Chapter 292 - Interlude: Soul Thief (Patreon)

Tenrik stood with his arms crossed over his chest. He was on friendly terms with the dozen or so High Level Cultivators standing about, but he was mentally preparing himself for the upcoming fight and so kept to himself. They had all already exchanged pleasantries days ago, anyway. He wasn’t so nervous that he needed to engage in small talk.

His Benefactor hadn’t been stingy with drumming up support for this operation. Tenrik understood what was at stake, so he was actually a little concerned that they might not have enough firepower available to them. The weakest member of their group was low Tier 7, but they didn’t have anybody that had crossed the Tier 8 threshold.

Either his Benefactor didn’t have enough pull to move any hidden masters at such a Level, or the Local Group didn’t actually have any. He was more inclined to believe the latter. It had been ages since he had even heard of anyone crossing that barrier.

With how the Leveling worked in each Tier, the highest Leveled Cultivator in their group, Level 286, could be anywhere from 365 to 1,414 Levels below the monster they were supposed to stall. Chances were very much that it was on the lower end, at least. There were very few opportunities for a Tier 8 to gain enough Experience to Level up at any kind of decent speed, but even 365 Levels’ worth of Stat Points meant the creature was far more powerful than they were, depending on what its Stat distribution was.

That being said, they had no idea what kind of monster they were going to face, and they had no idea how old it was. With the vitality of a Tier 8 monster, the thing could be tens of thousands of years old. Plenty of time to eke out many Levels within the final Tier.

Again, Tenrik didn’t believe that, though. He would have heard legends and myths about the creature, and he hadn’t. It could be a recent arrival to the Local Group, but it should have been sighted if it was moving around, even using the subspace inside the dimensional veil as some of the Cultivators purported.

The biggest piece of evidence the monster wasn’t insanely high Level was the very fact his Benefactor asked him and the others to stall it. If they weren’t capable of stalling it, that meant certain death with the power levels they were dealing with. Tenkrik had absolute faith his Benefactor wouldn’t send him on an impossible mission.

It was still going to be challenging. There was no way fighting a Tier 8 monster wasn’t going to be hard.

Tenrik surveyed the chosen battleground once more. The location decided upon was a valley nestled within the mountain ranges of a mostly unoccupied Tier 6 Region near the border to the Tier 7 Region above it. They were deep in the mountains, and if they had been close enough to an edge, their sight would have stretched almost the entirety of the Region with their Perception Stats.

Even cities would appear to be nothing more than little circles or squares on the ground, not that there were any in a Tier 6 Region. His own empire was based on the Cultivator Sects with the majority of the population living in different subspaces and only the higher-Tier individuals living in a smaller community beneath his floating castle.

Other than being scarce of any sapient life, monster, beast or human, the other significant reason for choosing their location was the leyline beneath the surface and being between the Tier 8 Region where the monster was coming from and the Tier 5 Region his Benefactor said it was heading to.

The leylines were an interesting thing. Most people only understood the Wilderness between the lower and upper Regions as some sort of anomaly that existed because of the differences in Mana density. While it was true in an abstract sense, the real reason was because it was the outer edge of the leylines.

The leylines were like a wheel and its spokes. They originated from the center of the landmass, the Tier 8 Region, and they branched out to the outer rim located in the Wilderness. The “wheel” was only an abstract. It wasn’t a circle, and the leylines weren’t straight. It was only if one viewed the entire landmass from a top-down view and normalized the shape that one could perceive the wheel.

A little-known fact, the borders between every Region were also caused by leylines. If one wanted to visualize it, the leylines leading from the center to the Wilderness were streams, the Wilderness was a raging river, and the borders between Regions were little trickles, barely even noticeable.

The leylines themselves were metaphysical. Their impact on the Realm was real, but they existed within the veil. It was one of the reasons they had chosen a location atop a leyline. The monster was supposedly traveling through them, so what better way to ambush it than to wait right on top of one of the conduits.

Because Space Mana and metaphysical properties of the leylines were abstract and complex, it didn’t matter if the monster was moving down the actual physical leyline they were positioned on. They could bend the Space Mana to their will to overlap with wherever it was and force it out.

Tenrik glanced over at one of the higher-Leveled Cultivators who was here just for that reason. The amount of Mana they would need to overpower a Tier 8 monster in the veil was immense. The monster not having an anchor to the real world would hinder it, but only so much. The Space Cultivator had an entire cohort of disciples assisting him with the endeavor.

They had painstakingly drawn massive runes along the borders of the leyline within the valley to further empower themselves. That had taken the majority of the preparation time for their ambush. Now they just had to wait until they sensed the monster’s presence to snatch it into their trap.

