Cerina and Amaranth: It's Soup All The Way Down
Ah, the Simmering Soup Sect. A place of wonder, a place of cuisine, a place where the greatest chefs of the Clan, aspiring or otherwise, trekked to visit a fragment of the diabolical Soup Chef's Dao itself.
….Or so the guidebooks said. Amaranth himself couldn't really say much in
either direction.
Apparently, according to his journals, this had been a place which he had cherished deeply. It said, supposedly, that he had made a yearly pilgrimage to visit the sites of the rejected soups from the local tournaments, which were often sold en masse for cheap. While his appetite certainly had its place for fine quality, there was also something to be said for merely gorging yourself on the baseline level expected of those who competed at the highest echelons.
…And while that sounded good and all, he was having quite the bit of trouble getting even a
flash of one of those times to pass through his brain meats.
What a pity, he mused. That seemed like it would have been a hell of a lot of fun.
Ah well. Tapping his head, he gave it a bit more thought. "I suppose this just means I can give it a second try?"
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Wandering through a ragged sea of scarred stones and sand was a grey-skinned man. The individual, haphazardly covered in cloth, roughly bearded, and with a dizzy look in his eyes, to any traveler on the well-trod roads, would seem like one more idiot who had visited the outlying lands around the Simmering Soup Sect with very little preparation at all.
In fact, it was a place notable for escaped ghosts and beasts, so a voyage of that kind wouldn't exactly end well for those who had just taken the decision to jump out with their pajamas on, so to speak.
And yet, for whatever reason, the man didn't seem bothered at all by the notion. Well, no, he
did seem bothered, but for another reason entirely.
"....Where the
hell am I?" The man complained to nothing at all. As he paced in place, the sand around him slowly melted to a glassy plain as his fiery limb licked its way through the grit and the dust.
He knew, from the guidebook, that the Simmering Soup Sect was in this particular direction. He was pretty sure, anyways.
….Unless, of course, he had gotten scammed. Again. There was something about having only scraps of your hard-won memory that made getting fleeced by novices significantly easier.
"Ugggghhhhhhh." He dragged his good hand over his face. "Are you
serious…."
Many li above the man's head a girl was enjoying a bowl of soup, with a second waiting. She looked up. Her brain was tingling, the familiar wave and oscillation in her soul starting up again. The [Path] was calling as she looked over the edge. Distantly she saw a speck upon the earth -
Him.
He was in need of guidance.
Cerina tossed herself off the side, soups in hand, and fell straight down. The wind pulled playfully at her hair and the flower growing from her skull. The fall was mercifully quick, though her scream of sudden realization reached the man a good while before she did.
As Amaranth trudged, the sound of a…. What was that?
He turned his head upwards, seeing a cyclopean woman a good foot taller than him fall down and kick up a plume of dust as she landed. Foundation Establishment, even by the measure of his clouded senses. "Who's
that?" he muttered to himself, trying to grab a piece of his memory that would give him any idea of his new visitor.
But, after a few seconds, it appeared that nothing came to mind.
Ah well.
Ooookay then. In that case, then he should probably make a small bit of distance before he asked. In his current state, who knows what the heck could happen if he met something random and just did nothing about it?
"Ah, hello? Are you venturing over to the Soup Sect for the food too?"
Cerina looked at her hands frantically, the dust cloud fading away. "Soup?... Soup? Oh, yay! My soup's okay!" She babbled, glee quickly replacing concern. She looked up at Amaranth, and proffered him a steaming bowl of wonderful smelling soup.
"I am! Would you care for some Soup, Senior?" She asked.
The smell of spring onions and chilies wafted over to the man, and a smile started to creep onto his face. He had…. prepared for the trip by not eating soup for a while to keep the taste of it novel, but in retrospect, that seemed like an out of character thing to do, he supposed.
…Why
not take her up on this offer?
"Sure, that sounds wonderful! What's the soup?" He smelled some kind of meat in it, and while he could make a few guesses, he felt like asking nonetheless.
She levered herself into a seated position and took a slurp. "Beef, garlic, spring onions, and chilies. Noodles. The garlic is really really good, and its very filling." She gave her half empty bowl a slosh. "Really, really good noodles." She took another savoring bite, bobbing slightly in happiness. She waved the second bowl his way.
"Seriously. Take. Good," she mumbled around her mouthful.
Amaranth took a look, evidently interested by how eagerly she was eating the soup. Enjoyment like that, he firmly felt, had to be the real deal.
Wordlessly, he reached out for the bowl, palm face up. He nodded at her, as she handed the warm bowl to him. Then she realized he didn't have chopsticks like she did. "Oops." Reaching under her yellow robe to rifle around in the upper pockets of her black undertunic, she retrieved some simple metal chopsticks and handed them to him as well.
With a flourish, he picked up the chopsticks and went to work. The noodles seemed to glide across the surface, attracted to the sticks of metal without any evident use of Qi.
Then, something rather un-elegant happened. The man simply stuck the chopsticks directly into his mouth, and the noodles and broth began to flow in a stream, bits of spring onion floating like rafts paradoxically traveling up a waterfall into the man's mouth. A satisfied look grew on his face, as it looked like he was having some kind of experience in the process. "...This soup…. Did you make it?" He seemed like he was very impressed, even as he poured more and more of the bowl straight into a mouth that seemed like it really shouldn't have fit it.
Cerina matched him, slurping up her soup, though she used her chopsticks as they were meant to be. Once she finished, "Ahhhh, so yummy." She said to the now empty bowl. Then she processed his question. "I didn't! The people up on… my… ride -" She looked up and her face fell. Far, far above, the receding tail lanterns of an airship faded into the night. "Ah well, guess I'll have to walk." She didn't seem that fussed about it, much more interested in her new acquaintance. "I'm Cerina Polya of House Paratiritis. What's your name Senior?"
Cerina Polya, huh. He almost felt like he should recognize that name from
somewhere… Well, it wasn't much of an issue. "I'm Amaranth Castellanos. Good to meet you, Cerina." Even as he was, he didn't need to say much more than that. After all, as he fuzzily recalled, didn't that Zeno guy he worked with at some point write an article about his ascension or something? And he never really remembered himself to be much of a stealthy sort in the first place.
Cerina's eyebrow rose, her blind face conveying excitement and vindication. She saluted with her chopsticks and empty bowl. "Good to meet you, Devouring King. What brings you to the lands of the Soup Sect?"
The man clapped his hands. "Vindication! I DIDN'T GET SCAMMED!!! I knew that guide looked trustworthy!" Then, he seemed to gather himself, and responded more slowly. "Well, I remembered that my favorite soup was from this place, so I thought I might give it a good ol' visit and see if the quality dipped or improved any. It's been… a good decade since the last I visited? According to my records, anyways."
The man's mannerisms finally clicked for Cerina and she realized he wasn't firing with all his memory. She thanked her [Path] again and its Sublime timing. Her head tilted slightly. "I was going here cause I've never been to the Soup Sect, and I
love eating, and my legion needs supplies for a mission."
"Ah, a new visitor!" A bright look appeared on his face. "So, in other words, you could say we're in the same boat. Someone who has, at least reportedly, visited this place something like a hundred times by now, and someone who is visiting it for their first!" Amaranth mused. "Honestly, I'm still not sure if that journal is entirely real or not. Some of the things written there… Man, can a single place's soup
really be that good?"
