Gaius Antonius 54 - Earthly Ties, Part 4
no.
Pink Flamingo Cabal Grand Vizier
- Location
- Pennsylvania
Gaius Antonius Omake #54: Earthly Ties, Part 4
To Gaius, the run was very difficult, especially in his injured state, but to White Gazing it was liesurely. She stopped for a mere three hours per day, both to submerge herself and to let The Seeker rest. She mostly kept to herself but sometimes idly chatted with Gaius about philosophical topics.
The beast was annoyed with this pace, but would put up with it for the one who did her such a great favor, especially since he also proved a worthy intellectual sparring partner. Mei of course had endless questions as well, and Gaius acted as an intermediary between the two, relaying White Gazing's telepathic messages verbally.
"So... you say you're not a dragon, but do you know any?" Mei carefully asked White Gazing, who lazily rested her head on the riverbank.
"Personally? I was trained in several arts by one, but he wishes to protect his identity. The only other I have met in person is an ancestor of mine, who you might know as Blue Fang."
"Seriously, your ancestor was the Scourge of Claw Isle? The one who sunk an island off the west coast?" Mei pressed the beast,
"That he did. A tragic loss of temper, it was. White Gazing sadly nodded. "To wipe out the sinners living on Claw Isle was only proper, but to destroy the landmass, such that no land-dwelling creature could be born there again? Foolishness and spite. I shall speak no more of this topic."
As she had many times before, the Dragonfish cut the discussion off after just a minute, not being particularly enthused with conversation. Instead, she once more retrieved her eggs from some whorl in space which orbited her body. It was not the immortal aperture, from the one example Gaius had seen, Konstantinos' aperture was an extremely stable thing, a gateway which was as solid and well-defined his hands. This was some kind of extremely powerful technique, spacetime warping of an unbelievably high level for a Core Formation being.
Gaius was once more humbled by the sheer magnitude of the monster he had involved himself with.
Things didn't stay so cheery, though. With each passing day, the intensity of the run, even from her position in the basket, wore on Mei. More and more frequently, she coughed up bits of blood or even tissue, and she complained of pain in her back from the fourth day onward. It was clear as day that the severe pace of this travel was killing the old woman, but they had already known going in that this was a one way trip for her.
----
After thirteen days of travel, of which Mei spent a good portion asleep to preserve her strength, the three of them arrived at their destination. In the northwestern edge of Golden Devil territory, Gaius climbed a mountain whose name he could not recall. It was particularly steep and treacherous, the slope often becoming a sheer ninety-degree angle. Many times, he had to climb on the underside of an overhang, supporting himself and his old friend with only the pinching strength of his fingers and praying that the rocks would hold.
White Gazing had already flown ahead, and waited for the two of them near the peak, offering no help. She had promised that should they fall, she would save them, but that was cold comfort for Gaius, who was carrying a fragile, sick old woman; the tumble would kill her before White Gazing could arrive and arrest their fall.
Once more The Seeker found himself perplexed by the peculiar priorities of the mighty beast. She was grateful enough to bring them all this way, to show them something so precious that Gaius' lips had to be magically sealed on the subject, yet refused to carry them anywhere as a matter of principle? He supposed he had to accept that, equally intelligent as they may be, they were very different species.
"Are you holding up there, Mei?" Gaius asked, turning to look at the basket on his back.
"Well as I could be, all things considered..." The old woman responded hazily, wiping away a nosebleed with a handkerchief. "This altitude is a real pain though."
"I never should have brought you along, it was a stupid plan. I'm sorry." Gaius shot her a pensive look. "But we're so close, so please hang in there."
"Worry about yourself big boy." She replied, though the sassiness was undercut by a coughing fit.
By the time they reached the peak, they were five miles up from where they started and the sun had gone down. Gaius could have made it in half the time were he allowed to make the kinds of leaps that Cultivators were known for, but with his cargo that just wasn't an option.
White Gazing swished her tail from side to side impatiently as the pair took a few minutes to rest. "You finally made it. Come on, we must not dawdle any longer, I am already three days late."
The Dragonfish turned to the mountain face and exhaled a strange blue gas, which clung to the stone, illuminating an array of incomprehensible complexity, carved in a script which Gaius had never seen in his life. It wasn't a matter of deliberate obfuscation; the sheer amount of information simply demanded a level of mental processing power which no one below Core Formation could ever possess.
