Chapter 102: Curiosity Killed the Cat
An moved through the forest unhurried, but he'd activated his Qi and sent it down into his legs. Each stride now covered more than 50 m/s, and he wasn't even pushing his body toward its actual limit. He felt no strain on his system at all, even at that speed, and it caught him a little off guard. 'Cross-country, I can hit 180 km/h, and the Qi cost is almost nothing... What happens if I push for the real maximum my body can handle?'
He started accelerating, trying to see how fast his physical body and the Qi in his legs alone could actually carry him.
'This isn't going to work if I keep dodging trees and obstacles.' Once he remembered what his body was actually capable of, he stopped holding back and just ran in a straight line.
Like a train on rails, he tore through everything in his path. Massive trees shattered to splinters; some, from the sheer impact of his body alone, were ripped clean out by the roots. Stones, crusted with centuries of moss, turned to sand the instant he brushed against them.
Kicking up huge clouds of dust and a noise loud enough to sound like an earthquake tearing through the forest, An finally slowed back down to his earlier, calmer pace. 'I broke 160 m/s, that's 570 km/h, if I'm converting right. And that was with obstacles still in my way. If I remember correctly, that's about the speed World War Two-era fighter planes could hit. Not bad.' Pleased with the result, he kept heading toward the central ring.
'Huh... I never even thought to ask him whether he had a Qi technique for Foundation Establishment. Would've been nice just to compare, even casually.' He shook his head and kept running along the ground, easing off his speed a little and steering around obstacles again, so as not to make any more noise than he had to.
After moving like that for a few hours, the scenery around him began to shift, and before long, he came out onto a wide, snow-white river. His first thought was that it looked like a river of milk. Even the foam gathering along the banks was pure white. A faintly sweet smell hung in the air, uncomfortably close to the smell of rot.
An sniffed at it and briefly considered wrapping his nose in Qi to cut off his sense of smell entirely, but in the end he just held his breath. Lifting off the ground, he started flying across the milky river.
'It's got to be a few kilometers wide, at least... I really hope nothing's living down there.' He'd barely covered a few hundred meters before he felt something moving toward him from below, something far too fast, and far too big.
He shot up several hundred meters into the sky and stopped there, watching the creature through the thick, milky water.
Whoosh!
The beast broke through the surface from below and launched itself into the air. Nearly fully clear of the water, it appeared before An in its entirety, though he'd already gotten a partial sense of its shape while it was still submerged.
A massive black body, a long neck, powerful jaws lined with several rows of teeth. Dozens of long, thick whiskers bristled from its snout, like the barbels of a catfish. All four of its upper limbs ended in webbed, clawed feet, the claws long and sharp. Black scales covered its entire body. Its golden eyes, serpent-like, swept the area, hunting for wherever An, its meal for the day, had gotten to.
'Is that a dragon? I thought dragons were land creatures with wings... Maybe some kind of mutated snake? Those eyes definitely say snake. Hm, I don't remember seeing anything like this in the beast book. And honestly, it doesn't look much like a dragon at all.' Hovering in the air, An studied the creature with real curiosity, searching in particular for anything resembling dragon features, because the longer he watched the thing thrash around in the water, the more it seemed like some close relative of a dragon, even if it wasn't one outright.
Suddenly, sensing something instinctively, the creature threw its head back toward the sky.
"ROAR!"
Gathering Fire Qi in its jaws, it spat out a massive fireball.
An watched the burning spit hurtling toward him, mildly surprised at its speed, and leaned his body just enough to slip clear of its path.
'The energy in that attack's way stronger than the acid spit from that flying thing I could barely take down right after my breakthrough...' Studying the fireball, his mind wandered for a moment. 'Judging by the energy this thing's putting out, it's only at the early stage of second rank, the same as my own cultivation. But the density of its Qi is way higher than mine... Is that a forced evolution from all the demonic energy in it?'
Picking up the thick demonic undertone in the creature's Qi, An could tell this was a spirit beast, not a true demonic one, even though it clearly used demonic energy freely, its foundation still ran on pure Qi.
'The creature must be storing impurities and waste from the surrounding energy in the outer layer of its body, between the skin and the flesh, probably. When it attacks, it draws on its clean Qi first, then wraps it, or blends it, really, with all that waste and impurity, ending up with something denser and more potent as demonic Qi. It's a roundabout way of doing things, way more manipulation than it needs, but it does come out stronger in the end.'