A flurry of activity, and by Cultivator standards that meant a few people were shifting their feet back and forth, drew Tenrik’s focus. The lead Space Cultivator looked up at everyone.

“Get ready,” he said. “The monster has made its move, and we’ll be making ours in about ten minutes.”

Everyone disperse to their battle formations. Tenrik, being the hardiest and most physically daunting member of the group, made his way right to the center of the runes where the monster would be pulled up. His unique build would allow him to survive strikes that would obliterate the others, Qi or not, and he would just shrug it off.

A lifetime of pain had brought him to the peak of being a lead vanguard, regardless of one's Class or Stat distribution.

Tenrik flexed his muscles, stretching and warming up, before assuming a proper fighting stance. His only armor was his own flesh and blood, and his only weapons were his fists. He was the epitome of the pugilist standard.

His Tier 7 Class, like all other Tier 7 Classes, was unique to him and him alone. Shining Fist of the Abyss. It was tailored made for a man who had crawled through hell and come out the other side, determined to wash away the filth that had tried to hold him down and corrupt his soul.

And after I’ve purged myself with enough Providence, my Tier 8 Class will finally drop the Abyssal moniker and I’ll be clean and whole once more.

His Benefactor was the one who had shown him how to tap into and harness the energies of the Abyss to enhance his own Classes and Skills, and he had been the one to show him how to use Providence to cleanse the stain such a method came with. He hadn’t been tricked into his path. He had understood what he was doing and what he would need to do from the very beginning.

The only thing he hadn’t known, most likely because his Benefactor didn’t know, either, was that absorbing Providence required an equivalent in Experience to fully absorb. He wouldn’t advance another Level for decades, possibly centuries, with the amount of Providence needed to cleanse himself.

He still felt it was worth it. He would have never been able to advance as far and build as much as he had without walking the path he had chosen close to a thousand years ago.

A vibration in the air brought him out of his rumination. Despite his mind wandering for a moment, his stance had never relaxed, and his outward focus had never shifted.

The vibration wasn’t specifically in the air, either. It was just a minor physical manifestation representing what was going on beneath the surface.

The Cultivators had overlapped their leyline position with that of the monster, and the presence of the monster moving through the veil was causing a disturbance. If there hadn’t been two places overlapped on top of each other, the veil would have been thin enough that the vibrations wouldn’t be detectable. Because it was thickened with the presence of more than one leyline, however, the vibrations had enough purchase to be detected.

“Hah!” The Space Cultivator shouted.

He summoned Qi radiating a black mist around his fist and struck at the air in the center of the runes.

The very fabric of reality shattered.

The disciples and runes shone with incredible light as they worked overtime to simultaneously overpower the monster and contain the effect. The hole in reality spread rapidly, and in only a few short seconds, the sky just above their heads was a complete void.

A humanoid figure fell through the hole rent in reality and landed right in front of Tenrik. Tenrik immediately dashed forward and struck at the figure’s head.

The man, and it was obviously a human man, was completely unfazed and blocked the strike with a casual lift of his palm. Tenrik’s fist met the palm, but if felt like he struck cotton.

No, not like cotton, Tenrik realized. Cotton soaked in molasses.

He was unable to withdraw his fist. No matter how hard he pulled, his arm moved at a glacial pace. The man wasn’t even holding his fist. It was just the effect of entering whatever Skill the man used to defend himself.

Tenrik looked into the face of the man they had ambushed, and terror gripped him.

No, I was wrong, he thought. Whatever this… thing, is, it’s no man.

The creature before him only vaguely resembled a human. It wasn’t the features that were devoid of humanity, either. One glancing at him out of the corner of their eye would never notice the difference, but looking directly into its eyes, Tenrik knew that there was no humanity there.

It was an ethereal quality present within the aura of the monster. Tenrik couldn’t place his finger on what it was, but it was clear as staring into the sun to him that it was there.

The System agreed with him. A Notification sprung up unbidden in front of his eyes. With his Clarity, Tenrik’s thought processes were lightning fast, and he read through the Notification almost instantly.

[WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!]
[SYSTEM ALERT!]
[A BEING MARKED AS ANATHEMA HAS APPEARED]
[IT IS YOUR DUTY TO DESTROY IT!]
[TARGET: THE SOUL THIEF]
[Reward: Instant Providence Cleanse with no side effects]
[Penalty: The Anathema still exists in your Realm]

The not-man smiled at him.

Only a fraction of a second had gone by since the man had appeared in the valley. While Tenrik was still trying to pull his arm away, a flurry of ranged striked empowered by Qi and Mana alike struck the man. A thin blue shield of Mana prevented anything from so much as touching his skin.

