Chapter 585: Cultivation is Creation - Chapter 580: Lucid Lawbearers Battle
“Shen Bolin,” Tian said with a lot of urgency in his voice, getting up onto his feet and walking over toward the man who was his expedition leader, “what’s wrong with you, why are you doing something like this?”
“Song Wei,” Shen Bolin said, and he said it through teeth that were pressed together so hard I could hear it, and his two hands had already closed up into fists that hung down at his sides. “Of course it had to be Song Wei. That bastard always turns up in the places he shouldn’t be turning up in.”
I frowned at that. Fine, so the two of them had bad history between them, everyone in the cultivation world had bad history with somebody, but why was he taking that history out on us?
“Senior Shen,” I said, and I was careful about how I said it, keeping my voice level even though his pressure was doing its best to fold me down into the floor, “if you have a problem with Song Wei, then that is a problem between you and Song Wei. Attacking the people with him isn’t going to solve any of it.”
“You don’t understand anything,” Shen Bolin said back to me. “Song Wei can’t be allowed to take the Celestial Dream Lotus. Because of that, his expedition ends here, in this room. Leave right now, or I will kill every single one of you.”
His words didn’t have any heat behind them, and that was the part that got me, because a threat is meant to scare you, to make you back off, but this man was making a promise.
Tian put himself in the space between Shen Bolin and the rest of us and raised both of his hands up. “Teacher, please, I’m asking you. Hou is my sworn brother, I can’t just stand here and watch while you—”
“Move aside, Tian,” Shen Bolin said, cutting him off. “This has nothing to do with you. These cultivators made the choice to follow Song Wei into this place. That choice makes them part of whatever it is he is planning.”
“Planning?” I said, and I’ll admit I was actually curious now instead of just scared. “What is it exactly that you think Song Wei is planning?”
Shen Bolin’s eyes moved over to me, and I felt the whole weight of his attention land on my shoulders. “You really don’t know? He never told you the real reason that he put this expedition together?”
“He told us that he wants the Celestial Dream Lotus,” Xu Feng said from over by the wall, where he was still holding himself up against the stone. “What other reason is there supposed to be?”
“The lotus is not what all of you think that it is,” Shen Bolin said, and his voice dropped down lower and there was something dangerous inside of it now. “It isn’t only a healing treasure. It is much more than that. The only two people who deserve to retrieve it are Tian and Li Na. Anybody else who tries to claim it is going to bring down disaster on everyone.”
That struck me as very strange. Shen Bolin was a Lucid Lawbearer, he had more than enough strength to walk in and take the lotus for himself and nobody in this palace could have stopped him, but instead he was standing here insisting that only his two junior disciples should be allowed to have it. That did not match how cultivators behaved. That did not match how cultivators had ever behaved in the entire history of cultivators. Something strange was definitely going on in this palace.
“That doesn’t sound fair,” Xie Ling cut in. Her ice barriers had finished hardening around where she stood, and they made a dome of frozen protection over her head. “Why is it that only your own group members get to claim the treasure? Every one of us risked our lives to make it this far into this place.”
Whatever she said in that sentence made Shen Bolin angrier than he already was. His spiritual pressure came down on us harder, and I felt the floor under my boots crack from the weight of it.
“Fair?” and now his voice was rising up. “This has never been about what is fair! The fate of the Dream World depends on the question of who inherits the Celestial Dream Lotus! It is more than the Dreamgod’s treasure, it is—”
He stopped himself in the middle of the sentence. I watched him catch the words before they got all the way out of his mouth, and his jaw locked up tight, and when he started talking again, his voice was back under control.
“It does not matter what you understand and what you don’t understand. What matters is one simple fact, and that fact is that Song Wei can’t be allowed to retrieve the lotus. If he does, the consequences are going to be catastrophic for every dreamer that exists anywhere.”
He looked at all of us, one at a time, taking his time about it.
“Song Wei picked you for this expedition because you are useful to him. You have abilities that he needs so he can get through the deeper trials. He is using all of you as tools and nothing else. When you have finished serving whatever purpose he has for you, he is going to throw you away, or he is going to kill you, whichever one of those is more convenient for him at the time. So I am giving you a choice, right now, while there is still time to make it. Leave the palace. Go back to whatever lives you had. Or stay here and die, either by my hand, or by one of the trials in this place, or by Song Wei’s hand on the day that he decides he doesn’t need you anymore.”
I held back the sigh that wanted to come out of me. Of course this couldn’t have been a simple herb retrieval job. Of course there was hidden depths and secret conspiracies and fate of the world buried underneath it. This was the cultivation world. Nothing in the cultivation world was ever simple.
