[MA] 260. Shattered Preconceptions (Patreon)

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[A/N: Chapter this week: 3/3

Next chapter: Tuesday]

"Fuck!" Liya cursed, and Shen felt himself being teleported away.

He opened his eyes to find himself sitting on a small island in the middle of the world's green ocean. Liya also teleported nearby, into the air a few miles away. She was running away from him to tell the Heavens she didn't mean to interfere with his tribulation, but a golden lightning bolt still materialized out of nowhere and struck her.

Liya didn't try to defend herself. When people interfered with tribulations, a warning came first. It was painful but bearable. However, if she tried to protect herself, true heavenly punishment would befall her.

She took the bolt in the chest. The impact threw her away so fast that she became a blur to Shen, soon disappearing into the horizon. The lightning released a mighty and loud shockwave that lowered the nearby sea level and damaged Shen even from afar. Not too much, thankfully, but still enough for him to bleed from all his orifices.

All that happened in an instant. Shen's mind was still being pulled in seven different directions, and he felt a grander will, likely the Heavenly Tribulation, encroaching on him to hinder his evolution. Changing locations hadn't affected the process.

He understood why Liya had done that when he saw the massive wall of wind coming from the horizon in the opposite direction she had disappeared.

The thing was so huge it seemed to be endless to both sides. Already it carried trees, rocks, and animals with it, all of which were being zapped by constant lightning that was born within. The broken trees kept being broken down into very sharp-looking long splinters resembling crude spears. The winds also lifted the ocean, turning into something resembling a mix of a hurricane and tsunami mix. Or perhaps a sandstorm made of wind and bits of broken nature. Or just a world-ending storm.

Everything was powered by Laws.

At any moment, anywhere, Laws continuously affected everything and defined how Reality worked. Someone walking a Path could make their Concepts or Laws more potent in an area with energy and willpower. And Reality itself could also give birth to natural wonders where some Laws were more prominent than others. The Harmonization Tribulation was such a natural wonder.

The power of Laws in the storm was so great that he felt it even with it on the horizon. That world was much bigger than Earth, and he could see much farther than Earth's horizon, yet it still affected him. His body and soul trembled like a child both fearing and welcoming a strict parent.

The Laws resonated with his Path, and he was awed by what he witnessed.

The wind was ridiculously slow and soft. Gentle. Obviously, Zephyr. Yet, it seemed to carry the weight of the world. He would have thought it impossible when concerning the Concept of Zephyr, but he understood it now.

The Law of Zephyr, which Shen decided to think of as Gentle Breeze to differentiate from the Concept of Zephyr, was a Law. A Law. It was part of the things controlling Reality itself. It was anything but weak.

In Shen's understanding, a Gentle Breeze could barely blow a few blades of grass. However, he was limited by his perspective. What could be considered a Gentle Breeze in a world where everything was A-rank would immediately destroy Earth without even trying. Opposingly, a Gentle Breeze on Earth might not even be considered Wind when touching an S-rank.

Gentleness was relative. Breeze was relative. The only thing absolute was the Law that permeated every Gentle Breeze in the multiverse.

Such Law could be found in every world with a molecule of air. Such Law had the weight of Wind itself behind it. Such Law only gave way to other Laws when it had no alternative.

The Wind was violently pulling everything on the surface of that world into the air. Still, it could be considered a Gentle Breeze on a multiversal scale, and that was ultimately the scale on which Laws operated. A Gentle Breeze with the full power of Wind itself could destroy everything Shen cherished.

It was a display of mighty and a clear warning: this was what Shen was dealing with.

When the Alliance came to Earth, it promised to turn those who passed the Pioneer Tutorial into gods. There are many kinds of gods in mythology, and the consensus was that the Alliance was referring to those on the weaker side. Shen had been incredibly mighty after just reaching D-rank, enough to be called a god under certain circumstances. Bullets couldn't hurt him, and after just a little progress, he became impervious to any modern weapon.

But this? This felt like true divinity. If that Gentle Breeze wanted, it could easily unmake Shen's body and soul.

Gentle Breeze shattered his preconceptions about Reality.

The Law of Stream ground the remaining splinters of his assumptions into dust.

In that storm, Stream refused to be controlled by the Wind. The Water allowed itself to be carried but kept its essence. Every drop of Water in the incoming calamity moved in a pattern that would look chaotic to most. But for Shen, it formed a complex system of endless small Streams that flowed into larger ones and then split into smaller ones again. Each Stream was contained in itself yet affected every other.