An drifted a little higher, dodging another fireball, and stretched a palm out in front of himself. Activating his Qi, he formed two small clumps of energy: one pure neutral Qi drawn straight from his dantian, the other pure Death Qi. 'For some reason, I'm suddenly thinking about that moment on the ship, I felt something back then too, but I still can't put my finger on what it was.'
He sped up the two clumps hovering over his palm, and just to be safe, pushed his Qi Silence to full strength, dissolving himself completely into the crimson clouds, invisible to the half-dragon thing below. 'My ordinary Qi, the neutral kind I pull straight from my body and dantian, always carries a constant enrichment from the Dao of Wood, since Wood's my single element, the source my body and spirit both draw from... But what happens if I use Wood Qi pulled directly from the pool that holds my Dao of Wood instead? Meanwhile Death Qi is straight energy pulled from the cloud of my Dao of Death, inside my own body... Why does my gut, my instinct, keep pushing me toward trying this?'
Closing his eyes, he sank fully into a state where every part of his focus locked onto the two clumps hovering over his palm. Carefully, An swapped out the neutral Qi for Wood Qi, pulled directly from his Dao, all without disturbing the steady, cyclical motion either clump was already caught up in.
Concentrating, he began reading the state of both clumps through his closed eyelids, gradually adjusting the speed of each clump's motion, along with the particles moving inside them.
Slowly, he brought the two energies together, letting them just barely brush against each other, watching closely to keep the particles inside from tipping over into full chaos.
.
.
Over the next several dozen hours, he sank so deep into the process that he lost all sense of his surroundings, all sense of time passing. Merged with the clouds, he poured every scrap of his mind's capacity into watching and correcting the two clumps, analyzing everything happening between them, moment by moment.
By this stage, the two masses had already sunk into each other, like two patches of oil on water, still distinct, still holding their own boundaries, but no longer entirely separate.
An managed to shrink the gap between the particles down to its bare minimum, compressing the two energies together so tightly that the still-unmerged clump had started to look less like two substances and more like a single metal sphere, every particle locked into place, fixed dead still.
Once he'd reached the point where the particles, which had always spiraled toward chaos the moment they got too close to each other, could finally sit in stillness, he'd fully snuffed out any chance of conflict sparking between them.
At that moment, he felt an overwhelming rush of gratitude for all the time he'd spent training multiple parallel thought-processes at once, back when he was drilling with Qi Blades and their layered, simultaneous movement patterns.
Right now, his entire mind was devoted to the clump on his palm, with nothing left over for any other thought at all.
Even complex thoughts had stopped forming in his head, only fragments now, sometimes not even complete words. Dozens of projections filled his mind, each one a different angle on what his eyes could see, the clump itself, viewed from every side, each fragment of his attention locked onto its own specific patch.
Having pushed everything to nearly its limit, he began, very carefully, colliding two individual particles first, then four, slowly but surely building a controlled, fully controlled chaos inside the mass.
Pair by pair, three pairs, four, ten. Each time, he added just one new pair, folding it in with the rest. Slowly, he started to feel his own mental capacity wasn't quite enough to keep the experiment going comfortably.
That was when his heart stopped completely. Instead of two beats a minute, it simply stopped. His lungs contracted and shut down entirely. The blood inside his veins froze in place, motionless. Every muscle in his body went slack, save for the handful still holding his palm steady, keeping the process from breaking. His head dropped forward under its own weight, saliva running from his mouth, his eyes half-shut. From the outside, An looked like nothing so much as a paralyzed patient.
The one thing his subconscious kept a permanent, minimal reserve for was Qi Silence, he understood perfectly well that if that technique ever slipped, he'd be laid bare for anyone and everyone nearby to sense.
Hanging in midair like some strange, unidentifiable thing, drooling down into the milk-white river below, he kept adding chaotic pairs of particles to the growing cluster.
.
.
A full day later, An was drenched in sweat, his skin gone completely white, tinged sharply blue. Along the length of every vein, his skin had started turning black, and in some places his very muscles had begun something like rot, splitting open into horrific black wounds, as if something had detonated inside him. Black blood seeped from every one of those wounds. His fingers and toes had gone fully black and started dying off. His nose had rotted through completely, and part of his skull had begun to crumble. His lips and teeth had simply fallen away. If not for the skin and tendons still holding on, his lower jaw would have dropped off long ago.
All of this was happening to his body for a few reasons. First, because his internal physical processes had shut down entirely, his heart, which should have been pushing blood through his veins, wasn't. Second, because of his constant, direct exposure to the Dao of Death and Death Qi itself, even though that energy technically belonged to him and shouldn't have been able to harm him, in practice, the interaction with the surrounding Qi, and the ongoing conflict inside the clump between the two Daos, was taking a serious toll on his body. Third, because his mind was so completely occupied that he couldn't spare the attention needed to trigger his own regeneration.
