A screech erupted from the Outer Pagoda structure, and a scantily-clad woman ran for her life as a watery lash whipped behind her and latched about her exposed ankle. She screamed, and an equally bulky monster of an instructor made himself visible. The slob strolled through the opened double doors like he owned the place. Well, based on his behavior, he probably thought he did.
“Deny not this Master! I, Master Pigong of the holy ground demand…” His greedy rant faltered, his attention diverted by the oversized crowd of mixed servants that looked too different for his liking. “What are lesser servants doing on my holy ground?”
“Is that thing Pigong?” Artorian leaned over next to a red-robed student. The student fearfully nodded. “I understand.”
Pigong unleashed his trademark water whip. The swirling technique of agony made the crowd wince. Their backs knew well the suffering such a magic Chi weapon could inflict. He flicked it into the air, about to give chase to the entire body of ‘lessers’.
The raised water whip seemed to have different plans. It recoiled from the people and instead twisted around its wielder’s neck. Sharpening for a bare instant, the coiled Essence smoothly decapitated the perplexed fat man. Pigong’s body flopped to the ground, and his whip reverted to water vapor before his failing brain could begin to grasp what was happening.
Artorian wasn’t here for a fair fight. He wasn’t even here for a fight. This was pest control. Striding forwards, the academic punted the still-blinking decapitated head off the edge of the cliff face. The body was unceremoniously tossed off right after without so much as a mention or clever quip. These pigs weren’t worth the breath it would take, and every second the students saw them was another second they would need to heal.
As the head launched into the air, he half expected a smattering of Elves to pop from the brush and start scoring. Ah, he was missing the forest more every day.
Artorian hopped onto a nearby rock and introduced himself. He gave the same speech to the students that he had given to the first crowd; the promise of teaching. When he asked this group if they too would come with him, maximum support was their reply. Other students that had remained in hiding were gathered so they too could experience the shining zone of warmth and resplendent recovery.
“Mas… Grandfather.” A red robed student got Artorian’s attention, performing the palm-to-fist bow. Ah. He’d forgotten to mention that. No matter, the Courtyard students would fill them in later.
“Yes, my boy?”
The students went quiet since the Master… elder? The old man was speaking. That was going to take some getting used to. Artorian’s desire not to be called by the common title was tripping the students up. “How did our previous master… perish? His weapon appeared to attack him?”
Artorian brushed a hand through his frazzled beard and considered how best to answer. “You’re going to learn this over time, but I’ll give you the easy version. That weapon was made using a concentration of energy forced into a shape. It wasn’t a very stable or well controlled shape, just a floppy noodle with some unbalanced water Essence in it.”
He smoothed out his beard. “The premise is basic. When striking, it would deal damage as if it were a real whip. Unfortunately for him the design was poor, the workmanship shoddy, control abysmal, and he knew little about what he was actually doing. I took all the parts he wasn’t influencing and turned them against him. Since the majority of that technique was so poorly controlled and exposed, it took but a thought.”
Finishing his grooming, he warmly smiled at the gawking crowd. “Don’t look so baffled. You too will do this one day. All it takes is practice and a little nudge in the right direction.”
He strolled off to the next set of stairs without another word. The disbelieving gaggle of students caught up, talking amongst themselves as they ascended the spire. Artorian overheard parts of the story he’d missed before. Not the entire school was in this state of disrepair, but something bad had happened after the last Grandmaster entered seclusion.
The overall tone was more pleasant. Forward thinkers had raided the supplies from the pig that had hoarded every scrap of food that made its way to the mountain, which gave the group something to snack on.
Growing food on the spire wasn’t impossible. In fact, it was quite suitable to many crops. The humidity was stable and sunlight shone aplenty. If only there were better plants to grow. Well… didn’t he have some seeds literally in his pocket? An adventure to pursue after this mandatory pest control.
