ALL NOVEL 430. Sightseeing
Shen and E'livia drank Lunar Dew Whisky, a low-level Overlord drink, as they watched over the Shaffer Company's Headquarters from the skies. It was located relatively close to the city center but far enough that it was evident it was no more than a mid-level organization. That Nmara could learn the High Language despite their relatively small size showed her ancestors had the gift of diplomacy that she lacked.
Nmara had refused monetary compensation for her assistance in the inn, and E'livia could afford to pay quite a lot after selling a few trinkets from her spatial artifact. Instead, Namra had hinted at wanting them to guard her company for a week. She had the subtly of a tremor dragon mowing through a toy-sized crystal palace.
Her intentions were obvious: she wanted them to be publicly associated with her. Shen and E'livia knew it but decided to accept the offer anyway. They would gain a week to understand that city's politics and be able to use the Shaffer Company as temporary backing while they got their bearing in the Shaft.
"Should we kill them?" E'livia asked on the sixth day when Nmara's deeper scheme became blatantly obvious.
Shen shook his head. "I'm not a great sage of politics, but I bet any attack would work in Nmara's favor. Even if the Enamel Tower went behind her back, she had to at least suspect they might lie to us. She brought us there nonetheless. She has to be prepared for us to respond aggressively. No; the best way to punish everyone involved is to reveal their tricks when we leave."
The Enamel Tower had lied to them about not knowing how Shen should master his Laws. They promised to figure it out in a few days but had requested an extension twice already, the last time being a few minutes ago. Even E'livia, with barely any experience with intrigue, could tell they would "need" another extension at the end of the week Nmara had asked for. The foolish woman was trying to leverage it against them to keep them protecting her company.
E'livia wasn't convinced. "Us telling on them will punish them? How? Won't we just look easy to trick and incapable of playing high-level games?"
"Maybe. Or perhaps people will just understand we're willing to give people a chance, but we aren't willing to play their games. That's what we'll claim; there will be little reason to doubt us. No one knows us; how we react to this will serve as a baseline for people's expectations of us in the future. Yet, this is not about us."
"What's it about, then?"
"Nmara wants us to temporarily protect her company because she has Demi-Dominator enemies. She's desperately trying to rope another Demi-Dominator in while we're here, using us to prove her business acumen and the benefits she can provide. If she succeeds, she'll be seen as having a good sense of opportunities. Then, even if we leave on bad terms, she'll be safe."
E'livia frowned. "I don't follow how that's good to us."
Shen smiled. "I don't blame you. This is more or less also the extent of my intrigue senses, so to speak. Nmara misread our 'good guy aura,' or perhaps how afraid we are of making a move. We aren't unwilling to kill her or burn the Enamel Tower to the ground; we simply don't need to. Also, we're not trying to hide our conversation. People are listening in and know what we're planning.
"So, any Demi-Dominator who accepts the job will be going directly against us. It'll be a challenge, likely at the behest of the powers-that-be, to test our response and power. We'll kill them before we leave because any other response will make us look weak and invite more trouble for us later on. Nmara will be taken as the fool she is for miscalculating, and whoever lost a Demi-Dominator will take it on her and her allies. If no one is willing to test us, and we leave as planned, speaking ill of her, she'll be seen as a fool who takes stupid risks. Her best and dumbest move is to try to gain the support of a peak organization, which is likely what she is going for."
E'livia raised an eyebrow. "Oh. Should we be fighting a peak organization?"
Shen shook his head. "Not if we have a choice on the matter. We're not barbarians. More importantly, we're not revolutionaries. The Overlord Realm's status quo must not be challenged if we can avoid it. The Realm is massive, and we can't fight a nigh-infinite number of Demi-Dominators by ourselves. If a peak organization helps Nmara and lets us go, we'll leave in pathetic defeat but alive.
"It won't matter for our revenge, though; she'll already be seen as an idiot for selling her company right after repurchasing it. Her future will be sealed. Also, I doubt the Enamel Tower will ever have any more business after trying to trick a Demi-Dominator like you connected to Habnor. The Enamel Tower, and maybe even Nmara, reached above their station. The same status quo we're unwilling to offend won't let them go unharmed."
E'livia yawned. "That sounds overly complicated and boring. And Nmara sounds like an idiot. Why would she do that?"
Shen shrugged. "Who knows? We could find out, but does it really matter? It might even be what she wants us to do. But we're not interested in this city. We'll leave tomorrow."
He was shocked that no one appeared out of nowhere to challenge his declaration. It seemed life could really be uneventful if the Heavens weren't creating Chaos whenever you went. He sipped more of his Lunar Dew Whisky and kept watching the city, using his Allvision to check interactions and understand the local culture.
Well, he focused more on inter-species interactions than the city's culture itself. Five days ago, he and E'livia decided they didn't want to waste time learning to navigate that place's waters. They honored their agreement with Nmara to guard the company because it was the honorable thing to do, despite Nmara's deception, but that was all. It was better to waste years finding a place with less politics than to get entangled in the crazy mess there.
