An Immortal's Retirement: To Achieve Peace

I walked through the subspace, piercing through the first layer of space with no resistance. It was locked and guarded, preventing anyone aside from myself and Gauntlet from entering. I looked around at the plain white space. The qi here was plentiful, much more so than anywhere else on this planet, and the laws were abundant. This was the under realm of the valley, the place I’d set just beneath the skin of space. Tendrils of qi skimmed through the place moving and bringing materials from the valley above it. At its center stood a giant ball of moving power. The array.

It wasn’t awake yet, but there were movements of consciousness on occasion. Bits and pieces of thoughts, dreams of dreams, and vague attempts of sentience. It hadn’t learned to think yet, but it was getting there. I studied the center, watching as its inner pieces moved and multiplied like growing cells.

I knew what was happening now. I knew exactly what was happening at every single point in the array, but there would come a point when it would grow too complicated. Complexity would rise from simplicity and eventually, a soul would be born, and that would be the day I’d planned for billions of years.

Though I don’t know if I’d be around to see it hatch. Far removed from the array was another thing, a large set of doors the size of mountains. Gauntlet stood by them guarded and ready, and I walked. The doors themselves were huge and were inscribed with numerous arrays, all of them churning to keep the doors closed no matter what.

“Well,” I said to the sword in my hand. “Time to visit your kids.”

Wriendler squirmed approvingly.

To understand Wriendler, you first had to understand that Wriendler was not a sword. It was an eldritch horror that looked like a sword. Wriendler’s specific breed of eldritch went by an unpronounceable name of cosmic horror, but most people called them the devourers. They were the ones in those myths about the insatiable monsters. Their spores would invade universes and grow in size eating all they could, even each other. Eventually, they would eat so much that the only thing left to devour was the universe itself and they’d do that too, bursting from the husk of a dead realm and ready to enter the void.

They rarely got that powerful though. Most of them would become black holes and slowly die out as time went on, burning their energy and qi attempting to exist in a crumbling universe.

And that was what Wriendler was. It wasn’t scary by eldritch standards. Its species was at the bottom of the food web out there in the great big void, and they normally never made it past the twelfth rank. That was why Wriendler had been so easy to tame.

Devourers were like the insects of the eldritch world. Small, generally unimportant, but extreme in their differentiations. Their forms were based on what they ate and Wriendler had been fed a lot of swords. I’d shoved it full of blades ever since it was just an egg. Magical swords, nonmagical swords, strange metals, strange knives, anything and everything sharp I could find, I fed to Wriendler.

My goal had been to create an eldritch beast that had eaten every type of sword there ever was and could manifest itself into some big sword Dao being. It was a childish dream, one that many cultivators had tried at one point or another, but an eldritch being was an eldritch being for a reason. They weren’t designed to refine daos or qi but rather to corrupt it, and to change that was to try and change the nature of eldritch itself.

But it was too late for me to change by the time I realized that. I was already at the ninth rank and Wriendler had been at the eighth rank at the time, and I couldn’t force myself to throw away literally millions of years' worth of progress. And I had already developed a bond with the sword, making it the only constant companion I’ve ever had.

So I switched strategies. Instead of feeding Wriendler just swords, I fed it everything I didn’t need or want. It still kept that general sword-like structure, but all of that would fade away soon. The more it ate, the more it grew, changing and digesting everything it had ever consumed.

And occasionally, Wriendler ate something that it couldn’t quite stomach, something too big or too powerful for the poor bastard to choke down. And that was when the children were made.

Well, maybe children was too human of a term for them. They were more like sentient, semi-digested, eldritch monstrosities. Wriendler would puke out whatever thing it was that he couldn’t quite choke down and it would plop out partly corrupted and broken.

It was rare. I was generally careful about what I fed the bastard. I’d scan everything he swallowed thoroughly and check for any rare artifacts or hidden weapons. But sometimes, something slipped through my senses and into Wriendler’s stomach and I’d be forced to deal with its horrendous children.

I generally dealt them a quick death. These things weren’t children, after all. They were corrupted beings, less cute adorable babies, and more evil sentient vomit. And they weren’t shaped like swords either.

Most of them came out retaining their original form, with a slight eldritch twist to them, but their overall look heavily relied on how much they resisted Wriendler’s attempt to digest them. Going by how quickly this one was pushing out of him, I’d say it had barely been touched by the eldritch’s qi. And that meant one of two things, it was either a higher rank than Wriendler, which was impossible because I never fed the thing more than it could devour, or its quality was beyond that of Wriendlers’s.

