AIR Chapter 38 Children and Beasts

Part 1

The little girl stared at me, eyes viciously accusing and angry.

“Gah!” She said while pointing.

“I had stuff to do.”

“Gah!” She said again.

“I was busy.”

“Gah gah boo, me bfppp!”

I sighed. It had been a month since she was born, and it had been one hell of a month. She was up and angry at me when I’d gotten back and there were a lot of baby gibberish accusations thrown my way.

It was weird. Apparently, a fifth-ranking child came out with the intelligence of a grown man. She could understand me by reading my aura and I could do the same to her. Her words, no matter how meaningless, were means of delivering tone and emotion and that’s just what the child did.

“I’m sorry!” I said in a tired tone, but the baby was having none of it.

“ARRRGHGHHG!” She screamed.

Today, she was mad. I’d promised to take her down to the village for some of the merchants that would be arriving today but had gotten caught up reading through the information I’d received from Lynoria.

“We can see them tomorrow,” I replied to the angry little woman.

“Da!” She said, then she turned around and farted.

I sighed.

She was a strange creature. The half-beast part didn’t manifest itself physically, but that was probably due to Tai Jey’s own preferences. But it was there emotionally. The child was absolutely feral, ripping into everything she could. She attempted to eat me when she first saw me and then she attempted to eat Wriendler.

I’d kept her out of the village for now, but she had heard bits and snippets and she was curious.

“Gauntlet, grab her!” I yelled before she could crawl out of my sight. And the big stone man swung down to grab the human chihuahua.

She fought him, angrily kicking and screaming. She was at the fifth rank too, which gave her terrifying strength. That and her bloodline made her a human nuke. A human baby nuke.

That was why I hadn’t let her go down to the village.

But Chin had treked up here to talk to me about it and she had heard about the whole thing from him. She hadn’t tried to eat Chin, but that made sense, Chin was good with animals, I was not.

I took the kid by her left leg and put Wriendler by her mouth. She bit the poor bastard, keeping her mouth occupied as I took her outside.

“Is it ready?” I asked Xi Lu and she nodded as she backed away several paces.

Then I threw the dam baby into the pit. She snarled and growled but Wriendler bound her tightly and pushed her into the depths. Enchanted water consumed her as she struggled to get out, but alas, it was useless.

“This is mistreatment,” Chin said from a distance.

“She hasn’t bathed in over a week,” I replied. “This is a necessary evil.”

A small hand reached out from the water, only to get dragged back in by a brown tentacle.

“She’s not even scrubbing,” Chin noted.

“The water is enchanted. She’ll be clean whether she likes it or not.”

“Is there really no other way?” Xi Lu asked.

I shook my head, staring sadly into the hole. As funny as this whole thing was, there was a sad part to it all. The girl’s beast nature was taking over rather quickly, and if I couldn’t figure out how to hold it at bay, then it would define her.

The way to curve this behavior would be to find a proper punishment, something to push the instinct away. But I wasn’t gonna beat the kid, that seemed insane, even for someone like me.

I couldn’t use pain, so I looked through other methods of change, diving into the information I’d gotten from the Eternal Tome. I had an idea going for now but it would take a while to go into effect.

“Can she breathe?” Chin asked.

"Eh'" I shrugged.

Chin gave me a dirty look.

“She’s at the fifth realm. She doesn’t need to breathe."

Chin's scowl lessened but didn't fade completely.

A tentacle poked out of the water and waved. That was the sign. I pulled out a large grey towel and held it open and ready.

“Fire!” I yelled.

Wriendler hurled the baby in my direction at Mach speed and I caught her like football. She immediately tried to escape, squirming and turning with enough force to topple mountains, but I held on.

“Nope,” I said, wrapping her tightly within the cloth.

She screamed in gibberish, but I held firm, bundling her up like a well-wrapped Christmas gift. I put an array seal on the cloth, one that could fend off an eighth-rank attack, just in case she got angry.

By the time I was finished, I had one frowning and clean baby tightly bundled up in a bunch of enchanted cloth.

“Gah!”

“No. It’s nap time.”

“Gah do!”

“Yes, you do.”

“Gah! Gah do!”

I sighed and carried the bundled newborn in my arms.

“Honored Master,” Xi Lu spoke. “Lin Tai says that the preparations are finished.”

I nodded and started on my way.

“What preparations?” Chin asked.

“Baby stuff, wanna see?”

Chin shrugged and came along.

