289 Border Troubles
I opened my eyes to the wide mountain ranges, sitting cross-legged on a flat stone while the wind argued with the grasses around me. Why stop? When we were only a month away from reaching the Empire? Well… Lu Gao and Yuen Fu needed me…
My Hell Soul informed me of there progress.
When they didn’t need me anymore, I focused on my main body.
“That was one giant fuckfest.”
Northshire had been loaned to Lei Jia by the Temple, and she had made it hers in a way that disgusted me and fascinated me in equal measure. It seemed that the Heavenly Temple promised the Arch Gate and a route back to the Greater Universe to Lei Jia. In exchange, the world got a tyrant of a demon who helped supply the Heavenly Temple with demons as if it were an ore vein to be mined. I thought about precedents and exiles, how once an example existed there would be more like it, and I chewed that thought over until the taste of it grew thin and bitter. Still, I learned a lot. For example, how ‘belief’ could be harvested. As opposed to merely prayers on altars or hymns in temples, it was possible to gain them through fear and pain. Lei Jia had been a master at it, transforming her cruelty into a tool to inspire followers who then fed her immortality.
Did you know what it means?
I could have been a film star back on New Willow, or perhaps started a boyband and monetized devotion differently.
If anything. the most notable gain from fighting Lei Jia was that I had reached what should have been a new plateau: [Level 11] Ascended Soul. The process was strange and hard to describe in words, like the world itself recognized my stakes, acknowledged my claim, and rewarded me by binding more layers of immortality to my existence. Hei Mao was right. To cultivate as an Ascended Soul was to steal immortality by creating an impression so large that the Heavenly Dao stamped its approval and gave you what amounted to experience points.
Then the most ridiculous thing happened. My layers started to flicker like a failing lantern.
“Oh, motherfucker!”
[Level 10], [Level 9], [Level 8]…
I was stumped at the decline. Then the world betrayed me further: the bright numbers retreated in a dizzy cascade, blinking down through [Level 7], [Level 6], [Level 5]… until I was desperately willing the Heavenly Dao to be done with its nonsense.
“Hey, hey, hey… What is the meaning of this?”
The drop finally arrested at [Level 2] and then, with a humorless little sigh in the marrow, at [Level 1]. It was infuriating, and I cursed the cosmic bookkeeping with every fiber.
“You gotta be shitting me… Fuck!”
I stood then, gritty and short of patience. I cinched the wooden mask over my face, fixed the illusion of blond hair with a wisp of quintessence so the sun would catch it correctly, and let the cloak of subtle power settle across my shoulders. If another Ascended Soul stood before me, they’d probably see through the disguise.
“Are you done, already?” said Alice as she stood impossibly close, sneaking up on me. “It looks like you are having a hard time.”
“Come on, don’t scare me like that,” I snapped, more embarrassed than angry.
“How did it go?” asked Alice.
“Perfectly fine! Just suffering from level aneurysm.”
I shrugged, watching her face fold with a worry I couldn’t read at first.
“Speaking of levels,” I said, trying to steer us back to the practical, “Da Ji’s sitting pretty at [Level 9], representing each tail with her immortality… and then there’s you, Alice, at [Level 10] Ascended Soul after you unified the Transcendent and Longevity paths with Mana Road cultivation as your spine. Care to give me advice? Because being capped at [Level 1] feels unfair…”
When I left Meng Po’s world I had been at [Level 1] or maybe [Level 1.5], a fuzz of potential… and then the Ascension Games happened. The worship, the slaughter, and the terrible attention from the Supreme Void… The works! Since then, I’ve been cultivating hard, but it didn’t seem to stick the way it did for others. For Da Ji and Alice, being part of the Great Guard pantheon had streamlined their ascensions; favors, worship, and their core methods fed them cleanly. For me, the gains glitched out. I blamed my own instinctive distaste for being adored, the way my gut recoiled at altars and songs. It made me feel stupid, like watching kids outrun me in a playground race I forgot I’d ever agreed to.
“Where’s my sister?” I asked, trying to make my tone light because admitting envy felt vulgar.
“She’s off killing local demonic beasts.”
