For those who had sinned against the Immortal and Sovereign; for those who had transgressed him not once but ti and ti again— for those who were, to him, now enemies… There was a certain way of dealing with these things. A distasteful way, perhaps, but they were cultivators. Theirs was the power over life and death. Theirs was the power to build, and theirs was the power to destroy.
The mont their car left safely, Mingtian turned his back on the whole procession, darting away— shaking the observers that Guxi had not so subtly sent to watch him as much as she’d sent them to ensure that nothing untowards happened to his once-students. They were no match for him even as a mortal— and as he dissolved into sunlight and snapped across the length of the city— they were certainly no match for him then.
In the sky above Old Saffron— a particular isle to which he’d tracked the Twin Pines clan, Mingtain slowly shed his mortality. Binding by binding, first through third and third through sixth, he loosened his self-made shackles and slowly unleashed the burning cynosure that was him, the all-consuming, the all-emmanating, the radiant and divine. His hair returned to its coruscant luster, golden like sunlight— like molten sunlight, caught gently from the sky and fashioned into the shape of a man. His skin bronzed, just slightly— almost golden in a respect. His freckles, which were all but unnoticeable in his mortal guise, stood out darkly against his face— little sunspots, shadows of darker brown crawling across his visage.
His eyes blood, and burned, pools to the heart of a star— to the heart of a supernova, a hint of the heart of the creation of all things, within him residing— infinity. Power beyond asure. With a thought and a wave of his arms, his (mostly) modern attire was replaced with a pair of his favorite robes— white and gold-fringed, and covered in such density of golden threat, patterns that seed to shimr and move in the sunlight and his light. What they depicted was hard to pin down— at once glance fields of golden wheat, at another dragons swimming through clouds, at another again rays of sunlight bursting out of the last death-throes of a dying star. In truth, it was pure formations, all the way down— the patterns, intricate as they were, re obfuscation. With them, he could not but feel more solid. More real.
More himself.
He spread his aura in a single, imnse burst— essentially subtle, intertwined in his aura until it was as sublily subtle as sunlight himself. In it, he heard, he saw, he knew everything. He knew about the dungeons cleverly hidden beneath the compound, he knew each and every secret nook and cranny— he knew the whole shape of the clan-in-East Saffron. He saw the training grounds, used by assassins and would-be-assassins, of elders and children, of soldiers, a secretive force fully dedicated to one thing and one thing only, even if writ large over a hundred different stories and a thousand petty pursuits— power, and the gaining of more of it.
He’d seen its ilk before, only all too commonly. A sneer twisted onto his face, as he felt such utter disgust— insects, worms, that dared to strike against his students? For all that East Saffron liked to pretend it was beyond the petty squabbles of individual cultivators, wrapped up in its imnse bureaucracy and noble purpose… this, this infection, still lay nestled at the core of it, infesting it from the inside out.
At last, his aura settled into a small room, on a manor tower towards the edge of the compound— where it abutted the cliffs that abutted the sea, looking out on the choppy waves of Saffron Lake and the birds that wheeled unbothered above its expanse. Two figures sat in the room. Brothers, he figured instantly. Young, but not so young that they shouldn’t have known better. They were older than Lily, and Lily was nothing like their perfidious kind.
He did not hear the entire conversation, as the second brother leaned over the first— who was still wrapped in bandages, what was bare covered in familiar burns. His techniques often left burns like that.
He grabbed his brother’s bandaged hand, whispering— “we’ll succeed eventually. We have all the resources of a clan behind us. Eventually, they’ll slip up, and… eventually, we’ll get them, and the Elders will be in our favor again. I promise. I’ll get you the pills you need.”
The second brother rasped, a laugh— a sob? An anger. “I don’t care. I just want them to hurt.” There had been more. Plans. Planning. A part of him filed it away as more fuel for his wrath, as more reason for retribution, but he did not pay particular attention to it. He had gotten what he needed to know.
