Chapter 122
At last, I reached the foot of Mount Kunlun.
This, of course, was not where the Daoists lived. It was where people lived. Pass through the human lands and you came to the country of those halfway things, neither quite person nor quite immortal, that they called Daoists; go farther in still, and you reached the place where the immortals themselves resided. The higher you climbed, the less the mountain was built to let a person enter alone. Even now I couldn't see how I was supposed to get in, so I meant to think about it when I arrived. That was what I wanted.
I could have, if there hadn't been a long line of people who might reasonably be called soldiers spread out in front of me.
Dozens of them, every one on horseback, spears leveled at me. From among them, the man whose armor and helm were the most distinctive came forward.
"His Majesty desires you. You will follow."
No introduction. Only the tone of a man who took it as given that when he spoke, I would obey.
"No."
So I told him what I thought. Had I met them a little earlier, I would have gone at once. If I was to build an automatic harvester among the people seated up high, the way I had planned, then now was when I ought to go. Turn them into harvesters, and build a system that gathered warmth on its own. That plan was still underway.
But only if there was no natural enemy. Make a harvester of the emperor this time, and the immortals would simply come again, cast him out, and raise another. If I were an immortal, that is what I would do.
From the memories I had gathered so far, the immortals on Kunlun's side were, for the most part, righteous people. They had not stood by while a monster made the people of this world miserable. They had stepped in themselves.
The Murim Alliance, and the Heavenly Demon Cult.
Set the two side by side, and from a human point of view the Heavenly Demon Cult was indeed an ugly villain. It was the sort of evil where you first killed every living member, and only afterward were allowed to regret that you should not have done it. They had already lived too long as a culture and a society too alien to be joined, and each of them was an insult to what people owed one another. There was no blending with that. Submission to strength I could let pass; most societies were built that way. But there were things a person must never accept.
They planted parasites in people. Refuse the word of someone above you, and the worms made you suffer. That was what their society treated as ordinary. It was twisted past all reason. Kill only the head and spare the rest, and the cult's culture would have changed its face and grown back in the same place, because the people who had learned it would still have been standing there. Change the shell on top, and the inside does not change. A culture, once born, does not vanish easily. So wiping them out entirely and regretting it later was the correct choice, and that was what they had done.
I was not bound for Kunlun because the Heavenly Demon Cult had fallen. I had a goal.
Yuanshi Tianzun.
Daegon had been an enormous mass of information, immensely valuable. Only, the foundations of those special arts were built on the premise that one consumed a great many Sacrifices and used the arts oneself.
Yes.
He was deeply learned in the techniques he himself used. Hand that knowledge to a harvester, and I had to wonder whether they could ever reach a stage at which they might actually wield it. Useful techniques, to put it one way, that only a character of level 100,000 could use — and raising one's level that high was flatly impossible. Or else someone like Daegon would have to become a harvester. Would that huge mass of light bow its head to me merely because I offered it a chance?
They were techniques I couldn't use either, of course. But the side that had stood against him — Yuanshi Tianzun's side — was different. They were closer to a technological civilization. They handled peculiar tools and did their work by means of those tools, and what I liked most was that the whole of it was made of knowledge. Obtain it, and I could copy it and paste it in, couldn't I? And if, among that knowledge, there was an art for moving a world…
"So I warn you one last time. Monster. Come quietly, or you will be dragged away in a state no one would call whole."
"I said no."
He had been going on for some time, loud about the emperor's authority, the power delegated down to him, and his own greatness, and I had been letting it wash past while I thought of other things. Now he was using the word last.
"Then be dragged."
The words were barely finished before they drew strangely shaped wooden boards from their saddles and aimed them at me. The boards shone, and chains of pure-white metal burst out of empty air and bound me. From the color, I didn't think it was steel. Even with Choseol's power, they looked difficult to break.
Hmm.
I had felt it when the Heavenly Demon bound me the first time we met: simply restraining me, or sealing me, did not seem to count as an attack. When I was attacked, I felt them strike my body. There was nothing like that now.
Thud.
As if to ask what he thought he was looking at, I kicked him in the back. Pale blue light poured out of it. Several of the men on horseback staggered and fell from their mounts, and the ones who hit the ground crawled toward that back with vacant faces. Then the ones still conscious climbed down and, shuffling, drove things like long needles into the bodies of the men crawling toward it.