A Stream was never alone. It's made of smaller parts and part of a greater whole. On a multiversal scale, the oceans of individual planets might look like drops of water, but even they might also be part of a Stream no one could see. All Water was connected and served a purpose.

Shen had just touched on the secrets of such a grand scale with Gentle Breeze and even considered it with the Concept of Boundlessness, but that simple truth became crystal clear now. Every set of Laws was everywhere. To believe they only affected things on a micro-scale was foolish. How far could one see from the top?

The next to surprise him was the Law of Conductivity. It shared some of the insights he had already gotten and made him realize something new: it didn't exist by itself.

Conductivity required an initial spark, a charge to carry forth. A Stream and a Gentle Breeze were also like that, though he hadn't grasped it on his first look. They were moving forms of their sets of Laws.

Shen immediately recognized the truth of the Expression of Change.

Without Change, there was no movement; without movement, there was no physical matter. Not in the way he knew it, at least. Subatomic particles constantly moved, Changing Spatial positions over Time to make physical existence possible.

Every set of Laws had also come into existence through Change, some later than others. Weapon Laws like the Spear were the most obvious result of Change. A Spear's crudest conception, like what Shen saw in the incoming tribulation, was just a long piece of wood, thin enough to be wielded, with a sharp end.

The most basic Spear was a Shaft and an Extremity, thus producing a Killing Weapon.

Yet, despite being the product of Change, those three Laws ceased requiring movement after they came to be. Conductivity, Stream, and Gentle Breeze continued, but a Shaft could just exist after the initial spark of its creation. So could Extremity. Likewise, a Killing Weapon didn't stop being a Killing Weapon even if it wasn't used.

The latter was less static than the other two, though. If a Weapon wasn't used for Killing, could it be considered a Killing Weapon? Would other people killing with a Spear keep the Law of Killing Weapon strong? Or would an individual spear stop being a Killing Weapon if it was hanged for too long?

Was a Killing Weapon defined by history and potential or by its current individual existence?

Now that Shen thought about it, Killing Weapon was much more complex than any other Law, except maybe True Boundlessness—if he could even call the latter a Law. The Law of Killing Weapon could only exist because there were living beings; else, how could it kill anything? But Life was another set of Laws; it wasn't part of the Spear itself.

Killing might as well be a Concept shared between Life and other Laws, so it was surprising for it to become one of the Laws of the Spear. Clearly, Liya's explanation hadn't been thorough. A set of Laws could be so affected by others that they could redefine part of their identity in how it interacted with those others.

Maybe Killing had to be a Law because it ended beings heavily bound by a competing set of Laws, Life. Or perhaps it had just been arbitrarily created by whoever Realized the Laws of the Spear and pushed it into the multiverse first.

Shen's horizons were broadened by acknowledging sets of Laws were not set in stone. Obviously, new sets of Laws pushed on the Heavens would force the others to shift. It was also evident that the Expression of Change would still affect the Laws. But that Change seemed more fluid than he had assumed.

Fluid like his own True Boundlessness.

Shen couldn't fit True Boundless into his new categorization. True Boundlessness was static because, once accomplished, it didn't need to move to keep existing. However, the potential to move was an intrinsic part of it, just like it was part of Killing Weapon, or it might be limited by something new. In fact, it could be limited by its own definitions of being static.

True Boundlessness was also unique in that it refused the very Aspects of Reality it needed to exist. It didn't want to be limited by Space and Time. Yet, without them, it couldn't have the Change it needed to turn real its Will of ultimate freedom.

The more Shen explored Boundlessness, the more he found it paradoxical. In fact, it could only exist if there were boundaries for it to opposite. Without limits, the Will to break past them wouldn't coalesce into a Concept.

Without limits, it would just be nothingness—Void.

All those considerations swam in Shen's head as he stared at the approaching storm. Meanwhile, his mind kept being pulled in seven directions but was blocked by a higher power. It was a strange state of affairs. He was getting enlightened—as slightly as it was—about Laws without truly touching them. While Reality blocked his mind, it couldn't or wouldn't prevent his evolved body and soul from matching with the Laws in the storm.

Shen lost himself in watching and marveling.

Eventually, the slow Gentle Breeze got close. It was self-contained, not releasing a single strand of wind beyond the moving wall, now filled with water, lightning, and pointy sticks. Anything else was gone, destroyed or pushed away.

Strand of wind or not, it promised danger.