I went through the standard xianxia tropes inside my head. Let’s see now. We had a mysterious inheritance that turns out to be more than what it appears to be. Check. We had the elder who seems benevolent on the surface but has hidden motives underneath. Check. We had the protagonist type character who is “destined” to receive the inheritance. Check. And we had the evil senior cultivator who is manipulating juniors for his own nefarious purposes. Check, check, check.
But which specific one of them was this? Was the Celestial Dream Lotus actually a key that would unseal some ancient evil? Was Shen Mohai not really dead but instead trapped somewhere and waiting around for a suitable vessel to show up? Was the inheritance going to corrupt whoever ended up receiving it and turn that person into the next great villain of the age? Or was this one of those reincarnation situations where Shen Mohai’s consciousness would push out the inheritor’s soul and take over his body?
Too many possibilities and not enough information to narrow them down.
As for the part about being used by Song Wei, well, that was simply how the cultivation world operated. Senior cultivators used junior cultivators. The strong took from the weak. Resources went upward and danger went downward. I had never once been under any illusions about what Song Wei’s motivations were. He recruited us because we were useful to him, and on the day that we stopped being useful, he would either leave us behind or try to get rid of us so that he didn’t have to share the lotus with anybody.
I was already prepared for that. My goal in this palace was a simple one, get to the core chamber, take one petal for Lu Chenyang, and then handle whatever it was that Song Wei tried to pull afterward. If it came down to an actual fight, then I had advantages that he had no idea about.
The red sun energy. The blue sun programming. The protective functions of the Genesis Seed. My connection back to the main body and everything the main body could bring.
Song Wei was a Lucid Lawbearer, that was true, but I had gone up against powerful opponents before and I had survived them, and I could do it again if it came to that. And as long as I never killed Wu Kangming, my number of lives was infinite.
Sure, Song Wei might be capable of killing me. But the real question wasn’t that. The real question was how many times can he kill me before I manage to kill him one single time.
I looked over at everyone else.
Xie Ling’s face had gone from neutral into calculating, and her ice qi was building up, frost was crawling out across the floor from underneath her feet. She looked ready to fight regardless of the cultivation gap between them. Xu Feng was fighting to get himself upright, using the wall to do it, but his earth element pressure was steadying out. Even Pan Jun was trying to push himself back onto his feet, though his arm hadn’t finished healing and that made the whole process slow and awkward for him.
All of them were getting ready for combat. Against a Lucid Lawbearer. Inside a ruin that was infested with nightmares, where any serious fight was going to attract things that were worse than Shen Bolin.
This was about to get messy.
And that is exactly when I felt it, another spiritual pressure coming into the chamber, and this one was familiar and it was just as overwhelming in its own way.
Song Wei walked in through the entrance, his single arm hanging loose and relaxed at his side. There was nothing at all on his face as he looked over the situation, Shen Bolin standing there hostile, my group getting into defensive positions, Tian in the middle of it all looking miserable.
“Shen Bolin,” Song Wei said. “Still making threats that you can’t back up, I see.”
Shen Bolin’s spiritual pressure blew outward all over again, except this time all of it was pointed at Song Wei. “Song Wei. I should have killed you forty years ago when I had the chance to do it.”
“You tried,” Song Wei said. “As I remember it, that didn’t work out well for either one of us.”
The air in between the two of them felt charged up.
“Still alive, after everything,” Shen Bolin said. “Still chasing after something that you have no right to claim.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“I have exactly as much right to it as anybody else does,” Song Wei said back. “More than that, actually. But you know that better than anyone alive.”
“That is the reason that I have to stop you,” Shen Bolin said. “You can’t be allowed to claim the lotus. The consequences of that would be catastrophic.”
“You are still saying the same nonsense that you were saying all those years ago,” Song Wei said, and his tone stayed flat and untroubled. “Your paranoia hasn’t gotten any better with age.”
“I will give you one chance, Song Wei.” Shen Bolin’s eyes narrowed down. “Leave now. Take your expedition and go. If you refuse then you are going to end up the same as the others did.”
Song Wei’s expression didn’t move at all. “You are welcome to try.”
The air between them went hard as something fundamental in the space that separated the two Lucid Lawbearers changed, and it felt as though reality was holding its breath and waiting to find out what was going to happen next.
Then Shen Bolin moved and imposed his will onto the chamber itself.
The black stone floor underneath us rippled, and then all at once vertical became horizontal, gravity turned sideways, and my stomach lurched as up and down stopped having any meaning at all.
“Law of Perspective,” Azure said quietly. “He is rewriting the fundamental definitions of spatial orientation inside his sphere of influence.”
I grabbed onto Tian’s shoulder without thinking about it, he grabbed onto mine at the same time, and the two of us anchored each other while the world went around and around.
Xu Feng slammed into the wall, which was now the floor. Pan Jun rolled across what used to be the ceiling. Even Xie Ling’s ice constructs came apart, their structure failed the moment the directions changed on them.
