Ugh, it's really annoying.
From what the kids told me, they all saw some or another mentor in their heads explaining stuff to them, got to see some really cool shit, and me?
Nah.
One moment I didn't know something, the next I... well, I just did. Sort of like copying something over from an USB onto the PC. Except a bit faster, I suppose.
The understanding of the art didn't advance by much at all for the duration of the array. Didn't even go up by a tier, staying at Perfect, but I did feel that I was on the cusp of a breakthrough.
It'd be odder, to be fair, for it to have gone up considering I've never tested the goddamn thing.
Kids, one by one, began to awaken from their temporary comas, sporting various expressions of success and a few of disappointment.
... and then there was Han Yimu. He was nestled in the corner, his eyes burning through my soul with how hard he was staring. No, seriously, for a sec there I genuinely believed he'd developed laser eyes and was using them on me.
"Master, Master, can we land, please?" that was, surprisingly, Xi Zhao, who seemed remarkably excited. I was going to land us anyway, so after taking a quick peek outside I slowed the chariot down and gently landed it.
We were still in the vast open plains southeast of Spirit Vein City, having not even crossed the nearest other river per my estimates.
What made the terrain stand out was the grass--or, well, the color of it. It was not a singular color, but rather a gradient whereupon the lower half was a perfect gradient of emerald green going darker closer to the roots the grass got, while the top half was a gradient between azure and rather bright blue at the very tip.
I crouched down as the kids scattered about, grabbing one of the stalks; the blend of colors was just... perfect. Honestly. I'd struggle to blend them in this manner even if I used a gradient tool itself.
And the vast field extended in every direction for dozens of miles, completely and totally covered in this grass.
"It's called azure-tipped grass," Lan Shun explained. "Quite some ways south of here, we'll also pass Azure-Tipped Canopy which is a forest of trees colored similarly to this."
"What causes it to be this way?" I asked, standing back up.
"We're not sure," he replied, stroking his chin for a moment. "The Tower has investigated the stalk and the trees briefly, but outside of their strange color, they have nothing particularly unique about themselves. The grass shares practically the same properties with the ordinary grass, while the trees were all mostly willow trees. As neither had any unique property that could be used in alchemy, our studies ended quickly.
"I did hear one of my Seniors at the Tower once mentioned that they'd ask some of the locals living near Azure Dragon Mountains, and can you guess what their theory was?"
"... a Dragon died in those mountains a long time ago and its corpse contaminated the nearby soil which led to the strange colors?"
"Huh, you could be a proper historian," he said as I rolled my eyes.
"Aren't we quite far away from the mountains, though?"
"Yes. Which is why the Tower never agreed with that theory."
I mean... it's not impossible. If only the form changed and not the function, then the change is biochemical rather than physiological, and it's not as though that's even that rare of a phenomenon. Hydrangeas, for instance, change their pigment from pink to blue because of exposure to aluminum.
Pigments can be altered on a base level by anything from copper to iron if circumstances are correct. What makes this one stand out is just the particular nature of coloring: it's gradient rather than solid.
So, it really could be that it's due to a dragon's corpse, where the corpse's decay caused leeching of trace metals or minerals into the nearby soil that caused contamination, leading to odd appearances. It is a bit strange for it to have propagated this far away, but hey, maybe it was a really, really, really big dragon. Or it was a really, really, really long time.
It could also have nothing to do with the dragon at all and that it was a microscopic fungal symbiosis. The grass and the trees are normal-colored, whatever that means, but are covered in a layer of microscopic biofilm which causes their color to look odd.
Naturally, that's kind of impossible to prove. No matter how much Qi I pour into my eyes, they do not become microscopes. Not even close.
A less likely solution would be something along the lines of altered wax crystals. Lots of succulents, for instance, have wax that scatters light. So, it's possible that there's something in the soil which changes how epidermal wax crystalizes, causing the grass and the trees to reflect blue wavelengths instead of white light, leading to their current appearance.
Maybe a 'pH gradient' inside the stalk? I mean, anthocyanins love changing their color depending on pH. But why would it work for only half a stalk? And I've never known anthocyanins to form such perfect gradients, no matter how whacky the pH.
It's that perfect gradient that's throwing me out the whack. No random speckling, no mottling. Scary uniformity across every blade of grass.
Shit, might even be silicon accumulation.
Or it might not be any of those things. It might really just be some weird magic out the wazoo, and the cause is the dragon but it has nothing to do with some scientific hoopla, and just has to do with some magical, weird Qi property unique to dragons.
"Back up a bit, everyone," Xi Zhao's voice dragged me out of my thoughts; it's been a while since my old pharmaceutical habits broke out to the surface.
I looked over to my right and saw Xi Zhao bending forward slightly, his hand gently tapping against the handle of the sword as he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Everyone else had scattered at least fifty yards from him, but even I, who was twice the distance away, felt it.
The wind had become razor-sharp, cutting against my skin. I'm fairly certain that if there was a mortal person next to me right now, they'd have become a mangled mess of flesh and blood.
Before long, the blades of grass underneath us began to fly up and around, creating a breathtaking rain of colors. As the stalks flew up, the light of the sun scattered through them, almost like through a prism, creating a strange distortion. Before I could process it fully, Xi Zhao grabbed the handle and drew.
I didn't actually see him pull the sword out and back into the scabbard. I just felt it.
Whatever instinct I managed to hone about danger since coming into this world was absolutely screaming at me, telling me that if that was aimed at me, I'd be a goner.
Nothing happened until everything happened.
A singular sword array cut flatly onward for about ten miles, ripping open a gash in the ground all the way through and creating copious amounts of spatial tears that just hung loosely in the sky for a few moments before the world 'patched' them back up.
The shockwave that followed was so potent and destructive that it tore open the ground like somebody just peeled it and shuttled it in every possible direction. It even lifted half the kids up and tossed them backwards, despite them trying to use Qi to stabilize themselves.
By the end, it looked as though there had been a massive battle involving hundreds of cultivators, considering that the terrain was absolutely unrecognizable. There was no field of gradient-colored grass reflecting sunlight in a perfect harmony; there was just carnage, and a literal crevice in earth spanning about forty yards across and full ten miles out. Something that would take the might of nature millions of years to create, a teenage boy did in less than a second.
"... whoa," I let out rather casually.
"Who the fuck is that kid?!" that was Lao Shun, his voice suffused with terror. "Is he a Sword Emperor reincarnated?!"
... and to think when I first inspected him, the system told me that he was likely to die never having achieved much, unless he experienced enlightenment.
Man.
These kids are terrifying.