12. Consequences

Ko Ren and six other men chanted the ritual, standing in a circle around the unconscious child. They were certain in their conviction. Nobody remembers who it was that had suggested the boy’s success was due to demonic possession, but these elders had it in their heads now and could not be convinced otherwise.

It had taken months to find a ritual to serve their purpose. They could have performed a simple exorcism weeks ago, but their goal was much, much more than that.

The ritual continued. The chanting continued. The candles burned. The crystals shined. One was dull. But then, that too began to shine. Ko Ren had been convinced that it would take a dark hue, perhaps the color of blood. Instead it was a bright white.

“Who are you. What have you done to me?” the voice of the demon asked.

The others froze. This was proof that Ko Ren had been right. That they had all been right. They had drawn out the demon’s soul and entrapped it within the crystal.

“We have captured you, demon,” Sho Keh, one of the more zealous adherents of this little cult, declared. “We have pulled you out of the body you took over and freed the child you have enslaved to your wicked purpose! No longer will you--”

“This body is mine. I am no demon. I am an awakened soul,” the demon said, sounding annoyed. “There is no other occupant of Little Bug’s body for you to free.”

“Liar,” Sho Keh said. “Prove your words! Let us speak with the boy!”

“All this ritual does is pull the soul out of the body,” the demon said. “If there were a second soul in this body, then it would have been pulled out with me and there is nothing I could do to prevent it from using one of these crystals to communicate. But that’s not happening. Do you know why? Because it is my body! I entered it through samsara! I am Little Bug, and Little Bug is me! ”

“There is no reasoning with it,” Ko Ren declared. “We must entrap it within the crystal.”

The demon scoffed. “You think that this thing can hold me? Perhaps if I were a demon. But I am not. However, I will not seek retribution. Not yet. I can understand that you may only have been concerned for my health when you performed this foolish ritual, and if I were being possessed by a demon I would likely appreciate being freed.”

The others began chanting the sealing ritual, and the crystal continued to glow. The body of the boy, which had grown still as his breath had stopped for a moment, once again grew warm and resumed breathing in a soft, steady pattern, no longer in any danger of death from having its soul pulled out.

~~~~~~~~

I awoke. And I remembered. The ritual that Ko ren and Sho Keh and the others had performed on me had shattered the wards that I had constructed in the land of the dead to keep my mind partitioned. If that was all that they had done I would have been content to sit back and wait to see what happened next, having marked the elders responsible for my botched exorcism as questionably enemies. However, many of the wards which they had so casually destroyed were to obscure my presence and location and reduce the impact of any karmic ties.

I had been uncertain how it was that Nadia of the Divine Fates was following me, so I had thrown every method I could think of into the wards to protect my identity. The result had been the long battle in the sky between the lord of this realm and the empress. She had been attempting to slay an entire world to snuff me out, but with my location revealed, she could use more subtle approaches.

I swiftly rebuilt the wards which had hidden me with the energy of my soul and reinforced it with Qi. But I knew it would be too little, too late. If Nadia had been searching for me, and I had little doubt that she had been, then she would have located the sect. She would begin to send assassins.

It was annoying, as I had been enjoying my life as Little Bug, even though he had been … off. It had been enjoyable to cultivate simply for cultivation’s sake. To learn martial arts without the intention of using them. To enjoy my brotherhood with Hien Ro, who had embraced my differences. And to appreciate the attempts of tutelage that Pi Phon and Di Ram had provided.

I sighed. I was back at home; one of the cultists must have carried me back after their foolish attempt of an exorcism. If that’s what they had been doing, at least. I had my suspicion that it was more than that, and I had left behind a trap in the crystal in which they had attempted to trap me. Fortunately, the bond between my body and my soul was far too great for their sealing ritual to have any hold.

I sat up. It was dark out, after midnight. I went into Hien Ro’s room and shook him awake. He jerked, then sat up and looked at me in confusion.

“What’s wrong, Little Bug?” he asked.

“I remember who I am,” I answered.

He frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“I was born to kill the empress of the Divine Gates Empire. That is my goal in life,” I informed him.

“Ooookay,” he said. “That’s a little lofty, but I suppose at the rate you’re going you might have a chance in a century or two.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have that much time. She was defeated by the lord of this realm, but they are both licking their wounds. She will come back, and if I know her she will bring others with her. Nobody as strong as her, because she wouldn’t trust them not to betray her, but it might be enough to tip the scales in her favor this time. I can’t afford to wait. I need to leave the sect.”

“You’re acting really strange, Little Bug,” he informed me. “You’re talking way too much.”

“You’ve been my best friend, Brother Ro,” I said. “I wanted to say goodbye to you before I left.”

He frowned, then shoved back his covers and stood up. He had been undressed for sleep, and he quickly began pulling his clothes on. “If you’re going somewhere, I’m coming with.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, you’ll just get in the way.”

“I need to record your cultivation secrets,” he argued. “You must leave behind a legacy.”

That actually gave me pause. The Sect had given me so much. I had taken, taken, and taken. I needed to give them something back in order to settle the debts between us, or there would be lingering karmic ties which would be difficult to sever.

“Very well. I must go speak with Di Ram. We will leave at noon tomorrow, so begin packing,” I instructed. He was already going about his room and throwing things into a pile.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

I left the house and sprinted to Di Ram’s villa. I knocked on the door until one of the servants answered. They frowned, but recognized me, and showed me to the waiting area before promising to wake the master. Within ten minutes, the Elder came down to greet me.

“Elder Di Ram,” I said, putting one fist in my other palm and bowing over it, giving him the respect he was due for perhaps the first time. “I thank you for taking care of me until now. I believe you have several questions, the answers to which I am prepared to share.”

“I am listening,” Di Ram said.

“I am an awakened soul,” I said. He drew in a sharp intake of breath. “The techniques I developed were the combination of hundreds of different heritages and styles, adapted for the unique heritage of the people of this world. I developed them in my dreams because that was the place where I was most awake, until now. Something has changed, however, and it is time for me to leave the sect. I am taking Brother Ro with me, and I will continue to teach him my cultivation secrets. Before I leave this world, I will send him back to the sect to share what he has learned.”

Di Ram was silent for a long moment, then he nodded. “You have my permission to leave the sect, as does Hien Ro. I expect you to keep your vow. It would be nice to add a seventh peak to the Six Mountains Sect, one higher than any of the others.”

I nodded. “I leave you now, Elder.”

“If you’re truly an awakened soul, then should I not be calling you elder and you be calling me junior?” he challenged. I smiled, and backed out of the room.

