PtM Book 17 - Chapter 32: Fortress

The mountains of South Blight Sanctuary were treacherous and unstable, prone to collapsing mid-battle. What water they found was poisonous, and plants that at first seemed edible reduced their energy reserves instead of replenishing them.

The very air they breathed wore them down, and only by consuming high grade spirit stones could they stave off this effect. Nothing short of top-grade spirit stones were required to replenish energy they spent, which happened frequently as wave upon wave of fiends set themselves upon them at chokepoints and natural fortifications.

The land here was the enemy. None of the demons one their team could fuse with it. Domains and law projections were suppressed. Only physical strength, divine abilities, and soul techniques remained unaffected.

Despite the clear advantage the fiends had, they never gathered in larger groups. Every patrol was under the command of one or two rank 13 fiends and several rank 12 lieutenants.

Their team thus made slow but steady progress through the formation-like terrain. They used traps, paintings, and long-ranged attacks to whittle down their enemies, so as to leave nothing to chance.

The three consistent members of their team were Cha Ming, Huxian, and Wei Longshen. Cha Ming was relatively immune to the local law suppression and could actually recover energy. This was of limited assistance to Huxian, who required different energies than Cha Ming to function, but the fox was adaptable. The South Blight Sanctuary’s spatial makeup was quite unstable, and therefore much easier to shape and shatter.

Soul energy and soul attacks weren’t under intense suppression in this secluded domain, and fiends seemed especially susceptible to soul attacks in the first place. The only problem was that their souls were not easily harvested – in fact, they shattered and dispersed almost as soon as a fiend was slain.

Wei Longshen’s army dwindled, and Cha Ming’s ink began to run low as well. Their army of rune-gathering cultivators started taking casualties.

“Status report?” Wei Longshen asked. He was the best in their group at commanding troops, so it fell to him to give orders.

“The copies are in inbound, just as planned,” White Mirage replied. “I estimate three minutes till contact.”

“Hold position,” Wei Longshen said. “And if anyone exposes our position again, I’ll stick a song in their head for the next decade.”

There was a small hill in the distance, beyond which was the fiendish army and the copies they were chasing: a complete replica of Cha Ming and friends’ army, paintings, spirits, and wardens included.

Fiends, they’d discovered, had trouble parsing through the natural laws of the Chasewind Plane. The replicas couldn’t have fooled a five-year old, but the fiends pounced on them regardless.

“Get ready for contact,” said Wei Longshen. “Three. Two. One.” The painted army collapsed, leaving very confused fiends scrambling to make sense of the situation. “Eight Directions!” Four portals appeared in the midst of the fiendish army, out of which rolled four disaster spheres. Huxian released the time lock on these sealed explosions and blasted half the fiendish army to bits.

A quarter of the fiends were killed outright, such that not even their black blood remained. The rest were knocked prone, such that they couldn’t defend against a formation attack, courtesy of thousands of linked Daoists and demons hidden on a nearby cliffside.

“Eight Directions, see how many you can finish off without sustaining losses,” Wei Longshen said.

Huxian appeared before the group of fiends and assumed a bowling stance. He threw his Sumeru Terrarium at them, crushing whichever fiends were too slow to evade.

“Mop-up duty,” Wei Longshen called out. He summoned his flute and played a Soul Rending Melody. Baleful Vision and Wu activated purification fields while Cha Ming, Jadefall, and Xing Tianlong jumped in finish off their enemies with pure physical strength.

Whatever high level fiend blood remained, Cha Ming stored in his inventory. It wasn’t active here like other places, because here, there was nothing to corrupt.

“All right, good job everyone,” Wei Longshen said. “Let’s tally up our gains and losses in this battle. We’ll take thirty minutes to recover before moving on.” They gathered around Baleful Vision for purification and took out top-grade spirit stones to recover.

Although not much remained of the fiends, some remnants were salvageable. Most notable was the tiny primal chaos crystals that accumulated inside their cores. The higher rank fiends had the largest crystals.

Cha Ming purchased most of these crystals with points. Only Baleful Vision and White Mirage kept their share, as these crystals were especially useful to the development of Baleful Vision’s bloodline.

“Is it just me or are the patrols tapering off?” Huxian said. “It took forty-eight minutes between waves this time.”

“Much longer than the original twenty-one to twenty-eight minutes,” Wei Longshen agreed.

