Chapter 455: Dead Treasures and Dead Vaults

Omilaena played it off like it was nothing, but meeting with Nymidria had not been easy. She had needed to spend most of a day scouting the sect headquarters, finding the new weaknesses in their defenses. The guards were in disarray and many barriers were down, which meant both new openings and a lot of chaos that could potentially get in the way.

Their direct communication seeds were all suffocated by the new aura, however, so there was no choice. Technically they had what they needed, but Omilaena wasn't going to leave without letting the dryad matriarch know what they found. She owed her that much.

Once she finally got inside, she didn't waste time: she dumped some of the supposed Loam of the Gods on the ground and let it speak for itself.

"Those fuckers." Nymidria raged for a while, throwing out more profanity than Omilaena had known she was capable of, before her tree branches finally stopped cracking ominously. Instead she settled back into the trunk, her eyes burning. "I knew they were stringing me along, but I never imagined that the Loam had been dead for so long."

"You might actually have the longest memory here," Omilaena pointed out. "How long ago do you think it died?"

"In the past, they were always so stingy with growing anything using the Loam. I think it was probably losing its strength even a century ago, and they were desperately trying to enrich the soil again, using it only rarely. When they started producing so many elixirs, I thought they must have decided to stop holding back..."

"Apparently not. So what are you going to do about it?"

The boughs of the blue tree swayed unnaturally, then Nymidria straightened her humanoid body. "I could uproot myself and abandon them, but they would retaliate against all the dryads who followed me. I can't let that happen, but I also can't take them all away."

"What if we took out the Verdant River sect?" Omilaena waited for her surprise, but it didn't come. "They know about the three of us, but not that we were working with you. We're planning to decapitate a lot of the sects here, which will leave a power vacuum. The Masterful Crown clan will need someone in the south capable of growing powerful alchemical ingredients, and if they don't have the Loam..."

"I suppose it could work." Nymidria was silent for a long time, staring over the walls of her garden. "You'd have to take out a lot of their leadership and really cripple them."

"Do you think we can't?"

"You haven't seen their full strength, not if they think the survival of the sect is on the line. These young masters are not their most dangerous cultivators."

"Is that a refusal?" Omilaena asked. She idly spun a needle through her fingers, wondering if she would need to kill the dryad matriarch. It had always been a possibility that she'd refuse to work with them, and letting her turn to their enemies was not an acceptable outcome.

"Fuck no. You three are the only ones who have treated fairly with me." Nymidria began gathering her power through her roots. "If you want to take them on, I can give you even more."

Soon Omilaena left with brand new communication seeds, several illusion wreaths, and most importantly the location of one of the sect's most critical vaults outside the headquarters. She'd left the portion of the soil with Nymidria, just in case a dryad could learn more from it than she could. The situation had become a little more complicated, but they also had a direct opening to their opponents' weaknesses.

So when Omilaena returned to Kai and Zin Nim and found that they hadn't screwed anything up either, for once things seemed to be going well.

.

..

.

It was a bit surreal for Kai to sit and watch himself and his wives running into the battle. Everything about them was all wrong, especially the way his body was flailing its arms and legs. It was probably just a trick of the mind, because the illusions should be perfect, but he thought that Omilaena and Zae Zin Nim looked worse than usual.

His real wives were further west, preparing to attack the vault. But Kai had remained back to make sure the decoys worked properly... and most likely to save their asses.

The Redtree rebels had continued taking territory from the Verdant River sect, but the much larger sect was finally hitting back. This was meant to be their decapitating blow, so they had sent along a whole formation of Earth Souls to eradicate the rebels. There had been a chance that the sect would send a Sky Soul as well, in which case Kai would have been the one to fight, but there were none to be seen.

He watched as more forces poured east, aiming to attack the doppelgangers. This was actually a real force, a major portion of the Verdant River sect, and they were adept enough at using formations to be inconvenient. Against the weaker rebels, the battle was more unbalanced.

The Earth Souls maintained their formation as they advanced on the fakes, waves of qi sweeping aside all attacks on them. They might have been able to be defeated if the Redtree cultivators had just used their medallions for explosions, but they were frustratingly reluctant to give up the status symbols. And Kai supposed that he was enabling them, because he leapt from hiding to attack.

First he flew over the enemy's lines, letting the shockwaves from Thunderbird's Wings disrupt many of them. Then he hit the formation of Earth Souls with an earth-shattering impact. The wall of qi water surrounding them actually kept him at bay, because it unified all their cultivation bases, but that wasn't going to be enough.

Before they could strike back, Kai breathed Baleful Breath directly into their formation.

