An Immortal's Retirement: To Achieve Peace

I frowned. What a waste of time. Wreindler tightened itself, having eaten everything the group had brought with them. The eldritch blade had been with me for a large portion of my life. I had found it when it was still young and though it was a common species of eldritch, this living weapon variation was unique to Wreindler.

This dumbass. This self-righteous entitled moron of a cultivator had gone and made me kill him. I didn’t want to kill the bastard. As disgusting as he was, it was too much trouble. But he just wouldn’t stop following me, and even if I could have gotten away, that wasn’t a salient option for the future. I had caught the interest of powerful people before and things never ended well if those interests were left to fester.

“Dammit,” I mumbled.

But I might have made a mistake this time.

He was a direct descendant of a God-Imperium, a prince of the multiverse, and I had killed him. What I had just done was the equivalent of murdering the president’s son. This bastard was important. He was an heir and that meant that people would notice his disappearance. And though I doubted his sect would care for the loss, he was a high-ranking member of a celestial sect.

His death would be taken as an insult by the Divine Beast Emporium, and to cultivators, that was the most unforgivable crime. They might even involve the Enki Maluth, one of the oldest investigatory sects in the multiverse.

There were a variety of different sects and orders within the multiverse. Some stayed to themselves, never interacting with outside forces. Others were much more antagonistic, pushing and expanding, constantly seeking war and power, but a lot had learned to coexist.

There were sects that provided trades, jobs, materials, artisan goods, anything and everything you could think of could probably be bought somewhere. The Beast Emporium was an example of such a sect. It sold lifeforms, mainly beasts, and had cemented itself with the multiversal market as the best supplier of those specific wares.

The Enki Maluth were a similar group, but instead of supplying beasts, they supplied truth. They were known for their techniques regarding the Dao Of Truth, and they were horrifyingly capable. Divination, time resonance, qi detection, anything and everything they could do to see into the past, they would. It could be one shred of that bastard’s qi floating around, or maybe a scent of that talisman he had used. They were known as the Sect of Vengeance, because of how many sects employed them to find the killers of their scions, and if the perpetrator was anyone without significant backing, then they would almost always end up dead.

“Damn,” I said as I stared into the mess of qi and faint echoes of the battle we just had.

Cleanup was going to be a chore.

I scanned around. First I would have to destroy the realm, which would be quite easy but quite wasteful as well.

This wasn’t an ordinary realm, in fact, this wasn’t a realm at all. It was an array I had made way back in the day, back when I was just a little ninth rank still making my way through the multiverse. And I had built and rebuilt it over and over again.

I smiled thinking back to those days. Back then, I’d pissed off the scion of a middling sect, through no fault of my own. His ghostly pale girlfriend looked in my direction once or twice and that seemed to be enough for the prick to chase after me like I’d killed his mother.

He swore he would kill me. He even made a Dao Vow claiming that he would ‘show me pain and terror beyond my wildest dreams.’ The tough part was that he was actually a rank above me, so I had to set all of this up in advance and lure him out here afterward.

And that asshole had been pretentious too. He had tried to kill me at every realm I hopped to, so I almost died about seven times before he finally got into this one. And even then, his talisman was an attack sealed in there by his sect’s patriarch and had been one of the twelfth-rank.

Since then I have reworked and remade this array countless times. It had started out as a complex illusion array that would make a person think they were in a realm as soon as they had entered it. Then eventually, it became a pseudo-reality. It mimicked the nature of a realm so much that at this point it could be categorized as one, at least at first glance.

You couldn’t cultivate or grow anything here and the natural development of life was definitely not going to happen within this place. Simply put, this universe wasn’t natural, so it wouldn’t have those traits that naturally developed universes tended to show.

And now I would have to destroy it.

I gripped my blade and closed my eyes and felt. Arrays were complicated. They were, at their core, an imitation of cultivation. A pull and a push. That’s how cultivation started. You pulled qi into your dantian, filled it up, then refined it. And to use your qi, you pushed it, either to your limbs or weapons or organs.

Arrays were that same push and pull technique extended to outside of the body. Eventually, you learned to make that push and pull a self-sustaining process, and then you learned to push and pull other things it would be confusing at first, but since everything was qi, it was possible. And then you learned to manipulate laws and Daos and that’s where the fun began.

I felt the key array points, they were the conglomerations of laws that kept the universe together. Time and space, and a bunch of minor laws that governed the interactions of subatomic particles. Weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, gravity, electromagnetism, and a bunch of other things all hotchpotch together to keep the realm afloat.

If a universe was a functioning healthy human being, then this was a Frankenstein's monster with a brain that only knew how to breathe. It was barely a realm, but it got the job done. It granted me controls that made battles infinitely easier. I could entrap people with it, like I had done to Kin Jey’s group, killing them as soon as they tried to leave.