White Gazing silently stared at the array, and a series of reactions occurred which caused the script to change and shift, whole sections moving like pieces of a sliding puzzle or spiraling into maddening swirls of information. Eventually, she finished whatever it was she'd been doing, and a loud rumbling began to take place.
An entire section of the mountain, thousands of tons of stone, slid out as if extracted by a titanic spoon, floating above them and revealing a tunnel which led deep into the stone. Though there wasn't really a staircase, the pathway down was a gentle, spiraling slope that was easy to walk on, allowing Gaius and Mei to follow White Gazing down into the mountain with relative ease.
"I wasn't aware that dragons really... built things." Gaius commented, still in shock at what he had seen.
"Usually we do not, but sometimes, the land does not provide us the faculties we desire. On such occasions, carving out secret places is no trouble for a true dragon."
"I don't know if I'd call something like this just carving..."
"Foolish boy, of course one like you cannot see." White Gazing scoffed, a gout of steam escaping from between her fangs. "Walk the path much, much farther, and perhaps one day you will understand what power really is." With that unhelpful bit of advise over with, the trek returned to an uneasy silence.
Mei sighed with relief as they descended down to a less oppressive altitude. Gaius looked at her and grimaced; she looked terrible compared to when he'd first seen her in Flumenus. Her skin had grown splotchy with bruises, and her eyes were bloodshot. Internally, all of her organs were in a substantially worse state after all the strain, especially her lungs. Even if this was what she wanted, Gaius could not help but feel an intense pang of guilt in his chest; he had well and truly killed his friend.
----
Several miles later, the two humans and one beast entered a huge reservoir in the heart of the mountain. The light of the moon and stars, refracted straight through the miles seemingly opaque stone through yet more inscrutable arts, softly lit the wide open chamber.
Gaius whistled in appreciation as he took in the view. "Is this where you live? You said this place was built by a dragon, but it doesn't seem to be here - did you find it?"
"It was not I who found this place; I was invited by another dragonfish several mating cycles ago. Several of us use this place."
With a serene gentleness, White Gazing unraveled the space-time vortex, retrieving her eggs, and gently floated them down into the water.
Clumped together and submerged, they quickly extruded a mucoid substance which bound the clutch to a large rock. Half a dozen other such structures were visible in other parts of the reservoir. It was in that moment that Gaius realized what was going on.
This wasn't just any reservoir - it was a spawning pool.
Oh. Of course any human who visited would be bound to keep this a secret. To even show this to a single being of another species was an invaluable gift.
The spacious, insulated interior of the cave would provide a safe hiding place with a well-regulated temperature for the hatchlings, while the spirit stones lining the bottom of the pool would allow them to cultivate without fighting over ambient qi. From there, once they grew large and strong enough they would swim down the river and into the Green Scale Plains to the northwest.
Already, some of the eggs were beginning to pulse and squirm as the fish inside stirred to consciousness. Mei peered over the edge, watching enraptured as the first hatchling finally broke free from its eggs, soon followed by several more.
Mei gasped at the sight, then turned away as another coughing fit overtook her. Small flecks of blood spattered on the stone where they were greedily sucked up by the moss and lichen. "To think that someone like me got to see something like this..." She laughed weakly, slumping against a rock to gaze out upon the water.
"It's gorgeous." Gaius nodded in response, tears beginning to well up in his eyes. The pale moonlight punctuated the scene, casting a magical, ethereal mood over this momentous place and occasion.
"I'm so glad I could come here, Gaius." The old woman sighed, enjoying the way the refracted moonlight dappled off the water. "I'm satisfied with my life. I don't have any big regrets. But... just this once, to see something so magical and touch the spiritual world... this was nice."
"I'm glad I could help you." Gaius said, smiling sadly. He wanted to punch himself; here, at the very end, he just couldn't think of anything to say. "I missed so many things. Do I really have the right to be here?"
Mei laughed weakly, her head starting to slump to the side as she no longer had the strength to hold it up. Gaius immediately went to her side, cradling her in his arms. "The right? What does that even mean? You're here, and I'm glad you are, that's all there is to it."
Off to the side, White Gazing diligently observed the hatching, giving the two friends as much privacy as was possible in this place.
