An Immortal's Retirement: To Achieve Peace

Sun Wukong wandered through reality leisurely. That was the way it should be said.

He strolled through multiverses, taking care not to rupture the delicate balls of reality he passed by. It required delicacy at times, like walking through a patch of grass while taking care not to damage a single blade.

Though it took no effort, merely intention.

That was how it was for a God-Imperium. Omnipotent in the truest sense. Powerful beyond reason.

Wukong hated it.

He remembered his old days, waking in the void of space and nearly dying there, abandoned by his mother. Struggling against the Buddha before submitting to him and crossing the multiverse with the monk and his company. He remembered those days, the fights and deliberations, and the valiant struggle.

Yes, the struggle. At first, he had loathed the Buddha. The man had forced him to submit and after reaching Nirvana and stepping into the realm of God-Imperium, he had rebelled. He had fought and attacked, only to lose again.

Wukong smiled.

It was the Second Age, or as the common man knew it, the Age of Death. That was when several Dao Angels of Death had risen to become God-Imperium and that was when most of existence had been slain.

The monk had known that war, no matter how righteous, breeds death. And an eternal war even more so. Wukong still remembered the countless multiverses slain in the infinite conflict. In those days, God-Imperiums clashed without any regard for the rest of existence, like men waging war in a field full of ants.

Yes, those were the days. Wrath and fury, rebellion and hatred, those things fueled his passion and Wukong used them dearly. But then, he had fought, not just for the sake of rebellion itself, but for the world, for a purpose.

The Heavens and the Hells needed to be shattered and the eternal war needed to be quenched. So Wukong had stood as the division between good and evil.

He had forced the Righteous and Demonic to acknowledge a third party, the Orthodox. Those who sought peace, but didn’t see a need to spread it. The war between the Heavens and the Hells was costly, forcing cultivators and even mortals to pick a side and die for it.

With Wukong’s opposition had come peace. Most of the demonic rose and most of the righteous fell, creating a new group of powerful cultivators, the Orthodox. And as the group grew larger than any else so had peace spread through existence. Reality settled and the war calmed down, raging only in the quiet corners designated for war and blood.

But now everyone knew. The Sea of Death had been made by the Dead Daos, a place of infinite death, lacking life in every way. That was the designated place for conflict nowadays between God-Imperiums.

Order was restored, conflict was contained and things had a place.

There had to be a middle place, a middle ground for the Monkey King to guard and maintain. Without that all of existence would crumble and only God-Imperiums would be left, crushing everything else around them in their absolute fury.

But what Wukong wouldn’t give for a good fight at times, for a good rageful opposition.

Then the God-Imperium sighed. He wouldn’t get that, not anymore. He was too strong, too much of a force to be bullied and now he had allies who would come to his aid, demolishing any that attacked him.

Instead, he watched. He watched those privileged struggle, walking and fighting their way through life. He’d aid them occasionally, like that boy, Bill was his name.

He had aided him, if only for making him laugh and showing him that technique, Seeing Through the Void, what a beautiful thing.

It was an ancient technique, derived by one of the artistic sects of the third age, and one that Wukong had not seen before. That and the plots of the little tamer were worth far more than what Wukong had given him, but he wouldn’t go overboard with his aid, that would take from the boy’s struggle, from his rebellion.

Yes, Wukong was intrigued by the little tamer, he was one of the oldest new Gods. Rising to the seventeenth rank within the Third Age, having tamed a dragon, the grandson of Beast, and then later suppressing one of the eldritch things.

It was quite an accomplishment.

But all God-Imperiums were impressive in their own right. And in the grander scheme of things, even Tai Jey was but a small thing, at least in comparison to his betters.

But what intrigued Wukong the most was the little array the boy had made. That was something magnificent. Something new.

Even the library had sensed it and given him a tome to take home and that was strange. The library rarely bothered with such things, especially not with a mere thirteenth-ranked child, but even it had been curious about its discovery.

A living array. Yes, it was quite strange. Arraymasters were an important group of people within the multiverse. Arrays were necessary for the weaker ranks to traverse through gaps of infinite. They created small rivers of qi that lapsed and changed in nature and managed to tie all of reality into a bow.

Array roads, mere cobbling of qi and power, flowed throughout most of the known universe, tying the realms together. Of course, no one at the fifteenth rank or higher needed them, they were only necessary for those who couldn’t traverse infinite nonexistence, and they were only there for the central parts of reality, stretching through and around Lynoria.

But they were never that strong. That was the curse of arraymasters, no matter how much they knew of every dao or every law, they could never invest themselves deep enough into one concept to cultivate growth.

It would defeat the very purpose of being an arraymaster. They sought connections and complexities beyond their rank, laws, and daos only truly available to those of the fifteenth rank and beyond. The Law of Creation, or the Dao of Connections, ideas so close to the nature of reality itself that even God-Imperiums would take time to understand them.

Children attempting to know the doings of Gods, that’s what they were.

And until very recently, that was what they had been. They duplicated ideas or concepts, nothing groundbreaking and nothing new, not until this one at least.

Bill had created a soul, a thinking growing being not of the four Primordials and not made by a fifteenth-rank individual. This wasn’t just a construct or an amalgamation of species, nor was it an eldritch thing.