He didn’t even have to block my strike if he didn’t want to, and I still wouldn’t have hurt him.

Tenrik grinned.

This wasn’t the first time he had faced a challenge. He understood that they would have to burn through the man’s Mana and Vitality before they could injure him, and they weren’t even technically here to do that.

His Benefactor never told them they had to kill this man. He never even said they had to hurt him. They just had to delay him. The reward granted by the System would be tremendous, but Tenrik was under no illusion that it was anywhere close to being within his grasp. He was here for a specific purpose.

And mission accomplished.

Now they just had to fight to survive.

Fighting on the edge of life and death was the reason for Tenrik’s existence. There was nothing more thrilling than staring down the edge of death and not falling over. This was what Tenrik lived for.

The ranged strikes broke whatever Skill the not-man had used to immobilize Tenrik’s strike, and instead of retreating, Tenrik struck again.

Ranged attacks rained down on the being rejected by the System itself. They were all blocked, but it kept the thing’s attention from maintaining its hold on Tenrik’s movements. He was still no closer to actually landing a blow as the man contemptuously blocked all of his attacks and the ranged strikes simultaneously.

The not-man seemed to be perfectly happy with just standing in place and taking the entire offensive of dozens of Tier 7 Classers and Cultivators. They were throwing everything they could at him, and he wasn’t breaking a sweat.

This could have gone on for a long time before they burned through the passive resistances of the monster, but something finally changed.

A little black orb fell through the portal. The monster’s eyes flashed briefly as its will extended and enveloped the orb. He drew it into himself lightning-quick. The thing’s aura surged as soon as he absorbed the orb, and he back-handed Tenrik with a casual fling of his wrist.

Tenrik felt like a mountain had slapped him across the face. The world spun and he was completely disoriented. Shapes and shadows flashed by his vision. Even with his Stats, his mind wasn’t able to keep up with the shifting environment spawned from the backhand.

It wasn’t until he abruptly came to a stop, his body slamming into and through the wall of the Tier-6 infused mountainside that Tenrik realized he had been launched clear out of the little valley they had set their ambush in.

It had been many years since something had been able to physically move him from his stance, much less launch him well over half a dozen miles in the blink of an eye. The boom of the shockwave from the sound barrier being breach slammed into him face first as he recovered his bearings. The sound and vibrations were literally nothing in the face of getting slapped away by the being.

He pulled himself out of the wall, creating a much larger opening as rocks, stones, and bits of soil broke off from the mountainside along with him. He bent down with his legs and then rocketed forward with an explosive leap forward. He dashed back to the clearing to resume his role of lead vanguard. It wouldn’t do for the person responsible for holding the monster’s attention to not even be present for the fight.

Tenrik took a glance at his Status as he raced forward and noticed that the simple backhand had shaved 30% of his Health Points away. His supreme Regeneration was hard at work, but it could only restore around 0.1% of his Health every hour. He had a tremendous Skill for his Regeneration, but his other Skills and Stats had raced ahead to protect himself from harm so much that his Regeneration never had an opportunity to be exercised to any significant degree. It had lagged so far behind that it made no difference in a fight anymore.

An oversight I’ll have to look into correcting one of these days, he idly thought. It was already over Skill Level 100 with its first Transcendent ability. He would need to plan ahead for the direction he wanted to take the Skill in the future.

In only a couple dozen seconds, Tenrik arrived back at the clearing. He was confused at the lack of noise and Mana and Qi flashing about as he ran up. When he finally arrived, though, he realized why.

The clearing was a complete mess. It looked like a natural disaster had rolled through and left without a care in the world. All of the trees and vegetation were scraped clean. Even the topsoil was gone. In place of a little idyllic valley was nothing but a bedrock base nestled between the mountains.

The rent in reality was gone. The runes were gone. The people were gone.

Tenrik dashed about and scanned the surroundings with his immense Perception. Upon closer observation, he finally found something out of place.

A severed arm in a pool of blood.

Tenrik stood over the arm and stared at it for a moment. He didn’t recognize who the arm belonged to. He bent down and picked it up. It was still warm and the Vitality of whoever it belonged to could still be felt within it. A groan caught his attention as he contemplated what to do.

Tenrik looked up and noticed movement dozens of yards away where the ground wasn’t scraped clean. A man sat up with blood covering his face and body. His eyes swirled around in his head like he had taken a severe blow to the head and couldn’t focus on anything.

Tenrik dashed over and noticed it was the Space Cultivator. He was missing an arm. Tenrik glanced down at the one still in his grasp, and he extended it to the man who was slowly coming around.

