A/N
Two chapters combined to 1 longer chap for better readability, enjoy!
Chapter 801: When Karma Runs Dry
"Ke Yin, what happened?"
I was sitting on the meditation mat with my hands still shaking against my knees and I took a long moment before I said anything because the honest truth was that I didn’t even know where to properly start. Every place I considered starting from led immediately to something I wasn’t ready to think about yet, so I just started from the beginning and went forward from there.
I told him about arriving in Porvale and finding out that Tomas was still dead, which meant that Kal had never come to save him at the moment the loop began, and I explained the four possibilities I had considered for why he was absent and how the worst one had turned out to be the one closest to the truth.
I told him about the three days traveling with Lady Laelyn's caravan as a servant and listening to Academy gossip until it became clear that no Rank 8 named Kal existed anywhere in that world, and about the choice I made afterward to work with the new Saintess rather than continuing to hide from everything.
I walked him through freeing Laelyn from the Saint's Essence, through Beric's tattoo awakening with the power of a pseudo-Rank 7, through bringing Elder Thorn over to our side by playing the role of the Golden Sun's prophesied heir, and through the fabricated war to empty both academy’s defences, so that the road to the Eldest Tree would be open to us.
Then I told him about the Vermilion Vale.
I told him about the possessed elders coming down from the sky with glowing blue eyes and about the Blue Sun establishing direct communion with them because the silence left behind by the destroyed Saint's Essence had made it suspicious.
I told him about Beric wrapping his arms around a Rank 7 elder and detonating himself to protect his lady, and I told him about the golden avatar I raised over the Sacred Ring to crush a man whose only real crime was following orders he genuinely believed in.
And then I told him about the tear in the sky, keeping my voice as steady as I could manage throughout.
Sect Master Yuan had listened to all of it quietly up until that point, nodding occasionally and occasionally narrowing his eyes at a specific detail, which didn’t surprise me because a man like him had probably listened to over a million mission reports across the full length of his life.
But when I described the blood-red eye opening above the Vale and the voice that had called me a world walker, he froze, and the temperature inside the hidden room dropped.
"It knew what you were," he said, barely above a whisper.
"Yes," I said. "It said we meet at last, which means it has been aware of my existence for a long time, and it asked me how many worlds I had saved, so my best understanding is that it felt me undo its work in the Realm of the Chosen and has been following me across realities since then."
"And Kal," Yuan said, his fingers pressed together in front of his chin. "What do you think happened to him?"
"I think the lich-like being extracted his soul at the end of the previous loop and something about that extraction carried across the reset when nothing else did," I said. "Kal had been the anchor of that world's time loop for who knows how long and now he was gone and nobody in that world even cared."
Yuan closed his eyes for a moment, and I understood that this was grief, for a man he had never met and would never meet, a cultivator from another world entirely who had spent centuries in solitary repetition in service of people who forgot him every single time.
"A Rank 8 who carried a thousand loops alone," he whispered. "For him to be erased so quietly, without even his own world taking notice of the absence, is a particular cruelty very few experience." He opened his eyes and looked at me directly. "Tell me the rest. Tell me how you survived."
So, I told him about the hand that reached through the tear, cycling through human and beast and demon and plant forms as it descended, I told him about the Ethereal Anchor pulling my soul free of Tomas's body, and how if he hadn’t gifted it to me, I don’t know if I’d be here right now.
Then I told him about the karma.
"Master, I detonated all of it," I said. "Everything from the Realm of the Chosen, the Lithari, the Leech-kin, everything, and it only erased the entity's arm up to the boundary of the tear." I paused, and my hands tightened on my knees. "And the blast also erased the continent. Everyone. Laelyn, Corwin, the elders, every village and every cultivator and every living thing as far as my senses could reach. The entity asked me if I could live with the guilt of destroying the world I had spent all those loops trying to save, knowing that I couldn’t."
Yuan didn't speak, and I forced myself to finish.
"Then the world began rewinding. The loop was still active after all, even without Kal. The entity told me the reserves fueling it are nearly spent, that I have one more chance, maybe two, and then the loop fails and the world becomes its property. And that we would meet again one day, that it was certain of it. Those were more or less its parting words before the barrier pushed me through."
The silence that followed stretched long enough that I could hear my own heartbeat, and when Sect Master Yuan finally spoke, his voice was more gentle than it had ever been before.