"Hah—!"
They came to at once.
"A tool that bewitches people. It works in daylight, too?"
"To smash a ward of the mind in an instant — an anomaly of the lowest Unranked grade at the very least…!"
"Use the Primordial Heartquake Spear!"
They revived out of disorder with remarkable speed. The confusion died at once, and they finished putting themselves in order just as quickly. Then the ones who had been doing nothing in the rear came forward, drew grotesquely shaped spears from their saddles, and leveled them at the back. No beam lanced out, and yet the back broke and shattered to pieces.
All of them handled it as if they had done it a hundred times. They had been through this sort of thing often. Well, it was a world with yaoguai; it would have been strange if the human world had no office for dealing with them. Stranger still if no such office existed wherever a human ruler sat. And if there wasn't one? Then the ruler was not human, or something ruled the human ruler.
"Struggle all you like. It will do you no good."
The man who had been boasting said something or other. And here I was, needing to reach Kunlun quickly and meet Yuanshi Tianzun. Very well. Then I would struggle as far as struggling could take me. I seized the pure-white chains and stamped down on reality.
Ching.
A thin, long, razor-clean crack ran through empty air. The chains became dust.
"The binding chains ought to be holding it — and it uses a power like that?"
"General. In the air — that. Th-that crack. That's the one, isn't it? From when the monster came in from outside."
"The Shadowless Beast. Don't tell me this thing, too, is a monster out of another world. At least I will have a reason to give His Majesty for why I failed to bring it in."
Whether the crack had provoked them or not, they drew from their saddles weapons unlike any of the gear they had used so far. They took up arms that resembled crescent glaives, and they meant to kill me.
Yes. They meant to kill me. Then a single push ought to be enough.
A provocation.
The man's face hardened, and he got down from his horse. The others dismounted as well and leveled those weapons at me. He gave a hand signal, and at once three subordinates who had been behind him broke into a run toward me. Between them, I could see him watching me with great care.
Cautious. Whether they had trained in martial arts or not, they closed a considerable distance in an instant, and the three soldiers who reached me cut me down. With a sound like the hiss of static from a broken television, my body was sliced into pieces. From the wounds, black powder scattered instead of blood.
Was that me? No. No, it wasn't. For a moment I wondered whether they had cut my true body, but they had only finished the wounds in a different way — as a hero, striking the heads from a many-headed serpent, sears each stump with fire. I suspected the function was to make regeneration difficult. And I gained the warmth of three people.
In an instant the three swelled like foam, and pieces of the body that should never have come out of where they belonged, organs that do not exist in a person, burst free.
Mm. A little of the sense of it was coming to me. This, too. The light turned black and then shriveled, though the shape of it remained, like a crumpled plastic bottle. Daegon's had been so enormous that I could push myself inside and move. It was something like climbing into a mascot costume and walking around in it. To be held inside a contract script was to fill the stuffing of that costume with the liquid that was me. This, strictly speaking, was moving from outside the costume.
I took hold of the three and hurled their spears at the leader of the band. A single motion. That alone, and the blackened light ruptured like a bottle someone had forced full of water. The flesh, once the light was gone, drove itself into the ground and shriveled.
Crack. Crunch. Crrrrack.
No. It wasn't shriveling. Where their corpses had been, a very small hole hung in empty air. They had been pulled into it, the way an alien in some half-faded science-fiction film is sucked out of a ship into the vacuum.
Ah. Now that I thought of it, Daegon had died that way too. A huge crack had appeared, and it had been drawn slowly in. The crack had been connected to me, so I knew.
"An Unranked anomaly?"
"Raise it two grades. Catastrophe-class, at the minimum."
"General. We've already put it down — do we really need to raise it two grades more?"
The general, having knocked aside all three of the spears, glared at me. Of course he did. My body was still in pieces, black powder spilling from the wounds and nothing more.
"Wear a human skin, and the true body comes out while the human flesh remains. Disguise yourself as human, and the true body is revealed. But that thing is simply staying as it is. It means it has not been wounded at all. Isn't that so, monster?"
Crrrack.
