QI is spiritual energy refined for personal use. Ghosts, angels, and demons could all be considered QI lifeforms. I still don’t know if King knew that, or he had guessed. Our first-world had ghosts but no cultivators; magic was the primal force of this world, not QI. To have pulled off what he did, he’d need a background as a cultivator, a mage, and an engineer. While he had two, the last requirement was absent.

How did he know the relationship between life force and QI? They were opposites and practically rejected each other outside the body. None of his clones had a drop of QI, and without King’s input, they had the intelligence of house cats.

Time wasn’t on Flank Town's side. King’s distractions bought him enough time to initiate the next part of his plan. I was literally a dimension away, about to face a prepared King.

…

Black waves lapped at the sandy beach, depositing shards of bone, hardy chunks of organs, and glass-like crystals on the red beach. I scooped a hand full of the red sand and marveled at thousands of tiny shards of crystal. The entire beach was made of this red crystal.

Further, ahead orange and green stalks grew knee-high. I ran forward through the reeds towards my target.

“Tag your it.” I felt a small hand tap my leg and turned to see a black-haired child run away.

“King is that you,” I said.

“You can’t catch me.” I activated sprint and charged forward, but the boy vanished before I touched him.

A stone building appeared that wasn’t there before. I recognized the door and the ancient 5k run sign-up sheet. Where was I, how was this place here, and why was King a child?

I opened the door to see King staring at his phone. My seat was pulled out, and for a moment, I was years in the past. But then, I felt my ears perk up to listen for a call for me. So many of my breaks had been cut short because of that.

“There’s no shame in this job. It sucks sometimes, but it’s a paycheck, right.” King said.

“It wasn’t the worst place I’ve worked,” I said, mimicking our old conversation.

“You should really play this game; if you like the anime, then it’s a must,” King said.

I couldn’t let this go on. If I wanted to save anyone, then I couldn’t allow memory to hold me back. “This isn’t real; it’s just an illusion you created to distract me,” I said firmly.

The world shifted suddenly, and we were back outside the office where Silent left me. “What is real? Is it what we taste, the feeling of air on our skin, or the smell of horseshit? Do you even remember what’s real?” King said.

My spectral fist punched through his body to no effect. He wasn’t even here; this was just a projection meant to hold me back.

I rolled my eyes. “No amount of matrix references will take back the tens of thousands of lives you’ve taken,” I said.

“How very vegan of you. Will you swear off animal products next?” Then, again, the room shifted until we were in Fister’s old house. Fister sat on his couch holding the bigger blacker cards of humanity box. My old friend’s once vibrant gaze was dead like a fish washed up on a beach.

“Don’t you get it? This was real; we lived in the real world, and now we’re trapped. Those people, as you call them, aren’t real. NPCs don’t matter; I could kill a million of them, and the world would keep on spinning. So you just had to take an arbitrary stance and go native. I was here first; why didn’t you just leave?” King said.

When I looked at King and remember the friend, he was compared to the creature he’d become.

My fists clenched until I felt my bones quake. “I was jealous of you; I wanted to do something with my life; I never took the risk. At the same time, I thought I was better than you for not getting into debt. I rejected women and family to focus on myself, and when you left, I cut myself off. Then the isolation happened, and I felt trapped. My job crushed my soul while I knew you became successful.” I shook my head. “Hating the world for my own choices wasn’t me. There had to be more to life than work, sex, and death, so I searched. Then this happened, and you became a magic engineer, and I became a slave. It felt fitting. When I met you again, and you became a serial killer, I couldn’t understand it. How could someone who has everything I wanted throw it all away.”

Waves of heat rippled from my body, ripping apart the illusionary room. Finally, King’s phantom began to dissolve like a melting wax candle.

He took a step forward. “You told me not to get married at the time. I thought you were crazy. I loved my job, and for a while, I almost had the American dream. Six months after starting my job, I found a wife and got married. Unfortunately, 9 months later, she had a child that wasn’t mine; it belonged to my boss. I got my wife a job as his secretary. Less than a year later, she filed for divorce and stuck me with child support.” King pointed an accusatory finger at me. “No one warned me but you about the world. So why are you, my enemy. If anyone should be on my side, it’s you. That woman destroyed my life, and I’ve learned women are all the same. I awoke, and now I’m free.”

