PtM Book 17 - Chapter 31: Missing

Years came and went, and soon, it was autumn again. Bronze and gold leaves fell like rain upon the twin mountains, covering it in a beautiful but temporary layer of decay that marked the end of the first half of their stay in the Heartforge Realm.

Thirty years had come and gone. Thirty hard but fruitful years for those who’d survived this long.

Cha Ming and Huxian were enjoying a relaxing afternoon, drinking chilled wine as they watched the leaves fall. A fiend outbreak was imminent, which meant that they would soon be heading to the blighted lands to hunt the latest batch of them and gather primal chaos crystals.

For now, however, they relaxed. But there was a wrongness in the air, a twisting in the pattern. To Cha Ming, it felt like tiny strings pulling him up and away; to Huxian, it was like an itch that couldn’t be scratched.

“The peaceful times will soon be over,” said Cha Ming to Huxian.

“It’s the itch again,” Huxian said in agreement. “I hate the itch.”

Sure as rain, trouble came finding them later that night in the form of a parcel. The originator was Petros Sullivan, and he’d sent the package out three months ago.

“This is a contingency parcel,” Cha Ming said as he reviewed the information in the package. “The letter says he always arranges for these before going out on a mission. I guess this is the first time he’s gone past his deadline.”

“Where was he off to this time?” Huxian asked.

“I’m not quite sure,” Cha Ming said. “Some part of the blight I’ve never been to. Here’s a map.”

“Tricky,” Huxian said. “Did he leave anything else?”

“A lock of hair in case we have to craft a tracking compass, a cracked life slip, and some paperwork that can let us take over the Hunter’s Guild if his life slip shatters,” Cha Ming said.

The cracked life slip was extremely worrisome. It indicated that Petros was either near death or has suffered an attack of sufficiently high power that the slip had considered him dead for a brief moment.

“It looks like we’re going to have to move up the hunt,” Huxian said. “If Petros was out there, it’s bound to be lucrative.”

Cha Ming nodded. “It looks like we’ll have to bring a few helping hands though. The area he was investigating is quite large.” They sent out messages to all their friends and began gathering supplies. Regardless of who showed up, they would get moving within the hour.

***

The blighted lands. They were a cursed place filled with fiends, spatial fissures, and a perpetual wrongness one couldn’t quite put one’s finger on. Any cultivators who wandered too deeply inside it found their strength diminished, and if they were extremely unlucky, gone entirely.

Yet the blighted lands were all the rage these days. It was in the blighted lands that you could make your fortune. It was in the blighted lands that you could turn your life around.

Fortune and danger came hand in hand in the blight, which was inhospitable and unable to support life, but somehow rich in resources. This was due to the fabric of reality warping and breaking apart. Unrefined and chaotic energies poured into the region with no natural outlet, resulting in the birth of rare primal chaos materials that could be used for anything from cultivation to treasure refining or upgrading one’s bloodline.

The inhabitants of the Chasewind Plane knew the value of these materials, but this was not the primary reason they ventured so deep into dangerous territory. Most of them were here to hunt fiends for the rewards offered by each region’s wardens.

Cha Ming and friends made use of these local forces. They offered triple the rewards normally offered to investigate the region and offered a hefty reward for any information on the region that might lead to finding Petros.

“Status report,” Cha Ming spoke through voice transmission jade specially suited to cut through planar barriers and spatial turbulence.

“Nothing here,” Baleful Vision answered.

“My spirits haven’t found anything,” said Wei Longshen. Xing Tianlong, White Mirage, Jadefall, Wu, and Huxian also came up empty.

Cha Ming also issued orders to his portable army, namely the cultivators from the Bloodstorm Region and the Hallowed Turtle Ox Region currently training in the Clear Sky World. He changed frequencies on the voice communication device and sent out another transmission. “Status report,” he said once again. One by one, they reported their findings.

“We still haven’t located any traces of Warden Sullivan, but we’ve discovered a few strange structures,” said one of the six thousand cultivators.

“Show me,” Cha Ming said, flying over to their location.