“I haven’t been much help thus far, but I believe I’ve discovered something interesting,” White Mirage said. “These troops that we are fighting aren’t just uniform. I think they’re copies.”

“Copies?” Xing Tianlong asked. “Like Clear Sky’s paintings?”

“My paintings aren’t copies,” Cha Ming interjected, but White Mirage cut him off.

“Yes and no,” she said. “I wasn’t sure earlier on since the troops were less uniform, but these past few waves have been similar.  I’ve narrowed it down four different troop compositions and three different behavior patterns.”

“You sure?” Huxian asked. “Because to me, they’ve all been different.”

“Of course they’re all different,” White Mirage said. “They’re capable of independent action, so by definition, they would be.”

“Are you saying they’re clones,” Cha Ming said. “Independent clones?”

“They all have the same root,” said White Mirage. “And my guess is that they all developed in different ways as they encountered different situations. The first groups we encountered have been around for longer, and therefore had much more time to diverge from their original mold.”

“You see this same situation when there’s a large litter of cubs. They all receive the same instruction in their youth, but there is some variance in their talents and exposure. Their core techniques should be the same, but they rarely end up that way.”

“Reminds me of copied techniques,” Baleful Vision said. “They’re never exactly the same.”

“Alright, let’s say that these troops are cloned,” said Wei Longshen. “We killed so many that we’re killing increasingly fresh batches. That begs the question. Who’s making them?”

“Or what,” said Cha Ming.

“I don’t know about you guys, but my bet is that we’ll find out at the South Blight Fortress,” said Huxian. “You know. Quests and all that.”

Their journey continued, but this time they were mindful of White Mirage’s observation. They discovered a few different behavior patterns and counter strategies, which they used to destroy each wave with decreasing losses.

Eventually, they arrived at a valley flanked by two large mountains. A castle-like building made of the same obsidian stone the mountains were built of stood at the center of the valley. It only had a single gate at the front, and no windows or visible formations or arrow slits.

“What a terrible fortress,” Huxian said. “The designer should be ashamed of himself. Only a single door? No windows? No weapon mountings?”

“Just because we don’t see them, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” Cha Ming said. “Besides, it has a moat.”

“Moats are useless,” Huxian said.

“Moat or not, breaching those walls won’t be easy,” Wei Longshen said with a frown. “The building only has one weak point: The door. And I have no idea what’s on the other side. Or what kind of materials the building is made of.

“I don’t think attacking the walls is a good solution,” said Cha Ming. “Maybe I could take everyone into the Clear Sky World and use Bloodstorm Rush to get us in?”

“We should build a gateway,” said Huxian.

“Why a gateway?” asked Wei Longshen.

“Let’s say we break the door. Are we going to let them occupy it as a choke point, or are we going to want to rush in as soon as possible?” Huxian asked.

“Is it even safe to try portalling into a location we can’t see?” Baleful Vision asked.

“And why wouldn’t we be able to see it?” Huxian asked. “It’s a door, isn’t it? I imagine it opens and closes.”

Huxian and Wei Longshen hashed out a preliminary plan, then Huxian got to work. Thirty-three minutes later, the fortress door slid open. Huxian didn’t wait to see what was coming out - he forged a connection to the other side of the gateway and through his Sumeru Terrarium inside it.”

“Paintings first,” Wei Longshen said. Cha Ming obliged by sending a set of Five Point Monarch paintings through the gateway, followed by a small group of smaller paintings, and spirits.

Cha Ming, Jadefall, and Xing Tianlong charged through next, followed by the rest of their group. Then came the surviving rune gathering cultivator army and their chaperones. The entrance was massive, large enough to accommodate several rank 13 fiends, so despite the close quarters, their small army had more than enough room to maneuver.

Holding ground in a hallway was easy in theory, but the flexibility of the fiends provided challenges that neither Cha Ming nor Wei Longshen could have imagined. Fiends crawled out from the very walls, which oozed out a thick miasma that both strengthened their opponents and suppressed their own law cultivations.

“Huxian, how much time do you need?” Cha Ming asked. The fox was key to their current strategy. One of the Five Point Monarchs fell, and Cha Ming used eruption to detonate the other four to buy them time. Hundreds of fiends exploded, and their blood wriggled and tried to come together, only to evaporate under the influence of Baleful Vision’s aura.

