185. Learning One's Past

Alistair learned that over a day had passed in the sauna. The heat and Mana were good for his mental state and cultivation, but he left a mental reminder to never get too distracted by one of them if he had plans.

Over the course of the next day, he feasted on the best food he had ever had. Sure, the Dragon’s Head Tavern was great for a mortal chef, but they couldn’t hold a candle to a cultivator chef, especially one at the Profound realm.

As an honored guest of the Grand Imperator, he received a complimentary meal including a Mana-filled hamburger. The beef was farmed from non-sapient Adept realm aurochs on a farm planet, seasoned with herbs that he couldn’t pronounce.

It was clear that this kind of cultivation food was not something he could expect regularly. It was prohibitively expensive to feed Foundation realms food of that quality. Indeed, when he checked the prices, it was far beyond his budget.

Before leaving Earth, Alistair had set up the finances for his world. His personal salary was only 0.1% of their total revenue, amounting to 1,135 Gold drachma per day. The rest of the 99.9% was for the new world government. Now that they weren’t northeast anymore, he was considering a name change, but there wasn’t a concrete name in mind yet.

1,135 per day was a drop in the ocean of what a future Adept realm needed, considering that his coffers were at zero at the moment. He couldn’t even access the Land Store outside of his territories.

There were a couple of options for earning money, though he wouldn’t really need drachma at the sect. He could hunt beasts, collect Natural Inheritances, bounty hunt, amongst other jobs. The problem was that at his current realm of cultivation, those kind of jobs weren’t the highest paying.

However, money was less important than his leveling. If a job was important enough, the Pathfinder AI could issue a Quest. The rewards of non-initiation Quests were usually leveling Mana and Upgrade Points.

Alistair asked Praetei what the easiest way to pick up Quests was. She told him that most jobs didn’t cause the creation of one, and that they were more likely to be issued when taking missions of importance to powerful individuals or a large number of people.

For example, rescuing the kidnapped daughter of a planetary lord or saving a country from a Beast Ruler were things likely to create Quests, while finding a lost kitten was unlikely to do so.

That turned out to be one of the ways that Charisma-based cultivators kept up in leveling.

At face value, that stat barely helped in combat. A non-Karmic cultivator’s Charisma bettered their Fates and attracted others at a personal level, but couldn’t be used like Alistair’s [Hand of Karma] or [Eyes of Truth].

If your primary Attribute was Charisma, you got awarded with both much better Quest rewards and a much higher chance of getting them in the first place. Still, it was the least cultivated Attribute in the Final Frontier Empire, and most likely in other polities that had Pathfinders.

Alistair’s main reason for increasing his Charisma was twofold—the incredible Jack of All Trades Badge, and the doubling of base Karma. Now, he had a third purpose.

For the next three weeks of the trip, he split his time in three main ways.

First was cultivating. Praetei graciously granted him access to one of the custom chambers where could attune the Mana to blood, ice, lightning, and force. Unfortunately, she was too busy doing official Grand Imperator things for another meeting.

Second was the library, where he often socialized with Evangeline. He found that the sect members and inhabitants of the ship weren’t that interested in talking to him.

Third was sparring. He didn’t need the others to be gregarious to exchange pointers. There was a massive training hall for all variety of styles.

Alistair chose to focus only on the fists, incorporating {Psychopomp’s Discipline} and the styles of the Silver Comet Sect and Church of the Holy Ones. His intention was to synergize all the styles he knew into a cohesive unit that still kept his personal touch.

Skills were cool and all, but unarmed combat was the base of his fighting style. Getting rusty in that would lead to doom in a real cultivator fight. Thankfully, there were a few pugilists on board willing to suppress their cultivation to a Late Foundation realm for sparring.

Despite their suppression and his own talent, he found it impossible to win. His victories were found in increasing the time it took for his opponent to seize victory.

An Adept realm’s understanding of the Dao was fundamentally superior to his own. The superiority of the Dao was inherent to their technique. Even if they moved at the same speed and struck with the same force as him, their skill was too high to broach.

Still, his sessions slowly improved his understanding. His Dao of the Fist was approaching a third deepening, making him curious about the future of his Nodes.

Alistair was cultivating three broad Daos. Unlike Alexandra and Pharaoh, whose Nodes had names like “Barbaric Rage” and “Lost Sands,” his were basic concepts. Fist, Justice, Ghost.

