Chapter 232: My Scale of Adversity! I
Damian gazed down at the kneeling Demon Emperor.
Serala stood at one shoulder. His Ama stood at the other, whole now, white-gold and grand, her body real and her pain gone.
The Demon Emperor knelt on the floor of the garden where he had collapsed during the Empress’s transformation and woken to find himself exactly where he least wanted to be, which was conscious and in the presence of the being that had unmade two Ancestral Celestials over the River of the World.
There was an overabundance of information flowing through Damian’s existence at this moment.
The Pure Primordial Essence had done something to him that he was still cataloging, rivers of it integrating into his being and bringing knowledge with them, knowledge he hadn’t sought and didn’t fully understand yet. He truly didn’t know how to explain his current power.
It sat so far above and beyond anything the Lands of Stone knew, and the cultivation system of the Ancestral Celestials, the whole framework of Ancestral Lands and Transcendence that Zhuque had presented as the supreme structure of existence, could not compare to this. He had suspected as much above the River. The Essence had turned the suspicion into certainty.
But certainty about his power wasn’t the matter in front of him.
The matter in front of him was judgment.
He had promised his father he would scorch every demon from existence. He had said it during the communion above the Cradle, had meant it, had carried it as one of the fixed points his purpose orbited around. And yet in the last few minutes, his Ama had looked at him with a softened gaze and asked him something he had not expected to be asked.
She had asked whether there was a way to handle the demons without committing genocide against their entire population.
Genocide.
It was an interesting word for the situation, and an interesting position for his Ama to take. He didn’t think she had grown fond of the demons. She knew exactly what they were, knew it better than he did, having existed among them for eight summers without a body while they studied her and used her and kept her in a tower.
But the succubus who had been tending the garden with her, and perhaps others he hadn’t met, must have treated her with some measure of decency, because his Ama was the kind of person who remembered decency even when it came from things that didn’t deserve credit for much else.
He raised his gaze and let his senses spread across the garden, the tower, the crimson citadel, the surrounding miles.
He sensed everything.
He sensed the demons moving throughout the capital. He sensed the members of the 72 Dukes who served under the Demon Emperor already moving toward this tower, drawn by the commotion, the deaths of Barbatos and the demon beside her, the pillar of obsidian power that had flowed through the structure during the Empress’s transformation.
He sensed lesser demons going about whatever lesser demons went about, moving through the streets of the citadel, talking to each other and among each other, carrying things and tending to things and living the small ordinary lives that even monsters lived between the moments that made them monsters.
It almost seemed like any tribe. Any city. Any population of beings sharing a place and getting through their days.
Except the higher members of their lineage were the ones who enjoyed eating the flesh and souls of other lifeforms.
Because of that, the situation resisted the simple answer his father had given him.
Damian was quiet for a moment, and then he spoke, and his voice carried the calm that had become his baseline.
"Life across the Lands of Stone is unfathomably hard," he said. "It is hard before anyone makes it harder. And then it is made harder by other lifeforms sharing the same place. There is conflict. There is competition. There is natural selection. Those most fit to survive end up surviving, while entire tribes of Dross get swept up in a tide of beasts and trampled, losing their lives in the span of a single night. You can have entire tribes harvested and eaten by demons before the sun comes up."
He looked at the citadel beyond the garden walls. "I have come to realize that this is simply life. This is how existence is arranged. It is filled with boundless adversity and challenge, and most of the time, the adversity wins."
His Ama watched him. Serala watched him. The Demon Emperor kept his eyes on the floor.
"I want to change this," Damian said. "I want to give everyone a chance. To give the Dross a chance. So that in the lands I will never see, the lands I don’t even know exist, if there are demons or beasts preying on those who can’t defend themselves, the ones being preyed upon can at least stand a chance of defending themselves."
As he said it, he felt THE Primordial Source within him, paired now with the Pure Primordial Essence, buzz with something that he could only describe as affirmation. His whole existence seemed to lean in the direction his words were heading, as if the power he carried recognized what he was reaching toward and approved of the reaching.
His first elevation through THE Primordial Source had been for his mother.
What he wanted to do now was larger.
He thought about the Lands of Stone and the demons and the beasts and every lifeform scraping survival from a world that didn’t care whether they survived, and he thought about the scale that everything was currently judged on, which was power, raw and inherited and unearned as often as not.
A Dross born without the capacity to hold Mana was ground to dust regardless of how hard they tried. An Anointed One born into power kept it regardless of what they did with it. The scale was fixed before anyone made a single choice, and it stayed fixed no matter what choices followed.
He had spent eight summers on the wrong side of that scale.
"From this point onward," he said, and his voice changed, taking on the weight of something being decided rather than discussed, "if one struggles in adversity. If one puts in the effort. If one does everything they can. Let them have a chance."
He looked at the Demon Emperor, at his Ama, at Serala, at the citadel beyond. "I am a nobody. I cannot judge others on what they do, on what they are, on the circumstances they were born into. But there should be a single scale that judges everyone the same way. A scale where the adversity each lifeform faces, and the choices they make, and the actions they take, can be measured and counted and answered against."
He let the idea finish forming as he spoke it.
"A scale where choices matter. Where adversity and effort can change someone from nothing into something grand, regardless of what they were born as. On this side of the River of the World, and beyond it, and everywhere my reach extends, I wish to establish this scale."
HUUM!
His obsidian eyes burned steady. "A Scale of Life. A Scale of Existence. I will call it... my Scale of Existence. Vakochev’s Scale of Existence. It will act as the judge and the executioner for all those moving across the Lands of Stone and all the choices that they make."
BOOM!
