The Man cowered in the corner of the one room house. People were attacking from one of the sects. Why would they do that? Just because the elders had refused to pay tribute until the Vrooshkin in the area stopped attacking them? That was the point of paying protection to the sect, wasn’t it? You pay, and they protect you.
That’s when he realized how strange this was. Why was he cowering from a random sect at his level? He looked down to see that he was a level zero commoner woman in a simple dress. While she wasn’t bad looking, she wasn’t anything special, even if he might have thought so before he got used to cultivator women. Why was he now a woman, though? Had he died and somehow his soul had possessed this woman? That might mean that she had spiritual roots, if his soul was draw to her. He was about to try and project chi into some wood, water, and dirt to test for those roots when someone kicked in the door, causing it to fly off of its leather hinges and into the wall at the back of the house where it shattered into scrap and loosened a stone in the process.
He looked up to see that two men had just entered the room. Somehow he recognized them. It was himself and his friend Blood, though they were 300 years younger than they should be. That’s when he realized that this wasn’t a hallucination or a possession. This was a memory, only he had switched positions with another character.
“Well, look at that.” said Blood. Though the man, now woman, supposed he should call him Li, as he wouldn’t choose a Dao name until he entered the third level in thirty years, as the sect tradition dictated. “We found a woman.”
“Not bad looking, either.” said the younger version of the man. “Wasn’t expecting to find a treasure like her while celebrating our advancement to second level.”
“You know, Chang.” said Li. “Xiao isn’t here to nag you about looking at another woman. We could have a bit of fun with this mortal before we kill her.”
The doppleganger nodded. “You know, I think you’re right. Though you get the second round, as I saw her first.”
Li laughed and began to untie his robes.
For the next several hours Blue Phoenix, formally known as Teng Chang, experienced many such scenes. He was beaten, stabbed, tortured, and left tied up in the desert for weeks with no water. The good visions were merely when he was a mortal shop keeper and a cultivator would steal his goods, ruining his livelihood. Yet as hard as he tried, he couldn’t break out of this. Was it an illusion? A memory? Someone sending his soul back in time? He had only heard of the last from seventh and above level cultivators on the Time path, so it was unlikely.
Then an idea struck him. What if it was that monk’s doing? Showing you the pain you had caused others seemed like something a Buddhist might do.
He didn’t see the point, though. He thought about the situation as he was being nailed upside down over a river filled with carnivorous reptiles. Did the monk intend to break him? Make him repent? Neither would happen. He wouldn’t let it happen. He would use his superior willpower and get through this.
Perhaps that plan might have worked if he had only killed or tortured hundreds or a thousand people, but he and Blood had made a sport of it. In the library of their now defunct sect they had found references to a technique for rapidly progressing through the fifth level. Ordinarily one would either continuously go over their past lives for more insights so that they could slowly advance, or they would go live among mortals and study their lives to advance more quickly. According to this document, though, the experiences one uses to improve the quality of their soul need not be their own, or that of a past life. As long as there’s enough detail to the memory and they are significant enough events, all memories can be used. That includes those taken from others via telepathy. Sure, there were diminishing returns, but as long as there was enough variation, they could easily make up the last twenty or thirty percent they had left to reach the peak of fifth realm so they can attempt to condense a supreme soul and enter the sixth level.
So, while Mist had set up a shop in the seediest neighborhood she could find, absorbing the dual cultivation and sexual experiences of those that visited the brothel, the painful memories of the downtrodden, and the bizarre memories of those mortals that used intoxicants, Blue and Blood had targeted a specific life experience that all people would go through eventually, death. And what was wrong with accelerating that death by a few decades or eight, if it meant that their experience would advance the cultivation of a superior. It gave the deaths and, by extension the lives, of these mortals meaning. Blue Phoenix and Blood were even able to add in a bit of torture to keep it interesting and make the memories more useful in cultivation. Blue merely chose to do this at the end of the fifth level, while Blood did this at the beginning, seeing his past life memories as a precious resource.
But no matter how much he rationalized it, the pain kept coming. No one’s mind can hold onto reality after experiencing so much pain, both physically and mentally. So by the end he was simply watching the events happen, catatonically experiencing the torture and his own death dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times.
---
The formation ended and the five elemental items stopped glowing, just floating in place. The Apprentice waved at the items and they flew towards him before shrinking and returning to his ring. “Most of their charge is gone.” he said to Adams. “He must have fought it.”
The Man, Blue Phoenix, Teng Chang, fell to the floor, not even trying to catch himself. The other two walked over to demand his surrender when they noticed he was muttering to himself. “You aren’t going to break me.” he said repeatedly while staring into the distance like he neither knew nor cared what was happening around him.