The Cultivator stared at the arm presented to himself for a few seconds before glancing down at the stump of his shoulder. He looked at Tenrik and then took the offered arm.

“Thanks,” he said, groaning again as he leveraged himself to stand up. “I’ll get one of the Healers at the Sect to reattach it for me later.”

“What happened?” Tenrik asked. “I was blown away, but I was only gone for like twenty seconds!”

“The monster got annoyed, is what happened,” the Cultivator scowled. “It could have killed us all. As it is, only about half of my disciples actually died, too weak to handle even a single casual blow from whatever that thing was.”

“If nobody died, then where are they?”

“Look around,” the Cultivator gestured with his severed arm. It would have been comical if not for the serious situation. “That thing’s aura surged enough to blast you away after absorbing one of those orbs that followed him through the Spatial tear. Well, you didn’t see it, but that one was followed by a thousand more.

“As soon as he absorbed all those orbs, his aura was so vast it couldn’t even be sensed anymore. It looked like he blurred for a second and then he was gone. It had simply gone around and smacked everyone in the clearing once, then he simply left.”

The Cultivator shrugged.

“I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. The thing was just annoyed at us. It kind of felt like it was saying, ‘bad’ as it disciplined some children. It wasn’t interested in fighting us. Heck, it wasn’t interested in punishing us. For something considered Anathema by the System, it seemed awfully reasonable considering the circumstances.”

“Heh, reasonable,” Tenrik smirked. “An ant is still meat. We weren’t even considered that.

“Come on, let’s go find the others, the ones that survived. They probably need Healing, too, and we’ll need to contact the Benefactor.”

“I’m sure he already knows,” The Cultivator waved the suggestion aside. “But yeah, let’s go collect the others. I’ll open a path to my Sect and we’ll go lick our wounds there. Then…” The Cultivator paused and looked Tenrik in the eye. “Then we’ll celebrate.”

The Space Cultivator chuckled.

“Hey, despite the outcome of the fight, mission accomplished, eh?”

Tenrik laughed, a gleam in his eye. If fighting on the edge of life and death was his absolute favorite thing to do, then throwing down at a party was a close second.

—

The hunger was gnawing at the back of his stomach. He had been so close he could taste it. Literally. One of his manifestations got a good whiff of the soul as it was about to devour it. It was an ever present problem, though, and one he had grown accustomed to.

At least as accustomed as was possible. Stealing others’ souls came with consequences, one of which was soul-starving. He had starved as an orphan once, millenia ago, and that had nothing on starvation felt from one’s very soul. Only tremendous Will kept him sane, and that was arguable.

He actually prided himself on his restraint against the pests that had pulled him from his goal. Not indiscriminately killing everything in his path was one of the ways he used to judge his own sanity level. If he ever looked back and saw nothing but carnage in his wake, he knew he had gone through an… episode.

They had grown less frequent, though more potent, as he grew stronger over the years. It had been over a hundred years since he last lost control, but he had been close to losing it this time.

To have his prize snatched literally from his teeth was frustrating, to say the least. He would just have to track it down again.

Suddenly something shifted and his gaze turned in a specific direction. A thread had been snapped, and his lock on the target dissipated in the wind.

No. It was more than that.

He didn’t just lose his target, but it appeared as if it had never existed at all. He sunk his awareness into the Tapestry and hunted for anything that could lead him to the tasty, tasty soul that had slipped through his grasp.

Whatever, or whoever, had snipped that thread had chosen the exact perfect one, though, and there was no trace of his quarry to be found.

He threw his head back and howled in rage, everything around him turning to dust at the power of his voice. Maybe losing control wouldn’t be such a bad thing right now.

—

The Masked Man dabbed the sweat above his mask as he snipped the thread at the base of where he had grafted an entirely new path for it. It was no simple task, either, as the one thread was bound up in knots and weaves with hundreds of others.

He had to select a position in the Tapestry far enough away and close enough to all the others to redirect the entire web enough to avoid the monster searching for it. There were enough other threads obscuring what he had done, though, that it would be a million years before the monster, a creature not specialized in viewing or manipulating the Tapestry, could possibly find it, even by accident.

He finally released a breath he had been holding for what seemed like months and relaxed.

The pain hit him all at once. He doubled over into a fetal position. Blood dripped on the ground in front of him. The slow trickle soon turned into a stream.

Blood poured out of his facial orifices. There was so much of it that it didn’t just trickle down his face under his mask. It seeped out of the edges and through the eye slits.

There was a cost for mucking about with Fate. Hopefully he would only have to pay it a few more times.

Almost… almost.