Chapter 215: Light and Dark
Shuang had become an elder of the elven people — the only outsider ever to hold the title — and in the process, nobody raised the matter of Evan again. He was given quarters among the honored guests. It all felt like a dream: from a necromancer who'd stubbornly tagged along uninvited, to a guest of honor among the elves, practically overnight. The gap between the two was almost too much to take in.
He lay on a soft bed that carried the faint scent of sunlight, with little to do about elven affairs and Shuang off elsewhere. His mind kept returning to the World Tree's words — that magical cultivation leaned too heavily on the external. Evan had already sensed the truth of that himself. He found himself thinking back on the knowledge the Life Goddess had once given him, which had touched again and again on how the deepest mystery of divinity lay in grasping the vastness of the mind — that everything could arise from consciousness alone. Much of it had struck him as contradictory at the time, mysterious to the point of sounding like nonsense.
He sat up and quickly settled his body and mind. In his Sea of Consciousness, the Black Lotus had grown very faint. Something stirred in him, and this time he let go of every outward sensation entirely, visualizing nothing at all for the first time. His mind fixed itself on emptiness, and gradually even the emptiness itself slipped away. This time, he truly entered a state of absolute stillness.
He couldn't say how much time passed before awareness returned to him again, and when it did, the whole world before his eyes had changed. Countless motes of light seemed to fill the space around him. Everything filled him with curiosity, and yet nothing felt out of place — no shock accompanied the wonder, only a strange sense that he already knew what all of it was, though no words could have described it.
He looked outward and found layer upon layer of tree-shapes dissolving into mist, each ringed with a faint halo of light. Amid them drifted countless human-shaped glimmers, and animal shapes too, down to the smallest insects. He watched it all with fascination, and reached out a hand — though what was a hand, really? Some part of a body, he supposed — and another question rose at once: what was a body? He paid it no mind. Language had lost all meaning here. He didn't know what to call it — perhaps intention was the closest word. He brushed against a small flying insect and sensed something lacking in the glimmer of its life, a thin thread trailing off toward somewhere distant. He considered it a moment, then let it be.
Evan never knew that outside his room, a small insect had been flying by when it suddenly froze in midair — a thing no one noticed happen — before resuming its flight and drifting away, free again. But in that same instant, Shailen, sitting in his own courtyard, had been using his flying insects to patrol the elven city, a practice of his own devising. It wasn't truly a branch of magic at all, but something closer to a stranger kind of witchcraft, one that still survived in only the most remote corners of the world these days.
Shailen had refined the technique further, weaving nature magic into it, and considered his version far superior. By now he could directly command more than a hundred thousand insects at once. He'd never told a soul about it, and being accused of spying felt, to him, more than a little unfair — he'd long since lost any interest in matters of love between men and women. Still, it gave him an advantage over control of the entire elven city that nothing else could match.
But just now, one single insect had lost its connection entirely, as though frozen in an instant — a mere one in over a hundred thousand, and yet the sensation had rippled outward, touching most of the others as well. He hadn't been able to trace the source of it.
For a moment he sat there, uneasy and unsettled. In all his years practicing this magic — what he called bug-sorcery — nothing this strange had ever happened before.
While Shailen sat there second-guessing himself, Evan had no body to speak of, and had forgotten his own entirely. What he'd become was, in truth, a kind of primordial spirit of another sort, though he had no concept for it — that ignorance did nothing to stop him from using it. From this point on, his cultivation had truly found its proper gate. His primordial spirit hadn't actually left his body; all of this was simply that spirit's function at work. He didn't know it, but ordinary magical cultivation unknowingly suppressed the primordial spirit — only at the level of Legend did it fuse with the conscious mind, which was exactly why such power manifested there. A different system of cultivation entirely began from the primordial spirit as its foundation, using the conscious mind only as its instrument — that was the true path to eternal life. Magical cultivation, by contrast, only cleared away the accumulated yin at the level of demigod, restoring the primordial spirit to clarity and only then opening the way to true immortality.
Evan had stumbled onto all of this entirely by accident, with no idea he'd brushed up against the very root of true cultivation. Two systems existed side by side: magic belonged to the world of the living, its spells boundless in power, touching every corner of daily life — but it was never built around eternal life as its purpose. Only the lich's path, in truth a road of walking corpses, held out any real hope of immortality, though it did so by cultivating as a spirit of the dead, its yin energy accumulating heavier and heavier, until, without some reversal at the extreme, without yang energy finally rising up in answer, even that path would fail to grant true immortality.
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Magic, whatever its power, whatever mysteries of mind and nature it touched, was never built for the pursuit of eternal life — which was exactly why Evan's own road to immortality had proven so difficult. Fortunately, today he had finally opened the gate to it.
Evan understood none of this. He still made no distinction between inner and outer. He saw a tree of light, vast beyond measure, its leaves layered endlessly upon one another, seeming to emit some beautiful sound within the mind itself. A vast consciousness looked upon all of it with delight, embracing Evan within it, and countless streams of information came pouring in like a tide. In that moment, nothing about it struck him as wrong. He sent out streams of information in return, and the two of them communicated. Slowly, Evan understood: she was the World Tree — though not the only one in this world. Others existed too, in Goling and elsewhere, and between them ran some subtle, wondrous resonance.
