The Fourth Wall - Chapter 26 preview (Patreon)

She dropped her pickaxe by her side, staring at the deep hole that she had gouged into the cliff face. Bending low, she scooped up the broken ore into her storage ring. Each one that transferred lessend the pounding in her head by a small, almost infinitesimal degree. Standing by the seam, she knew there was no way to make the pressure upon her mental defenses disappear. Not till she left it alone and away.

Ground clear, she sniffed and wiped at her nose with her robe, grateful that Wu Ying was not here to see it. It didn’t help, of course, that she had a formation set outside her mining spot to contain her use of chi and the changes in the environment. This ore, this seam, this mystic realm was so different and strange. A warped permutation of the real world.

One that should never have access to theirs.

A flicker of power, a shifting in the energies that permutated the surroundings. Dozens of li away from the city and Tou He, she could still feel it when the traitorous snakes began another assault on the cultivator. Once again, the very air warped, the night sky brightened as the flames from the cultivator reacted. 

When he had explained his defensive measures, his technique that he believed would keep him safe, she had been doubtful. She had pushed an escape talisman on him, defensive enchantments that would ensure he was safe and could escape if he was wrong. Yet, she could admit, she was entirely wrong.

Even in his forced slumber, his technique, his bloodline and flames had reacted to protect him. Energy had exploded forth from him, such that the very ground beneath his feet had melted. Now, he lay slumbering, untouchable in his mountain projection of his techniques, flames rolling off the projection. Any attacks that attempted to reach him were burnt away, the attackers forced to retreat a distance away rather than be burnt away. As it stood, a pair of the snakes were channeling their energies into the surroundings in an attempt to contain the high temperature and save their city.

 It was a bad matchup, for both of them. Tou He was out-numbered and his opponents were attacking him on a mental level. While his mental defenses were decent, strengthened and refined to protect against the pressures of cultivation and ascension; it was not built to withstand such assaults on the regular.

On the other hand, Tou He’s own control of his element, his dao and his cultivation techniques and his experience doing battle with the heavenly directives allowed him to weather the attacks in a way that another cultivator might fail at. More than that though, these rasashas were not physical creatures. In fact, the pair were vulnerable to the heat more than either had expected.

For now, it was a stalemate. They could not reach him to harm him, and Tou He was in an enforced slumber. It would not last, for they had the benefit of numbers.

Till then, though, Yang Mu could operate on the silent. Gathering information, gathering these ores and emplacing the formations that they had planned to utilize. Tou He was the bait in this endeavor, it was her job to complete the mission.

At that thought, she sighed and reached down to pick up her pickaxe. Once again she swung, striking the wall and feeling its enchanted tip pierce the wall, shattering stone and metal ore with ease. Again and again, she swung with the full strength of her arms, knowing that there were a dozen more such locations she had to dig out and formation flags to emplace.

Now, all she had to do was make sure they didn’t find her before she was done.

***

“Cultivator Long.” The voice of Librarian Norbu interrupted Wu Ying as he listened to the latest translations. 

Day and night, they had been in this room, translations filling the tiny room with sound, over and over again. In an attempt to speed up the process, Wu Ying had a pair of dueling translators speaking, one on either side of him, splitting his attention to take in the details. For now, this matter worked, though later on, he might need to pay proper attention. But till he found the right document or type of manual, he could do nothing else but speed through the works.

“Librarian Norbu.” Wu Ying held a hand up, stopping the translators who gratefully took a sip of water as they waited. 

“Have you sensed the fluctuations in the portal to the mystic realm?” the Librarian went straight to the matter at hand, his eyes intense.

“Fluctuations? No, not at all.” He gestured around the room, at the small embedded glyphs that helped provide privacy that were activated. “I’ve been within here the last few days and my senses are... well...” he shrugged, a little emberassed. “They are not what they used to be.”

Librarian Norbu at first looked suspicious but when Wu Ying brought up his injuries, that suspicion alleviated itself a little. He let out a long, slow sigh and inclined his head. “Ah, my apologies at interrupting your studies.”

“No need,” Wu Ying said. “I’m sure your attendants were grateful for the relief. But before you go, what fluctuations?”

“In the shielding, around the library of course.” Like Wu Ying, the librarian lied through his teeth with aplomb and without a trace of hesitation. “We - I - was concerned it had to do with your presence. A wind cultivation base is quite rare.”

“It is,” Wu Ying agreed, smiling. “Well, I’m glad to hear it is only a minor matter.”

Again the librarian nodded, and the pair stood, facing one another in silence till it grew uncomfortable. Eventually the librarian coughed into his hand, stepped back and bowed a little. “I shall continue to pursue the matter then and leave you to your studies.”