“Buy me a minute if you can!” shouted Huxian.

“We don’t have a minute,” Wei Longshen said. “Clear Sky, if you have any cards up your sleep, use them. Spirits can’t hold ground very well.

“What do you need help with in particular,” Cha Ming asked.

“Those,” said Wei Longshen As four rank 13 fiends finally appeared. Wu managed used a Xuanwu shield to defend Xing Tianlong and reinforce Jadefall, who assumed her fusion transformation and gored one of the six-armed monstrosities with her ochre horns and shoved it backward.

Cha Ming had been holding back his three elementals, but with four rank 13 fiends added into the mix, he didn’t dare do so any longer. Luther, Coral, and Disaster emerged from the Clear Sky World and under Cha Ming’s direction, they painted an apocalypse of three colors.

Explosion. Blood. Devastation. Storm winds, lightning rain, and calamity hail. The three elementals used up half of their energy to take out a third of the opposing army, while Cha Ming himself took bloodstorm energy into his body and charged at an unoccupied rank 13 fiend.

With his low cultivation, Cha Ming was no match for such a powerful fiend. But he activated triune soul burn and overlaid wind, blood, and lightning to activate Bloodstorm Crush.

Boom!

The Clear Sky Staff and the fiend’s clawed hands collided, forcing the much larger fiend back several tens of meters. The collision was mutually destructive and hurt Cha Ming almost as much as he hurt the fiend. But he forced it back and bought his allies time, and that was all that mattered.

Three seconds later, it was back for more, and Cha Ming, having barely recovered, met it in battle once again. He stepped to avoid two clawed hands and vanished before a third could strike him, appearing just above the massive fiend and smashing downward with Bloodstorm Crush once more.

Cha Ming’s bones were broken. His body ached. But Huxian still needed time, and his allies weren’t yet ready. He could feel tiny heartflames winking out as the rune gathering cultivators, he’d brought fell in b battle.

“Give more forty – no, thirty more seconds!” Huxian called out. Cha Ming ran a few calculations and decided that this approach, while effective, couldn’t buy him that much time. He would run out of energy long before then.

He changed his tack and teleported past the creature’s guard once again, this time smashing upwards with a Bloodstorm Crush, sending it flying upwards slightly. He then took another step and struck it once more – it flew backwards, but this time, only ten meters.

He then closed the gap with Bloodstorm Rush and used his temporary incorporeal state to break past the fiend’s defenses and surround it. His body exploded into ten-colored mists that formed a ten-colored runic serpent that wrapped itself around the fiend’s torso and squeezed. This was one of Cha Ming’s Clear Rune Battle Art techniques, Clear Rune Constriction.

Twenty-five seconds, Cha Ming thought. The rank 13 fiends seemed to receive some sort of message, because they suddenly disregarded their defences and tried to break through their defences at all costs. As for the fiend Cha Ming was constricting, its body suddenly exploded, wounding both itself and Cha Ming but escaping the confines of Clear Rune Constriction.

Fortunately, Cha Ming had already planned for this eventuality. Daoists and demons couldn’t self-destruct to escape his constriction, but with fiends and demigods, this was a real possibility. He a cauldron out of Heartforge Spirit Flames and filled the area with tiny flame sparrows that hunted down the larger globs of fiendish blood as they formed.

It’s a good thing Wei Longshen spotted this weakness on our way down to the fortress, Cha Ming thought. It turned out that though the fiendish creatures had a soul, it wasn’t a very durable one. They were susceptible to all manner of soul attacks, and that included Cha Ming’s Heartforge Spirit Flames. Armored and whole, Cha Ming could not pierce their defenses, but dissociated and defenseless? Nothing could be easier.

“Done!” Huxian said as Cha Ming took the last of the fiendish blood into the Clear Sky World. Space stabilized in the shape of several interlocked pyramids, sealing off this portion of the hallway, and blocking open the doorway into South Blight Sanctuary. Moreover, the blockade had a door that could be opened with the keys already in their possession. The fiends could not go in or out, but they could.

The fiends had gone all out to stop Huxian. Riddled with wounds, it didn’t take much to put them down. “What a battle,” Wei Longshen said, wiping his brow. To win, he’d needed to sacrifice a third of his spirit army. So many had perished that his memorial tablet was on the verge of dropping a grade.