"All is possible between Heaven and Earth, they say." She looked at their empty bowls. "And its made a good start, tell you what." Her stomach gurgled.
Amaranth laughed. "Yeah, that's for sure." He peered off to the distance. He couldn't quite see it, but he felt a kindred spirit, now that Cerina mentioned that thing about the Sect lands, in the distance. Even as he was… no.
Especially as he was, he could feel that resonance, that similarity between something that wasn't quite his own. Songs of the same genre, perhaps? That Pot really was the real deal.
She gestured for his empty bowl and chopsticks, and once she had it in hand, she stacked it in hers and dropped the lot into a compression pack on her hip. "Want to take a walk and taste the soups together, Senior?" She asked, offering him her hand.
He took it without another thought, and started bounding towards the Pot while laughing crazily. "Oh man, this is going to be
fantastic." Finally, at long last, he knew where the hell he was going.
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Cerina hummed, singing a happy tune under her breath. Traveling like this with a new friend was always better than traveling alone in her esteemed opinion. They were on the road west of Nan Men City and headed towards the Hundred-Li Soup Pot. It just made the most sense to go straight for what Senior Amaranth was sensing - the Pot would have the most soup to try. He'd mentioned tournaments there that sold to the public. So they walked under the gem blue sky, the sun baking the road and the sand, the heat warming their metal skins.
"You ever tried to cook anything on your own skin Senior?" She asked out of the blue. She'd tried with a chicken egg once, and well, it'd quickly turned into a scramble. Both in the dish and to try and keep it from spilling everywhere.
Amaranth gave that a thought. It
sounded, almost, on the tip of his tongue, familiar. But
why… Oh, right. Those frog legs.
"Yeah, actually! See, when you're in the middle of a desert, you don't always have a nice pan ready, yeah? And sometimes, you want a sear more than a
bake, and a bake is mostly what you're going to get when you're using some sand on the ground. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but copper has its own uses there."
Back when…. How long was it? Two centuries ago now? That sounded about right to him.
The words came slowly. "I was… doing guard duty near a village where there was an outbreak of these
gigantic toads. I'll admit, near the start, getting my mouth anywhere near them just grossed me out. Those things were like an enormous flock of birds blotting out the sky, just, ya know, on the ground." He looked wistful for a moment. "But
time has a certain thing it does, where familiarity with something can eventually tread all over worries like that. And besides, it's not like you can get
that much variety in the sticks. So, one day, I thought I'd try out that particular dish from the local cuisine. It was a fire-touched variant, if I'm not mistaken. A toad born from the magma flows that had hidden in a cave, nearby, for something like a few decades. When we guards found the thing, we had honestly been surprised it took us
that long to get to it."
He licked his lips a bit. "The thing about any creature attuned to Qi of flames is that it always has this nice
kick to it, as many can guess even without eating any. But, one additional factor that I've found consistently the case is that the flesh
thickens compared to the normal variation, in order to better tolerate the temperatures involved. Given that normally, frog legs are a delicate meat that can be fried up in around five minutes, it's a bit of a unique challenge."
Amaranth chuckled a bit embarrassedly. "The first time I cooked a bunch of it up, I
totally screwed up because of that. It turned out that I needed to marinate it for longer than I had guessed in order to get the flavor to penetrate all the way through…. Like, there's something to be said about saucing meats after the fact, but there's definitely an appeal to having meat that just
has all that flavor in it from the get go… the caramelization of something that's been exposed to all that heat…. It's fantastic." Amaranth was actively salivating at this point. "Man, I can't believe I'm actually missing it at this point. I thought I'd be tired of it for at least one more century…."
"Froggggssssssss…" Cerina said, her face hungrily envious as she drank in her Senior's words. She shook her head to clear the daze. The hole in her stomach didn't go away though. Her hunger had been a lot stronger recently, ever since she started traveling with the old man. But that'd just make the soup better when they got there. "Man, where was this village?" It'd be hit or miss chance he remembered, but she had to try.
Amaranth frowned a bit. "It was…. There was a spirit cane plantation. Hm. But that was three centuries ago now. Is there still one at the same place? Besides, there's so many in this desert." He surely knew the name. It had been a place where he had stayed for a full century of his life, make no mistake.
"...No, it's definitely still there. I remember the mayor saying something about the profits still remaining strong, the last time I visited… when
was the last time I visited?" A contemplative look came onto his face. "Hmm. The thing about spirit plantations of that kind is that spirit beasts consistently visit the things to pick off densely massed Qi in order to maintain their advancement. It
could be that they'd have been wiped off the map by now by some beast tide, but that feels really implausible." He shook his head. "I wouldn't have allowed that at all."
He looked confused for one more second, before his face finally cleared up, almost disbelieving. "
Did I seriously never ask about the name?" He racked his brain some more, but he soon accepted it. Even positioned as a guard, near the area, taking the majority of his missions keeping that tiny out-of-the-way oasis guarded among a few others, he didn't visit the village proper
that often either. Mostly, he just hovered around the area hunting those damn Cane Toads to further his cultivation.
"Huh, I suppose I never did. Well, Cerina, I know that it's in one of those oases right next to the Scorpion Road, and I know for a fact that's barely any information at all. Look for a village that had a huge outbreak of Spirit Cane Toads around three hundred to two hundred years ago. It used to be an enormous problem at the time, economically, so there
ought to be records somewhere, even if I can't give you the exact name."
She giggled at him, chuckling over the mistake. She couldn't throw stones though, she might do the same in a similar situation. Ah well. "It's a mystery hunt! Yaaay!!" She threw up her arms. "I'll need to take my students on a quest to find it." Shui would really appreciate getting to watch and fight new spirit beasts and Zeixian would love to study the geomancy of the area. Maybe Cerina could use that interest to nudge her students apart and undo some of the overreliance on each other she'd instilled in them.
Her mood tried to plummet thinking about her past fuck ups, but Cerina wasn't one to let a stray thought get her down. Instead, she held onto hope. She could fix the mess she'd made. Breaking out of her silence, she gave Amaranth a smile. "Thank you for the story."
Amaranth grinned a bit in response. "Thanks for asking about it! The last time I've talked about food with someone in detail… It's been a bit, ya know. Granted, my memory's been a mess, but even then, I remember it being a little less common to have folks be interested at all outside of places like the Soup Sect. Helps break up the boredom of just wandering around the desert."
"It really does," she shook her head and sighed. "Frankly, not many people can keep up with me, walking or talking so its great to have a --- YEEEP!"
Cerina leapt ten feet straight up.
The terrain flitted with actinic sparks, and Amaranth's eyes sharpened, sweeping the area, for— There!
It was on the larger side for a beastie, around fifteen feet across if he wasn't mistaken. A…. lizard that had been crowned in the lightning from a tribulation! That horn… it seemed familiar. He definitely had fought something like this before.
He could tell that the lightning it bore wasn't something intrinsically part of its Fate, but rather a matter of circumstance. It must have been near the area of a breakthrough of some potency. And had not only survived, but had wicked off some aspect of that Heavenly Will to become an extension of that tribulation towards other creatures it met. Minor as it was, it was a beast of Heavenly Judgement nonetheless.
….He remembered something about creatures like those. They possessed energies antithetical to the Demonic, and as such, would normally have a type advantage against individuals like him.
Normally.
His right leg of metal hovering above the ground by nothing more than idle walking now stayed firmly a few feet above, while he took a great
leap with his right foot of flame. Even without the Toad Flipper Boots, he still had enough in him to clear that thing's height and then some.
