Chapter 75 - No use crying (Patreon)

I am only posting a single chapter this week. I have chapter 76 written but wholly unedited (not even the Grammarly pass!). I cannot bear to post that. Next week, I will do a 3 chapter release. I was also quite pressed with both my unending assignments and prepping for the Dao of the Web relaunch.

....I also posted the smut chapter on Royalroad today... O'gawd.

14/10/23 - Edited

[Table of Contents]

Chapter 75 - No use crying

The Flareful Empress looked at the voidfiend with grim determination. She had only faced one foe as strong as this one.

Her late husband, her master when she was but a slave, the previous Emperor of her grand empire, the cruel monarch who had taken everything from her.

Her past, her present.

But not her future.

She had ensured that when she had strangled the sow-borne bastard in his bed, just as he had killed the owner of the tavern where she had once worked. Just because he could.

For the cruel monarch had been weak.

Even as a supposed powerhouse in the Unfolding Heaven 1st Realm, he was tempted by the honeyed poison of virgin girls and toxic yin.

But not this creature.

The Wretched Emissary, the envoy from the void itself who had come to spread its rotten religion.

No girl could tempt it; no poison could intoxicate it.

It smiled kindly, its face looking like a kind old man. The face was sewed on a ren head after all, one attached to what could only be the trunk of an elephant. On the other end of the trunk was its actual head, seemingly an elephant skull curtained over by human skin. In its giant eye sockets, more ren heads acted as eyeballs, and more heads hung upon its large fan-like ears as earrings.

A necklace of heads, a bracelet of heads, a chalice made out of skulls that it held on its strange grey arm.

The elephantine creature, unwanted and unwelcome, stood on its hind legs, wearing a pristine white robe with intricate patterns of suffering. As it moved, its colossal stumps left deep imprints on the ground; all its heads, actual and accessories, would move with it, staring at the cultivators with calm disapproval.

The Wretched Emissary opened all its mouths, and then it spoke with all its heads.

It was a strange sound, the notes of its voice visible to all. Pale white, with lines of faint purple or green.

Both on its body and on its voice!

The Flareful Empress took the hypnotic wave with her Unfolding Heaven realm Amaranthine Torch Dragon Physique. She got close, clenched her fists, then punched. The origin qi-powered flaming strike took the fiend on its rotund gut. The toxic flames spread like concentrated wildfire on its pristine white robe, then penetrated through it, burning this being of evil to ashes instantly.

The Flareful Empress clicked her tongue and stepped away.

A split second later, the place she escaped from twisted upon itself as though an entity from beyond the planes had squeezed space itself into a paper ball.

The ball constricted further until the space was nothing but a drowned corpse's pale head. The head of the kind old man sewed to the trunk of the elephant. From behind the head, the rest of the Wretched Emissary's body appeared, robe still as pristine; not a drop of blood had even spilt from its chalice.

It raised its elephantine trunk and sang again.

All this happened in the blink of an eye, but to the Flareful Empress, it might as well have been an eternity. For she had this exact exchange in many different variations with the fiend ever since the fight had started.

The Wretched Emissary seemed unkillable, turning the rocks, air, and the world itself to another one of its heads, rebirthing anew using the flesh and blood of their very Last Ascension Mortal Plane as its nutrient. Like a new parasitic flatworm hatching every time one of its kind was purged.

<What sort of Dao Aspect is this? Does the Flareful Empress have any guesses?> Asked the expressionless elder from the Twilight Blood Palace. He had transformed, activating his bloodline, and looked like a massive hominid hunting hound wearing the colours of his sect. Red and black fur, with canine fangs and eyes. But a portion of his coat had turned pale white, an aftereffect of taking the sound wave void art from the fiend head-on.

Despite the damage, the elder appeared unfazed.

<Perhaps corruption, perhaps necromancy. We need to kill its heads.> The Flareful Empress said, spitting on the ground. It was blood; she too, was not unharmed. The blood was pale white. Despite her Amarathyne Torch Dragon Physique which could ingest even the most esoteric poison as elixirs, the fiend’s otherworldy corruption managed to spread through her meridians.

