Prologue: Soul of Blighted Metal Part I

  “Pulsar.” The white-haired woman’s declaration was soft and eerily calm. The power it invoked carried the full fury of cosmic wrath. A technique that directed a concentrated, instantaneous beam of power stronger than anything Scoria Scorn had witnessed since the terrible final days of the Demon War when she chanced to observe Bloody Roam in combat. The discharge of energy surged far beyond anything she believed a cultivator could truly channel.

  Moving with the impossible, unmatched velocity of light itself, that stream of energy could not be anticipated nor dodged. Scoria Scorn, already battling through horrific injury and crippling pain, could do nothing save take the assault head on. Light embraced her body.

  All flesh burned away at once. Defensive talismans flared and failed. Armor evaporated. Skin melted. Bone burned. No escape existed. No endurance was possible. The metal and sand statue that served to form the surface of her immortal body collapsed utterly, reduced to molten glass.

  It hurt.

  It hurt like nothing she’d ever experienced before in thousands of years of existence. Every sense she possessed, every means of appreciating sensation, it all scourged. Radiant power burned away all that she was. It was the only time in her long life that Scoria Scorn felt the agony that a tribulation induced matched by the actions of a human being. Once again, she was laid bare before the heavens, only this time there was nothing left to resist with.

  Only an instant, in truth, and it was all over. Her body disintegrated. From the surface of her skin to the deepest core of her bones, nothing was left, only dust remained.

  But this was not the end.

  All her senses guttered out. Sight, sound, touch, those things were taken from her through the destruction of the physical. A lesser existence would have ended there, lost alongside the body. The soul swept away on winds of qi and taken to wherever it was that souls were carried when a life came to an end.

  Purification and a return to a new life, or so most people believed. Not so Scoria Scorn. She rejected those sage-induced lies of a merciful universe. Souls did not go around again and again, she did not accept that. They simply vanished, lost in the outer dark.

  Neither fate, however, awaited her, not yet. As an immortal cultivator her mind, qi, and soul were one. A fusion forged out of the complete assumption of her personal dao. She could not be so easily destroyed. The loss of her body might erase all physical senses, all awareness transmitted through light and motion, but the ability to sense qi, to touch the fundamental nature of the universe, remained.

  That sense, deeply refined, told her more than all the others combined. It offered her more than enough information to rely upon, to orient and act. Countless streams of qi, and their equally numerous sources, surrounded her. Those interlocking patterns of energy were not easily read, but she had much practice. Mostly important of all, she retained awareness of the twisting distortion, the rippling of spatial qi bent and warped, that lay so very close still. The knotwork that marked the gateway to this hidden land.

  Her only remaining path to survival.

  Scoria Scorn did not hesitate. Even as her body burned away, she grasped the strands of qi surrounding her soul and propelled her bodiless existence through the gateway.

  This shuddering lurch, an embrace of imminent doom in order to secure prolonged salvation, was all that saved her from the devastating blade of qi that sought to tear apart the matrix of essence that now comprised the entirety of her personhood. A single evasion, the misdirection of exactly one attack, but that was enough.

  As a creature of pure qi a blade of mere metal could not harm her. Only channeled power would touch her beyond the boundary of physical being, and the time it took to summon up such energies offered the barest of gaps. Just enough to maneuver.

  Blasting forward, seizing on the differences that described the flows of power through a mixture of pure instinct and the deeply engraved understanding of the dao her long existence had produced, she invoked her movement technique and plunged onward, blind and senseless, through the gateway.

  This instantaneous transition could not possibly be mistaken. The disruption of qi flows, the replacement of one ambient backdrop with another, and the return of the full potency of the plague’s presence rather than the mere trickle that the hidden land permitted, all these things informed her, without sight or sound, that she had passed through.

  The same innate cultivator sensitivity informed her that the devastatingly powerful concentration of qi that marked out the white-haired seventh layer monster known as Iay had followed her through.

