A Waste of Time

Chapter 113: Nadir of Echoes

Daemon was, of course, completely unaware that his existence as the Mountain’s captive had driven the Inner Circle into a fierce round of Cultivation and training mania. Corridors ran hotter, queues moved quicker, and every stray conversation circled one baited word: Blood-Essence. Junior Cultivators who once measured a day by chores were now counting by the next full moon—and by what they could seize before anyone else did.

Even the Disciples and Instructors in the other circles caught the same fever. Core Disciples cashed favors with their own Masters and, shameless as debt collectors, asked to exchange Contribution Points for drops of that Blood. A few walked away with a wrapped vial and a flat warning about greed. Most were turned at the doorstep and told to make the trip to the Merit Hall themselves, to let the price board teach them how much it would cost when the exchange was done in person.

The Instructors within the Outer, Inner, and Core Circles were no different; patience thinned to paper. Drops from a Body-Refiner’s Blood-Essence were among the rarest tonics—none of them had refined such a thing before—which made it perfect for their path. It was meant to toughen flesh and make it last. It was meant to cover a glaring weakness. It was meant to run where strain shows first: through the meridians.

Durable Spirit Roots and wider Root-Hairs meant a stronger pull and a deeper hold. More Spirit Energy drawn, more refined cleanly, faster Cultivation without scraping the channels thin. Best of all, this new Cultivation Resource bit past the quiet enemy long usage had raised: Immunity. After too many Pills and Medicinal Ingredients, bodies learned to ignore bite and bitterness both. Blood-Essence did not ask permission; it answered Immunity with force.

But none of that noise reached the boy who had started it.

Daemon lay where the Sect had fixed him—mind awake, body refusing. He could not move a finger. He could not open an eye. Most of the time he drifted inside the same slow question for too long: Is this a dream or reality? Which side am I on? Sound came late and wrong-shaped, like voices leaking through stone; touch felt borrowed; light, when it found him, felt like memory instead of fact.

The taking did not help. Blood went out and the world thinned at the edges. Somewhere beyond the seals his red was portioned into thousands of three-drop shares for Disciples and Instructors he never saw or knew. He could not hear them refine it. He could only feel the wake—lightness without relief, quiet without rest—until judging cleanly became hard and staying lucid, harder.

Still, the kid was diligent. When it was time for his Hourly-Roll, he did not miss it. He jumped to the other side and entered the System on time, every time. Sometimes he spent the whole day on the submerged path, letting his thoughts settle while the ocean moved beyond the path’s invisible edge—clear to his eyes, never touching him but always a source of entertainment in this dull wait between Hourly-Rolls.

He walked tile to tile and let the noise go thin. Silver fish crossed like slow frames in a reel beyond the boundary; deeper down, broad shadows turned without hurry. Even the maw of darkness at the far bottom—the wide mouth that once sat under his ribs—had dulled to a shape and nothing more after so much time here. He gave it a small nod in passing, the way you nod to a stray that will not bite unless you act like meat.

“It has been a week already!” He looked at the red-and-white Dice, then ahead at the dozen or so white tiles between him and the surface—between him and leaving this submerged path. “Hopefully I won’t receive a penalty this time. Last time I was here in this position, things ended up badly for me.”

Daemon muttered the magic word, “Roll.” The red-and-white Dice vanished from his palm and blinked onto the tiles ahead, turning and twisting as it danced between the six white squares in front of him. A few days back his luck had been on fire; every two or three Hourly-Rolls he would hit 6-White, step forward, try again, and most times step forward a second time—until he reached this stretch, almost within reach of the surface on just a couple more clean Rolls.

Then the nightmare began. The next Roll came up 3-Red and, instead of dragging him back three tiles the way it always had, a hard pull shoved him forward. The third tile ahead flipped as he landed toward it, white turning over to expose its underside—a tiny Summoning Circle opening like a mouth, its swirl a pure, steady red instead of the layered, colorful light he knew from the one at his Orc Camp and the one the Archmage used when they met.

He had no choice. His foot found the circle, the mouth closed, and the path snapped him away—no wind, no splash, only the clean, sick lurch of being put somewhere else. He reappeared where he had stood a couple of days before, far below his hard-won progress, the maw of the abyss staring up from uncomfortably close range. A thin cackling—ridicule braided with evil laughter—threaded the waterless air of the path and rang in his ear.