“Why are you up here anyways?” I asked him as we walked. “Shouldn’t you be haggling all the merchants coming through the valley”

“Ah Medin’s got all that covered,” he replied. “She loves haggling. Haggled my dowery from fifteen stones to fifty that woman.”

I nodded. Chin’s wife was a hell of a haggler.

“And the crops?” I asked.

“All planted, all growing. The boys can do the maintenance for now.”

Now that raised an eyebrow.

“What?” I asked.

“What?” Chin replied.

“You? Not farming? Leaving it to other people?”

Chin shrugged and turned away, but even Xi Lu looked at him with wonder.

“Why?” I asked.

“Medin… she insists… Well…”

In the few decades that I had known this man, this was the first time I had heard him stutter.

“She said that I should ask you to teach me.”

“Teach you… cultivation?”

Chin let out a sad sigh.

“I was complaining about how… unhelpful you are and just how helpful you could be if you put your mind to it and… Well… I suppose she got a bit tired of that. Told me if I thought cultivators were such a waste of strength that I should go be a cultivator myself instead of complaining at home all day.”

“Wise old Medin Chin strikes again then,” I muttered.

Chin gave a sigh of resignation.

If there was anyone who could hassle Chin into doing something other than farming, it was his wife. The lady had a way with words, but how could she not? I still remember how she had talked him into dedicating a full month to his wedding, pulling him aside from any form of work for that whole time.

“I’ll just tell her you said no and-”

“Why?” I asked.

“Wha- what do you mean why? I’m an old man, that’s why. Old men don’t cultivate, everybody knows that.”

“Nah,” I said with a smile. “We can give it a try tomorrow night. A couple of hours of meditation and stuff, see where that gets ya.”

Chin frowned.

“With all due respect Mister Bill-”

“Or I can tell Medin you said no?”

Chin sighed and continued walking, murmuring something about having fallen in love with a demon.

“Where are we going?” Chin asked.

"Sightseeing."

"In the woods?" He asked.

"Lots of things to see in the woods."

"Like what?"

"Trees."

"Trees?"

"And animals," I replied.

"We're going to see trees and animals?"

"In a sense."

Chin frowned and I smiled.

“Can you just tell me-”

“And here we are.”

Chin turned his head and looked around, seemingly unable to see what was happening.

“Where?”

I snapped my fingers and immediately the forest fell away. The illusion collapsed to reveal a stump, a giant stump filled with an uncountable amount of little animals yelling at each other. Of course Chin couldn’t hear them, they were all using their auras to speak. They must have looked like a bunch of strange little mice hustling around one another to him.

“Alright,” Lin Tai yelled. “Line up!”

Her voice was stern and impatient. She was commanding the beasts and surprisingly they were obeying. I had worked up a nice little defensive talisman for all the girls, and I’d given Lin Tai a particularly strong one. Still, the talismans were defensive, not offensive. The beasts couldn’t hurt her but they certainly didn’t have to obey her, and yet… they did.

It was weird and nice. She seemed happy as she directed them to their roles, like a very strict but well-meaning preschool teacher. But instead of toddlers, this teacher was managing a bunch of Divine Beasts that made their nests in the void between universes. Aside from that though, it was a very similar job.

“Things going good?”

“Yes. The Dragon has requested to have a death battle with every faction leader so far.”

“THEY PISS IN MY POND!” The lizard yelled.

“Your pond extends to our territory, making it our pond!” A small monkey retaliated.

“YOU DON'T EVEN NEED TO PEE!” The dragon retorted.

“That’s true, but it is our right to do so and it is our land we pee upon!”

The dragon roared indignantly.

“They’re speaking now?” I asked.

“Yes,” Lin Tai nodded.

“Why?”

“Well the groundhogs started to do it-”

“We are the Prarie Party!” A small groundhog yelled.

“Then the monkeys did the same-”

“The Free Beast’s Republic!” A tiny gorilla rebelled.

“Then the birds joined in-”

“The Fowl Kingdom!” A small pheonix harumphed.

“And they’ve all been doing it ever since,” Lin Tai sighed.

“What’s going on?” Chin asked. “What are these things? Why are they yelling at each other?”

“You ever read those fairy tales about little forest creatures having a secret hidden world of their own?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what these are.”

Chin looked around with a squint, studying the little animals from a distance.

“You’re lying. These are animals, small strange animals,” Chin stated

“Yeah, little forest creatures,” I rebutted.

“No. Forest creatures are fairies or elves… not small angry hamsters.”

There was a faint and appalled yell coming from one of the groundhogs, but I ignored them, and so did Chin.