I could also strip the place of ambient qi or turn off the realm entirely and toss whoever was in there with me into the void, which was lethal to the unprepared. I was almost godlike in this realm, and it gave me a degree of flexibility that my fighting lacked. I was an array master, jack of all trades, master of none. And as well-rounded as I was, that meant fuck all for combat.

And even then, I had almost died when the talisman went off. That was a full-blow fifteenth-rank attack that would even leak into the void, meaning if I had just left the realm, I still wouldn’t have made it. This was the power of a celestial sect. They must have had hundreds of thousands of bastards like Kin Jey. After all, an eternal sect was bound to have an immense number of descendants. But even then, he still had defenses like this.

I pulled, rearranging the array to self-collapse. And it did. The realm crumbled like a piece of paper. Stars, planets, galaxies, all came together and huddled into a single point. Existence shook and shivered as the fundamental laws of reality collapsed, and everything dissipated.

The qi jumbled up together in a sea of unsustainable laws, and I stepped into the void.

I could feel the realm rot. It was a process I’d witnessed countless times, even causing it on a few occasions, but I never got tired of seeing it. Universes were sustainable bundles of qi production within the void. They were things that grew and prospered, and in some cases lived. And when they popped and burst back into the nothingness from which they were born, they’d rot into a jumble of nonfunctioning qi, and that was when the jungle ate.

The immense amount of qi pushed, echoing out through nonexistence, and I could feel them come.

A myriad of creatures swarmed in my direction. The group suddenly pierced through the void and into the body of the dead realm. Ants, worms, dragonflies, centipedes, and anything with more than four legs and an exoskeleton managed to work its way into the thing.

The bugs were always first. Then the celestial beasts and eldritch creatures mixed into the fold as well, each consuming whatever they could before more of them pierced into the area. I watched in wonder as all types of creatures swarmed the area.

The thing that interested me wasn’t their strength. No, I was stronger than all of the creatures here by at least two ranks. Rather, what captured me was their existence. These were interdimensional beings, some cthulhuian in nature. Creatures that could tear at the minds of mortals with a single glance.

And yet, the void had stronger creatures than them. These were ants, and the jungle had lions. I’d seen some roaming wild God-Imperiums before, and the only reason I had lived then was because I was too weak to be noticed. These creatures in front of me were the bottom feeders of this ecosystem. They were at the bottom of the food web, eating abandoned realms or freshly fallen universes.

I watched as they tore through the qi, each gulping down their own portion before turning and trying to steal from the others. As soon as the qi became limited, the weaker ones fled, knowing that the stronger ones would turn to them and try to hunt them down.

And then there was only the strong left with a few brave weaklings pecking around unnoticed. But eventually, everything was finished and the creatures either fought each other for scraps or scattered back into the void.

That was called a feeder wave. If there was ever a spill of giant qi anywhere within the void, these bastards would sense it and come running towards it all at once. They were like ants to a slice of cake, and once they got there, they would clean out everything they could.

I remembered when this had been the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. I had just hit immortal when I’d left my realm, and I’d run into one of these frenzies while wandering through the void. A wave of tenth-rank creatures thundering through the void was a horrifying sight back then.

But now, I was able to hide my existence from them. I could even end them if I wanted to.

This could have been an ego boost to some but that wasn’t the way I looked at it. To me, it was a humbling experience. I looked at these creatures and I remembered what they were, how scared I had been the first time I’d seen them. I remembered the fear and horror I’d felt when I first saw them.

I remembered how small I felt. That was an important feeling for someone like me. When you lived as long as I have, you tended to get a pretty big head. I had just destroyed a realm, a universe, something with infinite space-time.

As much as I hated the cultivator’s mindset, I understood it. Actions like this were enough to convince any man of their own greatness. But that feeling, that insignificance, and horror, that was something I needed to be reminded of every now and again.

I am nothing in the grand scale of things.

I smiled at the thought and walked through the void to my first home.

********

The planet of Ah-Marin stood in the void of space. It was large, almost a billion miles in diameter, and it hovered surrounded by stars and nebulas on all sides. A planet of this size shouldn’t have been possible. It was too big, and anything this big should have just collapsed in on itself and became a star but the qi surging in its center allowed it to defy gravity and keep itself stable.

Most giant planets had something in their center keeping them afloat. In Ah-Marin’s case, it was a simple but rudimentary qi gathering enchantment laid out far before I was born. But that was how all giant planets worked. They all start out as a normal-sized planet or asteroid and some cultivator would settle down there, setting his formations to gather all the ambient qi, and then he’d die or leave and the qi would continue to gather and with a whole lot of luck, and a little bit of human interference, you’d get a big star sized planet.

The main sects on that planet guarded the formation, setting up whatever things they could to make sure no one got down there, so it was all very well guarded and stable, but entirely unnatural. Well, as natural as plastic-eating bacteria, I guess.