From the looks of things, this should have been a fatal mistake. The closer one was to the skies, the easier a beast of Tribulation could call lightning upon its enemy, as indeed this horned lizard did.
…Hmmm. No. He was mistaken.
This thing was a failure. He looked at the skies, and all he saw was ten parts of killing intent. A critical error in the process of its comprehension. Of course, he supposed he couldn't expect more from a random lizard in the desert.
It was a mistake to assume that the vital force in a tribulation was
solely a mercy towards the individual taking a trial. In fact, it assisted the lightnings themselves, differentiating the Qi that fell from the sky from the Lightning Arts a human might perform. It was almost transcendent, in a sense, drawing from the nature of the World to expunge wounds like himself. Something like this was no such mirror at all.
As such, he lazily just raised a hand without much more thought put into it.
Feed.
Without the shield of a greater force, the Will of the King who shattered the material into the bright would easily crush any ordinary lizard that stood upon these sands. His
Dao acted upon the lightning, and it dispersed as it should have, spreading its energies to enrich the life that lived in this terrain.
…The horned lizard seemed surprised. Cerina was too, boggling at what the old man had just done as she fluttered through the air like a leaf. "YEAH! Beat its ass Senior!" She hollered, suddenly caught up in the moment. She landed and stuck her tongue out at the lizard. "Stuuuupid lizard, you ain't got shit on us!"
Amaranth took a closer look at the thing.
…Was it afraid? He supposed that was fair enough. Now that he was using his Emanation in full, his restraint on his presence was completely gone, and given that he had cleared the second stage of the Single Pillar realm almost sixty years ago, that meant….
"Ah, drat. Everything in a hundred kilometers should…."
Well, he supposed that would save him some time. "Hey, lizard. I won't eat you if you listen to me." The lizard rapidly nodded, almost comical in how it acted. Slowly, he explained their journey to the spirit beast. "We're heading over to the Soup Pot over there." He jabbed a thumb roughly at its direction. "Do you know what I'm talking about? Soup. Pot. Spark twice if you understand me." In short order, the lizard shone blue, and then paused. Blue, and then paused. It seemed to be very deliberate in its actions, which Amaranth could respect.
"You fine with taking us over to that Soup Pot? You seem big enough to carry two humans. I'll toss you a stone for the trouble." He shuffled around in the unassuming roughly hewn cloth sack he carried, taking out a piece of cloudy grey rock dense with Qi. Technically speaking, Amaranth supposed he might be able to muscle himself out of a payment, but it didn't sit right and might cause issues down the line besides.
The lizard seemed rather confused by the notion, by the look in its eyes, but it sparked twice once more. Satisfied, Amaranth hopped onto its scaly back, a dense carapace that seemed to be webbed with horns between half his arm's length and his full height. It seemed like a decent enough place to rest. He'd been walking for far too long, after all. "Hey, hop on! It seems to be fine with some hitchhikers."
Cerina was already gripping the lizard's leg. She clambered up its front leg. "Upsie daisy. Nooooo funny business lizard," she said as she sat behind its head. She wasn't going to just come out and say she could turn it into a balloon. That'd be cruel and make her feel bad. But she could and her blase attitude towards the lightning firmly established the dominance hierarchy in play here.
"Giddy up! We got places to be!" She said, legs around its neck. The lizard shivered. It did not like either one of these strange monkeys. But it greatly valued its life, so it meekly trotted forward.
She looked at Amaranth. "That was amazing." She spread her hands and pointed at him. "But also
how?"
Amaranth scratched his head. "Well, nothing got destroyed, you know? The lightning's still there for all intents and purposes." He took out a finger. "And there. And there. And there." He was deliberate, even though he seemed to be pointing at empty air. "I just gave it some help doing what it was always gonna do."
"Hell, I'm pretty sure… If you were enterprising enough, and stayed in this one spot for long enough, you could probably pull some of that lightning right out! I'm not sure why you
would, though. Seems like a whole lot of effort without much results."
"Hmm," Cerina had her chin in her fingers, brain churning. She wasn't ignorant of a King's Dao magic, and listening to the process of it… it struck a chord.
Amaranth paused for a moment, thinking about how to describe it. "The Qi is still attuned to what it originally was, for now. And Qi is the energy of life, so even if no human does much of anything to it at all, eventually it'll all get digested." He spread his arms out. "Life is like a big stomach, if you think about it. If you leave out some meat without preserving it, it'll end up rotting real well, and that'd… get eaten by the soil, if we had any decent soil here outside of the oases. Similar principle. Eventually, some beastie is gonna use bits of that lightning to build up its nerves, or maybe just to jolt itself awake one day instead of sleeping for one more. It's all just the three Rs, if you think about it." He almost seemed like he was delivering a public service announcement with that last bit.
She laughed, slapping her hands on the lizard. "'Life is like a big stomach', hah. Seems more like a prison to me but," she wiped her eye and giggled some more. She shook her head, her mind moving a mile a minute, as it always did.
"Qi is everything, in everything, and in the connections between," she thought about it. She
looked, [Observation] sweeping across the land beside them. The lizard had attacked from the sands to their left. The landscape dipped slightly out there, and spreading around where the lizard had been she could see them. Little swirls of actinic energy. And they were like sprouting seeds now, spreading little fingers of energy into the land around them and the sky above.
Her pillar swelled with insight as she pondered how this region might grow. She could see the rains falling, and grasses beginning to grow. Maybe a temporary oases would form. Maybe the Qi would be picked up and gathered into a sandstorm, giving it a life as a dervish spirit. Maybe it would sink deep and become a secret pool where blind fish held court.
She looked at her companion.
The full attention of [Observation] pressed onto Amaranth. She could not see everything, not while he was calm and somewhat restrained. But his spirit pressed onto the world, escaping through the cracks in his control.
Her Foresighted Eye buzzed in her upper jaw, and the kaleidoscope of Amaranth's potential movements bloomed upwards into the air. A towering conglomeration of his arms and legs and faces and bodies. All the edges indistinct, rising into the sky like a pile of meat. Was his Intent malformed? No. Her head tilted, and bobbed like an owl's as she looked at him from multiple angles.
Her pillar rendered her like water, as she reflected upon him and was changed in the process. Her awareness noted his muscles, bones, nerves, the flutter of his heart in his neck. She felt the phantom sensation of his hands as her own, flickers of nervous impulses replicated in her own body. His Qi pressed into her mind like clay, creating eddies in her own system, measured and cataloged.
But when she peered through the cracks in his control, to glimpse his soul, she felt herself touch a whirlpool. The resonance in her soul tapped his own and it was disrupted. Her attention was pulled apart like meat in teeth, sucked down and away. Her body leaned towards him, resisting this phantom force.
Insight struck her. But she could not make much sense of what she saw and she looked away. All she knew was she had to stick with him. Beyond that, her sense of guidance, her intuition was unclear.
Meanwhile, Amaranth felt really itchy all of a sudden. He scratched absentmindedly at his right arm. Ever since it took the form of flame, it ended up annoying the heck out of him from time to time for no apparent reason at all. Though, there seemed something particularly odd about this instance… He focused inwards for a moment, taking a look at the connection between his body and soul that the Grand Elder had revealed to him a century ago now, a boot camp he could never forget.