"You did the right thing by fleeing," he said. "I want you to know that, because I suspect you have already begun building a case against yourself in your own head. An entity that consumes worlds is more than most can deal with. You survived and the world reset. Nothing was lost that has not been returned, so don’t blame yourself or it."
"But Master, I…I destroyed a world."
"The world is still there," he said simply. "The people are alive. What remains is a memory, and memories, however heavy, are things a cultivator learns to carry. We will speak more of this. For now, rest. Your soul has been stretched across dimensions twice in one day, and even a World Tree Sutra user has limits."
***
A week passed.
The rest I needed turned out to have very little to do with my body, because thanks to the pendant Sect Master Yuan had given me and the Ethereal Anchor protecting my soul during the crossing, I had come back without so much as a bruise on my spiritual foundation.
Azure's diagnostics confirmed within the first day that everything from my meridians to my inner world was operating exactly as it should. The damage was all in my head, and no pill or pendant in the sect's treasury had ever been refined for traumatic memories, which was something I still didn’t understand given how common those problems were in this world.
Those memories were difficult to let go of: Beric's bloody smile before the detonation, Laelyn kneeling at the crater's edge with her hand pressed against the scorched earth, Isara's head rolling to a stop in the grass with her eyes still open, the blood-red eye looking down at me, and me turning the continent to ash.
So yeah, I spent the first three days barely leaving my pavilion, just thinking about what I could have done differently. What I had learned was that my intentions didn’t matter as much as my actions did.
When I had been a Qi Condensation disciple scraping together spirit stones for dumplings, a mistake on my part could hurt me and perhaps the people standing directly beside me, and that was the full extent of my blast radius.
But I was a Stellar Realm cultivator now, a world walker carrying three suns and a Genesis Seed and quantities of karma that a Dao of Karma practitioner would describe as frankly stupid, and at that scale, a single defensive reflex had vaporized a continent.
Even though I knew that the Sect Master was right and I didn’t have any other option but to do what I did, I didn’t want to ever be in a situation where there was no reset and that my destructive actions had permanent consequences.
That type of mental trauma was something nothing would be able to heal.
And the memory wasn't even the only lingering consequence, because it turned out that detonating every scrap of good karma you possess leaves you with a very specific problem, and that was my luck was gone.
I noticed it in small things at first.
On the fourth day I visited the dining hall for the first time since returning, and the last portion of the braised spirit duck was claimed by the disciple directly ahead of me in line, which had literally never happened to me before in all my time at the sect.
On the fifth day, a delivery of formation materials I had ordered before leaving for the Two Suns World arrived water-damaged, the seller apologized and explained that the transport talisman had failed mid-route for the first time in his hundred years of business.
On the sixth day I reached for a book in the archives and the shelf bracket, which had presumably been holding that shelf up for centuries, chose that exact moment to give out and drop forty volumes on my head if I hadn’t had the reflexes to dodge it.
Sure, none of it was dangerous, but all of it was suspicious.
So, on the seventh day, I decided to run a proper test, and I did something I didn’t like doing, which was place a bet. I had never been a gambler, and the reason was simple.
In my old world I had watched classmates lose their savings to games designed by people much smarter than they were, and I had realised early that gambling was a tax on people who believed they were special. And in this world, where karma was a measurable force and Daos were built around fate itself, betting struck me as even more foolish, because you were essentially wagering spirit stones against forces you couldn't perceive.
Which was exactly what made a bet the perfect diagnostic tool.
The sect, as it happened, was currently consumed by a betting frenzy over the annual Beast Taming Trials, an event where disciples who cultivated beast-focused methods pitted their bonded companions against each other in a series of contests ranging from combat to obstacle courses to a rather absurd event involving the retrieval of a greased jade egg.
I had avoided looking into it when I first heard about it, because my initial mental image had gone somewhere ugly like illegal pitbull rings back on Earth, animals conditioned into aggression and discarded when they stopped being useful.
Then Azure had mentioned, almost offhandedly, that the Beast Taming path was one of the few cultivation disciplines where a practitioner's soul was bound to their companion's, like me and Yggy.
Which meant that beast tamers were known to throw themselves in front of attacks meant for their companions and their beasts would do the same. The grief when one died was like losing a part of yourself. Since it wasn’t as bad as I thought, I decided to go, and I’m sure if Wei Lin had been conscious, he would have been running the numbers on this event for weeks, calculating odds and hedging positions and probably operating a small book of his own on the side.
