Once there had been a soul. It was not special or unique amongst its kind, merely one of countless others; turning with the Wheel through life, then death, then life again. On and on, an endless tide of existence.
Each life it lived was an immaculate treasure, perfectly itself. A pearl on a string that stretched all the way back to the beginning of time. And although the soul carried nearly nothing from one reincarnation to the next, an instinct began to emerge – a consistent personality, one could say.
Kindness. Empathy. Self-sacrifice. Not every life the soul lived was pleasant, and sometimes it had no choice but to hurt others to survive, but always it at least attempted to do good. To leave the world fuller when it came time to rejoin the Wheel.
And eventually, without the soul ever truly becoming aware of itself, it broke through a barrier. All of those lives, every pearl on that endless string, suddenly condensed down into a single point. The soul burst at the seams, exploding into a cloud as it was reborn for the last time.
But it was not reborn as a human, or an animal. Nor an insect, or even a plant. No, the soul was now something entirely different – and in fact, it was no longer a soul at all.
On that day which was otherwise unremarkable, long before humanity discovered the secrets of cultivation, an angel was born.
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Heaven was not like Earth. There was nothing solid, no water or stone or air. Even the angel did not actually have a body; it was a diffuse being, a cloud of thoughts and emotions, only barely able to interact with other angels where they intersected.
But it could interact, just a little. By mingling itself with its neighbours, it learned. It exchanged memories, lifetimes, joys and sorrows. It came to understand its new home, and the things it could do.
It had no eyes or ears, but it could still see, still hear. And yet it was not Heaven that it observed with those senses – no, when it opened itself it saw the whole of Earth, that place it had left behind, life continuing to turn in its endless toil. Each grain of sand was as complex a world as it had ever imagined as a creature of flesh, each living thing a cosmos of interacting forces.
For eons it watched, together with the other ascended post-souls. It learned and grew, and as new angels were born it helped them to learn and grow as well. Its sight expanded and deepened; where before it could only see as it had when it was alive, eventually the angel began to predict. To see the bonds of causality that governed everything, and after uncountable years of effort, to pluck those strings – to change the outcome. Alter the future.
It refined itself, growing its prognostication, and its ability to change fate. It revealed murderers before they could kill, eased sickness, guided men and women towards prosperity and happiness. And it did not do so alone; though from Earth it would have seemed like nothing more than random chance, in reality there was an ever-growing legion of Heavenly observers, each acting to avoid evil, each putting their hands to the scale of fate. They could not change everything, or even most things, but still the Heavenly host worked tirelessly.
The world continued to turn. Nations rose and fell. Forest turned to grassland and back again. And then one day, in a country named Haggera in the northernmost point of the northernmost continent, the first cultivator was born. A woman, a medicine maker, noticed a pattern in which fish would become monstrous and huge. A confluence of spawning location, diet, and behaviour.
That qi existed had been known for generations – indeed, that medicine woman used spirit herbs in her trade. Warriors the world over drank the blood of monsters to gain strength. Tools made of naturally enchanted stone and wood were passed down from parent to child. She was not anywhere near the first person to attempt to utilise qi in the manner of a spirit beast – merely the first to succeed.
When she condensed her dantian, Heaven’s collective eyes were drawn. Like the sun capturing planets, the first cultivator, Mana of Haggera, drew the fate of everything around her into her orbit. Within three decades, she was queen of her country. Within three centuries, cultivation became commonplace.
It crossed the sea, heading inland through rivers and trade routes, and soon each kingdom was headed by a new class of human. Fate churned wildly, and the amount of the planet that Heaven could influence began to shrink as more threads were captured by masses far closer than any angel.
But although these happenings would be a turning point in the history of mankind, for the angel it did not seem overly important. Cultivators were not fundamentally different than other people; no more kind or cruel than average, as likely to be vile as virtuous. They did not tip the scales of the world, merely make them harder to manipulate.
And so the years continued to pass. The angel grew greater still, its compassion and interest in the world remaining despite the growing distance from its origin. Its eyes grew keener, its hands defter, and it averted tragedies years before they began. Younger angels looked to it for guidance, and in time it and a few of its ancient peers came to require separate designations, something that the collective memory of Heaven had previously rendered unnecessary.