“We were lied to our whole lives, but it wasn’t women who lied. The world sold us on a sweet dream, and you aren’t free from it. The lie that tricked you into relying on a broken system is the source of that rage. But rage isn’t the answer; it is only a step in your journey. Don’t let it live in your head, don’t give the world we left behind the satisfaction. Eventually, you will fall into the darkness and take the black pill as I had. Nothing mattered, not my job, my family, or even my own life. The world could burn, and I’d have happily gone up along with it.” Instead, the fire I started hungrily burned up the crystal shards buried beneath the illusion. “Even that isn’t the end, only the final stretch to true freedom. When I arrived here, I decided to make my own meaning and purpose. Even as a slave, even if I hadn’t put it into words yet, I had made my decision.”

“This world has no meaning; it's just code. Nothing here matters. I could eat babies for every meal, and it wouldn’t matter.” King said.

“If you started going from village to village eating babies, I’d stop you,” I said.

“So we escaped the world only for you to replace it. But now I have more power than anyone.” King said.

“Bullshit, you’ve just become Alucard from Helsing. He wasn’t invincible. If someone dropped a nuke on him when he released his full power, he’d die.” I shook my head. “What were all those lives for? Did you collect power to enforce your own moral code? Who’s replaced the world now?” I asked.

“All of it was a means to an end. Not even the vampires know my plan. They think I’ll help them create an empire of the night. One of them, an 11ft tall giant bitch thinks I’m going to let her turn me. You must have leveled your skills up quite a bit to get past her.” King said.

“I fisted her into unconsciousness,” I said without emotion.

“Shit!” King laughed. “I wish I could have seen her face. That sounds like some hentai shit.” I stared at the man who used tentacles regularly.

“Right! I’m going to go to your true body and kill you now. I’ve given you enough time to make peace with your god.” I said and blasted the apparition with a heavy fireball. The will of the apparition persisted for a moment before my desire to see it destroyed won out. Finally, my qi lashed out, and the energy making up the spirit burst.

With the apparition gone, my destination became apparent. Just a few dozen football fields away, I sensed a rising source of QI.

Red sand exploded under my feet as I shot across the sand. Then, across the sand dunes where great crimson streams flowed, I saw a monolith to King’s sins. A fuck all towers rose from a crimson spring. At its top, King stood staring back at me. Only his body had changed.

King had become a behemoth of muscle and bone held together by various skins. He stood at the top of the tower, looking down with a carved grin on his face. A bone-carved helmet made of different skulls hung as a cage over his face shined to a mirrored perfection to reflect King’s face. In King’s right hand was a sword easily 12ft long and in his left was a tower shield made from a vault door.

I leaped over the spring, extended my extra arms, and latched onto the tower to climb after King. The second I touched the tower, I heard screams. My spectral hands dug into the tower, and all I felt was them. King hadn’t killed any of them; all of them were still alive, trapped together in this tower. Then there was the QI; the sheer amount of QI within this tower was staggering.

But how they shouldn’t have this kind of power? Strange symbols covered the tower, and I wished I’d gained an education in magic symbols. If I got closer, I might destabilize them and cause an explosion of QI.

Streams of blue light descended from the heavens and wrapped around the tower. Each held enough QI to blot out the sun and kill me like a magnifying glass scorches an ant. I ignored the screaming and climbed with all my might. Six arms were great for climbing. I didn’t know what kind of greeting I’d get when I reached the top, but if I stayed on the tower, the descending QI would catch me eventually.

I climbed at an incredible speed and found a way in the tower a few hundred floors up. For a second, I stopped and looked around. Notes littered the ground. Books covered the ground stacked upon each other to the ceiling. The room smelled of rot, and headless clones lay in piles a hundred stacked.

The dull roar of an excellent bickering mob greeted me as I crossed into King’s sanctum proper. “This will work. I promise we just need to carry the seven and add two runes here.”