But Song Wei was standing in the exact same place he had been standing before. His feet stayed planted on what he still understood to be the floor, and Shen Bolin’s spatial manipulation didn’t touch him. There was a thin barrier of silver light around his body, holding onto its own definition of reality separate from the law that had been imposed on everything else.
“Counter-Law, Absolute Position,” Song Wei said calmly. “Your perspective tricks don’t work on a man who has anchored his existence to fixed coordinates.”
Shen Bolin’s jaw tightened and he raised up both of his hands.
The chamber answered him again. The walls started flowing, reshaping themselves into new configurations, doorways opened up in places where there had only been solid stone a moment before, and the ceiling stretched upward until it was impossibly far away. Distance itself turned into something negotiable.
“Law of Mutable Architecture,” Shen Bolin declared. “Inside my domain, space obeys my intent.”
The attack was subtle, but it was devastating. The distance between Song Wei and the rest of us suddenly expanded outward. One second, he was thirty feet away from us, and the next second he looked to be hundreds of feet away even though he hadn’t moved at all, it was the space in between that had grown.
Song Wei lifted his single arm. Silver energy gathered up around his hand and formed intricate patterns that looked almost like calligraphy that had been written in light. “Law of True Distance. All measurements return to objective reality.”
The expanded space snapped back into place with a crack that was loud enough to make my ears pop, and the chamber went back to its original dimensions. Shen Bolin staggered a little, because his law technique had just been forcibly overwritten in front of him.
This was incredible. I had read about Lucid Lawbearer battles in the archives back at the Slumbering Scholars Sect, but reading about one and watching one happen in front of your face were two completely different things.
They weren’t fighting with spiritual energy, they weren’t fighting with physical techniques either, they were arguing with reality, both of them trying to impose their own personal truth onto the world around them.
That was the reason they were saying the names of their techniques out loud, the words helped make the thing real.
“Law of Inevitable Consequence,” Shen Bolin said, and his voice carried a resonance in it that made the words land heavy. “If you attack me, you will suffer the exact same injury that you inflict.”
The law settled down over the whole chamber, and I could feel it pushing against my consciousness, trying to install itself as fundamental truth.
Song Wei looked at the manifestation for a moment and then he smiled a little. “Clever. But flawed.”
He put out his arm, and the silver energy around his hand condensed down until it looked solid. “Law of Proxy Action. All effects that originate from me are instead attributed to the palace itself.”
The technique went active, and the air around Song Wei shimmered as his law wrote over the top of Shen Bolin’s. Now it wasn’t Song Wei attacking anymore, it was the palace attacking, and Shen Bolin’s reflection law had no way to bounce damage back into a building.
Song Wei struck with his will, the palace’s own spiritual energy answered him and formed a huge fist of compressed dream qi that shot toward Shen Bolin at tremendous speed.
Shen Bolin crossed his arms in front of himself. “Law of Denial. This attack does not exist within my perception.”
The fist of energy stopped existing the second it came into Shen Bolin’s personal space. It wasn’t blocked and it wasn’t deflected, it simply ceased to be as far as he was concerned, because if he couldn’t perceive it then it couldn’t affect him.
But Song Wei had already known he would do that. The fist was never meant to connect, it was a feint, and while Shen Bolin was busy denying the obvious attack, Song Wei had been putting something else together.
“Law of Accumulated Momentum,” Song Wei said quietly. “All kinetic energy inside this chamber belongs to me to direct.”
Every movement, every shift of a foot, every breath that any of us had taken, all of it had been producing tiny amounts of kinetic energy this entire time, and Song Wei had been collecting all of it and holding onto it. Now he let it go.
The air turned into a weapon. All that accumulated kinetic energy came at Shen Bolin from every direction at the same time, and there was no single attack for him to deny and no specific threat for him to refuse to perceive, it was the entire momentum of the room turned against one man.
Shen Bolin had to react. His hands moved through complicated patterns, and his dream qi erupted outward into a spherical barrier. “Law of Perfect Stillness. Nothing moves within my domain.”
The kinetic energy hit that barrier and stopped, frozen in place, and the air around Shen Bolin went motionless in a bubble of total stasis.
But holding that level of control cost him. I could see the strain sitting on Shen Bolin’s face and the way that his spiritual pressure flickered a little as he pushed enormous amounts of dream qi into keeping his law alive.
Song Wei pressed on his advantage. He didn’t attack directly, instead he started walking in a circle around where Shen Bolin was standing and his single arm left trails of silver light hanging in the air behind it.
“Law of Erosion,” Song Wei said. “All things decay. All barriers weaken. Time favors the patient.”
The silver trails started connecting into each other and formed a web all around Shen Bolin’s sphere of stillness, and everywhere the light touched the barrier I could see tiny fractures opening up in it. The perfect stillness was being eaten away, worn down by the simple truth that nothing lasts forever.
