I raised my hand toward the red sun as it hung in the sky of my inner world.
Drawing energy through the Blood Moon felt different from drawing it directly. There was a layer of translation happening somewhere in the process, the energy passing through the moon's dead stone substance before it reached me, and whatever happened during that passage changed something about it.
I found a small tree nearby, one of the younger ones that had sprouted near the meditation plateau, and I directed the energy into its root system rather than into myself. I wanted to see what the combination did to something external before I tried anything more personal.
Within a second, the root began to change.
It darkened first, the pale woody color draining out of it and being replaced by a deep charcoal-red. The texture shifted next, the fibrous quality of wood becoming denser. The veins running through the root surface looked less like wood grain and more like something had been etched there by a very precise and very cruel hand.
I wasn't surprised by the transformation itself. Red sun energy had always done something like this to whatever it passed through. That was exactly the reason why most in the Cultivation World would mistake red sun techniques for demonic cultivation.
What happened next was the part I hadn't predicted.
The root turned toward the tree it belonged to and latched onto the trunk with a deathly grip and started pulling, drawing the tree's essence into itself, and growing as it did.
The tree shrank as the root swelled.
The process was disturbingly efficient, and by the time it finished, the root had become something that barely qualified as a root anymore. It was thick as my arm, dark as coal, and it was turning its attention toward the nearest patch of vegetation with a hungry look.
I stared at it for a moment.
The Blood Moon had two functions as far as I understood it.
The first was corruption, taking the nature of whatever it touched and pushing it toward an extreme version of itself. The red sun loved consuming things, loved devouring and transforming, and the Blood Moon had apparently decided to enhance that quality until it became the defining characteristic. The result was standing in front of me, looking for its next meal.
The second function was reflection, the moon's natural purpose of bouncing back what it received, but for some reason the moon hadn't reflected the red sun's nature. Whether it was because it was unable to or chose not to do so, I didn't know.
Maybe the Blood Moon's reflective function worked differently depending on what it was reflecting. Maybe it required something from me that I wasn't providing. Maybe I was missing a step in the process entirely.
I filed the question away for later, because right now I had a more immediate problem in the form of whatever I had just created, which was currently investigating the root system of a completely innocent nearby shrub.
I put out my hand and sucked out the energy from it.
The demonic tree let out a cry as the red sun energy returned to its source.
By the time it was done, what was left was ash that drifted down onto the soil and disappeared.
I looked at the ash for a moment.
If I could help it, I would never use that ability.
This was a demonic technique that devoured the power of opponents and transferred it to the user.
The cultivation world had produced entire schools of thought around exactly this concept of devouring, and most of them were listed in sect archives under headings that included phrases like "forbidden" and "grounds for immediate execution by Heaven's Mandate."
Sure, I’ll admit that the temptation was there.
I was a Stellar Realm cultivator in a world full of things that wanted to kill me, and the Blood Moon was here to give me an ability that could make me much more difficult to kill by making everything else weaker.
So, yeah, the appeal was there like it would be for anybody, but I could already tell how it would turn out if I gave in even once.
First, I would get into a fight against someone stronger, which seemed to be a reoccurring problem in my life, then I would get the temptation to just pull a little of their strength away, just enough to even things out and survive.
Then, it would happen again and again, each time I would take a little more while justifying it to myself until I was too far gone.
After all, the slide from a single compromise to a pattern of compromises was usually so gradual you barely noticed you were moving. And the cost of losing myself like that was worse than heavenly retribution or sect punishment or any of the external consequences even though those were real enough.
The cost was the same one Wen Suli had been paying her entire life, and Sun Li Hua before her, and every person who had ever been treated as a resource by someone more powerful. If I used that technique on a living being, I was making the calculation that said some people's power was more useful as fuel for someone else's growth.
That was not the type of person I wanted to become.
I shook the thought out of my head and turned my attention to the blue sun.
For this experiment, it would be best to see how the Blood Moon affected my paintings.
I drew on its energy into my index finger and began to paint on the air.
I kept the subject simple, a golden retriever, it was the default example of an animal that wanted to make friends with everyone it met. The painting stabilized, the lines held, and the energy settled into a shape that was not a golden retriever in any meaningful sense of the word.
The size was right and the basic proportions were there if you looked past everything else.
But the fur had gone the color of dried blood, coarse and standing along the spine in a permanent ridge. The eyes were wrong in an eerie way, too bright, too aware, with pupils that had an irregular shape. The teeth were visible even with the mouth closed, and there were more of them than a dog twice its size should have.
The aura rolling off it was thick and hostile.
It was as if it had been created believing that everything was an enemy.
It looked at me, and then it started barking, short sharp sounds that carried more threat than most cultivators manage with full techniques, and it pulled its weight forward like it was deciding whether the consequences of charging me were worth whatever it would gain by doing so.
I narrowed my eyes at it, and the bark cut off mid-sound.
The dog dropped onto its belly, paws flat, and whimpered.
Smart creature, at least.
I watched it for a moment and thought through what had just happened.
When I painted with blue sun energy normally, I created things that used blue sun energy and nothing else. The nature of the creation was bounded by the nature of the energy. A dog I painted couldn't generate qi or red sun energy or any other type of energy that wasn’t blue sun energy.
But the Blood Moon had changed the nature of the energy before it reached the painting. What ran through its body could no longer be described as simply blue sun energy. It was genuinely demonic.
But unlike the red sun energy and Blood Moon combination, I could see how this one could come in handy.
Not for anything I wanted to do regularly, but the applications were real.
A group of creatures like that, deployed in the middle of a fight, would create chaos that forced opponents onto the defensive regardless of how much stronger they were. Also, the intimidation value alone was considerable. Even experienced cultivators flinched when something that looked wrong appeared in front of them.
The corrupted golden retriever continued to press itself flat against the ground, still whimpering softly. I dissolved it carefully and watched the energy disperse, then turned my attention to the golden sun.
I was careful this time.
The memory of standing in the rubble of my own pavilion while Yang Bo tried to decide whether to attack me or congratulate me was still recent enough to keep me cautious. I drew the golden sun's energy through the Blood Moon slowly, keeping the flow narrow, and directed it into my spiritual manifestation rather than letting it expand outward the way it wanted to.
The energy hit my spiritual form and the crimson threads came with it.
I could feel the change through my spiritual sense rather than seeing it directly.
I was glad I'd kept it small because what looked back at me from my own spiritual reflection was something I wouldn't have wanted to meet in the dark.
The proportions were mine, the height and the frame, but everything else had shifted.
A crown had appeared above my head, it was jagged at the edges, the points curving inward like thorns turned upside down, trailing dark red smoke from each tip. A cloak had materialized across my shoulders, it was the color of deep space with veins of crimson running through it that swayed with the wind, and the hem didn't end cleanly but frayed like it had been torn by claws.
The face underneath the crown was mine, which was somehow the most unsettling part, because it made everything else on the form feel like a revelation from the Golden Sun rather than a disguise. And that revelation was that I was going to one day become a demon lord.