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Chapter 348: Shadow Realm

"I thought I felt the presence of someone familiar," a perfectly neutral voice echoed through the void. Then, a giant red eye opened before him as if it had always been there.

"Mars, it\'s good to see you again," Ashlock replied to Maple\'s sibling, using Abyssal Whispers as he paused his journey through his root. "How have you been?"

The eye seemed amused by his words, "Same old, same old. If I get lazy, time ceases to flow, and since our last meeting, I have been rather bored." Tendrils of darkness slipped out from a giant mass of something hidden behind the eye and seemed to come toward Ashlock\'s vision with curiosity. "So imagine my surprise when I awoke from a nap and sensed something traversing the void. I had hoped for a tasty fool trying to sneak between the layers, but it turned out to be my sibling\'s favorite spirit tree. What brings you to the void? Finally, starting the era of ascension again? That\'s always fun."

"Sadly, not yet." Ashlock replied, "I have just entered the Nascent Soul Realm, and my sect members are far from strong enough to deal with even middling sects on the 8th layer of creation. We have a long way to go until then."

Ashlock could feel Mars\' disappointment. He had promised to help them enter heaven\'s reality once he reached the 8th layer of creation and retrieved the next divine fragment. Until then, they were stuck in the endless void, dying of boredom.

"I suppose I can\'t blame you. It hasn\'t been that long since we last spoke. Right?"

Ashlock had lost track, "It can\'t have been more than a few months ago."

"You were in the Star Core Realm back then... wow, you are growing quickly."

Ashlock laughed. It was weird being flattered by an eldritch abomination. "Say Mars, where are the pocket realms? The Mystic Realm made it seem like they were close together."

"The void is as vast as it wants to be," Mars answered cryptically, "Those unattuned to the void or without a path like you using your root have no chance of traversing it."

"I see..." Ashlock didn\'t fully get it, as he kept thinking of the void as a magical version of space. It was hard to wrap his head around sometimes.

"So, Ashlock, may I ask where this root leads?" Mars asked as their eye trailed the path through the void.

Ashlock saw no reason to lie. "I\'m heading to check on my pocket realm."

"Oh, I see—"

Mars blinked in confusion. "Hold on. Pocket realm? How can someone in the Nascent Soul Realm own a pocket realm?"

"I stole control of one from the Shadow Sovereigns." Was that something unheard of? Maybe he should have given a different answer.

"You stole one?" Mars seemed baffled, "Can I come? I promise I won\'t devour it. I just want to look around to cull my boredom a little."

Ashlock was taken aback as he hadn\'t expected that request. He couldn\'t help the Worldwalkers infiltrate heaven\'s carefully woven reality, but pocket realms were separate spaces created and ruled over by individuals. So, it might be possible to let a Worldwalker in?

"I can try and let you in, but what do you mean by devouring it?"

"Ah, you wouldn\'t know," Mars paused, "Mhm, how can I explain this. Monarch Realm cultivators can create a pocket realm from their knowledge of daos and a large amount of Qi. They then cast this \'seed\' filled with intent out into the void and let it slowly grow over time by absorbing the Qi that trickles down from the heavens. Imagine it as a lake. The cultivator figuratively creates the hole in the ground that will house the lake and also carves out the path for a river. They then let the flow of water do the rest. It\'s a far less Qi-intensive process than forming an Inner World, but it takes much longer."

Ashlock kinda understood what Mars was saying.

"So cultivators lay the foundations, and the pocket realms grow on their own?"

"Correct. The size of a pocket realm depends on how well it is designed to absorb Qi, what it is used for, and, most importantly, how old it is. If Qi is drained from a pocket realm, like a lake, it will eventually dry out and turn into barren land."

That sounded really bad. Thankfully, Ashlock hadn\'t drawn any Qi from Tartarus over the last week since he\'d gained control over it, and he was glad he hadn\'t. If he had greedily drawn Qi from it like he did from the World Tree\'s roots, it would have become useless with time. However, there was a slight issue: if cultivating in Tartarus drained it of Qi, how was he supposed to use the pocket realm to raise shadow cultivators for the cult?

"I\'ve seen pocket realms covered in Qi gathering arrays." Ashlock said, "If pocket realms have limited Qi, they don\'t make sense as places to cultivate. Are the cultivators simply unaware that cultivating inside a pocket realm kills it over time? Otherwise, I can\'t see logic in their actions."

"Nowhere except the heavens has infinite Qi." Mars replied, "While using a pocket realm as a cultivation space will slow down its growth, so long as it\'s well designed to catch the ambient Qi of heaven and not overused, it can maintain its size or even grow."

Ashlock felt a light bulb go off in his head. So, a pocket realm was a giant Qi battery he could tap into. Continuing the lake analogy, the heavens\' Qi was like a constant rain pour. The better the lake captured the rain, the faster it would fill. But no matter what, if he opened the dam and let all the water flow out, it would eventually empty.

"I had wondered why the pocket realm filled with Qi gathering formations that Stella found had been left empty. They were likely giving it some time to recharge, and I bet those Qi gathering formations also help the pocket realm capture heaven ambient Qi."