Shen Bolin let his stillness law go before it could collapse on him completely. All the kinetic energy that had been frozen exploded outward, and he used that explosion to throw himself backward and open up distance between them.
“Law of Distance Multiplication,” Shen Bolin declared. “Every step that I take carries me ten times farther.”
He moved. One step became ten meters, two steps became twenty, and he was on the far side of the chamber in an amount of time that should have been impossible.
Song Wei didn’t chase after him. He planted his feet instead, and his spiritual pressure changed its quality, it became denser, heavier, and more concentrated. “Law of Inescapable Gravity. All things are drawn toward me.”
Shen Bolin’s multiplication law faltered as Song Wei’s gravity well started pulling on him, and the chamber itself began to warp, stone cracked apart as it was dragged toward Song Wei’s position.
I had to grab a pillar to keep from being pulled forward, and Tian did the exact same thing, his face full of concentration as he fought against the attraction. The others were having the same trouble. Even Xie Ling had made ice anchors to lock herself down in place.
The one who had to take the worst of it was Shen Bolin, and he was being dragged forward no matter how hard he tried to hold his distance, his feet scraped across the stone and left gouges behind them, and his spiritual pressure flared as he fought against the pull.
“Law of Weightless Existence,” Shen Bolin countered. “I am not bound by gravitational forces.”
The two laws hit each other and reality seemed to get confused about whether or not Shen Bolin was supposed to be affected by gravity, and the result of that confusion was that he hung there in the air, not pulled forward and not able to get away either, stuck inside the contradiction between two truths that were both trying to be true at once.
But Song Wei was never trying to pull Shen Bolin closer to him. He was buying himself time for the real attack.
The silver energy that had been eroding the barrier earlier hadn’t gone anywhere. It had been spreading out through the whole chamber the entire time, invisible threads connecting into every surface in the room, and now every one of those threads started to glow.
“Law of Synchronized Resonance,” Song Wei said. “All energy inside my domain vibrates at the frequency that I choose.”
The chamber began to hum. It started out low and barely audible, but it climbed fast in both pitch and intensity: the black stone walls vibrated, the water on the floor rippled, and my own bones felt like they were shaking around inside of me.
Shen Bolin’s weightless state couldn’t do anything to protect him from that. The vibration was going straight into his spiritual channels and disrupting the flow of dream qi through his cultivation base.
He grimaced from the pain, but he didn’t cry out, he channeled more power instead and threw out a desperate counter. “Law of Selective Immunity. Vibrations do not affect my physical form or my spiritual form.”
The humming around him dampened down and made a bubble of silence in the middle of a chamber that was still resonating. But I could see what it cost him. His spiritual pressure was fluctuating badly now, and he was burning through his reserves keeping several active laws running at the same time.
This was the longest Lucid Lawbearer battle I had ever seen. Not that I had seen very many of them. Actually this was the first one. But going off of what I had read in the archives, most fights between cultivators at this level were finished inside of a few minutes, because the energy expense was too high for anybody to keep a long fight going.
Song Wei and Shen Bolin were still going. Their techniques matched each other perfectly, every law met by an equal law, every attack negated or turned aside. Song Wei only had one arm, and he was still fighting on even terms with his opponent.
I watched all of it with fascination, studying the way they built their laws, the way they layered techniques on top of each other, the way they predicted and countered each other. This was valuable information for me. If I ever made it to the Lucid Lawbearer realm myself, then understanding these principles was going to be crucial.
But the longer the fight went on, one thing became clear.
They were too evenly matched. This fight could go on for hours, or it could go on for days, and there was no guarantee of any decisive result at the end of it. Each one of them had enough experience with the other one to predict what technique was coming next. Every counter was anticipated and then pre-countered before it even arrived.
And we did not have hours, and we did not have days. Not here inside the Sunken Dream Palace, where every extra moment spent standing in one place pulled the attention of nightmare entities and other things that were worse.
I looked over at Tian. He was watching the fight with the same worry on his face, and he had probably arrived at the same conclusion that I had. Our eyes met, and I saw the understanding pass between the two of us. We needed to end this before it got any worse than it already was.
Song Wei was gathering energy for another technique. His spiritual pressure spiked upward as silver light condensed around his single arm and formed patterns that looked like they were capable of tearing straight through Shen Bolin’s defenses.
“Law of Unmade Creation. The attack that I am about to use has already struck you in the past.”
It was a temporal paradox attack. If it landed, then Shen Bolin would retroactively have been injured before Song Wei ever launched the technique in the first place, and defending against something like that was close to impossible because the damage would already be there in his timeline.
Although, looking at how everything had gone so far, Shen Bolin was going to answer it with a counter that was just as monstrous. So, I acted before Song Wei could finish the activation.