Chapter 196 Atlantis Part 1

Wang Hou had a smile on his face and a small snack in his hand. 

He was a large portly man, not just fat but big. Muscle was underneath the fat and his physical form carried weight and mass. 

From his aura, I could sense his nature. Abundance, reserves, endurance. 

His qi hummed with compacted power. His cultivation technique revolved around eating and storing the energies he consumed. He naturally had large qi reserves and his technique focused on making them even larger. 

I couldn’t sense any malice from him, but he certainly wasn’t a righteous path cultivator either. He was of the orthodox path, walking without much allegiance to either the heavens or the hells. 

“Greetings fellow daoist, I am indeed heading to Atlantis.”

“Ah, that is good news then. We can watch over each other as we march then Senior, please accept this one’s company.”

Company? He was at the twelfth rank, the difference between me and him was immense. If anything, he was looking to me to protect him during his journey to Atlantis.

“I will be moving fast,” I noted. 

Travel speeds across the void changed based on your rank and my speed as a thirteenth rank would propel me much farther than he could keep up. 

“I will chase diligently, elder brother. I will not slow you down.”

I sighed. 

He was being decent enough and I supposed there was no harm in allowing him to trail along. We weren’t that far from Atlantis anyways. I could feel its blue chaotic water in the distance. 

“Come then,” I said with a nod and started walking. 

“Thank you Senior, your benevolence is too much!”

Shameless bastard, you practically begged me to take you. 

“Why the caution Daoist Wang? It is a fairly safe trip from here to Atlantis, no?”

“You are correct Senior…”

“Bill.” I told him. 

“Bill?” 

“Bill.”

“You are correct Senior Bill, but the void has been humming with conflict recently. Chaos beings are trying to push into Lynoria and there have more Hives witnessed marching into the chaos realms. I am startled and felt unsafe, Senior. So I came to a man who walks the righteous path and asked for his kindness.”

I frowned. Was that me? A man that walks the righteous path? I guess my dao could give people that assumption. 

I ignored it and kept thinking about the other things he had said. 

“There has been conflict recently, between the Chaos Realms and Lynoria?”

“There is always conflict, Senior. I am from the Golden Lands and there we know and see the Chaos Realms’ spurious rage. But lately it has been somewhat worse.”

“What level is this conflict?”

When it came to war or conflict there was always one sure fire way of measuring the severity of the conflict and that was by the level of weapons used. On earth, you could have a conflict with words, to physical violence, to bunt weapons, to guns, bombs, and then nukes. 

The term nuclear had a certain apocalyptic future tied to it.

In the cultivation word, that level was measured by ranks. 

“There are rumors of fifteenth ranks getting involved, Senior Bill. I do not know of their validity but I do know that fourteenth ranks have been seen fighting within this area.”

That wasn’t too bad. It still scared me and it should scare any reasonable person of my level but that amount of conflict was normal within the void. 

“Any deaths?”

“Not too many from what I have heard,” said Wang, grabbing his belly and patting it like a pregnant woman. 

Deaths were when conflicts got serious. More specifically, the types of deaths were important to consider. If a fourteenth rank was killed by a fifteenth rank, that was one thing. Their power differences and the power differences between the opposing groups would let him get away with it. It could be wrong and immoral or righteous and deserved, but the point was that if the groups and cultivators fighting each other weren’t evenly matched, then they would most likely not engage. 

It was when the two were of similar level that you had to worry. 

Either way, death was rare all together. The stronger you were the more you prepared for it and only those stronger than you by wide margins could ensure your death at this level. 

Everybody had paths and business of resurrection past the twelfth rank, even me. 

We were still behind the insect hive at that point and they were going to trail by Atlantis, probably to drink and refill their qi before they left for the Entropic Path to fight with the abominations there. 

They would probably take a ship just like we would. 

“Strange isn’t it, Senior Bill? These insects are so organized and intelligent, so human in many ways but still so strange. Those drones are of the thirteenth rank and yet they are willing to die for their hive with no thought of themselves.”

“They’ll be fine,” I replied. “As long as a single one of them gets away their hive will persist. And if the queen can escape, she will do so with the souls of all in the hive with her and remake them at a later point. That will cost resources of course but the hive survives.”

“Its unfair!” Wang Hou spat. “They’re so powerful and contained as a species. It feels like we humans are lacking compared to them!”

“Would you rather be a mortal human or a mortal ant?” I asked him. 

Wang rubbed his belly in thought. 

“Senior, your words hold truth. But still, why do they go off to die like this? They at best win and take something for themselves, but the chances of death are far too high for it to be worth all that struggle.”

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “But the Chaos Realms are… anti-primordial in ways you can’t truly understand.”

“Truly? You are a scholar, Senior Bill, a follower of the Tome and a wise man! Educate this fat junior!”

I had been avoiding calling him fat out loud but if he was calling himself fat then who was I to deny it.

“Well Fatty Wang,” I chewed on how that sounded for a second. “Chaos destroys while order preserves. In classical duality thought, yin yang, light and dark, both are needed to live. You need to change to grow and order to remain the same. The Chaos Realms and the Law Lands are extreme opposites in that sense. In the Chaos Realms, there is constant change and no stability because stability is order, identity is order, anything that is cherished is order because only order can give something enough form to make it be. The Law Lands is the opposite, there you have stillness, no change, no movement, just absolute zero. You’ve heard of the Land of Tranquil Souls?”

“Yes Senior! The place where many cultivators go and freeze up like statues?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “Fanatics like those freeze themselves there, perpetually existing without thinking or moving, or barely even living. The insects are similar. Out of all the primordials, they are the ones with the deepest ties to order. To them, the elder things and eldritch creatures are their enemies because they counter them. They actually won’t attack eldritch things of order or reason, but they will slaughter any chaos being into nothingness.”

“Truly frightening,” Fatty Wang mumbled. 

In the distance, I could see a big blue star. A flooding wave of water laws could be felt even from this far away. I saw elementals, dragons, creatures of the sea and water pulsing through here. 

Water without form, just the ideas of it, the nature of it, started touching us as we walked. 

It was refreshing, overwhelming, cold, and drowning all at once. I felt like I was sinking deep into the ocean, barely able to hold my breath. 

I ignored it and kept walking. 

Here was Atlantis.