But that was fine. She was buying time after all.

“I am prepared, my fellow daoists!” The elder from the Victorious Tide Island sent her voice into the qi.

<Use the communicator!> The Flareful Empress sent an angry retort.

Before she delved into a tirade, though, her feet moved her behind the Wretched Emissary. The Dao Aspect embedded into her very flesh and blood burnt as fuel for the Martial Art, and she transferred the qi-powered momentum into a blazing conflagration on her fingertips as she struck the lumbering voidfiends back with a power palm.

The exchange from before resumed once more near identically. But this time, while she attacked from behind, the elder from the Twilight Blood Palace pounced from the front, his blood-edged obsidian claws coming down.

He slashed through the trunk with the first strike, then took a step forward and sliced the elephantine head with the next, and with his third step, the Wretched Emissary was seemingly shredded apart.

The purple flame from the Flareful Empress's strike clung to the shredded remains of the fiend like glue and burnt them to toxic cinders.

The head-on attack from two strong Origin qi cultivators was enough to erase the creature from existence thoroughly. Seemingly.

But again, the space distorted, the two ren cultivators dodging just in time.

In their wake, they left behind talismans at strategic locations.

A head formed from space a moment later, and the elephantine body appeared behind it.

The Wretched Emissary was to be reborn again!

<Oh no you don’t, you big-eared foe!>

The Victorious Tide Island elder’s spirit qi pulsed from eight positions surrounding the space where the fiend was rebirthing. The air and qi around them swirled using the talismans left behind as the crux, first chaotically, then clockwise.

The malformed space seemed to distort further, but only in the opposite direction to which the fiend could be reborn.

“Groum!”

A visible pale white soundwave spread from the emissary’s half-formed body, but the clockwise rotation from the Victorious Tide Island’s spiritual art cancelled it out.

<You aren’t the only one who can use vibrations as a weapon!>

<Perfect job, my fellow Daoist.>

A maelstrom of qi with the elephantine fiend at the very centre. Whenever it wanted to form fully by warping space, the Victorious Tide Island elder's attack would unspool the spooled space.

The water-aspected spirit qi were like an ocean in the air as they formed into streams of waves and the mist, chains and corals, and trapped the reformed monster within like an oceanic cage trapping a titan!

But the fiend was not to be underestimated.

The Wretched Emissary grinned with all its mouth. The Victorious Tide Island elder coughed out mouthfuls of pale white blood. Taking the chance, the fiend fully formed; the counter-rotation of the spiritual art was not enough to stop it.

But still, the cage itself held. The spiritual art was yet not broken!

The Twilight Blood Palace Elder and the Flareful Empress attacked, the maelstrom of water-aspected spirit qi giving them free passage.

Once more, the fiend was rendered and burnt, and once more, it was about to reform again. It tried, but precisely in the same place. It took longer to reform this time because the Victorious Tide Island elder could unspool the spooled space more expertly with her prior experience.

And when the fiend inevitably formed fully by expanding its infinite supply of void qi, the other two powerhouses would be there to destroy it.

This repeated again and again and again until the Wretched Emissary finally showed an expression other than laughter.

With only its elephantine head still formed like a floating lamp with a skin curtain draped over it, it looked on to the puny cultivators that dared to hold it in place. It bought out the chalice, biting it with the ren head attached to its trunk, and sobbed.

***

<Nyanya, Silky, Floofy… You bullies.> Yung wasn’t afraid. He was terrified!

The immense pressure from the shadowy barrier blocking the entrance to the cave threatened to keel him over.

It was like a divide in realms. Literally, he could feel a menacing force checking up on his cultivation base, questioning him why he wasn’t a powerless mortal.

It would have let him pass without so much as a wink if he was.

But he wasn’t one. He had a bunch of heart qi gathering from all the worship the Fortune Fox Totem received every single moment, and a cultivation base that broke through the stages like they meant nothing each time he snuggled with Nyanya.

