Heaven's Laws - Lifestone - Chapter 39

Just as they spent some time each day playing for the cultivating disciples on the third floor, they spent time with their chosen group of disciples on the second. As they did, Huifen spent much of her personal efforts on trying to better understand the nature laws.

The more time she spent trying to understand nature, the clearer her water and ice laws became. She was beginning to think they really should be considered the same element. The distinctions between them were qualitative in nature but relied on the same fundamental substance. Chao had once described water as a transitional element that should help her understand the other ones. It had indeed helped in her understanding, but he was wrong that it was an intermediate element. Nature was the true transitional element. It had heavy yin and heavy yang variations and everything in between.

It was a long road, but she saw the opportunity that was there. One day she might be able to borrow and even enhance fire and lightning. Creating it outright was likely impossible, but if she could reach the fourth law morph, she might actually be able to create something that shouldn’t exist. She imagined heavy yin flames.

For now, she tried to borrow the form of the different plants in the penjing garden. It was still difficult for her to work with unknown neutral plants, and heavy yang were impossible. However, if she started with a seed, it was possible for her to slowly cultivate a normal yang plant to thrive off her yin qi. Her current goal was to bridge that gap.

She tried again to borrow the peach tree’s basic form. It appeared in her lap in a miniature state compared to its original version on display that sat across from her behind the barrier. Many might consider this a success for she had indeed borrowed from the source. As soon as she did, it found itself surrounded in ice qi. She tried to enhance the miniature version to make use of her qi, but the tree’s leaves started to turn. Within a minute it was shriveled and dead.

Dropping the borrow, what was left of the small tree disintegrated before her eyes. She placed her hands on her lap and began to meditate on what she’d seen. It was the same as all the other times before. This type of plant simply needed lots of sun and too low of a temperature was quick to kill it. The reason starting it was seed was different, she theorized, was because of the natural process the seed went through while sprouting. If she was tapping into this natural process, then her enhance law probably wasn’t as advanced as it seemed. It was possible to that not every type of plant could survive the process. She needed to try other seeds, many different types, to know for sure.

It also gave her hope that there might be plants out there that could allow her to borrow and enhance without a seed. Possibly even create…

There was a sudden shrill whistle that drew her attention. She found she wasn’t alone at looking up at her husband.

He held what looked like a bamboo flute in both hands and was cringing at the sound he just made. When he realized everyone was looking at him, he rubbed the back of his head. “Sorry. Sorry. I think I should practice on a back mountain somewhere before I try this again. I don’t think the flute likes me.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. He’d been trying to understand the basics of the flute for the last two days. The simplest of songs still evaded him. He’d had success with the drum within an hour, and the zither even faster. Thankfully he still used his pipa for most of his sound cultivation studies. He was just trying to expand his horizons.

“It’s just a skillset you’ve yet to develop,” Huifen said to encourage him.

“I thought Brother Tao was developing a new martial technique,” Eu-meh said with mock sincerity.

The golden-haired Fairy Zhu smirked. “It frightened me.”

Everyone laughed.

Li Qiang tried to comfort his friend but didn’t hide his own laugh.

Huifen prepared to speak up to remind them to remain respectful, when Fairy Daiyu blasted the room with ice qi and asserted, “It wasn’t that bad.”

There was a chorus of objections.

Instead of calming the situation, Chao exasperated it, “You’re courting death.” He then blew in his flute without any care for hitting the right note and cut through the room like a wailing child not getting their way.

She sighed after the laughter had calmed the offhanded comments had mostly stopped. They’d only had their discipleship group for a few days, and this wasn’t the first time such outbursts had stopped everyone from cultivating. Her husband was often right in the middle of it. After their dark days under Emperor Sun’s shadow, she couldn’t help but to allow it in moderation. She was smiling herself.

Chao winked in her direction as he replaced the flute with his pipa. Meeting him had added a whole new aspect to her life that she hadn’t known was missing. Heart of Ice was the main culprit, but he had insisted and slowly taught her to have fun in life. The Silly Sage was good title. He really wasn’t as solemn as he feared. But at the same time, he was just as much a sage.

