Chapter 237: Experimentation I
It was a strange thing about beings who had lived for centuries.
They were supposed to be the brave ones. They had seen everything, survived everything, accumulated power across spans of time that made the lives of ordinary creatures look like single breaths. By every reasonable expectation, they should have been the hardest to frighten.
The opposite was true.
When faced with overwhelming strength, the beings who had lived the longest became the most cowardly, because they had the most to lose and had spent the most effort keeping it. A creature with one short life could afford to gamble it. A creature with centuries already spent and centuries more expected guarded those centuries with everything it had, and when something appeared that could take them away in the span of a finger tapping the air, that creature wanted nothing in the world except to keep on living!
Damian watched Xuanwu prove it.
The massive winged turtle hung in the crimson sky, reduced by half, its breath still coming hard, and Damian watched it push down its humiliation and its pride. He could see the process happen. He could see the part of Xuanwu that wanted to answer the loss of half its power with the rest of it, and he could see that part lose to the older, deeper instinct that had kept Xuanwu alive long enough to become what it was.
The blue eyes that had measured him with confident interest now held only fear, and Xuanwu did not try to hide it, because hiding it was a luxury for beings who still believed they had options.
Without wasting another second, the turtle turned and rushed back toward the skies.
The other Ancestral Celestials followed!
HUUM!
They went up through the clouds the way they had come down, except faster, the procession that had descended with such confident interest now climbing back toward the floating lands above with the urgency of beings who had learned something and wanted distance between themselves and the thing that had taught it to them.
The crimson sky swallowed them. Within moments, the heights above the demon capital were empty again, and the only evidence that the Ancestral Celestials had ever come down was the stain on the stone below where one of them had not made it back up.
The demons of the capital looked up in terror.
They had watched their Emperor lead an enemy into the heart of their empire. They had watched that enemy unmake an Ancestral Celestial and reduce a High one by half and send the rest fleeing into the clouds. They did not understand what they were looking at!
They only understood that it was beyond anything they had a frame for.
Damian turned his attention to them.
He could sense the 72 Dukes who had gathered near the tower, the ones who had been moving toward the commotion before the Ancestral Celestials descended and had frozen in place once they arrived. He could sense the armies the demons had assembled, the lesser creatures filling the streets and the structures of the capital. All of it spread out below him, the full weight of the demon empire’s higher lineage, the ones who ate the flesh and souls of other lifeforms and had built a civilization on the practice.
"For the adversity your choices have caused," he said, "live on as normal lifeforms for now."
...!
He tapped the air.
It was almost gentle, the motion. He found the Sources of the 72 Dukes present, and the Demon Emperor still kneeling in the garden behind him, and he pressed the downward arrow on all of them at once, the way he had pressed it on the beings above the Dominion of Crimson Stone.
The power left them. Years of it, in some cases, the accumulated essence of countless consumed souls draining out of their existences and into the steady refinement of THE Primordial Source within him. The Dukes aged where they stood. The Demon Emperor, behind him, felt the last of what had made him an Emperor leave his body. By the time it finished, the higher lineage of the demon empire was a collection of ordinary creatures, no more dangerous than the lesser things they had spent their long lives consuming!
Oh!
Across the capital, the demons shook.
Every one of them felt it happen, felt the towering presences of the Dukes simply switch off, felt the power that had ruled them for so long evaporate in the space of a held breath, and the terror that ran through the streets of the demon capital was the terror of creatures watching the order of their world get rewritten by something they could not begin to oppose.
Damian did not care about their terror.
He shook his head, once, and the words came out quietly.
"Ashes to ashes," he said. "Dust to dust."
Then he turned away from all of it and went to his mother and Serala.
"With all that handled," he said, and his tone shifted into something easier, the tone of a son talking to his family rather than a sovereign passing judgment, "why don’t we go to the Purple Stone Tribe? To My Cradle..."
His Ama smiled with pride.
She nodded, and then she turned her gaze out over the vastness of the demon capital, the obsidian crimson structures stretching to every horizon, the empire that had held her for eight summers. She looked at it for a long moment, and she sighed.
Her eyes moved, last of all, to the succubus kneeling in the garden she had been tending, the one who had perhaps shown her some small decency across the years.
She shook her head.
"Alright," she said. "How far will this trip be? I won’t slow you two down, will I?"
Damian shook his head.
He had been thinking about something since they arrived, since the Demon Emperor had crushed his crimson coin and carried the three of them across the world in a few seconds of crimson light. He wanted to try it himself.
THE Primordial Source was so far above the frameworks of the Lands of Stone that something like teleportation, which the Demon Emperor had managed with a constructed Waystone and a chanted ritual, should have been simple for what Damian now carried.
He closed his eyes.
He reached out across the distance, past the demon capital, past the River of the World, past thousands of miles of the Lands of Stone, until he found his beast body resting on the floating landmass that was the Cradle of First Flames. It was his. It was a Source linked to his own existence, as much a part of him as the body standing in the demon tower.
He did not try to move himself across the distance.
He reasoned it differently. THE Primordial Source sat above the structures of existence, and the distance between two points was one of those structures. He did not need to travel between his two Sources. He needed only to establish a gateway from one to the other, to tell existence that the place his human body stood and the place his beast body rested were, for a moment, the same place.
In the next moment, behind him, an obsidian portal formed.
Its brilliance reflected across the faces of everyone present, across his Ama and Serala and the powerless Demon Emperor in the garden, across the demon capital that had no idea what it was looking at. The portal hung in the air, a circle of deep obsidian light, and through it, faintly, the green and gold of the Cradle of First Flames could be seen.
"It shouldn’t take long at all," Damian said. "Stepping through here should have us cover thousands of miles."
...!
His mother shook her head, slowly, and the pride in her smile deepened into something close to wonder.
"My son has grown too capable," she said. "Okay. Let’s go."
Without further ado, the Empress stepped through first.
Damian took Serala’s hand, and the two of them walked through after her.
As he crossed, he felt the domain of his Scale of Existence. It had already spread far past the demon capital, far past the River, across thousands of miles, and it had reached the region the Cradle floated in and was extending outward toward the Sacred Mountains of the Beasts.
It was still growing. Before long, all of the Lands of Stone would rest beneath Vakochev’s Scale of Existence, every lifeform judged on the same scale of effort and adversity and choice, the way he had decided it should be.
There was still so much he didn’t understand.
In the next few days, he would have to sit down and learn THE Primordial Source and THE Primordial Tongue far more deeply than he currently knew them. He had stopped a Primum Ancestor’s full attack with a finger. He had halved one of the High Ancestral Celestials. He had carried himself across thousands of miles by deciding two places were one. And he still did not know where the bottom of it was, or whether it had a bottom at all.
Just what were his limits?
He stepped through the portal with Serala’s hand in his, and the obsidian light closed behind them.
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