I appreciated the woman ignoring me pulling back my hand and stuffing the bird back on top of my head, which was when she stopped crying.
At least, thankfully, her yapping seems to have eased. Though not condoning it, and though I will never do it again 'cause the guilt might just kill me, I can kinda see why some parents chose to raise their kids through fear. If you have no patience, no empathy, and no love in your heart, and you don't want the kids to be disturbing your Wheel of Fortune time, threatening to kick them to the curb might just seem like the right choice at the moment.
Anyway, as the awkwardness of the moment ceased and the table and chairs reappeared, the atmosphere subtly shifted.
"They've already sent more," she suddenly said. "And they will hardly be as easy to appease as little Yimu. There are a few things you ought to understand about your current predicament," she stretched out her hand and flicked her fingers, whereupon, just over the center of the table, a freakin' hologram appeared--hologram of the structure I'd seen when I first took the teleportation array.
Seven planets and eleven moons, suspended in an unmoving stasis.
"None of these is the so called Upper Realm," okay, that did actually shock me a bit. "It is here," she added, smiling faintly. "Merely concealed. Heavenly Court, at least in its original form, was meant to serve Dao--to be its extension, to interpret the will of something that might not even have it, and them exercise that will upon the world. When it stopped being that... I'm not quite sure myself. Now, it's a self-serving overseer, who does not like it very much when anything... out of ordinary crops up."
"..."
"Ah, I might have scared you a bit--it's not the Heavenly Court investigating this, don't worry. It'll mostly be low-level sects of the Upper Realm sending their Disciples down here. But, once you move further down the path you're walking, they will take notice. Of you, of the kids, of that quiet bird on top of your head. You're an anomaly, in so much one can be an anomaly in this world. And they do not like them. How much do you know of the so-called 'Divine Purge'?"
"... uh. I know what divine means. I also know what purge means."
"..." she cracked a faint smile, snapping her fingers yet again as the world came to a sudden... halt. It wasn't the time itself freezing like with that 'demon' under the mine, but more so that she 'pocketed' us into some intradimension that existed independently of the world. "Emperors and Empresses come and go relatively frequently. After all, at any given time, there are precisely one thousand of them. Some are killed, some become weaker, or somebody emerges and overtakes them. However, there are precisely seven Emperors--well, four Emperors and three Empresses--that have maintained that status for so long that they predate most historical records.
"They have remained undisputed, at the top, sovereigns of everything. And they made precisely seven institutions that function as the bedrock of reality itself. Heavenly Court is merely one of them, governed by one of the seven--Empress of Life. That they were the seven strongest has been the truth for so long that we had all subtly accepted it could not be challenged. But... it was.
"One day, quite some time back, a young pup emerged from a lesser world and stormed the heavenly skies like a world-ending catastrophe. Nobody knew where he came from, nobody knew who he was, nobody knew much of anything except that he'd become an Emperor at an earlier age than anyone else recorded, and that he was shooting through the ranks so fast that most believed him to be a fabrication, or an anomaly of Dao itself meant to test the current crop of Emperors. Alas, he was a human, just like the rest of us."
"..." I'm pretty sure I know who that is, and why it's called 'Divine Purge'.
"It happened... about ten thousand years ago? Huh. It really has been a while," she chuckled. "Well, he died about that time--the hunt... the hunt went on for a while. It felt, at some point, the entire Upper Realm was trying to hunt him down, no matter what. Why? Because he'd done it--he'd done what we thought impossible. He challenged the Seven. No... he didn't challenge them. He humiliated them. One of my proudest achievements in life was that I was in attendance when he fought Sword Emperor.
"While everyone expected a duel that would shake the heavens and last months... it was over so quickly it was as though it'd never begun. But that was the only fair duel he ever got. After that, the Heavenly Court proclaimed him a heathen--they claimed he'd made a deal with the Infernal Races to undermine Dao, and that corruption was the source of his strength. Overnight, his empire collapsed, wreathed in flames."
"... was he?"
"Hm?"
"The heathen?" I asked.
"... I'm afraid I hardly qualify to answer that," she said, smiling somewhat bitterly. "I will say, watching him that day... it was the purest glimpse of Dao I'd ever witnessed in my life. So, if he truly was a heathen, he hid it more than any other ever had throughout history."
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked, truly confused.
"Because you will inevitably become him," she said. "Ultimately, it did not matter whether he was a heathen or not. What mattered was that he threatened the status quo. Even if the Sword Emperor, at the time, was by far the weakest of the seven, and even if there was no certainty that he could have won against others, he dared threatened that which was entrenched in stone for so long. Whether you want to or not, your children will do the same. Perhaps not in ten years, or a hundred, or even a thousand. But, one day, they, too, will become heathens. And they, too, will be hunted down--as will you. Towards the end of the hunt, Divine Blade had nobody left. No friends, no family, no loved ones. Either they were all massacred, body and soul, or they had turned on him. He was a single, lonely star, and the endless void was his home.
"Perhaps, with you it might even be worse. They let him become strong, they let him pillage and plunder, they let him ascend to the position of being able to threaten them. I very much doubt they'll let the same thing happen again."
"That still doesn't answer my question," I added. She doesn't know about the system. She clearly doesn't know about Long Tao. So... why? Why does she think any of this shit is relevant to me?
"... because you interest me," she said. "And because, as you'll come to learn if you hadn't already, the world is rotting away. I don't believe in the Court, I believe in the Dao. That song that will ripple throughout the cosmos once more. And because I'd seen many, many, many fires be kindled in many corners of the world, all of whom once held a dream of greatness. None, however, compare to you. You have the direct descendant of the Demon God with you; you have a Martial Body with you; you have a boy that I'd have to be terrified of were I not in the Imperial Realm; you have a Shaman with enough talent to forge a Circle of Light; each one of your kids could be plopped in any of the Holy Mountains and be ranked supreme. If you cannot do it," she said, looking away toward the sky as that fuzzy feeling of not belonging began to fade, with us returning to reality. "Then truly, there simply is no hope."
A 'bit' of an exposition chapter; haven't had these (in their pure form) in some time. Hope it wasn't too much, everyone ^^