“This is your doing, isn’t it?” Chin said accusatorially. “You given beasts the minds of men to see how they fair?”

“No it isn’t.”

“It is!” One of the groundhogs yelled from the stump. I turned towards the creature and glared. It scurried away, running through its people and into the surrounding bushed.

I sighed.

“I didn’t make them what they are, this is their natural state. I just brought them here.”

“Why?”

“Reasons.”

It was Chin’s turn to sigh.

“Is this why you told me to keep out of the forest?”

“Yeah, needed to get these guys under control first.”

“Are they a threat to the village?”

“Are mountains a threat to the ants that crawl around them?” The same groundhog yelled from the bushes.

This time I frowned and sent out a metaphysical nudge to keep the thing quiet. It screamed again and scurried to another bush.

“No, they’re not,” I replied.

“Can you guarantee that?” Chin asked with a noticeable shift in his voice. It was the same tone and look he’d given me when I’d told him about making my own sect. A firm and questioning look, something that displayed both annoyance and acceptance at the same time.

“Yes Chin, I can guarantee that they will not harm your village.”

Chin kept looking at me for a moment more, then nodded.

“Interesting mix of animals though,” he mumbled.

“It’s what the recipe called for,” I replied.

“You’re going eat them?”

“No, I’m going to eat their presence.”

Chin turned away, once again having given up on getting a straight answer.

The baby, which I had been holding tightly to this whole time was strangely silent. I looked down and found her staring, dumbfounded by all the animals. She had that wide-eyed look children got around dogs and her eyes glimmered with hope, looking from one little creature to another.

A lot of the animals looked at her, though many actively tried to avoid her gaze. I had told some of the beasts and by now I was sure that most of them knew of what she was. They didn’t know the details. They didn’t know the source of her bloodline or her parents or any of the particulars, only that she was the child of some powerful beast who outranked them all.

I’m sure some suspected. After all her aura was in some ways raw and unrifined, but her qi was now hers. I didn’t know if it was Wukong or her own natural development, but over the month or so since she’d been born her qi had settled down. It had mixed and melded and changed to become its own thing. I’d never thought that a primordial’s bloodline could be subdued and hidden away that easily, but I suppose if any bloodline held a chance at competing against it, it would be the Tamer’s.

And I suspected that Wukong had done something as well, aiding the mixture and coagulation of the two natures. I knew he had helped the girl mask her bloodline as one of his favors to me, but I didn’t know what that implied. Did he change the bloodline, or did he merely hide it? Had given her a bit of his own essence, making some kind of threeway blood child?

I didn’t know. And honestly, I didn’t care.

I laid the baby down on a small wooden crib and immediately she started to struggle, screaming angerily for release.

“Alright fellas, you know the drill!” I yelled.

And all the little animals did indeed know the drill. They all line up from the crib to the forest and even further on. A lot of them were the weaker members of the species, those around the seventh to ninth rank, but that was the composition of most of the beasts in the forest. Only the few tenth to twelfth rankers stuck around, prideful and watching from a distance.

I stared at the first animal in line. It was that groundhog, the noisy one. I frowned at him, but the little hamster glared back in bravery. Damn, the little bastard must have known I wasn’t going to do anything.

I waved impatiently at him, and he jumped over the crib. After that, the one behind him did the same as well, and the one behind them, and so on. Chin and I watched as the little creatures jumped one after another, and the girl in the crib’s eyes glazed over.

“Is… is she counting sheep?” Chin asked after a minute of contemplation.

“Yeap,” I replied.

“And that works?”

“In this case it does. She’s a fifth-rank Chin, she doesn’t need sleep. And because she doesn’t need sleep, if I want her to sleep it’ll have to be through special means.”

“And that’s by counting little talking hamsters?”

Somewhere a groundhog squaled in anger.

“It works. They all have different qi signatures and characteristics and the baby loves looking at them one by one. It’s more like consistent overstimulation of the senses rather than counting sheep.”

“Letting her tire herself out with little toys,” he replied.

“Precisely.”

“Why haven’t you named her yet?” Chin asked.

“I have, she just doesn’t like any of the names I’ve offered.”

“Oh,” Chin replied with a nod. “Do all babies name themselves or something? Up in the higher realms?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “This is my first baby.”

As we continued to talk, the baby continued to count. Her eyes glazed over as monsters and immortals leaped over her head. She focused her senses and relaxed her little mind the best she could, and she watched. Watched the beasts, watched us, watched the world, go by. And eventually, her little baby eyes and her little baby mind gave up and closed.