The Laws of Cultivation: Qi = MC^2

Visions swirled around Tian Feng, mist sweeping over him as he meditated. The world was chaotic and fate had been shifting out of his grasp, but even through the mists he could see a figure flying in the skies, a dark visage bringing dark tidings.The demon’s eyes shone a deep red as five rings of power swirled in its eyes.

Three other figures were present behind the creature, their forms hidden by the mists. Each with equivalent power. And they all regarded him as once, as his vision collapsed by force.

Tian Feng’s eyes shot open.

“What’s the matter?” Xian Yue asked, concerned.

He glanced towards his spirit, taking a moment to ground himself as the dream collapsed and the vision faded. But the vision he’d seen… that was not of the future, that was… of the past. And if so… Tian Feng shot to his feet and began to rush out of the chamber he was.

“What happened?” Xian Yue asked once more.

“We need to send a message to Divinities. The demons have Divinities on their side, and one of them is attacking the fourth peak!”

***

Lord Zhou rushed out of the camp and found devastation waiting in front of him. A large dome of darkness covered the fourth peak, spanning a huge chunk of the mountain, a clear sign of a power domain and a demonic one at that.

Yet… that size and the amount of power inside of it… he could not believe what his senses and eyes told, but he had no doubt about it. That was a Divinity’s domain.

Lord Zhou turned behind him and shouted.

“Yanmei! Take the soldiers and get back, leave the frontlines and retreat!” he shouted.

To her credit, Yanmei did not spend a second extra fretting or worrying and immediately shot into action.

Lord Zhou took comfort in that. He had not said it but he trusted the woman to handle the situation if he and Zeng were not to return from this confrontation.

That rage that he’d kept bottled up, it began to be let lose. He could feel it inside of his, it was a burning flame with flicker blades as edges that encompassed his soul, it was not a warm flame, like frost it flickered within him, growing stronger and stronger as the restraints on it began to loosen. His aura responded, sharpening, bending to his will, his command of it now sharper, more focused, colder.

The restrains he’d put upon himself, for just a moment he set them aside.

Lord Zhou looked at the domain and then Stepped within.

The world swirled around him as he entered the domain, his body immediately being pushed inwards by the miasma all around him, a terrible itch spread all over him and he pulled his Qi inwards to shield himself. He was protecting himself using his own domain, but the thing about domains was simple… the stronger one won. All he could do with his own domain was keep himself from the effects of this one, but he would not be able to manifest his own domain here.

He stepped in and found Lord Zeng in the skies, falling and injured and he rushed forward and caught the lord, who was clutching his shoulder, a chunk of his body simply gone.

The lord coughed blood as Lord Zhou caught him.

The demon flew in the sky, missing one arm, seemingly uncaring as he glanced down towards them. Lord Zhou quickly fend the fourth lord a pill from inside his storage to hasten his healing but it would not be an easy thing.

“Brother… apologies. I was caught unaware,” Lord Zeng said, before coughing a bit more.

“Save your strength brother,” Lord Zhou said, as they landed on the ground. Lord Zeng cycled his Qi. The bleeding has stopped but the man would not be able to fight properly.

Lord Zhou looked around himself. There was barely anyone alive in the domain.

“He used… something similar… to the weapon you showed us,” Lord Zeng said.

Lord Zhou frowned. From what he understood, those weapons combined Qi and Gu in a violent manner that annihilated both. To do that… the demon would need to have access to Qi somehow and be able to use it in a way that did not simply damage it, a creature made entirely of Gu.

“What chances do you think we have?” Lord Zeng asked, wiping blood off his mouth as he pulled himself onto his feet.

Lord Zhou looked in the skies and grimaced.

“Brother, it’ll be an honor to die by your side,” Lord Zeng said.

“Don’t say that just yet. I’ve seen enough miracles this past year to not discount one quite yet,” Lord Zhou replied, not truly believing his words.

The demon Stepped, arriving above them and a crushing weight bore down upon both the lords. Lord Zhou was reminded of his encounter with the other Divinities, of the weight of the power they had commanded that he’d sensed stirring within their bodies and souls. He’d never once been on the receiving end of such force but he’d been able to herald a guess. At his stage of power, and with the decades he’d spent knowing them, it was impossible to know the peaks for what they were. It was hard to explain to other cultivators who may not be near his power just how much stronger the Divinities truly were.

In the path of the heavens, the steps were anything but equal. Each progressive step onto the next realm, even those in between the major circles of power were an expansion of the scope of reality itself. A magnitude above the previous stage. Like how a first circle disciple could never even guess at the true depths of power of someone in the second circle, someone at the peak of the fourth could never truly fathom the power held at the pinnacle of cultivation. A part of him had been hoping the strength of the demon had been false, that what he’d sensed here had not truly been a Divinity, but a fascimile of one made by the demons. But no, there was no denying what he felt now, this pure vile corrupted power had touched upon a sinister kind of transcendence. Not the ones those deathless had, made upon talking corpses or trapped souls, these were true immortals.

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And yet, he was not cowed.

He pulled himself together and looked into the demon’s eye. An entire second passed. In a battle between people of his capacity, a second could be life or death. Entire battles had started and ended within this moment, so he very intentionally stood still, simply looking the demon in the eye, and let him know that the lord of the seventh peak would not bow to their kind.

If he died today, he would die standing on his feet, fists bared in combat.

“I’m disappointed,”the demon said, its voice surprisingly normal. Lord Zhou found himself surprised. When the demons typically spoke, their voices were unnatural, twisted, as if the words being spoken were not natural on their tongue. It was a sign to him that they were a twisting of the natural order, a perversion of nature and life itself. And yet… this demon spoke normally, calmly, and with an even tone.