Ashlock was grateful for this insight from Mars as it explained a lot about pocket realms and hinted at how he would form them in the future. But he was still apprehensive about letting a Worldwalker enter his.

Now that he owned a Qi-filled reality, he felt even more averse to letting in a Worldwalker whose one desire was to devour reality itself to grow in power. He could hardly blame heaven for wanting to keep them out. Letting Maple in had resulted in enough slaughter thus far, and he was still a baby Worldwalker.

Ashlock sighed. As much as he wanted to say no, it wasn\'t a good idea to deny a Worldwalker\'s honest request. "Can you pinky promise you won\'t devour my new pocket realm? I only just got it and would be quite mad if you ate it."

"Pinky promise? Is that how spirit trees make pacts?"

"Errr, kinda." Ashlock realized he had used a phrase from his old world and had assumed it was one here, too. "Just promise me, okay? No eating it."

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"I already promised not to; you just don\'t believe me," Mars retorted, and they were right—he didn\'t. But could you blame him for ensuring they were on the same page here? Mars was a world-eating eldritch monster that even heaven—the very fabric of reality itself—seemed to fear. He could be naive sometimes but even he wasn\'t that trusting. Unfortunately, there wasn\'t much he could do here. If Mars did end up eating the realm, he would now have a good reason to never trust the Worldwalkers again, and maybe that would save the 8th layer of creation from being devoured in the future.

"Fine. You can come visit with me." Ashlock gave in. "Seriously though, if you absorb any Qi from there, consider our friendship over."

Wait, did Worldwalkers even understand the concept of friendship?

"That\'s fine by me." Mars\'s eye began to collapse in on itself until they were a comparatively tiny dot. Zooming in, Ashlock noticed they had changed into their naked, androgynous humanoid body with no defining features like a plastic toy other than shoulder-length red hair. The form still had a slightly feminine figure as Mars and Neptune had copied Diana\'s DNA to make their human forms, while Maple had used Stella as his template.

Mars floated down and touched the outside of his ethereal root.

"Let me inside," Mars said, and Ashlock complied by creating a slit. Once inside his hollowed-out ethereal root, Mars looked both ways. It seemed they briefly debated taking the route that would lead back to Red Vine Peak but thought better of trying to survive realities suppression and began walking the correct way. Since space was compressed inside his root, Ashlock barely managed to keep up with Mars as they moved through.

[Now entering Tartarus]

Ashlock saw a system notification flash in his vision announcing his arrival. As before, surrounded by a swirling vortex of shadow law was Nox. She had grown in cultivation since he had last seen her and was now in the second stage of the Nascent Soul Realm. Her shadow dryad form, which was peacefully cultivating under her canopy, had gained more definition and looked even more mesmerizing and deadly than before. Her trunk had also grown, now towering at around fifty meters tall.

The ground near her roots cracked open, and from the rough crevice, an unnaturally white hand emerged.

"Who goes there?" Nox said as she slowly opened her eyes and began siphoning shadow law from the swirling vortex. She gathered it in her open palm and turned her head to the intruder.

Nox received no reply as the ground tore open, and Mars emerged. The Worldwalker\'s humanoid features were perfectly muted despite Nox\'s threatening posture of pointing a finger swirling with shadow law at them, and their black eyes, which carried the emptiness of the void, didn\'t help matters.

"Who are you," Nox asked again, finally standing up. "You are invading a pocket realm belonging to the All-Seeing Eye. What business do you have here?"

Ignoring the talking shadow, Mars looked to the sky. "Spirit tree, if this human attacks me, am I allowed to eat them—"

"No."

"Shame," Mars replied with the same monotonous tone as always.

"Ashlock, you\'re here?" Nox lowered her hand, "Who is this exactly?"

"They are one of Maple\'s siblings—a Worldwalker. I ran into them on my way here, and they asked me to check out my new pocket realm." Ashlock explained and enjoyed that he didn\'t have to hold anything back. Nox had become one of his most trusted aides, partially due to the level of control he had over her. "You can call them Mars."

Mars stared at Nox with a blank face. "Sorry to intrude."

"No... problem?" Nox seemed unsure how to converse with Mars, which was understandable. A lot of nuance regarding human communication was lost on the Worldwalker, and their flat tone and expressions made them hard to read.

Mars looked around with slightly offputting movements like an owl. Their neck twisted just slightly too far, and they never blinked. "This seems to be quite an old pocket realm judging by its size and Qi quality. I\'d estimate it was made at least ten cycles ago. You have gotten control of something quite special, spirit tree."

"Ten world tree cycles? Wouldn\'t that make the Shadow Sovereigns..."

"A very old family? Yes, if I remember correctly, they are one of the more powerful groups on the 1st layer of creation and have been around for a long time." Mars paused, "This was likely a tomb of some sort if it was left down here, right?"

"Yes, it had statues of dead cultivators defended by Shadow Liches."

