B2 Chapter 43
The process of advancing to Core Formation began with a provocation. When a cultivator reached the apex of Foundation Establishment, eventually they would find a point after which they could advance no further. One could linger excessively in Qi Condensation. Seek an eleventh stage, or a twelfth. Reforge their dantian and lay the first stones of their foundation with a strength beyond the usual limits of their realm.
Core Formation allowed no such advantages.
A cultivator's dantian might yet be able to accept more qi. The grand design of their foundation might yet be unfinished. But all the same, they would advance no further without contest. Even the most provincial of cultivators knew it for what it was, when that moment arrived. The shadow of Heaven's hand upon their heart. The first and final warning, before Heaven began to seek to stamp a cultivator out in earnest.
To step into Core Formation was simple. All one had to do was advance beyond the limit of Heaven's tolerance, and survive the tribulation that followed. Advancement, his brother had confided in him, was the easy part in comparison.
Li Xun could not have stepped back from the precipice now if he'd wished to. Not without casting away the demon upon his back, the worm that poured venom into his bleeding heart.
Elder Lu's form was a blur as it fled from his madness, bouncing between road and sky like a golden skipping stone. Li Xun slowed. His flight wouldn't matter. He was still in range.
One did not get caught up in another cultivator's tribulation. Even Qi Condensation initiates knew that. Indeed, many peasants knew that truth, for it was a staple in every great epic of the martial world. The moment to strike was before their advancement, or after. For they would grow stronger if they succeeded, and their foe only suffer Heaven's punishment for the temerity of interference.
What the peasants didn't understand was just how indiscriminate Heaven was. It took so very little for the celestial bureaucrats to decide one was involved with another's tribulation. They would rather punish a hundred doomed fools, than see a single tribulation cheated.
Li Xun exhaled.
His qi felt thicker than ever before, viscous as oil. He'd already stepped past Heaven's line. He'd not even felt the moment he had. But there was a difference between standing at the edge of a threshold, and charging headlong into the abyss. He fed the strand of qi to his gu. Blight-Crowned, he had named the plump thing. Spurs of bone encircled what passed for its head. A crown of thorns embedded in its flesh. He wondered what it felt in this moment, the culmination of its dark purpose.
The Blight-Crowned Crimson Rotworm made a noise that was not a moan. Its toothless mouth flapped guilelessly in satisfaction. It took in Li Xun's qi, all that Daoist Scouring Medicine had made of himself through ninety-seven years of cultivation. It drank his power down greedily, and stripped away its potential. Metabolized all that his power could have yet become to shit out what he had been too fearful to grasp.
Li Xun inhaled.
Another strand of oily darkness stained his meridians.
The churning maelstrom of stormfronts that had usurped the sky was silent. Clouds rose and fell like boats rocked by stormy seas. Soundlessly, they crashed into each other and were shattered, ripped to shreds by raging winds so distant they were but dark whispers to his ears. The sun itself dimmed as Heaven turned hungry eyes upon the fool who had dared step beyond his place.
Li Xun's sky, his judgement, held its own breath.
The first bolt fell without fanfare. Thick as a small sapling, it drove him to his knees, falling upon his back like the lash of a thornbush rod.
Li Xun grunted. It hurt, but he'd known lightning before. The worst of it was the way it crackled through him, numbing his meridians, a second power seeking to profane what he was.
The first bolt was but the taste. The promise of the ten thousand to follow. Yet, if Heaven had any regard at all for Elder Lu, it should have hit him harder.
Li Xun gathered his qi, pushing it out through his outstretched hand. More of his corrosive power than was wise to expend in the face of a tribulation.
"You will go no further." He commanded.
A venomous yoke settled upon Elder Lu, a green-black heat haze that held his golden body in place. Li Xun could feel him, the indifferent certainty of Elder Lu's nature. He held a tiger by a leash of woven grass.
But Elder Lu froze like a disciple before a furious elder. Held himself as still as a kitten grasped by the scruff of its neck.
Two bolts of lightning descended, half a heartbeat apart. Li Xun tensed beneath the first, then staggered as the second blow fell. His grasping fingers twitched without his command, as if yearning to close around Elder Lu's throat.
"More." Li Xun said. He knew not what impulse pulled that word in particular from his lips.