He felt like he was looking through some amount of water, the deep and murky sort that he didn't get to see often where he usually traveled. Were those… eyes? Little yellow flames with black pupils poked and prodded at the edges, never quite reaching through, but they gave off an eerie feeling nonetheless. It was like a magic eye puzzle, almost like if he tilted his head the right way, something would reveal itself - his instincts knew that what he saw likely wasn't the entirety of the story.
He extended a tendril of Will out, seeking to get a better picture of what was viewing him, and in a moment he just saw the person right next to him.
Well, that makes sense.
Amaranth looked amused for a moment. "Did you see what you wanted to see?"
Cerina coughed, rubbing at her Eye, and nodded. "Its a Mouth. Chewing on Fate." She rolled her shoulders, a bird fluffing her feathers.
"Huh, you have a remarkably clear sight for Fate for someone of your stage. Normally my passive defenses go unnoticed for the most part." Amaranth looked visibly surprised. "Diviners around Foundation Establishment usually need more elaborate methods to take a peek at the flow of things. Chants, rites, attuned materials, the correct moments in the year, even the right tamed spirit beasts! I knew a guy back in my guard station days who fed an owl Twisted-Clockwork Berries every new moon for a
decade before it would start giving him omens, or so he claimed. I still think he ended up wasting his money, given how much he lost on dice games every week, but apparently that sometimes can work! Or so Zeno said to me once, anyways, and
Zeno is a hell of a lot more reliable on the particulars of divination than rumors through the grapevine, by any metric."
"Even with the cracks… it's an expensive art to get accurate in the best of times. The Turtle doesn't like it very much when people give spoilers on his plans." Then, he considered some more. "With that talent in mind, I wonder what'd happen if… No, I suppose that's really all you'd see if I didn't have my full self expressed." He gave a childish whim of his a bit more thought.
Nah, I'll save that little trick for later.
Fully back to herself, Cerina huffed and smiled.
That was a wild ride. "You Kings are weird. First my Legatus isn't even made of normal matter anymore after her whole
Thing, and now there's you and eating Fate."
And he'd done a whole bunch of cool stuff in that fight. It was official. "I like you, old man. You're cool!" She decreed with all of her youthful exuberance.
Amaranth chuckled a bit. "Aw, thanks! You're pretty interesting yourself!" Now that he had seen what he had seen, he could guess… Even with that sealed up pillar, there was something
extra in that sensation that he knew for a fact wasn't within the normal bounds of density for the Foundation Establishment Stage. "You've… purified your Dao, haven't you?" He looked confused. "But why didn't you form a Single Pillar? You know without that you can't express your Dao through it for a long while, right?"
"Yep! But that's okay." She kicked her feet. "Me, and Shu, and Katha. We're gonna be Empresses. More than that, even!"
Amaranth scratched his head. "The Ninth Pillar, huh… I still remember the Prince complaining to me decade in and decade out once he got himself back into his body about the sheer time-lag between the Seventh and the Eighth. Apparently the Ninth ain't quite that bad though, so you've got that for ya." He considered it a bit more. "I wonder what that'd even do…" A Purified Dao and whatever that Prince managed to obtain through this new route that even the Clan had forgotten about.
The Prince claimed that he could affect bloodlines now in a way that he previously couldn't even imagine, but he didn't have the exact words to describe the process. It was something fundamental, Amaranth supposed, kind of like how his own abilities were difficult for him to put into words until almost half a century through. Though, given the sheer curiosity of that man, Amaranth was sure he'd make a dent in it at
some point.
"Yeah! Mistress Minervina was the one who got me interested. And the Prince is who convinced me to go for it. And then well. If two, why not all three?" She spread her arms and looked up at the sky. "Why
not conquer the entirety of the First Supreme Realm and go for Twin Core too?"
"Twin Souls, the Ninth Pillar,
and the Thirteenth Heavenstage…" Amaranth whistled. "That sounds like a hell of a task. You know, it's been speculated that the Thirteenth Heavenstage makes the
Nascent Soul tribulation more difficult just by itself, since it adds an extra element of surety to yourself that makes inserting doubt even harder. If you remember our old Protostrator, Heraclius—" Amaranth froze for a second. …Was Cerina even alive when Heraclius was still the Protostrator? "You know, this is a decent time to ask, but how old are you? Like, were you here to see Heraclius take up office after…. No, you probably weren't, that was over two centuries ago and you have a young feeling to your energy."
"I'm eighty."
Amaranth's eyes widened to the size of saucers. Well, not literally, but he sure felt like it.
Eighty. And ascended from the
Thirteenth Heavenstage to boot. "This new generation…. It's really something else. When those seers and prophets spoke of the Great Era, they really weren't messing around, were they. I still remember when Rina Callista ascending in one hundred and forty years was something me and Areta thought we could never speed over. It was a speed reserved to those who had luck fall from the heavens! And then someone got it in one hundred twenty, and then it appears now the new record is eighty…"
"Eh, closer to mid seventies actually. I ascended a few years back, ya see," Cerina rubbed her head, somewhat embarrassed to kinda contradict the old man.
Amaranth blinked repeatedly. Right. Well, he supposed that it was bound to happen at some point. He just never thought he'd see it in the same lifetime! "Man, there's something about this Clan that's weird as hell. This was a popular topic in the contribution board forums back around a century ago when me, Areta and Antonius all ascended in one shot, and now it looks like our total number of Dao Purified ascendants are both younger and got us to a total of ten… There's definitely something odd going on in the background, but I don't have the tools to tell what's meddling. I've never really been the sort to have the eyes for something like that, even at my peak. I'll just thank the Imperator that the Clan is apparently this lucky."
"...Anyways, back to what I was talking about. Right, there's been speculation that the Thirteenth Heavenstage is gonna make inserting doubt during the Nascent Soul tribulation a whole lot tougher. Like I mentioned earlier, our old Protostrator Heraclius used to follow the Dao of the Bull back when he used to walk the earth, which made his odds of passing through that dragon's gate so hard that he didn't even give it a shot. And by
my measure, someone who reaches that level of unshakability within the Foundation Establishment stage should be on a level that
far surpasses even Old Heraclius once they hit the Great Circle of Core Formation."
Amaranth pauses for a moment to think a bit more. "Though, on the positive end of things, this also should imply that moving through Core Formation should be easy as pie, which ain't a bad thing. So, what do you think about that one?"
She puffed out a breath. "I guess I'm happy for it? I'm so focused on working and hoping I can make it to Empress before the next Trial. Core?" She wilted. "It's gonna be so lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggg before I get there Senior." She complained.
Amaranth let out a slow breath. "Yeah, the difference in pacing… it's really something else. You know, one positive thing about Orthodoxy that most people brush over, but getting to Core seems to take about three quarters? Yeah, around three quarters or so of the time as reaching the Great Circle of the Single Pillar stage, based off of Rina's progression back when she hit Qiguai around a couple decades ago. Though, once you're at Core, it's all really just the same. It's… a time lag that I'm personally not looking forwards to myself, to be honest."
Amaranth looked almost
through the sky for a second, his eyes gaining an almost disturbing glint for a moment. "I wonder if there's a way to do a whole skip and just," and he motioned with his hands, "
Leap all the way out of there. It feels like it's just a Qi problem, yeah? To me, the main issues with cultivation always felt like a matter of Dao comprehension and Qi comprehension rather than… you know, the fiddly bits with the resources. That always felt like the
easy part, even with this Dead Sea. Ah well."
