An Immortal's Retirement: To Achieve Peace

The Void. The Highest Jungle. That’s what people called it, and understandably so.

A jungle, in the most basic sense, was a place where life competed for the right to exist. You would find the smallest jungles in warm puddles filled with bacteria tearing at each other’s throats for proteins. Above them you’d find ants fighting unending wars, having trillions die in just one day. And above that were the lizards and frogs and mice that ran through the fields in search of nuts and berries. And you could go up through that food web, you’d find this place. This jungle that made universes look like small puddles. A place where celestial being roamed and hunted as they pleased.

But the jungle didn’t stop there. Out here in The Void, the Highest Jungle, you’d find things that could crush me like a cockroach. For as far back as the jungle started, back in those warm puddles filled with bacteria, this was where it ended. This was where you’d find the real tigers at the top of the food chain.

Dragons, Gods, Humans, Supreme Beasts, Eldritch Monstrosities, and many other varying forms of life could be found here. There were an estimated five hundred thousand such beings, each of them at the strength of a God Imperium. Humans made up about a third of those numbers, and each of those humans represented an immense celestial sect that controlled numerous divine realms and countless higher realms as a whole.

And those were the ones at the pinnacle. It was said that beings like me, those around the thirteenth realm, numbered in the quinvigintillions. That was a number, followed by seventy-eight zeros.

That was all to say that the void was scary but familiar. It was the place where gods became ants and universes became puddles. It was the deep and unknown starry sky that we cultivators looked into, imagining what lay beyond those impossible depths and wondering how far we could go if we tried.

The higher realms glistened like stars in the distance, and I remembered the first I had set foot here years ago. I remembered the awe and fear. The trepidation and excitement. I remembered promising to reach the heights of those realms or die trying.

I smiled.

The awe was still there, and the trepidation had grown stronger. But all I hoped, for now, was to make it back to Ah Marin in one piece.

Dane would despise that sentiment, I thought.

But then again, Dane was dead.

I raised qi and pushed, rushing myself through the forest of the void. Even though the void was dangerous, there were a certain set of rules one could follow to increase your likelihood of survival. Just like an explorer trodding through the jungle, you could use certain things to navigate and manage how much risk and danger you faced.

One of those things were celestial nebulas.

Celestial nebulas were exactly what they sounded like. See, a universe or a realm had a few major traits. The most important one was having a constant production of qi, a realm that couldn’t produce any qi would soon be a dead one. This production rate generally stayed constant throughout the lifetime of the universe, but a universe's consumption of qi tended to rise as time went on. Meaning the universe would always be producing the same amount of qi while its consumption of qi would get higher and higher. Eventually, the qi the realm produced wouldn’t be enough, and the whole thing would spread too thin and pop.

Back on Earth, we had called this heat death.

Higher realms wouldn’t do that. They had a naturally growing rate of qi production, meaning as the realms’ need for qi grew, so too did their production of qi. So their interior was always dense and full of qi, perfect for cultivators to set up sects in and grow out.

Now sometimes, these realms would produce an unnatural amount of qi. So much qi that it would leak out from a realm and foam into the void. These were called divine realms.

And sometimes, even among these divine realms, you’d get celestial realms. Realms that produced so much excess qi that it would leak out and cluster up around them and create more realms. And it would create huge swaths of interwoven universe, each of them overlaying on the other, creating a realm with multiple layers of existence.

And realms that close and that condense in qi would only grow bigger and bigger, until eventually, their qi would echo out throughout the whole of the multiverse, being able to be sensed from almost every corner of existence. Some of these celestial realms were known back on Earth like Avalon, Atlantis, Yggdrasil, the Ten Realm, and many more, but a lot of them remained unknown.

Regardless, they all shone throughout the void, bits of their infinite qi reaching everything throughout nonexistence. And they each shone like stars in the night sky, making navigation a much easier burden for cultivators.

Surprisingly enough, getting lost wasn’t a problem. No, you’d always know where you were relative to the big stars in the sky. The problems were the unknown threats and dangers you’d face along the way.

This was the jungle, and the jungle was full of lions and tigers and bears, but the most dangerous, as always were the humans.

Humans. Humans. Humans.

