The Laws of Cultivation: Qi = MC^2

Chapter [B4] 30 — Yang Shen

My world changed within an instant.

I felt the heavens shudder, the last chain breaking as the Divinites vanished around me. I continued to meditate, the edge of harmony humming in my soul. I was not truly here, not truly in this situation. I was simply an observer, watching the world happen around me. And yet I ached at the deaths I saw around me. Two of the three divinities soul came to me, becoming a part of the cycle. The last one, it had died a worse kind of death.

But I did not linger on it. I could not. Time had lost its grip on me, I no longer knew how long I’d been here, but it had been quite some time now. I’d watched as the battle had concluded. Even now the armies fought around the walls, but a different battle had also been taking place, and I’d felt it end just now, as the chains tying the heavens were finally undone.

The heavens themselves opened up now. The last anchor of immortality was dead, and I felt the Divine Tree expanding itself outwards, reaching towards the heavens, claiming it. There was almost a shudder of relief, the mantle of the empire shifted, the cracks in the world starting to be healed together.

And yet, I waited.

I simply sat there, in this chamber.

In this moment, I was not just Lu Jie, or even Emperor, I was the vessel of the two divine beasts, standing upon the precipice of the battle that would determine the fate of not just the empire but this entire world. I did not have place to worry of others in the face of my duties, they’d only be burdens.

It was strange, understanding that this was it. I’d been dreading this moment for so long now.

So many people were dead. Even now, I could feel each battle, each drop of blood that was spilled onto the earth, each life that sunk into the earth and I claimed within myself, each soul and their weight, it had been slowly crushing me under their weight, but now, it all seemed to vanish.

Perhaps I’d simply made peace with it all, if this is what that looked like.

The heavens shifted under my authority. It was time for our meeting.

I did not need to know he was here, I could tell, my eyes saw all of the empire in their entirety in this moment. Yang Shen walked in, pushing the door to the emperor’s court room open.

He was barefoot, soaked in blood, and with a bone prosthetic arm on one side twitching as if it still hadn’t fully settled into its new body. He looked the visage of a demon, but I did not feel any threat from him in this moment. His footsteps echoed in the empty courtroom, till he stopped right in front of me.

The demon then gave me a deep respectful bow.

I opened my eyes, and regarded him with my own physical eyes. It felt strange to let go of this sense of being all seeing, of watching the world unfold from a greater perspective, I felt like I could get lost in it forever. And being back… having regular senses almost felt constricting. But I returned and took a moment to observe the demon.

He simply stood there, a blank face that showed no distinct emotions as he raised his head and simply looked at me.

Then the demon smiled, and I recalled the man who’d met back on the seventh peak, and in that smile, I saw the hint of Shen Yuan within him.

“To think you’d also become a god. It’s truly a strange world that we live in, isn’t it?” Yang Shen said.

“I am not a god,” I replied.

“Yet,” he said with a smile. “But you can feel it, can’t you? Now that you have all the pieces, now that you know it’s out there, you can feel it can’t you? The power to truly reshape this world.”

I did not respond. I did not want to.

In the moment when Shie Zhuihu had died as a Divinity, I had sensed it. It was there, a vague silhouette, but I could feel it. True Divinity. I had sensed it in the moment I had touched upon the heart of the heaven, but I had not understood it then, but now it was clear as day in my eyes.

They called themselves Divinity, but it was a false one, a pretense, a lie, a twisting of the order of the world.

But there was true divinity out there, and I was on the precipice of it. With the power of the four divine beasts and the Divine Tree, I’d have the ability to change the world in any way I wanted to, I’d have the ability to alter reality fundamentally.

I would be able to even bring back the dead. The people that had been lost, the loved ones that had been gone, I could remove illness, I could remove death, not bury it underground but remove it in its entirety. Cull it from existence.

I was on the precipice of true divinity now.

And so was he.

Yang Shen raised his hand as a gourd appeared in his hand and he lifted it taking multiple gulps as the liquid dripped from his lips. Letting out a breath that reeked of potent alcohol, he set the gourd on the ground between us and then sat down, crossing his legs and seating much the same way I sat.

He pushed the gourd towards me.

I looked down at the gourd in front of me.

“Thousand year old Baiju. Each drop is worth gold,” the demon said.

I believed him. I knew he was not trying to poison me.

I reached out and grabbed the gourd and then lifted it, putting it to my lips. A burning sensation ran down my throat, as I drank exactly three gulps, before putting the drink down.

I felt the baiju swirling in my stomach, feeding me the Qi it had soaked over my thousand years.

A drop of this just a year ago would’ve been enough to make me have a breakthrough.

Taking the full drink would likely be enough for someone to touch the cusp of Transcendence.

It barely made a dent in my soul in this moment as the Qi was quickly digested, pulled into my body and turned to Chi, feeding into the cycle.

