219. [Karmic Battery]

The answer to Alistair’s question, unfortunately, was that Aylesfort had no lesson for them.

The next day, when he arrived at the Contribution Hall an inner disciple told them that the elder was indisposed. Apparently, he was off on important sect business, so their next class would be in four weeks, right after Fuhao’s ball.

More than even the venerable Aylesfort’s class, Alistair had chosen the direction of [Hand of Karma].

The Pathfinder had offered him a choice like with [Phase Shift] and [Fighter’s Instinct]. An improved version of the old Skill, or a brand-new Skill that came with its own benefits and drawbacks.

Skill Evolution: [Hand of Karma] (Tier 4 Expert Skill): Sever Fate and soul with a hand of Karma. Karma Cost: 10.

Accept (A/B):

A:

Tier 4 Expert Skill [Hand of Karma] lost.

Tier 1 Master Passive Skill [Karmic Battery] gained.

[Karmic Battery] (Tier 1 Master Passive Skill): Max Karma +100%. Karma regeneration set to 0.1% of max Karma (further upgrades improve this number). Karma cannot be actively burned, but upon reaching Max Karma is passively burned commensurate to user’s Karma regeneration, but at 75% increased efficiency. User can grant Karmic energy that burns at the same rate as user to other people through physical contact. If user possess the ability to actively burn Karma, this Skill becomes inactive. Upgradeable (0/2,000).

B:

[Hand of Karma] becomes Tier 5. 15% increase ineffectiveness and range.

Now this change was more substantial than anything he’d seen before. [Karmic Battery] wasn’t just a branching of [Hand of Karma], it was a complete transformation.

The negatives were obvious. No longer would Alistair be able to wrap his attacks in cloaks of Karmic energy, able to sear the threads of Fate. No longer would he be able to peer as deeply into the future, though thanks to [Dharmic Gaze], he would be at around 40% of his previous capability as a Foundation.

The positives? A ridiculous amount of Karma that was always active, always affecting Fate. According to his calculations, if his passive Karmic burn was equal to his regeneration, it would be 1.299 per minute.

That was only 0.1 point per minute behind the amount he spent on his four-hour deep-sea dives, the dives he had to save up for nearly two days for!

This was frankly revolutionary. It would speed up his training by almost 100%. He could deep-sea cultivate every day.

But that wasn’t all. What about Contribution Hall missions, lucky encounters, and potential Quests? Having such an absurd passive Karmic boost would increase the likelihood of fortuitous circumstances in everything.

It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that Alistair was being given the powers of a full-on primary Charisma Attribute cultivator while maintaining his combat focus.

But… the downsides of losing active Karmic use were something he had never even considered. It was his ace in the hole, a comfort that he had a way out. The ability had saved his ass countless times.

The debate came down to current power vs. future power. With {Samsaric Guide}, he could get his Karma to truly towering heights. His speed of cultivation would be unrivaled, and his foundations would get better to.

But he would be making a short-term sacrifice, and a large one at that.

Take a blow to give a blow is how Chu Hua put it, Alistair thought. You could say it’s a corollary to you cannot strike without giving an opportunity for your opponent to strike. It’s two sides of the same coin. Another duality. It’s decided, then.

Alistair took the blow to give the blow. He chose [Karmic Battery].

The results of that were immediately obvious.

For the next four weeks, Alistair spent eight hours a day in the depths. Threefold Breath Cultivation and Spiritual Dragon Cycling worked in tandem, drawing in the condensed liquid affinity Mana and churning it through his body with his throbbing life force.

Every time he went to the mission board, he was always able to get one of the highest-paying Middle Adept missions. He received an unusual amount of reptilian and draconic beast hunt missions, progressing his bloodline and gaining 10 Endurance with {Letting of the Beast}.

Over the four weeks, he grew closer to Berengar and Riyord. No doubt it was fueled by their shared battle experience against the heretics.