I saw the shadow of a creature in the flicker of unsteady magic light. So large barely did the creature justice. It filled the room of King’s sanctum and dwarfed the columns of red crystal that supported the higher floors to the tower.

A feminine voice cut in. “That will blow us up sky high. Carrying the seven is the problem; forget about the seven, and let’s simplify the whole process.”

I heard a rowdy voice join in with a laugh. “That’s all you want to do; if throwing away the seven worked, we’d be gods by now. So the seven must be carried.”

I saw a giant worm made from the skins of thousands of King’s victims as I approached. The creature turned to face me, and I saw the faces of all of the King clones attached to the worm’s body. It yawned, revealing a maw filled with complaining heads as far as the eye could see. I looked up to see an empty spot at the highest most place of the creature’s body.

“Red, my closest friend, do you know what to do with the seven.” Slowly the arguments all across the creature’s body died down. Then, as one, they all turned to me.

“What did you do to yourself?” The creature laughed.

“I’ve ascended and become a being of pure intelligence. There is no problem I can’t solve given enough time.”

“Divide by 0,” I said automatically.

The heads blinked at me before the creature’s body turned red, and it roared in furry.

“How dare you mock us? We are an engineer brighter than any in history.” The creature roared.

Symbols appeared in the air, gathering mana into several points before firing ten beams of various elements. I saw them coming, predicted their trajectory, and got the fuck out of the way. Columns split in two, crumbled, and the tower shook.

Dust and steam from the gathered elemental beams obscured the air, and I attacked. My fist slammed into a barrier, so I followed up with rapid blows from my spectral arms.

The creature laughed. “I’ve long thought of any tactic you could come up with. There are no holes in my defense above or below my barrier is perfect.” The creature cackled.

It took all of 5 milliseconds to come up with a working strategy from that information. Then, with all six limbs gripping the barrier, I pushed with all my might. The symbols attached to the walls and columns were ripped away.

Animal youtube videos save the day again.

“What are you doing? Even if you pull me from the ground, my barrier won’t break.” So I knocked on the barrier. It was damn hard, nearly inflexible.

The creature’s beam attacks began charging again. I grunted and squatted the barrier out of the ground. Like a giant hamster ball, it rolled back. The beam attacks fired, blasting into the floors above.

“How did you know my attacks can’t change targets once locked?”

“Wizards in this world use staves and wands for a reason. Setting spells in the air is impressive, and if you’re bombarding a charging force or a wall, it's quite useful. However, once they absorb mana in the air, they can’t be moved or altered without being destabilized. Placing them on objects is a workaround. It's like this barrier. While it is charged, I doubt you can risk altering its size.” I said.

The barrier hit the wall behind the giant head creature and broke apart. Fortunately, half of the barrier was already outside the tower.

I had no idea if what I said was true or not. The minotaur didn’t blast clones with fireballs; he placed runes on his fists to attack. Kale’s hooves were covered in delicate symbols that lit when her hooves sparked with lightning. The only outlier was the system. I could control fire freely, but the system might compensate with runes for me. No theory was perfect.

The heads began to shout amongst themselves, and the creature snatched up a book and began rapidly writing symbols. Then, a beam began to charge within it, and the creature moved the book around.

“We thought we had surpassed the need for such archaic techniques. Now you can’t stop us, Red.” The creature said.

I gave the shield a final kick launching it from the tower. Beams blasted up from below as the creature fell. Really this tower felt like an elevator. Even while the thing spoke, the tower had grown several hundred feet.

With a bit of concentration, I zoomed in on the creature as it hit the ground. Then, as the barrier fell, I chased it with a few Heavy Fireballs. The explosions blasted the barrier down harder than gravity alone would allow.

After killing that creature, I made my way up the tower stairs to a room with a pool of blood. Slowly before my eyes, an Olympic size pool of blood congealed into a massive humanoid form. It opened its mouth and screamed. The creature shot forward, but it broke apart as soon as any part of it stretched too far from the main body.

I walked over to the dried-out corpse of a clone and infected it with curse before tossing it into the pool.