Like the others from the Heartforge Realm, Cha Ming kept a tracking compass close at hand. Should it find any traces of Petros or his belongings, it would hum and point in that direction. Do date, however, the compasses had shown no signs of activity. Wherever Petros was, it shielded him from normal tracking methods.

Cha Ming arrived at a small, small group of rune-gathering Daoists performing tests on cairn. It was covered in mysterious dark runes that no one in their team had been able to decipher. “Another cairn located,” Cha Ming said to his group members, then proceeded to list off spatial coordinates.

It was the fifth cairn today, and they’d yet to discover any effects they might have. “It’s a pity the runes are gibberish,” said the group leader.  “But even if we could read them, these runic lines are pure nonsense.”

“Noted,” Cha Ming muttered. He walked over to the cairn and placed his fingers on the rune-covered stones, tracing them with his finger and committing them to memory. Dark lines appeared in his spiritual sea. They formed a separate group from anything else he’d ever learned. Whatever these lines were, they were incompatible with standard runic conventions.

“Are you sure we have the right location?” Xing Tianlong asked through transmission jade.

“I doubled and triple-checked,” Huxian said. “The pictures match up, and so do the coordinates.”

“Then how long are we expected to keep looking?” Xing Tianlong said.

“Quit whenever you like,” Cha Ming said. “As for me, I’ll stay as long as this life slip doesn’t shatter.”

To his credit, Xing Tianlong did not give up. He continued grumbling, but it was all for show. He might be a little over-committed to the politics of the Chasewind and Inkwell Planes, but he did not form friendships lightly.

Days passed. More cairns were discovered, but they saw not a sign of Petros save for a few footsteps when he’d originally entered the area.

One day, Cha Ming had a sudden epiphany about the cairns and the runes they contained. “What does everyone think about these runes,” Cha Ming transmitted to the others.

“Unintelligible, as always,” Wei Longshen said.

“Unlike anything I’ve ever dealt with,” said Jadefall. The others followed up with more of the same.

“I sense space-time laws, but they’re not acting the way they should,” Huxian confessed. “It’s like they’re the same laws, but they’re not. And the runes are different.

“I feel the same way about some of these runes,” Cha Ming said. “It’s like they’re something I already know, but they’re written in a different language.”

“Well, what would you do if this was a different language?” Wei Longshen asked.

Cha Ming thought about it for a moment. “I’d collect as many samples as I could and see if I can detect any patterns I can relate to.”

“The information is strange,” Baleful Vision said. “I can’t copy any of the runes, and copying is my clan’s specialty.”

Cha Ming sighed. “Then I can only go to each cairn personally. Please map them out, and I’ll visit each location in sequence.”

Before long, Huxian had a full map assembled and transmitted it to everyone in their party. It was overlaid with the maps that Petros had given them. “The overall pattern is pretty strange too,” Huxian said. “Maybe something to think about?”

“Maybe,” Cha Ming said. “But I’m confused. Haven’t we passed over the center? Why is there nothing there?”

“It feels that way, doesn’t it?” Huxian said. “But my global surveillance system says otherwise. Something’s stopping us from getting to the middle area, and I think those cairns have something to do with it.”

So that means they can obscure, confuse, and warp space to some extent, Cha Ming thought. This is definitely a formation. A compound grand formation. It would have taken months for even a middle law-stitching expert to set up something similar on the Chasewind Plane.

Deciphering the cairns proved more difficult than expected. Days turned to weeks, and more cracks appeared on the life slip, which became brittle to the point that a stiff breeze might shatter it. They discovered hundred of small cairns, some wider and some taller, and some containing hundreds of times as many runes. They cycled through each of them in the hopes that someone could determine their function.

At one point, Jadefall suggested they destroy one of the cairns, but fortunately, they were able to convince her that this would be a terrible idea. “These things are connected to local spacetime in ways we can’t understand,” Huxian said. “If we break one, space might collapse, and we’d find ourselves sucked into the void.”