This made Cerina's brain tingle.
That. "Well with you old man, that just sounds like finding the right food to eat," she posited, finger on her chin as she looked at the sky with him.
"The
right food, the right food to eat…" Amaranth mumbled a bit, taking a closer look. "Hm, maybe. I think you're on to something there. I wonder how a Liquid Core tastes in a soup made with some shiitake and dried pork, or maybe
as the soup base—" And then he slapped his face. "That'd
totally be Blood Path, but then again, maybe if I processed it real good… Eh, I'll have to think about this more later."
Then, with a bright smile, he finally turned his head down back to Cerina. "Thanks for that one! I've been stagnating around the same level for a good while now, so maybe that'll be the one to take me out of this rut. Or maybe it'll be the pigeon I talk to tomorrow. Who knows!"
She burst into laughter at the old man's joke, giggling at his wide eyed and raggedy beard expression.
----------------------------------------
It took the pair two more days of riding to finally see something on the horizon. It began as purple shadows. Like mountains, just visible through the heat haze and floating over the dunes like a mirage. But these didn't disappear like mirages always did. No, the 'mountains' grew darker and darker, more solid with every hour. Until finally, they revealed their true nature. Not mountains, but great tooth-like spikes, curving over the rim of an
immense metal pot sunk deep into the sands.
It was a behemoth that strained the edges of imagination. Here, was a mundane soup pot, not exceptional in construction in any extent other than in the brobdingnagian proportions it was constructed for. It had a rim, like a normal soup pot. It had sides, etched with a glaze that a normal chef may have ordered their soup pot to have for reasons of personal preference, and it had… Well, it was SUPPOSED to have a lid like a normal soup pot.
Amaranth was not sure why he was so, stubbornly certain about this one fact when he looked at the top of the large pot, but for some reason the idea refused to leave his brain. This pot was not complete. It wasn't even the case that the lid was recently removed, no. He'd have been able to tell of a shift of that cataclysmic scale, as the movements of an object of that mass would indubitably cause. This, indeed, was an event that had occurred long before, when a certain man decided that he no longer needed this pot himself and was going to leave it for someone else to— Amaranth noticed his nose, bleeding the color of crimson. That was odd. His blood took on a bronze hue ever since he ascended to Foundation Establishment, and yet….
It almost felt like touching upon that thought in of itself was dangerous, so he carefully distanced himself away from it before taking a look at the pot one more time. Indeed, the craftsmanship was well done, but there were deviations in the sides that were, by and large, the same deviations that one would normally observe in a handcrafted pot by a family of four. The difference is that the sheer multiplication in size made it so that a ridge or bump in the process, normally imperceptible, was raised up to the size of hills and valleys, where a race of Sideways Walking Humans could conceivably fall into if they so chose to take the sides as a track to walk upon.
"Wooooowwwwwwww," Cerina gasped, marveling at the sheer size of the pot. She didn't think of the pot lid or anything like that. Instead her mind was full with one thought.
Damn, maybe I should have been born in the Simmering Soup Sect…
"Thank you for getting us here Lizard! You were way faster than I thought!" She looked down at it and smiled. They were still speeding towards the Soup Pot on its back.
The lizard did not desire this praise. It warbled, wishing to return to the wide and precious sands. "Oh lizard, don't complain, you'll be eating good after this!" She said. "Right Senior?"
Amaranth looked down at the lizard's lizard-y face. "You sure will, you big lug!" He petted the thing's barbed horn, evidently pleased by its performance. He eyed a wild Early Foundation level scorpion in the distance. "And in fact, I think I got just the thing for you…"
There was a loud splat, Cerina off like a shot and embedding her foot in the middle of insectile-face. She laughed like a madwoman, and leapt back onto the lizard's back. "Food for our wonderful ride!" She said, holding up its bloody corpse, filled with joy at defeating her enemies.
"Ah, this new generation really
is doing well." Amaranth looked kind of manic himself, seeing the sheer speed Cerina moved to slay the scorpion with at the same small realm. Temporal dilation? Must be. That flower, growing through her left temple… it appeared to be tied to the way she weaved through the cracks to permit that burst.
The lizard considered this offering. It blinked, licked its eyes. A bit of resistance crumbled. Opening its mouth, Cerina tossed the dead arachnid inside. The lizard sped up as it chewed, legs churning the sands. Perhaps this week was not so bad. Their mount's course carried them swiftly to the side of the Soup Pot and an arrangement of stone towers crawling part way up its side.
The two cultivators could easily see the elevators which would rise from the towers to scale the walls of the Pot. They merged into the flow of traffic, finding a lane for similar beast mounted or vehicular travelers. To the side was a smaller lane for pedestrians of all shapes and colors. She could see the sigils and banners of the Twelve Cities on their breasts and banner poles in one group.
Several people bore scorpion features, some carried axes, and she saw a Xin sorcerer practicing his fire magic as he spoke to a woman who displayed feather jewelry from the Peng Kingdom. Wherever she looked, she saw the spread of their empire. But the vast majority of visitors, pedestrian and not, were people like them. Golden Devils in the prime of their life.
As Amaranth and Cerina moved through the crowd, they could hear scattered conversations among the individuals, ranging from stories from home, hopes to visit grand restaurants and even a few actual chefs that visited to hone their own skill in the Dao of Soup. Many of the latter were concerned about the state of the Pass, hopping that their supply lines to coveted Plains ingredients would not be cut off in the coming seasons.
Cerina lingered on those for a while. She'd catch up to Rina after this trip - the Legion should be almost at Seven Heaven Trade City by now. She'd come here in part for specific supply needs, technically. She'd just gotten distracted.
However, for some peculiar reason, once the bronze-and-grey skinned man stepped towards the officials responsible for processing the teeming masses, the area quickly came to a hush. A man dressed in feathers, jewels, a towering white hat with the logo of a spoon and a pot, and very official looking finery walked up to Amaranth, who was confused by the sudden change. He seemed to be someone in Foundation, who normally would not be troubled for small matters like dealing with the public facing end of the line to enter the Soup Pot, or so his guidebook said. The Experts among the Simmering Soup Sect bureaucracy were notoriously proud of being able to spend their valuable time on the matters of soup rather than this, so when they left their city, it was always for a specific matter.
"What," the man very clearly enunciated, "are you doing
here."
Amaranth looked confused. "Is there a problem, sir? I've just come after a long time to visit my favorite soup spot, so I headed through the entryway just like everyone else."
The man looked clearly exasperated, and threw up his hands. "Are you messing with me? Is this some kind of joke, Amaranth? You already know that you don't have to come in through the front. Is this some attempt to get people to stampede through and impede all reasonable forms of foot traffic?"
Amaranth tilted his head. There was something about the shape of this man's face, and the specific way that he looked annoyed that seemed familiar to him. He couldn't tell exactly what, but he knew there was something he was missing. "Uh, I apologize, but do you know who I am?"
"Of course I know who the hell you are, you utter buffoon who only knows how to drink soup! I can't believe you're actually doing this right now. Wasn't fifty years ago enough? What, did the spices in your Spotted Flaming Tiger Soup tick you off?" The man's hat seemed like it was about to catch on fire, for some peculiar reason.