He took an unsteady step forward. The Immobilizing Spell was a lowly magic. He generally disfavored it in favor of the far more flexible Phantom Palm. But it seemed fitting here. His mind should have been upon his opponent. Upon the tribulation. But these might be his last moments to think of aught else. Where could his thoughts fall save his disciple? He had honored his parents, slain for his sect and country, and failed his brothers.
He hoped that he had not doomed Li Hou to his own fate. To be eaten up by the venom within him. He longed to see the monkey surpass his paltry attainments in spellbinding and martial combat, and struggle to match his grasp of alchemy.
In the end, this had been the only choice. His disciple never truly understood that. It wasn't about escape, or sheltering beneath a superior cultivator. It was about severing the ties of karma. Because those were the only choices in the end. Sever the tie between him and Elder Lu, or the one between him and the monkey. He could not bear to do the latter, and anything less than the former would have been insufficient.
It had destroyed him, in a way. The choices the sect forced upon those disciples who survived long enough. His foolish student had sought to spare even a demon, and not for lust or greed either. For naive trust and simple sentiment. Li Hou's heart was not so hard as his fur. He did not have the temperament for the path Li Xun had walked.
Four bolts of lightning fell upon Li Xun, one from each of the cardinal directions. He lost his footing for a moment. He could see the brutal arithmetic of it now. Ten thousand bolts, all the stories said. How many doublings was that? Ten? Fifteen?
His time was evaporating. He grabbed the Blight-Crowned Crimson Rotworm, cradling it to his chest to shield it from the lightning. It would not do for his death to die before its time.
Li Xun tapped the poison in his blood. Twisted it, made it something new. Here, in this space between life and death, between Foundation Establishment and Core Formation, he was as close to the Dao as he'd ever been. His senses sharpened, and his aches fell away.
He had no names for the stimulants he birthed from the mass of undifferentiated Poison Qi. Some drugs dissociated one from their flesh. His work did the opposite and more, killing sensation even as it lashed him tighter to his body.
Eight bolts of lightning fell, and Li Xun danced between them. His Five Element Body was a puppet possessed, a dying thing as agile as any Core Formation cultivator.
Elder Lu's expressionless golden face had never glimmered so fearfully. He could have broken the binding spell in a moment. But Heaven cared so very little for things like fairness and responsibility. To bear Li Xun's blows was to be a distraction, an irrelevant obstacle. To act against him, even in the smallest way? That was to become culpable. To usurp Heaven's exclusive right to crush the insect that trespassed against it.
Sixteen bolts fell upon Li Xun. He would not have known the number, save for the pattern, for the speed at which they struck. They caged him in like stone walls, sought his flesh like furious vipers. Burrowed into him like hungry worms.
Something in his qi began to curdle, to separate. He needed more. Better defenses. More perfect self-destruction.
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He could go further. Dead flesh did not suffer spasms. A man did not need skin. Corpses bore even powerful lightning strikes without flinching. The Poison Qi within him felt fraught with potential. He guided it, and it guided him. Intense vasoconstriction drove the water from his extremities. His skin began to blacken, to harden. Began to crack as he advanced through the storm, closing upon the helpless Elder Lu. No, too much, and not enough. It needed to be softer, and harder. Flexible like leather, unshakeable like a corpse puppet.
Poison Qi flowed through his meridians, giving birth to metals he did not know, venoms that had no name. It was not bodily refinement. What he was doing to himself was incompatible with further life. But his ash-black skin felt nothing as bolt after bolt of lightning fell upon it.
The raging heavens grumbled with disappointment, preparing their next salvo.
Now, it had to be now. Li Xun crossed the distance between himself and the frozen elder in the space of Heaven's inhalation.
Li Xun wished he'd had more time. That he'd been more honest. The monkey knew him as truly as his brothers. More truly than his parents. How paltry that felt now. How much he would never say. A hundred years would not have sufficed. He'd lived that span, and knew full well the amount of words that could go unspoken in such a time. If a hundred years would not have been enough, what was a single year except tragedy?
Thirty-two bolts of lightning was not a fence of pickets, but a forest. No speed could evade that. Li Xun should have been in agony, would have been, if he could still feel anything at all.
His venom kept him conscious, kept his body moving, long past the point where it should have fallen apart. He should have had shielding talismans and healing pills, as many life-saving treasures as he could afford to take the bolts for him. It felt both wrong and right, that he faced Heaven with nothing except his most brilliant mistake.