Ah-Marin held its own white suns in orbit and had an almost uncountable set of moons and asteroids circling around it. Some asteroids would occasionally fall out of orbit, but only the really big ones ever made it to the ground, but most of them never made it through the planet's atmosphere.

We used to call them moon falls back when I was a mortal, and I’d almost been killed by one early in my cultivating career. I had been sitting on a small mountain pass when a meteorite started to fall in my direction. I ran as fast as I could, and had I been any slower, I would have died.

I chuckled. I had been scared then, running around like a headless chicken, counting on luck to make it to the next rank. But looking back, it all felt a bit nostalgic. Chasing after immortality, and fighting off greedy sects and clan elders, it was all so simple in a way. My goals felt noble and righteous, and my conviction felt unbreakable, carrying me through a near-infinite amount of pain and suffering needed to make the next rank.

And here I was now, tired and worn.

I waved my hand and released Mei Shan. I didn’t want to trap her for as long as I had but I had to destroy the self-destruct enchantment that bastard had left on the ring before I let them out.

"Honored Mast-"

"Bill," I corrected her.

"Honored Bill," Mei Shan said, floating in the air and giving me a gracious bow. Her acting was spot on, but her aura betrayed her. There was shock and surprise, but mainly, there was a whole lot of fear.

I sighed.

“You knew?”

Her aura trembled. It was strange, in terms of body language, she looked as calm as could be, but her aura reflected a completely different state of mind. I frowned. I knew why she was able to do that. She had been trained to, it was that simple. What repulsed me was the question of why she would possibly need to master such a skill.

“I’m not mad,” I answered. “I doubt you had a choice in the matter.”

Her body was frozen stiff in a bowing position.

“Relax. I don't blame you.”

She still didn’t move.

“And I won’t kill you for it either. Nothing will happen to you or your sisters. You’re alright.”

“But… but what if he finds us?”

“Who?”

“Young Master Kin.”

“He won’t.”

“You do not know his persistence,” she said, shaking her head furiously.

“He will find you, and when he does he will… he will…”

“He won’t,” I said with a finalizing tone that seemed to imply my message.

I could see the gears turning and after a moment she nodded.

I replied with a smile. The girl was smart, smart enough to know what I had implied while also knowing not to ask for more information. I was planning to toss the girls to some of the better matriarchal sects in the multiverse, but I couldn’t do that now. They could be traced back to me.

I started circulating my qi and undoing the disguising technique that I had kept on all this time. It was tiresome, but it was a necessary step for the wandering cultivator. It took a minute but eventually my hair was its normal color and my face had settled into place.

I had short hair, which was an uncommon fashion in the cultivator world, but I had seen a number of people die because of their hair. In the cultivator world, a fight could break out any second, and when it did, those long hair bastards were always at a disadvantage. I’d seen a person’s hair blind their eyesight or get into their mouth, making them choke midway through the fight. I’d once seen a fleeing young master get grabbed by his waist length locks. His opponent had been large, and beat him to death with one hand while the other one hoisted him like a pinata.

Yeah, my hair was much more practical.

“Alright,” I said, turning to Mei Shan.

“Let me show you where we’ll be living for a while.”

I guided us down to the planet. It was a vast and wide space, but it was home nonetheless. Mei Shan looked down and watched as we flew by lakes the size of oceans and hills that would make mountains look small. We passed grand sects and clans and their tournaments and elders from a distance, but mainly we saw land and mortals. Farmers farming different plants and children playing out in the fields, decorated the world, but mostly we passed by people, people trying their best to live.

Eventually, we arrived at the destination, a small valley roughly 300 miles wide. It was surrounded on all sides by a long strip of dessert, but the valley itself was cool on most days. It had forests and rolling hills and big wide mountains in certain places. It looked like a New Zealand postcard and felt like a cut scene from The Lord of the Rings, but that was the reason I had chosen this place. I, that is to say Bill, had always dreamed of living in a place like this.

I flew us to my house. It was built into a small hill, its back leaning on the massive earth behind it and it stood opposite to a lake. The house itself was three stories tall and made out the local wood and timber and reinforced with a little bit of qi.

The house wasn't a relic, but it was a little on the older side. From the outside the walls were decorated with overgrown vines and mismatched windows. The house itself was more loppy than anything and it was hard to tell where one level began and the next level ended. It was structurally sound, but it did look like something you'd see out a fantasy book about little small men that lived in the hillsides.

"Okay, here we are," I said to them. I had brought out the rest of the women and let Mei Shan explain the situation to them. They weren’t nearly as good at hiding their emotions as she was, but after a few minutes of thought transmission and explaining on Mei Shan’s side they seemed to settle down.

"Honored Bill-" Mei Shan began.

