Chapter 48: The World Is Always Ending
Yuan and Mordiggian discussed the apocalypse over a cup of spirit-leaf tea.
Though he had seen cultivators partake in the practice in the past, Yuan had never been allowed to participate himself. Qi-charged nutrients were too rare and precious to be wasted on Scraps.
Now that he could test it, Yuan found himself supremely unimpressed. The beverage tasted terribly bitter and while it carried more qi than usual food rations, he could easily gather as much from training near a leyline.
“My sincere apologies for the taste,” Mordiggian said as he poured himself a cup with an ancient jade teapot. “I focused on cultivating wood-aligned spirit-leaves, which is of little benefit to those blessed by the metal sign like yourself. I myself was born under the auspices of the Yin Wood Pig.”
“Do you believe in the Zodiac?” Yuan asked as he looked at the hole to his left. Mordiggian had made his lair on the second floor of a ruined pagoda with a crumbled wall exposed to the garden below them. It offered quite a splendid view of the wasteland. “It always sounded so vague to me. Never put much faith in it.”
“I see the Zodiac like I see the wind,” Mordiggian replied while sitting on a dusty old cushion. The old cultivator lived modestly, with deceptively strong cobwebs keeping the cracked ceiling from falling apart. Yuan didn’t see any furniture besides the tea table, rare scroll shelves, and a few ceramic vases. “It pushes us in a direction, but hardly enough to throw us onto a specific course. It is merely one influence among countless others.”
“Strong enough for us to notice, too weak for us to care too much about?” Yuan glanced at the grass-covered rails below and the rusted wagons resting upon them. Lady Tama showcased a few of them to Orient’s group, with the spirit-train’s caretaker examining each of them closely. Yuan guessed she was considering which ones she would incorporate into herself. “Were there more trains and railways during the Lost Age?”
“Thousands, with routes that circled the whole of Earth,” Mordiggian said. “Men created so many technological wonders. Vehicles that could fly from one side of the world to the other in a day’s time; machines that could run a thousand tasks at once; even rockets that allowed us to go to the moon.”
“You’re making this up,” Yuan replied in disbelief. “They would have burned.”