I made my preparations. I put Gauntlet in charge of a few things and gave Rin Wi some command over the golem as well.

  Ah-Marin wouldn’t notice my absence, not if I did things the right way. I’d be out and in within the hour. The time flow rate for Ah-Marin was fairly slow compared to the rest of existence.

  But still, I prepped and prepared like I never had before.

  The Tome scared me. It was one of the few keepers of knowledge, an ancient being of wisdom and truth and it had told me that I had made mistakes. Miscalculations. I had slipped up and set my own life at risk, and that was partially true.

  And that terrified me.

  The array was no longer just a strange accident but a horrible fault. I had allowed it to grow incorrectly. I had mishandled a billion-year project. I had faltered.

  Compared to what Dane would have done, my faults were tremendous. But then again, my faults weren’t faults themselves but rather differences. I hadn’t overlooked anything, I had merely not seen it from where Dane would have.

  A difference in perspective, a difference in ego. But the Tome spoke as if that was my fault. It acted like Dane would have seen it, along with any capable being of my rank.

  I felt like a blind man who thought he could see.

  Sure the array’s troubles had been my fault, but the rest of my mistakes? I didn’t really know what I could do about those.

  Maybe they were faults in the most basic sense. Maybe they were accidents that would have led to my death, faults I couldn’t have predicted. But if they were, how could I be expected to take responsibility for them?

  I shook my head.

  “Can I trust myself though?” I asked. “If I made mistakes that dire, can I trust myself to go out there?”

  Yes. The Tome replied.

  “But how?”

  The mistakes do not matter.

  “What?” Now I was even more confused.

  They are a symptom of the deeper issue. They do not speak of a notable fault like pride or arrogance. No one word can describe the state of your soul. The problem lies in your mauled soul and Frankensteined essence. You are not whole. One eye sees too close and the other too far. It is not the distance that is the problem but the misaligned vision. For now, every decision you make, you must think over twice. Once as Bill and once as Dane. Bill to choose and Dane to choose wisely.

  “I…see.”

  That cleared up a lot, and it gave me some confidence back.

  I ran through my supplies and felt Wriendler’s hilt by my side.

  I thought and thought again.

  “To the Hills of Life,” I murmured.

  Then I stepped out of Ah-Marin.

  Wukong had scared the shit out of me.

  He was on my side, in a way. But he still terrified me. The whole experience had been, cosmically emasculating. As a cultivator, you spent most of your time fighting for your agency. Even within a sect, the more power you gained, the more freedom you had.

  And over time you gained certainty, an understanding of the world that you knew to be limited but trusted enough to believe in.

  Meeting Wukong had turned that belief upside down. He had found me, known me, and then notified me that if it wasn’t for him, I would have faced certain death. And even then I hadn’t learned my lesson. I’d gone off to Lynoria and wandered within the halls of the Eternal Tome, another God-Imperium.

  And there again I was wrong. The Tome was also on my side, I think. I still didn’t understand it or Wukong really, but they weren’t against me.

  Both of those experiences made me grow weary of the Void and all that lived in it.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  But then again, what protection did realms give me from God-Imperiums? An ant was an ant out in the open or beneath a blade of grass. And I doubted God-Imperiums would face any challenge from the old realm of Ah-Marin.

  I shivered and clung tightly to my blade.

  Mortal, a voice spoke in my head.

  “What?”

  You worry like a mortal, the Tome repeated.

  It was right.

  What would Dane say?

  I was underneath the God-Imperium’s power, but so what? I was no threat to them and they chose to help me anyway. And remaining in Ah-Marin would provide no cover. The best thing for me to do is to go out there and fix myself while avoiding other God-Imperiums.

  And even if I met them, I could call myself a disciple of the Eternal Tome, I had the tail of Wukong and a Tome that denoted their sect. And the Tome had given me the right to call myself that.

  I would be safe so long as no opportunistic being below the sixteenth rank came after me.

  Realistically, this was the safest option.

  But it annoyed me. It annoyed Bill, the guy who wanted to hang out in an old forgotten realm and gaze at the stars at night. It disrupted a new need in me, one that wanted to hear nothing but the winds running through the leaves during midday.

  I worried and feared and that gave way to something else.

  My dao. Yes, there was no peace here in the cracks of reality.

  I walked or rather moved through the nothingness and the itch grew.

  If this was what righteous cultivators felt then I could understand why they ran around constantly attacking anything that they deemed immoral.

  I stopped. I couldn’t travel like this, could I?

  I circulated my qi. I had no dantians, not at this rank. You lost your dantians at the ninth rank, which mixed into the essence of the self.

  It was the moment one entered the demigod rank and was able to leave a realm without worrying about the consequences of the void. You coalesced your being into one form, still made of parts, but no longer defined by physical laws.

  Higher level interdimensional sects didn’t even consider their children to be full grown until they reached the ninth realm.

  Either way, past that rank, all that was left was the self. There was the soul of course, the mind, the spirit, but they were all less of an independent thing and more a part of the whole.

  I moved my qi through them, feeling out each part and then feeling the whole of my being. I breathed.

  It was a breath made of qi, an exhale of myself, and an inhale of the world around me. Chaos came into my being, but it was quickly settled, circulated, understood, and dissipated.

  This world was not peaceful. No matter where I looked, I could see discord and war in the distance and my dao was telling me to move. To do all I could to fix it.

  But I couldn’t. Even if I moved now, I wouldn’t be able to do anything before I was flicked away into nothingness.

  So I had to accept it. I had to do all I could without destroying myself. I had to put a value on my own peace, above that of the world.

  My heart stilled and calmed down as I circulated the qi. My dao grew and changed.

  I looked out into existence and saw the Heavens and the Hells. They were beyond me for now, and maybe forever.

  I would do what I could when I could.

  “I wonder, is it the Hills of Life that will fix me or the journey there?” I asked the book.

  Both of course. You need the herbs within there, but you also need to live and breathe among your peers. Live as you are, and live with your dao. Growth corrects things in some way and it worsens them in others.

  is 13 chapters ahead at the five-dollar tier(up to chapter 122) and 27 chapters ahead at the ten-dollar tier(up to chapter 137) Patrons will be getting a quadruple chapter sometime tomorrow morning. I'm about 50% done.

  Volume One is finished on

  The next chapter will be Tuesday or Wednesday

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  Thanks for reading!