Chapter [B5] 29 — Risen Asura

Chapter [B5] 29 — Risen Asura

I hurled more bombs; the soldiers, inspired, did the same. I took two from my belt, snapped the seals with my thumb, and let them roll off my fingers with a small push of Chi to send them in a shallow arc under the Demon God’s ribs, where the roots had already chewed gaps in the hardened flesh.

Detonations thudded like hammers against wet clay. The nearest squads tracked my throw and shifted their aim.

The air filled with alchemical smoke, the kind that carried purification agents in a dense mist. Soldiers coughed but kept their timing. A line of formation flags snapped, and three arrays lit in sequence, their beams cutting vertical channels through the smog to keep visibility around the forward medics.

The Demon God screamed in pain, but it finally managed to cut through the roots and fell to the ground.

The sound of its body hitting the earth was not just impact. It was the crack of several roots giving at once, the groan of others tearing partway through their own fibers as they held, and the release of tension that made the land under our feet settle a finger’s width lower.

The Demon God lay twisted, skin hanging where the Tree had peeled it, plates sheared with clean edges where bombs had opened lanes for the roots to anchor. Its right shoulder had a crater the size of a wagon where a coil of roots had burrowed and then been ripped free. Corruption bled out of the wound and tried to crawl back to the body; Yin’s ground teams caught the flow with powdered talismans that turned it to ash.

Even in its terrible state, it managed to turn into its Asura form. The Asura rose from the shadow of the Demon God like a second body pressed to the first, but offset and unsynchronized. Tendons in its forearms flexed without pattern, and the sockets of its extra eyes wept a thin black fluid that steamed when it hit the ground. It lifted one hand and traced a circle that should have closed cleanly; the line quivered and broke in three places before completing, summoning more demons.

My friends were ready. They began bombing every demon summoned, clearing a path for me. But the path between us still churned with lesser beasts trying to create a wall with their bodies. I wove through them, not stopping to cut every throat that presented itself if someone behind me could finish the work faster.

When a broad-backed brute swung an arm the size of a tree trunk at my head, I dropped under it and let it pass, then snapped a kick into the joint so the next squad would not have to take the full force. A second creature with a spine of jagged plates lunged, and I grabbed a plate with my left hand, used the momentum to spin around its neck, and planted my right palm behind the skull. I pushed, felt the first vertebra separate with a crack, and released before the splash could hit my eyes.

And then, finally, I reached the Asura himself. He tilted his head. The gesture was small, but it drew the attention of everything still able to see. His skin looked stretched over the bones of the face; the lower right cheek had split and not sealed, leaving a line of black that continued down the neck and disappeared under the collar. Two of the four secondary arms hung slack, tendons frayed from earlier work. The claws of the primary hands were intact and clean. He looked me up and down with steady interest rather than hate. The space between us narrowed to the width of a breath.

“You even failed against Shen Yuan,” the Asura said. “Do you truly think you can win? What do you even plan to do now that I’ve come in my true form? Just accept your failure and die.”

I only smiled. Perhaps I should have been more affected, but I had already burned the shame out in the long stretch within the darkness before I met Chi. I had reviewed every misstep until there was no new angle to find. Words could not open anything new in me now. I let them pass like wind around a fixed post and measured his stance instead.

All I knew was that I had to win.

The Asura immediately unleashed bursts of Miasma at me and at the army, clearly intent on ending us to make sure we could no longer stop the demonic horde. Its dark power came out in bursts like miniature stormclouds, each aimed at a different cluster he had marked—the engineers on the ridge, the medics near the Tree’s trunk, the line of spear carriers guarding the wounded, my friends at the summoning breaks. The packets were tuned to different frequencies to slip through different kinds of wards.

The first would have punched straight through a standard shield, the second would have set talismans alight on their bearers, the third would have knotted a cultivator’s breath in his own chest. I activated the First Law. As I did, the miasma split into its component Gu. Before it could re-coalesce, I nudged it toward the nearest pockets of natural Q.The power readily combined with it and merged into the atmosphere harmlessly.

The field around me took shape the way it always did when I invoked that Law: not as pressure, but as a frame that sorted what came into it and what should not keep its form. The miasma hit the frame and broke into components. The halves drifted apart and lost the coherence that had given them teeth. Two bolts winked out against my forearm. Three dissolved a dozen steps from the engineers, leaving damp air and a smell like wet iron. Over the medics, a gray haze fell and then thinned until it was nothing.

The Asura stared at me with rage and confusion. I smiled back; the laws of cultivation could be used in rather versatile ways.

The Demon God roared.

I leapt forward, meeting him halfway because distance favored his throws. At close quarters, the First Law helped me as much against his strikes as it did against his ranged assaults.

