The silence that followed my confession was heavier than the lead that seemed to run through my veins. The woman processed my words about glass cities and mechanical noises as if she were dissecting the anatomy of a ghost, with a calmness that was almost insulting in the face of the approaching storm. But in this world, peace has always been a scarce currency, and ours ran out before the sun finished setting behind the peaks, leaving the valley submerged in a violet twilight charged with omens.
It wasn't long before the air above the hill began to vibrate with a discordant frequency—a hum born not from the wind, but from reality itself being forced. It wasn't the clumsy, spiteful gait of Joran, nor the arrogant, noisy flight of the disciples who had dared to step into my yard the day before. It was an atmospheric pressure that made oxygen feel scarce, a dense presence preceded by a rhythmic metallic tolling, a sound that resonated at the base of my teeth with a frozen vibration: clank... clank... The dry strike of silver rings hitting a black iron staff.
Ascending from the path was a figure wrapped in robes of a gray so dark they seemed to absorb the last remains of the sunset's light. He walked slowly, with a terrifying parsimony, but with every step he took, the grass around him withered instantly, losing its color and life, turning to ash before his foot even touched the earth. He was an old man, his face etched with wrinkles that looked like cracks in dry stone, and his eyes covered by a white silk blindfold embroidered with golden runes that pulsed with a dying light, like the embers of a fire that refuses to go out.
"A Censor," the woman whispered. Her tone didn't lose its superiority, but from its weight, I understood that this time, I was in deep trouble. "A mind-reaper from the Cloud Heaven Sect. They've sent a cultivator of the Natural Domain to wipe away the trail of their missing ones."
"They certainly came fast," I managed to say, though my throat felt like it was filled with sand.
I felt my knees wanting to buckle under the invisible weight emanating from the old man. He stopped right at the edge of my broken fence, where the splintered wood still bore witness to Joran's visit. He didn't need eyes to see me; he felt the "noise" of my existence, the geometric irregularity that my otherworldly soul caused in the planet's energy grid. To him, I wasn't a man, but a distortion in his map of the environment.
"Strange," the Censor said, his voice like the grinding of stones at the bottom of a well. "You have no root, no flow... you are like a rock fallen from a sky I do not recognize."
I looked at him confused. That description again. A rock. To them, my lack of talent and the density of my soul made me something inert—something that simply occupied space without belonging to the cycle of energy.
The old man raised his iron staff. As he did, I felt the air above my shoulders transform into a slab of solid marble. My body, dense and slow, could barely hold itself up. Every beat of my heart was a conscious effort, a heavy pumping that fought against a gravity that seemed to have multiplied tenfold just for me.
I looked at the woman. She remained motionless under the shadow cast by the willow, watching with clinical curiosity as the Censor prepared an attack that didn't seek to wound my flesh, but to collapse my spirit—to wither my will just as he had done to the grass on the path. I knew, with bitter clarity, that she wouldn't lift a finger out of mercy. In this world of ascension and power, mercy is a concept that has never been cultivated, a weakness that immortals prune from their hearts.
"Help me," I said to her aloud, forcing the words through my oppressed lungs, completely ignoring the old man's staff which was beginning to glow with a grayish light. "Help me get out of here and I will give you what no one in this universe possesses."
The woman tilted her head with elegant slowness, a spark of intellectual curiosity dancing in her silver eyes.
"And what can a 'Fallen' like you offer?" she asked, using that word with a weight that made me understand my arrival in this world had a technical name for beings like her.
"I will give you another perspective of the world, one the Taoists never bothered to see," I replied. My voice sounded strangely calm—a calmness born of absolute exhaustion—as the ground beneath my feet began to crack under the pressure the Censor exerted. "Knowledge yours ignore because they are too busy trying to be the wind to understand the mechanics of why the wind blows. I will teach you the laws that govern matter when there is no Qi to move it. Truths so absolute that your Tao cannot ignore them because they are the foundation of reality itself, not the ornament of energy."
The Censor, tired of being ignored by what he considered an ant, struck the ground with the base of his staff. A shockwave of gray energy, charged with a sepulchral stillness, swept across the yard in a perfect arc, intended to wither my soul and leave my body a hollow shell.
