One does not simply ride into Jingshen territory, doubly so, if you are of the Golden Devil Clan. It´s no understatement to say the Golden Devils and the Jingshen don´t get along. Since our clan came into the desert our two clans came into competition. Most of that competition revolves around the trade of the scorpion road. Whichever power controls the scorpion road, controls the massive wealth buried in the ground.
The scorpion road is also the reason we currently travel along its course as merchants, since merchants are welcome anywhere. The Jingshen are, as a merchant clan, no exception. The travel as a lone merchant was easier than I expected. Sometimes I joined caravans with my various wares, some roads I traveled on my lonesome. All the while I gathered information and made a mess of things when possible. It´s hilarious what a changed guard patrol sheet can do to a town's morale. Sadly, at some point I have to actually talk to people, but that´s difficult. Golden Devils are distinctive and any vassal of Jingshen could spot us many li against the glare of heavens tribulation lightning.
Thankfully I was aware of that issue before I set out on my journey and put out an open request for suggestions of possible disguises in enemy territory. What stuck out to me weren´t the various suggestions of special artifacts or just plain headwear, no it was the obvious. We are all cultivators and it will take many months before I arrive in Jingshen territory, since I need to arrive at a trader speed with cargo already in my wagon, ready to sell. Aretaphila rightfully pointed out that´s more than enough time to train, or cultivate my own Illusion technique for such a long-term mission. Normally the clans' archives wouldn´t know of such specific techniques, since the clan rarely develops infiltration specialists and the few that did more than likely couldn´t pass them on due to loss to the heavens curse and other conflicts in the past.
This isn´t the past, we live in the present and it has the new technique palace. It´s the solution to my problem! A clerk working there, harried by requests of many comrades every weekday, quickly gave me a working technique and the required Illusion 101 manuals he insisted everyone needed to learn or suffer the haunt of nightmare spirits for the offense given. Ominous warning, but nothing new for my life as a cultivator. My existence always offends something (Heaven) or someone (Turtle-blooded sect members), which makes nightmare spirits just another enemy to conquer. Though, that cycle of everyone offends everyone else through striving for excellence is really annoying and it´s even rewarded by the heavens with these trials, ugh. If there´s one thing I wish I could change it would be that. If only living a good live were rewarded just as well, but that´s a dream a future me can fulfill. The manual though, I memorized, because knowing my luck I will have to fight an army of these spirits in the liminal at some point. I wouldn´t put it past Mount Tai to send me challenges every now and then so it can make sure I am on the correct path.
The new technique is called "Unparalleled hidden moon lake view". What a pretentious name! It has nothing to do with
water or the
moon for that matter. At least my phantasmal sight actually concerns itself with the subject of the technique name! All this puddle technique supposedly does is make you not stand out like a still puddle in a crowd, which means no connection to the name at all. Anyways, it´s supposed to fool anyone in my or under my realm, but people in the foundation realm will no doubt pay more attention to the edges fraying due to my lacking qi control in comparison to them. Since my techniques just barely working won´t be enough for such a critical mission, Aretaphila has volunteered to figure out something better. I could not even begin to suspect where her knowledge of demonic tunes could help with body illusions, but we figured it out.
________
A few months ago, in the blooming crater of the Angelus manor
"So, that´s the technique in principle." The shimmer of qi, disguising me, vanishing on motes of qi.
Did I spot a look of horror on her face before she schooled her features? Was it really that bad?
"Er… Senior, was my control really worthy of such an expression?"
"No, No. It´s just. That technique is supposed to make you seem unassuming, pleasant and normal to be around, right?" Now she is even tapping her right foot, while thinking.
"Well, yes." What is her angle here and why does she look so happy?
"To be blunt, you just did the opposite and I love it!" What?
"Then why the look of horror?"
"Because you showed me something I fear and despise and no you may not know!" Fair enough. Moving on then.