Their journey to the fortress had cost them as well. Out of the original six thousand demons and Daoists, only 4,563 remained. This battle alone had taken 211 of their number.

Cha Ming summoned the law-stitching cultivators among the bunch and explained the situation. “I can keep you inside the Clear Sky World, but the situation is dire. If we don’t make it out of this fortress alive, none of your charges will be making it out.”

“Then it looks like we have no choice,” one of the sixty cultivators said bitterly. “We will remain with your group to assist you, as it may not be possible to summon us on time.” Cha Ming was not unreasonable. The rune gathering cultivators were wounded and completely spent and wouldn’t last long in battle. He sent them to the Clear Sky World to recover, much to the relief of their chaperones.

Next, Cha Ming took a tally of his paintings and his ink. He was running dangerously low on both. And is there even a point in making more paintings to replace the old? he thought. Painted creatures were heavily reliant on creation qi and Cha Ming’s Sky Canvas Domain, both of which were doubly suppressed in the South Blight Fortress.

They remained in the entrance for several minutes to recover using time acceleration. The entryway was enormous, and the walls were far enough apart to fit a marching army. The floor was built of a polished stone that fiendish energies did not corrode. They were also lit with eerie blue lights powered by primal chaos energy.

“Prudence says we should heal up to a hundred percent, but I’m reluctant to spend more time trapped here than necessary,” Wei Longshen said. “I think we should move forward.”

“Agreed,” Cha Ming said. “I’m sure you’ve noticed the extra suppression. I’m not as affected as you all are, but my creation energies are growing weaker.” And more violent.

“The sooner we’re out, the better,” said Baleful Vision. “White Mirage and I can barely use our natural talents here.”

They set out once again, using a combination of Wei Longshen’s spirits and Cha Ming’s paintings as vanguard. They weren’t even a hundred meters in when they sprung an energy trap, which annihilating thousands of each of them in an instant.

“Did anyone else completely miss that trap?” Cha Ming asked. “I cultivate a lot of vision techniques, and I didn’t even see it coming. My intuition didn’t trigger either.”

“White Mirage and I can’t see anything here,” Baleful Vision said. “Consider us effectively blind.”

“I’m not worried about parlor tricks like these, but higher tier traps that might be hidden?” Wei Longshen said. “Do we have any countermeasures?”

“I have a contingency version of Xuanwu shield,” Wu said. “But it’s less effective than normal.” Indeed, all their defenses were weaker, including demon armor.

“Could you slow the traps down as they spring?” Cha Ming asked Huxian.

“Hm… time isn’t my specialty, but I’ll see what I can do,” Huxian said. He summoned his trusty knife and trowel combination, then took out two pairs of tools Cha Ming had never seen before - a lighter and an inkpot. After much grumbling about spatial flux laws and impossible working conditions, he sent ink out  of the inkpot and merged it into the air. The flames from the lighter formed a bubble around them that distorted local spacetime. “Let’s keep going and see what happens, I guess.”

Cha Ming and Wei Longshen summoned another batch of lesser paintings and spirits. Several hundred meters later, portions of the wall began to vibrate aggressively. “Nice work!” Cha Ming said to Huxian, walking up to one of the runes that were frozen in time. It was one that he’d never seen before. He touched the rune with the Clear Sky Brush and used it to drink in the ink and copied the rune for good measure.

“How long can you hold your stasis field up for?” Cha Ming asked Huxian.

“I don’t know,” Huxian said. “It’s not very draining. Tens of minutes?”

“I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t like having a trapped escape route at my back,” Cha Ming said. “I’m going to disable this trap one rune at a time.”

Wantonly absorbing all of a trap’s runes was a great way to trigger it, so Cha Ming first observed the formation trap, committed its runes to memory, then painted his own counter-framework using destruction runes as basis. The approach was ad-hoc, as his knowledge of destruction-based laws wasn’t high, but it was enough to get the job done.

The five elements worked strangely here. They could be used, but only when combined with destruction qi, which stabilized them and allowed them to operate. This revelation allowed Cha Ming’s understanding of destruction-based formations to increase by leaps and bounds – assuming the external conditions he was working with matched those in the fiendish fortress.

Whatever he couldn’t restrain and remove, Cha Ming destroyed with creation qi. Inside the fortress, it could barely be used to form paintings; the law suppression here was too great. Doing so was not a complete loss, however, as he was able to heal broken paintings. Ironically, it was his Breaking and Dismantling runes that did so. His mending and assembly runes were now quite destructive.

