Chapter 236: Merely Ancestral Celestials! III
Xuanwu smiled as it...was a calm smile, the smile of a being that had lived a very long time. He kept his voice pleasant!
He asked small questions.
"Where had the young friend come from? What did you make of the demon territories?"
The measuring produced nothing.
Damian did not answer!
His aura remained unreadable, foreign in a way that Xuanwu’s centuries of perception couldn’t resolve into anything familiar, and the longer the conversation went without yielding information, the more Xuanwu wanted to know what he was dealing with. A treasure that couldn’t be sensed. A being that couldn’t be measured!
A beam of obsidian power that had reached the floating lands above the clouds from a source that presented as a young man and nothing more.
He needed data.
Through the private channels that beings of his level used to communicate without lesser things overhearing, Xuanwu gave an order to one of the pig-faced Ancestral Celestials at the edge of the procession. A simple instruction.
Test him. Strike, and see what happens, and let the rest of us learn from what we observe.
The pig-faced Celestial obeyed.
From its existence, mountains formed and rivers gathered, the developed authority of an Ancestral Land that had been built across far more years than Zhuque’s, and it sent all of it down toward the young being on the tower in a single committed strike!
The attack was real. It descended toward Damian with the speed of something that expected to land!
From the perspective of the watching Celestials, Damian did not move.
He did not raise a hand. He did not gather power. He did not so much as shift his stance on the tower platform. He simply stood there as the mountains and rivers came down toward him as they began to unravel!
And the Ancestral Celestial who had thrown them began to scream.
It happened to the attacker, not the target. The pig-faced Celestial’s expression went from confident to confused to terrified in the span of a breath, and then it began to age. Its power left it in a rush that nothing it did could stop, the centuries of Ancestral Land development draining out of its existence while its internal mountains and rivers, the attack barely hanging in the air halfway to Damian, lost their cohesion and dissolved into nothing. The Celestial shriveled!
Its developed Land collapsed inward. It lost its place in the sky as the power that had kept it there abandoned it, and it fell!
HUUM!
It fell the entire distance from the procession to the ground of the demon capital, and when it hit, there was nothing left of it powerful enough to survive the impact.
It turned to paste on the crimson stone below.
...!
Silence fell over the Ancestral Celestials.
It was a heavy silence.
Their gazes turned grave. Every one of them had lived a long life. Every one of them had built an Ancestral Land across centuries of careful cultivation. Every one of them had reached the heights above the clouds precisely because they had been good at not dying, at calculating risk, at knowing which fights to have and which to walk away from.
And every one of them also had pride.
Those two things sat in conflict now across the entire procession. The pride that had brought them down here, that bristled at being warned by a young being below the clouds. And the instinct for survival that had just watched a peer turn to paste. Neither won.
The procession simply hung in the crimson sky, grave and uncertain, while none of them knew what to do.
Xuanwu then laughed.
"It seems there is more here than what we know," he said, easy and warm, as if the death below had been an unfortunate accident rather than the result of his own private order.
"Again, what is the name of our young friend? I will pass the word to others, so they know you are down here."
He said it casually.
Damian looked up at him.
"I know you were the one who commanded that now-dead bag of bones below," Damian said. "He made the choice to attack. Adversity crushed him for it." His obsidian eyes held the turtle’s blue ones.
"But you also made a choice. You chose to command him. So you have invited adversity onto yourself now. This is also a choice."
...!
HUUM!
The air around the procession turned cold.
The warmth Xuanwu had been performing fell away, and what replaced it was the chill of a High Ancestral Celestial reminding itself of what it was.
"Young friend," he said, and his voice had hardened, "one has to know when to push and when to pull. You don’t want the entire Realm as your enemy. We belong to a terrifying force in this Realm, and beings like us are not the end of it. There are powers above us that you cannot imagine. Killing one of us is a small thing. Drawing the attention of what stands behind us is not."
...!
Damian did not seem to care.
"For your choice," he said, "you also face the consequence. But I am in a good mood, so the consequence will be light." He tilted his head. "Because I don’t want the stupid outcome where all of you die here and then thousands more Ancestral Celestials come down to find out why. So you will be the messengers instead."
"I am Vakochev. Let it be known that if nobody seeks adversity with me, they will have no adversity from me." His eyes burned steady. "But if they do."
He tapped a single finger.
HUUM!
Xuanwu reacted instantly. Golden seas surged out of the massive turtle’s existence, lands rose, the full defensive weight of a High Ancestral Celestial’s developed Ancestral Land throwing itself up between Xuanwu and whatever was coming!
It was the defense of a being that had survived everything the Realm had thrown at it for longer than the empires below had existed, and it was thorough, and it was fast, and it was the best that one of the most powerful beings in this region of the sky could produce!
And...
Oh!
It lost!
Half of Xuanwu’s power left him in an instant.
The golden seas drained. The lands collapsed back inward. The hundred-mile turtle howled, a sound of genuine shock that rolled across the crimson sky and shook the clouds above, as half of everything it had built across its long existence was simply taken, pressed down by the downward arrow Damian had touched on its Source, gone in the time it took to tap a finger.
The other Ancestral Celestials surged backward.
They moved as one, putting distance between themselves and Damian, and the atmosphere turned deafening with the sound of powerful beings retreating in unison.
Xuanwu hung in the sky, its power reduced by half, its radiant blue eyes wide, its breath coming hard, and the rest of the procession stared at it and then at Damian!
If even Xuanwu couldn’t defend against this being, then none of them could!
