I understood a lot of things. It was part of my job, or rather my calling to do so.

But what I didn't understand, at least not well enough, was the map in front of me.

"What is this?" I asked the floating book.

A map, a true map of existence.

It looked like… well there wasn't really anything I could equate it to in the third dimension, or the fourth, or even the fifth.

It was just a mess.

But the best way to think about it was akin to the night sky.

The stars that shined the clearest were the ones that were closer, but the problem was that in this map, there was no set perspective. I wasn't looking at existence from one spot or another, but rather through a neutral look.

So there was no relative existence to balance things out. That meant that everything was everywhere, almost literally.

It hurt my head, and I was a man who could keep track of every strand of qi within a universe. I could point out the location of every single subatomic particle with no effort.

And I could barely even look at this.

"There's so much," I said, squinting at certain areas.

Yes. It is a collection of reality. It contains layered infinite infinitum.

"What?" I asked.

Effectively, it contains the connected infinite realms and the infinite realms both in between them and within them. Lynoria has an infinite amount of realms and that's documented in here as well every other realm willing to be known to me.

"Right, and why am I seeing it?"

It is a navigation tool for the multiverse and existence. When the time comes you will need to make small journeys to certain corners of existence to continue healing your soul. This map will cut down on the effort of all that significantly.

"Is it valuable?"

More than you know.

I closed my eyes and massaged my head, not that it helped.

The Tome, for all its annoying blathering, was right. I needed this. It wasn't just about healing my soul all the way through or running around existence for no reason.

It was about growth. It was about what the Fisherman had told me.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"I don't suppose you could give me a cultivation technique while you're at it?"

I think you can supply yourself with one.

I nodded and walked myself down to the basement.

This house was mostly for show. As I was now, I didn't need to eat or sleep, or use the bathroom. It was mostly for privacy. And all the maidens had moved out, though they came here to sleep sometimes, they mainly stayed with Chin down in the village.

But the basement was where I kept… well everything else.

But mainly, the Palacium. It was an uninspired name. It was a palace, and it was a little bit more than that so Dane had called it the Palacium.

It was large, near continental on the inside but on the outside the shape could be managed. It was a portable universe in a sense, but I didn't bother making it infinitely large because space, at my level, was such a useless resource.

What I needed was quality, ranked strength. Just like how the cup I had given Cai could hold an ocean, this Palacium, this place, could hold a whole lot more than just things.

It held laws, materials, daos, and natures. It was my toolbox and it contained about everything I had for making arrays.

It also contained an amazingly lazy sword, something still in the eleventh rank, though I would change that today.

"Wriendler," I said, sticking my hand out.

The eldritch blade shook in reply and flew into my hand. It churned and hummed in whatever passed for joy in its mind.

Wriendler had been my weapon since I had hit immortality.

It was a sword, a type of eldritch known as devourers. Its specific subclass was one of the weaker ones. It was one of those babies that got eaten by other babies in the large and strange foodweb of eldritch life.

But in its early days, I had tamed it.

And nowadays, even in its weaker state, it still serves a purpose.

It ate.

Making arrays also meant making mistakes. It took a lot of trial and error to understand certain concepts and when you put the bread in the oven, only to find that it came out as hard as rock and twice as heavy, you fed it to Wriendler, the eldritch dog under the table.

That was its main use.

But it was a sword and for all its gluttony, it could still cut.

It was also eldritch, which wasn't evil per say. You had eldritch lords of virtue and strange wheels with eyes somewhere in the heavens. But it was a definition.

Eldritch essentially meant all things not of the primordials. It was a name for an archetype of life that was either as old as the Primordials or had developed independent of them.

The array, which had been quiet and still for a while now, was technically an eldritch being.

Wriendler was all of those things, but also a sword. Eldritch things did that often. They would take on parts of a concept and mix it in with themselves. Motherhood, Knowledge, Fire, whatever it was, they would infect it and it would infect them, mixing their qualities and natures.

It might seem strange, but eldritch things didn't know what they were. The definition, or echo, hadn't really spread through existence. Oh there were eldritch beings of the Imperium Level, but they were their own thing. They weren't archetypes like Man or Beast, but rather their own beings, and the definition of eldritch was too vast to claim.

So, they mixed their nature with something else very often.

And Wriendler was a decent sword, but it was weak.

"You ready for tribulation bud?" I asked.

The sword went quiet. All of its wriggling and excitement seemed to have run away and hidden.

"You've been at this for a while now. You're at the pinnacle of the eleventh rank, you have to face the tribulation at some point."

The sword affirmed itself slowly.

Dao's, for all their power, were a mostly human thing. Insects, plants, beasts, and particularly eldritch things, didn't need them.

But they all still had to face tribulation. They all had to be judged.

The sword wasn't ready yet. It needed a while to gather itself and I had some plans to set up in Ah-Marin, but the time would come eventually, after everything was done. We could go out to some rural part of existence and face its tribulation.

But first, I had a sect to set up.

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