The air suddenly went hush, and Cerina's head popped up over Amaranth's shoulder. "Sir, Soup Master, my Senior has suffered some - "
"Suffered some
what? The only thing I see suffering here is the soup I left on the fire while a certain man refuses to get his ass out of the front line! You know, I cooked that soup for the last ten years, specifically for your next arrival. I can't believe I actually did that for someone without even the slightest bit of consideration! Do you know how long it takes to get the Ghost-Shimmering Death Pearl into a state where it's edible instead of a lethal poison? Do you know how small the window is for it to avoid creating a SMOG that would wipe out a TOWN?" The man's face was red with rage, steam somehow flowing out of his ears with enough heat to char the delicate looking plants arranged near the entrance to give the opening more ambiance. The man looked like he was winding up for another rant, so Amaranth tried to quickly slide in with the time he had.
He raised his hands placatingly. "Sorry, I want to be extra clear here. I've forgotten a large amount of my memories ever since a fight I had during the last…. Ten years, actually. Was my last trip right before E.K. 294? That sounds like something I'd have done."
The tall-hatted man looked confused. "Yeah, that was actually… exactly the last time you arrived. And you're saying you forgot a lot of your memories?" The steam slowly started to stop. After a few moments, the chef spoke in a more measured tone. "Well, if it's like that, there's not much to be done. Exactly how much did you forget? You clearly forgot me, and if you forgot me, that's at least half of your visits right then and there."
Amaranth looks a bit embarrassed. "Well, I sort of forgot… all of them? Yeah, all of the visits. I've been reconstructing my travels to the Simmering Soup Sect from my journals and some guidebooks I've managed to scrounge up since then."
The chef slowly came to a realization. "Damn. But that's almost since you were in the Ninth Heavenstage. That's... so much." The chef looked kind of depressed, his tall hat drooping down. "Well, anyways, I'm currently known as
Tall-Hat Macharius. Not Short-Hat, or Medium-Hat Macharius. I've been a Tall-Hat now for a good couple decades. Now, follow me." Tall-Hat Macharius proceeded to walk apace to the side of the soup-pot, away from where the hustle and bustle was at, towards a clearly flat region of the soup pot. There were no doors visible, no windows, or any other such openings.
The tall-hatted man spoke a word.
[Spaghetti-Os.]
It is a profound phrase, that Amaranth can barely comprehend the bare edges of, and the pot clearly recognized it. Cerina was completely hopeless, other than the feeling of
OM, as in one consuming in a single bite. A clean geometric shape formed on the surface of the pot, a hexagonal impression that slowly slid out into a passageway. The three walked through, a staircase sliding into position from below the sands as they move towards the opening.
"Chop chop now." The tall-hatted man said distractedly, as he opened up a jade slip for perusal. "We're almost time for the final preparation step for the soup. Since you two are here, you can help me."
As they entered the passageway, the first thing Amaranth noted was that the pot wasn't just metal. It appeared that there was more than glaze applied to the outside. There's a layer of what he was fairly sure was some kind of porcelain beneath the glaze, and then a sandwich of metal layers beneath that ceramic. The metal, he knew, was likely to improve the conductivity, and the porcelain perhaps to make its outside easier to clean? He wasn't quite sure about the particulars of cooking in enormous pots, but he could take a guess.
It went on and on, for a distance that Amaranth was actually quite certain the outside wasn't as long as. And yet, this Macharius fellow did not seem particularly concerned by the time it was taking to move through. Minutes upon minutes passed, until he hazarded a question.
"Uh, Tall-Hat Macharius—"
"Don't just call me Tall-Hat Macharius again and again. Just say
Macharius. I get the idea." The man said without looking behind for a second. He clearly had a lot of trust in who Amaranth was before he lost his memories.
"Alright then, Macharius, what's with the time difference in crossing the thickness of the pot? I'm almost certain this wasn't how thick the pot looked like from the outside, you know?" Amaranth was honestly puzzled. Given how rushed the chef had seemed earlier, this seemed completely off.
The man finally turned around, staring at Amaranth like he was an idiot, and looked like he was about to bark something out, but then reconsidered his response. "...Well, that's because of the proximity to the Dao of Soup. We're in the material of the pot itself, after all. I chose this particular route for a reason. Before taking on that final challenge, I wanted to shore up my comprehension by stepping into this thing one more time."
Proximity to the Dao of Soup? Amaranth couldn't tell the difference. It seemed to be the same intensity either way.
The chef huffed at Amaranth's words, and said no more.
Finally, as the trio passed through the end of the opening, a New World of magic and wonder was revealed to them. It was…. The World of Soup!
The first thing to hit them was the Scent, a wonderous thing that reached into the taste centers of their brains and said simply;
take me in, revel in this, let go.
Savor. Relaxation flowed over them, savory flavors chased by spices they could not name took up residence in their brains. Their ears heard the clamor of servers calling out orders, customers calling out in happiness, the click-clack of utensils all said;
take a seat, be right with you, please enjoy. This dripped into their bones, pulling them forward.
And through their eyes, it seemed as if they had stepped truly into a pot of Soup. The massive walls of the pot descended to a land full of steaming mist and wide rivers. The land seemed to be noodles, the finest of dough used to form them, the rivers broth both dark and clear mingled. Rafts like spring onion and sliced peppers and leaves floated along them. And growing from the land were buildings that the two would swear were slices of meat with bone scaffolds still present.
A food overload that promptly shut down Cerina's brain, and replaced it with the audible growling of her stomach. "Sooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuppppppppppp…" her mouth cried along with her belly.
Amaranth soon joined in, his eyes devouring the appearance of each and every building. It was like he had
never seen them before. "Soup. Soup. Soup. Soup. Soup. Soup." His lips spilled the words like a stream building up into a waterfall.
Macharius looked entirely unsurprised at his reaction, and a faint grin tugged at the edges of his lips. "Yes, there is soup here. Now, hurry along!"
The trio traveled across hills of glistening rich buttery mashed potatoes, skins and all, and valleys bordering lakes of thick, boiling hot gravy that would assuredly cook an unwary traveler that lacked protections against the heat. Amaranth's eyes never left the surroundings, and even as he tightly kept his mouth shut, he couldn't stop himself from salivating at the sight. This place… he wondered how it could even exist. Surely, there would have been spoilage by now.
Extending his senses out, he felt a single thing permeating through all things.
Soup. Soup. Soup. Soup. It was like an orchestra of countless notes gathered into one. A single, almighty, totalizing food that could hold all things within its watery embrace. It didn't matter if the birds, the rabbits, the foxes and the bears wished to partake. It was just all ingredients consuming ingredients, and none of it stopped the sum from being soup. It was almost beautiful in its sheer simplicity.
If he was thinking more lucidly, perhaps the idea would have concerned him a little bit. Though, in general, he was never really the type to be worried about
food. That would be silly!
Finally, they reached the building where Macharius said his Ghost-Shimmering Death Pearl Soup was being prepared. It was a surprisingly humble abode, compared to its surroundings in one of the richer districts of the Soup Pot, a wicker basket enlarged. As they entered, the centerpiece of the building quickly came within direct sight.
It was a pot, around thirty feet across, composed of the bones of some kind of sea-creature, by the looks of things. It was plated with scales and what appeared to be once spiked bone, sanded down into a gleaming iridescent finish. Inside, there was what appeared to be noodles made of…. Buckwheat? Amaranth raised an eyebrow. Buckwheat noodles had a tendency of getting soggy if they were in the water for too long, and as he turned his head towards Macharius, the chef was already responding as he grabbed a soup ladle twice as long as he was tall.
