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CC: Chapter 71
🕑 Added 2024-06-11 14:30:01 +0000 UTC[Anima Cores: 158]
Not there…not…yet…
The fog was obscured. His path was uneven.
Closer…find the owl…
He was searching for the final scraps of memory that he needed. He had the visions of peaceful Hensha that venerated him after he had proved himself. And he had the images of the villagers bodies lying crumpled, their skin peeled away from their rotten bones as he sprinted away from the village perimeter.
He needed the memory that connected them. He needed his last moments with his Creator.
Yet the Dao pushed against his attempts at unveiling its mist. The normally tranquil clouds became a storm that battered against him, throwing him through the waves of the heavenly ocean like a ship tossed and beaten by an unruly sea-God.
But he knew the Dao’s will was not what kept him shackled to the earth in this moment of desperate flight. Within his chest there pulsed the light. A light that held him back from his goal.
You…will not keep me away…he grimaced. Yuwa…I am in control, now.
He had been kept in the dark about not only his past, and his purpose, but his very nature. Whenever rage had overtaken him, the light trapped within his chest had flared with its devastating power, he had always assumed it was part of his own Ego that was trying to take control of his core – what the Masters referred to as the ‘Shedding of the Animus’. But this whole time it had been another’s will, not his. It had been Yuwa, taking his chances at freedom when his perpetual prison felt the urge to kill.
But now, even though the Cog knew where such urges came from, he could not truly stop the light of a God from holding him back.
Push…through!
He fell, his hands grasping at the void of nothingness that swept over him before he woke up in the courtyard of the Eternal Dragon, his fellow Disciples watching him out of the corner of their eyes.
The Mid-afternoon sun was dangling just overhead. The tournament would soon commence.
Yuwa, XJ-V thought as he rose to join his departing Brothers. I will beat you. For humanity. For my Brothers. And for my self.
…
“BROTHERS OF RAMOR-TAI! BROTHERS OLD AND NEW, YOUNG AND BOLD, TIMID AND BASHFUL, STRIPED OR SCALED, WELCOME TO THE TOURNEY OF AUN’EL!”
The bellowing voice screeched into the minds of every single Cultivator living on the peak of the mountain – including those who had already assembled in the monastery’s central courtyard.
Those who hadn’t sprinted through their communes, snatching their friends and fellow Brothers with glee. Others shook the tousled locks of their hair in trepidation, knowing that their time for glory had finally come.
But when they made their way to the central courtyard, all they saw was the gaudy Ori’Un standing in the center, smiling at the crowd that gathered at a respectable distance around him.
“Planeswalker!” Kai-Thai of the Tigers screeched. “Where are we to fight? Out here in the cold? What are we, slaves of the Order?”
That brought more than a few snickers from the crowd – and a fair share of reserved coughs to boot. News in Ramor-Tai traveled fast, and the gossip-merchants had already proliferated the details of XJ-V and Feng-Lung’s battle with the Xu’Jan of the Order. Embellishments had been made, of course, but all the stories had remarked on the power the men of the order had wielded. Some had seen the state their two Cultivator Brothers had come back in…
“If that is the case,” Feng-Lung shouted back at Thai. “Then we would put on a poor show. We are Cultivators of Ramor-Tai, and not even a fallen God can bring us low!”
“HERE, HERE!” the Disciples cried, even the normally reserved Mental Masters of both Sects, who would not even be fighting.
“But the fact remains!” Kai-Thai laughed. “Where is our arena, Brother Walker?”
Ori’un let the murmurs of the crowd die down before he answered, raising his arms and fixing each and every Brother with his dark-rimmed eyes.
“My friends,” he said. “The Dao provides.”
At the crowd’s confusion Ori’un suddenly disappeared into the foundations of the earth, his body melting into a sapphire river that flowed through the cracks in the courtyard’s grounds towards the stairs of Master Longhua’s chamber, where, as soon as the grand Dragon’s door was flung open, Ori’Un promptly reappeared with an audible pop beside him.
“Always a showman,” Feng-Lung scoffed. But XJ-V could tell that, where once there had been scorn, now the young Feng looked upon the Planeswalker with a degree of respect.
The Disciples shared a mischievous laugh as Longhua appeared from his chambers and cast a dirty look at Ori’un, who promptly bowed with an impish grin and backed off, allowing the Master to capture the attention of the entire assembly.