"Then did I get scammed?" This is frustrating, If I can´t use this technique I would have to rely on mere clothing, which will make information gathering difficult and trading in their bigger cities almost impossible.
"No, I don´t think so. The technique is from the technique palace and was stored in the karmic portion, right?
"I-I think so? Oh, you mean the clans karma is affecting my illusion technique, since Heaven doesn´t want to help me?
"Yes, oh I can see the potential for discordant music weaved into it already! This was worth the time traveled already. My enemies will slaughter themselves at seeing their fear realized next to them, he he."
"Uh, Senior. Are you with me?" That seems to have brought her out of her daydream.
"Oh, uh yes. I am here. If you could ignore that, please. I´ll show you how to our harmonize our bloodlines Karma to heavens dark self, the Heavens shadow!" accentuating her statement of action with a raised finger.
"Uh, harmonize with what?" It seems familiar, yet not.
"The Heavens shadow, is opposite of the light and yet part of the heavens."
"I didn´t know that."
Aretaphila takes a moment to take a deep breath and shortly thereafter shadow qi coalesces above her hands. The shadows somehow putting the still unrepaired courtyard walls into the deep contrast in spite of the middays sun shining upon us from overhead.
"Then why can I, who is not darkness aligned like Archegetes Old Gold, still find so much more shadow qi than usual in this unusually verdant manor of your family? Your walls are even overgrown with vines full of that qi. They look millennia old and we both know none of our families had the time to cultivate and transport them over the retreat!"
"Well, uh, about that. I know it sounds ridiculous, but It´s connected to the reason it looks so devastated. The recently attacking Cannibals were barely repulsed and we banished them to the shadow of Mount Tais dream."
"You saw Mount Tai!?" Since she doesn´t seem to want to let me out of her grasp anytime soon; I shadowport myself to her shadow and continue my explanation, now in a lotus position on the ground.
"Yes, as domineering as goddess Bixia, though I am not quite sure on their relationship. Her kiss on my lips was strange, because lord Tai mantled my body for his triumphant return to his return. It was not quite the kiss of a lover, more of a mother to all I think." This statement makes her return her pint-sized front, back around to face me, red-faced.
"H-Hold up! Your family fought Cannibals in this village, generally made a mess of things and Mount Tai rewarded you with a surplus of shadow qi in the form of vines growing out of the ground?"
"No, my father bargained his chance at glory with our ancestors in the afterlife for my release from Mount Tais service as his servant on the Mountain."
"Well, shit. He´s as good as dead then." Her shock quickly morphs visibly into worry. I suspected our small family couldn´t excuse his absence for long.
"Your mother, is she, uhm?" her apologetic tone apparent in her voice in demeanor.
"We are still grieving, but at least the joyous birth of my adorable brother allows her to focus herself on someone else. He´ll grow up alright, just without me in the picture. There are few enough Qi condensation experts with a focus on more subtle arts, fewer still who can mirror a cultivator averages speed like I do." A nod is all I receive and want. Condolences won´t bring father back, but my actions will!
"Don´t worry I already have a plan to get him back to the world of the living!"
"Really?"
"Jup, Mount Tai promised it would release my father and his platoon once I reach the 8
th pillar of Foundation Establishment and I have all the motivation I need!"
"That sounds great! You are directly challenging a dreaming servant of heaven! Oh, how exciting!"
"To quite obviously bridge to your earlier suggestion, Aretaphila. You suggested I should harmonize my qi with the shadow of Heaven instead of heaven itself, right?" that sudden shift in topics makes her hands clasped around mine wander quickly back to her, ready to lecture me.
"No, no!"
"The shadow of heaven is a part of heaven and not something different. Get it right,
μᾰθητής!"
"Ok, ok, but how does that work with demonic tunes!"
"Why the very basics, of course! Qi cycling.
My confusion must be easy to read, judging by her frustrated expression.
"But I won´t just be able to start dancing whenever I want."