  Hesitation meant death, and Scoria Scorn refused to die.

  Accordingly, she discarded all restraint and wisdom. Survival required the placement of an insurmountable obstacle between her and the overwhelming devastation her pursuer promised, something capable of blocking the soul-destroying blow to come.

  Only one such option existed. She plunged straight down, directly into the earth below.

  It hurt. It tormented her like nothing else. The destruction of her body, the tribulation of celestial ascendancy, these were nothing compared to slamming her remnant soul into the rich soil of the upland plateau.

  Irregularity, that was the reason. The ground, the earth, it was not one thing, not some endless layer of pure clay or sand. It was a deep mix, an accumulation laid down by thousands of years of forest growth and death, and an equally lengthy interval of farming prior to that. Roots and seeds slammed concentrated nodules of vegetative qi through the matrix of her soul. All the tiny creatures of the soil, beetles, mites, worms, and more did the same as their animal being lashed their living essence through all that she was. Loose stones, filled with strange flares of metallic qi and fragmentary bits of sulfurous and leaden compounds likewise raked their nature across the entirety of her existence.

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  Scoria Scorn knew the secrets to motion through earth and stone. Her movement technique naturally aligned her to magnetic fields and pulled her along veins of power layered in the great depths below. Once she reached bedrock, she knew she would be safe, clear and free and navigating along uniform paths of crystalline qi.

  But it was a long way down, and she needed to descend with unreasonable, reckless, haste. Iay, a silent specter of burning blue mastery, a white-hot sun of merciless qi, would not be blocked by mere earth. She could tear her way down to the depths of the plateau with brutal swiftness. To reach bedrock, and the safety of the veins of ore, everything that could be risked must be.

  Foreign qi tore at the naked core of her being, her dao. Absent the armored protection of the flesh, every impact tore loose pieces, base components, of her self. Each strike, each minuscule-seeming impact, carved away a portion of all that was Scoria Scorn. Her cultivation rippled and degraded, layers of achievement and potential stripped away. The abrasion threatened to tear her apart entirely, for if she lost the ability to sustain a knotted accumulation of qi of the size and complexity immortality demanded all else would dissipate through catastrophic shattering.

  She ought to have perished there, ripped apart by the myriad components of the deep soils laid by fire and forest atop what had once been the site of the last battle of the Demon War. The substrate was simply too deep and rich, roots rippled in every direction and uncounted tiny shelled creatures and entwined fungal strands filled the gaps between every last grain. It ran a grater against her soul, tearing her apart just as inexorably as the beam of blue-white fire launched from Iay’s chakrams would should it reach her.

  A journey no orthodox cultivator would ever survive.

  But she was not an orthodox cultivator. Her qi, her dao, was inextricably linked to the plague, and the plague filled the soil the same as it did the waters of the world. With each interval of advancement its qi streamed through her being, restoring that which stone and wood struck apart. This crude, wet, red knitting of existence restored and rearmed her dao just enough to press her past the final horizon of roots, clay, and pebbles before she slid down into the sheltering iron veins of the bedrock and flashed along those pathways into the true depths of the stone below.

  The beam of qi dissipated as she disappeared into the rocky abyss. Iay, it seemed, was unwilling to pursue further. This did not, properly, assuage the fears of Scoria Scorn.

  Bodiless, she plunged deeper, further, following the ore network far, far down. She kept going until her qi sense detected the shifting, molten warmth generated by the pressures of such immensities of stone. Only there, in this world above the liquid edge of deeps, did she stop.

  Safe. At least for the moment.

  These deep places were subject to the influence of the rumbling, molten, world below. Mountainous masses of rock and qi that would tear her apart in an instant, remnant soul or no. They shifted very slowly, and she knew them well. It was not an immediate risk, the slow churn of those powers. Nothing compared to the immediacy of Iay’s wrath.

