Chapter 127
What must be true before an Outer God can touch another's light?
The Outer God touches it herself. Flesh meets flesh.
The Harvester, for what it is worth, holds an Outer God inside it, and so its touch carries the same effect. Containing an Outer God is not a matter of dipping into the sea that she is and lifting a portion clear. It is the reverse: the vessel is turned upside down and sunk into that sea.
The Harvester cut with a blade. A tool was used; nothing truly touched, and yet the touch landed all the same. An arrow was loosed, and the projectile registered as contact even after it had left the body behind.
A seal, though, could not touch her. An act undertaken without killing intent never connects to an Outer God.
And what of Yuanshi Tianzun?
The moment her weight increased a thousandfold, the Outer God was mashed flat against the ground. Choseol was tall to begin with, and the burden a body feels grows in proportion to that height. Looking down at the Outer God plastered to the floor, Yuanshi Tianzun spoke.
"I will ask only once. If you will live from this day without coveting anyone's warmth, I shall release you as you are."
Even a villain, should they truly mean to change, might be granted a chance. That single opening was given to Yuanshi Tianzun. He had no real margin for mercy, but this was the life he had lived, and it was the teaching on the heart that he imparted to those who dwelt in the celestial realm of Kunlun.
One righteous conviction spared Yuanshi Tianzun's life. Unfortunately, what stood before him was no wicked man who might yet turn. It was a monster produced at the end of a human being twisted through and through. Goodwill, as ever, is trampled by malice, and twisted into something vicious by those who envy it.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Many take this to mean that goodwill alone can plunge a person into horror, but that is not goodwill at all. The saying is used, rather, to whittle away the will to do good. To bestow kindness while blindly assuming all will turn out well, without the least notion of what will follow, is not goodwill.
It is the family gathered for a holiday, raising the matter of your wages or your marriage and calling it concern for your sake. If, once you had fallen into hell, the person who spoke so were the first to step forward and bear the responsibility, that would be another matter. Most never do.
What such people do is not goodwill. It is an ugly knot of the laziness that never looks into what will happen, the arrogance that never truly sees the person in front of it, and the self-satisfaction of believing oneself engaged in a kindness — an ugly act with not a shred of goodwill in it.
Before Yuanshi Tianzun stood precisely that sort of being. A wicked monster that takes another's goodwill, fouls it into something hideous, and then brandishes the fouled thing to declare that you are the one at fault, fastening the blame upon you.
So his goodness had saved him, and yet the evil of the one he faced was far too fierce for him to slip free of this. Yuanshi Tianzun, who had truly meant only to subdue her and negotiate, thereby avoided being bitten by the Outer God.
Once. By the working of his own goodwill, he had been given a chance.
The trouble was that Choseol, unable to call on any special power such as qi, proved weaker than anyone had imagined. Her body was nowhere near sound. She had been raised in a breeding pen that held human rights in contempt, and so not only her limbs but the very ribs that ought to have held her organs gave way, every one of them, and caved inward. Blood from every reach of her body, and the fluids that belonged inside her organs, were wrung out of her as if from a rag. She became, quite literally, a pulp of blood. A hideous thing remained, blood-froth seething up from place after place, and a moment later the calyx of her form, unable to bear gravity amplified a thousandfold, was utterly destroyed.
Immediately the scorching gale of the Extreme Yang Spear, which had been wrapped about the surroundings, swept in over the spot. It had been difficult to see, but the place was still a burning hell of several thousand degrees. The last of the damp earth burned away to nothing, and what elements remained flashed into vapor, then, torn apart into atoms and free electrons, joined the violent currents raging through the celestial realm.
In that instant, it was no fault of Yuanshi Tianzun's that he thought, without meaning to, that he had won.
But what stood before him does not die of a thing like that. It is not driven back to the bottom by anything so small. And once a vessel is gone, it is only the natural order that whatever was held inside should come pouring out.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
Cracks ran out in every direction. A small glass bottle joined to a glass bottle — a little dimension that certain works call a pocket universe, and that this world calls a celestial realm. Its interior could not endure, and fissures opened through it.
Kunlun possessed an art for passing between such bottles. Yuanshi Tianzun, who stood at the very end of that art, understood that something was amiss.
Something is wrong.
Crack.
At last it went beyond fissures. As if a wall were giving way, a vast crack split the whole of the bottle, and beyond it lay pitch-black dark. There was nothing there, and so an empty space, called darkness, gaped wide. The emptiness was not the strange part. The crack itself was.
He had spoken of it as a glass bottle, but strictly it was no bottle at all — closer to a mass of light adrift in the void. Had it been glass, then no matter how a living thing despaired and fell toward the bottom, it would have struck the floor of the bottle. A world is a place where stars gather, and to step outside is only to be drawn back, by gravity, into the world one left. One world is like a galaxy, and to cross from world to world is like crossing from galaxy to galaxy. It is not the true universe, of course. The likeness is only a way of making the thing easy to grasp.
