The Jin Clan Domain, Part II
I flew seated upon a black lotus, drinking down the qi sealed inside Jin Gi-hwan's golden core.
Fine quality. There was not a trace of turbid qi in it. It had been condensed until it rivaled gang qi itself—and for all that purity, the quantity was nothing slight. If anything, it surpassed the internal energy held in my own demonic core.
That told me what I needed to know.
Pills refined by grinding human beings. In truth, the method was nothing more than a means of better absorbing a mortal's innate true qi—their life force, in other words. And did I need any such thing? No. Even without it, I could take not only innate true qi, but every last shred of the acquired true qi they had stored up since the day they were born. Had I not already digested Jin Gi-hwan's golden core?
A pig fattened on their flesh would nourish more than a half-corpse starved down to the bone.
So I would absorb the Jin Clan Domain in its entirety. Whatever intelligence remained on that ground, I would gather, and then I would go on to the next clan, the next cultivation sect, and absorb them in turn. Common folk there was no particular need to grind down and drink; consuming them would scarcely help. If the need arose, I would. Otherwise, they could be left out.
Good.
Their very existence was, to me, no different from a stroke of karmic fortune. My internal energy would become the sum of theirs and mine together.
It was worth the asking. Jin Gi-hwan had played his part. Because of him, the time required to ascend to the Upper Realm would shrink by orders of magnitude. And the knowledge that they would grind down their own kind and drink them without a moment's hesitation, all for the sake of power, gave me something else as well—certainty. Certainty in the plan to complete a world that had transcended the Five Desires and Seven Passions.
When that time comes, even I would no longer have to live with a heart this empty. I would be incapable of feeling the emptiness at all; and with nothing left that needed pouring into the hollow, it would, by that very fact, cease to be empty.
I reached the barrier of the Jin Clan Domain in a single minute and lifted the Divine Sword of Primordial Unity overhead.
A single downward stroke. The barrier split clean in two and crumbled.
The Jin Clan Domain had no choice but to bare what lay within: a vast estate, scored across its length by one perfectly straight sword-scar.
"A-an attack!"
"Aaaagh...!!"
Cultivators fled in flawless order. Most likely they were lingering at Qi Refining or Foundation Establishment. I had no business with them for the moment. I would be busy enough dealing with those of Core Formation and Nascent Soul.
A cultivator who looked to be of Core Formation was directing the field, his spirit-speech ringing out until the air itself shuddered.
So that one is the strategist. Then he dies first.
By the time the thin whistle of cloven wind reached anyone, it was already too late. The form of Black Point had already run his golden core through.
"Kgh—grrk..."
Blood foamed at his mouth. His eyes went slack, and his body pitched forward. I wrenched the sword free, and blood and scraps of viscera jetted out like a fountain.
"On a battlefield the commander matters, so I killed him first."
I said it as I stamped his head apart beneath my foot.
"And yet it seems you never needed a commander at all."
Somewhere in the space of that remark, I had been surrounded by some fifteen cultivators. Fourteen of Core Formation. One of Nascent Soul.
I don't think I'll lose. With every kill, my internal energy only grew. And I was slowly beginning to grasp the taking of life's own qi.
"...Why are you doing this?"
"You ask why? Because I need power. The same reason as you."
I tipped my chin—come, then—and leveled the sword's point.
In that instant a man came rushing in, flame wound about his fist.
"A rather fine movement."
But that was all. Movement that did not even reach the Peak Realm could do me no harm.
"Though, fortunately, that does not appear to be the whole of it."
An arrow of fire. A sphere of fire. A sword of fire.
From each of them, without cease, the three poured forth.
Even so, they had not been loosed in the same instant, but at awkward intervals, and so they were difficult to turn back all at once. Dodging was plainly impossible, surrounded as I was.
But if they are not the same, I need only make them so.
I gave ground, turned my body just enough to slip the flaming fist, and opened distance toward the attacks that had come out ahead of the rest.
Black pigment laid itself over the world in a circle centered on me, sheared through the spells, and broke the golden cores of three Core Formation cultivators. I could have shattered all fourteen. But—
"Nascent Soul. You won't fight me yourself? I prefer to cross blades directly."
The Nascent Soul cultivator stood where he was, bearing down on me, narrowing the moves I could take, forcing them.
"The sword left undrawn is the sharpest of all."
He said it with a grave face. Cold sweat streamed down his brow from the contest of moves between us. In truth, three Core Formation lives had already been spent because he lost that contest.
A tiger wrought of fire trod the empty air and came charging.
"But however sharp a sword may be, if it is never drawn, it cannot cut."
I kicked off the ground, body inverted, and drove the sword toward the cultivator who had cast the spell.
The thrust went first. The detonation followed.
"H-hiiik...!!"
...The cultivator did not die. A ward of flame, no different from a barrier, exerted a repulsive force and shoved away the sword-point that had touched his chest.
"...So they caught me."
The moment I murmured it, formations flared to life beneath the cultivators' feet.
That avatar of fire swung a fist the size of my body. I flipped myself upright and settled into a ready guard.
The Divine Sword of Primordial Unity erased everything along its path and rushed the colossus.
Black flame and red flame crashed together, each trying to break the other. A clean slice—the Divine Sword of Primordial Unity split the giant's right arm in half, and the contest of fire was ended.
Then the giant's left fist, driving in at me. I met it head-on with Black Point, and was overpowered.
The end?
Flame detonated, and my upper body was deleted entire. Only the lower half remained, driven into the mountainside, pulped flesh spraying in every direction.
Death.