The friendship between the two roommates started out of convenience. Like Alistair, Riyord’s foundations were lacking. In fact, he might have started in a worse place, not having an initiation that selected an elite echelon. His planet was just some dump in Amarasta Duchy, possessing hardly more ambient Mana than Earth had.

Berengar tutored Riyord in the ways of the cultivator and the history and etiquette of the Final Frontier Empire, while Riyord trained Berengar in his sleep.

Adept realm cultivators didn’t really have to sleep unless they received a serious injury or stressor, physical or mental. The fifteen-year-old mage was capable of forming a lucid dreamscape where Berengar could perfect his technique and skills against any opponent his brain could conjure.

There were the Training Grounds and missions, but sometimes you just needed to face the same opponent twice. Or a hundred times, learning with each defeat. Riyord’s dream Dao was better and far cheaper than the holographic training facilities.

Alistair was not the only one to take notice of the prodigy—Norman Goldhair, the 8th-ranked inner disciple—recruited the mage for missions like Chu Hua had with him. The ever-friendly Profound realm always had a piece of juicy gossip or interesting news.

For instance, he corroborated Chu Hua’s claim that Elder Da Siar Ka was about to exit seclusion. Since he was her beloved apprentice, Alistair accepted this rumor as truth.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. As one of the foremost inner disciples, he heard things that Alistair didn’t.

Captains all over the Empire were grumbling about their ships being seized by imperial agents. The great starforges, dormant for millions of years, thrummed with renewed purpose. To what end, no one was quite sure.

The Clear Water Sect was being shut out of sect politics. All the elders blamed the unfortunate misunderstanding with their exception to the taxes, yet for some reason, the Tiarvon had sent their princess.

No one could explain that, either. The Tiarvon were intimately close with the top four sects of the Empire, the very sects shunning the Clear Water.

People all over the Empire had noticed the strange number of missing or inactive Progenitors.

The Eight-Eighty Progenitor Clans were one of the pillars of the Empire, despite their waning power. Any remaining Progenitor Clans were old, old things with long memories, memories of the First Emperor leading them to salvation.

While at times they strayed from the light, they were currently aligned to the Emperor, so many wondered if it was the corporations’ doing. Such a bold act seemed unlikely, but then again, where were the hundreds of Profound and Visionary Progenitors?

There were also rumors of an invasion of the Empire—past or future, that was the unclear part.

Alistair had quickly ascertained that the past rumors of invasion came from the Barrow Province. Even the Emperor couldn’t hide the thousands of Visionaries and Profounds he sent to liberate the zombie worlds.

People talked. Not as many as you might expect, since almost everyone died before the cavalry arrived. Those who did survive spoke of Pathfinder-less cultivators with unfathomable means.

The vast array of schemes was not something that Alistair could penetrate at the moment. How did the Cabal’s infiltrate relate, if at all? The invaders from an involved polity, did they know about Red and Nenna?

Did those events relate to the events happening within the Empire, or were they coincidences?

All that Alistair knew was that he had to get stronger. His father, John, the firebird, and everyone else on Earth were counting on him. His planet wasn’t safe as long as it was associated with the key, and if he wanted to have any power to change things, he needed to get to at least the Visionary realm as fast as possible before it was too late.

That started small. Somehow, he managed to recruit Red for a very peculiar mission.

Chu Hua was far more tight-lipped than Norman, but everyone had a weakness. If the Heavens were going to bless Red with the most handsome face a man could have, then he needed to put it to work.

Operation Flirt to Convert Chu Hua was underway. To his surprise, Red took the mission quite seriously. A tiny part of him was hoping the Cabal recruit would fail, but that was naturally impossible. The weekly progress reports he gave him were proof of that.

Giving Elder Aylesfort the Beast Core and skull had been the right move, but now he was wishing he had kept a small part. However, they found a minor breakthrough the week before Fuhao’s gala.