Crack!
Under its own weight, his right leg finally gave out at the hip, the last tendons holding it snapping with a crack. It slid down inside his pant leg, hung there for a couple of seconds, then dropped out through a hole near the bottom and fell into the milky river below, along with several other small scraps of flesh that kept sloughing off his body without pause.
Crack!
Plop!
After several hours of nonstop feeding on rancid, rotting meat, the small fish below suddenly sensed something. Before they could even look up, a wave of incredibly dense energy tore out of the clouds and crushed them into dust in an instant.
The surface of the river began to boil and steam. Beneath the water, creatures started roaring and whimpering in fear, unable to understand what was happening. Craning their heads upward, sensing the source of that energy through the thick water like some volcano erupting in the sky, primal terror gripped their slick bodies, clawing to break free from within.
With everything they had, without a second glance back, every creature within a radius of several kilometers fled as fast and as far as they could, terrified of the strange fear rising inside themselves.
Only a handful of creatures, lying on the riverbed and giving off third-rank energy, kept watching the source of that energy with something like fascination. And the reason they only watched was that, deep down, they too could feel that same strange fear trying to drill its way up from some long-forgotten place inside them.
Even the third-rank creatures, curious as they were despite the fear, quickly reined themselves in. Sensing other creatures nearby with cultivation just as high as their own, they had no interest in drawing unwanted attention to themselves. However tempting the curiosity, it clearly wasn't worth risking their lives over.
At the center of that energy, in a spot where even the air itself had been annihilated, hung a half-skeleton, missing both legs and one arm. Most of what remained of his body had turned black and rotten, even the bones themselves rotted through to a deep, charred color.
Half his face had melted away like ice cream, slowly taking one of his eyes along with it.
Feeling absolutely nothing, not even aware of what was actually happening to him anymore, he stared at the clump of energy with the one eye he had left. By this point, he'd essentially slipped into unconsciousness, his mind had exhausted itself so completely that it had simply shut down and gone dormant, leaving only a thin, remaining sliver of himself still present, staring hungrily, greedily, at that mass of energy.
That eye held no conscious thought behind it anymore, it moved purely on instinct, on some deep pull from his subconscious, from whatever inner self remained. Slowly, carefully, he drew his one remaining arm toward the place where his dantian sat, the joints cracking and grinding as he bent it, snapping apart brittle, half-melted bone in the process, just to bring the palm holding the mass of new energy as close as he could to his stomach, or rather, to the massive hole in his stomach, through which his long-empty dantian was plainly visible.
Pushing his hand through the hole in his gut, breaking a few more bones along the way, the clump finally made contact with his dantian.
Woosh!
Like something scalded, the clump shot straight into the dantian and settled dead center.
At that exact moment, the remaining eye suddenly gained a spark of light.
"Ah... AH! GRAAAHHG! AAAAAH!!!"
Waking up, the first thing he felt was pain, pain so overwhelming that even he couldn't process it as pain at first.
His entire mind lurched from one kind of shock straight into another, completely swallowed by that pain, nothing left but screaming, nothing but constant convulsions. Shaking violently in midair, more and more pieces of his rotting body dropped away into the water.
Screaming with everything he had, like some kind of siren, choking on black blood and scraps of flesh flying out of his ruined throat, his one eye flooded completely with black tears. Unable to process anything at all, out of his mind, An began falling like a stone toward the water.
BOOM!
He hit the water after a free fall of several hundred meters, and nearly blacked out all over again.
His last remaining arm skidded across the surface from the impact before he started sinking, dropping fast toward the bottom. The whole way down, he kept screaming, and not even the sheer weight of the water above him could muffle it.
The third-rank spirit beasts, seeing and hearing all of it, immediately gave up on the idea of swimming any closer. Watching what this once two-legged creature had become, or whatever it used to be, before all this, watching this strange, incomprehensible process and its aftermath, even the boldest, most curious among them thought better of it, feeling that strange fear inside them only grow stronger.
By the time he hit the bottom, An could no longer even scream, what was left of his throat had torn open completely from the violent vibration of his own voice, leaving a massive hole through which black blood poured out, mixing into the milky river.
Lying on the riverbed, one eye bulging, with no thoughts left in his head besides the pain itself, he had no attention left to spare for whatever else was happening inside him.