It chose the name Compest, and was given the title of archangel. And with that new title draped around its shoulders, it resolved to work twice as hard, to divert twice as much suffering and create twice as much joy. It educated its juniors, that they might themselves become archangels in a fraction of the time. Heaven swelled, and as the Earth entered something of a golden age, the conflict of the first wars of cultivation dying down, Compest looked to the future with boundless optimism.
And then everything was shattered.
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The man who would be the first Heavenly Emperor was not born any ruler of men. Not a prince or lord, but only the son of a vegetable farmer.
But he did not remain a farmer for long. By his fifth year, the child had reached the first realm – and by his tenth the second, by his fifteenth the third.
On the day he reached his hundredth year of life, he was in the seventh realm of cultivation. So quickly had he ascended, that his body had the appearance of a boy only just entering puberty. He became a living legend, a slayer of monsters and a spiritual leader. He founded a sect, and drew students from across the whole of the rainy southeastern continent.
For over three millennia he led the Rainworld Sect from the front. His youth did not last long in the grand scheme of things; by his thousandth year his limbs had lengthened and filled out, and he became a man of great stature, his chiselled features and lustrous hair adorning countless statues. Then as the generations passed his skin began to wrinkle, his hairline and muscles equally receding. He took to a more leisurely lifestyle, leaving younger men to tame the jungle. Many thousands of years passed, and by the time he ascended to the peak of the tenth realm his hair was a small white halo around his ears, his previously jet-black skin closer to grey. His body was like that of a mummified corpse, shrivelled and dehydrated.
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And yet, his eyes still burned like those of an indomitable hero. A slayer of monsters, a leader of men and builder of nations.
He was a man who had led his people since before recorded history, and he would not die to anything so mundane as time.
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Much like the first time a human became a cultivator, Heaven’s eyes were drawn to the first time a human exceeded the limits of cultivation. But while it was not different in substance, the scale was unimaginably larger.
Compest felt a shudder go through the entire host, and in an instant its current task – nudging two feuding families just the right way to avoid bloodshed – was abandoned. As though drawn by a magnet his divinations were flung to the south, to the top of a temple that had been carved out of a mountain. It was not something he had ever had cause to look at before; cultivators were difficult to move, their spiritual mass too great for Heaven to budge. They kept mostly to themselves anyway, so the host was content to leave them to their own devices, preferring to guide less pointlessly strenuous populations.
It was a colossal construct, the work of hundreds of cultivators over thousands of years, a building to dwarf any city in the world. And on each step up the long stairway there was a kneeling figure, their heads pressed to the polished stone. As the temple ascended into the sky, so too did the worshipping figures ascend the realms of cultivation; at the bottom were young children, their dantians new and rough. In the middle were older disciples, warriors and craftsmen and priests. Near the top were venerable elders, each of them a philosopher-king in their own right, their heads as low as any other’s.
And at the very peak of the temple, ninety-nine ancient monks surrounded a storm of fate the likes of which Compest had never seen. Even their might wasn’t enough to entirely penetrate it, the threads so thick as to obscure the thing in their centre – the younger angels could not even look at it, it was so brilliant.
But Compest was an archangel, and with effort it could catch glimpses. A small figure draped in silks, a string of beads held between their hands. A crown of stone, humble in substance but unbelievably ostentatious in construction; simple knapped stone carved so intricately that the rising tines might appear to be verdant trees from one angle and sharp swords from another. Weathered skin the colour of parched soil, so deeply wrinkled it was impossible to discern whether the figure was male or female.
The worshippers chanted, holding their hands aloft as the storm continued to build. Soon it was beyond even Compest’s power to look directly at the withered figure, its senses breaking down before whatever it was that was occurring.
The storm of fate was mirrored by an actual storm, thunderclouds gathering to swirl around the temple. For an entire day and night the phenomenon went on, the monks chanting and the lesser cultivators kneeling in worship.
And then Compest felt a curious sensation, something it had not felt for a very long time. As the host trembled and clung together, and the stormclouds were blown away all at once, it cast its memory back and remembered: this sensation was a shortness of breath. Something it had never once experienced since reaching Heaven.
There was a great and resounding crack, as if all of Heaven was a bell being struck, and each and every angel reeled. Compest felt pressured, flattened, another equally unpleasant sensation that should have been impossible.