There was nothing wrong or right about this. You could make it to at least Exalted, if not higher, starting with Justice and turning it into something crazy like Avenging Hand of the Downtrodden Laborer, or you could start with Ocean’s Tide and eventually turn it into the elemental Dao of Liquid.

However, Alistair had a feeling that he would not pursue Fist, Justice, and Ghost to their respective peaks alone.

He had this feeling because already he was considering them part of a holistic goal. His idea of creating a paradise for the multiverse was more central to his being than the Fist or Ghost, and it didn’t quite match Justice exactly.

Eventually this would culminate in a singular Dao that encompassed everything, but that was aeons away. Three would have to become two before one, and he wasn’t sure how his three would become two. An opportune moment might be when he would transform his Dao Nodes into Dao Focuses near the end of the Adept realm.

This was information that he found in the library, stating that big picture transformations like name changes were best suited to upgrades like Nodes to Focuses.

Alistair became almost as big a bookworm as his sister, though his principal topic of focus wasn’t cultivation, but understanding the sects, and his in particular.

He reasoned that any public cultivation books on the ship were extremely basic, as no one gave out important cultivation secrets for free. He would learn what he needed to at the sect.

Instead, the more important information to acquire was how the sects operated. How he needed to act, what he needed to know.

The library didn’t have any books on the Clear Water Sect in particular, so he devoured the texts that he had seen before: History of the Sects During the Reign of Emperor Dragus and The Makers and Movers: Important Cultivators from the Reigns of the Last Two Fell Emperors.

While they didn’t have a physical form, they listed a word count.

Alistair’s mind was boggled. Both books contained more than a billion words. You could fit five thousand Iliads into a single one of them.

Both books were written by a single author—Tameruz Kladen. There was no doubt he was a high level in some type of Scholar Class. Even with Alistair’s own Intelligence, it would take him over a month reading 24/7 to finish. Thankfully, he didn’t need to read all of it.

Most of the books were about long-dead Visionaries who had shaped the Final Frontier Empire. Without special means, even a Peak Visionary only lived a million years, which was a far cry from the reign of Emperor Dragus’s nine million years, or his father’s fifteen million.

As such, hallowed names like the Sword Saint of Mai Atal or Sanctuary’s Troesh Toleria were meaningless. Rogue cultivators who never passed down their legacy often had little impact on the state of current affairs. It was a sobering thought, that these men and women that reached the near the peak of cultivation on the frontier left so little an impact.

Of course, there were some names that still influenced the present. One of those was the founder of the Clear Water Sect, Gideon the Golemmaker.

A rogue cultivator who ascended to the top of the Final Frontier Empire from undistinguished foundations, he had no family name, known mononymously or by his epithet, “Golemmaker.”

Alistair’s readings told him that Gideon rose up during the 10th Fell Empress, Mira Laketor. He founded the Clear Water Sect 47 million years ago, making it a middle-aged sect. Its history couldn’t be compared to the sects around since the First Fell Emperor, but neither were its foundations as new as the sects founded during the current reign.

Gideon was a genius without compare in the Empire, and he rose to Visionary within two hundred years, which was essentially unheard of in the multiversal frontier. His golems allowed him to deal with the scores of enemies he created in his meteoric ascent, protecting the Clear Water Sect that he founded.

The histories said that Gideon had initially served the Empress with loyalty, but it wasn’t enough for the greedy cultivator.

No, Tameruz declared, Gideon desired true immortality, and turned against the Final Frontier Empire. He grew close to reaching Exalted, and Empress Mira was forced to boot him out of the universe.

After that point, no one knew what happened to him. Even if he had reached Exalted, it was still almost 50 million years ago. He would have needed to reach Ascendant to still be alive, unless he found a lifespan cheat.

In her benevolent mercy, the Empress had chosen not to destroy the Clear Water Sect, who had remained loyal to the Empire and fought against their founder once his betrayal was made public.

They used what Gideon left behind, his formations, golems, resources, and cultivation manuals, to become one of the premier sects across the universe. This was before the purchase of the Pathfinder AI near the end of Mira Laketor’s reign, when cultivation manuals mostly became build manuals.

There was a tiny appendix about how Gideon was mischievous and childish, creating secret challenges and hidden rooms. Some even spoke of a lost heritage he left behind, but no one had ever found it, if it even existed.

This was the telling of the story that Tameruz gave in History of the Sects During the Reign of Emperor Dragus. It was a tiny blurb of text within a sea of words, given that the author’s primary goal was to describe the time of Dragus Laketor, not his great-grandmother.