I pushed the gourd back in between us, simply looking at the demon seated from across me. Was it strange that we were not fighting each other immediately? Perhaps. Perhaps it was. Even now I wanted to kill him, to erase him from existence. But there were other things I wanted to know first.

“You have spent so much time and effort in trying to get me here. You had a million opportunities to kill me, to stop me from being a hurdle in your path, but you didn’t. Why?” I asked.

Yang Shen looked at me, and then scratched the back of his head with his bony dead arm.

“A whim? No, not quite a whim. You understand that fate is real, don’t you?” Yang Shen asked me.

Had he asked me that merely a few minutes ago, I would’ve replied by tossing a void bomb at him and killing him on the spot. But I could not, not anymore, and so I gave him a nod.

“Well, it was pushing me to bring you here. And so I did. It’s because you would be the only other person in this world who could truly understand,” Yang Shen said.

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I hated his words. Each one made me want to kill him more and more, but I was burdened by knowledge now, burdened by understanding that I simply could not escape anymore.

“I’m also from Earth by the way. Well, I imagine you know that. It’s not just me, there’s been quite a few of us being pulled over to this world pretty much ever since the empire began. But I’m quite sure I was the first,” Yang Shen said.

That surprised me. But I did not interrupt the demon as he grasped the gourd one more time and took a gulp, before letting a deep satisfied sigh.

“I was hoping you’d show a bit more reaction,” Yang Shen said.

“I’m waiting for you to elaborate.”

“Tch, you’re no fun. I suppose that’s to be expected, Divinity changes you. You’re doing better than I did. When I first touched it, I nearly died. It took me a few years to be able to be able to handle it, it’s crazy to me that you aren’t falling over at the scale of all that’s feeding into you. You might be the more prodigious one of the two of us by far.”

I did not reply, I had nothing to say. Yang Shen seemed to realize as much and let out a deep sigh.

“We both come from similar worlds. Maybe the same one. I’m not too sure, the world you knew is entirely foreign to me, that said I did recognize some aspects of it. But I suppose, I should begin at the start,” the demon said, and a wistful look came over in his eyes.

“I was brought here at the birth of this empire. When the Azure-Jade empire had starting to just form, the vermillion bird had fled to the west, the continent had been reshaped by the war at the time, and I found myself be born in a small village to a farmer of no name. He was my father. The first one anyway,” the demon said, and then paused. “I’ve met about a dozen people brought here from different worlds. Almost all of them came over as they were, with their own bodies. All of them were mortal, and thus died soon after. But some had families and left behind hints of their existence,” Yang Shen said, looking at me.

Yin’s grandfather, I thought, and the man who’d left his gun here. John Smith. Both of them had arrived here physically.

“But do you know what happens to people who arrive as souls? People like you and me? People who had already died before they got here? We don’t get to just move on Lu Jie. There is nowhere to move on to. And so the thing that brought us here, it just repeats the process. And you’re reborn, again, and again, and again,” the demon said, taking another gulp.

“The people who come here with their own bodies, for them it’s easy. They are tied to their bodies in a way we aren’t, so they mostly just go down, with the rest of everyone else. That’s what’s been happening for so long. They all move down, and then they slowly start to change, and like annoying mushrooms, they pop back up but as demons. What you see here, all of this is just a mere slice of everything down there. They stay there, mostly because it’s nice there, the surface is hostile to them. Qi doesn’t like Gu and Gu doesn’t like Qi so the two are content to remain separated. It’s a solid system, as long as it works,” Yang Shen said.

“What made it stop working?” I asked, and realized that I was listening quite intently.

“There’s only so much space, and similar to the Heavens above, there is an Earthly entity. You must have felt it at some point surely, deep into the bowels of the earth, it’s not really a physical thing, just a presence of force. It doesn’t like how many dead things are loitering around anymore. And so it’s spilling them out. The balance has tipped over and it’s only going to get worse. All you’ve done so far, all you’ve managed here,” he said, spreading his arm wide to indicate to all of it, all of everything that I’d done. This just delays the inevitable. There’s billions of them down there, just waiting. Forget the land, the oceans are so much worse. There’s so much death teeming there, just the bottom of the water surface positively radiates it. There’s was a balance here for the longest time, but the scale had always been tipping. And now it’s tipped and I’m here to correct things once more,” he said pointing at himself, and then he grinned. “And so are you.”