The city's only mildly interesting thing was the biochip implant that worked as a sort of poor man's Guardian System, but it only worked in that nation. Shen and E'livia weren't sure where they would end up, so they didn't buy one.
The next day, they left a crying and regretful Nmara behind. No Demi-Dominator came to test E'livia's prowess. Either they didn't want to risk a Demi-Dominator of theirs for a mid-sized company or just didn't care enough about him and E'livia to plot against them. It was likely the latter, considering no one came to try to forge connections with them, either.
Being disregarded like that felt pretty bittersweet, but it was better than the alternatives.
⁂
Shen could move hundreds of times faster than sound, or so it resembled; more things were involved in his movements than sheer physical speed. He could get from Earth to the moon in less than half an hour. Yet, Habnor had said it would take Shen almost a hundred years to go from one edge of the Overlord Realm to another at his peak speed, not considering teleportation.
So, the Overlord Realm was so vast Shen couldn't fully picture it with his C-rank mind.
But he was willing to explore. E'livia needed to meditate on the local Axioms before trying to break through, and Shen himself needed to figure out how to master his Laws. A worry-free journey through the countryside sounded good enough.
So, they bought some cheap books about the region's and the Overlord Realm's geopolitical boundaries—and a few others about general cultivation knowledge—before leaving Nmara behind and going sightseeing.
Oceans of night and curtains of burning salt; trees woven with pure qi and Void-corrupted animals that no one seemed to consider a big deal; palaces filled with all earthly desires one might want for cheap and bite-sized meals that cost one's entire fortune. They saw wonder after wonder as they traversed the lands. Bandits were rare close to the cities, especially in the seat of power of nations, but were plentiful on the outskirts. Very few had a Demi-Dominator, and in six months, only three were miscalculating enough to try to go for them.
E'livia's Path took that long to harmonize with the Shaft; it was more complicated than she initially expected. She got ready to break through, but they decided to wait until Shen could break through with her. It turned out that the first time one reached a new rank, they were forcibly pushed to the next Realm. Who knows what trouble might await her there? Shen needed to at least master his Laws before he could be safe by himself.
Shen had seldom been the strongest cultivator around, but he could recall very few instances where he was directly protected. He didn't like the feeling.
He liked dying even less, though.
They bought the knowledge he needed in a few cities before they trusted the information enough to use it. Simply put, Shen had to find a way to peek into Reality's Laws and use his will to change his Path's Laws to match the mastered Laws. There was no enlightenment involved, no getting insights through experimenting the world. It was a mere copy-pasting of the Axioms into himself—at least at first sight.
Copying things wrongly happened all the time and was highly dangerous. Doing so while walking the Grand Dao of Ideals was even more challenging because Shen's One Self would fight his changes.
They decided he should wait for a stable environment, with a doctor nearby, before he attempted anything.
They weren't in a hurry to grow more powerful. They enjoyed the novelty of each other's arms and would take a very, very long time to Ascend, which was needed to get back to the Myriad Worlds. Taking the time to decompress now was for the best; an investment, really. At worst, it would make little to no difference in the long run.
It took them another six months of traveling the land to find a place they liked.
The simplest way to describe the massive, massive city was as a cyberpunk utopia, where cultivators became cyber samurais and businessmen, each following their own non-standard Path. It was a utopia instead of a dystopia because beneath all the punk-like anarchy was a rigid honor-based society in the sects, which functioned more like gangs or mafias. Said honor was what differentiated them from profit-driven ventures and corporations. The inner politics could be tricky to navigate if you dug too deeply, but most of it boiled down to a constant tug of war between sects and ventures—and both also fought internally.
Even after researching, Shen and E'livia found no explanation for how a cultivator society could develop like that. Sure, high-tech body parts could strengthen a cultivator faster than classical cultivation, but so could simple armor, which was less invasive. Shen concluded that people found the theme cool, and Law Overlords lived long enough to get bored of the same old. In a place as impossibly vast as the Overlord Realm, they could also pick their poison in how to struggle to grow more powerful.
That aura of willingness to be there was the second reason they picked Cylek, the first being the honor-bound gangs. People were there because they wanted to be there. They chose the side they felt more comfortable with, gang or venture, and understood that it was a fight for growth and supremacy in a dog-eat-dog society of their own making.
That ideal ran so true through everyone's hearts that, despite Cylek being a "mere" city-state of provincial size, it hadn't been conquered by the three neighboring big countries for hundreds of thousands of years. When the Cylekians went to war against an external threat, they united—and they were strong. Oh, sure, there was plenty of backstabbing and internal sabotage, but even that was part of the game in a way.
Living in Cylek was a unique experience, and Shen and E'livia were all in for that.
And so, on the 899th year of the 9,322nd Era, Shaft Time, they entered a high-tech dojo and declared it would henceforth belong to them.
In the future, that event would be considered the beginning of the Shattering.