Alistair’s first impression was that it was bullshit. The story sounded way too convenient for the Laketor Clan, whom he didn’t trust one bit. The Clear Water Sect sounded like they had to officially renounce their founder, but he wondered what the Perfect’s thoughts were behind closed doors.

In any case, the Clear Water Sect was amongst the top four sects for tens of millions of years, and it was only during the reign of Emperor Dragus that they had fallen.

Tameruz described a plethora of factors for their disgrace. Most important was the rise of the new economic order under their previous two sect leaders, Wozhan and the Perfect.

This book wasn’t about economics, but as a true historian, he couldn’t describe the big picture without a mention of the changes.

Exactly 1,056,281 years ago, a genius was born, though of a different kind than Gideon. Not a cultivation genius, but a business genius.

Her name was Akata Siar Ka. A woman of shrouded origins, she started as a merchant at the vestiges of the Final Frontier Empire, facilitating trade between border universes. She quickly rose to prominence as a smuggler during the wars between the Final Frontier Empire and the Zarbax Collective.

After the wars, she had amassed a fortune of a small noble family—impressive, but nothing to write home about. It was her actions as a Profound realm that allowed people to see the possibility of a merchant association being on the level of a noble clan or sect.

The book didn’t go into the details, but Alistair ascertained that prior to her existence, the economy of the Final Frontier Empire was closer to feudalism, with the clans and sects having no need to develop any other financial techniques.

However, Siar Ka introduced something closer to what he recognized as modern capitalism, though he couldn’t be entirely certain. Even as a Profound realm, she became one of the wealthiest in the universe, allowing her to collect enough resources to breakthrough to Visionary before she died of old age.

The book also answered a burning question he had once he learned about her story: how exactly she was able to gather so much power while the Emperor, the nobility, and sects existed and were unwilling to give it up.

Tameruz didn’t dive into too much detail. What he did say was that she quickly became indispensable for the FFE, as was often abbreviated, and there were speculations she had an outside backer that scared away direct intervention, though those rumors were never confirmed.

Whatever the truth underlying Akata Siar Ka was, her impact couldn’t be understated—especially on the Clear Water Sect.

The patriarch at the time was Wozhan, and like his successor, he had a strict code of honor and was old-fashioned in his mentality. He refused to deal with the new corporations, believing them to be beneath a proper cultivator’s notice.

The other top four sects publicly agreed, though as it would later turn out, they all made backroom deals with Siar Ka. Over tens of thousands of years, the Clear Water Sect fell behind as they could no longer provide the cultivation resources that their rivals could, and talents went elsewhere.

By the time Wozhan had realized what had happened, it was too late. Not that he would have changed his mind. He was a stubborn man and stuck to his beliefs until the end.

It was weird to read about the Perfect in a book. She was born 132,985 years ago, making her young as far as Visionaries went. She was born to two elders of the Clear Water Sect, making her an ideal candidate for Wozhan’s successor.

According to the book, she was considered one of the major proponents of the Old Ways ideology. The Old Ways wasn’t a fixed group, nor a specific political creed. It was a term used by many to describe the set of cultivators who believed the current state of the universe was degeneracy.

However, unlike her predecessor, she was moderate enough to deal with the corporations. She had to, if she wanted the Clear Water to survive.

Officially, the Old Ways ideology was made taboo by Emperor Dragus, though he had never persecuted anyone for the matter. The Old Ways’ leader was considered to be Prince Hoen Tiarvon, widely believed to be the second most powerful cultivator after the Emperor.

The Tiarvon Clan held the fief of Sanctuary, the largest of all thirteen fiefs in terms of population unless you counteed the non-humans of Klei Utom. The book recorded the whispers that Prince Hoen had a method of breaking through to Exalted.

As one of the four Progenitor Clans that still possessed a fief, along with the Portolon, Kai Esoi, and Etu, they commanded immense power. Power that even the Emperor could not ignore without due consideration.

As the unofficial leader of the Old Ways, they never openly defied the Laketor Clan. But behind closed doors, in the shadows, they advocated for a return to traditional norms.

As Alistair expected, he read that this made the Tiarvon Clan an enemy of the corporations. As Dragus had allowed the expansion of the corporations, one might expect him to be an ally, if his greatest enemy was indeed the Tiarvons. However, in recent times, the corporations had grown to the extent that the Emperor felt more threatened from the Akata Corp and Siar Ka Company (the two major offshoots of Siar Ka’s original organization) than the Old Ways.