It was only after inspecting 500 cairns that Cha Ming finally compiled a subset of runic symbols. “I’ve never anything like them before,” Cha Ming explained to everyone. “But they do have a pattern, and it’s a familiar one.”

He traced out white runes and formed a few elementary formations. “These are illusion, spatial, energy gathering, and obscurement formations, all formed with creation qi. When combined, they can effectively hide a space and ward away intruders. Normally, the elements of the formation are hidden, but in this case, they are not. Which makes me wonder if hiding them was impossible, or the formation artist simply didn’t bother.

Baleful Vision was one of those in their group that had experience with runic formations. “Those formations you drew look nothing like what we’re dealing with.”

“True,” Cha Ming said. “But see what happens when I invert their formulas.” He twisted the runic circles, reversing their causes and effects. The circles no longer functioned as originally drawn, but Baleful Vision saw the point he was making.

“Those are the same energy patterns we’re seeing on the cairns!” the Paper Tiger exclaimed. Then he frowned. “But these runes shouldn’t work as is. They conflict with the energy you used.” Then his eyes widened. “You’re saying the energy base is different, so there is no conflict.”

“That is correct,” Cha Ming said. He banished the creation qi formations and began painting the inverted flow formations. But this time, he used destruction qi to make them.

“Impossible,” Baleful Vision said. “Destruction qi is unstable.”

“Yet somehow, it’s behaving,” Jadefall said, poking at the formation as they snapped together. “Strange.”

“Very strange,” Cha Ming agreed. “It’s normally impossible to create anything with destruction qi. It can’t even be used to form runes. But here, in this place, it’s possible, which is why we overlooked the idea to begin with. In this place, you can ‘create’ with destruction qi, as long as you use the right rules to do it.”

He then combined the smaller destruction formations together, creating a compound formation. It wasn’t the full grand formation, but an important element. “The laws in this place are strange. I believe this is why cultivators grow weaker in the blighted lands. It’s not that space and time are turbulent, and that spatial boundaries have weakened. It’s that natural laws are in conflict in this location. Two sets of laws exist simultaneously.”

“But if that’s the case, who made these formations?” Wei Longshen asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Cha Ming said. “In the blighted lands, us humans and demons are at a disadvantage. But there’s one type of creature that isn’t.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Jadefall asked.

Cha Ming nodded. “It must have been the fiends who built this.”

***

With a working formation framework and a shift in their mindset, it didn’t take them long to discover the focal point of the formation. It was Huxian who discovered the general area, then Wei Longshen who pinpointed the exact location.

“It’s not just heaven and earth energies that are used here, but spiritual energy as well,” Wei Longshen said. “Oddly enough, it’s only slightly foreign. It seems spiritual power is far more transferable that natural laws.”

There was no cairn at the focal point, only a grove of hundred-meter-tall trees with dagger-sharp glass leaves. They fell upon the ground to create a parody of autumn beauty that masked the constant belching of destructive mists in the area.

“I can’t solve this,” said Cha Ming, shaking his head.

“I can’t either,” said Huxian. “Fusion?”

“Fusion,” Cha Ming agreed.

Man and fox merged together, combining their souls, their memories, and their energies. Spatial laws fused with creation and destruction laws and immediately began to break down the complex runic structure.

They painted strange runes and twisted shapes atop the alien formation. Sometimes they used destruction to modify it. At other times, they used creation qi to break it.

Destroying a large-scale formation was both difficult and ill-advised. The slightest mistake could very well destroy spacetime in the southern blight, causing great damage to the Chasewind Plane. They therefore opted for the second option – creating a gap in the formation through which they could enter and exit.

They fumbled around like a novice thief with a new set of lockpicks. Fortunately, the lock wasn’t well built; after a minute, the grove began to ripple. Then it vanished, revealing a ten meter by ten meter gap in its structure.

“My compass just activated,” White Mirage said.

“As did mine,” said Wei Longshen.

This meant that Petros was on the other side of this gateway. Moreover, he was alive, else the compass would never have shown such a strong reaction.

“Is it… safe?” Baleful Vision wondered as they inspected the opening. Neither he nor Cha Ming could see what was on the other side, and whatever spirits Wei Longshen sent in were destroyed without being able to report back.

