Chapter 929: Battle Against the Heavens III
The truth was, I wasn’t overpowering his domain. That would be stupid. The difference between my domain and his was the same difference between a drunk painter and the man who invented color.
Trying to fight him head-on in domain control would be nothing more than an elaborate suicide note. So I didn’t touch his world. I touched myself.1
My domain folded inward, coating my thoughts. It lied to my senses before his lies could reach them. It made my mind believe that up was up, forward was forward, and my fist was exactly where I intended it to be. A weak delusion, yes, but it was my delusion, and inside my own head, I was far harder to bully.
I shot forward, and the Enforcer’s palm swept through the place I should have been if I had obeyed his domain. I didn’t. My fist came from his right, and he blocked it. Of course he blocked it. But this time, his sleeve shifted. A tiny victory. Pathetic, perhaps, but I’d take what I could get.
I pressed forward, striking with everything I had. The black domain around us continued trying to distort me, but my mind no longer listened. I moved through false directions as if they were smoke, punching, kicking, twisting, and lunging through a world designed to make every instinct wrong.
For a brief second, I wondered if he would use Monochrome, and that thought was enough to chill the heat in my blood. I still didn’t have a counter for it. Not a good one. Not a proper one. Monochrome touched upon things that were too close to heavenly law for fort. It could make something less than real, turn a thing into an idea of absence, and if the Enforcer used it with his level of mastery, I doubted my domain-wrapped mind would mean much.
Then I remembered his words. The Enforcer guarded the heavenly Dao. He was not the heavens, but he acted for them. He enforced, observed, corrected. A cultivator could be rude. A cultivator could steal from the heavens, spit at fate, cheat laws, and call it enlightenment. That was our privilege, apparently. How generous. But him? He had rules. He had limitations.
If Monochrome touched too closely upon heavenly Dao, then perhaps he could not use it here carelessly. Not against me. Not in a tribulation meant to test, not erase. I smiled, and the Enforcer noticed. “What realization has amused you?” he asked.
“That even you have things you’re not allowed to do,” I said as I ducked under a palm strike that would have inverted my organs if it landed.
“How restrictive.”
“You speak too much.” His knee slammed into my stomach, and I folded around the blow and tasted bile. Before I could fly back, I caught his wrist with both hands, twisted, and drove my forehead toward his face. He leaned aside. My skull met empty blackness. His elbow struck my temple.
The next few hours became pain. Not a poetic kind of pain either. No grand revelation at first. No sudden breakthrough. Just pain, the very real and very ugly kind that makes one question whether cultivation is simply a long chain of increasingly bad decisions. I fought. I dodged. I ducked. I was beaten down. I rose. Then it repeated.
My cannisters came out once, thrown in an arc to flood the space with poison fog. The Enforcer waved his hand and the poison separated into harmless mist, then into nothing at all. I used bombs next, small ones, nasty ones, the kind that would ruin the day of even an old monster if they were careless. They detonated without sound, swallowed by the domain before their force could reach him.
I drew my revolver and fired six shots loaded with different poisons, each bullet carrying layered inscriptions and enough malicious intent to make alchemists weep. The Enforcer caught all six between two fingers. Not one by one. All six. At the same time. He dropped them onto the red carpet I could no longer see and said, “Tools, are extensions of power. They are not replacements for it.”
“Thanks for the lecture,” I said, and charged again because what else was I supposed to do? Stand there and nod? The annoying part was that he was right. Cannisters, bombs, my revolver, all those trinkets and tools were good to fool around and fuck over other cultivators. They were good for war. Good for ambushes. Good for breaking stronger enemies who thought battle was only about whose Qi was bigger. But against a being tied to the heavenly Dao, tricks like that were useless unless they were backed by my own power.
This was the test. Not whether Shen Bao had enough toys. Whether Shen Bao himself was enough. The thought settled somewhere deep inside me, bitter and hot. Fine. I put the tools away. I let Creeping Demise rest. I stopped reaching for bombs and stupid stuff.
My Qi rotated faster. My blood boiled harder. Poison coursed through my own meridians as I swallowed pill after pill, some meant to restore stamina, some meant to sharpen nerves, some meant to keep muscles moving long after mon sense would have suggested they stop. It was doping, yes, but if anyone had a problem with that, they could go cultivate under a mountain and leave me alone. I was a poison cultivator. Using poison on myself was practically self-care.
The fight accelerated. The Enforcer moved faster. So did I. At some point, the black world began to tremble under the violence of our exchange. We moved faster than sight, faster than sound, faster than the mind could fully track. Every collision produced a pressure wave that rippled through the domain. Every step I took forced Qi into the false world beneath me, allowing me to launch, twist, vanish, and reappear.
But no matter how fast I became, he was already there. My fist would reach his chest, and his palm would meet it. My kick would aim for his ribs, and his elbow would descend. My fingers would stab toward his throat, and his shoulder would shift by the smallest possible distance. Meanwhile, his blows landed. A fist to my jaw. A palm to my sternum. Two fingers to my shoulder. A knee to my liver. A backhand that sent me spinning through the blackness until I forced Roaring Ki out of my feet and stopped myself.
I coughed blood, swallowed it back, and laughed again. The Enforcer’s eyes narrowed slightly. Good. He wasn’t bored anymore. That was progress. Probably.
The sixth hour passed. Then the seventh. I lost count somewhere after that. Time inside a domain was already questionable, and time inside the domain of a heavenly Enforcer was likely a suggestion written in invisible ink. Still, my body knew. My body kept score better than my mind. Torn muscles, cracked bones, ruptured veins, exhausted meridians, poison forcing everything back together just enough to continue.
I was losing. pletely. Utterly. Humiliatingly. And I had no intention of stopping.
If fighting the red sun was the training, this is the real application, and this one was much less restrained and far more deadly. How wonderful.
Reviews
All reviews (0)