"Just Bill," I said.

"Honored and Just Bill," she corrected.

I sighed again.

"We are grateful and blessed to be able to serve you, and truly, we are thankful for your kindness-"

"You’re not serving me," I cut in. “I don’t want servants. I just need you to live here for a while until I can hold my own. After that, you’re free to go wherever you choose.”

"Yes, honored master," she replied, bowing below the waist.

This was to be expected, these people only knew how to serve, after all. That was the thing they had been trained to do since birth.

I had once freed a colony of slaves and they were in a similar situation, and I couldn’t blame them. Servitude to a cultivator was far different from any mortal slavery. Cultivators weren’t mortals, they weren’t people that you could see at your own level and rebel against. To most beings in the universe, cultivators were the equivalent of gods and demigods in the flesh. And you didn’t need chains or whips to keep people in line when you could blink them out of existence. That was how Mei Shan saw me I supposed. Even with their own cultivation base, these people were raised on servitude and dedication.

I sighed.

"Alright, do any of you have any normal clothes?" I asked.

I was keeping up a pretty tight disguise routine and unfortunately for these women, their clothes were a dead give away. They were dressed far too well for this region. Hell, they were dressed too well for the continent. The materials of the fabric alone would have cost a fortune, much less the masterfully crafted embroideries and accessories it had woven into it. And I was fairly certain their shoes were made of some celestial beast too. You’d think servants would get the rags and hand me downs, but I guess to celestial sects, that’s what this was.

"Normal?" One of the girls replied.

"Yeah, normal. Something plain."

"These are our travel clothes," one of them clarified.

"You know what, forget it, Gauntlet!" I yelled.

A low thumping echoed through the place before the front door creaked open slowly. The giant ten foot tall stone golem was crouching, being careful not to break the door. He gripped the door knob with his thumb and his index finger, having to turn it delicately so as to not crush it. After a few more seconds of readjusting and reframing, like a semi truck slowly working its way through a carwash, he stepped through the door.

"We have guests. Show them around and set up rooms for them, please."

Gauntlet looked at me for a second with what I imagined must have been a furious anger, and then he slowly turned around and started to work his way back into the doorframe.

“He doesn’t talk, but he can help you get comfortable. Just stay out of the garden, that’s his thing. And make sure to stay within fifty miles of the house, at least for now.”

The group of women nodded and bowed in unison, then they left and stood behind Gauntlet as he worked his left leg into the building.

I’d have to talk with this group eventually, but I didn’t want to deal with that right now. It had been a long day, and I doubt I could say anything to comfort them right now. I flew, soaring up and above the sky until I could see the whole valley from where I stood. I had designed this valley myself, from the top of the mountains to the canyon scars, it was all me.

It looked natural for the most part, but the true purpose of this place was to function as an array. This was my first line of defense against attacks and now it is almost complete.

Being an array master was a sweet and sour position. It was great because a person’s mastery of arrays wasn’t really tied to their cultivation rank, that’s why I was called Array King Dane, even when I was just at the twelfth rank. You could achieve power and prominence without having to reach an insanely high rank and that made it worth it in my opinion, but it also had its downsides.

It limited your cultivation. Arrays were all about connections, tying in one thing to another to create something new that was more than the sum of its parts. It was complicated and nuanced, but it was also without a Dao. There was no cultivating the way of the array master. It was too general to cultivate. You could cultivate many things. The Dao of Karma, the connection between people, or the Dao of Cycles, studying how the seasons passed and looking at the order that always seemed to emerge from chaos, even on a cosmic scale.

But being an array master was bigger than that, it wasn’t the connection between a certain set of things. It was the connection between everything. You would always look at one law and then look at another, wondering how you could tie them together and create an interesting interaction between the two.

I had a lot of Daos and laws with me, but they were all too small to be an actual forgeable path. I studied certain Daos and Laws, but that was only to supplement my understanding of arrays and my own combat techniques were limited.

There was also the fact that you couldn’t power an array yourself. Arrays, even ones that are below your rank, oftentimes took more power than any one individual or group could afford to give it. Their power was environmental and taken from the natural qi around them. A fifth rank array would be like an elephant while a fifth rank cultivator was akin to a mouse.

I looked over at the land one more time and waved. Multiple beasts appeared in front of me, all of them ranking from the fifth rank to the eleventh. They were the beasts I had purchased from the Divine Beast Emporium, and they were also the last piece of this array.

An array didn’t actually create anything, it was more like cooking. You took some ingredients and mixed them in a certain way, and you suddenly had something entirely different from what you originally had. These beasts were like tiny batteries that would give me the specific types of energy that I sought. They had Daos and laws resounding inside of them and would create ambient qi that would provide the array with the power it needs to activate. It was a little hypocritical to enslave beasts on my part, but there was a reason that beasts were beasts and people were people.