Something in the old woman broke in that moment. Not physically but spiritually; Gaius felt something begin to shake loose. Mei's soul would soon depart. With no time left, The Seeker tore himself open and let his emotions spill out.
"I'm afraid, Mei. I'm terrified of what I'm becoming, even if I don't let myself think about it. I wonder if every Cultivator feels like this." He confessed, holding her close to speak right into her ear. "This pain, the pain of being left behind. I swear, I'll carry it for the rest of my days as a scar on my heart, along with your memory."
"Feh. You're such... a stupid fucking sweetheart. I'm happy, I've... been happy." Mei gasped out as her soul began to fully escape her body, desperately clinging to her organs as it was inexorably ripped away. Within the pool, more and more hatchlings began to emerge, spurred on by their siblings. "Keep going. As far as you can go. You... big... nerd..."
With that, the old woman's soul fully exited her body, a lifetime's worth of memories evaporating instantly. She was right: there truly were no regrets in there. Scrubbed of all earthly traces, the soul vanished completely from Gaius' senses. Mei was gone.
Gaius sat there in silence for a while; he wasn't exactly sure how long. He closed Mei's eyes and gently stroked her hair, as if she had merely fallen asleep in his lap. This felt wrong. It felt weird and painful in a way that he wasn't equipped to process. This girl who had been younger than him become something else, something worn out and dried up, something which had simply come and gone without raging against the world and fighting for more.
"I shouldn't have brought her here." Gaius lamented, weeping. His dripped down his face and off his chin, falling into the spawning pool and mixing into the water. "She always did get in over her head. She had months left. In my greed, I stole those precious months from her family."
White Gazing turned her eyes away from the pool for a moment to regard Gaius with curiosity and empathy. "How a mortal chooses to die is none of my concern. I suppose humans, who give birth to one child as a time, view the weak with more love than we who lay large clutches do." She sighed, curling herself up to gently brush her tailfin against Gaius' back. "It seems difficult to live that way, as a lifelong pack animal. How do you bear the suffering that comes with so much connection?"
"How do we bear it?" Gaius laughed, drying his eyes. "We ask ourselves that all the time. Each of us finds our own answers." He reached to the side, briefly embracing the Dragonfish's fin in thanks.
"We Tyrant Beasts live together in schools, as Sacred Carp. In a large river, hundreds might dwell. As Rainbow Carp, we keep to ourselves more, but still see each other often. We possess sub-human intelligence in those stages, but some instinct drives us to stay together." The beast turned to the spawning pool, watching as more and more hatchlings broke out of their eggs and surged forth into the water.
"When we become Dragonfish, that ends. We are small in number as all Core Formation species are, and we have no need for civilization. We spend most of our lives in solitude. We gain greater understanding, but drift apart. I wonder, what is it that we lose, when that happens?" A sea of myriad and complex emotions swirled in the fish's eyes as she watched the hatchlings begin to gnaw at the algae. "This feeling in my heart right now, this overwhelming pain and joy... it feels foreign to me. Perhaps those old instincts are reviving in me, just for today."
"White Gazing..." Gaius hesitantly began, not sure what to do or say. How was he even supposed to respond to a statement like that?
"And so, for one day, I shall pay my respects to those days I left behind. I shall act most unlike a dragon, even though I should be seeking to become one." She lightly batted Gaius with her tail, forcing to his feet and sending him stumbling toward the pool. "The smallest, feeblest ones, those with no chance of reaching the next stage on their own. Among those alone, choose one."
----
After several minutes of fervent bowing and copious thanks, Gaius finally made his way to the spawning pool. He looked on with awe; there were so many of them, somewhere in the low thousands. Of these, perhaps one Dragonfish would arise. Cultivation was, as ever, cruel.
White Gazing said to pick one of the smaller babies, but that still left Gaius paralyzed with indecision. Mere minutes old, the carp all looked identical; translucent little things which swam around gormlessly, with nothing in the way of distinguishing marks or features.
Gaius tried to let instinct take over, fumbling around with his spiritual senses for one which felt familiar, but it was fruitless. These newborn creatures were as pure as pure got; their souls also felt identical.
Fuck it.
Slowly, Gaius dipped his hand into the water and waited. He cupped his hand, observing as the little fish flitted about. After a minute, one of the runts swam right into his palm, and he snapped his fingers closed, loosely restraining the newborn as he pulled it out of the water.