Even with the steady mindset of a middle-aged man—long life on Earth, death, the walk between worlds, and the impossible before and after wearing this boy’s body—Daemon prayed for his luck to hold. The System kept rolling out the same majestic, unreal vistas: precise, gorgeous, and looped. He was bored in spite of it, and anxious because of it. Curiosity tugged hard at him—his Orc Camp in Asura’s World: fires, sentries, small routines. What state are they in now? Are they safe?

Every Hourly-Roll felt like tossing a coin at a locked sky. Hope thinned by layers. The people of the Mountain seemed perfectly content to keep him sealed and useful—half-awake, half-here, wholly vulnerable. Am I meant to sleep through my own life? He pressed that thought flat and counted tiles, prayer pared to one line: Let the luck hold. Let it hold long enough to get me out.

Daemon watched the Dice continue its dance and felt time slow as his senses heightened—the same edge he only reached when the heat of battle in Asura’s World truly bit, when a fight in the material world drew a grin. The red-and-white cube spun, and he saw everything: the pips on each face, the micro-twist at every pivot, the seam where red kissed white.

Focus tightened. Surprise flickered, then satisfaction: he was laser-focused enough to anticipate the Dice’s path—a tilt, a turn, the snap of its axis—a heartbeat before it happened. The cube cut its arc and settled on 2-White. Light rippled along the tile ahead; the System moved him to the matching square.

“Phew… at least it’s a positive step forward. Baby steps are still steps.” He kept the victory small, resisting the deep urge to turn and give the abyss his middle finger. Don’t jinx it. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get sent back on the next Roll.

He reclined on his side and let his eyes roam. Beyond the path’s invisible edge, the ocean moved in silence: a giant squid raking at a whale-like shadow far below, tentacles and bulk crossing like slow frames on a reel, clear to him, never touching him. He breathed once, steady, and watched the fight write its dark script in the deep.

Ten-Thousand Beasts Mountain, Merit Hall.

The bronze bell had not finished its second toll when an outer disciple in ash-colored robes sprinted down the lacquered hallway, sandals whispering over jade-inlaid floorboards. Panic rode her breath; discipline wrestled it down. At the corridor’s end the world broke open into green: a walled garden of dwarf pines and knife-edged scholars’ rocks, raked gravel gleaming like frost. Four slender bridges stitched the banks of an artificial lake to a central pavilion. She slowed there, fingers fussing her sash straight, and made herself cross the bridges the way a disciple should—heels together, eyes lowered, water left undisturbed.

A boy lay in the pavilion’s shadow on a low stone dais, skin the color of candle wax. Six silver needles anchored a ring of cinnabar thread around his navel. Blood ran in hair-thin streams along engraved copper channels toward five stoppered jade vials. A separate tube carried something darker—thicker, luminous—to a squat gourd whose runes pulsed faintly. Around the dais, eight waist-high pillars etched with beast totems held a shimmering veil in place. The veil was not light so much as the memory of light, a film of rippling air that bent the koi beneath it into wavering smears. Every few breaths, it sighed—like silk pulled across a whetstone.

At the far side of the pavilion, an elder in green robes sat cross-legged on a cushion, brush in hand. He dipped the hair tip into a glass vial the color of old pomegranates and dragged it over pale leather. Lines grew beneath his wrist—unbroken, elegant, cruel. He did not look up.

The outer disciple halted at the threshold and folded her hands. “Elder Bai Sui,” she said softly. She did not dare move again.

Bai Sui, the blood-brush of Merit Hall—short-tempered, meticulous, impossible to please—finished a curling hook, then a row of teeth along a stylized beast skull. Blood pooled at a corner of the talisman; he breathed once, and the pool slid obediently into the stroke, filling it to the edge with a jeweler’s care. Only then did he speak, eyes still down.

“Speak, Disciple.”

“Su An,” she answered automatically, as if names might soften his temper. “Outer Hall, Third Roster. The… the Temporal Seal Formation is drifting at the seventh node.” She swallowed. “Three counts every ten breaths. The extraction rhythm shifted with it. If we keep the current draw, the boy’s life-lamp will dip below safe measure before the second incense stick burns out.”

Bai Sui dot-dotted a chain of tiny marks and set the brush across the lip of the vial. His gaze cut toward the veil. The shimmer over the boy had thickened, like heat over road dust. Drift. Hnh. It meant someone, somewhere, had pulled on the thread that kept this child from his proper hour. The garden’s breeze chose that moment to turn; the lake darkened, a wrinkle of shadow passing underneath as if a carp had remembered it was once a river dragon.

“Who touched the array?” His voice was flat, but Su An could sense the rage building beneath these words.

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