I, stripped of the flesh, looked down upon the scene. The cultivators were vomiting blood or gasping for breath, and what remained of my body—even that last lower half—was hardly intact.
That I can still think is because the soul remains. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a vengeful soul.
If I die, I will be reincarnated at once in another world. I could feel something, somewhere, pulling at my soul. That attraction had to be the source of the power called otherworld reincarnation. I could not resist it for long. The pull was too strong, and this was no mere gift from the world of my birth—it was a power of an entirely higher order. Only because the divinity of this world had bound me here could I endure even this instant. An instant that would not last a full second.
Did I want that?
No. Impossible.
Only this world, which I love and which I also hate, has any meaning. Only this world—the one that let me meet the person I loved above all else, and then took her away—is mine. I will complete it. Whatever happens, I will. I cannot be buried anywhere else. If I am to be buried, let it be here.
The natural qi of the surroundings was drawn into me with a low, gathering hum.
I can feel it. Not all natural qi is of one nature. Some is like water, some like fire, and some bears the nature of wood, of metal, of earth.
Qi of like nature clumped together, and five spheres took form.
Water. Fire. Wood. Metal. Earth.
The qi of the Five Elements was drawn into the middle dantian.
Bone warped with a grinding creak. Three black roses bloomed behind my head, and the demonic core in the lower dantian vomited black light.
Upper, middle, lower. Spirit, essence, qi. Heaven, earth, human.
Their union was accomplished, and the flesh was reconstituted to fit the soul. Bone regenerated harder than before; denser, more pliant muscle sheathed it. Skin and organs alike were replaced with the new. The body evolved into the vessel most fit to hold the soul.
"Y-Yang Flame Arrow!"
"...Flame Tiger...!"
The cultivators who had noticed the change poured their spells upon me, but by then the regeneration was already finished.
A silent sword-stroke, erasing even the air that might have carried its sound, bisected heaven and earth.
The spells collapsed. The Core Formation cultivators were deleted, leaving only their golden cores behind. Where the stroke had passed, even the splendid architecture was reduced to wreckage.
Step by step, I walked in the new body toward the only one whose flesh still held its shape—the Nascent Soul cultivator. The lord of the Jin Clan.
"Ghhk... what in the world did you do...!"
"What do you mean?"
"Why... why won't the wound regenerate! The golden core is perfectly intact...!"
He was right. My sword-stroke had severed his upper body from his lower, and for all that he had reached Nascent Soul, he could not regenerate. No flesh would bud from the cut, and a black fluid was eating into his body besides.
"You already know, don't you? I cut the soul."
"...How. How, in the world...!"
"A swordsman, if he is to be one, must be able to leave uncut what he does not mean to cut, and to cut what he means to cut. That is the essence of the sword."
"And at the moment of death, I was able to reach it. A realm unlike the material world—one that touches the essence of all creation, and the soul."
"A higher realm...? You touched the Honwongye?"
"Is that what you call it. My thanks."
I raised the Divine Sword of Primordial Unity overhead, and he cried out in a panic.
"W-wait!"
"What."
"...Senior! I am a cultivator of the Nascent Soul stage. I can reshape my flesh as I please!"
"And what would you have me do with that? I can do as much myself."
"But I possess the ability to assume the form of a chosen target..."
"I don't care to hear the rest."
As I brought the sword down, the lord of the Jin Clan let out an ungainly shriek—eek!—and hastily remade his face and body.
...Into Seol-ah.
"Haha... Th-this is the one Senior finds most ideal..."
White hair. Blue eyes. Every feature of the face. Nearly all of it was Seol-ah.
Feeling as though my brain were burning, I gripped the sword all the harder.
"...You thought I wouldn't be able to cut you, so long as you wore that body?"
You dare. Above yourself.
You would mimic her?
"Ghk—ghk...! S-Senior! That is...!"
The voice. The same. The vocal cords were the same; it could not be otherwise.
You dare beg for your life in that voice?
Countless sword-strokes tore his body to shreds.
Heaven's Net. Heaven's Net. Heaven's Net. Heaven's Net. Heaven's Net. Heaven's Net.
Black resentment dripped from my eyes as I hacked apart the mass of meat that wore the body of the one I had loved.
"Hah... hah... hk..."
Only when that flesh had failed to leave even a scrap behind, reduced to a handful of bloody water, did I stop the cutting.
Different. The real her would never speak that way, nor wear an expression like that. But the sensation of butchering a body with her appearance was far from pleasant.
"Huurk—gueeh...!"
I drove the sword into the earth and retched, again and again. It hurts. I want to die. I want to be buried in this ground, side by side with her.
...I can't.
This is not the time. Quickly. Quickly. Even a little faster. I have to complete this world.
I rose and began, staggering, to search the Jin Clan Domain. I could not keep at it for long.
"Ah... ah. Ah..."
I sank down, clutching my head in both hands, and black resentment dripped and dripped. And then the mind that had newly reached the realm of Five Qi Gathering at the Origin barely, barely gathered itself.
There is no time for this.
"...No. There is no time for this."
A moment was worth a fortune in gold. Faster. Faster still. I had to lead this world to the Far Shore.
I had to.
And yet this heart had to be kept. To lead not one person, but the whole of this world, to a Far Shore beyond the Five Desires and Seven Passions, I would—paradoxically—have to stand closer to them than anyone. Every evil karma, every emotion, every desire: I would bear them all. Do that, and the completed world might have no place for me. It did not matter. It was only what had to be done.
I drew the black resentment, pouring like a waterfall, back into my body, and stood. So that I might walk toward the purpose of delivering this world.