I held my blade firm and readied and slaughtering array throughout the subspace. Wriendler’s edges swelled and pushed, making the blade look like a distorted tentacle giving birth. Its eyes flared open on the flat of its blade, and the eldritch thing screamed a noise of agony and anger. There was a taint within the scream, one that sought to corrupt and destroy all that heard it. The noise was powerful and all-consuming, the stuff of Lovecraft’s dreams, but I held firm.

Wriendler usually tried its best to not hurt me, but right now, there was nothing it wanted more than to gulp down whatever power was trying to escape it. It screamed and fought and did its best to swallow down whatever was trying to come out of it.

It failed.

The edge of the blade burst open and a shadow-like egg popped out into the open. Not dark, shadow-like. The egg was a twisting mess of black grey and black, flittering with the environment like a persistent shadow.

God dammit.

There were two parts to a thing. Anything, whether it was a man or a rock, had quality and quantity. Quantity in the cultivator world was qi and rank, while quality was that being Dao’s and Laws. Wriendler ate both. The qi from the egg had been devoured almost thoroughly but the laws and daos themselves were too much for Wriendler to consume.

And looking at the egg, I could see why.

Its nature was beyond me. The Daos and Laws it contained were things that I couldn’t even imagine, and the only reason I was able to see them now was due to Wriendler having stripped the egg of most of its qi. The mere fact that it had slipped past my senses to begin with, was a show of its nature.

I readied myself. I was still far stronger than the egg in many ways. I was clearly of the higher rank, and even if it had a strangely high accumulation of its own Daos and laws, the pure power of my strength alone should be enough to crush it into nothingness.

I prepared my attack as cracks of pure black spread across its dark surface. Whatever this was, I couldn’t allow it to slip away. It couldn’t hurt me for now, it was barely above the fifth rank, but if it gathered up enough qi, there was a chance that it could hide again.

And that was already an insane thing for it to do. For something to be able to hide from me, a thirteenth rank, it would have to be at least at my own rank, if not one rank lower.

But for something of the fifth rank to be able to hide from me… that was unheard of. It would have to be a coagulation of Daos and laws so dense that only a God Imperium could have made it.

I readied my attack as the being broke through. This hidden realm was one that I had made and I could make or break anything that entered it. Here, I was god. The space itself was locked and hidden away, barely clinging onto the edges Ah-Marin’s reality.

I readied myself.

The egg broke. Time slowed and I moved destruction toward the being.

The laws and Daos I had picked up over time turned and twisted with me, being given strength by the force of my qi. Death, annihilation, entropy, any and all methods of ending life moved with my hand as I reached for the new lifeform. My arm glowed black with demise and reached for the thing.

Only to stop right before I touched it. I didn’t know why I stopped. My first thought was that the newly born lifeform was controlling me somehow, but no. Nothing pointed to such a thing. My qi was fine, my mind was fine, and Primordials knew that nothing was going to be able to touch my soul.

Then what was it?

The lifeform, for all its strangeness, didn’t seem to notice the death in the palm of my hand.

I pushed forward again, trying to end the thing before it could gather enough qi to try and hide from all over again. And again I failed. My hand would hover close to the thing, but for some reason, I wasn’t able to go through with it.

I couldn’t kill it.

I blinked. It wasn’t awake yet. It was barely even alive. Wriendler had drained the thing of all of its qi before it hatched, making it come out akin to a starving newborn child. It howled in hunger.

It- no, she wasn’t the one stopping me from killing her. She could barely stay alive as she was, much less influence me in any way.

I looked at my hand, questioning its actions in a new light. It wasn’t some outside force that was stopping me from ending this creature’s life. It was my own.

The Dao, my Dao flowed through me, rebelling at the action I had tried to do. Overwhelming guilt pounded at my soul as I looked at the newborn life. It hadn’t chosen to end up here. It hadn’t chosen to exist, but it did. And that was not something I could punish it for.

If you seek peace, then you must give it as well. I looked at my hands. Daos were not something you picked up and left behind so easily. I then turned my eyes to the lifeform in front of me. I could kill her. I could force myself to take her life and break my newly acquired dao, just like I had done so for so many other daos before it. Or I could let her die and leave her to rot in this realm, alone and uncared for.

But neither option felt right. Killing her conflicted with the new Dao and letting her starve to death conflicted with my own morals. I looked at her. This thing, this half-dead lifeform before me.

This child.

I sighed and turned my qi into nourishment, channeling it to the formless thing. The starving child ate greedily, gulping down as much as she could. Its senses opened and mingled with my own, cooing as it stared into my qi.

“Congratulations,” I said to Wriendler who was floating beside me.

“It’s a girl.”