Of course, you should worry about beasts and strange monstrosities as well, but humans were the most persistent threat. If you met a bear in the jungle and it charged at you but you manage to fend it off with bear spray, that would be the end of that interaction. But not with humans.

Humans were vengeful, grudge-holding, persistent creatures. You could fight off a divine beast and move on the next day, but if you piss off the wrong human, they’d track you down across all of reality just for the chance to smash your head in.

I mean, just look at that Kin Jey guy. He tracked me so far outside of his realm, merely because I might have something of interest. And look where that had gotten him.

I funneled more qi, moving myself through the sparsely populated area with little effort. This would make the journey much longer than necessary, but the roads traveled less were often the safest out here.

That was the real key to traversing the void, especially if you were an unaffiliated guy like me, an ant with no colony. You had to avoid all of the juicy bits. You couldn’t let yourself be tempted by clusters of unknown qi or hunt an injured divine beast, and you certainly couldn’t go chasing after weaker cultivators in hopes of stealing their fortunes.

That was what Kin Jey had done. And he had died, even with his fifteenth-ranked defensive treasure. That made the human rule a bit of a two-way street. Don’t be greedy and don’t look enticing.

No, the best way to survive through the void was to mind your own business and stay out of other peoples’ way. If you see something, move in the opposite direction. If it follows you, either scare it off or run away. Stay away from decaying realms and large clusters of qi because those would attract ninth and tenth-ranked beasts, and while those ninth and tenth-ranked beasts weren’t dangerous to me, their presence might attract something that could threaten me.

It was all about seeing the cosmic food web and trying to separate yourself from it as best as you could.

But nothing was guaranteed.

I looked up at the celestial nebulas floating vaguely in the distance.

At this rate, it would take me a Lynorian millennia to make my way to my destination, but I wouldn’t be using only my own strength to get to my destination.

Up ahead of me, as ahead of me as anything could be without the existence of space, was a giant stream of qi. This was a qi current, a sort of artificial highway throughout non-existence. They were generally formed by celestial sects who needed to carve a less qi-extensive form of transportation, tying up their territory together.

They were everywhere throughout the multiverse, most of them were old, ancient, and abandoned but a lot of them persisted, like old abandoned highways cutting through an ancient forest.

I stepped into the stream. Ironically enough, these streams were made by Array Masters. It was our biggest source of income within the multiverse. The ambient qi was often gathered from the edges of celestial realms and was then converted to a thin semi-toxic stream that would cut across the multiverse. It needed to be semi-toxic so that it wouldn’t attract beasts and other lifeforms that would want to feed on it. After all, free, abundant, and unmonitored qi was quite tempting out here in the void.

But these artificial paths weren’t really attractive to most beings, and besides, there were naturally abundant and extremely enticing streams of qi out there as well. Most of the void’s denizens would rather make that their home rather than this pathetic little stream.

I walked onto the path, now having to exert significantly less effort than before. Existing became less troublesome and as the current moved, I could feel myself being moved along with it.

Moving through the void was a strange idea. There was no time, no space, so how could you move through something that didn’t have those things? How could you move through nonexistence?

The answer was simple. Relative existence. Things existed, relative to other things. Every realm and universe out there could be considered their own closed qi systems. Things happening in one universe couldn’t affect things happening in others. But there was more to it than that. The void itself separated the realms, piling in huge amounts of nothingness between any two planes of existence. And some existences were separated by larger amounts of nothingness than others, making them technically exist less, relative to each other.

In that sense, the void functioned like a measure of distance. If I wanted to affect something in a neighboring universe, it would be just a quick exertion of qi for me to be able to travel there. But if I wanted to affect a realm across the multiverse, well that would require a significant amount of traveling and qi exertion, sort of like what was doing right now.

I read the qi stream gently, doing my best to hide my presence and circulating multiple stealth techniques along with my void walker technique.

And then suddenly, the world halted and all of existence seemed to disappear. My qi fled and I was left open and defenseless. Fear, true blood-curdling fear spread throughout my body.

“Shit,” I whispered as I spread out my senses desperately. Nothing came to me. My divine senses and perception had shut down entirely. I was like a mortal man trying to see with my eyes closed.

“You smell,” a voice spoke echoing through the blackness.