I paused, taking in all that Yang Shen had said so far. Everything he’d said and done, it was all just to fix the cycle? I did not believe that. “You’ve chosen to inflict so much death, chosen to create so much suffering. If you wanted to just fix the cycle, you wouldn’t have to do any of that. There were ways, better ways.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong,” Yang Shen said, his voice firm. “What better way was there? And you think I didn’t try? That old turtle was with me before he was with you. Forget him, I had the Vermillion Bird before anyone else. The Vermillion fucking bird. Qinglong is a coward is all he is, Zhuque was Xuanwu are the prime two beasts. There are no ranks, the beasts are all equal in theory, but in reality, summer and winter are the core polar opposites and Zhuque is the divine divine beasts. He purifies anything his flames touch. I tried, I tried quite hard in fact, and all it got me was repeated suffering. I did not get here in just one try. I’ve lived nearly a dozen lives. My first few lives were very brief, in my first one I died after a famine. It’s what happens to most mortal children. In my second a spirit beast skill me. In my third, I was kidnapped, tortured and then killed by bandits. You get the idea,” Yang Shen said.

I… had a hard time imagining all of that.

“Eventually though, I started to learn how to cultivate. I touched upon Qi, I always had it, but I’d never realized it. I found a master who had secluded himself that was willing to teach me. In this life I was a street rat that got lucky. I lived around forty years before dying at the hands of some idiot with a spirit treasure too powerful for his own good. I killed him in my next life. Things only went up from there. In my life after that, I cultivated at a young age. I made the mistake of being too good, and got killed early in that one, so I made sure to learn how to hide my abilities and skills. Never let people truly see the depth of what I could do. It wasn’t easy but I learned and I continued to grow,” Yang Shen said, and then paused.

“The things you mention, I understand them, precisely because I’ve been exactly where you are. I’ve been in your shoes. But I was naive. The world does not work this simply. Do you think the divine beasts are just going to forgive and forget? Do you think the dispute was like a typical argument between siblings? No, they are fundamentally opposed to certain things. But that’s still the easiest problem to fix. You can make them work together. Perhaps you better than me because I have longer history, much more complicated history. But even if you do that, do you think the emperor would’ve gone yes please take the divine beast that my empire hinges on and then take away my immortality for which you need to kill me and all my divinities and then destroy the world as I know it, shatter my empire, burn it to the ground ashes and then salt it for good measure before establishing this new one of your own. That sounds lovely,” Yang Shen said, and I did not have a good response to that.

I understood now what I would’ve had to do, had I wanted to pursue that route.

“You can say all of this because I took on that burden, because I fought this war. I gave you all the convenient ways out, to not have to make the hard choices, to not have to actively decide any of this. But that’s fine, I’m not holding a grudge over that. I don’t want to inflict what I had to suffer on you, I’m not that petty. But I think you can see my point. This is why I wanted to meet you, but meeting you too early would’ve made it pointless. I wanted you to get here and understand. You cannot explain these things, you cannot explain what’s at stake to people who don’t see. That kind of person, that touch of Divinity, it is not something anyone but we can understand. And that is why I am here, that is why I have done all this. I have razed cities, I have sown the seed of death, I have even become all of this,” he said, looking down at himself with a wry smile. “This did not come without a price. Gu is not as tame as Qi is, you know that, it whispers, it heightens the worse parts of you. But it was a price I was willing to pay, it was a price I’d be fine paying, because I knew what was at the end of it, because I could justify it. And think, you understand too. Don’t you?” He asked, looking at me, and I had to pause.

Did I understand him? Did I? His words sounded convincing, I could see the points he was making, what were you supposed to do in this kind of situation? If the people you were fighting were not willing to change… I defended the empire because I wanted to see this war come to an end. I defend this place because I hated the senseless death, but was the empire right?

No, I’d never thought they were right. I defended them simply because they were the only thing to defend. The demons were a consequence, a force of nature more than anything. And I did not blame the action of empires onto the people, who were often the ones who suffered the result of such actions. I could not blame them, and so I defended them.

Yang Shen stood, putting away the gourd as he extended a hand towards me. “Come with me. Join me, join my side, let us reshape this world, together. We can end death, end suffering all together, we can remove the root of its cause all together. End this madness, fix this broken and wretched world one and for all. With our strengths, we can alter this reality, alter it so nobody has to suffer ever again. Together.”

I looked at the demon’s hand. I knew he spoke the truth. He would not force me to forfeit. We would stand together, shaping the world together. That was truly what he wanted.

I reached out my hand towards him…

And yet.

“Do the means truly justify the cost?” I asked him.

Yang Shen looked down at me, and spoke with absolute conviction. “Yes.”

I asked myself for my own truth. A truth that existed beyond thoughts, deep within me. I felt the mass of souls, I felt their thoughts, their belief in me, their suffering, all of who they had been, resting within me. I did not doubt the words Yang Shen spoke, there was truth to them, I could tell that in a fundamental way.

But that did not mean I agreed.

I didn’t have to say it, he understood, he saw it in my eyes. Yang Shen let out a deep sigh.

“Do we truly have to do this?” He asked me, almost pleading.

“It would seem so,” I replied.

There were no more words shared after that.

We simply stood there for a long moment, and then, with a wordless start, the battle began.

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