Chapter 204 Choices

The world held still, time refused to pass and in that instant. 

We had stopped moving, but it felt like the world had suddenly decided to hold perfectly still.

“Senior?” Wang Hou asked. 

Why was he coming to me for assurance? I wasn’t his older brother. Then the ship spoke, or rather communicated to us its intention. 

We were stopping for the harvest. It was on the ship’s path log and we would be perfectly safe. 

I watched from the hull as hordes of people started to pour from the ship opening gates. These were the people of the sects. 

There were millions of them. Some of them were at the thirteenth rank, most were below that. A fourteenth rank stood above them, watching as they engaged in combat, and above them were nine dots. 

The World-Kings watched their disciples with silent judgement. 

There were two knights, one member of the Primordial Cult, a swordsmen, another automaton aside from the ship, a half dragon half man, a warrior woman with a sword at her waist, a wizard, and one more warrior standing upon his sword. 

None of them looked at me, which gave me a moment of reprieve. 

Their disciples fought and they stood above them, watching in silent judgement. 

The fighting itself started slowly. At first the lesser beings outside of the ship had fear. And then after noticing the lack of higher beings attacking them, they seemed to have chosen to move.

“They can’t see the fifteenth and fourteenth ranks?” I asked. 

The woman of the Primordial Cult nodded her strange rabbit head. 

Someone died, one of the people who lived on the ship. I frowned. 

“Worry not, their death is temporary," The woman spoke. 

“Reserecction?”

“No, reincarnation. All the people of the ship will always stay upon the ship. They shall be reborn among us, made anew.”

Oh. I guess that was slightly better. 

The chaos beings came in all sizes and hatred. 

A lot of it was eldritch horrors beyond a mortal’s comprehension, but there were also other cultivators of the void. 

The Speakers of Corruption. 

A key to remember was that we were on the Entropic Path, so there were people who practiced a certain level of chaos still here. The hard part about chaos was that if you over indulge then you tend to kill yourself. 

Chaos naturally destroyed, so the lesser beings of chaos had to stay out of the Chaos Realms. They’d die out there, so they littered the paths here. 

The Corrupted Senses were a sect of immense proportions, lead by a God-Imperium deep within the Chaos Realms. But again, the Chaos Realms were not a place for lesser beings. There were places within the realms that were hospitable by anyone beneath the fifteenth rank. 

So their sect members flooded the Entropic Path. 

I called them sect members, but really they were like beasts or insects. There was no order, no group, barely a functional sect, only a cultivation method and shared order. 

They were led of course, bound to follow a being greater than them. But again, the sect had no true order and most people refused to even acknowledge it as a sect.

Their leader was called, It the Broken. No one knew what it had been or who it had been, but it had been corrupted so thoroughly that it turned into something new, something arguably not alive. 

It, the Broken. 

And these were Its followers. Men, beasts, insects, and twisted visages of plants ran at the ship like a flood. 

Each of them had a mouth and an overgrown tongue. It stuck out, smacking against their face as they ran. 

The Speakers of Corruption were a subsect of the corrupted senses that focused on speaking. Some of them had tongues the size of a hand, others had been bloated into a large triangle shape, concealing the overgrown tongue within their body. 

They screamed with hatred and attacked the ship. 

Wang Hou shivered and even I felt a little bit of disgust. 

“What horrible creatures,” Wang Hou whispered. 

I nodded. 

They spoke words of corruption. That was their strongest technique and the army of cultivators struck back with attacks. 

The people of the Dark Delver held firm. We were safe and kept from all the battle, but the rabbit woman next to me frowned as she watched her people bleed and die. 

One of the speakers, with a mouth so wide and tongue bursting from his mouth like a sick animal panting away, burst and at least a dozen cultivators died in the explosion. 

Cultivators of the twelfth and thirteenth rank screamed. 

These beings, these gods watched as their people were slaughtered and killed over and over again. 

But the death wasn’t permanent. They would be reborn, made anew. 

Reforged in blood, over and over and over again. 

I felt my dao move in anger and confusion. In a way, these cultivators were mortals, children being watched over and the leaders of this group were their care takers.

They were allowed power and strength. They were given a chance at growing ever more able and for what?

For this? 

For death?

They chose this, true. But could anyone really be allowed to choose this?

Wouldn’t they be reborn in this state? In this place? Forced to believe that living and dying is the way to gain power?

The deaths would be repeated many times over. 

The suffering would be felt a thousand fold. 

They would forget. In some ways, they would forever be dead. 

And they knew this and chose it. 

I felt my stomach grumble and turn, as if I had seen something grotesque. It wasn’t the war or the battle. It wasn’t the cost of a life lived training and a death that would break them down again. 

It was the fact that they chose this. They chose to die and be remade all for power's sake. 

I was conflicted. 

“You’ve sailed the Sea of Death?” I asked the rabbit woman. 

“Yes,” she nodded. 

“Their fighting, it reminds me of the Carrion People.”

“The Dead Folk? You’ve seen them?”

“From a distance,” I nodded. “I’ve been to the edges of the sea and met a few of them there. I am not as well traveled as you.”

She frowned. 

“Yes, that is an appropriate comparison in a way, though our death is not in any way like theirs. We can remember past lives given time. And we can grow as well.”

I nodded. 

“Still,” I replied. 

“I agree,” She said. “But that is the way of the warrior. That is the path of the blade. To grow is to struggle and without such struggle, one will only wither and rot in content.”

I thought back to Chin playing a losing game against me back on Ah-Marin. I thought back to Medina learning to cook bread and failing. 

“How much of a struggle, I wonder.”

“The greater the cost, the greater the growth,” she answered. 

“Then, can you outpace a Carrion Man?”