The song he played was one of his new ones and a favorite of his. It was also a favorite of hers. Unlike many of his old ones, this was complex. It started lighthearted, but quickly descended. The bulk of the song was tragic That just added to its impact. Soon triumph filled their ears and she felt a yearning settle inside her to experience such victory.

It was different than the mindset his old song used to give her, but in many ways the same. That must have been his laws at work, for the songs themselves were completely different. She thought this new one fit her better.

Glancing up, she didn’t see the ceiling but was looking past it. The waking visions she had were rarely the same. However, there were aspects that they always shared. There was a plane, the pinnacle, not of the lower realm, but like that of the highest heaven. Sometimes stairs ascended to this platform that rested in the darkness of space. Other times there was an invisible border at which thousands of the greatest of cultivators gathered. It was not peaceful, for they all sought to break the barrier with force.

When she ascended to this barrier, she found it gave her no resistance and she slipped right through it at the protests of all who were present.

She reached the platform of cloudy white stone. There were no stars above or beyond it. The galaxies laid at its feet. When she reached it, she wasn’t alone, but the crowd there was sparce. There was a loneliness to dwelling there. It was what accompanied those at the peak of martial power. It wasn’t alone. With power came long life. Wisdom followed. She desired such loneliness. To reach the end of human knowledge and to peer upon the universe as it truly was.

The vision faded as her eyes landed upon the man she had married. It was but a fantasy, a daydream, but it had guided her life since before she arrived at the Ice Phoenix Sect. Her mother had helped cultivate the desire in her. It had never been necessary. Her Peerless Spiritual Body was a beacon to her young heart even before she understood where it was guiding. Destiny called. It was something she couldn’t deny. Chao complicated everything even as she determined to bring him with her to the very end.

If any other man was her husband she’d have little doubt, but he threatened her vision as no other man could. There were times where he seemed like the most competent of cultivators, and others where he rejected the very notion of defying the heavens. What if the day came when they reached that border that marked her final step and he reached out his hand, touched its surface, and then bowed his head. Instead of defying the heavens, he seemed to travel with them hand in hand. But that wasn’t what she feared the most. What if he decided to accept heaven’s will and she followed him instead?

She’d already been wrong about so many things. She concluded that was not a naturally just person. Only her lessons, her master turned mother, and her now husband had tempered the blind fury inside her. Quinyuan had taught her to decide on her own, but here she was surrounding herself with others. She was a living contradiction. She was starting to trust others, especially Chao, more than she trusted her own judgement. All the more reason she should reach the peak of the martial arts. With such wisdom she’d be able to understand. But after living without Heart of Ice for more than two years now, she could no longer do so alone.

A little fire dragon with overly large eyes zipped across the room and hovered before her face. It reached out and nozzle her nose. It disappeared the next instant.

Chao looked away as soon as she glanced over and pretended he didn’t notice. Sometimes he got lost in his cultivation and it was like he’d forgotten she was even there, but then he’d do something like this. Confusion or not, there were some things she couldn’t deny. Chief among them is that there’s no other place she’d rather be.

***

As had been their custom in the Frigid Moon Mystic Realm, they refined pills in the morning. They weren’t focused on yin or yang pills specifically any longer. They’d refined countless of each. What they focused on now were new pills that they hadn’t refined in the past. The dual refinement techniques had become mostly second nature to them. It was what gave them the confidence to do it behind their array formations without requesting supervision from Sage Pangfua.

After a few weeks of their new routine, Chao was starting to see a pattern to the speed in which they cultivated. His Huifen’s speed was slower than his. That was to be expected since they were spending so much time in a heaven and earth qi heavy environment, but with their pill refinement, dual cultivation, and the Esh Vine Nectar still in his system, his speed was even faster than it had been in the Earth Realm. Each minor level could be broken up into small and large success just like a large realm. He was reaching a new minor one each week. Just three weeks after he'd reached the fourth level of the Sky Realm, he broke through to the fifth. It would undoubtedly slow as he neared the peak of his realm, but he could very likely breakthrough to the overlord realm before they left the Divine Spire.

Had that been what his father hoped all along? It was just like the slippery old man to hide things from him.