Evan found that this World Tree's roots ran deep, tens of kilometers down into the earth, all the way to the magma below. He understood now why the elven city's own little climate stood so at odds with everything around it — the World Tree simply had the power to make it so.
His thoughts drifted back to his own Sea of Consciousness, to the great tree there — the World Tree he'd named himself, different in appearance from the elves' own, yet undergoing an equally sweeping transformation in this very moment. Root after root spread out like a nervous system, reaching deep into every part of his body. The cells that had regained their vitality glowed now like strings of nodules, or like rows of light bulbs flaring on in unison, their glow growing brighter still, while among the cells that had died, one after another slowly began to stir back to life, more and more of them lighting up. A quarter of the cells in his body had already begun to glow — a quarter of him, brought back from death.
Evan found it fascinating. He remembered something then — a book, called the Book of the Dead, sitting somewhere in his mind. The moment the thought crossed him, the book manifested before him, its text like a swarm of living sprites drifting through his Sea of Consciousness, searching for somewhere to go. All at once he felt a flower bloom on the tree, and the book transformed into a beam of black light, plunging straight into his Divine Domain. In that instant, words left Evan's mouth of their own accord: "Let light and dark divide. Let life and death cycle."
Within the Divine Domain, light and dark split apart at once, a realm of the living and a realm of the dead taking shape — much like the Taiji diagram, one half teeming with life, the other littered with bones, and between the two, life held death within it and death held life within it, cycling on without end. From it rose a thread of tawny-yellow light, drifting to scatter itself throughout the Domain.
Shuang, meanwhile, sat in the Queen's palace. Ladriel had already made up her mind to let the elves split apart, though the elders were still arguing the matter fiercely. Ladriel's gaze drifted to a small beetle sitting in a corner of the wall, and she let out a sigh. She knew perfectly well it belonged to Shailen — otherwise, how could a mere insect have found its way into a corner of her own palace, past a Legend mage's notice?
As you wished it. May my sister's spirit finally rest, she thought silently to herself. Below her, the elders kept arguing, and she paid them no more mind. Shuang sat beside her, thoroughly bored, stifling a yawn — when suddenly her whole body went rigid, her eyes filling with disbelief.
"What is it?" Ladriel asked quietly.
"Nothing. He's had another realization somehow. How does the world even work?" Shuang muttered, baffled, before closing her eyes and slipping into stillness, entering the Divine Domain.
The moment she stepped inside, she froze in astonishment. What she entered was, of course, the Domain's projection — and she found it had already split into two halves, a heaven and a hell taking shape within it. She hadn't expected a change like this at all.
She wandered through it. No living thing dwelled there, and yet she could sense the tawny-yellow energy drifting through the space. The moment she brushed against it, she felt its boundless potential — as though matter and spirit had fused into one. She drew in a breath of it, then let it out again, and felt her own soul rise a notch higher for it.
Ladriel watched Shuang's eyes close and saw a thread of tawny-yellow light flicker briefly across her body. She thought she'd imagined it, but when she looked again, the light had vanished entirely — though Shuang seemed to carry an even deeper air of mystery about her now than before. Shuang opened her eyes, a flash of tawny-yellow crossing them.
"Elder Shuang, what happened?" Ladriel asked.
"Nothing much. I just picked up on some of what he was feeling, that's all. Never mind — you all keep arguing, I don't understand any of this anyway. I'm heading off. Don't call me to any more meetings like this one. Oh, and by the way, Your Majesty — I love the emerald you gave me. Thank you." With that, Shuang spread the wings on her back and flew off. The elders, still deep in their argument, hardly noticed — they'd never taken Shuang especially seriously to begin with, for all that the World Tree's favor had earned her a seat among them.
Shuang flew straight to where Evan was. He'd already emerged from his meditative state and was turning over the day's cultivation in his mind when she flew in and landed on his left shoulder. "Did you have some kind of breakthrough?"
"Not much of one. I'm still an Arcanist. But the Book of the Dead has merged into my Divine Domain now — the Domain has both a heaven and a hell in it," Evan said evenly.
"What's the Book of the Dead?" Shuang asked, puzzled.
Only then did Evan remember he'd never actually told Shuang about it. He gave her a brief account of what had happened back in the Borbert mountains, and only then did she learn that the Book of the Dead was a magic tome left behind by an ancient civilization, one that had carried Evan into the ranks of Arcanist.
"So you've been hiding a treasure like that this whole time. Out with it — what else are you keeping from me?" Shuang said, her tone sharp.
"Nothing. Really, nothing," Evan said offhandedly. But as he turned the thought over in his mind, he paused — there was, in fact, one more thing. His Nameless Technique. It was still running, and had changed its pattern too, now cycling through his five organs, part of it even reaching into the World Tree — though it circled through and returned to him afterward, only refined further for the journey.