Depthless Hunger

Before he reached the Blueblade sect, Kai stopped using Thunderbird's Wings and instead jumped onto his flying sword. It traveled much slower than going under his own power, but this way he would look like a normal cultivator, plus he could use a moment to catch his breath and reflect after the week streaking across the Western Wilds.

The Blueblade "sect" proved to own an entire city, which explained why Zae Zin Nim had chosen it as their first meeting point. The city walls and most of the upper class buildings were all made from blue slate, but otherwise it struck him as remarkably similar to the other buildings he'd seen on Cloudspire. Maybe he could ask about why that was after they met up again.

Or so he hoped... but with every inn or major landmark he checked without finding his wives, that hope began to wane.

Eventually he entered one of their locations for messages: a large teahouse. Not only was it owned by the Blueblade sect, it had to rub it in everyone's faces with sword-shaped chimes covering the ceiling. The wind was allowed to flow freely through the open rooms, creating a constant symphony of random chiming. Seemed like it would be murderous, if a wind ever blew the swords down.

More importantly, this teahouse was a neutral location that could allow parties to securely exchange messages. When Kai approached and gave the staff the secret code they'd agreed on, he finally got a response: there was a message for him. Two, actually, written on familiar paper that they'd all received back on Rosemount. Using that paper for messages instead of anything from Cloudspire was an added layer of security in case anyone tried to leave a false message.

First was a straightforward message from Zae Zin Nim, explaining that they had gone to the Pureflower sect. She apologized preemptively if it interfered with his plans and suggested more locations they could meet once they were done with their training.

Second, Omilaena had left him a very detailed description of what she planned to do with them once they reunited.

For a while Kai sat and drank his tea. Either it was completely tasteless or he didn't have the heart to taste anything. After so long dealing with the Bloodcoral sect, he had been looking forward to spending time with Zae Zin Nim and Omilaena.

People walked through the streets below and his gaze slipped over them, seeing almost nothing. His eyes eventually caught on a blue medallion hanging around the neck of a cultivator: clearly the local equivalent of the coral medallion around his own neck. It seemed to have multiple swords on it, no doubt reflecting an exact rank.

It sank in that thousands of people would spend their whole lives in this city that he could barely focus on. There were entire lifetimes here, slowly cultivating, earning ranks in the sect, and engaging in their own politics. But that wasn't going to be his life, any more than he could be a cultivator in the Bloodcoral sect or a hunter in Goralia.

One day he might choose a second name other than "Clanless" but it felt very appropriate in that moment.

Kai drank the rest of his tea in one swallow as he made his decision. He hadn't come this far by aiming small or staying in one place, so he wouldn't stop now or just go chasing after his wives. If he pursued his own advancement, their paths would definitely cross again.

So he left a message of his own, then headed out into the Western Wilds.

.

..

.

On his way back to the Bloodcoral sect, he reflected that his disillusionment had been entirely his own fault. He'd seen the sect's cultivators fighting the oceanic monsters and slotted them into his old patterns of hunters on the Frontier, but their situation was entirely different.

They did annoy him in some ways: the squabbling, the backbiting, the factions. But the truth was that was just the expected result when they faced a threat that was limited, not existential. The monsters from the oceans were more an opportunity for advancement to be earned than an apocalyptic enemy, so of course they were treated accordingly. It was on him if he expected anything different.

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Still, they weren't fundamentally bad people, and his time in the sect hadn't been wasted. In addition to all the qi he had stored up, ready for advancement, he had access to more resources than before. When Kai arrived back at the sect, his medallion lowered the defensive shields and opened the inner gates, letting him stroll inside.

Some of the young cultivators tried to get his attention, maybe mocking in some way, but whatever they said sounded insubstantial to him. Instead he went directly to the main complex, where his four-marked medallion allowed him entrance to new services.