Alice summoned a bicorn beneath a spray of violet sparks. The beast snorted, nostrils flaring, a coat like midnight glass and horns like curved spears. “Climb on,” she told me plainly. “So that we reach the Empire without any more delays.”
I did as told, climbed the beast, and the thing promptly decided it would rather throw me than obey. We cartwheeled across a slope until I found myself flat on my back, the sky spinning like a bad painting. “What was that for?” I rasped, helping myself up. “There’s something wrong with that beast of yours, Alice!”
“They don’t like virgins,” she said, laughing, as if that explained every wild animal on the continent.
My eyebrows went up without permission, because the sentence landed in my head like an ill-fitting shoe. “I am not a virgin,” I objected reflexively, part pride and part confusion. The bicorn snorted as if it had heard the whole pantheon and was now politely amused.
Alice’s expression shifted to something like pedagogical condescension. “All vampires share the same blood with the Dark Progenitor of Life,” she explained, as if delivering a footnote in a lecture I’d repeatedly missed. “And the Dark Progenitor was a hedonistic bastard that thrived on debauchery. So no, I was not created a virgin; neither were the rest of us, which is why the bicorn tolerated me.”
Her explanation felt scholarly and grotesque at once, an anatomy lesson that included morality as an optional appendix. I let it sink in, feeling both relieved and awkwardly late to a social contract I apparently should have known.
It was a small shame, but really… I should pick up my readings again. My Linguist sub-class was suffering, just because I forgot to study lore stuff.
I faked a cough and mumbled something in Infernal at the bicorn. “Can you just let me ride you? I don’t feel like moving my legs.”
The beast snorted, and then, with absolute gall, answered me back in a perfect, flippant Infernal. “I can speak Common perfectly well and Draconic too, but I’ll neigh at you instead to ruin your day. You don’t deserve Lady Alice at all, you insufferable gooner.”
I blinked hard, unsure.
There were levels of insult and then there was that moment when I had to decide whether to be offended by vocabulary borrowed from a language I half-knew and kind-of-knew.
Still… Gooner!?
“I don’t even have a dick!”
It was then that memories jabbed me in the ribs… They were vivid, unpleasant recollections of False Earth and that slimy Jue Bu who’d used my body, and, in so doing, stolen whatever private foolishness I had left to be stolen. “Ugh, I almost forgot about that one…”
“Stop arguing with my bicorn,” said Alice who had been watching the whole pantomime with the indulgent patience of someone who knew all my embarrassing histories. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“If it can speak, why does it neigh?” I demanded.
Alice rolled her eyes. “She’s a magical beast,” she said casually, “we’re spiritually bound. And she’s a horse. Of course, she talks and neighs as she pleases.”
This was my first time hearing this bicorn had been a ‘her’ all along. But that was irrelevant. She was a prick all the same.
The bicorn flicked a tail with contempt.
I stared at the bicorn, trying to reconcile the absurdity. Mounts with standards felt like a cultural artifact gone wrong… what was next, horses demanding tax forms? What was so difficult with letting me ride along?
“Stop it, David. Don’t harass her. The bond between a bicorn and its master is sacred, like a knight and his warhorse. Be a dear, stop complaining, and let’s go.”
I obeyed because the alternative was being punched by a bicorn’s moral superiority, and having to sit through Alice’s scolding.
The beast did a small, impatient prance and then leaped into the air. I followed after with Zealot’s Stride, my feet barely touching the wind as I matched her leap.
Soon, we found Da Ji.
Her colossal fox form loomed across the ridgeline: nine tails curled like banners of silver fire, each one swaying with terrible grace. The mountain wind carried a crisp frost that stung my cheeks, and at the center of that storm my sister stood triumphant over her prey.
The dragon had been formidable by any measure with scales that glistened black as volcanic glass, its claws sharp enough to cut through the spine of mountains. From the way its qi distorted the, I estimated it sat at the Tenth Realm, half a step to the Eleventh, an apex predator that should have ruled its skies without rival. Instead it had been caught in Da Ji’s blizzard. The once-proud roar of the beast was muffled by layers of frost until all that remained was a jagged sculpture of desperation.
I landed lightly on a nearby peak, my boots grinding against stone, while Alice kept her perch atop her bicorn. She tilted her head as if weighing whether Da Ji would finish the job with subtlety or spectacle. Predictably, my sister chose spectacle.
