Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Adrift in the Infinite Sea

I should’ve panicked. I should’ve withdrawn my senses, broken my focus, altered my breathing.

Instead, as the riptide of qi bore my consciousness away, I rode along with it. It felt right, like the time had finally come to commune with the great nothing to which I’d always felt some connection.

But nothing communed with me. No great sage bestowed their wisdom, no horrible monster lurked in the darkness, no god ruled over the void, nor, as it happened, did the void rule anything else.

It simply was.

Vast and empty and unknowing and unwanting, the void accepted all that came, made way for the insistence of existence, and swept in as the existence departed. It sat still, unstirred by the tides and currents of needless motion.

The first thing I realized as my consciousness drifted, was that the qi had only come to sweep me away because I’d called for it. So eager I’d been to drink of this vast reserve of energy, I’d underestimated my influence upon it. Such was its way. Emptiness didn’t assert itself the way existence did. It simply came to whichever space offered itself.

But I’d known my whole life about the vastness of space. For decades I’d pondered the nature of nothing. That wasn’t new.

The qi was.

How could there be qi where there was nothing? From whence could come this colder energy that seemed to so flood the corners of dark infinity? And how was there so fucking much of it?

A single sip had saturated my soul, setting my meridians alight and my center overflowing. Was I so weak that but a taste of real power overwhelmed me, or was the void so brimming as to make such power plentiful? I settled on both, with the caveat that perhaps all cultivators shared my weakness. How could a man be anything but weak in the face of such might? How could a god?

I found beauty in that. To the void, all were equal, for no finite gap in power could bridge the way to infinity. To the void, all were neutral, for morality could only exist where there were decisions to be made. To the void, nothing mattered.

Nothing mattered.

Nothing mattered.

So I drifted. I had no cause to return when cause itself no longer was. I had no tasks to complete when any action I took could change nothing in the scope of reality. I had no dreams to chase when even my wildest fantasy meant naught to the sea in which I swam.

I can’t tell you how much time passed. I can’t tell you if time passed at all. What was a second, a minute, a lifetime to cold uncaring infinity? Here, there could be no joy, no sorrow, no love, no hate. There could be no life, no death, no knowledge shared or secrets kept. The could be no fond memories, no soul shattering trauma.

I ached. I ached, but I knew not why. My spiritual self, the only part of me that could embark on this voyage, seemed whole. The wound to my meridian had long closed, and while the surplus qi ran rampant throughout me, its was the realm of cool comfort, of welcoming darkness and sweet relief. Pain belonged to the living.

I found the source hidden away atop my still-closed brain meridian, a wildly complex weaving designed to be unnoticeable. Compared to the void, it shone like a beacon. With a dull thought, I swiped away life’s annoying insistence, my own minute share of the infinite sea more than enough to wash it away.

I remembered.

I watched in my mind’s eye as the cultivator twitched, as moaned with euphoria, as my brother’s corpse landed at his feet. I felt again the desperate race of my heart as I’d fled, the crushing hopelessness as Lucy’s doors had slammed in my face, the maniacal laughter that had echoed through the halls behind me.

I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Horrific as those events may have seemed, they’d barely caused a ripple in the infinite sea. All it would take was time, minuscule, pointless time, before those ripples calmed and the waters stilled again.

But I was still here. I yet drew breath, yet maintained life’s unique capacity to effect change, as much as finite life could alter the infinite.

Perhaps that explained it. Perhaps that displayed why cultivators drove themselves towards immortality, dedicated their lives to the hopeless chase of infinity. On the scale of forever, no man, no woman, no star, no black hole could hope to leave a mark upon these endless waters.

But they could make a splash. Their ripples could spread to the furthest corners, reverberate across time and space for unmeasurable eons before they too finally faded. If there was beauty in the eternal, could there not too be beauty in the fleeting?

By the curse of opportunity, did I now bear the burden of greatness? In the aftermath of RF-31, of the void psycho, of Brady, did I now owe it to them to make as big of a splash as I could? Whether or not I saw value in pointlessly defying eternity, I was roofie’s last scion, the only one who could spread their ripples across the uncaring dark. Is that what they’d have wanted? Did their wants even matter? I thought nothing mattered.

It had mattered to them.

Was I so much greater, so much more enlightened to believe I knew better than they? I may have been the first to sense its qi, but all had glimpsed the void—by its nature it was everywhere. My failure to find meaning in it didn’t negate their successes.

Those successes deserved to live on, to make an impact, to reverberate through the heavens for all to hear. Perhaps that’s what it was to live, to seek out and glorify every bit of meaning to be found. Ancient wisdom said that to cultivate was to defy the heavens. I wasn’t sure I agreed.

To cultivate was to flail against infinity, to stoke the flames of discontent at one’s own smallness, to glimpse eternity, recognize the hopelessness of it all, and fight back anyway.

If not meaning, I found at least beauty in that thought. Maybe that could be enough.

I followed that beauty, that dream, that hope, back through the endless dark. It led me to a raft, a tiny blip forcing itself upon the emptiness, an island of blinding light and deafening cacophony and boundless love. It led me home.

The world came back all at once, the padded floor beneath me, the roaring fusion core ahead, the walls on all sides. Lucy’s presence warmly welcomed my return, her silent comfort some solace against the maelstrom to come.

The memories struck like a blade through the gut. Foreman, Brady, the cultivator, images and emotions ravaged my spirit with neither Lucy’s enchantment nor the void’s numbness to shield me. I collapsed onto my side. I quivered and quaked and curled into a ball beneath the weight of it all.

And I wept.

Next 

---

[Author's note] Hey guys.  This was kind of a weird chapter.  Not much really happens, and it's only a thousand words, but I felt its themes were separate enough from other events and important enough to merit a chapter of their own.  Please let me know if it feels like progress is made or I'm just rambling, and absolutely let me know if you found yourself bored or losing interest.

As a side note, I think I may have found a title: To Flail Against Infinity.  Let me know what you think, and if you'd click on a book with that name if you scrolled past it.

As always, thanks for reading,
Nixia