Huifen’s cultivation wasn’t staying the same either. Three weeks later, when he was readying to break into the sixth level of the Sky Realm, they requested for Sage Pangfua to come attend to her breakthrough to the fourth level of the Overlord Realm. It was completely unlike her last breakthrough for she was breaking through to small success.

Mother Sya was also there. Chao sat behind her, ready to inject heaven and earth qi into her if the situation required, but what she really needed was just to intake massive amounts of ice qi. His main job was just to monitor her wellbeing. In the end, he just got to admire his formidable wife. One of the surprise benefits she received during her overlord breakthrough when creating her inner world’s core with tribulation ice was that her hybrid qi refined her physique even further than it normally would. Perhaps it was due to her Peerless Spiritual Body, but she adapted quickly. Breakthroughs often taxed the body and pushed the meridians to their limit. For her it was as easy as morning mediation.

Chao sat surrounded by blades. He’d first found sharpness a difficult concept to cultivate. There was one aspect to it that was physical. The blade held the required edge, but it didn’t equal this edge or sharpness would’ve existed as the material itself. There was more to it than that. Many substances that spanned different elements could be considered sharp. It wasn’t limited to weapons and tools used for war, preparing food, or parting two sides of the same object. Stones, metal, woods, thorns, talons, claws, beaks, and fangs were only a beginners list of that things that could be sharp.

There were certainly different levels of sharpness as well. A child might be given a knife with a dull edge only sharp enough to cut weak plants and dig up dirt, while a cultivator’s blade might be honed to the finest grade. Neither were as dull as a hammer.

Borrowing sharpness came first. The difficult was the same as the one he had when he was dealing with intangible elements like space and sound. He felt like it should be applied to an object, but it wasn’t that object. Space was the same. I required It existed only naturally as the container of matter and energy. It never came alone. The laws made that possible. The lack of space found in a space tear could even be said to be the sharpest object of all.

It was through this contemplation that success came. He borrowed the sharpness of his blade and applied it to seemingly nothing. But it wasn’t nothing at all. Air was something.

One of the most interesting aspects of sharpness was that it was directional in nature. A space tear could be deadly when approached from any angle. But sharpness applied to a strand of air was useless if it wasn’t approached form the front. Even then, air held little weight, so a weak piece of clothing was enough to overpower its edge.

That didn’t mean it was useless. Sharpness might not hold any weight or stoutness on its own, but…

With his swords resting on the ground, he awakened a wisp of wind and handed it its new weapon. He tossed up an old shirt. It didn’t fly as evenly as he liked, so when the wisp approached the shirt was more wadded than flat.

He rarely used wind when fighting. It lacked in most areas compared to other elements unless your goal was to move things instead of harming them.

The wisp burst against the shirt, sending it flying. He scooped it up with his qi and caught it. Unwading the shirt, he was surprised by what he found. There were a few large cuts on different places on the garment. It was a success, though a small one.

It made him wonder that if he advanced, would he be able to it to his martial techniques or laws that could make use of it. He imagined a massive fire dragon with fangs that could do more than burn, but then he realized piercing, slashing, and cleaving might be better concepts if such a thing was even possible.

Would it be worth developing? Covering one of his awakened elements with space tears for teeth would be far more damaging.

Perhaps the reason sharpness seemed to hold less promise was because it was a lesser law. Or maybe he needed to be able to create or enhance it before it showed its true worth. It was far less complex with fewer variables than any element. Enhance should just empower what it already was. Morph, however, he didn’t even know where to start.

Should he pursue it? That was the real question. There were countless concepts, or lesser laws. It wasn’t in him to just give up because it didn’t seem promising. It held secrets and he wanted to know them all.

With his

With the elements, he wasn’t sure what direction to go next. He had reached awaken in all of them. He was working on morph with the few that continued to allude him, and was determined to figure them out, but what about after that? He couldn’t say he’d reached large success with awaken with any of them. He rarely even used an element without awakening it any longer, so he felt that that was only a matter of time.

There was something. One final thing that his mother had accomplished that he hadn’t. She’d reached perfection with her ice borrow law. He knew technically what that meant, but could he really comprehend it?

Mother An had once fought Mother Quinyuan. She’d been in the Sky Realm where the Sect Master had been a sage. As the telling goes, there was no way An should’ve been able to defeat her friend, but she didn’t just command her own qi, but the ice of her opponent as well.

