The Beginning -
Manuel felt himself drawn in. As he slept, his dreams were fitful, and when he awoke, he remembered.
He was Heraclius Sarantapechos, Threefold Lord of the Imperator. A servant and general, and one of the strongest men under his liege's command who aided him in the Beastwar. He commanded the massive iron vessel the Imperator had forged, containing endless cultivators and bearing massive armaments. At the centre of it all, he stood, watching them all scurry about as they prepared for combat.
The massive iron ship was better described as a sphere than a true vessel. It was larger than any world that Heraclius or any of his force contained within them, sufficient to contain invasion forces capable of taking over an entire world. It was absurd, able to retain its size even when oppressed by the world they were entering.
Heraclius was nervous. As they prepared to breach the entry into the Turtle Emperor's dantian, that which contained his world and all within it, he began to think.
They hurtled towards oblivion or victory, and Heraclius continued to think, creating tiny pearls of thought interwoven with what some of the men had named the Shadowed Heaven. It was not a Heaven, of course, merely an opposing will, capable of seizing the mind of the being they fought and rendering it subservient to his master.
Heraclius continued weaving his complex web of thoughts, condensing them down to where they were mere words containing no pathos, conveying no ethos. Even the logos that ruled his inner world was left wanting. They were just words, echoes of sound that even a mortal could comprehend.
Attempting to do so was difficult for him, but this small amount of time set aside would perhaps pay off.
If he were a more arrogant man, he would have said he predicted the future. As it was, he knew he was just using his mastery of his own time and Qi to predict possible timelines, to simulate the worlds and conflicts that could be, not those that certainly would. Seeing into your world's own future was possible and quite easy unless one involved a Dao Seeker or one who stood at Law Creation or above, and his own world was nearly empty.
After all, he possessed no Life Spring.
As he looked ahead, he spoke, each word sounding in the web of connections that made up the Will Opposing. The experience would be stored there, released only to the correct person.
"There are to my mind three possible futures. The first, and mostly likely is that we win in some sense - either we damage the beast sufficiently that it is easily killed and we are then able to take its Life Spring. The second is equally simple. We are slain, we are scattered, and the turtle Emperor then continues on much as he did before. The last of the most complex in the most concerning, we do not defeat the emperor yet he does not defeat us. In this case we would require some measure taken to perhaps guarantee us or at least aid us in victory. This is that measure."
Heraclius took a deep breath.
"You must know the truth of why we came here, what we seek to do, and what the consequences are for failure."
He gestured to the iron shell around him.
"Everything we have is given by the Imperator, for he possesses a Life Spring. The name is apt - all life flows from a Life Spring, except for the unnatural life of the Dao Lords. The very air we breathe - what the barbaroi call Qi and what we name Pneuma flows from such Springs. Without it we cannot exist. They are the only precious thing in a vast universe, and seizing a Life Spring will let us raise another of our number to the Life Step of the Threefold Revival Stage. In time a cultivator can increase the power and flows of their Life Spring, and eventually split it off to allow others to gain entry into the Life Step."
"This sits amidst the war that has torn the cosmos apart. It is named the Beastwar, and uncountable trillions of humans and Beasts have died already, as have those who live within their worlds."
He rubbed his hands together, thoughtful.
"We began the Beastwar, but we are not winning it. Our unthinkably clever strategy was turned against us in a sense, and what was once merely a hunt for Life Springs has led to the annihilation of uncountable worlds, uncountable cultivators. I am a proud servant of the Imperator, yet even the Imperator bows to a greater power. Yet even the Autokrator - the woman who stands at the very top of human existence - even she is losing."
He sighed.
A memory became real for a moment, and around Heraclius a peculiar set of images sprang up, each attempting to show something that was clearly a grand truth beyond human knowledge with mere image, sound, and floating seas of mathematical equations.
What was mere words became reality, as a massive wall of concepts embodied by fractal pieces of space, ever-descending, ever-repeating as hordes of creatures assaulted it, tens of thousands lost forever as they were shrunk into nothing, the impossible tangle of absurd unreality leading more beasts into an area they saw as accessible, massive lions flanked by equally huge beetles, crows flying above and fish swimming below - all this becoming smaller and smaller with each passing moment as they advanced, yet never truly moving forward.
After a moment that stretched into millions of years, the army of creatures stopped their advance, and began to assault the wall, the fractal thing beginning to warp and become less predictable under the strain of such an army, two-dimensional lines searing through nth-dimensional space and slicing men who were themselves worlds in two, killing thousands of defending human cultivators.
As the massive mathematical construct began to fail, and the logic of numbers themselves started to dissolve, a man amidst the army suddenly. He gestured grandly, and an array of clocks flew out across the battlefield, each spinning slower and slower until they stopped, locking the creatures within a moment of time, before that moment simply lost purchase on the rest of the universe and was gone forever.
A few surviving humans looked on in awe, thirty or forty from the very edges of their formation, the weakest among them. The man did not speak, but in a single moment he disappeared, and the wall that had been so badly damaged was rejuvenated to its prior state.
Heraclius spoke in a lecturing tone.
"The Imperator is one of the few remaining human cultivators defending this portion of existence. We were attacked by millions of Beasts, had Dao Lord Timeless not slain them the reality-wall we erected would've been overrun, and the defending force - myself included - would have been butchered. From there, the beginning of the end would have come rapidly enough."