Since he still had more than enough money, he purchased a few supplies, as well as all the poisons they had in stock that could be purchased by inner disciples, and their corresponding antidotes just in case. More importantly, he bought one of their conch horns for Omilaena to take apart later, as well as several of their coral spears. That meant he could carry away the majority of their unique assets to his destination.

After that, he headed into the archives and asked for information on the local tribes. That took a little longer, even though he wanted to treat it as just one more item on his list of tasks. He didn't have a native understanding of Cloudspire, after all, and he needed to do his research properly.

The "cultivation tattoos" he'd seen were by far the most interesting power he'd found since arriving, and since they seemed compatible with other systems, he had to research them. But if he was going to do that, he might as well aim for the best. A tribe like the Thundering Scorpions might be a regional power, but they couldn't compete on the level he needed. If he ever needed poison, he had Omilaena for that, so they would just waste his time.

Instead, Kai researched the most powerful factions in the Western Wilds that used cultivation tattoos. Though smaller sects came and went, the largest usually had immortals to lead them, so they tended to stick around longer. The scrolls listed four groups as most prestigious: the Heavenly Sands tribe, the Sandcrush sect, the Manticore tribe, and a branch of the Blueblade sect known as the Bluemarked tribe.

Based on the description of their arts, the Heavenly Sands tribe was known to have the purest qi while the Manticore tribe allegedly had the most powerful tattoos. Kai didn't particularly care about qi purity, and in fact he suspected that prioritizing purity over other factors might be a bad idea for anyone who wasn't a straight cultivator. Which meant his targets were set on the Manticore tribe.

According to the scrolls, the Manticore tribe was massive and contained four sub-tribes: Manticore Head, Manticore Claw, Manticore Tail, and Manticore Quill. They allegedly once had multiple Sky Soul cultivators and all that kept them from being a top tier faction was that no individual was truly exceptional among the strongest on Cloudspire. The scrolls implied that their cultivation was limited by their use of lesser arts, but Kai didn't really trust the Bloodcoral resources to be unbiased on that subject. Zae Zin Nim was a much better cultivator than any of them, and she had come around to balancing different systems of power.

With his research complete, Kai didn't need anything else from the Bloodcoral sect. On his way out, he was briefly drawn toward the house of assignments or the boards of monster hunts, only to remind himself that he had outgrown them.

It took him a week to find anyone, since the Western Wilds had vast empty distances between outposts of civilization. During that time he mostly trained his monstrous abilities, pushing Thunderbird's Wings even harder for long term travel. He couldn't consistently use a speed half-phase, but he managed to increase the ability from epsilon to zeta rank. His fundamental phase training from the Frontier was solid, so attaining something like a god ability was just about building up enough power to compress.

Eventually he knew he must be in Manticore territory, because the flat lands gave way to the arcing rock formations he'd read about. They began with simple pillars and gradually became more twisted as he flew, from arches to spirals to strange fracturing formations that seemed to be a different shape from every angle. None of the scrolls had explained why such a powerful tribe lived in an apparently inhospitable region and he found himself wondering just what it might be.

Until, out of nowhere, he finally felt real qi. There were cultivators fighting up ahead... Kai eagerly pulled his sword from out of his spatial ring and stuck it under his feet, though he was basically just skimming across the air with the momentum from Thunderbird's Wings.

Soon he flashed past a corpse, a man with a manticore tattoo all across his back. It still glowed with mana, but the man was dead, the rest of his skin blue and shriveled. Whatever had felled him must have been up ahead, where all the Manticore tribe cultivators were doing battle.

For a moment, Kai thought that he could repeat his entrance with the Bloodcoral sect: arrive in time to help the tribe survive their hunt and earn their trust. But as his eyes searched the battlefield, he didn't find any monsters, only the same bronze robes, manticore tattoos, and explosive qi techniques. No one retreated, they fought until they died against foes that he couldn't perceive until he unraveled the chaos and accepted that there was no invisible adversary.

The Manticore tribesmen weren't fighting an enemy, they were fighting each other.