King’s Infant Slime

HP 100,000,000/100,000,000

Through the red ooze, I spotted a shape a little darker than the rest of its body. Then, the corpse dissolved, and I moved the curse through the creature into its nucleus.

King’s Infant Slime

HP 70,000,000/70,000,000

Ding!

QI +3

QI 72

Lines of cursed energy corrupted the creature quickly. Finally, parts of it turned black and fell into a heap of putrid sludge.

King’s Infant Slime

HP 30,000,000/30,000,000

Ding!

QI +4

QI 76

Finally, the basketball-sized nucleus in its center turned black fully and cracked.

Ding!

QI +3

QI 79

I walked across the side of the pool and up the stairs to the next floor. That had been too easy. Why, what was the point of all this? Stalling me at every turn and sacrificing valuable clones didn’t seem like him. What worried me most of all was the pattern forming.

That head creature had been powerful, but it lacked anything but intelligence. It knew how to do things but couldn’t make the right decisions. The slime was basically water. The corpse I threw into it offered wasn’t resisted at all.

Ding!

New Skill

Investigate lvl1

Rank: C

Type: PER

Description – This skill enhances the user’s ability to find clues to determine the schemes or thought patterns.

ATL – Figure out the motives of your enemies, discover plots, and identify clues.

Abilities

Red Flag – You see patterns where few would.

Yet another flight of stairs took me to yet another version of King. This one hurt my eyes just looking at him. He was surrounded by the corpses of hundreds of women of varying species.

Rot was a smell I had grown intimately familiar with.

“Red, how have you been, man? We haven’t talked in a while.” I realized then that this version was the same King that fixed my arm. But if before his charisma had been a 1, it was a 100 now. Even prepared for it, I felt my mind threaten to grey out. Instead, he gave me his undivided attention and smiled. “Do you want anything wine, weed, or there might be a woman with a pulse somewhere in here?”

I shook my head, raised my hand, and blasted him with a Heavy Fireball. Only for him to vanish and appear beside me. He placed a hand on my shoulder.

“It's ok; I’m not like the rest of my clones. But, listen, I can help you.” Those simple words resounded in my head like a melody. It was too bad, really.

I pulled a finger of my spectral hand out from between the clone’s eyes. King’s Clone’s eyes immediately began to cloud as my curse spread through him.

“Charisma, no matter how strong, doesn’t work on someone who can see through your game,” I said.

The clone fell to the ground, unable to stand. It looked up at me with determination in its eyes.

“No, you wouldn’t be here if that were true.” My curse finished spreading quickly, killing the clone.

White/Black Hawk Assassination lvl6

Rank: B+

Type: DEX/QI

Description – A terrifying strike used by cultivators of the white hawk clan. They strike with deadly speed and precision to deliver a single death blow, steal the core of their prey, and escape. It’s a striking skill all about precision and timing combined with an indomitable qi flow.

ATL – Assassinate and steal the treasures of your targets as viciously as a true hawk.

Abilities

Flow Of The Hawk – The user’s qi has gained a pattern to copy and empower the body. Though it is young with the training, you will become much faster. AGL increases by 5% of QI for every ability in WHA. Timing And Target – The user’s qi has adapted to the views of a hawk on the wing. PER increases by 10% of QI when monitoring a target. Cursed Blow – A corruptive qi gathers around your fist for a single devastating blow. Once struck, the target suffers the status cursed. Once cursed, the target suffers irreparable damage to their lifeforce. If the corruptive qi isn’t expelled quickly, the curse will build until the target expires. Stolen Years – Every 10,000,000HP destroyed by the curse increases the user’s QI by 1. Precision Strike – Cursed blow can target organs for increased curse damage. Enfeeblement – Those struck with the curse are slowly weakened until they are entirely debilitated. Flow Of The Predator – The user’s qi has gained a pattern to copy and empower the body. Though it is young with training, your precision will improve. DEX Increases by 5% of QI for every ability in WHA. Lock ON – When this ability activates for 120s, smoke, debris, and even walls fail to hide the enemy.

Ding!

DEX/QI +4

DEX 54.3

QI 83