In that millisecond, the woman moved. It wasn't a physical displacement; she simply appeared in front of me with the grace of a thought materializing. She extended a pale, almost translucent hand, and the gray shockwave simply bent. It didn't crash, it didn't explode; it curved around us as if it had hit an invisible magnet of infinite power, dissipating into the earth behind the cabin, which turned black and dead instantly.
The Censor jumped back, his golden runes flickering violently until they almost went out.
"You!" the old man exclaimed, his voice full of a dread he hadn't shown before. "That presence... you are not from this province!"
She didn't even bother to look at the man. Her attention was fixed exclusively on me, evaluating my offer like someone weighing the value of an ancient gem found in the mud.
"It's a curious bargain, Aethel," she said, her gaze still calm. "A world that understands the laws of energy without using the soul as fuel... I accept. I am curious to know what you see that I do not see in this vast nothingness."
The woman didn't even bother to say goodbye to the man floating in my yard; it seemed she had finally achieved her goal. With a fluid movement of her sleeve, the landscape around us began to stretch, warping as if reality were a fabric pulled to its limit. The colors of the valley—the green of the willow and the gray of the Censor's robe—melted into lines of white light, and the sound of the old man's staff hitting the ground once more was lost in an absolute vacuum, a silence so deep it hurt.
When my feet touched solid ground again, the air that entered my lungs was freezing and so thin it burned. We were at the top of a mountain so high that the stars no longer seemed like distant points of light, but immense jewels pulsing with a cold brilliance above our heads. There was no more mud, no wood, no smell of life; only living rock, eternal snow, and a metallic peace that seemed to freeze time itself.
I collapsed onto the stones, panting, feeling my soul groan from the transfer.
The cold at the summit was absolute. It wasn't a cold that stayed on the skin; it was a needle seeking the bones, an absence of heat that seemed to want to extract the little energy I had left after the spatial jump. I stayed there, face down against the polished black stone, feeling the thin air enter my lungs like ground glass.
Every cell of my being seemed to protest being torn from its natural place. My soul's inertia didn't just make it hard for others to move me; it made moving myself a titanic task.
"Breathe slowly, Fallen," the woman said. Her voice didn't tremble from the icy wind; she didn't even seem affected by the lack of oxygen. "If you try to fill your lungs too quickly, your blood will turn to foam. This place is not made for those who still depend on air to exist."
I forced myself to turn over, lying on my back against the rock. Above us, the sky wasn't blue, but a violet-black so deep it caused vertigo. The stars didn't twinkle; they shone with a cruel fixity, like eyes that never blink. We were so high that the atmosphere could no longer filter the raw reality of the cosmos.
The woman walked toward the edge of the precipice. Her white silk robe fluttered with silent violence, but she didn't move a millimeter. She looked like a marble statue placed there by a forgotten civilization.
"Where are we?" I managed to whisper. My voice sounded small, insignificant before the immensity of the landscape.
"At the Star Lament Peak," she replied without looking at me. "A place where Qi is so pure it burns the weak, and where silence is the only thing the supremes of this world respect. Here, the Cloud Heaven Sect is but a distant rumor. They cannot follow us. Their 'Natural Domain' stops long before reaching these heights."
A long silence followed. Only the whistle of the cutting wind filled the space between us. I stared at my hands; they were pale, almost blue from the cold, but beneath the skin, I felt that heavy vibration, that "Thump... Thump..." which was now slower. My body was trying to stabilize itself.
Minutes passed, perhaps hours. Time in this place seemed to dilate, losing its linear meaning. She was in no hurry. She watched me out of the corner of her eye, waiting for my mind to return from the shock of the journey.
"You promised laws, Aethel," she finally said, turning around. She sat on a rock ledge, crossing her legs with inhuman elegance. "You promised a structure that does not depend on the Tao. But before you speak, I want you to understand something."
She leaned forward, and her silver eyes seemed to absorb what little light the stars emitted.
