Chapter 101
“Have fun investigating. Be careful, it takes time to craft another set of wooden figures to die for you. So, don’t die.” before Jason was about to head to his parents’ place and Caroline to SFPD to meet with the forensics technician Erika, Jianmen had to remind them, that they will need to be extra careful this time - because just like he said, it takes time to craft another set of wooden figures that will serve as extra lives for the students, so before he could make them each another one, they could just die like any other.
Per Jianmen’s knowledge and experience, the thing with this kind of true mortality scapegoat figures is, there is no way to craft spares. This is a natural and undefiable restriction on any kind of true mortality scapegoat artifact. Before a cultivator reaches a certain level of cultivation and starts gaining certain traits of immortality - to become “pseudo-immortal”, if you will, there is no way to bypass this restriction. Jianmen knew some cultivators from his past who tried to find a way to work around this, and all of them failed. The lucky ones had their mortality scapegoat artifacts and their spares all activated at the same time, thus causing their time, effort and precious material to all go to waste. The unlucky ones were more common, and what happened to them was that none of their artifacts or spares actually activated when they needed to.
When Jianmen gained more knowledge about The Will, he began to sense and understand that true mortality artifacts, when successfully crafted, are bound to the soul’s place in the karmic flow, in a similar way to gaining a state of pseudo-immortality.
When Caroline and Jason left the inn relatively fully prepared, Jianmen went into the back of the inn to tend to his garden - he had a feeling that the rosebud brought back by his students would likely bloom soon, which in turn would “hatch” the minor spirit inhibiting it.
Right after tending to the garden and reinforcing the protective arrays around it, Jianmen suddenly felt some strange energy waves emitting from somewhere near. He couldn’t exactly trace it directly, without making some big moves that might alert whoever or whatever that’s causing the strange energy wave to appear.
Jianmen swiftly went into the basement and cast a few layers of cloaking spells on himself. Then he took out the energy and karmic pollution detection tool shaped like a crystal ball with sand inside and locked inside a cube made of six square pieces of distinctly colored glass from hidden cellars and went straight outside. Before he left the premise of the inn, he cast a spell on the inn itself - a common repelling spell that can make people less likely to go in and want service or even talk to the staff there. It was bad for business, but it was something he had to do in such conditions.
The waves of energy were faint, scattered and inconsistent, which reeked of someone or something trying to hide their tracks. What was worse was that he also sensed the energy seemed to have some effect on karmic flow - a very typical tell for something related to karmic pollutants. When Jianmen activated the tool with his Xuanli, the grains of sand in the crystal ball were spinning in it in all kinds of directions and stuck in a cycle of merging in the middle, bursting to the edge of the interior, spinning through the edge and the merging back in the middle.
With a heavy frown on his face, Jianmen then forcefully slowed down the movements of the grains of sand in the crystal ball. And he noticed that there seemed to be slightly more sand moving on the bottom of the crystal ball than there was on the top of the crystal ball.
“Sneaky bastard.” Jianmen’s body started rising above through the air and accelerating as he rose. Within a few seconds, he already rose above the clouds without disturbing the air on his trajectory.
And floating in the thin air in some distance, was something also with layers of cloaking spell/magic. Jianmen could not see through them directly, so he gently extended his hand at the thing’s direction, creating a small and barely noticeable center of suction of energy.
After a short while, Jianmen collected enough escaped energy on his fingertip, he ran a quick analysis of it then he placed the fingertip on his forehead.
The shapes and colors of the thing that hid under the layers of cloaking spells were then revealed in Jianmen’s sight: it was a giant glowing floating jellyfish looking monster, with a round head and thousands of tentacles. On the circumference of the head of the jellyfish monster, laid six giant eyes of different shapes and six mouths with long, spikey teeth inside.
The monster, while floating in the air like some sort of horrifying hot air balloon, seemed to be absorbing some sort of energy from the ground down below using its mouths. And on a regular frequency, the six giant eyes of different shapes projected beams of energy on the ground down below.
When the mouth closest to Jianmen started absorbing energy like it was a huge suction tube, Jianmen swiftly pointed his finger at the stream of energy flowing into the mouth. A small blob of energy was separated from the stream and flew right into Jianmen’s hand.
Jianmen broke apart that small blob of energy into six even smaller droplets and analyzed it for a short while - and it looked like that this giant monster was collecting energy that was from negative emotions of sentient beings. As Jianmen used his power of mind and will to get a quick sense of each of the droplets - turned out the emotions being collected were fear, anxiety, anger, jealousy, depression and worst of all, purposelessness.
When Jianmen carefully snuck closer to the monster, he was able to get a better sense of the monster - the monster had a special and tiny power core within its body, and its huge body was actually filled with karmic pollutants. The effectiveness of the pollutants did not seem too strong, but the huge quantities made him hesitant to act right away - he still had some pretty serious internal injuries that weakened him till this day. He could not just go into another battle with a creature that is affected and empowered by karmic pollution, it was not just about the price he pays when he uses The Laws of Karma, it was also about the sheer quantities of Karmic pollutants this monster had, if he was not careful he could do more harm than good.
Just this moment when he hesitated, the monster seemed to have noticed something. The next moment, wrinkles emerged from the space around the monster’s body, its head shrunk and its tentacles retracted to the base of its body. When the monster had its whole body minimized to about one tenth of its former size, it squeezed itself into a rupture in space and disappeared literally into the thin air.