They passed through twisting mountain tunnels until they reached the Inner Pagoda. This was the cavitatious area where the actual Pagoda stood… what was left of it. Bodies littered these grounds, and green-robed skeletons were visible everywhere. Cuts on the bones and the cloth were indicative of a very one-sided fight.
A hoarse voice hiccupped from a darkened corner. A barrel it seemed? A barrel with feet sticking out of it. It shattered from within as a drunk stumbled out, also clad in green robes. Stolen green robes. This man was a cultivator, and a decent one at that.
*Hiccup*. “More blood for the distillery!” The drunk’s jar of alcohol deflected Artorian’s lance of light. His gourd remained undamaged save for a little scratch. Holding it close to his eye to inspect the chafe, the stumbling drunk hiccupped again.
“Ppfft. You’re going to face a Fallen Cleric with these weak celestial feces? Y-y-y-ou must be drunker than I am. Just… stand still and let me harvest you, I’ve got blood Essence to cultivate!”
Chapter Thirty-Two
*Crash*! After draining a deep drink from his gourd, the drunk dropped the jar, shattering the ceramic container. The remaining red goop drenched the ground.
Artorian calmly flipped through his mental notes. Red fluid. Bloodshot eyes? Bloodshot eyes. Blood cultivator? What does that mean? Time to check the patterns!
Hints of rogue celestial, fire, water, and… something else? Another four Essence channel cultivator! It was nice to know that he wasn’t the only one. Artorian guessed that fire corruption was at play if Dwarven brandy was being drained. It seemed that an effect was in place, one that both kept his blood free from impurities while also empowering the Essence flows along his channels. Artorian could just start to tell what the pattern was going to be at a certain point.
So, this man would be incredibly easy to anger then? Since the cultivator was only pretending to be a drunk, Artorian snootily caused a scene. Two could play the pretend game. Artorian performed a funny walk to the edge of the cliff, where he held his nose high and started to act with great drama. “Give my blood? To whom? You? Hah! You couldn’t take it if you tried. You’re far too slow, and far too drunk. Can you even see me, or are you seeing five of me? Which one is even the real me? You couldn’t tell had you been sober!”
Enraged and fueled by fire corruption, the blood-cultivator blindly leapt at this insulting, unwelcome guest that hadn’t brought anything to drink.
“That worked? Too easy.” Artorian scoffed at being correct. He didn’t side-step as the angered blood-user expected. Both of the drunk’s hands split, splattering out a wet red mist that formed talons of crystalline crimson mid-charge. As he swung… the cultivator felt the old man step on his head, hopping up and over.
The insult! A push to the back of his skull made the blood-user falter, and now he was drunkenly teetering on the rocky edge. He wasn’t about to be done in like that! Spikes of blood jettisoned from the man’s feet, impaling the ground and preventing a fall from such a minor tactic. “Hah! Not so easy, am I?”
A ball of condensed air tore the rooted cultivator right out of the dirt, sending the Wilhelm-screaming annoyance spiraling into the clouds below. The man complained in a drunken rage as he tumbled down the steep mountain.
Artorian made a single sharp nod, pleased that his plan had been successful. He had known that a push of air alone wouldn’t have done a thing. But so long as he uprooted the chunk of rock drunky was latched to. That long, long fall to the bottom
would do all the hard work. Repeated impact was only a bonus to ensure the one-way trip. Did he have any methods of negation?
He highly doubted that Ember’s inertia-dampening trick was well known. Peering over the edge, the academic felt pretty sure when the blood cultivator made a sudden crunchy stop. The shimmery blip of drunky’s aura winked out from Artorian’s vision. On an unrelated note, did people release all their essence when they died? Something for another time.
Returning to the two groups of cheering students, he ignored that he just used a swirling gust to hurl someone off the mountain. While he considered mountain-tossing as a trend that was likely to repeat all day, the students celebrated the roaring victory. With equally roaring cries.
Artorian was somewhat jaded from being around gifted cultivators for his entire tenure as a cultivator, but these students didn’t even have the corruption cleansed from them. His techniques were whispers of fantasy to them. To the students, what he was doing was otherworldly.