With a wordless nod of acknowledgement, White Gazing effortlessly lifted over ten gallons of water out of the pool as an amorphous liquid blob. Gaius plunged his hand into the water and released the baby, allowing it to swim freely again. "That one will do." Gaius nodded, a few fresh tears springing to his eyes as he watched the hatchling gradually adjust to being alive.
Yes, this was the only way to go. It was far from certain, but having died right next to so much birth, Mei very well might have reincarnated into one of these carp. If he ever meant anything to Mei, and if her soul had truly come to dwell in one of the carp, then destiny would have brought them together just now. Gaius had no way of knowing, so there was no need to think about it any further.
With an effortless exertion of power, the beast swung her tail and released a wave of cutting power, carving big, solid chunks of stone out of the wall. She then breathed out a ruinous black wind which dissolved it into sand, followed by a torrent of white-hot fire that burnt it into glass. In moments, White Gazing presented Gaius with a slightly rough but fully functional glass tank. "This ought to do. Of course, it will need several times more water and space in a few years' time."
From there, the Dragonfish launched into an exhaustive list of exact specifications for the hatchling's proper dietary and cultivation needs, and Gaius couldn't help but smile. As cold and distant as she acted, White Gazing was a very good mother.
----
"What the fuck was I thinking!?" Gaius lamented as he made the long trek back to the Dawn Fortress, which would take about five times longer than he had hoped thanks to the huge glass tank of water on his back. There was absolutely no way that little hatchling needed this much water, but the stubborn beast had refused to give it any less. "Weakling as it may be, it is still my child. Pay it the respect it is due." She had said.
So now Gaius had to walk - not run, not ride, not Earth-Glide, but walk home, so as to not damage the tank in any capacity, or hurt its fragile occupant. If the two had already bonded their cultivation then this would be easier, but Gaius knew almost nothing of beast-taming, and certainly wouldn't be taking chances with such an obscenely valuable creature.
He looked back at the tank, peering through the glass to see the baby staring at him obliviously. The organs were visible through its translucent skin, pulsating and squirming as such things do. Its mouth gaped. Were it not already submerged, Gaius wondered if the little beast might be drooling.
Fishing a low-grade spirit stone from his bag, Gaius tossed it into the tank, followed by a few pinches of algae - it would graduate to small insects along with the algae in a week or two, and eventually smaller fish after a month. The baby greedily snapped up the plant matter within a few minutes, then swam to the bottom of the tank and nestled up to the stone.
As Gaius continued his trek, he felt the carp dutifully drawing energy from the stone at an incredible speed. It really was five times faster, as they said. It had been born at the First Heavenstage, and might reach the second in a single year.
"Talk about an impulse purchase; I can just tell you're gonna be a pain. I'm gonna have to invest so much time into learning beast-taming arts too..." Gaius sighed, shaking his head.
Gaius had chosen to learn the basics of body cultivation, sword cultivation, curse arts and soul arts early in his career. His reasoning had been that the farther along one's cultivation base gets, the harder it got to pick up entirely new disciplines. Thus, even though the majority of his time and knowledge went into body cultivation, he was competent in multiple other arts. And now here he was, in the Eleventh Heavenstage, needing to add in an entirely new branch to his knowledge; how idiotic.
"I've heard about the dreaded 'rebound pet' before. To think its allure was this powerful..." He raised a hand to tap the glass, then hesitated and put it back down; better to be extremely careful until it got less... squishy-looking. "Now, what the hell am I gonna call you?"
From Gaius' hip hung a bag full of ashes, the last remains of his sole connection to mortal-kind. He wasn't sure where the right place would be to bury or scatter them, given he had to keep the ruse up to her family. For now, this tenuous tether would keep him company, just a little longer.
----
And here we come to the end of this short arc. The truth is, when I started writing this the idea of Gaius getting a carp companion never actually occurred to me. It wasn't until I was having a conversation with @ReaderOfFate that I realized what a blindingly obvious plot point was staring me in the face.
I wanted to write something about Gaius reuniting with an old mortal friend, and at first it was this soap opera-ish family drama that I couldn't get a handle on at all. Instead I decided to frame the story around Gaius fighting a monster, and eventually it became about appeasing a monster.