The demons eyes scanned the peak. “I’d expected a battle. Are tricks all you’ve got? If you kowtow I’ll consider making your deaths swift.”

Lord Zhou extended his arm to hold back Lord Zeng from replying to the demon. Though the demon spoke vile words, its eyes were calm, focused, unnaturally so, and it spoke with a clear intention to rile them up.

This creature is not being fulled by hatred. It is calculating this battle.

That, more than anything, settled Lord Zhou. He had fought demons before, but they were not like this. They were not calculating. None other than Yang Shen, who was an anomaly of the centuries. It warned him, more so than the power of the creature. This was not a mindless thing… no, this was a powerful enemy in a battle. He’d need to treat him as one.

“Disappointing again. I thought that was the kind of things you cultivators said before getting into battle? Ah, this whole thing is turning out to be a bigger pain than I’d anticipated,” the demon said in a bored and exhausted drawl.

Lord Zhou paid the creature no mind. Settling himself, he looked into his soul and into those flames burning with fury and rage inside of him. They’d been demanding a release for a long long time. He was not Lu Jie, he could not do miracles. He was not blessed with powers so strange and mystical and had not gone from a no-name disciple to a heaven shaking entity that could stand against divinities in a single year and gained the blessing of two divine beasts.

No he was none of those things. In 10 battles against a Divinity he’d lose all 10 times. In a 100, he’d lose a 100. Even with Lord Zeng by his side, he knew that his chances were slim, quite slim, there were not many realistic avenues where the two of them could force this Divinity to retreat or hold him off long enough for one of their own to arrive. And yet, none of that seemed to shake him.

It was not that he did not fear death. His people needed him. His son needed him. The boy had so much to learn and being in the influence of Lu Jie he’d grown despondent at not having such ridiculous growth in power to have been able to keep up. He’d tried to hide it, tried to not let it show, but he was the boy’s father, and he’d seen it in his eyes. He’d known of his training, of how he cultivated much more. The choice, when asked to take a new path by Lu Jie, the boy had rejected it, unable to think he’d be able to fulfill his duties should his path change, not willing to go off the set path so easily and that weighed on him too. He thought he had been left behind.

In some manner of truth he had been. Lu Jie had simply… outgrown Zhou Fang. That boy would outgrow this entire empire in a decade if simply left to his own devices, those were not reasonable expectations to have of someone and yet the boy did not see it that way and it weighed on him.

He could not leave his son behind like that, nor did he have any intention to do so. He was not prepared to die, he had not made his peace with it.

And yet, he was ready to stand till his last breath on this peak should it come to that, because it was his path to protect this empire and he had sworn his life on it, even if it meant abandoning things he could not justify abandoning to himself. And so the flame burned in his soul, as Lord Zhou reached within himself, into a part of himself he had not recalled in a long time.

The storage ring on his fingers unlocked with a pulse of Qi as a blade appeared in his hand. A jian. It was a gift from his father, and he drew it in front of him with intention as he stood there, not as Lord Zhou, but as Zhou Sun the Warrior.

And the flames of fury enveloped his soul, his cultivation and his entirety of being as the heavens rumbled in the skies.

It was with a smile that the Lord noted that he’d managed to break past the blockade that had been holding him forever, triggering a tribulation.

***

Zeng Shanyuan was an old man. Perhaps older than most in the entire empire. He was older than the youngest Divinity, the Shie Matriarch, which really just spoke to her youth more so than anything. Still, he was old and this was as true as the rays of the sun were true when the skies were clear. And being that old gave a person perspective, gave them experiences, and told them what to expect and what not to expect.

He did not think himself above being surprised, far from it, there was always more to learn, but he had tempered his spirit somewhat by now, and so those experiences had become less and less frequent over time. So he’d been quite taken aback when Lord Zhou had arrived and shown him weapons that seemed like they’d been plucked from some mysterious realm beyond this world. Even weapons received from the Heavens were a known quantities. The Heavens were perhaps, more truer to form than anything else, predictable, understandable. There were rules to their interferences, though he knew Divine will often shifted these limits a little.

And so he was understandably shocked when he felt his long time friend and companion begin to have a breakthrough in the middle of this battle by simply having his drawn his blade on the demonic divinity in front of them.

Were the heavens interfering? To ascend Zhou to Divinity in face of the battle. He knew the balance was off, he understood that these things came in sets. There had been and there simply never were more than five Divinities within the empire at any given time. It was the balance of the world, the balance of the five elements.

He knew, in a time now lost to history, before the empire had been established, there had been greater kingdoms. The five great clans had sprawled the wider world and had battled one another. This history was not known by many, but he was old, and so he knew.

And yet, even in the extremely rare situation where a Divinity died, one did not simply just ascend. After the death of the previous Shie head, the new matriarch had a taken a century to ascend to her position. An entire century, spent consolidating her power and growing her strength to be suited to her role and status. There were rules that the world simply needed to obey.

“Cheap tricks? No… something else entirely,” the demon whispered, but it spoke loud enough that all of them could hear.

Zeng did not pay the beast much mind. It did not matter. Perhaps these dire circmstances had forced the hand of the heavens, perhaps Zhou had simply always been at the cusp of such ascension and had only needed a nudge, and for the position to be vacated or perhaps he had died from the strike before and these were simply the fleeting dreams before he fully submerged into death, he did not know, reality was unclear for this moment, but he knew what task he had to do.

Zeng summoned a spear in his hand. The weapon in his hand crackled as flames erupted around the weapon. He was calmer now, but he had not been so in his younger years. If Zhou truly was to ascend, then he’d fight and fight for as long as was necessary to keep him alive.

They had needed a Divinity to fight this creature, and it seems like the heavens had decided to give them one.