"They're not buckwheat, Amaranth. It
looks like buckwheat, yes, but it's actually a mutant form of Spirit Wheat that I specifically bred for the purpose of handling the Death Qi from the pearl. This new strain of wheat, in fact, is the masterpiece that I plan to present in the upcoming Centennial Soup Fantasia, and, if this test run goes well, will prove to be my
magnum opus, the beginning of a new era of Death Qi infused culinary pieces!"
There was a kind of fervent madness in those eyes of his, a dedication towards his art that Amaranth could only respect. But wait, did he say he
bred that strain of Spirit Wheat to let it handle Death Qi? Wouldn't that be extraordinarily difficult and be in the order of generations to get it to work in any safe manner, given the inherent opposition of the Yin energies with the Yang energies of the sun-absorbing plant? Amaranth said as much, and Macharius readily answered.
"Yes, normally this would be a
large issue. However, with some careful infusion of ghostly energies from the Demon Ghost Graveyards during the selective breeding process, selecting for the species that had the best ability to tolerate large concentrations of Death Qi while reducing the toxicity, I think I've finally reached the point where I've done it!" The man coughed a bit, looking a bit embarrassed. "Well, of course, it would likely still kill anyone below the Foundation Establishment stage, but it is still in the early stages, after all. I'm sure someone like you, however, can handle it just fine, so this should be a solid enough dry run!"
"And by the way, did you know— WHAT ARE YOU DOINGGGG??!!!" Macharius looked like he was about to have a mental break.
Cerina had gotten off to mischief while they weren't looking. Sat in front of the pot, she had found a large serving spoon from somewhere, and was currently gnawing on its bok choy-like handle, several others already reduced to just the scoops. A serving bowl sat in front of her. There were bite marks around its finely crafted rim. Her gaze was insensate. "Soup soup soup soup soup souuuuuuuuuuppppp!" She cried, rattling her bowl.
"NOOOO, NOT MY SOUP SPOOOOONS!!" Macharius ran towards Cerina like the Soup Chef himself was at his back, looking to cook him for the sacrilege of taking an eye off of his own equipment. He quickly snatched away the remnants of what his soup spoons had become, as well as the one serving bowl on the floor. He looked at the spoons, glassy-eyed. "Noooooooo," his whisper was like the whistling of steam through a crack in a poorly maintained soup pot.
"Soup?" A voice asked him. She had crawled up to him and was looking at the serving bowl.
Macharius stood there for a few moments more, before his face firmed up, and he made a decision. He walked over to a big oaken tank with a metal faucet, and opened up the spigot, filling up the gnawed serving bowl with a bright orange liquid that somehow was still piping hot. His hands, still shaking in barely concealed dismay, still firmly controlled the bowl. It was clear from the look in his eyes that he fully intended to somehow get her back, but he knew that now was probably not the time. The first experience to the presence of the Soup Pot, after all, was always the strongest.
He took a few toppings from some metal bowls stationed at a counter near the tank, and dropped them into the serving bowl using some metal chopsticks that came from seemingly nowhere. Diced mushroom from the morning errands, some dried kombu from a visit to the Sea and some recently cooked octopus ought to be good enough, he surmised, given the herbs infused into the rest of the orange broth. After they were in the bowl, he stirred the mixture vigorously, infusing some Soup Qi to accelerate the process of steeping to a few moments.
Finally, he passed the bowl over to the eagerly waiting Cerina with a soup spoon made out of wood, without any decorations making it look like vegetables.
"Here. Soup." He spoke deliberately and intentionally like he was handing something to a wild animal that might very well bite his hand off if he made the wrong move.
"SOUP"
She grasped the bowl and her head flopped forward, dropping her face into the food. The sound of drinking emerged from her bizarre shape, each pull long as she savored the meal. When she was done, some measure of sanity returned to her, she sat back up. A long tongue flicked over her face to catch the broth, as she considered the bowl. That had tasted so gooooood… there was probably some left in the wood of the bowl.
As Macharius reached for the bowl, his hand passed through empty air. Cerina's cheeks were now puffed out like a squirrel.
A vision immediately flashed through Macharius's eyes, of a time where he as a Short-Hat visited the local department store. There was… an angry store clerk talking to him about the return policy near the end, if he wasn't mistaken.
"Our store's century long return policy does not apply in the event of theft, intentional damage, vandalism, or consumption by wild animals. You can beg all you want, but if that ever happens, we won't give you a shiny cent!"
Cerina Polya looked this man in the eyes with her blind gaze, and with a heave of her throat, swallowed the bowl. There was a thud as it hit her stomach.
Macharius looked, in complete disbelief as an entire wooden bowl went down a cultivator's gullet. He had thought that something of this stripe would never happen to him. After all, did he void the warranty by infusing the bowl with Qi that might interest a predator or cultivator to take the bowl? No, he responsibly followed all the rules of that stupid department store, patiently even when they had been ANNOYING AS HELL for the last damn ninety years.
....Was that the choir of the dead? Oh, mother, it was time to finally come home. He fell onto his knees, seeing the recipes he put inside the soup bowl rapidly flitting through his mind.
"...Summer Leek Bonanza… Afternoon Resplendence Chilli… Abyssal Tomato Soup… Winter Watercress Wonton…" The man brokenly muttered the names of soup even as he smashed his right hand against the ground again and again.
Amaranth was still in the same place he had been this whole time, in contrast, staring intently at the bubbling soup pot. He hadn't even noticed the hullabaloo after Macharius decided to stop his spiel on the particulars of his soup ingredients.
"Hmmmmm…" Amaranth put a finger on his chin. He could sense the saturation of Death Qi leaching from the pearl growing more intense, causing transformations in the meat added. …Was that crawfish? Normally those were cooked live, so the addition confused him. The common wisdom was that crawfish should be cooked in dense quantities of spices as well, which… while this broth certainly seemed spiced and not to mention aged, didn't meet his usual mark for the amount of spice present.
Then again, perhaps the Death Qi was transmuted in its flavor-creating properties by the interaction with the… let's call it Void Spirit Wheat Noodles? It seemed like a decent enough name, though he'd have to check with Macharius to see if he had something already lined up for it.
Amaranth finally looked away from the bowl, to see this:
Macharius limply collapsed to his knees, head hung and hands limp beside him. His eyes were blank, his spirit broken. Beside him, Cerina was examining him curiously. She perked up when she noted Amaranth looking over. "Oh, Senior. I think this guy broke. You got any water to wake him up? His soup's gonna go bad soon."
"....What the heck even happened here?" Amaranth looked completely baffled at the sight. Macharius's right hand looked like it had been set under a
boulder, and not a light one by any measure. He shook his head. "Anyways, it's not like I can afford to be gentle. My soup-making skills aren't anywhere at his level, so if
I'm the one responsible for completing this work of ten years, we might as well destroy it already."
"NO!" With a desperate cry Macharius suddenly revived.
He sprung to his feet and wheeled on the pot. "We are out of time. We must improvise to save the soup!" He rushed over to a valve in a nest of pipes that led from a tank against the wall, to the pot and frantically turned it.
"You! Grab that ladle and START STIRRING AT MAXIMUM SPEED! When I give you the signal, I want you to BLAST that pearl with your Dao Magic!"
Amaranth looked completely flabbergasted at Macharius's rapid turnaround. "Bu-bu-bu-but, in what way? If I just use my unrefined Emanation, I'll just EAT the soup, Macharius! What do you want me to do?"