Whom did the Clear Water Sect detest more? The corruptive corporations, or the Emperor that allowed the festering wound to spread?

Given the power plays happening between the imperial family and the corporations, a declining sect like the Clear Water could have chosen a side. Especially with the recent escalation to the Three Imperial Decrees Against Usury.

That was not Loroa Di Boswann’s code of conduct, and he admired her for it, even if it made the sect he was attending fall precipitously through the rankings to around twentieth in the Empire.

The Perfect, even before the recent situation, had refused to ally herself to either party, nor to Prince Hoen and his inner circle. The Clear Water Sect had old friends, but it would not be tied down to a political purpose.

The Emperor’s recent friendship with the Clear Water Sect had thrown everything into a dizzy. Despite the recency, Tameruz had somehow updated his book with those new facts. No one was quite sure what the Emperor’s intentions were.

Alistair read more about the history of the Final Frontier Empire, and before he had a chance to dive deeper into the The Makers and Movers, he realized that there was only one day left before they were to arrive in the capital of the Harmonious Note System.

His planetary system, he amended. That was where Earth was annexed to, even if the main body of the system was quite a distance since they were so close to Chaos. The addition of FX-14752 increased the system’s planetary count up to 437.

The capital of the Harmonious Note was Ah’Drezakh, a death-attuned planet of 20 billion. Zilvesky Aportamus was a talented up-and-comer of the Barrow Province, a vampiric sword cultivator close to the Profound realm despite being under 200 years old.

Hearing about Baron Aportamus led to another discovery—their duchy was known for being a home to the undead. Alistair would have thought that the unliving were verboten in the multiverse, but apparently not. There were, of course, violent and aggressive undead kingdoms and empires, but the vast majority of undead were peaceful—for cultivators.

Still, they liked to conglomerate together, safety in numbers being the important principle. It just so happened the Nightwatch Duchy was a haven of the undead.

There were few enough planets under his rule that a Baron liked to meet all his planetary lords personally. Alistair was assured that if he showed up at Zilvesky’s door that he would be allowed in.

Evangeline was the one to bring him out of his reading stupor as she asked him a question. “Do you have a plan?”

“What?” Alistair asked, realizing he had been reading for over ten hours without a single break. “A plan for what?”

His sister gave him a pointed look. “I asked you about how you plan on leveling up.”

That was a good question. A question that Alistair didn’t really have an answer for. “Uh, I just thought I’d do it.”

“You’d just do it?” Evangeline had an unfortunate case of lecture-face. “Interesting…”

Alistair rushed to defend himself before something truly horrible happened. “I’ve been diligently cultivating in this environment, and I’m close to level 74 already! Once we land on Ah’Drezakh, I’ll ask the Baron about what we could do to level up in time. I’m more worried about you than about me. You’re only level 65.”

“Don’t worry about me, Alistair,” Evangeline said. “Whatever we figure out, I’ll be fine. We just have to do the figuring part. The Baron will be a good source of information. Did you do the math as well?”

Alistair nodded. “Yep. It’s a little over a level per week for me. That would mean going at a speed twice as fast as I was leveling before, but with a new environment, I think it should be fine.”

“Good. I came to the same conclusion.”

“You’ve transitioned your Class to be partially non-Combat, right?”

“Yes, they call them Lifestyle Classes. It’s more suited to my path as a researcher.”

Alistair couldn’t help but feel a bit of relief at that. It wouldn’t put her out of danger entirely, but Lifestyle Classes were less likely to die in combat.

“There’s still the question of the Domain itself,” Alistair said. “Getting to level 99 is probably easier than that.”

“I’ve already got my idea ready,” Evangeline replied. “What about you?”

“Thankfully, yes. I hope it’s good enough.”

Alistair wrapped up his conversation with his sister and walked out of the library to the main deck a few miles away.

This was something that he had only discovered a few days ago, yet it was now his favorite part of the journey. Yes, surpassing even the sauna that he visited daily.

From the outside, the ship was so enormous you couldn’t see it, but there was a section near the middle, a circular glass roof with a radius of over three hundred feet.

Through the glass dome, the passengers could see the vast expanse of space.

Alistair’s first thoughts were that it was less empty than he expected.

They were already far past the Milky Way galaxy. Given he knew how empty space was, he wasn’t expecting to see anything as they passed through inter-galactic regions.

