The Dao of Magic: Book IV Read online

  His reasons for actually putting in an effort restored, the large man looks at the neatly tiled pavement. Previously, his way of doing things had two modes. The brute way entailed being sleepy, and he performed the subtle way by being a swell guy. This situation seems to require a dozing sort of focus.

  Then Keeneff remembers that all of that emotional control has absolutely zero effect on the energy swirling through his heart. He sighs deeply and looks at the centre of the city for a brief moment. Above the exact spot where he recently poured his all into punching an overweight youth hangs a crystal. Looking into the crystal brings forth odd ideas. Alien structures become visible in his mind’s eye for a short moment before he shakes his head.

  That can come later. First, he should understand what is happening. If the elders ever decided to blame him for this entire fracas, the least he should offer them is another target and just enough evidence to make the unfortunate person a plausible scapegoat. That might just save his hide.

  He looks down. Then he looks again. And he looks once more. Only when he concentrates upon looking for the fourth time does he see it. Fine wires of power are woven through the stones, a faint web of energy forming an intricate structure of latticework and meaning.

  “Those brain fucks again. I hate those idiots.” Keeneff’s temper rises as he recognises a braincore’s handiwork. Growling with suppressed fury, he punches the shit out of the street tiles he is standing on. The square pieces of stone predictably crumble into high-velocity dust, sandblasting a portion of the tunnel network revealed in the act of mindless violence.

  He crouches low upon landing, the power in his veins speeding up through pure instinct. He sprints away, now determined to complete this task a soon as possible. Only when the customer is satisfied on more than just the physical level can he ask for the information he needs, after all.

  Keeneff wonders again whether this is the correct course to follow. Brute force didn’t work, so now he needs a more subtle approach. But still, sometimes he wonders whether this entire thing might be a tad bit too subtle.

  Then he stumbles upon a rather gory sight. A cave with a diameter of a hundred metres is lit up by a penetrating red glow. The source of the lighting is the large shining circle in the middle of the cavern. Cages filled with bleeding beastkin of all shapes and sizes are located at evenly spaced intervals, red streams of thick blood dripping from each one.

  “NO! That is not how you consume females, you stupid human!” If there is one thing that Keeneff hates more than not being able to sleep, fuck, or fight, it’s when good things are wasted in front of his eyes. A human in ragged clothing is standing inside of the ornate red circle of blood, and even the rather insensitive muscled man himself feels the gathering power radiating from the entire thing.

  But still, the realisation that the power in front of him is one he can’t easily beat is unimportant when he sees the several excellent females being bled dry. “That is not how they should be used AT ALL!” Pointing at the suffering women in a blind rage, he storms forward. Tendrils of blood strike at him but are ignored. He sprints ahead, storming into the bloody formation with brute force. He is stopped a mere metre from the rather desperate form of a crazed-looking human, formless limbs of shining red holding the snarling beastkin back.

  “Another one for the slaughter, yes come to me! Give me your blood. It’s an honour for you to feed your betters. I’m high mage Fredon and I thank you for your sacrifice of blood! Oh nice, he’s a heartcore. That should get me enough to fill up with liquid, at least! Good, good.”

  Keeneff gasps in indignation as he is stabbed. He fights the draining force with all his might, managing to resist for seconds before a steady trickle of blood escapes his control. The withered human staring him in the face is perspiring now, the gloating speech of before halted. Keeneff then calls upon his previous affinity, willing the very rock around him to his will. The ground still responds to him, if in a diminished fashion.

  Then two things happen at once. The single shard of rock surrounded by loose dirt is wrenched free under Keenef’s forceful mental command, and a rather fat fist smashes the human’s skull to smithereens. The entire ornate blood formation collapses into a dirty looking puddle of red mud as both Keeneff and Fredon’s corpse collapse to the floor.

  “Thanks, furry guy. I kept losing him. Come punch me again tomorrow, okay? You’re the only one helping me advance anyway. Bye!”