He swung, and I slipped inside the elbow and pressed the flow of his Qi apart, so the strike arrived without force.

I answered with a palm to the ribs that drove him half a step sideways. He stepped in again without giving ground and smashed his forehead into mine. Lights flashed across my vision, and I tasted blood. I dropped my weight and caught his knee with mine. The shock ran up my thigh painfully, but it bent his stance.

We traded like that, fast and ugly, beating each other bloody and blue as we crashed across the battlefield.

Every time we hit, the ground sank and burst, sending clods and grit and broken bone outward. I flared the First Law to spare those I could reach by splitting off heat and shock, but I could not catch everything.

Two soldiers died under our feet when a chunk of collapsed earth swallowed them. I heard someone scream a name and then be cut off by another scream.

I kept moving. If I stopped to grieve in the middle of this, more would die.

The Demon God let out a furious roar, and, using his Asura form, swung a hand from the sky, intent on clearing an entire swath of soldiers. A shadow fell across the center ranks as the arm lifted above us, larger than a tower, the fingers spread to rake and crush. The air pressure dropped with the lift, and then rose as the arm descended. Banners whipped flat against their poles. Drum counts faltered. s

I called upon the Second Law—the Genesis of Chi—and with a roar, ignored mortal limitations, tapping into this very world. The draw had to be clean or not at all; if I took from the land without care, I would strip more than I needed and leave the ground drained for a generation.

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I spread the pull wide. The air lent me pressure; the soil lent me cohesion; the water in the bodies around me lent me flow with their consent, which I asked for in a pulse that touched every friendly presence in range and returned a hundred small nods.

The Tree answered with a deep surge that shook its crown, a surge it could spare even through its struggle because it had been waiting for that request. I set that sum against the first hand and pushed.

The Asura’s flesh unraveled into strands of Qi and dispersed like smoke, leaving a rain of black dust that did not reach the ground. The second hand fell and met a wall of raw genesis; it split at the wrist, then the elbow, then the shoulder.

The third hit even as I turned to face it. I caught it with a wedge and redirected the push into the Asura’s own ribs. The arm tore free at the socket with a sound like wet cloth pulled apart. The three severed limbs fell, hit, and broke into sludge that tried to crawl back to the body.

Our front lines, already ready for this, threw capsules that exploded into pale powder that drank the sludge and hardened it into inert cakes.

The Demon God roared even as the arms began healing back. The stumps boiled, and new limbs grew in uneven fits, inconsistent in thickness and length.

Before the Demon God could act again, I invoked the Third Law—Resonance of Chi.

I listened to the battlefield first. Everything had a rhythm: the drum counts that traveled down the lines; the hiss of the Tree’s sap moving in heavy pulses; the clatter of our weapons; the short, rough breaths of men in the third file; the cadence of the Asura’s heart as it labored. I set my own breath between those beats and then pushed a clean, even tone into the ground. The tone rose and spread, found the frequencies that held the demon beasts together, and pressed on them without mercy. Screeches cut short. Wings that had been mid-beat stopped. Claws that had been swinging hung with their tips a hair from throats.

Even the Demon God’s voice hitched, broke, and rose again as I laid a second layer of dissonance under the first. The link that let the demons coordinate frayed in a visible ripple that traveled across their ranks like wind across a field. My resonance spread so wide that some soldiers cried out too—pain flaring along the edges of their meridians as my tone brushed their cultivations—but they fought through the pain, seeing the chance to take down the beasts in front of them and not willing to let go of it.

That was the difference between demons and humans, wasn’t it? Humans had willpower. Humans were fighting to protect.

I saw it in the way a young pike holder stepped in front of a medic with his pike set low even though his hands shook. I saw it in the way a formation master shifted her formation bars to shield a fallen stranger rather than save Chi for herself. I saw it in the way Yin’s bomb crews kept their spacing exact so no blast woke a resonance that would hurt our wounded.

The sight steadied what my body and spirit were already doing.

I leapt at the Demon God as it screamed and used the Fourth Law of Cultivation: Domain.

I tapped into the world, into my domain, using everything present to bolster the Tree of Life for just a split second, just long enough for it to be able to use its roots to bind the Demon God in another quasi-cage. There was no time to build a cage from nothing. I took what was already there: the roots, the broken stone columns half buried in soil, the metal plates our engineers had laid, the very weight of the air under the Tree’s crown.

I told them to act together for a single purpose. The roots responded first, shooting out in thick coils that wrapped the Demon God at waist, chest, and throat. Smaller roots braided themselves into bands around wrists and ankles. The broken columns rose at my push and wedged into the gaps to give the roots something rigid to brace against. The plates slid under the Demon God’s feet and then up along the calves to keep it from finding ground to push against. The air pressed from above in a steady field. The Tree’s inner glow brightened for a blink and then steadied as my domain poured support into it. The Demon God hung without leverage, struggling with movements that did not produce results.