"Of course not, which is why demonic tunists use the meridian in your throat and create an inner cycle. I know that the clans' techniques prefer qi projection, but the inner cycle isn´t really that dangerous normally."
"Do I want to know the exceptions?"
"No, because your focus now lies on moving without motion, so stop diverting the topic
μᾰθητής!"
"Yes,
δῐδᾰ́σκᾰλος!"
_____
That was an interesting discussion and it worked better than we hoped. Having such a highly qualified senior helping me reverse engineer that technique made the physical learning part trivial, since she practically knew every theoretical possibility and accounted for them. The comprehension of the 12
th heavenstage is frightening to behold and I am happy to be her ally!
In the little free time I have, I wonder who would win in a no holds barred fight. Would Lady Callista outlast her enemy or would Aretaphila's tunes of terror destroy lady Callista's mind defenses first? What happens once they have realm parity? An interesting thought-exercise for another time.
Just to be safe on the clothing department I asked some legionnaires with free time to spare on acceptable clothes I could wear and thankfully most of the options presented to me involved actual clothing that covers the body and not just transparent silk I hear some sects in the plains prefer. That makes the clothing disguise choice easier, but not that easy. A false-positive in one of the arrays of cities I will travel to could detect me, so I commissioned a full face-mask for the rare time it´s necessary. It sunk my family's income by half, but the logistics division made it remarkably well. It feels like a second skin after a few minutes of wearing it. Well, I have everything prepared, time to fool around with the enemy's trade!
Most of the time travel is boring, since all you do is wander along the various roads from town to town and the Jingshen, merchants at heart as they are, even make deals with the common bandits to their benefit. All of it not traceable to their greater clan of course and any faction dumb enough to be caught gets shafted rather quickly in their treacherous politics. Them knowing that I am a reliable, no nonsense trader that just wants to sell good merchandise reliably makes ingratiating myself with the most outsider friendly faction easy. A beer with the fellow trader giving me tips for a place to sell my wares for the day here and in turn some news of wares the mortal kingdom merchant houses would want, all fronts of our
Parakoimomenos Xie Xinya, of course.
The help of her fronts in the lands of our vassal clans were the least of her help in my endeavors. She even shared some information about the trade lanes the clan has with the Jingshen. She even made time talking with me about various points of failures I could have. Afterwards we drank to the better side of potential futures over a nice round of tea about killing our clans' enemies with grace. Predictably, with such potent preparations in the whirlwind months before the start of my travels, the actual subtle disruption of trade was an easy affair.
I quickly arrived at the destination for my chosen wares, wooden ballistae's from the Magic Oak Sect. Easier to build and less potent, but far cheaper for the poor Jingshen vassals to buy and everyone wants to buy, they just don´t know it yet. The thing is, the border states between Jingshen and us were in a stalemate for centuries now. Sure, Jingshen and us Golden Devils share more border on paper than at any other time before, but for the common man, nothing has changed, because trade has been fleeing smoothly. No trade treaties the common cultivator could point to were violated and critical infrastructure supply the Jingshen have built up themselves over the centuries or bought from elsewhere, preferably the Magical Oak sect. They are more reliable to buy from, if only, because we aren´t in the way. And that is the point where Pupillus and I will come in with our separate efforts. We both seek to disrupt trade the Jingshen enjoy with various border states and make it more confusing for their various factions.
My caravan for one, buys Magical Oaks´ oak with metal bearing as string for ballistae's and deliver it straight to the dissatisfied vassals in the Heavenly Bandit Kingdom. Everyone is aware of their grumbling about being left alone to fend against the Cannibal Hordes not even a century prior and they just got new enemy vassal clans to border. That looks like a new market opportunity to me and also to my new friends in the Jingshen foreign Market faction. No one can grumble when the Jingshens´ Vassals are suitably prepared for conflicts after all, not even the Jingshens´ xenophobic dunists, worshipping some diamond scorpion deity called mountain stinging diamond maw.