“Let me send a few disposable creatures as a vanguard,” Cha Ming said. He used his ninety-percent-fused qi and River Lake Style to paint a detailed rendition of the Five Point Monarchs. He spent three whole minutes on it and expended much of his energy in the process.

“Go in there and hold the portal,” Cha Ming instructed them. The fifty-meter-tall paintings squeezed their way through the tiny opening and immediately activated their defensive formation. Cha Ming could not see what they could, but he could tell what kind of state they were in. “They’re holding. Let’s go!”

They jumped through the portal and found themselves face to face with a two-hundred-meter-tall fiend that was halfway through destroying Cha Ming’s paintings.

“White Paper Purification!”

“Hell-Crushing Battle Halo!”

“Xuanwu’s Blessing!”

They called out one ability after another. Cha Ming used his Heartforge Spirit Flame to paint a courage-bolstering streamers that affixed themselves to his back as he personally charged into battle, blocking one of its attacks with a heavy strike from his staff.

Blocking came at a heavy price – his bones cracked, and his internal organs turned turn to mush, forcing him to use a great deal of fused energy to return to peak condition.

But her held the line, buying his allies precious time to put up a defense against a swarm of fiends closing in on their position in tight military formation. Wei Longshen summoned an army of spirits form his memorial tablet and began playing a spirit bolstering melody from his soul-bound treasure, Voice of the Forgotten. Several of his spirits regained the memories of their past lives and used divine abilities and Daoist spells to stabilize the situation.

Cha Ming ran through the battle scenario in his mind and realized that the situation was far from ideal. There were two many fiends, with two many elites. They’d last minutes at most before they were overwhelmed.

He opened several portals from the Clear Sky World, summoning all six thousand rune gathering cultivators and their sixty law-stitching-realm chaperones.

“We’re not supposed to be fighting!” one of the chaperones shouted angrily as Cha Ming pushed them into battle. “Our job is to watch our charges!”

“If you don’t fight and buy us time, your charges will die,” Cha Ming said. “It’s your choice, but whoever doesn’t fight will be imprisoned in my realm until such a time that I see fit to release them.”

Cha Ming didn’t send out the six thousand without assistance. Since his Five-Point Monarch paintings were barely holding on, he had them unleash one final attack before painting an army to reinforce them. This army was an army of creation and light. On the Chasewind Plane, they would be harmless, but out here, they were unstable harbingers of destruction.

He then turned to the Rank 13 fiend, which was causing them all quite a bit of grief. Jadefall’s axe was chipped, and much of her armor broken. One of Xing Tianlong’s arms, the one with the buckler, hung limply at his side.

Cha Ming used Bloodstorm Style to paint an explosion of pain. Luther, Coral, and Disaster guided the energies he painted to carve twelve deep gouges in the fiend’s back that bled black blood over the battlefield.

Huxian transformed into a half-corporal six-tailed fox. His foxes tails became chains that appeared from six directions to lock down the fiend’s six arms.

The fiend, which had been in the middle of attacking Jadefall, lurched to a stop. This bought Jadefall the time she needed to transform into a Fallen Jade Devil Ox, who charged at the rank 13 fiend with an army of hellfire oxen.

The army of fiends caught up to them then. Daoist and demonic spells blasted their front lines apart, while demigods held the line with sword, spear, staff, and fist. They cut openings into the enemy formation that Wei Longshen’s spirits and Cha Ming’s paintings exploited to dig deep into their lines.

But Cha Ming didn’t use all of his paintings. He pulled half of the paintings of light and creation and had them charge at the stunned Rank 13 fiend. “Erupt!” he commanded, and the paintings detonated one after another. Their potent creation energies tore holes into the fiend’s exoskeleton, which Jadefall’s hellfire oxen immediately exploited.

Xing Tianlong had lost the use of his shield, but his spear was still perfectly serviceable. The opening was what he’d been waiting for – he merged his yang phoenix buckler into his yin dragon spear and threw it at the fiend, blasting a hole through its weakened shell.