Chao could already do the same, couldn’t he? He’d once borrowed the fire from his opponent in the arena but didn’t dare to do the same against a cultivator at a higher realm. The force of their martial techniques was simply too much. So how had his mother overcome this?

Did she borrow the ice Quinyuan had summoned, immediately awakening it to fight against her? Was perfection so powerful that it the will of a Sky Realm fairy could so overwhelm that of a sage?

Did she borrow the ice Quinyuan had summoned, immediately awakening it to fight against her? Was perfection so powerful that the will of a Sky Realm fairy could so overwhelm that of a sage? Was there a limit to the number of means and methods one had to grow in the martial arts?

Should he seek perfection with fire? It had always been one of the easiest ones for him. He believed it was because of his natural yang despite cultivating heaven and earth qi, but the better he understood his relationship with sound, the more he suspected it might be something else. It might not be his yang at all, but because Zan was a yang cultivator and he loved his father. If Mother An would’ve lived, perhaps his ice laws would’ve been just as profound. Certainly his wife had helped make up the difference.

In the end, it was his space laws that he turned to in hope to improve his martial prowess. His sound laws were the arbiter, but if his space laws didn’t improve then how could he protect his wife and himself once he reached the Divine Realm? The combination of the two held the most hope. Without neglecting everything else, he poured himself into figuring out what space could do under the sixth floor’s pressure. It was the simulation of the Divine Realm he needed.

He used what he already knew, but in many ways he worked in the opposite direction. Instead of learning to manipulate space in his surroundings, he used a large space tear as his canvass. Creating in the void cost very little as long as he could tear enough area of natural space.

The tear he worked with was round in shape and no bigger than his fist. The tear itself consisted of nothing. His qi empowered its nothingness boarder by the law’s power. Interestingly enough, when he created a second tear and tunneled between them, this void was filled in when they were jointed in the middle and a passage was formed. Emptiness was naturally filled, but even as it was, a space tunnel was contained by reversed space. Its boarder was a tunnel of nothing. It was a strange paradox. It shouldn’t be so, but he’d seen it practically worked out countless times now.

It wasn’t the first time he extended the void canvas. As it deepened like a cavern that hung on the air before him, air was sucked into fill the new emptiness.

He didn’t command it to return to its original shape, for that would require him to displace the air that had entered his tiny space cavern. Instead, he erased it entirely and felt the air that had been sucked in rebound. It blew against his face. It was almost like he had forcible expelled the air but erasing his space tear had allowed natural space to automatically fix itself. The natural process expelled it for him. On a large enough level, he could use both process to his advantage.

He started over. Creating a tear the same size a shape, he also created a tiny, red, Nascent Realm flame that flowed right in front of it. He pushed against his little canvas and the round void extended outward like the tunnel of a gopher. It wasn’t deep. Only a meter at most, but as soon as the air started to be sucked into the void, the flame went with it and was smothered under the inrush of air.

Chao created a second flame after the small cavern had filled in and released his reverse create. The tunnel started to dissolve. The air rushed outward. Instead of smothering the flame this time it enlivened it. He had to lean to the side so that it didn’t singe his face.

His reaction was unnecessary. Nascent Realm fire would no longer burn him. It proved the concept would work.

If he could make a tear large enough, especially once he reached the overlord realm, he might be able to use the same technique often enough that he could use it to swallow the techniques of cultivators far stronger than he was. The force they could generate, and their speed was still something he couldn’t hope to match. His options were still growing.

When he noticed Huifen was watching him, he got up and walked over to her. “Could you use a little break?”

She nodded that she could.

He scooped her up with his qi and caught her with one arm beneath her legs and the other behind her back.

She asked him what he was doing.

Instead of answering, he carried her toward the wall, removed a pillow from his spatial ring and tossed it to rest against the wall and the floor. He sat down and reclined against the wall with her laying against his chest.

Huifen didn’t complain, but she looked concerned. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing,” was all that he said.

They lounged there without saying a word. Before long, she curled up against his much larger and warmer body then relaxed her eyes. He focused on her breathing and for a time forgot everything else.