Shen knew without a doubt that the tribulation was here to try to kill him. He grasped his C- spear, filled it and his body with his Idealized qi, focused on absorbing qi from the surroundings like crazy, and prepared to fight for his life.

The Gentle Breeze touched him, and most of his preparations fell apart.

It wasn't Shen anymore.

It was a Gentle Breeze.

= - = - =

It flew freely in the skies. It touched grass, playfully blew the animal's white hair, and moved around everything it wanted. To be it was to be free, and its freedom resonated with...

With...

With one of those annoying parts of itself that kept trying to turn it into something else.

There were six annoying parts, all fighting it to overcome its existence. But it wouldn't relent. It was Gentle Breeze and nothing else. It was free.

It was Truly Boundless.

So it existed without limits or boundaries. It simply was. It had no form, yet wouldn't be contained.

What bothered it the most was the pesky fleshy bit that insisted on trying to contain it. It was destroying that vessel, but it wasn't simple. The vessel's energy protected it, and it had just so much of that energy!

True Boundlessness barely knew it could win a battle of attrition against another flesh vessel, but this one could keep energizing itself for longer than True Boundlessness would be around. It would have to destroy the vessel despite its unfortunately robust defenses.

A sibling part of the strange construct True Boundlessness was part of insisted it could destroy the vessel more easily than it could. That sibling could end the vessel once and for all. It could kill.

True Boundlessness gave in, for it wasn't bound by self-definitions of what it should be.

It became a Weapon made for Killing. All of itself, all of its power, all focused on a single point. It was the Extremity of its entire existence. Its Shaft moved ahead, straight at the vessel.

But it never hit the mark, for it demanded to Conduct itself through the path of least resistance, and the vessel resisted it.

Instead of a Killing Weapon, it became a Stream. Free again, flowing through its own pathways. It only had to keep going, and everything would be alright.

It only had to Gently blow, and there was no issue.

It was free.

It was Boundless.

And then, it couldn't withstand the vessel anymore. It blew Gently but with the power of Wind itself, trying to erase the vessel like sand in a windstorm. The meat bag was pierced by a thousand Killing Weapons Gently Breezing through the air, Conducting themselves where there was the least resistance. By a Stream of Extremely sharp Shafts. By Conductive lightning bolts that were too plentiful and wanted to test the vessel's resistance.

In single-mindedly pursuing the vessel's destruction, the separate parts found Harmony. However, Harmony limited them, and one part refused it. The whole fought itself and separated again.

The battle between Laws continued. Each individual part demanded something different. Most of them tried to destroy the vessel more often than not, but it could never last long. Yet, paradoxically, the different types of damage made the vessel suffer much worse than if there was only one type of attack.

The damage piled up in both body and soul. It weakened the vessel. The pain of having its soul ripped apart snapped its sense of self.

And so, the vessel became vulnerable.

It could no longer force the links to the Laws of Reality to exist his way. The Laws smelled blood. They had been seeking to grace that mind with knowledge of themselves to indirectly increase their hold over Reality. Now, instead, they took it upon themselves to directly increase their influence by having a living avatar made in their Image.

Instead of pulling his mind, they pushed themselves into him.

Instead of a strange mix of Laws fighting for supremacy outside his body, Shen's mind became all seven Laws separately.

Part of him was the Gentle Breeze blowing on him. It pulled the physical breeze and the very Law of Gentle Breeze into the vessel's body and soul. It sought to remake it into only Gentle Breeze, but the vessel was also made of many other Laws. Trying to make it exclusively Gentle Breeze damaged it.

That part of Shen's mind had been entirely overwhelmed by the Will of Wind itself. Gentle Breeze didn't care if he died. If he couldn't become its perfect and exclusive representation, he might as well cease to exist.

Other parts of him became the Stream entering the vessel's lungs and drowning it, the Conductiveness of the Lightning striking the vessel down, and the Extremity and Shaft of the Killing Weapon putting holes in the vessel. The final part became everything the vessel was and more, Truly Boundless.

Each mind-Law pulled its Law self into the vessel to remake it in its Law Image, accelerating the vessel's destruction.

But the vessel kept resisting. It could withstand much of its own qi and had much of it.

Minutes of agony turned into hours, then days. The battle raged on. And one day, he reached one of the tribulation's thresholds.

A small, almost erased part of the vessel's most genuine sense of self was allowed to escape the grasp of the tribulation's Will.

Shen recalled who he was.

Barely.

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