chart her course across the needlessly sprawling complex. Another thing Cultivators of both stripes liked was using far too much room for things, as if they had all the space in the world. Since they could easily move two to four times as fast as a normal person without any more effort, they had no more effort moving around in such open space than in more reasonable quarters, and it also created greater distance between one another... both staying out of one another’s way and giving them that extra crucial distance in case there was an attack.
They weren’t an assassin Sect – the major one left was the Starving Ghosts Sect – but that didn’t mean they didn’t have Stealth users. However, their focus was more on ambushes and scouting then pure assassination.
Many Qi users fell back on actual Invisibility effects instead of a true Stealth check to remain unseen. There were many ways to get around Invisibility, as many of their assassins had found out a bit too late to do anything about it, and she definitely wasn’t telling them about Darkstalker’s ability to foil alternate senses.
The Void Brothers, the most persistent stealth ops on her side, weren’t going to, either, although some talented Nulls were also expressing great interest in inflicting some fear and darkness on the Daoists... and getting their first practice kills in now that the Voids were having difficult penetrating the perimeter of the Sects.
She ghosted along tiled roofs and dividing walls, hopped sixty-foot gaps, slid past the occasional watchbeasts here and there, and let the standing fields of sensory Formations and Wards ripple past her, her Null drinking them in and giving them no echo.
What she wanted to see wasn’t going to be in the big building up ahead, which had phantasmal screams rising from it, and real sounds of metal on metal and shouting blood-mad disciples complementing them, even at this time of night.
No, what she wanted was going to be outside, because it had to have unrestricted access to the Sect’s master Wards, which had to be outside. Their training and assembly hall wasn’t going to be appropriate.
She skirted the whole thing and the numbers of disciples within, armored and not, moving into and out of it, clearly ready to get some fighting in.
She smiled as she felt the heightened stench of frightened Daoist, a kind of curdled milk odor, under all that bloodthirsty frenzy.
What would they think if they knew one of the most prolific killers of them, before she had gone and flitted off to India, was only yards from them? That the originator of the Song that they didn’t want to hear was close enough to listen to and smell them?
She wanted to find out, but the mission came first.