The overwhelming favorite was a disciple named Guo Fan and his bonded Thunderplume Falcon, a magnificent silver-feathered raptor that had won the aerial retrieval event three years running by margins so wide that the odds on it were barely worth the transaction.
Behind it were a Stoneback Hound whose owner swore it had finally learned to ignore distractions, a Mist Serpent that was fast but famously temperamental, and a fat Cloudpaw Badger that nobody took seriously and that had been entered, as far as anyone could tell, mostly as a joke.
I put fifty spirit stones on the falcon, the safest bet available in the entire sect to see just how bad my luck was.
The retrieval event began exactly as everyone expected, with the falcon shooting off the perch in a streak of silver the moment the jade marker was released, opening a lead so enormous within the first ten seconds that half the crowd had already started celebrating, and I stood at the back of the viewing stands watching the most certain outcome in the sect fly toward its conclusion.
Then, forty meters from the marker, a gust of wind that no formation had predicted rolled down off the mountainside, and the falcon, this three-time champion who had flown through storm training exercises without blinking, hit the gust at a bad angle, tumbled, clipped its own wing against a boundary flag that should have been nowhere near its flight path, and spiraled down into the safety netting with an indignant shriek.
The Stoneback Hound, startled by the commotion, lived up to its owner's fears and bolted sideways into the Mist Serpent's lane, which sent the serpent into one of its famous temperamental episodes and straight into a boundary marker. By the time the chaos had finished sorting itself out, the fat Cloudpaw Badger had waddled across the finish area completely unbothered and sat down directly on top of the fallen jade marker.
The stands erupted, and I couldn’t even blame them, no one saw this coming.
"The heavens are blind! How could they let this happen to me?" a disciple two rows ahead of me howled, tearing at his own topknot. "Three years! Three years it wins and the one time I bet my entire monthly stipend…"
"I put everything on the falcon," a pale-faced boy nearby whispered. "My stones and the spirit herb I was saving for my breakthrough. They’re all gone because of a badger."
"Junior Brother, you need to breathe," someone told him urgently as they escorted him out.
"You told me it couldn't lose!" another was shouting at his friend, gripping him by the front of his robes and shaking him. "You said, and I quote, 'a blind man could collect on this,' and now I owe Senior Sister Yang four thousand spirit stones and she is going to make me copy scrolls until my fingers fall off!"
"The badger didn't even run!" the disciple next to them shouted, throwing his slip into the air. "It waddled! It waddled to victory while three cultivated beasts destroyed each other, how does something like that even happen?"
"It’s because it’s cursed," an older disciple muttered as he shuffled past me toward the exit, staring at his betting slip with hollow eyes. "The whole event is cursed. Something foul walked into these stands today, mark my words."
"Senior Brother is right," a girl behind me said loudly to her companion. "You felt it too, didn't you? There was something wrong with the spiritual energy in here from the very beginning, I said so before the event even started, I told you something felt off and you told me I was imagining things."
"You said you were cold," her companion replied. “How is that the same? How does that have anything to do with some curse?”
I didn’t bother to listen to what else they had to say, this was a good moment to leave because they were right even if they didn’t know it for sure.
Something foul had, in fact, walked into these stands today, and it was currently trying to get the hell out of here before anyone worked out that the disaster's epicenter was a Legacy Disciple with a fifty-stone slip and a karma balance of zero, if not in the negatives.
I slipped out through the rear of the stands without a word, because explaining to a crowd of furious gamblers that I had dragged their sure thing out of the sky simply by wanting it to win seemed like a bad idea.
I brought the results to Sect Master Yuan that evening, and to his credit, only a faint smile appeared on his face.
"A badger," he shook his head. "Truly, the heavens have a sense of humor about these things. But no, Ke Yin, you have nothing to worry about. Karma is a flowing thing, and yours emptied all at once, which leaves the vessel briefly dry. Continue living as you have lived, helping where help is warranted, and the balance will return to the positive on its own. In the meantime, I would recommend staying away from games of chance, cliff edges, and unattended shelving."
"The shelf already found me," I said, and his smile widened ever so slightly.
So I did exactly as my Master suggested, I went back to living.
A/N
Sorry everyone, no chap tomo, I'll be going to my sister's graduation, we'll return on Wednesday!