A crack ran, and I regenerated. I looked over the joins with care, in case the cut surfaces split open again or something else went wrong, but there was nothing of the sort. Again there had been no resistance at all, so I half suspected I might collapse once I had finished regenerating. Surprisingly, though, this was weak at compelling reality.
Anyway.
"Yes. I'm perfectly fine."
I walked forward. Time was being wasted, so it seemed better to let them attack. I could convert all of them each time they did.
Step. Step.
The frightened humans aimed their weapons at me. But the man who seemed to be the general raised a hand and stopped his men.
"Fall back. I am using that."
"General! Use that, and this whole region disappears!"
"Better to fall back and let it collide with Kunlun. If the nonaggression pact with the Chan Cult breaks, we are the ones at a disadvantage."
"They don't punish a man for failing to capture an anomaly of Unranked or higher! Here, we have to take one step back!"
His subordinates seized him and pushed him away. A few of the things they said caught at me. The region disappears. That meant they had a weapon with the force of a bomb. And a nonaggression pact with the Chan Cult. We were right at Kunlun's doorstep, and soldiers had come swarming in, so I had wondered whether Kunlun might actually be weak — but there had been a treaty. Which meant that if I stepped onto Kunlun's land as I was, they would not be able to act freely.
His face grew complicated at their words. In the end, even when I came in among them, they only kept their weapons aimed. They did not thrust. I bowed in front of the man they called general.
"Thank you for stepping aside."
I meant it. We had fought a little, and time had been lost, but that was better than fighting on in this place. More than anything, I was beginning to worry about the durability of the glass bottle. Until I reached Kunlun and got the art into my hands, the bottle must not break. Among all these countless worlds, how many even held someone who could cross from one world to another? And among those, what were the odds of a chance this close — close enough to reach my hand?
This was the chance.
A few steps on, and behind me the sound of hooves faded away. They had run, it seemed. Still, if the emperor wanted me badly enough for this, that wasn't bad. If things went well from here, I could go to the emperor too. Remembering that the Murim Alliance had kept a spy inside the Heavenly Demon Cult, it was likely the imperial army had kept one inside as well. They would have heard the rumor that I could heal people. I regenerated lost limbs. I cured disease. And that included the disease called aging. Quite a decent ability — the sort a ruler would want. Seeing them want it this badly, I felt sure that later I really would be able to build the automatic harvesting system the way I imagined.
There was something I had to do first. So I wanted to meet Yuanshi Tianzun quickly.
I was thinking that when a sharp sound split the sky, and then — thuk.
A pitch-black harpoon burst out through my stomach. In the same moment I gained his memories, and I understood what had just happened. He had said that if I entered Kunlun like this, something terrible would come of it. He had seen so many anomalies that brought about absurd things once a particular condition was met that his instinct had told him he must not send me there.
I turned my gaze back. Far off, between flesh swollen with a runaway growth of meat and bone, I could see a man smiling as if satisfied he had done it. The spear was something that had been in the memories of the three, and the man who had just tasted the light knew it as well. The Extreme Yang Spear. A spear that bore the name Son of Xihe; turn its power to the utmost, and a fierce wave of heat blankets everything around it. The instant I gained that memory, the spear flooded blue.
I pulled it out of my stomach. Yes. So it was a bomb. What of it?
Krrrack!
Cracks were running in every direction, but I had thought of a more amusing way to do this. I took it up and walked to the man who had already gone mad, nine arms sprouting from him, eyes budding all over his body. And I shoved that bomb into its chest.
You know, the monsters I make by taking warmth are a great deal like harvesters. People are difficult. But right now, with the change only just begun — who can say. I had only just learned it, but I had one chance to take control of a monster. Hoping they would join into one, I smashed the light.
The nine hands became a single thing like a flower, wound tight as a bud.
Mm. I had learned one thing. A yaoguai that is concept first becomes an object when you take its warmth. A person becomes an object if you set a suitable thing in place and fuse them while you take their warmth.
Wait. Using people like this — I had seen it somewhere…
Ah! Tongtian Jiaozhu's art of elixir refinement!
It must have been because I had Daegon's memories. Daegon really did pour it out without keeping anything back. Then how lavish would Yuanshi Tianzun turn out to be?
Kehehe.
Holding a single flower, I arrived at Kunlun.