~~~~~~

The Necromancer hissed as he sensed the prey getting away. He had sensed its location for but a moment, a brief window in which the soul’s wards had lowered or failed before they were rebuilt. This was the first time this had happened, and he had narrowed down the soul’s location. The target was still on the world that he had previously tracked it to. More importantly, he now knew which sect the soul had been born into in this life.

Unfortunately, just as he was about to pierce the veil and claim the soul, entrapping it for his mistress, the wards flared up once more, stronger than ever. He completely lost trace of the soul, although there was little doubt it had gone far. It was still a failure to act in time. Once again that blasted unbound soul had eluded his grasp. Once again he would have to report news of his failure to his mistress.

He shuddered in fear at the thought of the mistress. He had no illusion that she would not kill him, were his skills not so in demand. He was one of the few who could track the soul, unbound as it was, as it traveled through the multiverse. Even this was only because he had spent centuries studying it as it had stood at the gates of death, defying everything he had thought he understood about the processes of soul decay.

In his youth, he had tried to exorcise the unbound soul for the Divine Fates Empire, before it had fallen into ruin and been reconquered by its present empress. He had been confident in his ability to entrap the soul into an illusion of its personal hell, just as he had for thousands of others, but the soul had simply laughed at him. The soul had invited him to take the last step, to truly cross over the line between life and death so that he would truly understand. The soul had taunted his study, calling him a demon!

He was not a demon, he was a sainted researcher!

Unfortunately, his knowledge came at great personal risk. Necromancy was illegal in most places, after all. Carrying around the souls he had bound and the corpse army he had created could only be done in places where the powers that be were too weak to suppress him. He had carved out a small niche in a small stage 4 world, effectively culling the population until only his research subjects were left alive. He had built his power and gathered his army, ready for the day where he would invade a stage 5 world and claim it as his own.