Li Xun stood facing Elder Lu. There were no words left to speak. His foe waited, ready to receive his strike, refusing to defend himself and join Li Xun's tribulation.
Daoist Scouring Medicine felt like a corpse puppet. Empty. Propped up only by the supports of his qi.
He clenched a fist, unfeeling, then released it.
He'd held off for so long. Greedy at first, for something perfect. A core that balanced both halves of his nature, a font of boundless renewal and destruction. Perhaps he might crack it if he spent thirty or forty more years. That was what he'd kept telling himself. Li Xun did not know when greed had turned to fear. At some point after his brother's failure, certainly.
Sixty-four bolts slammed down upon him. Li Xun felt nothing, but the bolts drove him to his knees and bowed his head all the same.
It was time.
It had been so long ago, but the words had never left him. He raised the Blight-Crowned Crimson Rotworm to his lips.
"Always eat worms. Is best part."
Elder Lu stared in fascinated disgust, as Li Xun took his disciple's advice. His gu uttered a single aborted cry of betrayal, before his teeth silenced it forever.
Madness. But he was mad. And nothing less than the worm's full power would be enough to ensure Elder Lu died with him.
His tongue was one of the first things he'd numbed, lest he bite it off. Li Xun could taste nothing. But the Blight-Crowned Crimson Rotworm tasted good. Slick, like oil. Sweet, like a insensate death dissolved in wine. It tasted like sex and power and death and freedom; it tasted like all the things men killed and died for. His throat closed up, but he forced it down anyway. Juices dribbled down his chin, and even the abomination he'd made of his flesh was insufficient to bear their touch. Li Xun burned with fever. He felt the impossibly intense Poison Qi eating away at his meridians, corroding the walls of his dantian, wiping away the boundaries between Li Xun and the world.
But his other hand was upon Elder Lu's golden shoulder. And beneath his deadened fingers, even the distant and incorruptible metal, unalloyed and untarnished, began to melt away. Not cherry-red with forge heat, but sloughing off in great layers like thick metallic pus.
The world spun, as Elder Lu's fist sent him tumbling end over end with a ring like a gong.
And then one hundred and twenty-eight bolts of lightning descended to scour the weight of both men's sins from the world.
Orange-crest did not run to Mount Yuelu, but he did not simply appear there either. He'd forgotten himself, but not yet remembered who he was. To simply be elsewhere was a branch too far for him to grasp.
A man would say he travelled as one does in a dream. Crossed the lands of man and beast alike, hills and vales rhyming and half-remembered. A specter of a monkey, pressed by dire purpose.
For orange-crest, it was like coming home. Not merely returning to Mount Yuelu. The timelessness of the journey was a return to when he'd been a simpler monkey, unchained by concepts like 'last month' and 'three weeks from now'. He didn't know how long the journey took. All he knew was what mattered, which was that he'd run as fast as he could manage.
And then he was there.
"My king."
The words were quiet. Hesitant. The need was urgent, but an all-too-human part of the monkey could not help but wonder if they were still true.
There was no reply to his halfhearted entreaty.
Orange-crest fell to his knees. Doubt bled from watery eyes. Even in imagination, especially in imagination, biology gave way to sentiment.
"My king! Save!" Orange-crest screeched, pouring the qi that maintained him into the shout. "My king! Save! King! King! Save him!"
Orange-crest wept like a man, and cried out to the skies like a monkey. He tore at his fur, beat at his chest, screamed out toward the uncaring sky. That old refrain of youth, save me. No, one note was different. Save him. That prideful idiot, raging alone against the storm.
His plaintive wails echoed across his once and future home.
And his cry was answered.
Through teary eyes, orange-crest saw the Monkey King leap through the skies like a golden comet. Watched with a bleary disbelief born of understanding as the Monkey King crossed his mountain in a single bound.
The greatest of monkeys landed before orange-crest with a dull thump. He was exactly as orange-crest remembered, and yet so very distant from the Monkey King that had once held up orange-crest's sky.
He wore his tiger pelt across his waist like the bottom half of a robe. His circlet of burnished copper-gold gleamed as it always had, like the king bore the sun upon his brow. He carried his staff across his shoulders, and wore an easy grin on his lips. Lighter than air, heavier than life, ready to soar through the sky like it was the most normal thing imaginable.