He was dead wrong. The first time he was on the observation deck, his mind had expanded as he saw a being whose size boggled the mind.

Nothing compared. There was that blood dragon whose bloodline he had taken, but that was more of a spiritual experience.

Feasting on a nearby star was a humanoid figure easily thrice the size of its snack. The being had the shape of a man, its skin black as the surrounding darkness, except with sparkles that looked like galaxies.

On its back was a squid-like creature, its tentacles wrapping around and fusing into the humanoid’s skin. It was composed of hundreds of different colors of every shade, pulsing with dozens of different affinities of Mana. It was as if all the expressions of Mana were encapsulated within the squid’s nature.

Alistair had watched this enormous creature with reverence. The star was on the small side, an O-type blue star, but to be over three times larger than any star was a size that could hardly be comprehended.

A notification had popped up as he wondered what it was. A helpful screen, connected to the observation deck, informed him.

Abyssal Titans are often found in the far fringes of the frontier. Graceful, docile creatures that blend the line of beast and person, the infants our their kind are born the size of rocky planets. They consume mostly stars as food, though other energetic phenomena suffice, and can theoretically live and grow forever as long as they continue to eat.

In the frontier, the stars are not of high enough Mana-concentration to sustain infinite growth, and they will stall out at around the size of the largest natural red giants, around 500 million miles tall.

For this reason, the powers of the core and the involved keep Abyssal Titans away from their territories at all costs. Their rate of growth given cosmic materia is dangerously fast, and an Abyssal Titan that makes it to the involved could become an Exalted in less than a year if they find enough stars.

Abyssal Titans are kept to the outskirts of the frontier to prevent excessive danger. They are extremely hardy and can breed with surprising speed given their lifespans. Without the culling processes that frontier polities use to harvest Abyssal Titan parts, they likely would overwhelm creation.

Besides their sheer numbers and durability, one of the reasons there has not been a concerted effort to eradicate Abyssal Titans is their usefulness in alchemy. Abyssal Titan blood has incredible restorative properties, while Abyssal Titan spinal fluid is used in dozens of potions relating to understanding the Dao. Their bones are often used in weapons needing the hardest material of that cultivation realm, up there with the alloys of the most talented blacksmiths.

Thanks to their sheer numbers, Abyssal Titan parts are relatively cheap and can be afforded by many in the frontier.

Alistair remembered reading those words and being sad that such majestic creatures were harvested, though he understood it had to be done. It did make him curious why the core polities let the frontier work it out on their own, given the seeming danger Abyssal Titans posed as well as their economic potential.

There had to be something else going on, but he was in no position to figure it out.

As they approached Ah’Drezakh, Alistair didn’t see another Abyssal Titan, but there was something almost as cool—a planetary sized Mana Storm.

Mana Storms could form anywhere, only requiring a current of Mana to form in a certain manner. These natural ones didn’t have any Devonic Purebreed inside. They were simply the conglomeration of nature’s wrath.

Bolts of red lightning the size of Praetei’s ship flashed in and out of the clouds of the storm. Flames and ice traded places and mixed together, time and space fluctuating with nearly invisible energy. Pink crystals and white-yellow plasma bubbled to the surface, while bones and explosions interlaced the lightning, despite the absence of oxygen.

This Mana Storm was far more elegant than the ones back on Earth, and Alistair could make out way more types of Mana, including ones that he had never heard of before.

“It’s a large one,” Praetei said. “The Mana concentration out here is higher, but usually you only see storms of this size in the Imperial Heartlands. You’re getting a treat.”

Alistair’s [Reality Sense] didn’t register the Grand Imperator getting so close at all. It was as if she appeared out of nowhere the moment she began talking. The gap between Visionary and Foundation was too great for even his Tier 10 Skill.

“It’s beautiful,” Alistair murmured.

“We’ll be stopping a in a few hours. Are you ready?”

“No,” Alistair admitted. “But that doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Well put,” Praetei said. “Be prepared for something out of your comfort zone. The undead are unnerving to most when first encountered.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I’ve never met this Zilvesky before, but I’ve heard he’s a rising star within Nightwatch. You’d do well to make a good first impression.”

“I will, Grand Imperator.”

“Good, good. Keep your wits about you at all times, and may we meet again in a thousand years.”

With that, Praetei Dai Kezlan disappeared as mysteriously as she came. Alistair relaxed, watching the passing stars as they finished their journey to Ah’Drezakh.