The cult originated from the subjugated Grand Scorpion Sect, gained a following in the Heavenly Bandit Kingdom in the aftermath of the last Cannibal war and it supposedly lays claim to all the desert with the Jingshen as their newly favored champion by mandate of the heavenly diamond scorpion. Mandate of the diamond scorpion, yeah right and we devils should
of course just vanish beneath the Jingshens` divine right.
It´s good then that I won´t invest my enormous profit margin of spirit stones back into my family's cultivation like the Jingshens foreign trade faction expects me to. It`ll go right back into the heavenly bandits, not that they´ll know, of course. The stupid puddle technique, Aretaphila helped me reverse engineer, is perfect for imitating the dune deity they so fear. An appearance before a young devotee declaring the Jingshen disfavored, here in the western Grand Scorpion territory, as the sand deity. In the next town over, I am attending the banquet of the local bandit king, who visits this place as part of a tour of his realm, as the merchant Wang Ren. There I claim the Jingshen sought to let their loyal vassals wallow in weakness by not only tariffing the ballistae's we need to destroy the heretical storks invading our rightful desert for their gain, they also sought to destroy important war materials to inflate the prices, uncaring for the damage wrought upon the holy weapons of war.
The first claim raised a fuss and some murmuring started in the wide halls full of tapestry depicting achievements of war. After the second claim various parties demanded proof, which was easy to give. Before long, my caravan was brought into the huge hall, which had just crossed the border from Jingshen to the Heavenly Bandit Kingdom after all.
They discovered my whole wagon load of Oak planks had an infestation of thousand-months-devouring-termites in them. It takes one whole year to cross Jingshen lands to the Heavenly Bandit Kingdoms, since there is no Scorpion road to travel there and the planks of oaks, once to be thought of as materials of war gear, were in a pitiful state for all to see. The King of these bandits declared that this was a holy matter and asked that the attending honorable Elder of the Grand Scorpion Sect, Wu Jiang, to divine the state of these holy gears of war. The Grand Scorpion sect's representative, grumpy as he was, even personally performed a divining ritual on the spot.
It took an entire week of communing and pleading on his side, but at the end we all knew of the final devastating result. The holy gears of war were desecrated by wretched termites, a vassal race of their deities arch-enemy, the Devil bees. I don´t know how much of that was true, but I can tell you the tempers ran high that night. That night, when the unforgivable slight of the wretched Jingshen was discovered, alliances were made over cups of stilled scorpion poison. In months thereafter Wang Ren vanished in the sands, leaving his newly made fortune behind as a parting gift for the Bandit King to find, who promptly helped his new powerbase among the dunists to new heights. With them at his back and the Grand Scorpion Sect at their side, the disparate factions started contesting the control of various industries held by unsuspecting Jingshen factions through fanatical proxies. That´s the last I heard before I crossed the border into the Shen Kingdom. Let´s see how the pragmatic Jingshen handle the religious unrest of the religion they pay lip service to, while their vassals gain new confidence with the small hoard Wang Ren accumulated over the decades.
_____________
words: 3155
I noticed that, apart from Informationals, the Heavenly Bandit Kingdom and the Grand Scorpion Sect were untouched in terms of Omakes, so I painted a rough scorpion worshipping brush over them and let the resentment from the cannibal wars fester. Then I added in two sleights by the Jingshen who wanted to implicate an uppity merchant travelling between towns of the Jingshen clan and skipped the JIngshen, because of course my customers in the vassal kingdoms are more important. The reputation bomb intendet for Zenos alter ego Wang Ren failed and now their vassals actively conspire against them.
Tl;dr Jingshen have to bother with inter faction conflicts and their vassals hatred after the cannibal wars. The Golden Devil clan doesn´t have to bother with faction wars, has vassals that like them and is therefore superior to the Jingshen
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