The statue didn't fall.
That was the first thing I noticed.
I had been holding it when the voice came out of it, and then my hands had gone slack from pure shock, and the statue had simply stayed where it was, floating at chest height in the middle of my inner world, blue light pouring out of its eye sockets like something was burning inside it.
The Weeping Root made a sound I had never heard from him before, something between a gasp and a whimper, and pressed himself against the back of my legs. I didn't move. I was running the same calculation that I always run when something unexpected happens, which is: how fast can this kill me, and what are my options if the answer is very fast.
After all, every piece of logic I had told me that the next thing to happen was an attack. You don't announce yourself in someone else's inner world unless you're either very confident or very desperate, and the voice didn't sound desperate. It sounded like someone who had woken up in a strange place and was furious about it.
The presence in the statue turned its attention in a slow arc, the blue eyes moving across the sky, across the Leviathan, across the gathered Leech-kin standing frozen on the Leviathan's back, and across me, without stopping.
It passed over all of us like we weren't there.
And that’s when I realised that it couldn't see us.
I didn't understand why, but I was glad.
Despite him being blind, I didn’t relax, just because he couldn’t see us, didn’t mean he couldn’t sense us.
A blind cultivator was still a dangerous cultivator.
Before I could decide what to do about this intrusion, one of the Leech-kin children on the Leviathan's back chose that exact moment to point at the floating statue and say, "It has different eyes now. It was red before. Why are they blue? Is it alive again?"
Three things happened in rapid sequence.
Snik, who I had returned control over his body to when I came back through the portal, lunged sideways and got one hand over the child's mouth before the next syllable could escape.
Every adult Leech-kin in the immediate vicinity held their breath.
And I put every piece of my attention on the statue's blue eyes to see if they had moved.
A second passed and nothing happened.
The Masked One was apparently operating without access to his senses in any useful way. He couldn't see. He couldn't hear. He was standing in the middle of my inner world like a deaf person in a dark room.
I let out a breath I hadn't realised I was holding.
Snik, crouching on the Leviathan's back with one hand still pressed firmly over the child's face, looked at me over the top of the child's head. His expression communicated something along the lines of: I have survived over six hundred years through extreme caution and in the last several hours everything I have ever been afraid of has happened repeatedly.
I gave him a small nod that said: you're doing well, keep the child quiet.
Children had no instinct for danger. I had noticed this before when one of the little ones who had wanted to touch the Leviathan's eye. There was something almost admirable about it if you weren't in the middle of a situation where it was actively dangerous.
The Weeping Root poked his head out from behind my leg and looked at the statue.
"What is it doing?" he whispered.
Azure appeared beside him, which seemed to surprise the Weeping Root less than it would have surprised most people. Inner world spirits, I was learning, had a recognition for each other that bypassed the usual process of introduction. The Weeping Root was a wary, cautious being by its nature, but Azure got a look of acknowledgment that was the closest thing to immediate trust I'd seen from him.
"It's blind," Azure said. "Deaf as well, as best I can determine. Whatever method it's using to project itself here, it doesn't include sensory access. It can sense spiritual energy directly, but it cannot see or hear in any conventional way."
The tension went out the Weeping Root’s small shoulders, and he stepped out from behind my leg and stood beside me properly.
I appreciated the confirmation from Azure, but I wasn’t sure if the inability to sense anything was because of the Masked One’s technique or an effect of the Genesis Seed. After all, who would be foolish enough to project themselves into someone’s inner world without their senses?
But the reasoning didn’t matter to me, what mattered was that the Masked One was in my inner world and couldn't perceive it. That was good because I wasn’t comfortable with others knowing what my inner world contained.
My inner world was not the inner world of a standard Stellar Realm cultivator. It was not the inner world of a standard anything. The Lithari alone would have been remarkable enough to attract attention. The Cathedral, the Genesis Seed, the Realm Stabilizing Tree housing Xie Junhao's consciousness, the three suns in their orbit, the Blood Moon I had just stolen from Ke Jun's dying world. Any one of those was the kind of thing that a person who collected unusual cultivators and their unusual assets would find very, very interesting.
The Masked One collected people. He had collected Ke Jun. He had collected Li Yuan and who knew how many other souls. If he had arrived here with full perception, with the ability to actually see and catalogue what I had built, I would have become the most interesting thing he had found in years, and that was not a category I wanted to be in.
Being interesting to a collector of souls, when you were a world walker with a Genesis Seed and three cultivation systems and an inner world that size, was a kind of dangerous that didn't have a clean solution.
So: blind and deaf was perfect.
But the question remained: what should I do now?
Usually, I was a follower of the belief that people could change.
Even someone like the blood statue of Ke Jun had changed from someone trying to take over my body to someone I could make a fair deal with.
Sure, the reason for the change in character was the threat of the Genesis Seed, but the ability to think about the pros and cons and make a decision meant that even though I didn’t expect Ke Jun to become a saint, there was some hope in Ke Jun becoming a somewhat decent person.
As for the Masked One, he was a person who had developed an entire system around the collection and enslavement of other people's souls, and who had sent puppets to hunt and kill cultivators he found narratively interesting.
And maybe Ke Jun had done similar outlandish things in the past, after all, he was a blood cultivator, but something about the Masked One’s tone and the little that I knew about him, reminded me of the arrogant young masters, who no matter how often they were beat down, never developed any common sense or gave up on their ways.
I couldn’t spend the next few decades or centuries trying to convert him into a righteous cultivator, the destruction and pain he would cause to innocent lives wasn’t something I could fathom.
Which meant there was only one thing left to do – kill him.
However, someone like him would have many life saving techniques. If I was going to act, I had to make sure that I killed him permanently, and that was easier said than done in a world where there were who knew how many ways for a cultivator to return to life.
Before I could think of a way to annihilate a soul beyond resurrection, I felt something change.
A pulse went out from the centre of my inner world.
It was the Genesis Seed, and it was furious.
This entire time, it had been sealed by the Heavens for my tribulation.
The golden calligraphy had locked it down completely, in my experience with the seed, it had a certain type of pride that refused to be suppressed by anything, and since it couldn’t take its anger out on the Heavens, it turned its full attention to the Masked One.
The roots that ran through all four quadrants of my inner world rose came out from the ground.
On the Leviathan's back, the Leech-kin who had been watching the floating statue quietly erupted into noise.
"The roots are flying…"
"Don't stand near the edge…"
"What is it doing to the statue…"
"Pull Mirrin back, she's going to…"
The roots shot towards the statue and pierced it from all sides.
The blue eyes in the statue's face went wide.
A sound came out of the statue that was not quite a voice and not quite a scream, something that existed in the frequency between the two, and then the sound changed as the roots went deeper into the statue's spiritual structure.
It seemed like the Genesis Seed was going to tear his soul apart.
The Leech-kin on the Leviathan's back reacted in a wave at the brutal sight.
I felt a little bad for them; this wasn’t the first impression of my world that I wanted to give them.
Several adults grabbed the nearest children and pulled them close. One of the older ones, the woman who had asked me where they were going back in Ke Jun's world, stood very still with her arms around both her children and watched in fear, probably wondering what kind of world they had migrated to.
Then something happened that none of us expected.
A soul came out through the statue's surface.