I had a lot of fun writing this arc. Gaius is the type to repress his own negative emotions and let them quietly rip into him beneath the surface, so letting him be more emotionally open was interesting to write.
To Gaius, the run was very difficult, especially in his injured state, but to White Gazing it was liesurely. She stopped for a mere three hours per day, both to submerge herself and to let The Seeker rest. She mostly kept to herself but sometimes idly chatted with Gaius about philosophical topics.
The beast was annoyed with this pace, but would put up with it for the one who did her such a great favor, especially since he also proved a worthy intellectual sparring partner. Mei of course had endless questions as well, and Gaius acted as an intermediary between the two, relaying White Gazing's telepathic messages verbally.
"So... you say you're not a dragon, but do you know any?" Mei carefully asked White Gazing, who lazily rested her head on the riverbank.
"Personally? I was trained in several arts by one, but he wishes to protect his identity. The only other I have met in person is an ancestor of mine, who you might know as Blue Fang."
"Seriously, your ancestor was the Scourge of Claw Isle? The one who sunk an island off the west coast?" Mei pressed the beast,
"That he did. A tragic loss of temper, it was. White Gazing sadly nodded. "To wipe out the sinners living on Claw Isle was only proper, but to destroy the landmass, such that no land-dwelling creature could be born there again? Foolishness and spite. I shall speak no more of this topic."
As she had many times before, the Dragonfish cut the discussion off after just a minute, not being particularly enthused with conversation. Instead, she once more retrieved her eggs from some whorl in space which orbited her body. It was not the immortal aperture, from the one example Gaius had seen, Konstantinos' aperture was an extremely stable thing, a gateway which was as solid and well-defined his hands. This was some kind of extremely powerful technique, spacetime warping of an unbelievably high level for a Core Formation being.
Gaius was once more humbled by the sheer magnitude of the monster he had involved himself with.
Things didn't stay so cheery, though. With each passing day, the intensity of the run, even from her position in the basket, wore on Mei. More and more frequently, she coughed up bits of blood or even tissue, and she complained of pain in her back from the fourth day onward. It was clear as day that the severe pace of this travel was killing the old woman, but they had already known going in that this was a one way trip for her.
----
After thirteen days of travel, of which Mei spent a good portion asleep to preserve her strength, the three of them arrived at their destination. In the northwestern edge of Golden Devil territory, Gaius climbed a mountain whose name he could not recall. It was particularly steep and treacherous, the slope often becoming a sheer ninety-degree angle. Many times, he had to climb on the underside of an overhang, supporting himself and his old friend with only the pinching strength of his fingers and praying that the rocks would hold.
White Gazing had already flown ahead, and waited for the two of them near the peak, offering no help. She had promised that should they fall, she would save them, but that was cold comfort for Gaius, who was carrying a fragile, sick old woman; the tumble would kill her before White Gazing could arrive and arrest their fall.
Once more The Seeker found himself perplexed by the peculiar priorities of the mighty beast. She was grateful enough to bring them all this way, to show them something so precious that Gaius' lips had to be magically sealed on the subject, yet refused to carry them anywhere as a matter of principle? He supposed he had to accept that, equally intelligent as they may be, they were very different species.
"Are you holding up there, Mei?" Gaius asked, turning to look at the basket on his back.
"Well as I could be, all things considered..." The old woman responded hazily, wiping away a nosebleed with a handkerchief. "This altitude is a real pain though."
"I never should have brought you along, it was a stupid plan. I'm sorry." Gaius shot her a pensive look. "But we're so close, so please hang in there."
"Worry about yourself big boy." She replied, though the sassiness was undercut by a coughing fit.
By the time they reached the peak, they were five miles up from where they started and the sun had gone down. Gaius could have made it in half the time were he allowed to make the kinds of leaps that Cultivators were known for, but with his cargo that just wasn't an option.
White Gazing swished her tail from side to side impatiently as the pair took a few minutes to rest. "You finally made it. Come on, we must not dawdle any longer, I am already three days late."
The Dragonfish turned to the mountain face and exhaled a strange blue gas, which clung to the stone, illuminating an array of incomprehensible complexity, carved in a script which Gaius had never seen in his life. It wasn't a matter of deliberate obfuscation; the sheer amount of information simply demanded a level of mental processing power which no one below Core Formation could ever possess.