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He was an Immortal. His was the right to determine the guilty and pronounce judgent, and to upturn heaven and earth to strike his enemies—
To deliver punishnt, the very hand of heavenly wrath.
Slowly, he rose higher and higher into the air, letting loose the subtlety of his aura— bidding, as he did, for the sunlight around him to turn harsh. He had learnt the lesson, again and again— that most quintessentially cultivator’s lesson— that when it ca to problems, sotis—
Sotis you simply need to pull them up from the root.
A man zipped out of the compound below him— on a flying treasure, not even an actual technique; clearly, he hadn’t yet even reached past Core Formation— coming up to hover in front of him. As close as he could manage, anyways, against the oppressive aura of a perfect sixth stage cultivator. “W-what is the aning of this! You can’t do this! The Bloody Saffron Sect will have your head— they’ll have all of your heads!” He cocked his head, intrigued by that statent enough not to instantly vaporize the man. “The Aurelian Alliance of Sects won’t allow the Empire to do sothing this brazenly! Turn back now—”
“Ah. That’s a misunderstanding. I’m not beholden to the Empire.” The man’s eyes widened— but that was all he got the chance to do as Mingtain channeled a vast torrent of qi through one of his techniques— his central technique— and a bar of incandescent radiance lanced silently out to atomize him utterly. In its wake, a mighty clap of thunder— louder and more terrible than any natural sound of its kind.
A thousand or so feet above the island, enshrined in the center of his his perfect power— enshrined beneath the sun, like the slitted pupil of its enormous and baleful eye—
His aura turned oppressive, locking onto every single mber of the Twin Pines clan— them and only them— and for a mont they knew, they knew as his domain bore down on them, exactly what sort of god they had offended.
Then, he spread his hands, and birthed the blinding light.
A hundred, hundreds, thousands of rays of searing light descended from heaven, simultaneously streaking down to lance into the buildings below as he obliterated the Twin Pines clan in a single and terrible clap of divine censure. A few shot out to land in the city proper. The light of it, the sheer, intense, radiance—
For a mont, it was as though a second sun had dawned over East Saffron.
The reaction was imdiate. A crushing pressure descended on his corporeal body as an array above him activated— as the array above him activated, a do flashing into existence over the entirety of East Saffron, covered with such twistingly complex runes that a mortal would probably get a headache just from looking at it. Sothing shot out of the city towards him— a sixth step Elder of the Bloody Saffron Sect, no doubt— but before they could reach him sothing blasted in through the side of the formation, passing it with barely a ripple.
Mingtain turned to face the bigger of the two threats, ignoring utterly the sixth step Elder behind him. He was too weak to be of note. No— his eyes locked onto the form of a seventh step man as his sword crashed against a barrier woven of golden thread, the impact blasting out around him and throwing him a thousand feet back over the suddenly furious waves. Impressively, he controlled his attack enough not to harm the mortals on the island below, saving Mingtain the trouble of erecting a barrier. For such a small realm, that was quite good.
There was no doubt in his mind that the man in front of him was the ever-famous Sect Master of the Bloody Saffron Sect. Yet, in his gaze, Mingtain could see nothing but a furious and desperate rage. Not the sort of composure he’d have expected from such a figure… Then again, he was young.
“Why?” Not stupid, though. Clearly, he was perceptive enough to realize that a fight with him wouldn’t end well. “Why would you commit such an atrocity?” Stalling for ti, then, until soone else arrived. A sect ally?
It didn’t really matter. Mingtain didn’t intend to fight, anyways. He rely inclined his head, not even taking particularly much pleasure in the way that seed to stoke the flas of anger within the Sect Master. “Why not? They offended .”
“You—” but their conversation was over. Space ripped open behind him as a ninth-step cultivator stepped into reality from the Chaos Sea— but by the ti they had fully traversed back into material existence, Mingtian was gone, so simply vanished, carried away by the sunlight. The last remnants of his aura faded on the wind, leaving, in its wake, only the faintest echo of an immortal’s ire, and a city shaken.
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