Chương 165: A Star Is Born (And Immediately Gets Bullied)

When I opened my eyes I was exactly where I'd left my body, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my quarters in the Outer Disciples' residence, and through the window the same crescent moon was hanging in the same spot in the night sky like nothing had happened at all and no time had passed whatsoever.

"Azure," I said, stretching out muscles that felt both well-rested and stiff, "how long was I actually gone?"

"Three days in the Starhaven Realm," he replied.

"About six hours here."

"In the Two Suns world two months only works out to roughly two hours here, so the time dilation should be..." I started trying to do the math in my head and then gave up and just let Azure handle it.

"The Two Suns world operates on roughly a 720 to 1 ratio, while the Starhaven Realm appears to be running closer to 12 to 1."

"That's a massive difference between them," I said, turning the numbers over in my head.

"I wonder if it has something to do with inner worlds naturally having less temporal distance from the main world than other types of realms do, or maybe the time difference has more to do with how deeply the creator understood the Dao of Time when they made the place."

"Both factors make sense," Azure said.

"But I think the relative distance between worlds probably plays a significant role as well, and if the Two Suns world isn't an inner world, that would explain why the temporal displacement there is more extreme." Everything I'd seen of the Two Suns world didn't fit the pattern of an inner world.

The sheer scale of it and the complexity of its power systems was both far beyond anything that should fit inside someone's soul, and if it actually was someone's inner world then whoever made it was operating on a level that made even the Celestial Sovereign look like they were just getting started.

"Master," Azure said, "you should check your inner world, we have a situation." I closed my eyes and shifted my awareness inward. I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting to find but it definitely wasn't what was actually happening. The red sun, which had always had something of a territorial personality, was currently in the process of trying to physically bully the new star into a corner of the sky, the little stellar body was doing its best to hold its orbit against this pressure.

As for the blue sun, it had positioned itself directly between the two of them and was somehow managing to project the energy of a protective older sibling despite being, you know, an enormous ball of energy.

"Are they actually fighting?"

"The red sun appears to be asserting territorial dominance over the new arrival," Azure said, sounding like a nature documentary commentator.

"The blue sun appears to have elected itself as the star's protector."

"Fantastic," I sighed.

"My inner world is becoming a celestial soap opera, what's next, the Genesis Seed launching a reality show?" As though it had been listening for exactly the right moment to make an entrance, the massive tree extended one of its branches and gently nudged the star upward into a slightly higher orbit where the red sun would have more trouble reaching it.

"At least someone in here is being useful," I muttered, and then tried to redirect myself toward something actually practical.

"What effect is having a star in my inner world going to have on my cultivation, beyond entertainment?"

"Potentially quite significant," Azure said.

"Unlike the red and blue suns which are essentially representations of another world's magic system, this star is a legitimate cultivation resource from our world which gives you access to stellar qi."

"Stellar qi," I said slowly. Where Qi Condensation cultivators worked with raw qi and Elemental Realm practitioners commanded the elemental forces of nature, Stellar Realm cultivators worked with the power of the stars themselves. The difference in scale between those things was not a small one. Regular qi was like a creek compared to the river of elemental qi.

Stellar qi was an ocean by comparison, the raw energy density alone was orders of magnitude greater and the range of what you could actually do with it was wider. The reason for this is because elemental qi was constrained by its natural properties, fire burns and water flows and so on, stellar qi could be shaped into almost any form or function you understood well enough to attempt.

"I should mention," Azure said, "that while you technically now have access to the same category of energy as a Stellar Realm cultivator, the quality and quantity of what you're actually working with are somewhat lacking."

"Somewhat lacking," I repeated.

"So trying to use stellar qi with my current cultivation level would be what, like trying to drink from a firehose?"

"More like trying to contain a supernova inside a paper cup," Azure said, dryly.

"My current estimate is that you could manage one attack using stellar qi." I stared at nothing for a moment.

"Only one..."

"Yes," Azure confirmed.

"And I should also warn you that even that single attack may be more than your current physical body can safely handle, stellar qi is not friendly to Qi Condensation realm cultivators under normal circumstances."

"So it's a break-the-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation where you also have to be prepared for the glass to explode and take your arm with it."

"That's actually a fairly accurate description of the situation yes." I watched the red sun make another attempt to drift toward the star and get intercepted by the blue sun for probably the dozenth time and I pulled my attention back to things I could actually do something about right now. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"We need to learn more about inner worlds in general, there has to be a way to understand the annexation process better and maybe speed it up, the library here must have something relevant."

"I doubt they'll have the specific information we're looking for," Azure said.

"Most sects keep their higher-level cultivation knowledge restricted pretty tightly."

"True, but it's somewhere to start, and besides," I added, "we can use the time to add whatever beast lore they have recorded into your database, two problems at once."

There is something deeply unsatisfying about spending hours in a library and coming away feeling like you know less than when you went in, and that was more or less exactly how I felt sitting cross-legged at one of the reading tables surrounded by stacks of books that had each individually and methodically destroyed a small piece of my optimism as I worked through them.

"Master," Azure said, "I believe that's the fifth time you've sighed in the last minute."

"I had genuinely forgotten how deeply annoying libraries could be," I said. Most people assume cultivation sects keep their libraries locked down tight because they're worried about outsiders stealing their techniques, and sure that's part of it, but the real reason is that it forces disciples to actually sit down and read the books rather than just scanning them with their spiritual sense and calling it done.