  And so Keeneff finds himself laying on top of a desiccated headless human corpse inside a large puddle of blood-soaked mud. The dim figures in the cages around him stir back to life as the constant draining of their life force stops. The mysterious round figure that helped him out this time went as fast as it came, leaving Keeneff more confused than not. He curses up a storm when he sees a pile of drained mutant corpses to the side of the room. Realizing that his client will not happily provide him with more information due to her pet being dead, he looks around.

  Once again wondering how his life went from the relaxed affair it was before to this mess, the incognito-dragon-turned-detective starts questioning the groggy prisoners, whether or not they know who killed the previous Tooth of the Beastkin.

  He only has five years before his task as Guardian ends, and he can find a scapegoat to find whom he can blame why the entire world went to shit.

  This power called qi is wonderful, but it’s truly wreaking havoc upon the wildlife, after all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Worm

  “Rheaaaaa…” I let my voice drag on like a whiny child. I shift my body to a more comfortable position, rubbing my face against her soft thighs. “I don’t wanna do anything anymore. Let’s just curl up in front of the fireplace and pretend it’s snowing outside, okay?”

  She sighs and looks down at me. I peek at her through cracked eyelids, stealthily trying to measure her reaction. Her face remains blank, but I can see that familiar questioning slant to her eyebrows. I also see a slight hint of defeated acceptance on her beautiful, sharply angular face. I smile to myself while trying to dig my head deeper into her lap. I wonder how she smells this good while consciously not thinking about the workload in front of me. I ignore the process telling me that Rhea’s skin does, in fact, produce certain substances that activate my olfactory senses.

  “Drew, Bord just killed Fredon. What’s going on with that?”

  I look up at her again. I can see a faint white channel of information flowing from the top of her head. The outline of a tree has been growing more and more solid over the past ten days. She has been exploring her cultivation base in new and interesting ways, and the ephemeral structure of channels is yet another way she is playing around with manifesting her power. “Bord used the city crystal to ask me what to do about that persistent old cretin. I told him to use the three-strike rule when in doubt.”

  I see a single branch - the one connecting her head to the moon high above - light up as she makes use of her connection to Database. “There’s not much info on the three strikes rule in Database. What is it?”

  I take a closer look at the ethereal construct forming above her head. I make a firm decision. I will drag her along with me during my duties. She has done nothing but gather dust while sitting on her ass for the past ten days. The foundation realm is usually where a cultivator develops higher concepts, turning their purely physical mastery of qi into something more. The transformed dragon I’m using as a pillow seems to be heading towards some form of unmoving nexus point, and I don’t like the look of that at all. I did ask her to keep track of the entire world as it went through a supernatural and potentially cataclysmic change, but that’s no excuse to give up personal freedom for a small bit of deeply rooted power.

  I stand up and stretch. Ignoring the various popping sounds coming from my spine, I take a look around me. Tree’s golden glory is as resplendent as ever, the massive perennial towering above me around two hundred metres. The few buildings inside the clearing are still in an excellent state. This
cannot be said for the fence surrounding the clearing, nor for the buildings outside it. The lack of maintenance combined with the many untested fabrication methods employed during their construction has led them into a swift ruin. The same goes for the buildings on the moon. The lack of any qi-bearing beings occupying the structures up above combined with the qi-absorbing nature of the moon has caused them to start crumbling fast.

  “Three strikes. I’m generally a ‘live and let live’ kind of guy, you know. But sometimes, some people just don’t work out. I’d be totally content to let these people do their thing, far away from myself. This is what I told Bord, and he acted according to his own judgement after that.”

  The piercing glare I’m receiving from the seated woman is telling me she wants a better explanation. I pause my little speech in order to take in all the changes that have happened over the past few days. The sudden disappearance of my students from this little dimension has done it a load of good and some harm on an energy-ecosystem level. The physical side – other than some collapsed buildings – is largely unchanged. I still see a volcano and an ice-covered mountain towering above the trees on either side of Tree, and there is still a smattering of small suns high in the sky.