Minor was the important word in that phrase. They had scrubbed the beaches of Wailing Siren for hours looking for clues, but the traitor was good at hiding their tracks. Instead, they tried every major beast mission they could find, abusing Alistair’s Karma to get there first.

The breakthrough was not found in any specific mission, but in the general trend. It was Dev'rox who noticed it first.

After nearly seven weeks at the sect taking missions, the imp pointed out that there weren’t any snake-like beasts.

The beast subjugation missions were obviously highly varied. He’d taken down all manner of beast, from huge direwolves to shadow affinity ants. But never a snake of any kind, after the duskscale serpents.

Alistair did the math, double-checking it with his sister just in case. He did research on the prevalence of serpentine beasts, and confirmed they were one of the most common in the multiverse.

This was not natural, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. He eventually informed Elder Aylesfort, though even that felt uneasy.

The elder had been nothing but helpful, but what if he was in on the conspiracy too?

Alistair admonished that kind of paranoid thinking. He had already chosen to inform the Head of the Contribution Hall about the Old Man of the Lighthouse. If Elder Aylesfort was the traitor, there wasn’t much he could.

Elder Fanghorn’s lessons were informative as always, if annoying because of his unreasonable tendencies.

His recent lessons focused on the Pathfinder AI, the conception of the Dao, and soulcores.

The Pathfinder was a topic of great interest to Alistair, who hadn’t thought about the implication that not everyone in the multiverse had one. In fact, that number was a tiny, tiny minority of everyone in existence.

Much of what Elder Fanghorn said he had figured out in his own investigations, but much of the information was new.

As Alistair had surmised, the Sublime Machined Faction was a polity in the multiversal core. Whether they were at the peak of the multiverse or merely a great faction, no one in the Empire had any idea.

They claimed to have invented the Dao of Technology, thrusting it up to encompass an entire Dao Nexus. Whether this was apocryphal or canon, once again, no one knew, though that part of the lesson tied into the Dao Nexus session quite well.

Regardless of the origins of the Dao of Technology, the Pathfinder AI was proof of their claims to dominion. The AI was built into the fabric of the very universe, explaining how the great being of 0s and 1s had arrived so fast to defeat the demon cultists.

Mana, it turned out, was not a naturally occurring substance. Qi was. He got the sense that even the Sublimed Machine conflated Mana and Qi for ease of use, but strictly speaking, Qi was the quintessence produced by the Heart of All Creation and individual soulcores.

The Pathfinder AI refined Qi into Mana automatically, even altering their soulcore membrane to instantiate the process. Alistair had no idea what the consequences of that were, if any. They claimed that Mana was just straight up superior, lacking impurities and earthly taint, but that seemed too easy.

Everything in this world is not as it seems, Alistair thought. Everything is for someone’s benefit.

While his path was that of justice, his path was required because of the sordid state of affairs. He was under no illusion that those at the peak had noble intentions.

That wasn’t the only alteration the Pathfinder performed on their soulcores. The inventory, or more accurately, soulspace, was a function found in Visionary realms and above in the wider multiverse.

Classes, Badges, Skills, Talents, Achievements, and Quests were the Pathfinder’s way of divvying up resources.

When he got Badges that granted extra stats, the Pathfinder was literally remaking him on an atomic level. When he got {Crimson Bones}, the Pathfinder was building him extra organs and creating new neural pathways.

Quests allowed the Pathfinder to allocate Fate and reclaimed resources from nature and humanity, while Achievements were a way to standardize and support Dao History.

Alistair had Achievements in Discovery, Dueling, Conquest, Arcana, Politics, and Domain, but those weren’t the only categories. He was missing Alchemy, Formation, and Infamy, to name the major ones.

With the variety and magnitude of the quadrillions of bonuses the Pathfinder AI granted, he began to wonder how exactly they accomplished pulling it off.

Holy shit, Alistair thought. Do I have little nanobots crawling around my body?