“Check the area for survivors. We might get lucky.” A few hours later determined that they did not get lucky. The Inner Pagoda had been… emptied. With the structure a shell of its former glory, Artorian tried not to think of the polished halls it had once contained. He remembered weeks of scribing practice. How to spell. How to hold the quill. How to grind ink. How to wash ink out of clothes… that last one had been very useful. He was so messy.
A breath of mountain air broke him from the fugue and another set of stairs were beneath his feet shortly after. He told the students to stay behind and rest; they didn’t have his stamina, and were in dire need of some rest and relaxation.
He said he’d be back, and made the next climb alone. It was for the best. A skilled cultivator was waiting for him, as was… something else. A hole in the world that drank in Aura but didn't release even a hint of it.
The influence of each person was unique. Where the drunken blood cultivator had carried a hint of malice in comparison to the unpleasant feeling washing down his skin; this was a grinding darkness that clawed at him. Where Artorian radiated starlight filled with the celestial, this person waiting for him below the spear’s apex embodied the Essence he’d had the least contact with: infernal. They’d sensed each other all the way from the Inner Pagoda.
His Aura emanated the infernal, and electricity crackled in the air when their Auric fields met. Both men were confused when the environment acted up, and their Auras showed a significant difference in where their power was. One would expect Auras to meet cleanly in the middle when two opposing, hostile cultivators were within a few feet from one another. But here… the crackling static buzzed maybe a few inches from Takaviri’s skin, while Artorian remained eighty-eight paces away.
What an interesting comparison of Auric skills. The crackling only got worse as the space between them diminished; not at all what either of them had expected. The infernal cultivator quirked a brow as the old man slid on a pair of sunglasses.
How… new. The cultivator considered it time for a flashy entrance speech; after all, this was a great stage for a climactic battle! “I am Takaviri, direct disciple of the Invulnerable One.”
Takaviri was a proper C-ranker, possessing a fully built body and partially infused Aura. He didn’t let a little detail like ‘Aura size’ get to him. Abyss, it even meant he could let loose for a change! He was so sick of wiping the floor with that boring blood cultivator. Takaviri’s voice matched his Aura, both prickly and cutting as he began to laud himself. “You might be an actual challenge for this mighty cultivator of despair. I will show gl-l-l-l-hrk…”
Being a C-ranked cultivator supposedly provided one a lot of perks. Powerful body, powerful Aura, and a solidified cultivation technique for speedy Essence movement and enhanced control.
Now, when it came to Auric protections, it was well known that like rejected like. Fire bounced away fire. Air crackled against air. On the other hand, opposites cancelled. A fire Essence technique striking an Aura filled with primarily water Essence counted as rudimentary shielding. Both were expended equally if nothing else was at play.
But adjacents? Oh, those were fun. Adjacents interacted.
Arcing rays of metallic electricity wrenched between their hostile Auras. The infernal in Takaviri’s Aura wrestled the celestial in Artorian’s, dispersing in an air-Essence abundant environment. Going through the same motions as before, the old man indexed his opponent and started work on his attack. Takaviri wasn’t just an infernal cultivator; from the patterns surrounding him, and the contents of his Aura, the academic deduced his opponent was a dual Essence cultivator. Specifically, infernal and air!
That must have been why lightning snapped and sparked? Though it was strange to call it lightning. The clashing Essence mimicked the look, but it felt as if something was missing for it to really be ‘lightning’ as metallic electricity crackled. The opposites in their fields actively cancelled around the agitated, remaining Essence where like was rejecting like. Now, celestial and infernal didn’t have ‘official’ adjacents. Only each other, and only as opposites.
Air, on the other hand, had two adjacent types. Sharply pulling away the ambient heat behind the enemy cultivator, Artorian flared copious heaps of fire Essence in front of the man. That such actions were visible or not didn’t matter for the moment. The academic didn’t know the term for the environmental effect he was encouraging, he just knew nature worked as intended when given the correct conditions. It wasn’t the heat itself that was important, but the alteration of natural factors already in the local air.