White Gazing silently stared at the array, and a series of reactions occurred which caused the script to change and shift, whole sections moving like pieces of a sliding puzzle or spiraling into maddening swirls of information. Eventually, she finished whatever it was she'd been doing, and a loud rumbling began to take place.
An entire section of the mountain, thousands of tons of stone, slid out as if extracted by a titanic spoon, floating above them and revealing a tunnel which led deep into the stone. Though there wasn't really a staircase, the pathway down was a gentle, spiraling slope that was easy to walk on, allowing Gaius and Mei to follow White Gazing down into the mountain with relative ease.
"I wasn't aware that dragons really... built things." Gaius commented, still in shock at what he had seen.
"Usually we do not, but sometimes, the land does not provide us the faculties we desire. On such occasions, carving out secret places is no trouble for a true dragon."
"I don't know if I'd call something like this just carving..."
"Foolish boy, of course one like you cannot see." White Gazing scoffed, a gout of steam escaping from between her fangs. "Walk the path much, much farther, and perhaps one day you will understand what power really is." With that unhelpful bit of advise over with, the trek returned to an uneasy silence.
Mei sighed with relief as they descended down to a less oppressive altitude. Gaius looked at her and grimaced; she looked terrible compared to when he'd first seen her in Flumenus. Her skin had grown splotchy with bruises, and her eyes were bloodshot. Internally, all of her organs were in a substantially worse state after all the strain, especially her lungs. Even if this was what she wanted, Gaius could not help but feel an intense pang of guilt in his chest; he had well and truly killed his friend.
----
Several miles later, the two humans and one beast entered a huge reservoir in the heart of the mountain. The light of the moon and stars, refracted straight through the miles seemingly opaque stone through yet more inscrutable arts, softly lit the wide open chamber.
Gaius whistled in appreciation as he took in the view. "Is this where you live? You said this place was built by a dragon, but it doesn't seem to be here - did you find it?"
"It was not I who found this place; I was invited by another dragonfish several mating cycles ago. Several of us use this place."
With a serene gentleness, White Gazing unraveled the space-time vortex, retrieving her eggs, and gently floated them down into the water.
Clumped together and submerged, they quickly extruded a mucoid substance which bound the clutch to a large rock. Half a dozen other such structures were visible in other parts of the reservoir. It was in that moment that Gaius realized what was going on.
This wasn't just any reservoir - it was a spawning pool.
Oh. Of course any human who visited would be bound to keep this a secret. To even show this to a single being of another species was an invaluable gift.
The spacious, insulated interior of the cave would provide a safe hiding place with a well-regulated temperature for the hatchlings, while the spirit stones lining the bottom of the pool would allow them to cultivate without fighting over ambient qi. From there, once they grew large and strong enough they would swim down the river and into the Green Scale Plains to the northwest.
Already, some of the eggs were beginning to pulse and squirm as the fish inside stirred to consciousness. Mei peered over the edge, watching enraptured as the first hatchling finally broke free from its eggs, soon followed by several more.
Mei gasped at the sight, then turned away as another coughing fit overtook her. Small flecks of blood spattered on the stone where they were greedily sucked up by the moss and lichen. "To think that someone like me got to see something like this..." She laughed weakly, slumping against a rock to gaze out upon the water.
"It's gorgeous." Gaius nodded in response, tears beginning to well up in his eyes. The pale moonlight punctuated the scene, casting a magical, ethereal mood over this momentous place and occasion.
"I'm so glad I could come here, Gaius." The old woman sighed, enjoying the way the refracted moonlight dappled off the water. "I'm satisfied with my life. I don't have any big regrets. But... just this once, to see something so magical and touch the spiritual world... this was nice."
"I'm glad I could help you." Gaius said, smiling sadly. He wanted to punch himself; here, at the very end, he just couldn't think of anything to say. "I missed so many things. Do I really have the right to be here?"
Mei laughed weakly, her head starting to slump to the side as she no longer had the strength to hold it up. Gaius immediately went to her side, cradling her in his arms. "The right? What does that even mean? You're here, and I'm glad you are, that's all there is to it."
Off to the side, White Gazing diligently observed the hatching, giving the two friends as much privacy as was possible in this place.
Something in the old woman broke in that moment. Not physically but spiritually; Gaius felt something begin to shake loose. Mei's soul would soon depart. With no time left, The Seeker tore himself open and let his emotions spill out.