It was something living, something free. It resembled a realm in its nature, one like Lynoria or The Sea of Death. But it was different, somehow.

The boy believed the most valuable thing he had was the child of the Beast, but that array was far more spectacular. Only those above the fifteenth rank had created something like it, and even then it was rare.

It was a living will, exuding its identity like a dao angel but still different, able to grow.

A dao angel without bindings, yes, that was what it was.

“Wukong,” A voice spoke through the void. “What have you done this time?”

Wukong smiled. It was the voice of a friend, the Bodhisattva who had tormented him ages ago, Guanyin was her name, but now most knew her as Nei Lo.

“What stirs the Judicar to leave her court?” The Monkey King said turning to her with a smile.

Well, turning wasn’t quite the term for it. There was no direction here, no place, but there was nonexistence. The nothingness between her court in the lower heavens and his presence disappeared as he instantly stood outside of her domain.

He would have entered, but her multiverse was annoyingly strict. It weighed down on him like humid air in the summer.

“Tai Jey,” She stated simply.

“What about him?”

Her eyes narrowed with impatience.

Wukong smiled again. Truth was one of the most dangerouse things in this place, but she had it. More specifically she protected one of the oldest truth sects in all of existence. The Enki Maluth was what they were called.

Truth sects didn’t last long. They were sources of eternal conflict, unrooting the truth behind forgotten debts and being able to divine the truth of certain techniques. It was one of the most capable daos, but it was also the one that caused the most conflict. Few truth sects survived this long, even the library needed Wukong’s protection.

More than half of the most costly conflicts in all of existence had been brought by truth. With truth, justice could be served, but it also meant that nothing could be forgotten.

So in most places, there was no truth. It was collected by different sects and locked away for eternity, preventing ancient feuds and dead karmas from rising once more.

“I know you had something to do with it.”

“Oh?”

“Do not play games with me WuKong.”

Wukong smiled. There had been a time when she had led him, taught him even. But that was in a different time. Now he could stand here and claim himself her equal if not even her better.

He hated that.

“Do you know then? The nature of the thing?”

“I have my suspicions,” she replied.

“Only that?”

“A new bloodline of sorts. He was hoping to reinforce his sect's power. What of it?”

Wukong shook his head lightly, like an elder brother admonishing a sibling.

“What?” Nei Lo asked in surprise.

Wukong just kept smiling. It was rare that he knew more than her about anything, much less something she herself had started investigating. Truth was central to justice after all. You couldn’t pass judgment without knowing the whole truth.

“It seems like you’ve gone blind with your old age,” the monkey man muttered.

He stroked his hairy face and the patch of fur that would have been a beard had he been human.

“Out with it, you ape!” Nei Lo yelled.

In the distance, reality was shaped by her irate thoughts. Realms were made and crumbled. Daos churned and laws never known before came to be and, just as quickly, vanished.

But that was normal, the God-Imperium’s equivalent of blushing really.

“You do not know Tai Jey,” Wukong stated. “He is a man, not a beast. He stole from the Wolf, one of Beast’s first children, and raised its children into servanthood. He has attempted to tame Beast before, nearly dying at every encounter and only left alive by her will alone. He has even tried to tame me.”

“He is a lucky fool. But we’ve all clashed with the Primordials more than once and they generally don’t kill their challengers. He is not so different.”

Wukong shook his head lightly.

“Beast was not the first Primordial he tried to mate with,” Wukong explained. “He first tried to mate with man. And when he failed there, then he went to Beast.”

God-Imperiums could create a new species just like that if they wished to, sex was a secondary thing for them.

“How do you know this?” Nei Lo asked.

“The child was unnaturally human.”

“That could be due to an infinite set of reasons. Bloodline phenomena-”

“I am Wukong, Nei Lo. A half-being of Man and Beast. I know my mother. She only reproduces in lust, never in creation. And she has more children than she cares to remember. If all he wished for was children, he could have made them a thousand times over by now. But no, he made only one and he made only a female. Why?”

Wukong could see the gears start to turn in her head, metaphorically that was.

“He was injured when I saw him, a few minor ranks of where he should be.”

Wukong nodded.

“War,” Nei Lo muttered. “He is not merely trying to strengthen his clan but to create other God-Imperiums. He’s… collecting Primordial bloodlines. His wounds… must have been from Insect, not Beast. And… that child… was she-”

“She was one of many. One of thousands no doubt. That was why they managed to get away. He’s mixing his bloodline with the primordials in order to strengthen his sect.”

“THAT FOOL! Doesn’t he know the risk of such a thing?”

Wukong nodded. The idea itself wasn’t new, have children with the strongest things in existence and then use said children to increase your own power. It had been tried before, and each time it had failed. The children would simply end up being too powerful. They’d break away from their parents and wreak havoc among reality.

Wukong was considered by most to be one of the strongest things in existence and it was mostly due to his bloodline. The bloodline of a primordial was exceptionally hard to conquer.

Unless.

“Could he do it?” Nei Lo asked. “Could he tame the children of Primordials?”

Wukong frowned. He had been thinking the same thing all this time. Well, a part of him had been.

“Probably,” the monkey man said with an honest shrug.

Then he smiled.

“Hopefully. Things have been calm for far too long, don’t you think?”