<My, what gall you have. So cowardly yet so audacious! Are you not the one who bullies us under our blankets every night? Now, you cannot do one jaunt with us?>

<Kii, kii!>

<Woof!>

<See, dear lover? Your own contracted cries so sadly, so very adorably. What misery do you wonder his treacherous flock is going through? Would you not be a man and check?>

<Now listen here, woman.> Yung massaged his temples. <In situations like these, you have to delegate the task to the best one for the job! That's called leadership; it's called having a system of doing things.>

<… oho, you would risk the life of others for your own selfish follies?>

<T-That’s not what I meant.>

<But indeed it is as you mean! Mayhap you refer to the sellswords of the Dark Star Mercenaries? Do you feel at ease knowing they may die for you in exchange for some mere coin? Coin that, in fact, we have granted you. And for a task you had originally forced into the agenda on your paltry ‘deal’ with the headsmen of this village?>

<Okay, don’t be ridiculous. The usual you wouldn’t ever want to get your hands dirty. What do you want? Spill it.> Yung asked directly, not having a single idea of what his girlfriend was actually getting at with all this emotional manoeuvring.

But she was definitely plotting something.

It was so fake that even she must know that Yung wouldn’t fall for it.

<You dare think my words are so fake that you would never fall for our seductive guile?!> Su Nanya bristled.

<U-ugh. Okay yes. I will fall for it. I don’t want to be responsible for other people’s lives and deaths, that I admit. But why do we have to go in ourselves? Miss Maid can do it. Or Su Haochen? One of the sects? You’re all powerful! Make them slave away. Think about the efficiency.>

<And let them pry into our most secret of spots? You wish for others to see us naked, perverted deviant!>

<…. What?> What? Why do I love this crazy thot? Yung honestly did not know. No, actually, he did. She was hot and was a great conversationalist. <So you are saying that… inside the cave, there is a force with ill will towards the fox clan lurking, and they have dirt on you?>

<… We are the cleanest! No man can sully our purity, though only one may try, and definitely not to these crass void cultists!>

<I meant blackmail, not–ugh. Jeez. Having dirt means having material for blackmail.>

Void cultists? Yung remembered reading about them before on the scrolls. Crazy renyao that fell to the dark side, so to speak.

They were religious zealots and would not hesitate to kill clans and kin to advance the invasion of the void creatures into the mortal plane.

Yung really didn't want to go anywhere near them. Still, he continued nonetheless, <These void cultists, you're saying they have a method or some sensitive information that can be used to blackmail you, or maybe some object that can act as your weakness—the occultic foxball!>

<… we have no weaknesses! Merely inconvenient secrets, yes. We sensed such an aura with the Wretched Emissary, of our occultic foxball. They are using our most sacred treasure for heinous purposes, corrupting our maidenly jewel in who knows what nasty way. We shan’t allow it!>

<Can you not see Silky blushing?! Fix your wording, woman!>

<Our wordings are the most noble.>

<....it might not have been a coincidence that the other Foxmoths worshipped your occultic foxball, not Silky.> Yung said with a cramped lip.

<Indeed. Something most devious is churning in the underbelly of this cave. We must find out how such weak beings killed our Floofy's main body, which should be an impossibility upon itself! After which, they dared not to leave but remained hidden in this barren cave, doing who knows what sort of ugly actions to defile our beloved Floofy's remains, helpless we are to stop them and their vile patriarchal ways. Oh mercy me!>

<Please, for the love of Moira, can you choose your words differently? Why must you make it sound so depraved?>

<But are they not depraved? Their lot and their very banditly bodies? Or do you dare fathom that they take regular baths to wash off the putrid stench from the void?>

<It's a different kind of depraved. You’re actually being slutty to distract me from the main issue of you forcing me into a dangerous place, aren’t you? I’m not falling for it!>

<Fine, what troublesome a man you are.… ‘Our occultic foxball.’ Happy?>

<Thank you.>

<D-Dare you not fall for our slyness now?>

Yung facepalmed, then looked at the shadowy barrier again. Previously, it should have only hidden the Foxballs, Foxmoths, and maybe some aspects of a random planner fragment.

He was a fool to think it would be so easy.