"I'm afraid, Mei. I'm terrified of what I'm becoming, even if I don't let myself think about it. I wonder if every Cultivator feels like this." He confessed, holding her close to speak right into her ear. "This pain, the pain of being left behind. I swear, I'll carry it for the rest of my days as a scar on my heart, along with your memory."
"Feh. You're such... a stupid fucking sweetheart. I'm happy, I've... been happy." Mei gasped out as her soul began to fully escape her body, desperately clinging to her organs as it was inexorably ripped away. Within the pool, more and more hatchlings began to emerge, spurred on by their siblings. "Keep going. As far as you can go. You... big... nerd..."
With that, the old woman's soul fully exited her body, a lifetime's worth of memories evaporating instantly. She was right: there truly were no regrets in there. Scrubbed of all earthly traces, the soul vanished completely from Gaius' senses. Mei was gone.
Gaius sat there in silence for a while; he wasn't exactly sure how long. He closed Mei's eyes and gently stroked her hair, as if she had merely fallen asleep in his lap. This felt wrong. It felt weird and painful in a way that he wasn't equipped to process. This girl who had been younger than him become something else, something worn out and dried up, something which had simply come and gone without raging against the world and fighting for more.
"I shouldn't have brought her here." Gaius lamented, weeping. His dripped down his face and off his chin, falling into the spawning pool and mixing into the water. "She always did get in over her head. She had months left. In my greed, I stole those precious months from her family."
White Gazing turned her eyes away from the pool for a moment to regard Gaius with curiosity and empathy. "How a mortal chooses to die is none of my concern. I suppose humans, who give birth to one child as a time, view the weak with more love than we who lay large clutches do." She sighed, curling herself up to gently brush her tailfin against Gaius' back. "It seems difficult to live that way, as a lifelong pack animal. How do you bear the suffering that comes with so much connection?"
"How do we bear it?" Gaius laughed, drying his eyes. "We ask ourselves that all the time. Each of us finds our own answers." He reached to the side, briefly embracing the Dragonfish's fin in thanks.
"We Tyrant Beasts live together in schools, as Sacred Carp. In a large river, hundreds might dwell. As Rainbow Carp, we keep to ourselves more, but still see each other often. We possess sub-human intelligence in those stages, but some instinct drives us to stay together." The beast turned to the spawning pool, watching as more and more hatchlings broke out of their eggs and surged forth into the water.
"When we become Dragonfish, that ends. We are small in number as all Core Formation species are, and we have no need for civilization. We spend most of our lives in solitude. We gain greater understanding, but drift apart. I wonder, what is it that we lose, when that happens?" A sea of myriad and complex emotions swirled in the fish's eyes as she watched the hatchlings begin to gnaw at the algae. "This feeling in my heart right now, this overwhelming pain and joy... it feels foreign to me. Perhaps those old instincts are reviving in me, just for today."
"White Gazing..." Gaius hesitantly began, not sure what to do or say. How was he even supposed to respond to a statement like that?
"And so, for one day, I shall pay my respects to those days I left behind. I shall act most unlike a dragon, even though I should be seeking to become one." She lightly batted Gaius with her tail, forcing to his feet and sending him stumbling toward the pool. "The smallest, feeblest ones, those with no chance of reaching the next stage on their own. Among those alone, choose one."
----
After several minutes of fervent bowing and copious thanks, Gaius finally made his way to the spawning pool. He looked on with awe; there were so many of them, somewhere in the low thousands. Of these, perhaps one Dragonfish would arise. Cultivation was, as ever, cruel.
White Gazing said to pick one of the smaller babies, but that still left Gaius paralyzed with indecision. Mere minutes old, the carp all looked identical; translucent little things which swam around gormlessly, with nothing in the way of distinguishing marks or features.
Gaius tried to let instinct take over, fumbling around with his spiritual senses for one which felt familiar, but it was fruitless. These newborn creatures were as pure as pure got; their souls also felt identical.
Fuck it.
Slowly, Gaius dipped his hand into the water and waited. He cupped his hand, observing as the little fish flitted about. After a minute, one of the runts swam right into his palm, and he snapped his fingers closed, loosely restraining the newborn as he pulled it out of the water.