  “Fredon’s first strike happened a while ago, according to Bord’s report.” I pause speaking the moment I sense a slight bit of killing intent. Rhea’s glare is as cold as it is piercing. “Don’t glare at me like that! I keep some stuff private, like personal communication. Giving you access to nearly all of Database was a large enough sacrifice in terms of privacy as far as I’m concerned.”

  Our small staring contest is only broken when Rhea gives a derisive snort and closes her eyes again. She broke eye contact first, so why do I still feel like I lost? “Right… Fredon’s first strike was seeing the difference between the old rigid mage society and the new way of doing things inside Tree, rejecting the empirically better option. Growth, quality of life, and productivity. The new way of doing things is better than their old way by any measurable metric you can think of. Maybe not by something perspective bound as ‘respect’ or ‘tradition’, but I have no qualms about ignoring inbred and retarded stuff like that any day of the week!”

  I even observed the little maggot as he sauntered through Tree after gaining provisional access to the sub-dimension. He saw that more progress was being made in days than all the innovation of the old mage’s islands combined in a year. He saw that the old cycle of fattening up fellow humans like pigs for the slaughter was not needed without island-bound mana users. And yet he rejected all of it, working hard to drag everyone back down to his level instead of progressing himself.

  “The second strike was the reason this place is empty. I might have enabled that group by putting some less-than-wholesome stuff in hard-to-find places in Database, but I made it pretty hard to find in the end. And he was basically the linchpin of that entire operation. I also told Bord that the third strike is a special one. Third time’s the charm, and maybe someone will change their way after having their evil ways fail for the third time. A fourth time? Kill ‘m! Third time’s the edge case where redemption is still in reach, however. Well, Bord saw that Fredon was actively murdering innocents in order to speed up his own cultivation by lower double-digit percentages. He judged that as Fredon’s third strike. So he punched the shit out of the decrepit little maggot. Good for him.”

  “Okay… Thanks for the explanation? I knew all that. I just wanted to know why Bord didn’t do anything with the fact that there is another dragon inside the Beastkin Capital? Keeneff is a lazy philanderer - most Guardians are mentally defective in some way - but I think that a potential powerhouse like him would require some attention?”

  I stare at the sitting dragon for a bit. She said the part about ‘mentally defective’ without even flinching. She has either completely accepted that part of herself, or she is completely unaware of it… “Mentally defective, hmm…”

  “Would a mentally sane dragon become a humans’ mate?”

  I try looking at that question from her perspective. It’d be similar to a human taking a mayfly as a partner. “That’s a good point. No sane cultivator would do this much couple cultivating…”

  “I was wondering why I felt more… chaotic lately.” A true frown creases her brow as she looks at me.

  I grin at her. “I was wondering why I felt more… lazy lately.” I broaden my grin as I let my eyes roam across her body. I smirk even wider as I see a slight flush creep across her face. “Did you know that normal cultivators perform elaborate techniques, employ complex formations, and use what amounts to qi-condoms before they have sex?”

  The white tree above Rhea’s head flickers and disappears as she looks at me, her face a deadpan visage. “What?”

  “Yeah. Just shoving qi into your partner’s body was seen like some massive taboo back on the cultivation world. It was basically heresy. Casual sex for pleasure between sexes was not a thing there, at all, except for the mortals, of course. But nobody cared what the mortals did.”

  Rhea’s face switches between horror and fascination as she seems unsure what to feel. “So I’m becoming more like you? Are we losing ourselves? Are our souls melding each time we… By the All-Dragon, what have we been doing? Drew, what have we been doing?” She stands up and starts pacing around, ignoring me as I fall to the ground.

  “Nothing that you won’t agree to with your entire being. Transferring qi like we’ve been doing allows for trait bleeding only when the other partner completely accepts these traits.” I take hold of her hands, squeezing them gently while looking her in the eyes. “Those preparations in the Cultivation world were all because they thought women were lesser beings.”