“Of course. My apologies.” Wu Ying smiled congenially, watching as the man left before he turned to the waiting attendants. He gestured for them to begin again, electing to keeps tanding for the moment rather than sit again. It was not unusual, for shifting place and position through the day was necessary to relieve the pressure and pain in his body.

As he allowed the translators to drone on, he turned his mind to the mystic realm, the fluctuations in the portal that the librarian had truly been speaking of, and the actions of his friends. They had not told him what they intended, intent on safeguarding him from accusations of wrongdoing and conspiracy. Yet, he was not entirely ignorant.

There was something strange with the mystic realm, the library and the city’s interactions. Like a rotton, three legged stool whose population perched upon the top, wobbling back and forth and waiting for the entire thing to come crumbling down upon itself. Entirely inappropriate, and somehow intertwined, though he and his winds had yet to glean the details.

Nor would he push it. The winds drifted through streets, listening to conversations between mortals and librarian employees, between government officials and merchants and the occassional aligned cultivator. So few wandering cultivators here, almost all of them at the base level of progress. For a city this large, to lack any others.... it was a mystery.

One that Wu Ying would not solve.

He was all too cognizant about his strength, his weakness, the trio of Nascent Soul cultivators lurking at the bottom of the library. If he learnt something they did not wish him to know, dealing with him would be simple. He had no additional tricks to pull out, so keeping his head down and focused on finding the correct cultivation manual - or at least enough hints to build one was all that he could do.

Surprisingly, he thought he actually had a manual that might work. There were three that he believed might function for what he needed, though one led the pack. Listening to the translators, he had them working on two different paths - firstly, works that helped him understand his current status, the way immortal souls and bodies worked together and how such things were meant to integrate and secondly, the actual cultivation manuals to stitch the pair together. Because of his rather unique situation, it was not enough to acquire a soul cultivation manual at the Nascent Soul realm, he had to adapt it to heal and remove the injured and infected portions of body and soul as they constantly agitated one another.

Of the three cultivation manuals he had located so far, they were all soul manuals that progressed along the usual lines. Replacing the mortal body with immortal soul. The first - the Reborn Child - started by growing a tiny, immortal body within the user. While generally meant for women - what with their convenient womb - it was the movement of the immortal soul to the newly reborn and created immortal body that had some attraction to Wu Ying. It was a wholesale transfer, where the immortal body was left, empty till the switch. In that switch, he felt there was something that he could replicate, could fit.

The second manual - the Subsumation of the Mortal Lineage with the Immortal Mien - took a different route. Rather than growing an immortal body that would then become the receptacle of the immortal soul, the manual sought to replace portions of the mortal body. He believed, upon close study, he could utilize that portion of the manual to aid him in his own journey.

The last manual was the one that interested Wu Ying the most. At first glance, it was not as suited as the Subsumation of the Mortal Lineage. As a manual written by an artisan, a sculptor whose ascension had been achieved by the study of his art form, it had little to do with Wu Ying’s own path. Yet...

The Carving of Eternity was a Nascent Soul path that acted much like the sculptor did when facing a block of granite or marble or jade. It sought to bring out the internal beauty of an individual, to carve away the mortal portions of a body and even, to some extent, the immortal. Such that when it came time, the two - mortal body and immortal soul - might merge like two blocks fitting together. It was not, of course, the same, for they became like sugar and water, one dissolving into the other and the resulting matter altered - taking properties of both.

That cutting, that chiselling and careful examination spoke to Wu Ying in a way that the other options did not. It lit a path, but he was not ready to commit to the manual as yet.

There were still many books to listen to, more information to glean from the documents sprawled before him. The manuals themselves were but one portion of what he required, for the Nascent Soul manuals would give him the tools necessary to process his soul and body.

It was the other documents, the treatises on soul and body, on mortality and immortality that would give him understanding of what the should be seeing, what to replace, what the differences were. It was, he realised, something he had never even contemplated. It was not the normal need, for those who journeyed through soul and body cultivation. They had the tools in their manuals, the ways to lever themselves into position. They were the children of farmers, coming to a land which had been tilled over and over again, only needing to replicate the same process their forefathers had done to grow their own shoots of immortality.

He, however, had sown salt into his land, he had weeds and invasive species that had dug deep into the fertile soul of his soul. They spread now, draining nutrients and resources, crowding out any new plants. There was no simple solution, and instead, he needed to understand what he had done, what enroaching plants had taken root and how to dig each one out. Each problem, each injury, each breakage had to be dealt with separately and with the right tools.

Or he would fail once again, and in this failure, damage himself evne further.

For Wu Ying understood, above all, that whatever solution he brought to bear upon himself. Whatever tools he found in the manuals that were laid out before him, the process of healing would require a degree of injury. Like a surgeon cutting off a diseased limb, he would have to do much the same with portions of his soul and body.

What that might look like when he was done, he was not certain. But he did know that there was only one path to reach that, and that was to learn as much as he could while he could.