The moons rose high over the Azcan Oasis, where qi-lamps winked softly over empty, forgotten streets. A sheen of sleepy quiet settled in like a winter’s first snow, blanketing high-rises and Guild halls and boarded-up stores alike. Far above, the waters of the aqueducts streamed swiftly, silently, down their buffed steel tubes. The night was thick with dreams.

It was the Second Solstice. The white moon and the red rose high in the sky, looming huge and bright. Tonight their powers neared their peaks. It was not like that first Red Solstice, when they’d crossed paths—where qi streamed down to the sands, and the supernatural grew tangible. But it was still a time when the planes grew close to one another. So close they could almost touch.

***

Dorian sat, cross-legged, in a room he hadn’t seen in months.

It was the tea room in his grand estate, all the way in the Zenith Realm. It was a simple room. Walls and floors of thick, pristine bamboo. A straw mat in the middle, a humble table atop it.

In truth there was nothing humble about the room. Each of these trinkets cost a kingdom’s ransom. This mat, for instance, was woven of ten thousand straws. Each of these straws was of the Sheiko plant: a super-medicine, a life-extender which not only cured its user of all illness, but also granted eternal life! All it took was a pinch of the stuff: one straw, ground into a fine powder, could serve hundreds. No matter the cultivation level, no matter the sickness, the Sheiko was the cure. Gods devoted their lives to scouring for a stalk of the stuff.

And this mat was woven of tens of thousands of strands of Sheiko straw.

Which meant that this mat—if ground up, and made into vials, and given to the needy—could grant millions of people hundreds of millions of years of human life. The amount of suffering this one little thing could alleviate? Truly astronomical.

Dorian, of course, had no plans of doing such a silly thing! He used it as a place to rest his ass.

The rest of the room—the table, the bamboo walls—were like this too: valuable beyond measure, yet used for the mundane. Dorian did not consider it a waste. They served their true purposes very well: to show off! Dorian smiled as he took it in. Such was the way of a Godking! One did not grasp this much power by caring excessively for the needs of others. Not unless they also helped you.

Unless you’re Fate, I guess. Dorian scratched his chin. That god was a nut Dorian never managed to crack. He was one of the few men Dorian met in his many, many lives who, deep-deep-deep-down at the core of their being, really wanted to help people.

Of course some people thought such altruism was their deepest motivation, rather than a very pleasant lie they tell themselves. They thought themselves ‘good people,’ whatever the hells that meant. They might’ve believed it wholeheartedly, and even wound it into their identities. And yet put them through enough suffering, hold it across a long enough span—on the order of centuries, or millennia—and every such delusion cracks. At the base of every man is human nature. The same could be said of every beast, too: everything that thinks is but an animal, in the end! Even Houyi, the Eternal Sentinel—long called the noblest of the Godkings, purest of heart—knew that he was, in his heart of hearts, only human. Dorian had seen the frankly ludicrous lengths that man went to to keep himself in check.

But Fate—deep-deep-deep-down, to his essence, really was good, so far as Dorian could tell. It baffled him.

“I’m sorry that I must interrupt your run, my liege,” said a mild and familiar voice cut through his thoughts. “But I think you’ll soon agree this is necessary.”

A section of wall slid open. In stepped Gerard, his butler, in a trim black suit. His hair was gray, his posture straight, looking as any butler would. But he was very much like the rest of the things in this room. One would never guess this creature had once been the Golden Roc G’xyn, who had carved a trail of bloody destruction across the middle planes until a god was desperate enough to pay Salas Godhunter—one of Dorian’s incarnations—to hunt him down.

That was two thousand years ago. He’d been here ever since, acting as Dorian’s faithful servant. His faith was mostly assured by an ironclad soul contract on pains of death—but still. Faith was faith!

“Don’t apologize,” said Dorian, smiling. He poked the floor. “This is a dreamscape, isn’t it? If you’d actually pulled me out I might be irked. As it is, I only feel glad to see you! What’s it been? Two, three months?”

“Something like that,” said Gerard, blinking heavily as he spoke—scrunching up his nose and eyes with each time, as though he were about to sneeze. It gave him a suddenly avian impression. It was an old tic from his Roc form, and it grew worse when he was nervous.

Gerard almost never got nervous.

“My, my,” said Dorian. “For you to contact me mid run, and not even offer me tea before we chat? This must be some problem.”

“Quite.” Gerard took a seat opposite Dorian. He looked nearly manic by his standards—in that he looked very slightly frazzled, the way one might look upon discovering they’d forgotten their purse at home. But Dorian knew that look. He instantly sobered up.

“I’ve not much time,” said Gerard.” Please, my liege, none of your asides. The Godking Fabro—he is dead. More precisely: he has been assassinated. And his kingdoms across the Middle Realms have fallen.”