I leapt forward, appearing right in front of the Demon God, my right hand grasping its neck. My fingers sank into flesh that was both soft and too dense, like muscle packed beyond normal limits.

And then I initiated the Fifth Law of Cultivation—Transcendence of Chi. All the other laws were layered inside it, and for all my attempts at balance I would have been far from capable of reaching that point alone.

Lucky for me, I had a giant mass of hungry Gu and twisted Qi and ancient Chi all tangled up together into something that could barely be called a creature any longer.

Unity would take care of that. The dissonance would be calmed, the pieces of its victims through the years released, transformation bringing an end to its hatred and despair and leaving peace in its wake.

After so long building up to it, the actual moment was almost anticlimactic. I’d been subconsciously bracing for pain, for something to burn me away, a flash of destruction…

But even if it was a sacrifice for me to undertake, Transcendence was not a thing of pain or fear. The Law softly erased the parts of me that would have stopped at pain and left only the function, even as my body and soul started to come apart at every point.

“No, you fool! This is not allowed! You will destroy yourself!” The Demon God let out a roar filled with fear mingled with rage as it realized what I was doing, trying its best to tear its body free of my grip.

But it was futile. It couldn’t escape and neither could I, not from what I’d begun.

“Release me, now!” it bellowed, frantic as it found itself unable to escape. “I will spare you and we can go our separate ways. This battle need not be the end of either of us!”

“That’s the funny thing,” I told it, grinning at the irony. “You’re right. This isn’t the end. We will go on.” Tears escaped my eyes as I blinked, though I felt none of the grief that they signified. “We just won’t be what we are now.”

The first sensation was weight leaving the knees and shoulders, a quiet loosening where muscle and bone had been holding on without pause. The next was the change in breath. Instead of drawing air, I took in a steady current layered through the trunk, a calm intake that moved through wide channels and narrow veins carved over months of strain. The Chi paths inside the tree matched the lines of my own meridians so closely that it was like stepping from one set of rooms into an adjoining set through doors already open.

As I burned away into motes of green and gold, so too did the Asura begin dissolving. The texture changed under my hands first. The skin lost cohesion, then the tissue under it. The pressure in the blood vessels dropped as if a pump had been turned off.

Black vapor streamed from the pores, then thickened into forms. Those forms had edges and shadows and then faces. They did not linger. The Tree of Life pulled them in gentle arcs toward its trunk and into its hollows.

Ah, they’re the souls of people, I realized with awe.

Each time a soul passed my shoulder, the air cleared a little more. The cage of roots tightened to catch anything that tried to fall back.

I could feel it: the balance of the world slowly, steadily restoring. The air that had felt heavy and wrong since the first day of this war began to lighten. The ground that had given underfoot as if it did not want us standing on it steadied. The tone under everything, the tone I had followed to set my resonance, shifted toward something older and simpler.

The spirits of those who died in the war spilled from the Demon God’s crumbling body and into the Tree. As they passed, they bowed, thanking me; I acknowledged them with a nod and a smile. Their faces flashed across my sight: soldiers in armor caked with dust; women with talisman ash smeared across their cheeks; a smith with burns up both arms; a boy drummer with cracked lips; and also a few familiar faces, such as the emperor, with tired lines around his face and none of the previous indomitable aura. Even Shen Yuan—much to my surprise—was freed and floated to the Tree, winking at me as he did so.

None of them looked afraid. None of them clung. They flowed into the Tree as if going where they had always meant to go before this war bent their paths. The Tree accepted them the way it had accepted its charge since it rose to hold our enemy, its branches spread across the sky and its roots set like a warning and a promise.

Crimson light began to show from behind the black, then as the last of the stolen souls left, a blue light deep inside. It lit the diffuse cloud that used to be the Demon God in shades of purple, matching the blue within myself turning the gold to green, a mirror and an echo.

Completion. A song in three parts, not two.

I knew what I had to do, rhythms deeper than history pulling me along. This dispersion was only the start, the precursor to an all-inclusive expansion that my previous mortal self could never have conceived of.

Oddly, I didn’t feel as sad as I’d thought I would. I had accepted the situation. It was enough to remove the Demon God, this world-ending threat.

The sadness from when I first understood what this fight would cost… It had burned out over days and nights of worry and the weight of leadership. What remained now was focus, relief, and the knowledge that every breath, every pill spent, every blade swung, and every root that had carried miasma out of the world had led to this moment.

It had all been worth it.