Jadefall followed up at a cleave with her axe, and White Mirage and Baleful Vision appeared immediately after. They glowed with a brilliant, purifying light that formed a dagger of white energy that stabbed into its core, filling it with potent burning energies.

High rank fiends hard to deal with because of their strong defences. Cha Ming’s companions had systematically broken those away, enabling Cha Ming to set up a Clear Rune Field that filled the area with pure creation energy. Normally, he would have shaped it into runes before attacking, but here, creation energy had corrosive properties. He could only press his creation qi into crude stakes that stabbed into the creature’s open wounds, greatly damaging its vitality.

Rank 13 fiends were not easy to kill. The moment it noticed its predicament, it decisively abandoned several larger portions of its flesh and reformed into smaller creature fit for running. Cha Ming knew that it wouldn’t take long at all for it to recover given how many fiends had perished in the area – he used Clear Rune Steps and Bloodstorm rush to appear beside it and bind it with ribbons of bloodstorm energy.

“Huxian, are you just going to stand around, or are you going to do something?” Cha Ming shouted.

“Sorry, I wanted it to be dramatic,” Huxian said, appearing above the fiend. “One Sumeru Terrarium coming up!” He tossed out a pebble-sized object, and the fiend, confused at why the fox would send up such a tiny object, froze for a split second. Its hesitation lasted only an instant, but this was enough time for the pebble to grow into a two-hundred-meter sphere.

“Terrarium indeed,” Cha Ming said. The sphere was unimaginably heavy, because it wasn’t a normal object, but a pocket realm. Behind its clear outer shell, one could see mountains and lakes and several hundred square kilometers of packed earth that enabled it to smash through the fiend’s tough body with ease.

The rank 13 fiend went from threat to minced meat in less than three seconds. It tried to regenerate, but Baleful Vision’s purification aura, Jadefall’s hellfire, and Cha Ming’s Clearmist Field suppressed it. Then Cha Ming’s Clear Sky Brush swooped in and ate up all the fiend blood, first from the Rank 13 fiend, then from the battlefield. After that, it only took a few minutes to mop up the remaining fiendish forces.

The other side of the portal was beautiful. But it felt strange. Wrong in many ways. The laws here were inconsistent with their physical reality, which sapped at their strengths.

Everyone was affected differently. Cha Ming could use destruction energies and was familiar with these laws to some extent, so he was not suppressed. Baleful Vision’s purification powers allowed him to ignore some of the law suppression, and Wei Longshen’s soul methods and Huxian’s spatial powers received relatively less suppression. Xing Tianlong, Wu, Jadefall especially saw their strengths cut by at least half.

“We should move,” Baleful Vision said, peering into the distance with his paper-white eyes. “These creatures are well organized compared to the fiends on the other side of the portal. It would be prudent to assume they can somehow communicate.”

“I’m just worried about the portal,” Cha Ming said. “Huxian, do you have a way to stabilize the entrance?”

Huxian inspected the portal for a few minutes before giving his verdict. “Give me a half hour, and I’ll have it propped up and hidden.” He then summoned six copies of his demon weapon, three trowels and three carving knives, and began to shape the local space into beams, trusses, and other structures.

A half hour later, the portal was propped open and fully covered by a replica of their surroundings. Huxian handed each of them a key in case they get separated.

“Things are probably going to be a lot more dangerous from here on out,” Cha Ming said. “If anyone wants to leave, we won’t hold it against you.”

Unsurprisingly, no one left. Not even the grumpy Xing Tianlong. “We’ve come this far,” the prince said. “Might as well see this through. Besides, have you all seen the mission?”

“What mission?” Cha Ming asked. He’d been buys helping Huxian with his preparations. They both looked at their mission jade and saw that they had indeed been issued a new mission.

Mission: Explore South Blight Sanctuary and return to Mission Hall to report your findings.

Bonus Mission: Rescue Petros Sullivan from South Blight Fortress and escort him to Mission Hall for recovery and observation.

Reward: Variable. Consequences: Catastrophic.