Cultivation System: Elder Edition

Chapter 392

A Vow (V)

Long Tao had found himself afraid twice since having become an Emperor in his past life.

The first time, it was when he caught a glimpse of it... or them... something that shattered his mind in ways nothing else ever could. Even Dao, in all its endless profundity, in the truly spectacular nature of perfect symmetry, absolute unions, and the coalescence of all things into one, still fell short. Dao, after all, could be studied--it could be understood, broken down into its parts, and even mastered and utilized.

It existed as part of everything, an evaluated form from which life itself emerged, owing to the breath of eternity exhaled by the bygone eras. It was perfect, and it was beautiful, and it was harmony that no human or demon or beast or dragon could ever achieve; Long Tao himself had tried, as did many before him, to create Dao-like structure. To misshape Qi, the laws, and the arbitrations of the cosmos unto his own will.

He failed, though not once did he think it impossible. Hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of texts have been written by Emperors before him, all of whom confirmed that it, indeed, was entirely possible to create asymmetrical Dao. All understanding of it purported to that reality; it was merely that nobody ever comprehended the nature of it all well enough to succeed.

For all his life, practically, he believed Dao to be the most complex, the most fascinating, and the most grand thing in the universe.

Until that day.

Until that brief moment that could barely be categorized as a passage of time.

Until he glimpsed something he never wished he did.

He had begun noticing strange movements by the Heavenly Court for countless years prior. Small things, at first, but by that point, they had obviously been tracking him, at the very least. It all started when he rejected their offer to join and when he expressed a desire to create a Path and challenge their seats in front of the world.

In a twist of fate, he chose to follow some of them, too, back to the Longing Mountains and beyond the gilded gates and even beyond the Palace. There was a garden, suffused with ordinary oak and pine trees and mortal shrubbery susceptible to seasons. And beyond that garden was a well, and at the bottom of that well was a hall the size of a city--vast, deep, and hollow. Pillars like towers shot up from the ground and held up the grand ceiling, and walking amongst them felt as though he were walking amongst giants.

And at the end of that path was a ruin--an entire kingdom, it felt, lay wrecked among rubble and stone. Towers craned sideways, domed halls wrecked and disintegrated, stones as black as oil strewn about where pathways used to be. It was beyond there, where he should have turned away, that he felt a strange flux of energy. Attraction and rejection, dancing in a dance that seemed to be accelerating.

Curious, he made his way over and saw it--two motes of energy, both the size of a small pebble. One was mana, and the other one was Qi.

They spun around in a perfect circle around a helix-like rod, coming in close to it and then back out in perfect cycles. It was the strangest thing, as he'd never seen mana and Qi interact in such perfect harmony before. Like a pair of lovers spinning in a forever dance.

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As he came close, he found his instincts, ones honed over innumerable years of struggle, screaming at him, telling him to turn around and run. To run as though there were an army of highly ordained Archdemons chasing him down. But curiosity got the better of him, and he ignored it, walking even closer until he was about ten feet from it.

The entire 'thing', if it could be called that, was suspended about six feet off the ground, nothing to hold it. The helix-shaped rod was as black as obsidian, perhaps even darker, as Long Tao could not see light reflect off its surface, as though it was being swallowed.

He reached out in exercise of all accumulated stupidity he had and braved to touch it--though, he never quite got to. Even before he got within the range of the two motes of energy, he felt something slam against the tip of his finger. A sliver of something alien, something perverse, something so potent that his entire body disintegrated into ash and smoke.

As he endured the worst death he ever experienced before in his life, feeling every individual bit of himself dying in the most agonizing way, and just before the connection to his Avatar was cut off, he saw it.

That glimpse.

It was... infinity.

Behemoths with no edges, no ends, no estimates, dark and all-encompassing. He watched as stars shattered, flickering corpses swallowed up by the endless nothing.

It was cold--cold beyond frost, beyond even the most freezing ice Dao itself could produce. Even the Yin Hall, the ancient structure that could still not be accessed by anyone, as even the most profound Yang-focused Emperors would immediately freeze to death, could not compare. Not even remotely.

It was the kind of cold that bypassed skin, bypassed flesh, and bypassed bones; the kind that chilled the soul directly. He feared, had he stayed even a bit longer than the fading glimpse, his soul would have been directly eroded.

But he could never forget.

Never forget what looked like the cosmos itself bending to the will of the straying behemoths. So vast were they and so grand that Long Tao had no means of measuring them; the shards of corpses that were stars, he felt, were as vast as all heavens combined. How, thus, could anyone ever hope to withstand them?

Today, he recognized, was the second time he had been afraid.

As he watched, helplessly, the strange demon smile at him before it all... stopped. His awareness and his thoughts, they all froze. By the time he awoke, the demon was gone, and his strange Master was standing there, unafraid and unhurt.

But that was not what made him afraid.

What made him afraid was what his Master told him.

You cannot stop time, the man said. You can stop the perception of time, however.

A question that every Emperor since the dawn of Dao had been pondering was answered so unceremoniously he feared he may have gone mad. Even though he couldn't fully grasp what it quite meant just yet, intrinsically... he knew it to be true. He knew that, every time anyone 'stopped time', they didn't, not truly; time marched on, uncaring and unmoved, always. It was merely that the experience of it temporarily ceased.

As he stripped yet another stone from the wall, he stealthily glanced at that man sitting just off the center, staring at nothing as he mumbled something at nobody. Why did he feel, from the depths of his soul, that his Master might actually know what those things were? It was as though, when it came to Dao and cultivation, his Master was a child--an exercise in ignorance and failure--but when it came to things that even Dao could not wholly encapsulate...

The arts created further supported this--there were reasons why few, if any, had been made beforehand. Those who become qualified enough to make Martial Arts are students of Dao--devout, dogmatic, and zealous. They would sooner die than try to undermine the nature of it, to attempt to circumvent or subvert it.

Long Tao has long since believed that his Master was not of this world, though he always thought the man was like himself--merely somebody from another time. However, more and more, Long Tao has started suspecting that the man wasn't merely of another time but an entirely different space, too.

Perhaps... it was not twice that he'd become afraid, he mused.

But thrice.