All of the Earth Souls died with warbled screaming and their formation finally collapsed, water evaporating back into qi. Kai dropped into the burning darkness, then walked out of it to face the Redtree army. When he raised a fist, they let out a cheer and attacked the enemy with greater bloodthirst.

"Alright, you've done enough." Kai walked up to the decoys and held out a hand.

"Of course, master." They quickly took off the leaf wreaths and handed them over, turning back into normal cultivators as they did so. He was right... the woman who had been portraying Omilaena was awkward and stiff, with none of his wife's flowing movements.

"I'm going to finish wiping out their leadership," he told them, "but I won't have time to return. So the rest of the battle is yours to win."

They responded eagerly and he had no choice but to leave. In his absence they would probably make some decisions he wouldn't, in particular lack of coordination between different cultivator stages, but those were their mistakes to make. Now that they had thoroughly distracted the enemy, it was time to finish their attack on the vault itself.

His flight west was strangely peaceful, despite the urgency. If the enemy had planned a grand trap, they would already have closed it, so he was relatively confident his plan would work. Because the Redtree rebels had plenty of interactions with others throughout the Southern Rivers, they had assumed there were spies and only revealed the true plan at the last second, so the enemy had no time to adapt.

It seemed like they had held back their strongest, though, so there would be a real fight at the end of the road. Kai stuck to a pace where Behemoth's Heart would keep his stamina in peak condition.

Soon the fortress was visible on the horizon, a block of blue stone squatting over a river island. It wasn't so different from other fortresses, but this one had much stronger qi barriers because, according to Nymidria's information, it was one of the secret vaults for the entire Verdant River sect. And, if all went well, it would be theirs soon.

He could see the rough flow of the battle as he approached. Zae Zin Nim and Omilaena had ambushed the enemy effectively, leaving the gatehouse cultivators dead in a cloud of blue smoke, and then fought their way toward the main fortress. But it seemed like the surviving cultivators had effectively defended the barriers, and between their numbers and formations it was difficult to break through.

Kai hit the side of the barrier like a comet, slamming his full power into it. The fortress shook, and several of the cultivators spat up blood, but the wall of qi still held. He flipped back off the barrier as they tried to retaliate and landed near Omilaena and Zae Zin Nim.

Who, to his surprise, moved together simultaneously and planted kisses on his cheeks. Zae Zin Nim had to jump to do so, making it clearly a coordinated effort.

"What...?" Kai just stared at them, puzzled about why they'd do something like that in the middle of battle.

Then he heard someone spluttering angrily from the top of the fortress and began to understand.

"This is absurd!" Kan Jin Kung, heir to the Heavenly River sect, stood at the edge of the battlements and stared at them. "I thought I was saving pure maidens from a rapacious thug, but you've thrown your lot in with him? You're wanton whores! Vulgar strump-"

"We told you!" Omilaena shouted back.

"He has been shouting a lot of things," Zae Zin Nim explained quietly, "and we got tired of it."

"This is an abomination under heaven!" Kan Jin Kung vibrated furiously from his position. "They may be harlots, but both are Sky Soul talents... it's repulsive that they would be disgraced by a Nascent Foundation barbarian with only 800 Power! This is like pearls thrown before swine, a toad eating swan meat, a-"

"Stop ogling other people's wives!" Kai called back. Kan Jin Kung's face went red and he looked like he might explode. Maybe cultivators could actually do that, if they got angry enough. At minimum he might be able to cough up a mouthful of blood.

"Just once I want to be the toad," Omilaena muttered. "Aren't I eating swan meat? Just once somebody should get offended."

"Wouldn't you be a cannibal swan?" Zae Zin Nim asked, tilting her head to the side.

"I'd take that too! I'm just pissed that this is always about Kai when I did just as much to besmirch the honor of a jade maiden of Cloudspire."

"I don't think 'toad' is gendered," Kai pointed out. "It's about something lowly eating something noble."

"All of you, shut up!" Kan Jin Kung rose into the air, power glowing brightly around him and a sapphire crown lighting up over his head. "You fools are so busy indulging in vice that you never even realize that I have advanced to Sky Soul! Now face your doom!"

Kai looked at the man's soul and saw that it was true.

<

Name: Kan Jin Kung

Total Power: 1296

Cultivation: Sky Soul (900)

Physique: E-0 (80)

Immortal Body (+200)

Soul Level: 4 (16)

Flowing Crown (+100)

>

The leap between stages had granted him a huge jump in strength, from roughly 800 to 1300. Part of that was due to an improvement in his Immortal Body trait, which actually puzzled Kai more. Did they have more of the elixir that he hadn't known about?

But there was no time for that, because in that moment Kan Jin Kung brought the force of an entire fortress of cultivators down on them.