"For us, the universe is a dance of wills. We cultivate so that our will becomes stronger than the world's. If I want fire to freeze, I force it with my Qi. If I want the planet's force to ignore me, I seduce it with my flow. For us, 'laws' are only suggestions that the strong can break."
She extended a finger and touched a falling snowflake. The flake didn't melt; it turned into a tiny shard of green crystal before vanishing.
"Then..." she continued, her tone becoming sharper, "how can there be anything more basic than will? If your world had no magic, how did it not collapse into chaos? What kept your cities standing if there was no one with the power to hold them up?"
I swallowed hard, feeling the cold in my throat. It was time to start, but I knew if I let everything out at once, I would lose my only value to her. I had to build the foundations before showing her the building.
I sat up with effort, facing her. I picked up a small loose stone from the summit, a flake of black basalt, and held it between my fingers.
"In my world," I began, speaking slowly, letting every word weigh, "we didn't need will to keep cities standing. Cities stayed up because they had no other choice. The universe has rules that cannot be seduced, forced, or broken. Rules that are as old as the first atom and will still be there when the last of your gods turns to dust."
She arched an eyebrow, clearly skeptical but fascinated.
"Let's start with something you think you master," I said, pointing to the void surrounding us. "You say you 'force' gravity to ignore you when you fly. But tell me... have you ever wondered what is actually pushing you down? Or why this stone, if I let it go, will always choose the same path to the abyss?"
I held the stone in the air, just above the edge of the precipice. The woman fixed her gaze on the small piece of basalt, and for a moment, the wind seemed to stop, waiting for my next move.
I let go of the stone.
There was no impulse, no will behind the gesture. I simply stopped holding it. The piece of black basalt fell in a straight line, swallowed by the darkness of the abyss without making a single sound. The woman followed its trajectory with her gaze, her silver eyes tracing an invisible line in the void.
"It falls because the world commands it—or well, because the laws within the planet command it," she said, with a simplicity I found almost irritating. "It is the will of the planet. An object without spirit obeys the larger mass. There is no mystery in it, Aethel. Any first-rank disciple understands that the earth attracts what belongs to it."
"No," I replied, and I felt a small spark of my old life, from university classrooms and textbooks, ignite in my chest. "It's not that the earth 'wants' to attract it. It isn't a desire. It's a deformation."
She frowned.
"Deformation? Space is empty, Fallen. Emptiness does not deform."
"Imagine this world is a stretched cloth," I said, searching for the right words to translate concepts of quantum physics and relativity into the language of someone who believes the sky is a spiritual vault. "If you put a heavy iron sphere in the center of that cloth, the cloth will curve downward because of the weight. If you throw a marble nearby, the marble doesn't 'want' to go toward the sphere; it simply follows the curve of the cloth. It cannot help it."
I paused, letting the image settle in her mind. She didn't respond immediately. She seemed to be projecting that analogy into the void around us, trying to reconcile the "cloth" with the infinite ether.
"What you call 'seducing gravity' with your flow," I continued, my voice becoming firmer, "to me is simply applying an opposing force to fight against an invisible slope. You are spending energy to climb a hill that the planet's mass creates in space-time. But the hill is still there, even if you stop seeing it. The rule isn't broken; it's only countered."
She stood up slowly. The wind whipped her robe, but she seemed to be listening to something I couldn't hear.
"You say space itself has a shape," she murmured, almost to herself. "That it isn't a stage, but a fabric. If that is true... then your laws are not mandates, but geometries."
"Exactly. The geometry of existence. In my world, we learned that if you know the mass of an object and the distance, you can predict exactly where it will be in a thousand years. Without oracles. Without meditation. Only through calculation."
She turned toward me, appearing to understand his world better.
"So your world was a society of soothsayers? You predicted the entire flow of things?"
I fell silent for a moment, letting the woman's question float in the freezing air of Star Lament Peak. "Society of soothsayers." The irony of her words hit me with the force of a bitter memory.
"We weren't soothsayers," I replied, my voice sounding raspier, burdened by the weight of thousands of years of history she would never comprehend. "We were prisoners of our own precision. In my world, if you threw a stone with an exact force at an exact angle, you knew where it would land before it even left your hand. Not because the future was written in the stars, but because the universe is a machine that doesn't know how to lie."