Macharius slapped a knife hand into his palm. "
Vital essence Amaranth, you bumpkin! Your Dao involves rebirth! That!"
Amaranth facepalmed. "OHHH, that makes
plenty of sense." From death arises new life. He firmly believed this to be true. He took a breath in.
"Boss! What do I do?" Cerina called.
"Come here!" He called, now standing at the side of the pot, possessed by a manic speed. He took a sniff as she reached him. "Ah! Yes, as I suspected for such a terrible barbarian of no manners, you know curses. Curse the Soup until I say to stop!"
"Okay!" Blue flame burned in her Eye, bathing the soup and causing the froth to bubble unnaturally as the curse took hold.
Amaranth stirred and stirred like he had never stirred in the three hundred year span of his life. The thirty-foot wide liquid furiously whipped into a surging rapids, a torrential tribute that would have capsized a ship if it was present on any ordinary pond. As he stirred, he gathered his Qi, and condensed it into a wispy orb that was slowly gaining physicality inside of his body. He could feel his bones creak from the circulation, tendons straining from Qi being jammed inside, preparing for an act he knew would be beyond any sane limits for even his prior self.
They flooded over the banks, ripping into the holes Rashni left behind, and even so, Amaranth kept a tight grip on the Qi. He would do it all at once, for the sake of this friend that believed in him so.
A word welled up in his throat, a dangerous word that tensed against the muscles of his neck like a golf ball shoved straight into his gullet. Ligaments seized, choking the flow of breath to his body. Still, he continued, like a mad wraith straight from the underworld. A dark presence began to spill out, a soul strained to its limits no longer able to restrain the Emanations it could release.
Under Cerina's gaze the mortal flesh separated from its spiritual matter, a strange shimmer gathering. Like luminescent silk, it swelled in the broth, catching on the surface of the bubbles. Soon though the flesh would rot, turn to ash,
wither. A delicate balance swiftly nearing the tipping point. "Boss!?" She called.
"Wait!" The cook called, hand extended. "Wait."
A moment stretched, tearing, the burning sap of her flower buzzing in Cerina's brain as she stretched her perception.
"Now!" Her Eye closed, and Amaranth spoke.
Sweeten.
With a great roar, Macharius pulls out a gleaming chef's knife, a knife prepared for this
one task. From the moment it was forged from the ore that he pried with his bleeding fingers from the depths of Turtlebone, the Tall-Hatted man spoke to it of its eventual purpose.
You slice the pearl.
You slice it at the exactly correct moment, and even if your wielder's hands know folly, you will only seek one purpose. OVERWHELMING SOUP JUSTICE!
From the moment it was refined into metal, from the moment it was poured out to be hammered in an anvil, from the moment it was quenched in the very water that would become broth, from the moment it was filed and sanded, from the moment it rested in Macharius's hand, the knife knew what it was supposed to do.
See the pearl.
Cut the pearl.
And as the chef who was but a novice in combat
leaped from Gaia's embrace into the soaring sky, the arc of the knife made a clean trajectory towards its target.
The pearl had rested, unknowing of all else, for the last ten years. It had rested, unknowing of all else, being steeped under boiling waters, surrounded by companions that came and went. First, it had seen black pepper. Second, it had seen cardamoms. Third, it had seen cloves, and then eventually, in recent memory, it had seen far more, as the broth was finally refined down to a state where the ingredients that would come to be displayed with it was present.
It slept, and slept, and slept, expecting not much more to happen to it. For why would anything else happen to it? The Shimmering-Ghost Clams were long-lived creatures, spanning millennia even in Foundation Establishment, and the pearls of that creature were not very good to eat for any beast or man that sought its bewitching gleam. There never was and there never would be much more to expect than that.
…What was that in the sky? Through the opaque grey clouds in the lake, a peculiar shine shot through, sending a single crack of silver light through the surface.
It was getting closer. Was that strange man adding another ingredient? Not that it particularly minded, for it knew that anything foolish enough to consume the toxic brew it surrounded itself with would die in the span of the burning of an incense stick.
Finally, the pearl heard a
plop, as an object slid through the water and hit its surface HARD.
Ah, a knife. Was it trying one more time? Not like someone of
that level could do very much at all to even the sheen on its surface, it thought with contempt. It could sit here for a hundred hundred more years, with nary even a dent from something that sad.
…Why was it going further. WHY WAS IT GOING FURTHER—
With a blinding shout, Macharius plunged arm first into the soup, pushing harder and harder. A red haze covered his body, veins in his eyes bulging with enormous amounts of strain. Amaranth, despite his focus, could do nothing else but gasp. Macharius was forcing Qi through nerves that were never
meant to hold Qi in the first place, using them as temporary meridians to exert force past the Great Circle of the Foundation Establishment Stage he rested in.
"URRRROOOOOOOWWWAAAAAAA!!!"
The knife moved further, and further, even as a piercing
shriek emanated from the soup,
Desperately, the pearl gathered the reserves of Qi within itself in a last-ditch move to slay this intruder that dared to end its life before its birth, only to find that the plentiful Death Qi normally available to it…. had been stolen? Even as it searched deeper, and deeper within itself, it could feel a vile
decay, its body dry as the desert sands, every part of it separating from the others to
become like those sands under a press of withering isolation - a diminishment that wreaked havoc on its ability to draw on its Qi, its strength.
Was this really over? Was this really the end? Was it really going to die, to this filthy
monkey—
Shunk.
The gleaming surface of a pearl of a species that could have consumed the entirety of the Soup Pot cracked wide open, and the Qi that had been carefully stored within flooded out with vigorous force, flowing into the churning clear broth like ink onto a page.
Before he could contaminate the soup further, Maccharius pushed off the bottom of the pot with his knife, in an attempted acrobatic landing onto his feet. Unfortunately, his legs at this point were in no such shape for such dramatics, and he collapsed in short order to the floor. "Finally…" he wheezed out. "It's
done."
----------------------------------------
ReaderOfFate: This was a hell of a lot of fun to write, Bungie! Part 2 sometime in Turn 17, no doubt. One thing that I've learned from this whole sesh was that apparently writing cooking scenes is ABSOLUTELY AWESOME since it means I get to dump a lot of random worldbuilding with actual justification behind it, and it lets me write zany shit like this too, which is definitely a plus. Something I'll remember for later for sure. Also, Amaranth is going to Yuan this turn! Yay!
I also really liked having someone to bounce off of for characterization scenes since Amaranth's entire THING is just in flux depending on how I'm writing that day, and I think that helped stabilize crap a lot.
Cerina is just the ULTIMATE gremlin, derailing scenes in just the right ways.
MVP: Macharius. He just came out of nowhere I'm not going to lie. I don't even know how he EXITED my fingers.
Bungie: *MURLOC NOISES* SOUUUUUUUUP. SOOOOOOOOUUUUUUP *rattles the bars of my cage* Ahem. Having a moment for Cerina to go completely feral was funny as hell and honestly her youthful exuberance paired with Amaranth is Just Good. Its fun! Thank you much Chim for giving me the opportunity. I'm giving all the words to Amaranth too, not like I need em anymore with my fate rolled. Get hype for Turn 17 and Part 2; there's gonna be fucked up Centipede Beasts.
Wordcount: 12662 words to Amaranth's Yuan Run. SOUP!
Current turn total = 13,827 words.