Da Ji’s paw, larger than a siege tower, came down with an almost playful stomp. The dragon shattered into a hundred thousand shards, each glittering like frozen gemstones as they scattered into the valleys below. The crunching echo rumbled through the ranges. It was a victory hymn composed of frost and ruin.
With the kill complete, her form rippled. The monstrous fox dissolved into spiraling wisps of mist until what stood before us was her human shape. Her silver hair floated as though it disobeyed gravity, and her fox-like eyes found me instantly. She drifted toward us, not walking but gliding, with effortless grace.
“You are finally here, took you long enough,” Da Ji said, her voice neither accusatory nor welcoming, merely certain. “Are you done?”
“Yes,” I answered simply. “Let’s go.”
Her lips curved into something small, unreadable, and then her body dissolved back into silver fur. This time, however, the fox she became was scaled for convenience, still large enough to carry me across a battlefield, but not the towering colossus that had crushed a dragon like an insect. She crouched, tails fanning behind her in an unspoken invitation.
I didn’t bother with dignity. I leapt onto her back, settling against the warmth of her fur as Alice’s bicorn pawed at the air and then followed. The wind howled as we left the peaks behind us, each stride of Da Ji’s body spanning valleys with contemptuous ease. No ambushes, no demonic interruptions, and not even a wandering cultivator dared stand in our path. For once, there were no side quests detaining me.
We crossed great distances in a manner of a weeks, taking advantage of a storm that we passed by riding its winds with Da Ji’s spells.
Soon, we reached the Empire.
The Grand Ascension Empire rose in the distance like a continent unto itself. Spires clawed upward from the earth, walls layered with glyphs that shimmered faintly even under daylight. Da Ji slowed as we neared the borders, shrinking further until she could pass for human. She tucked her tails and hid her ears with a casual glamour, as if she had been human all along.
“Quintessence is really convenient, huh?” I remarked.
“It’s the power of creation at your fingertips, brother… I don’t think the word ‘convenience’ does it justice, would you?”
“Yeah, I know,” We descended into the forests skirting the outer gates. The trees were ancient, their shadows deep enough to swallow light. I raised a hand to Alice. “Hide in my shadow, just to be safe. No need to tempt a thousand eyes when one will do.”
Alice tilted her head but obeyed, shortly casting a spell after she dismissed her bicorn. Her body melted into sparks of violet and then spilled across the ground until her silhouette bled into mine. Her voice lingered in my ear, a whisper that brushed like cool breath. “I will remain here. Do not stumble, or you will take me down with you.”
My sister flicked a stray lock of silver hair back over her shoulder and adjusted her clothing. Nothing betrayed the beast beneath. Together we walked out of the treeline until the city walls dwarfed us.
The gate itself was a monument, plated in steel, and layered with formations that pulsed faintly with arrays of fire and thunder. A guard’s voice barked across the distance before I could take three steps closer.
“Halt!” His armor gleamed like lacquered obsidian, and his halberd was steady in his grip. “You stand before the Western Watch. State your purpose.”
I adjusted my robes , projecting just the right mix of confidence and humility. “I am an envoy from New Willow,” I declared, my voice carrying across the gate. “I come to establish a diplomatic relationship with the esteemed and powerful Grand Ascension Empire.”
For a moment, silence stretched. I expected questions, perhaps an escort into an antechamber where suspicion and ceremony would duel. Instead, the guard snorted loudly enough to echo off the walls.
“Rejected. The Grand Ascension Empire has no need of your New Willow. Turn back.”
His dismissal was neither cruel nor angry, just bored, as if my arrival was an insect brushing against the gate rather than a cultivator who had slaughtered ancient souls and survived gods. The halberd lowered a fraction, a polite suggestion that I should already be gone.
I stood there, mask concealing my expression, but under it my jaw tightened. That was it? No grand negotiation, no hidden test of worthiness, no scheming official waiting to drag me into their machinations? Just go away?
For once, I didn’t have a clever retort.
Wait… Okay… I’d like to take that back.
“But the Emperor calls me daddy?”
Yep. Just like that… a really clever retort. Maybe.