"Amidst all this, a single Life Spring likely means little to you, but this is true preciousness. Whoever controls a Life Spring controls the world it springs from, and the myriad peoples who live upon it. Unlike the Beasts, we do not create humans to feed our ethos. We create them because we are human, and we seek to make others like us. We slew the Beasts for their Springs, so I suppose in a sense we are no better than them. But know that whether they or we are the worst, if we lose we will all be slaves, or dead. If we win we will likely continue to hunt them, but we are beyond peace now."
Heraclius looked, as the sphere neared an intangible barrier perhaps he alone on this vessel could detect.The barrier of the world to him looked like the massive eye of a turtle, eyelid blinking desperately downwards even as the sphere of iron flew even more quickly, aiming to dart up under the eyelid and into the eye itself.
A teardrop flew from the eye, aiming to entangle the sphere, but it flew to one side, dodging left and right around it, avoiding all the defenses that had been set before it. Heraclius breathed in, his will empowering the sphere, moving it more quickly. He spoke more quickly, now.
"Whatever monstrous things we do in this world, know that they are justified. Not one human here would seize life eternal, not one would even reincarnate, shackled as they are by their fearful slavemasters. Even we enter this world knowing we exit the cycle of reincarnation, sheltered as we were by the Imperator's gentle hand. If we die here, we die in truth, and forever. If we win, we seize a Life Spring - one more soldier for the armies of the Autokrator, the Vice-Gerent of Creation itself. One more chance to hold the line."
Heraclius took a measured breath.
"I tell you this not as justification but for understanding. If you are in the far future and weak, perhaps only Law Creation or merely Spirit Severing, perhaps you forgot our purpose as well. We are losing, descendants of the Army. The existence of human beings within this world proves my words to you - if we lose, the Beasts will never again permit us to be a threat to them. They will cage us within them and their understanding will continue to grow, defying logos and ethos themselves."
With that, the sphere struck the eye, and disappeared. It reappeared inside a world, a massive sea upon which floated ninety-nine baby turtles.
Heraclius was thrown out onto the battlefield of another world. The rawest manifestation of physical Laws struck at him, but they did not truly matter. He was above the Law of another, and so disregarded it. Spun from the firmament they denied his life, yet he lived. They denied his access to Qi, yet he took what he willed. They denied the space around it and consumed it into nothing, and he walked free from a tangle of space and time that would have obliterated a lesser cultivator.
This and more he wove into the skein of the Will Opposing, memories of techniques and fights and glories that even a Law Creation cultivator would be able to absorb, things that such a cultivator could use to rise above and fight against the world itself. Methods to break the time of a world, to ravage space. Even some lesser legacies for the Spirit Severing cultivators, methods to temper their souls and to begin stepping on the path of comprehending Law, to avoid the tiresome entanglements of Earth and Heaven that would prevent you from reaching the Law if you took one step in the wrong direction unknowingly, or took an incorrect one.
Another fraction of a second passed, and he considered lesser legacies before dismissing them as pointless. If they were reduced to nothing more than Nascent Souls the battle would simply be lost, such a future was not truly worth contemplating. A Threefold memory would likely scramble the mind of such a weak cultivator in any case.
"If we are losing but have not lost, it is because the Will Opposing is positioning itself to strike. Know that it is only a thing of Law and Qi. It obeys commands given to it, but cannot conceive of new ones itself, and to direct it correctly across the ages if it has failed is beyond me. The Heaven that opposes it will be directed by thoughts and commands, but the Will Opposing will function merely on the predictions I have made. They cannot last forever, and they will eventually fail."
Heraclius closed his eyes.
"If it has come to this, the fate of the Sea-Conquering Army and the Life Spring is now in your hands. You must find the Will Opposing, and command it yourself. With its power in hand, you may yet be able to destroy the Heaven of the Turtle Emperor, and seize the Life Spring. I cannot imagine what drives you in the far future, a mortal who lives with the span of a gnat. To connect with the Will Opposing you must comprehend my Dao, my ethos, and so you must be like me in some small way."
This was said emotionlessly, for Heraclius did not in truth believe any of this would come to pass. There would be no need for it, merely a potential hedge against failure.
"No matter what you fight for, it will be lost if you do not seize the Will Opposing. Find it, and unleash it once more. If you have survived, the world will be weak enough for it to work."
With that, his speech ended, and Heraclius awoke with a start. He felt at himself desperately, his body old, twisted, weak. His cultivation was gone! Why was he trapped in the body of some ancient Nascent Soul? His breath became terrified, and he shook as he remembered. Yes, he was Manuel. Yet his life as Manuel felt so much less real than his moments as Heraclius, as though Manuel had been the dream and Heraclius the man.
For many weeks beyond that his former name often drifted out of memory, Heraclius insistent where Manuel had been, the memory of being a Threefold Revival cultivator far more potent than the old, ailing memories made by the paper-thin recollections of a Nascent gnat. Even then, he simply lied, the brilliance of the man he truly was making it easy to pretend to be this cultivator in the eyes of his subordinates, deceiving them for months that soon turned into years.
It would be simple enough, surely. Simply cultivate back up to Threefold Revival, slaughter the natives who opposed him, seize the Will Opposing and finish what he had begun so many years ago.
He had almost finished planning this out when the bells of the Trials began to toll.
Manuel isn't dead.