  The Twelve Sisters! What an absolutely terrifying thing to have stumbled into. She’d thought that bizarre cadre of immortals long dead, slain during the final battle of the Demon War, their deaths empowering their mother’s horrific ascension. Now, faced with clear evidence that this long-established belief was false, she was able to realize why immediately. The demonic cultivators had projected their ideals onto the orthodox in error. The fifth sage had reached ascension not out of the need for vengeance for those lost, but in the desire to protect those who remained.

  Had she still possessed a tongue, Scoria Scorn would have tasted bile at this proof of the potency of such wholesome, loving values.

  Ignoring such regrets, she turned her mind instead toward the circumstances of her own death.

  The enemy had executed a perfect trap, too perfect. She had taken every possible precaution and still somehow found those two blue women behind her, maneuvered to cut her off from the gateway. Had she fled even moments later she would not be a remnant now, she would be gone. That sort of coordination, it required predictive certainty that should not have been possible. How had they done it?

  Ten thousand times she asked that question. She ran endless reenactments of the battle in her mind, adjusted every parameter, every possibility. She contemplated every conceivable permutation. Over and over, she reached the same conclusion. It should not have happened. They should not have been able to get behind her like that, she had been too careful.

  Time passed. Scoria Scorn did not notice.

  Trapped within the labyrinth of regrets, she stumbled through the recollections of her demise endlessly, powered by immortal obsession. Her self slipped down into a spiraling recursion of doom and regret.

  Time ceased to have meaning. The external vanished. There was only the endless contemplation of the inevitable loss.

  Until the fickle fluctuations of nature intervened.

  Something immense, twisted by the periodic shifting motions of the earth on its relentless journey around the sun, rolled over in the depths. The stones shook. Qi pulsed through the veins of iron as heat and pressure equalized in spaces whose size shocked the mortal mind to senselessness. A discharge conducted and electrified through metallic magnetism.

  The pulsation shocked the remnant soul free of the destructive pattern of contemplation that consumed it.

  Jolted back to proper awareness, Scoria Scorn shivered to her core at how close she had come to falling apart completely.

  The shock had hurt. It damaged her cultivation yet again. A larger shift, or a closer one, could have destroyed her completely. If she remained in place, if she did not relocate, such a blast would eventually rise from below. Even if she somehow remained sane, that would be the end.

  And she had not even considered this.

  The remnant’s trap was truly terrifying. No wonder so few survived.

  She did not intend to give that trap, the terrible temptation of endless bodiless philosophizing, any further purchase. Alternatives existed. Being a creature of innate caution, she had prepared for this possibility. It was simply a matter of accessing that critical cache of resources.

  A difficult task indeed, given that they were on the opposite side of the world and she lacked both eyes and legs. Remnant that she was, only channels of qi allowed her motion and orientation. Most in her circumstances were blind and helpless, forced to seek out nearby concentrations of qi in the hope that they would chance upon some weak cultivator they could consume or some powerful artifact able to hold their essence.

  As a student of secret paths hidden within the ways of stone and metal, a cultivator cognizant of the mighty magnetic field laid over the entirety of the world, she had access to an alternative means of navigation.

  Magnetism aligned itself with countless veins of iron and other metal ores spread across the world. Just as a migratory bird or fish might, Scoria Scorn could utilize the magnetic field to navigate the subterranean labyrinth without eyes, ears, hands, or feet. Freed from any bodily needs and sustained by plague qi that she slurped through periodic risings to touch the surface, she embarked upon the long, slow journey across the globe in confidence.

  She endured countless false starts and dead ends. The route was circuitous, lengthy, and frustrating. She might not need sleep, being a remnant soul, and could work constantly with an immortal’s focus, but it still took ten long years to circle across the lonely northern edge of the land and then make her way south once again.

  There in a rugged realm of loose forest atop scraggly grass, she finally returned to an immense cavern that carved its way through the depths there and felt the qi of the formations she’d buried long ago to avert this doom.