Adams went over and slapped the man to see if he was faking it, but the man didn’t even flinch. “Ok. What the hell happened to him in there?” asked Adams. “This is not a normal reaction.”
The Apprentice shook his head. “I don’t know. Everything the formation shows him occurs only within his own mind. I have a technique to send knowledge into the head of another, but it doesn’t let me look into their memories unless they use it to send me the memories. I only know that he was forced to relive every time he’s hurt another human being from his victim’s perspective. Depending on how many he has harmed and how he harmed them, the collective pain and suffering may have done this to him.”
Adams nodded and stood up. “Well, I don’t think I need to kill him. He won’t be fighting any time soon, as calm as he seems. Ideally we would put him in prison, but at this point we may need to take him to a psychiatric hospital.”
The Apprentice nodded. “That would be too much of a security risk, as I doubt any mental health facility is capable of holding him if he becomes more lucid.”
Adams sighed. “Then we have only one choice.” He walked over to the man.
“You aren’t going to?” said the Apprentice, fearing that Adams might kill him simply because he couldn’t be held. Adams just looked at him, then picked up the mumbling man and flew him into the air.
Mist Crane was explaining to the Monk how No Roots cultivation was a threat to the entire social structure. Society was currently structured around the ten percent of people who could cultivate being in charge. If everyone could cultivate, or just a significant percent of them, then who rules and who follows is called into question. On Earth, around fifty percent of people had spiritual roots, so even if the Earth didn’t have No Roots Cultivation, the strong can still rule. Combined with a democratic structure in most governments, and the non-cultivators could choose from that much larger pool of candidates, thus allowing the people to vote yet not risking filling the government with weaklings.
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But neither of those work in the other world. There had been democratic societies in the past, but they all failed. The commoners always picked people they could relate to, meaning people who weren’t cultivators. Cultivators therefore were no longer important to society, and most of the cultivators left for societies where they would be seen as important. And this left the nations open for attacks by evil cultivators. Eventually, every society was destroyed by bandits, demonic cultivators, or beast tides, and those that survived became refugees in Cultivator lead nations.
“But if all of your people are cultivators, would that not solve the problem? You would have massive numbers of forces to defeat these threats.” the Monk reasoned.
“No, it would make it worse.” Mist Crane said. “The stronger one becomes, the more resources they require. The need is exponential. And the resources that are needed are only so numerous. Up to a point we may be able to expand the harvesting of resources, maybe farm them or mine them, but eventually that won’t be enough. With the shortage of resources, crime will increase. Demonic means of cultivation will increase. When you can’t get the resources you need to advance, you start looking for alternatives. And to demonic cultivators other humans are a very tempting resource.”
“All of those issues can be overcome.” the Monk said. “I won’t pretend that it will be easy, but our world has very little crime compared to yours, and almost none of it is driven by cultivation resources, unless you count thieves taking them to sell for a discount on the black market.”
“How are you going to fix that? How are you going to prevent a shortage of spirit stones or jade from preventing people from reaching even the second level, much less higher?”
“Most of the people on Earth don’t use spirit stones, though. Sure, some devices have small pieces of quartz in them as a power source, and some qi gathering devices use small crystals to gather qi to give it to them, but because of this, they have no need for the larger stones. As for jade, it’s only really used in decorations and art, even in the temples. We have a communications network and other ways to store information, so we don’t need the slips to spread information.”
Mist Crane sighed. “Ok, so maybe those two materials won’t be the issue, but surely you can’t…” Just then Adams arrived, carrying Blue Phoenix. “What happened?” she asked.
“He was about to drop a parking garage on us, so the Apprentice used Penance Cage on him. When it ended he collapsed and started mumbling about us not being able to break him.”
Mist looked at the Monk, confused. “A Parking Garage is a large concrete building used to store vehicles. He likely thought dropping it on them would be poetic. Penance Cage is a technique which makes a target relive all of the harm they’ve caused others from the victim’s perspective. When I used it on Blood he escaped because he had no sympathy. Blue Phoenix obviously had some, but saw the technique as a form of torture he must overcome, rather than an attempt to show him the error of his ways. He tried to fight directly against it, but his sins were too serious and too numerous for such an approach to work. This made it a form of torture rather than the guide it was meant to be.”
Adams handed the man off to Mist. “Oh, Mist. Did they get you too? Or did I get out?” Phoenix said. “Either way, you’ll be proud. They didn’t break me. They didn’t break me.” He continued to repeat this as she held him.
“If you are willing to leave Earth and stop attacking us,” offered Adams, “I will let you leave.” She nodded and carried him back to the gate. When she was gone he sighed. “You know,” said Adams, “My people might not like the fact that we let her leave, but..”
“We didn’t have the strength to fight her, should she have chosen to fight us. That was the wisest course of action.” said the Monk.