With a wordless nod of acknowledgement, White Gazing effortlessly lifted over ten gallons of water out of the pool as an amorphous liquid blob. Gaius plunged his hand into the water and released the baby, allowing it to swim freely again. "That one will do." Gaius nodded, a few fresh tears springing to his eyes as he watched the hatchling gradually adjust to being alive.
Yes, this was the only way to go. It was far from certain, but having died right next to so much birth, Mei very well might have reincarnated into one of these carp. If he ever meant anything to Mei, and if her soul had truly come to dwell in one of the carp, then destiny would have brought them together just now. Gaius had no way of knowing, so there was no need to think about it any further.
With an effortless exertion of power, the beast swung her tail and released a wave of cutting power, carving big, solid chunks of stone out of the wall. She then breathed out a ruinous black wind which dissolved it into sand, followed by a torrent of white-hot fire that burnt it into glass. In moments, White Gazing presented Gaius with a slightly rough but fully functional glass tank. "This ought to do. Of course, it will need several times more water and space in a few years' time."
From there, the Dragonfish launched into an exhaustive list of exact specifications for the hatchling's proper dietary and cultivation needs, and Gaius couldn't help but smile. As cold and distant as she acted, White Gazing was a very good mother.
----
"What the fuck was I thinking!?" Gaius lamented as he made the long trek back to the Dawn Fortress, which would take about five times longer than he had hoped thanks to the huge glass tank of water on his back. There was absolutely no way that little hatchling needed this much water, but the stubborn beast had refused to give it any less. "Weakling as it may be, it is still my child. Pay it the respect it is due." She had said.
So now Gaius had to walk - not run, not ride, not Earth-Glide, but walk home, so as to not damage the tank in any capacity, or hurt its fragile occupant. If the two had already bonded their cultivation then this would be easier, but Gaius knew almost nothing of beast-taming, and certainly wouldn't be taking chances with such an obscenely valuable creature.
He looked back at the tank, peering through the glass to see the baby staring at him obliviously. The organs were visible through its translucent skin, pulsating and squirming as such things do. Its mouth gaped. Were it not already submerged, Gaius wondered if the little beast might be drooling.
Fishing a low-grade spirit stone from his bag, Gaius tossed it into the tank, followed by a few pinches of algae - it would graduate to small insects along with the algae in a week or two, and eventually smaller fish after a month. The baby greedily snapped up the plant matter within a few minutes, then swam to the bottom of the tank and nestled up to the stone.
As Gaius continued his trek, he felt the carp dutifully drawing energy from the stone at an incredible speed. It really was five times faster, as they said. It had been born at the First Heavenstage, and might reach the second in a single year.
"Talk about an impulse purchase; I can just tell you're gonna be a pain. I'm gonna have to invest so much time into learning beast-taming arts too..." Gaius sighed, shaking his head.
Gaius had chosen to learn the basics of body cultivation, sword cultivation, curse arts and soul arts early in his career. His reasoning had been that the farther along one's cultivation base gets, the harder it got to pick up entirely new disciplines. Thus, even though the majority of his time and knowledge went into body cultivation, he was competent in multiple other arts. And now here he was, in the Eleventh Heavenstage, needing to add in an entirely new branch to his knowledge; how idiotic.
"I've heard about the dreaded 'rebound pet' before. To think its allure was this powerful..." He raised a hand to tap the glass, then hesitated and put it back down; better to be extremely careful until it got less... squishy-looking. "Now, what the hell am I gonna call you?"
From Gaius' hip hung a bag full of ashes, the last remains of his sole connection to mortal-kind. He wasn't sure where the right place would be to bury or scatter them, given he had to keep the ruse up to her family. For now, this tenuous tether would keep him company, just a little longer.
----
And here we come to the end of this short arc. The truth is, when I started writing this the idea of Gaius getting a carp companion never actually occurred to me. It wasn't until I was having a conversation with @ReaderOfFate that I realized what a blindingly obvious plot point was staring me in the face.
I wanted to write something about Gaius reuniting with an old mortal friend, and at first it was this soap opera-ish family drama that I couldn't get a handle on at all. Instead I decided to frame the story around Gaius fighting a monster, and eventually it became about appeasing a monster.
I had a lot of fun writing this arc. Gaius is the type to repress his own negative emotions and let them quietly rip into him beneath the surface, so letting him be more emotionally open was interesting to write.
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