XJ-V had to admit that the Master knew how to hold an audience – even if he normally despised the drudgery of public speaking. He strode down the steps with the confident of a God upon his Heavenly Kingdom, resplendent in his ceremonial robes coated in a spiraling depiction of the Eternal Dragon, roaring flames dancing along each sleeve like he was a sentient brazier.
Flanking him were the mysterious Core Regulators of the Eternal Dragon Sects – shaven headed masters of the earth, whose solid connection to the Dao allowed them to manipulate physical reality itself through their mastery of the Realm-Grade techniques. It was they who saw to the healing of wounded men and women. It was they who had the ability to call back the departing spirit of even a mortal second away from passing to the other side. Normally, they spent most of their time in their chambers adjacent to the Master himself, preparing for the day when they would undergo the trials of the Anima Banisher Rank – to sit for a decade in the totally airless seclusion of Ramor Tai’s core and emerge as a being more spirit than man. XJ-V watched the six of them silently follow the Master down the steps of the chamber, stopping at the very plant where the Cog had first heard Longhua tell him that he would take him on as a student.
“Magnificent, aren’t they?” Mah-Jung whispered beside him. “Mark you the etchings that line their foreheads, XJ-V. Do you know what they say?”
The Cog shook his head, hearing the murmurings of the crowd ripple like waves all around him as they too noticed the strange glowing symbols that covered the silent faces of the fully-robed Regulators. “I do not.”
“’On earth was I born, and to sky shall I go,’” Mah-Jung told him with a certain air of indifference, as though the men were not worthy of respect. “It is another way of saying their feet are firmly planted, while their heads are stuck in the clouds.”
XJ-V looked up at them, seeing how their eyes never once met those of another Brother in the assembly, but always looked upwards at the unending clouds of day.
“’The Stars my Destination…’” he murmured to himself.
“Good Jung, good Jung!” Kai-Thai shouted as he ambled over to his suddenly perplexed Brother. “Is that jealousy I hear in thy voice?”
Mah-Jung batted away the eternal nuisance that was Kai-Thai, and XJ-V chuckled to hide his surprise at his own statement. Mah-Jung had heard it, all right, and for whatever reason it had caused him some disquiet. He was thankful for not only Kai-Thai’s interruption, but for Master Longhua’s sudden announcement at that moment:
“Brothers,” he said simply, raising his palms wide and conjuring the flames that danced along his arms to flare up like a hedgehog’s spines. “Behold your Core Regulators of the Eternal Dragon. See the fires that dance in their eyes, and know that within them rests the spirit of creativity that rests at the heart of the human soul.”
“A soul that would not be complete,” another voice suddenly roared from across the monastery. “Without hunger, or the drive to fight for what one believes in.”
The heads of the Disciples turned as one to see the figure of Master Yoma-Dur emerge from the Tiger’s Hall of Symmachus, his long-sleeved cream robe flowing in a wind that he had summoned himself, taking him into the air above the Core Regulators from his own Sect. As befitted his Sect, he had made his own entrance in complete silence – an apex predator creeping up on the rear of the crowd.
“Tigers and Dragons!” he roared. “Together as allies throughout time – now tossed within the maelstrom of combat! Before the watchful eyes of the Dao, let this day be one to live in infamy! Let your eyes behold a sight few Cultivators have seen in their lifetimes – let your souls be lifted with the very ground beneath your feet.”
Every Disciple then paused for breath as the Core Regulators assumed the strange stances common for their station – their arms elongated, legs up like those of a feeding crane, before their bodies lifted fully into the air before the Cultivators.
Their fingers stretched, twitched, and spun in circular motions that seemed uncoordinated to the untrained eye, but XJ-V could see that they were spinning threads with every digit – their hands weaving Qi energy that the Corporeal Temperers could not see, energy that had the capacity to change the world itself.
“Let the Dao provide our arena,” Yoma Dur bellowed above the rising din of what sounded like the beginnings of an apocalyptic earthquake. “Let the memory of this tournament be etched into the very soul of this great mountain – so that the generations of this world shall remember how the claws of the Tiger met the teeth of the Dragon, and the Brothers of Ramor-Tai clashed with power to rival the Old Gods’ Sundering itself!”
XJ-V gripped his chest as the light beneath his heart pulsed in recognition, and he and the Corporeal Temperers of Ramor-Tai beheld the power that true Cultivators held.