The figure was gone from the temple – but not gone from Compest’s senses. For the very first time it could look at its actual surroundings with its divinations, for now there was something to look at. In the centre of the Heavenly host knelt the ancient cultivator, unobscured by the threads of fate, still holding their beads with their head pointed skyward.
A wave of visceral disgust flowed through Compest’s mind, an emotion mirrored by every single angel it could feel. Interloper, every instinct screamed, this place is not meant for you. It was yet another new sensation; the archangel had witnessed the worst crimes possible over the millennia, depths of depravity that only came every hundredth generation, and only experienced a profound sadness.
The host attempted to push the figure back through the crack it had made in reality, but it was futile; the cultivator was a physical object, and even pressed directly against its skin their mighty divinations could do little more than tousle hair.
Slowly the kneeling figure opened its eyes. They were clouded by cataracts, but as Compest watched those clouds began to disappear. The figure’s wrinkled skin became supple, their white and wispy hair became black and lustrous, their limbs regaining the vitality of youth.
Within ten seconds the mummy-like figure had completely transformed into a man at the height of his strength. His skin was like obsidian, his teeth like pearls. The stone crown fit on his head like he had been born for it, even the dull and faded robes he wore seeming to radiate triumph.
He spoke, his voice carving through the host like a sword through mist. “I am Taon, king of kings and the true living God. By right of conquest do I claim this place in the name of my empire, the Eternal Rain World, and take ownership of everything within.”
Compest strained himself to the breaking point together with the host, but if the cultivator even noticed their efforts he gave no indication. He raised his hand, and the string of beads liquefied, shaping into a short sceptre of milky blue stone.
“From this moment forth, I name myself the Heavenly Emperor. Let no man or false God lay claim to any inch of the Earth, for it belongs to me. Let no fate exist but the one I choose, for today death itself has been defeated.”
The man gestured, and a new wave of affront crashed through the host as this human, this vile thing that had cheated its way into Heaven, grasped the threads of fate with a power ten times as strong as the eldest archangel. In an instant causality was thrown into disarray, plans a thousand years in the making undone like a badly knit scarf coming apart at the seams.
Something inside Compest, a resistance to what was happening, a rejection of the reality unfolding before its senses, died. As a throne of obsidian and gold appeared out of nowhere, the archangel’s heart sank into a deep and cold abyss.
This, it thought, is beyond my power to fix.
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Time did not stop simply because the throne of Heaven was filled. The Earth continued to turn, and the Wheel with it. In time the host gave up attempting to force Taon back into material reality, and begrudgingly accepted the new order of things. Their role in subverting fate diminished, but did not disappear; the emperor was not concerned with the bulk of the world, leaving Compest and their kin to manage the day-to-day.
But they were no longer at the helm, and that knowledge chafed. It was no wonder then, that when a second cultivator ascended the angels felt smug at Taon's flabbergasted expression.
The humans fought, neither achieving a decisive victory, before a calamity much greater than two feuding Gods rocked the world.
To make a long story short, Hell was repelled. Additional cultivators ascended, until there were an even dozen. The host quietly managed things as they squabbled like roosters, resenting their presence no less than the first.
And then, Heim. A gathering place of ascended souls, much like Heaven, annihilated. And then the fifth, an Earth-like world, countless innocents reduced to vapour due to the fear of a dozen cruel Gods. And then…
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Compest felt it from a long way off, causality shifting like grains of sand in an upturned hourglass. Yet another one, it thought, looking into the future. Is it at long last that foot-dragger, Steadfast Heart? At least with an odd number they won't deadlock quite so often.
The world was smaller than ever, anti-divination wards obscuring vast swathes of Earth from Heaven's sight. But reality subverted the archangel's expectations; its divination was not halted by a barrier of demonic energy, and further did not seem to be pointing at a human at all. No, what it saw was simply a patch of forest, life growing verdantly as was only natural.
Except… yes, there's something else. A skeleton? It did not look like a human skeleton, nor any bones Compest had ever seen.
And then the corpse looked at him, its empty sockets devoid of life yet incomprehensibly aware. The two beings stared at each other through time, neither moving. The bones reached out, again without moving, and Compest felt its mind touch theirs as a fellow angel's would.
"You have been asleep for a very long time," the corpse said. "Would you like to wake up?"