Having been basics-trained by Ember, Artorian no longer needed to move his hands or body to throw Essence around. Making the somatic actions tended to make fine control easier. For this sleight of hand, not moving his arms made it seem as if he hadn’t been doing anything save closing the distance.
When Artorian could see the natural crackling between opposing Auras intensify from the temperatures he was upholding, he considered the right conditions to be in place. Taking an extra strong step forwards, he ‘falcon knee’d a gust of refined air Essence into the mixture to connect the dots.
Takaviri was overconfident. Having no Essence cycled to his eyes to see what his opponent was doing; he didn’t notice the pre-existing electricity being amplified by the violent addition of air Essence.
The active influx of high-quality Essence connected itself to the heavily laden positive and negative ion pockets in the area. Specifically, those in front and behind the infernal cultivator, which conveniently bordered active sparks. While Taka had been distracted by his own hubris and Auric size comparison, the man became a living conductor contained inside of a hard-light sphere, trapping him and the newly formed rampant plasma in said confined space as adjacents interacted.
Metallic-purple lightning rippled, snapped, and cracked with repetitive flashes through the quickly fracturing container. The temperature-influenced ion pockets and free-roaming Essence fully expended itself mere seconds after it had begun, but the damage was dealt.
Artorian watched as the infernal cultivator fried from the inside out by an Essence effect he couldn’t defend against. He didn’t cease his forward stride as he pondered mechanics. Lightning was likely just compounded air Essence rubbing against the ground, or earth Essence, but adding water and fire made that odd electric-purple stuff.
Takaviri slumped to the ground as a smoking husk. He gasped an oven-baked breath, regardless of being mostly charcoal. What was that absolute cheat of a move he’d just been hit by? That old timer had walked towards him, and bam! He’d been blindsided and struck by lightning? Had he been anything other than C-ranked, it would have already been the end of him. His Aura was fully expended from blocking as much of the damage as it could, he’d had to use his refined Essence to defend against that! The insult! “Ah… I… I’m going to butcher you!”
The old man wasn’t having any of that ‘second wind’ nonsense. A beam of light extended from his finger as he finally strolled past t
he broken cultivator, unceremoniously slicing his head off with a *Vmm*. Without an external Aura protecting the disciple, the old warrior didn’t even feel a hint of resistance as the Essence blade passed through.
Artorian rolled his shoulders, and the remaining free-floating Essence in the area re-absorbed into him via his presence. He supposed he wasn’t exactly fighting fair or in a manner that was sportsmanlike; in short, he wasn’t giving his enemies a chance. But what was wrong with that exactly? This wasn’t a sport; it was his life on the line.
Copying the blood cultivator’s Essence claw concept, he replaced the one-finger lightblade so that he could indirectly grab and toss the corpse. With a throw of the arm, another enemy joined the others in a journey off the mountain. A shame that Artorian didn’t have the luxury of time to study. He’d have loved to know more about infernal Essence and the people that cultivated it.
Unfortunately, he didn’t need to be told how despair was cultivated. The robed man had signed his death warrant by being in the way, and Artorian put it out of mind as he walked several hours to reach the next hollow. Pushing open the metal gate, he stepped into the open-air royal gardens. The previously romantic location was now overgrown, wild and unruly. No matter. Two parallel blades of wind cleared the entire path forward in a quick and easy straight line. He knew the way, and so tread purposefully across the cleaved greenery. At the end of the path, he looked up and sighed in relief. He needed to take a moment for his feelings to settle.
There it was.
The Academy.
Carved into the side of the stone mountain, with a waterfall curtaining every open window and walkway. Gnomes had chiseled it in ages past to run experiments both out of sight and out of mind. It had eventually found a different path in the pursuit of higher learning. The question of how they got the water up here was no longer a mystery. Not since he had seen the drunken stunts his Wood Elves pulled with their waterspout trees.
Artorian's Archives Omnibus Page 63