Once cultivators reach a certain level, they discover they can absorb entire texts in seconds by extending their awareness through the pages, which is excellent for gathering information quickly and terrible for actually learning anything. The Azure Peak Sect's solution to this was that every single book in the library had formations that blocked spiritual scanning and you had to physically open the cover and turn the pages and read with your actual eyes.

"Builds character," the elders apparently liked to say about this policy.

"Prevents shortcuts in learning," the teachers claimed. In my case, opening and turning was enough since Azure handled the actual reading and retention. I turned another fragile page in Advanced Inner World Theory and Practice carefully, because the book was old enough that breathing on it wrong felt like it might cause structural damage.

"Try not to do that," Azure commented.

"The junior librarians are already watching you with some suspicion." He was right about that, I'd been aware for a while of the two of them taking turns to walk past my reading alcove, apparently someone requesting access to advanced inner world texts was unusual enough to justify low-level surveillance.

"They're probably just worried about the books," I thought back, setting aside another tome that had turned out to contain nothing useful.

"But with how fragile these things are, I'm starting to think looking at them wrong might count as damage." The shelf I was working through was supposed to be dedicated to inner world development past the Qi Condensation realm and everything I'd found so far was basic enough to be in any standard cultivation manual. The inner world grows as the cultivator advances, a strong foundation is essential for later development, the size and complexity of one's inner world reflects one's understanding of the Dao.

I knew all of this already.

"Maybe," Azure suggested, "we'd have better results focusing on something specific rather than general theory, the Genesis Seed's annexation process might be mentioned somewhere under world-merging phenomena if we look for that specifically." It was a good idea but two more hours of careful searching produced nothing except eye strain. There was plenty of material about how inner worlds could theoretically merge or split under various conditions, but nothing at all about annexing other realms.

"There has to be more information somewhere," I said, mostly to myself.

"Master," Azure said, "you've noticed the pattern in these texts haven't you, how they all stop at roughly the same point in the progression?" I had noticed that actually, now that he said it explicitly. Every single book I'd found had detailed and reasonably thorough information up through the Stellar Realm and then suddenly became vague or stopped covering the topic almost entirely when it came to anything beyond that level.

It was too consistent across too many different texts to be coincidence or individual authorial choice. I got up and went to find one of the librarians who had been coincidentally organizing shelves in my general vicinity for the better part of an hour.

"Excuse me," I said, "I've noticed that these texts don't seem to cover inner world development beyond the Stellar Realm, are there more advanced resources available somewhere?"

"Those topics are only available to Life Realm experts," she said, smiling tightly.

"Can I help you find something more appropriate for your current cultivation level?" I was briefly tempted to point out that wanting to understand advanced theory didn't necessarily mean I was planning to attempt anything dangerous, but I'd spent enough time around cultivators to know that particular argument never worked on anyone.

"No, thank you," I said.

"It's fine." She nodded and moved away though she kept glancing back in my direction every few seconds like she was worried I might make a run for some hypothetical restricted section the moment she stopped watching.

"This would be easier if Elder Chen Yong wasn't in closed-door cultivation right now," I muttered, starting to stack the books back into a pile.

"He'd probably tell me everything just to annoy whoever decided to restrict it in the first place."

"And he would almost certainly find a way to relate it to wine somehow," Azure added. I smiled at that because it was so accurate.

"The Formation Guild might have better access to technical documentation," I said, touching the guild token in my pocket.

"Level Two practitioners should have clearance for more than this, right?"

"Worth investigating," Azure agreed.

"But I'd expect them to have their own restrictions in place." Well, it was time to find out.

The walk over to the Formation Guild gave me time to actually think through what I'd found, or more accurately what I hadn't found. The question that kept coming back to me was why information about higher-realm inner worlds specifically would be restricted at all, because it couldn't just be the usual thing of keeping powerful techniques away from junior disciples, that was practically a tradition in the cultivation world. It had to be more than that.

"Azure," I said as the guild's exterior came into view ahead of us, "what do you actually make of all this secrecy around inner worlds at the higher levels?"

"It is unusual," he said thoughtfully.

"Especially given how openly other aspects of cultivation are discussed, even techniques that are considered forbidden are usually just restricted rather than being completely removed from the available record."

"Exactly, it's like there's something specific about what inner worlds become at higher levels that someone decided nobody below the Life Realm should even be aware exists, not just that they shouldn't attempt it, but that they shouldn't know about it at all." The guards at the guild entrance waved me through with barely a glance at my token and the interior was quieter than my last visit. Most practitioners were probably either out on assignments or working privately in their study rooms.

I went straight to the information desk where a different clerk from my previous visit was sorting through a stack of documents.

"Excuse me," I said, setting my token on the desk.

"I'm looking for information on inner world formation theory, specifically anything that covers realms beyond the Stellar level." The clerk didn't look up.

"Formation level?"

"Level Two." Now he looked up with a frown.

"Inner world theory beyond Stellar Realm requires minimum Level Five clearance or Life Realm cultivation." I stared at him for a second.

"Level Five just to read about it?"

"Guild policy," he said, and slid my token back across the desk toward me.

"Anything else I can help you with?" I was about to accept the dead end and figure out another approach when movement near the entrance caught my attention. I looked over to see Madame Butterfly sweeping into the hall, her white robes with their six lines drawing every eye in the room to her immediately. I felt a small smile starting before I'd consciously decided anything.

"Master," Azure warned, "whatever plan you're thinking..."

"Don't worry," I told him.

"I'm not planning anything reckless."

"Somehow," Azure said, "that is not as reassuring as you think it is."