“…Huh. That is surprising.” Fabro was slippery as hells, and a wily fighter to boot. He had all sorts of dimension-magic space-time-portal nonsense to slip into; the man could find a hiding spot in an opening the space of a fingernail. Not even Dorian could wipe him out clean, and Dorian was a top ranker—not one of the Saints, perhaps, but easily in the top hundred-ish fighters in all the Multiverse on a good day!

“Who killed him?” asked Dorian.

“A strange new talent,” muttered Gerard. “He has risen from seemingly nowhere, and his forces are spreading at an utterly absurd pace. In a flash his followers have snatched up nearly a third of the Lower Realms. Already he and his followers—all ascended mortals—have encroached upon two of the twelve middle Realms. He’s taken the rest of us utterly off guard. They call him Jez.”

“Interesting.” There had been would-be multiverses conquerers, of course. Those seemed to crop up every few centuries. Of course none of them ever got very far. But as far as Dorian knew, such a speed of advancement had never been achieved. “Never heard of him. Give me a rundown, will you?”

“That is the trouble, my liege. We don’t know anything about him. His origins… shrouded, vague. Centuries ago, at least. Perhaps millennia. That much is clear. This network was not made overnight—he has been biding his time.” Gerard blinked heavy again. “All we know is this. He and his followers seem to have some symbiotic effect. He empowers them. In return as they cultivate and grow, they feed him a fraction of their qi. His qi is theirs to use, and theirs his.”

Dorian perked up. “Oh?”

“He’s found some kind of loophole which no-one else has still managed to uncover. He draws his powers from everywhere—every realm, every follower—and gives of it freely, akin to planting seeds. Multiply those followers by a thousand, a million, a billionfold…“ He sucked in a breath. “You see the danger. Such a creature could grow monstrously powerful! Unchecked? Why—I hardly dare to fathom what chaos he could wreak on the rest of us.”

“Isn’t this overblown?” Dorian scratched his head. “Good for him! Kid’s made progress. But all you’ve described is a church. Hells, I’ve done this path. It’s not that uncommon.”

“My liege, I ought to be clear. The mechanism of a church is to receive qi in return for communion, granting wishes, what have you. Some may form soul bonds with the central diety. But the hierarchy is distinct: they service a god, and for good reason: that god has a vested interest in keeping power. What Jez does is fundamentally different. The relationship is symbiotic. To each of his followers he sacrifices a piece of himself, and in so doing links them to him, true, but him to them also, inextricably. Their pain is his pain, their joy his joy. They draw from the same ever-expanding power pool, each giving of themselves to the whole.” Gerard drew a sharp breath. “What he is forming is a collective. He is only the central node.”

A silence drew over the dreamscape as Dorian took all that in, chewing on it.

“So let me get this clear,” he said slowly. “It’s not a hivemind. When he gives this… ‘seed’ of his power—he’s not taking control. It’s a gift, no-strings-attached? Truly?”

“Correct.”

“And if they die?”

“Then that piece dies along with them.”

Dorian was getting the picture. “So. Guy goes around breaking off little bits of his soul, implanting it in followers--most of them much weaker than he. If they grow, this ‘soul piece’ grows. If they die, it dies too. And they all share their qi in one big pool.”

“You have it, my liege,” said Gerard gravely.

“…on the surface this seems like a very low-reward, high-risk idea. You’re a god. Why bother? You’d probably make far more progress cultivating normally!” Dorian frowned. “These mortals--they'll all die in a blink, whether by each other or by time. There's thousands of soul-bits gone, like that. Hells, even most Gods don't live past two millennia. It’s a fool’s gamble. You may as well throw away chunks of your very precious, very non-renewable soul!

“Correct.”

“And doesn’t this benefit them much more than Jez? By the way you put it they share a collective qi pool. He’s a Godking. His Techniques would take large chunks of his pool to cast. His followers are ants by comparison! They could draw endlessly, only limited by how much stress their body could take! While he gets whatever tiny contribution they muster, which barely makes a dent to a Godking! He’s inviting parasites.”

“Mhm.”

“And isn’t the bottleneck in this whole scheme to size of his soul? Souls are not self-replenishing resources! Surely if he shears it out ten thousand times, he can hardly afford more cuts—ah. No. I see.” Dorian blinked. The solution was obvious. If it was anything like a religion… “I’ll bet there’s some self-propagation mechanism. His seed can use his follower’s soul to spawn more seeds. Make a derivative network linked to the main. And in this way it spreads. Only he’d need to convince people to take the same ridiculous, self-sacrificial gamble he has!”

“Why, I hardly need to explain anything, it seems,” said Gerard. He steepled his fingers. “Tell me, then, my liege—since you seem to have all the answers. How did he get so powerful, so fast? And how in the Nine Hells is he on the verge of conquering a quarter of the Middle Planes?"