She took a step toward me, her curiosity now tinged with a dark suspicion.
"If you can calculate the end of a movement before it begins..." she said, narrowing her silver eyes, "then freedom is a lie. If your world was a 'machine,' then every man, every blade of grass, and every speck of dust were just gears following a path they could not change. Is that what you offer me, Aethel? A universe where destiny is not will, but a mathematical account?"
I sat up with difficulty, feeling the creaking of my joints. The cold was beginning to numb my legs, solid as the rock beneath my feet.
"I offer the truth of the structure," I said, holding her gaze. "In my world, you couldn't fly just by wishing it, but you could build wings of metal that crossed continents because you knew exactly how the air would react to them. We weren't free from the laws, but we were free because of them. We could predict the flow of rivers, the movement of stars, and the time it would take for light to reach us from the sun."
The woman extended her hand toward the night sky, as if trying to touch that invisible "fabric" I spoke of.
"Predicting the flow..." she repeated in a whisper. "We spend centuries meditating to understand the 'Tao,' to attune our souls to the rhythm of the cosmos to gain a shred of influence over it. And you tell me that simple mortals, without a single drop of Qi, could know where the planets would be in a thousand years just with... numbers?"
"Just with numbers," I reaffirmed. "But it comes with a price. When you know the mechanism of the trick, the magic disappears. In my world, the sun wasn't a god, but a sphere of gas burning in the vacuum. Rain wasn't a blessing, but condensed vapor. We lost the mystery, but we gained control."
She fell silent, looking into the abyss where the basalt stone had been lost forever. She seemed to be processing a fundamental contradiction: for her, power was something snatched from the heavens through will; for me, power was something understood by observing the rules that the heavens could not break.
"If your geometry is so perfect," she asked suddenly, turning with a speed that made me flinch back, "why are you here? Why did a 'gear' from that world of calculation end up in this valley of mud? Did your mathematics not predict your own fall?"
It hurt. It was a question I had asked myself every night for the last four years. I had no idea why I was even here; I only had a small lie left to invent.
"There was an anomaly," I confessed, looking down at my pale hands. "Even in the most perfect machine, there is sometimes an error in the calculation. Or perhaps... perhaps there are laws that even my world didn't come to understand. Laws about the soul, about the weight of consciousness."
The woman let out a dry laugh, with no trace of joy.
"Or perhaps," she said, leaning in so close I could feel the aura of cold power emanating from her body, "the universe grew tired of being calculated and decided to throw one of its pieces off the board."
She walked away toward the cave entrance, stopping just before entering the darkness.
"Tomorrow you will tell me how your laws explain light," she stated without looking back. "If space is a fabric, I want to know if light is the thread that sews it. Rest, Fallen. Your body needs to conserve its heat, and this peak has no mercy for those who only know how to count."
I was left alone at the summit, surrounded by the mountain's sepulchral silence. I sat against the stone wall, feeling my heart rate stabilize completely, returning to its rhythm.
I looked up. For the first time in a long while, I didn't see stars—or well, I didn't focus on them. Just an endless sea of darkness. Had such a world of soothsayers died? Ha, knowing that a world or universe like this exists, that is the most likely thing.
—
The silver-eyed woman walked calmly along an unknown path, each of her steps capable of crossing great distances—distances that, in fact, seemed to ignore certain principles of matter and energy.
She walked thinking about that Fallen's strange description. A dead world? According to his description, that seemed to be it. Beings who manage to reach her level are capable of truly feeling the universe, as if it actually had some kind of consciousness or soul; so in her words or understanding, the universe in fact had life, or something like it, that allowed it to do marvelous things: divine treasures, secret realms, etc.
"A dead world..."
Something hard to believe. If any other person said that, they would simply be labeled a madman, but Aethel is a special case. In all the time she had been accompanying him, she had found herself unable to determine the origin of the dark abyss.
She lowered her eyelids slightly, watching as innumerable visions passed before her eyes. Even at that distance and position, she was able to see Aethel and the entire mountain with total clarity—so much clarity that the devices of the old Earth would be put to shame.
"—...."