  She looks at me astonished for a bit, unable to process this twist. “I’m serious, that place was awful for women. The histories of the first immortal told a tale of a man betrayed by a woman. The heavens saw the treachery, forever cursing the lesser sex with lesser cultivation potential. Anyway, enough talk about ancient history, let’s go take care of this stupid worm before it causes more problems.”

  I keep holding on to Rhea as I pull myself through Tree’s portal. The air around us shifts from a pleasant spring feeling atmosphere to an oppressive swelter. We pop into existence hanging in the air, hundreds of metres above endless stretches of yellow dunes. The distant mountains are faint silhouettes dancing in the heat, small patches of green marking oasis here and there.

  “Come on, a bit of sun will do you good. The world won’t end without you managing all of their lives for a couple hours. No need to start laying down roots already, you know.” I smile at her. Rhea seems to be beating herself up again. Her expression seems to ask herself why she keeps falling for my little shows.

  “Just… Tell me next time, okay? I understand now, but just tell me in the future.” She manages to keep hold of her serious expression for an entire five seconds before she rolls her eyes at me.

  “I’ll think about it. Anyway, one of my stomach bits landed here recently, and now it’s moving around. Which is not a good thing, I reckon.”

  Rhea looks down, her back glowing softly as white dragon wings with purple highlights form. I surreptitiously let go of her, getting some distance between her and me without making it obvious.

  Then the sand below us explodes and the area Rhea is hovering in is swallowed by a yellow segmented worm, segmented and toothed mouth flaps slapping closed around her.

  A piece of my guts – I assume since a drone spotted a high qi concentration falling from space – landed in an oasis a few days back. I’ve been too busy to get to it, but that oasis is now inside this big boy’s stomach, and it has been making the best of this energetic windfall. Instead of producing psychotic drugs - like any proper sandworm should do - this one has been gorging itself. Every single living beast for kilometres around is now inside its stomach.

  I feel a single hand on my shoulder and freeze. “You thought that was funny?”

  I try to
nod, but both the force keeping me in place and the absolute menace dripping from the voice prevent me from doing so.

  “I want to see how funny this is too. Off you go!”

  Just as the worm is falling to the sandy floor again, gravity reasserting its control over the gargantuan being, I am falling alongside it. I see one of its many eyes lock onto me. Its pupil restricts in recognition. Then the beast snaps its head towards me, and I’m surrounded by rows of teeth and oddly dry flesh. I idly muse on the dryness of the worm’s interior. For some reason, I expected slimy folds, not this leathery stuff that’s trying to crush me to paste.

  Why did I agree to this entire thing again? I could have seen all of this coming – her reaction to my attempted prank – if only I was allowed to enter combat mode. Looking at explosive situations from a perspective sped up a couple thousand times is really good for rational decision-making.

  Rhea and I had a discussion a few days back. Braincore cultivators tend to be a bit mentally unhinged, and not just because of what unchecked thinking power can do to a person. The long stretches of solitude a braincore goes through as they swirl qi through their brain tends to have a rather disconnecting effect. I suspect that my – often fatally necessary – constant use of time dilation in the Cultivation World was another reason I barely interacted with anyone back then. People also tend to grow apart when they spend much more time inside their own heads instead of with each other. So Rhea and I agreed to limit combat mode to a minimum as an experiment.

  I still have all my danger sensing processes running, and none of them are signalling danger on any significant level. My normal way of handling being swallowed by a massive worm would be to go into combat mode by swirling qi through my head. Then I’d spend a few days or weeks of relative time analysing the situation and planning my way out of this.

  And somehow Rhea managed to infiltrate my own body with a significant amount of qi, allowing her to paralyse a few very crucial nerve clusters. How long has she been at this? Damn the woman! I spent hours lazing around in her lap, not suspecting that she was infiltrating my nervous system for a single second.