Upon his first return here a week ago, he\'d checked out the statues after dealing with the Redclaw traitors. Whoever\'s soul had been stored in them had long passed, so they were nothing but lifeless husks of stone. He sadly couldn\'t extract any credits from devouring them or turn them into Ents as there was no soul left to consume or enslave.

Ashlock waited to see if Mars had anything else to say, but the Worldwalker seemed quiet, perhaps lost in thought. Since he was on a time crunch, and the tournament starting tomorrow would absorb most of his attention for the foreseeable future, he asked Nox, "How has the progress on our plans for converting this place been?"

The plan was simple. Ashlock wanted to turn Tartarus into the ultimate all-purpose realm for the cult of the All-Seeing Eye. Or at least those with shadow affinity. The Duskwalker family, such as Evelyn, would also obviously be encouraged to use it as their strength was his.

Since most cultivators under the All-Seeing Eye were in the Qi and Soul Fire Realms, the Nascent Soul Realm shadow law Qi in this room would do more harm than good. So Ashlock had tasked Nox with finding a solution and left her with many shadow dao-filled seeds, as he wanted to raise powerful offspring here.

Nox looked away from squinting at the motionless Mars, which looked like a creepy naked life-sized doll, and replied. "I\'ve got some good and bad news."

"What\'s the bad news?"

"There are no monsters left anywhere in the pocket realm. You devoured them all."

Ashlock had half-expected this. There had been a disturbing number of leviathans in this room. Now that he thought about it, they had likely bred like crazy here over the many eons they had been left alone.

"That\'s fine. Next time, I\'ll find some monsters in another shadow realm and turn them into Ents to guard this place. I assume the good news concerns changing the Qi level?"

Nox nodded, "Yeah, it wasn\'t too tricky. As I have total domain over shadow Qi in this place, I simply willed for the level to be lower in the outer rooms and have it scaling up until this room."

"Perfect." Ashlock moved away from the Bastion and was surprised to find his vision able to phase through walls despite Nox\'s roots not spreading that far.

"I guess her roots linking with the dark throne gave me total access to this place," Ashlock mused as he looked around and realized why the castle had been such a nightmare to navigate. While it appeared somewhat normal on the outside, besides its immense size, the inside was like a strange pocket dimension with floating rooms only connected by a complex network of shadow rifts. "Hold on, I can open and close these rifts at will and even float the rooms around. If someone had been sitting on the Dark Throne and controlling this place when we arrived, there\'s no chance we could have made it to the throne room unless we smashed through the heavily enchanted walls. This place is a true labyrinth fortress."

Ashlock followed the shadow rift path and noticed that Nox had created a very clear pathway but had disconnected the throne room from the rest of the castle. Making it impossible to reach for anyone coming in.

Looking at it from afar, Ashlock noticed the rooms connected by shadow rifts were arranged in a slanted stack like a titans staircase. The one at the bottom had Soul Fire Realm level Qi. Each subsequent room went up a single stage for a total of 21 steps, going from the 1st stage of the Soul Fire Realm all the way up to the Nascent Soul Realm.

Looking closer, each room had a literal staircase of darkness with a shadow rift at the top linking to the next room, or \'step\' as it could be called. Flanking the side of the shadow staircase were groves of Ashlock\'s offspring that had grown from his dao seeds. His offspring were all only a few meters tall at this point, with the ones growing in more Qi-dense floors having grown up faster and were now upwards of ten meters tall.

"To prevent people from getting overconfident and climbing up to a room beyond their level, I constantly release my presence. The higher they go, the more suppressive it becomes until they can\'t proceed without more training." Nox explained as if sensing where he was looking. "I also planted your dao seeds along the sides to give concentrated areas of shadow Qi for people to cultivate under. While I have total control of the shadow Qi in here, your offspring do a good job of assisting me in managing the flow of it."

"This is perfect," Ashlock praised Nox. He could foresee this place becoming a legend to those in the All-Seeing Eye, resulting in divine energy for himself. The only change to his original plan was how often he could open this place to the \'public\' due to the knowledge given by Mars.

"When Tartarus is not in use, my offspring here should do a good job capturing the ambient Qi from heaven and feeding it back into the pocket realm like Qi gathering arrays to prevent it from shrinking," Ashlock mused. "Once my offspring reach the Star Core Realm, they will passively generate Qi on their own like mini power stations, and the issue will be even less."

That is how things worked back in reality as well. Ashlock drew Qi from his many forests across the land during intense battles to fuel his techniques and skills. Once the battle was over, he would return the Qi and extra in hopes that once his offspring reached Star Core Realm, he would have a new consistent source of Qi.

Ashlock glanced over the many rooms in the castle once more, and while imagining how one room could be used as a jail cell to trap powerful cultivators, he realized something.

"Isn\'t this basically like a dungeon from those fantasy games?" Ashlock laughed. "It definitely has a stairway to heaven vibe, or should it be a stairway to hell with the dark theme I\'ve got going on? Either way, a dungeon is no fun without rewards and monsters to kill."

Ashlock realized he had just found a great new way to distribute rewards for \'free\' while making his cult members feel like they worked for them.