Then the mistress had come. She had come for his knowledge, flattering him and giving him research materials and funding. Entire worlds! All for the price of his knowledge. For she was dying, and she needed his knowledge to bind herself to a new body.

A simple task. He had happily obliged.

Then she had asked him to track the unbound soul, which had finally left its vigil at the gate of death. A more complicated task, but not impossible. The Necromancer’s previous encounter and his burning resentment had created a tenuous link. Barely noticeable, and tracking it required the faintest of touches. But he could track it.

And he had. Time after time he had tracked the soul. Rebirth after rebirth he had helped the mistress kill the soul in its infancy. The empress had showered riches on him, and he had rejoiced. She had promised him a stage 11 world for his own should he find a way to trap the soul as he could any other, and he had been in the midst of his research into the matter when the soul had simply disappeared.

With the soul vanished the mistress’s favor. She had taken back nearly all that she had given him and threatened him with utter annihilation, but he had bought his life with the fact that she required him for the ritual she used to switch bodies. But only just. No longer was he allowed to pursue his own projects, to conduct his research on matters not related to finding and trapping the unbound soul. If he did not turn all of his focus onto the matter, Empress Nadia had threatened to destroy him and take her chances with a lesser necromancer.

He had narrowed the soul’s location down to a specific patch in a medium quality universe. Then he had narrowed it down to a stage 3 world. The world would have been stage 7 but for the formations that were choking it in order to feed a larger array that enhanced the local Lord’s home planet from a stage 8 to a stage 11.

He scoffed when he discovered that. Such artificial world enhancements were ultimately shortsighted. It was better to cultivate the world’s own core than it was to flush it with siphoned off Qi from another. Cultivating a world was expensive, but no more so than siphoning off a vassal world. The Lord had apparently planned for the short term boost rather than a long term goal, a sign of poor leadership.

He had gleefully reported his findings to the mistress. He believed it would be a simple matter to displace the foolish lord, conquer the world where the unbound soul resided, and then entrap the soul. His mistress had agreed, and she had gone to war.

She had been humiliated. And she had blamed him.

He coughed up blood. The injury she had caused him, the tainting of his core, turning his own Qi against him, still lingered. He seethed inside that he must serve her, but without her patronage, he would not be able to obtain the pills he required to survive that taint.

He had taught her how to do that, and she had used it against him.

He had responded by weakening the array which kept her soul anchored. She had nearly disconnected from her present host, finding a new descendant to possess just in time. Now the two were locked into a game of mutually assured destruction. He must serve her, but she needed him.

Wiping the blood off his chin and rechecking the results of his tracking array, he walked into the communication room, where the crystal which allowed him to communicate with the mistress across worlds was located. His version of the crystal was twice the size of his head, suspended in a field of Qi that was carefully attuned and paired with the mistresses crystal. Her crystal was in an earing. One of eight, for he wasn’t her only advisor whom might need to contact her at a second’s notice.

“Mistress, I have found the soul, and lost it once more,” he said to the crystal. A moment passed, but he knew that she would answer. Indeed, after another moment, he sensed her attention on him, and an eye appeared inside the crystal.

“He has left the world? Is he still inside that damn snake’s domain?” she demanded.

“He remains on the world of his birth. But I have narrowed down his position considerably. He resides within a well known sect. The strongest of his protectors would not be past the golden path. Where force did not succeed, perhaps guile will prevail?”

Silence for a moment, then the eye spoke again. “I cannot infiltrate that territory, the local snake has set too many traps for me. But they are keyed to me. Many of my agents remain unknown.”

The Necromancer smiled. He had brought her valuable news, and was about to be rewarded. Perhaps, once the child was dead and his soul finally entrapped she would consider removing the tainted Qi from his core and--

“What better agent to send than the one who can track him directly?” she asked, interrupting his thoughts. The Necromancer startled.

“Me? You would send me?” he asked.

“My present host will last at least five years. I shall alleviate your symptoms for the same amount of time. If you fail in your task, then you will die, and I shall move to a new host without your help. If you succeed in killing the boy, then I shall cure you, and if you trap his soul then I shall give you back all I have taken from you, and all that I have ever promised you, and much, much more.”

The Necromancer’s greed began to grow with every word his mistress spoke. He bowed to the eye within the crystal. “I shall serve as you wish,” he vowed. When he looked up once more, the eye was gone.

‎