I had to stop picking up strays. The Maidens, Nai, Cai Xuin, and now some poor old demigod.
I sighed and stood still in the night sky, looking down at the growing village beneath me.
"Am I getting too egotistical Wriendler?"
The sword hummed in reply.
Sad as it was to say, this blade right here was probably my oldest companion. I had kept it, raised it, fed it, and bonded with it since I was a child.
Well, a child by my current definition. I was a grown man in my own eyes back then.
I walked over to the array, which was still stuck in one spot near the village. I touched it and it squirmed.
"Do something," I mumbled.
It just sat there.
It'll be active sometime next year.
Ah yes, my ever present companion. The Tome.
"Alright, I need to understand something."
You need to understand a lot of things.
Oh great, it was getting snarky now.
"You know what I'm talking about."
I do.
"What exactly can you do for me and what can I ask of you?"
You're aware of the nature of knowledge. You have seen enough God-Imperiums to know the consequences of touching something beyond your rank.
"A little. The higher the rank of something, the more I'll be shaped by it because I'm a lesser existence. But I've interacted with some things way beyond my rank and yet nothing changed."
Yes. Some things shape and some things don't. The water given to you by Forn, for example, does not shape you. But that river would have.
"The water was only at the fourteenth rank."
That is not the sole reason it did not shape you. The life of things matter as well. The river was more of a conscious concept rather than a living thing. The more alive and similar something is to you, the more you can be shaped by it. This all happens not due to the nature of the thing itself but due to the nature of your being. It is you who reshapes yourself into their image.
"So the water didn't change me because we were different beings?"
Correct.
"Why?"
It is similar to daos in that sense. Every person has their own path, but further from that, every form of existence has their own path as well. The larger the difference between existences the lesser the reflection will be.
"And this is why I can't ask you for a cultivation technique?"
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To be truly safe after the war starts you would need to be a God-Imperium, and no God-Imperium is given that status.
"Thank you for your overwhelming care and kindness."
The Tome said nothing.
"So, what should I do? What can I ask of you?"
Anything of your own rank or lower, and absolute aid in navigating existence.
I thought about that. It was useful. Extremely useful. The Tome had access to secrets beyond my understanding, even if they were of the equivalent rank as me.
"Alright. I want access to all the information gathered by the Array Kings that came before me and all their recipes as well."
Done.
"Thanks."
One more thing came to mind.
"Why do you want me to reach the God-Imperium rank anyways?"
Do you know the highest cost to war?
"Life?"
Yes. But more than even that, the highest cost to war is information. I remember things and concepts that have been entirely wiped out of history and I will never know certain things because they have been undone. People make things. More than laws, more than existence, it is people who make information. Stories, ideas, myths, and truths. Pure knowledge with no weight or substance yet still staggering lyfull of meaning. Do you know what God-Imperiums are? They're knowledge. Truths that have made themselves so strong that even existence reflects them. When they die, while something persists, those truths vanish. There could have been another Primordial for all we know, turned to nothingness from fruitless conflict. War is annihilation, absolute erasure. It makes the things I know turn into lies and rewrites everything beneath the Imperium in its wake.
"That was heavy."
I am Tome.
"Ha."
I grabbed the book, opened to a page, and started to read. There was a lot of stuff in there, knowledge passed down from generations of Array Kings.
Mentions of experiments, ideas, and tournaments. Oh the tournaments. That was how the Array King was determined. I wondered when they would have the next one. It was held in one of the Golden Realms, with a few God-Kings overlooking it.
The Array Master's Guild.
That brought back memories.
And so I read late into the night until the sun came up.
"Well," I breathed, still digesting the bunk of all the new knowledge suddenly thrown into my mind. I had finished it.
I had increased my perception to the maximum and devoured all the information I could over the night and I had gained the knowledge of the billions that had come before me, array masters older than the concept of Array Kings. All my predecessors had a lot of useful information, but I was the best.
Or rather Dane had been the best human. But that didn't mean that he knew everything, he had depth in many aspects of array casting but there was a nearly infinite lifetime of wisdom to be gathered here and it outweighed anything Dane had ever done.
And even though I was the best, it would be a lie to say I was the strongest. My current path was nothing new, many array masters hit their plateau and picked up a dao eventually.
And some had even become Imperiums.
I also read about their persistence techniques. That was the method through which they cultivated themselves without a dao. If the array casters were human then this was a necessity. But some Array Kings weren't human. Some were insects or beasts, or occasionally, even trees.
And they used arrays almost like a natural law.
That was entirely unheard of for me. I bubbled and giggled with near impossible joy at the book.
One tree had made its root systems into arrays, incorporating the fundamental concepts into its very biology and it had reached the rank of God-King. One hive queen had turned each one of her hive's insects into individual units and operated her hive like an array.
I had never heard of this.
It was almost worth the war.
Well, no, it wasn't. But it felt like it was. I hadn't been this happy in… I frowned.
I had never been this happy. Dane hadn't, and Bill's happiness, as large as it was, was mortal. Bill's memories shone on top of Dane's like fireflies on top of the forest night. But this happiness, this memory felt like the burning sun.
It is enjoyable, yes?
I nodded.
"I… I never knew it was that old. This dates back to the Realm of Imperium? Back when the Heavens and the Hells shared a single realm."
Even further before that.
I nodded.
"Yes. Some of it lacked that context but I didn't think that…"
It is a beautiful thing.
And I knew exactly what it was talking about.
"Makes me feel like I just started learning about arrays."
I am envious.
I laughed.
"Well, I've got a sect to run for now, but thank you for this."
The Tome shut itself and dropped onto my table.
And I walked over to Chin's house with the biggest smile I had ever worn.
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