Yet only now could orange-crest see the traces of humanity in him. The ways they had marked him. The broadness of his shoulders. The straightness of his back, and the length of his fingers. The flatness of his face, and the way his nose poked forward. He was like orange-crest. Neither beast, nor man.
"Orange-crest."
The Monkey King's voice was wry, filled with concern but without worry. More righteous than any noise he'd ever heard. Orange-crest's heart shuddered at the sound of his name. His true name, spoken as even formless-gleam couldn't, by one who had known him before he was something torn between worlds.
"What have you done to yourself?"
The words would have sounded harsh to a man. Questioning and judging in a way that cut at them. Orange-crest relished them, for his king still saw through to the heart of things, as changed as he was. He saw what his subject had become, and did not ask what they had done to him.
"Please! Save him!" Orange-crest begged, grabbing at his king's arm.
"Who?"
"Human master fights gold monster. Dies from pride-love. Stupid! Kind! Pack! Save! Must save!"
The Monkey King's face darkened. His teeth peeked through his lips.
"I swore I was done with them. Humans."
"Please! Li Xun good man! Best master! Deserves saving. Punish me! Save him! Kill Lu!"
Orange-crest had let the tongue of man slip into his mouth, but the Monkey King showed no reaction to his mingling of the two languages. Showed no reaction to the sound for 'human' he had learned from formless-gleam. He kept speaking, struggling to compress a year into two sentences. To make his king understand, for he refused to believe that he would not, could not, save his master if he did.
The Monkey King held up a hand.
"No pleases. No deserves. No punishing."
"No!" Orange-crest refused to believe it. "No! No!"
Before he could muster a cogent argument for why Li Xun deserved his king's protection as much as any of orange-crest's brothers and sisters, orange-crest found himself in the air.
It was like that first night, when Li Xun had kidnapped him. The Monkey King had slung orange-crest over his shoulder like a sack of rice, and then he was off, moving with speed beyond haste.
"You need to go back in your body."
"Save first!"
The Monkey King sighed.
"He is worth it? Worth what comes?"
"Yes!" There could be no other answer. In this alone, the two facets of orange-crest were in utter and unshakable agreement.
The Monkey King landed on a tree. The limb bent low beneath its burden, before snapping back as the king leapt with all his might.
Orange-crest was flying. Flying as truly as he had within the Azure Mountain's holy land. He had longed for this since he was an infant, but the Monkey King never carried any of his subjects airborne save at great need. He'd never explained why, only refused steadfastly.
"I said I was done with humanity."
The Monkey King spoke in the tongue humans called elegant. Orange-crest tried to answer, but the wind stole away his words. The Monkey King twisted, and kicked off a cloud, surging even faster through the air.
"But keeping promises," the Monkey King continued, "is a human thing. Foolish promises, at least."
"Faster!" Orange-crest wished he could cry out, but the Monkey King was already leaping through the air so fast he could hardly suck in enough air to remain aware. Wait, did he even need to breathe? Wasn't he a—
"What are oaths for, after all, if not to teach us what is important enough to make us break them?" The Monkey King finished, speaking only to himself.
The monkey that nobody called gold-mantle anymore stared down at the flickering thing he held by the scruff of its neck. The thin shell of qi wrapped around the spirit of his orange-crest. His own qi gently embraced his wayward kin, holding the shell together lest his spirit leak out.
"What took you so long?" The Monkey King muttered. "Constipation?"
He'd been drinking when orange-crest had disappeared. Remembering the good old days and the bad ones, feeling sorry for himself. A mistake. But not all calamities announced themselves, and he didn't live his life waiting for them to arrive.
"And what have they been teaching you, that you thought this was a good idea?"
The foolish little monkey had sent his spirit outside his body! If there were not an expert like him around to stuff him back inside, who knew what might have wandered into his body by the time he finally found it again?
Oh but he was a hypocrite. He wanted to see this golden monster. To meet whatever human had made such an impression on little orange-crest. No doubt he would be a disappointment. They all were, in the end. Even Old Jin.
It was just...
He'd made a bet with Lianhuo. Two hundred years, at least, he'd sworn he would stay out of the affairs of men. Yet it'd only been one hundred and eighty-seven. The ancient bird would be absolutely insufferable about winning. She'd not let him forget until his dying day.
"I suppose it is time for Sun Wuming to take a short trip off his mountain."