In short, outside the hole there is nothing whatsoever. And when glass breaks, it ordinarily yields shards. Which way, then, do the shards fly — along the force that was given, or along the force that was received? These shards were drifting in that deep dark.
A tremendous power was present. Yuanshi Tianzun could feel no power of any kind, and yet something vast enough to open a crack in the world — a phenomenon with no name he knew — was here. Inside this small celestial realm, only two now remained.
Choseol stepped out through the middle of the crack, perfectly whole.
"Just as I thought. Heat like this isn't the least bit warm. I have to admire the skill it takes to arrange an accidental death with no killing intent at all."
The Outer God spoke while thinking, privately, that she had found a weakness of her own. The picture was one of great evil, and a boy standing up to it — though in truth the gulf was even more wretched than that.
"Do you mean to stop hungering after warmth?"
To Yuanshi Tianzun's question, the Outer God gave her answer at once, with no show of thought whatever.
"No."
Yuanshi Tianzun set both hands behind him. Seen from the front, it was only a boy playing at being an old man, resting his hands at the small of his back. Seen from behind, his fingertips were shaking.
The Outer God had already read his face, and she knew he was afraid. At reading human feeling, she had long since left even an expert's measure far behind.
"You keep a severe morality. A standard fierce and impartial enough that you can name your own deeds evil. And yet — why?"
Why do such a thing?
"I'm too cold."
And so, as always, the Outer God stated the fact.
"To be rid of this cold, I'll do anything. However you look at it, I'm the one in the wrong — but what does knowing that change? Does it make the cold any less? If I endure, and someone else ends up happy, is that enough? No. I matter most to myself."
She answered without wavering, watching Yuanshi Tianzun where he still hesitated, drawing him toward killing intent — toward killing her.
"And standing right in front of me is someone with a technique that means I no longer have to wait until I'm called up from the bottom. Isn't it only natural I'd want it, no matter what it costs? I don't have to wait passively anymore. From now on, I can invade of my own will."
When people glimpse something human in a thing profoundly unlike a human, their affinity rises. There is a stretch, though, where it drops all at once into revulsion, and only climbs again once that stretch is passed. The revulsion in between is called the uncanny valley.
At the very center of the valley was the Outer God's smiling face.
Yuanshi Tianzun turned her words over. He nearly set her beside the Great Kun, then looked past the surface to what lay within, and let the comparison go. The Great Kun's crossing into this world had been a matter of survival, yes, but at the root it was his own greed. That greed had ruined his world. He had crawled into this one still unable to abandon it, and picked a fight with Kunlun, the people already living here.
This was different. A tiger needs meat if it is to live. A tiger that bears goodwill toward other creatures starves. Hers was that kind of cry.
Watching Yuanshi Tianzun hesitate yet again, the Outer God thought, inwardly, that she truly hated it. He liked people far too much, and so he would not do what had to be done. People of his kind were enemies that had to be removed. Her model of humanity assumed, as its foundation, that every human is more at home with evil than with anything else. A good person like him was of no use whatsoever in obtaining warmth. Warmth comes rolling in when human desire is affirmed, and when one will do anything in service of it. The spread of good people is avian flu moving through a chicken farm. After that, there is no chicken left to tear into.
The Outer God does not misread human feeling. She could see that his hesitation was not fear. He hesitated because he was trying to understand the one before him, and to persuade. And so she changed direction.
It is easy to mistake a good person for an obedient one. The truth is the opposite. A good person, faced with injustice, stands against it and goes on, however much they themselves are harmed. It means one who calls wrong what is wrong, who opposes the law when the law is wrong, and who makes war on morality when morality is wrong.
"Did you know? A long, long time ago, I was human once."
She meant that she did not act this way for lack of learning. The Outer God set her footing anew.
"So I know humans in detail. I know they are wicked from birth, and that if I give them power, they will kill and be killed and give me warmth forever."
Not person against person. An enemy they would have to stake their lives to destroy.
"I need warmth. Think of it this way — you can't loose a plague on a feeding ground, can you?"
She said it even while knowing full well that if people are to gather into a vast collective and build a society, goodness is necessary, and that they must follow it.
"I'll say it once more. To obtain warmth, I'll do anything. Anything."
At those words, Yuanshi Tianzun hardened his heart.
"I see. You have chosen that road. Then I have no choice but to strike you down here."
He raised a hand, thrust it forward, and gave his command to the countless tools hanging in the air around him.
Maximum Output
Gravity — Ten Thousandfold
The world shriveled.