The one constant of the Sublimed Machine Faction was that they often used extremely advanced technology in place of the Dao. Their approach went against orthodox cultivation, but he found some common ground. Technology was man’s conquest over nature, and their technology represented man’s ascent toward Heaven.

As he had once acknowledged before, the Sublimed Machine’s ideology wasn’t so far from his own. However, with the methods that he had seen them employ, they felt far more amoral than the Eternal Mercy Sect. What they had done to River’s civilization was unbelievably cruel.

Whether he had nanobots or not, there was nothing he could do. The only thing he was sure about was that once he reached the peak of Exalted, the current Pathfinder instantiation he possessed would become useless.

One day, if he wanted to continue incorporating the Pathfinder AI into his cultivation of the “mature” realms, Ascendant, Divine, and Truthseeker, he would need to journey to the Sublimed Machine Faction’s true core—their territories at the source of the Leyline of Carnation’s Maw.

Speaking of leylines, there were thirteen of them, and Alistair got to learn their names.

There were the Leyline of Authority, the Leyline of the Making, the Leyline of the Unmaking, the Leyline of Yin-Yang, the Leyline of Dead Life, the Circular Leyline, the Leyline of Void’s Gaze, the Leyline of Heaven’s Grace, the Leyline of Autonomous Causality, the Leyline of Earthly Desire, the Leyline of Unblemished Spirituality, the Leyline of the Contemplated Intellect, and the Empire’s home, a rivulet of the Leyline of Carnation’s Maw.

Elder Fanghorn had no clue as to what the names of the leylines meant, but one thing was for certain—the Leyline of Carnation’s Maw was the weakest of the thirteen. Not substantially so, but the ambient Qi along their home river was considered noticeably thinner than the foremost leylines.

Leylines were essential to higher-realm cultivators, and empires trillions of times larger than the FFE fought endless wars over their dominion.

There were only two sources of new Mana in the multiverse: soulcores and the Heart of All Creation at the center of the Physical Plane. It was a raging debate among Cosmic Theoreticians whether this process was energy-neutral or energy-positive, with both camps having relatively equal sway. Even universal Dao Hearts merely pumped out Qi from the Heart of All Creation, transported via leyline.

The final lesson was on Dao Nexuses. Despite the plethora of topics the elder previously discussed, this topic most intrigued him. The Dao was the most central aspect of cultivation, even if Mana and especially nue were undervalued.

There were twenty-two Dao Nexuses, but they weren’t set in stone. Parallel Attunement worked because Daos weren’t locked into their Nexus. Alistair wondered if the thoughts of sapient creatures influenced the Nexuses themselves. If the Dao of Technology hadn’t existed before the Sublimed Machine Faction, that would be proof of his hypothesis.

Dao Nexuses allowed Daos to be categorized neatly. Relative strengths and weaknesses of the Daos allowed for a harmonious system, yet undergirded the true chaos. Still, the existence of the Daos of the Elements, Essences, and Confluences created a stable base.

Something like the Dao of Burning Destruction would fall under the purview of the Essence of Ruination or Disintegration. Even so, a cultivator’s concept might not fit any Greater Dao exactly, which was why the Dao Organizational Map was a guide, not a rule.

Seven lessons concluded Elder Fanghorn’s remedial class. While Alistair could barely find a merit with the Profound realm cultivator, the lessons had brought up his foundational knowledge to acceptable levels.

Alistair reached level 109 by the day before the gala, surpassing even his peers who came into the sect at a higher level. With Dev'rox’s help, purification elixirs, and more spending of merit points, he ensured that his fast progress wasn’t messing up his soulcore in any way.

The gala that Fuhao mentioned crept up like a shadow on a long summer day. He needed to get some fancier robes, and perhaps a brush-up on etiquette.

Alistair thought that the gala would be even more deadly than any combat mission. Unlike hunting beasts, if he encountered a problem, he couldn’t just punch it in the face.