It took the better part of an hour to dismantle the formation. The more it broke down, the less of a burden it was on Huxian. At first, it looked like they would need to evacuate, but Jadefall and Wu discovered a way to joint their Demon Dao domains with Huxian’s and prolong the length of his stasis field.

Several more formation traps appeared after the first, but with his prior experience, Cha Ming made short work of them. Eventually, the fortress ‘gave up’. There were no more traps, no more cloned creatures, only a smooth, empty hallway.

Said hallway opened into a large room that contained long black boxes and small black cubes. They were neatly stacked up on one side of the room. Several runic circles were drawn on the ground. While they did not give off a sense of danger, Cha Ming inspected them anyway.

“These formations are training formations,” Cha Ming muttered.

“And this facility is clearly a messing facility,” said Xing Tianlong.

“Efficient design,” Huxian said, nodding in approval. “It’s got ant colony vibes. Not a bit of space is wasted.”

There were several smaller doors on the sides of the room, which they sent spirits and paintings into as scouts.

They found nothing. Every room was clean and empty.

“It’s strange that there’s no one here,” Baleful Vision said. “The last group of manufactured soldiers just left. A new batch should be training.

“I’m also concerned,” Xing Tianlong said. “We’re intruders. Shouldn’t there be some sort of response? What about alarms?”

“Why would they need alarms?” White Mirage asked. “It’s clear that they know where we are and can communicate without our knowledge. Otherwise, the traps wouldn’t have suddenly stopped in the hallway. The fiends we encountered at the entrance wouldn’t have behaved so strangely either.”

“Then why haven’t they sent something big at us?” Xing Tianlong asked. “In fact, why didn’t they just seal off the hallway and fill it with acid?”

“It’s strange that they haven’t sent waves of fiends at us to wear us down,” Cha Ming said.

“I can’t help but feel that there’s something deeper going on,” White Mirage said. “Think about our mission. Think about the fact that Petros was captured and not killed. Fiends are being manufactured here. By whom? We are here to retrieve information – who’s to say that the controller of the fortress isn’t probing us to do the same?”

The entire group shivered. Thus far, they’d framed this as an exploratory mission. What if they were actually turtles in a jar, trapped, but without knowing it?

“Then should we retreat?” Xing Tianlong suggested. “The deeper in we go, the worse it will be.”

“Not without Petros, we’re not,” Cha Ming said decisively. “He’s in here, somewhere, and his life slip is looking increasingly worse.”

“There’s still one more door,” Jadefall said, pointing her axe at the hundred-meter-tall door at the back of the room. “Should I kick it in?”

“I think we’d best be careful with it,” Cha Ming said. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this door.”

“I thought you said your intuition wasn’t working properly?” Jadefall said.

“Which is why I’m extra scared about what we’re going to find,” Cha Ming said.

“The door is dangerous,” said Wu. “I can feel it in my shell.”

“I’m going to go ahead and build a giant trap,” Huxian said. “Nothing like a good trap to start off a fight. Wu, can you bless us? Use the best.”

Cha Ming painted a small army to prepare. It was centered around the Five Point Monarchs and ten thousand elite paintings at middle through late rune gathering. As he painted, he imagined a scenario where the Five Point Monarchs descended upon a transcendent plane to do war against their enemy, the Paper Tiger Monarch.

He also summoned Luther, Coral, and Disaster. Their energy stores were somewhat recovered by now, and it wouldn’t hurt to have them ready for eventualities.

“Master, must you wake us for every scrap and battle?” Luther said.

Cha Ming snored. “I barely ever use you guys.”

“It’s not our fault our energies recover slowly in this place,” said Luther. “What is this terrible place, by the way?” Cha Ming refused to answer.

Wu laid down her best defensive spells, and Jadefall fired up her aura. Cha Ming’s aura was complementary – his Heartforge Spirit Flame’s ability, Rousing Candle Flame, cooled their minds and heated their blood.

“Let’s gather around and revue the plan now,” said Wei Longshen. “There’s no telling what’s behind the door, and we need to be prepared for many scenarios.” They discussed several possibilities before moving towards the doorway, which, as of yet, they still did not know how to open.

Except they didn’t need to open it. As they approached the door, it opened for them.