Adams nodded. “Yeah.” He landed near the Gate with the others. “I’m going to the other world, to see if they need any help. Do you two want to come as well?” The two of them nodded and went through the gate. The base was a mess. Thousands of bodies lay outside the walls, many of them being workers from the native village that popped up here, but most of them being from one of the sects in the area. Inside the base, however, there were no civilians, just hundreds of local cultivators and hundreds of soldiers. From the way they were gathered around the gate Adams could tell that the people here tried to defend the gate, only to be killed by someone significantly more powerful. Most were burned or frozen, but some had no external injuries outside of a few chemical burns. He knew that it was Blue Phoenix and Mist Crane that had killed them, and regretted having to let them escape.
Emergency personnel started coming through the gate from the other side and Adams started instructing them. “Priority is to find survivors. Check the civilian village too.” The emergency workers acknowledged the order, then started looking over those that were there. The Monk and the Apprentice started looking for people that were seriously wounded and healing them enough that they wouldn’t die before moving on to the next. As most of the first group were from the Red Cross, them having been notified as soon as the base came under attack, they treated this more like disaster relief than a battlefield, but they were still able to properly triage the people here. A few local cultivators from the sects survived and, while they would be treated, they would go to holding cells as soon as they could be moved, and would be under military watch until then, by people that were at least in Foundation.
Thirty minutes later the army and national guard started sending people through, and they helped get all of the survivors on both sides evacuated to emergency facilities on Earth. Interestingly, Adams didn’t know the name of this world, or even if it had one. He could have asked Mist, but it didn’t seem to be the right time to do so. Maybe he could ask someone later.
As he instructed the soldiers in cleaning up the corpses for transport back to Earth, he found two special ones beside each other. The first was what was left of a cultivator from this world, and judging by the fact that he, or at least Adams thought it was probably a man, was wearing a storage ring, he was a high ranking one. The second was Lindstrom. It seemed that Lindstrom had been locked in battle with the other man and, just as he won, he was shot in the back by some sort of heat beam. Most likely Blue Phoenix had seen him defeat the other Nascent Soul and finished him off.
Adams went over and knelt beside them, touching the center of Lindstrom’s chest. He extended his senses, and smiled. He called over one of the army officers that was nearby and pointed to the body. “Have Admiral Lindstrom’s body prepared for transport. I will order a cargo plane to pick it up.”
“Yes, sir.” the man said. “It makes sense for him to get private transport back to Arlington.” Adams didn’t correct him. The general’s core still contained a soul cloud, which meant that he could be revived. That was the main advantage of entering Nascent soul, that even in death you can return. Adams just needed to get him back to Nellis Air Force Base, where multiple clones of both Lindstrom and Adams were being kept.
It was another nine hours before all of the bodies had been cleared. The bodies of the locals were given back to the survivors, about 70% of the people who lived outside the fort having avoided being killed in the attack. The sect had tried to wipe them out, claiming the were contaminated, but the soldiers had killed most of those that were attacking and drawn the rest away. The bodies of the soldiers were sent back to their families, and military funerals arranged. What Earth civilians were on the base at the time of the attack had fled to Earth. That just left the dead cultivators. Adams knew nothing of cultivator traditions, so he called one of the anthropologists that had been stationed here to help with the locals.
“Oh, the cultivators tend to not really have funerals or burial rights.” Dr. King said. “While the locals do, usually burying their dead at a place of significance to the individual in order to remember them, and sometimes even having shrines in their homes, the vast majority of cultivators see the body as merely a shell that they are temporarily tied to. Their goal is to at least reach the fifth level, where they no longer need a shell, where they can change shells if they wish, and even function without one if desired. As such, they place no importance on the body of the people that die. They may keep a possession of the deceased to remember them by, and some sects turn useful body parts into pills which are distributed to those close to the deceased, so that they may aid their loved ones in advancement, or even give the core of a fourth level cultivator to a family member or dao companion, but those are both practical and ways to remember the dead.”
Adams had a choice to make. Should he send the belongings of the deceased back to the other sect, along with the cores of those level fours that died? Ultimately he decided that they had forfeited their rights to those things when they attacked. He had the belongings sent to the armory to be sorted and inventoried, in case there were useful things there, and he had the cores of the enemies stored there as well. When they rebuilt this base, they would need to step up security, and those cores could let them surround it in an impressive barrier.
The one thing that he kept for himself was the ring of the rival level 5 cultivator. It contained some pills, a few techniques on jade slips, a few changes of clothes, several thousand spirit stones, and a flying sword, most likely kept for nostalgic reasons, as the man could fly without it. Everything inside the ring was sent to storage, but the ring itself, bearing the insignia of a Peacock on the top, was now his.
