Within the endless, impossible, interval where time had stopped, Itinay felt the stars. Not as points in the sky that offered light in the darkness of night. Not as symbols of distant divinities. Not even as sources of the qi that powered her cultivation and had carried her from the base to near the pinnacle.

  No, in that moment of perfect clarity she felt the stars as they truly were.

  Unbelievably distant. Impossibly vast. Furnaces of endless energy of immense age who sent light screaming across the universe as the by-product of their celestial fires. The world upon which she stood, merely one of countless rocky spheres scattered across the cosmos, was nothing but leftover dust discarded by those domineering lamps.

  Their qi, each totally unique and derived from the immolation of an individualized mix of the primordial components that formed all things, was impossibly pure. Its unmistakable majesty was matched by nothing else in existence.

  The power of the heavens lay so far beyond anything she'd previously grasped that even in that moment of enlightenment it began to tumble away, a mark laid upon her soul she could not truly understand. The road to the heavens had been laid bare only to be coated in fog by an existence not yet ready to find the way. Perhaps she would solve that puzzle, as she grew stronger. If she could, Itinay knew, the path to follow her master would open one day.

  Even as this realization took hold, all things crashed back down into the present. Once again she was lying on her back atop black earth, bleeding from numerous wounds, and facing the embroiled wrath of a merciless monster. An end she could not escape.

  Only now there was a pillar of pure white light in the distance.

  The Entwining Blight's devastating volley began its descent.

  Faster than the eye could blink, the pillar of light vanished.

  Later, when sound caught up, there would be a massive soft thump, the shock unleashed by a massive spatial transfiguration across the land to the west, but events outpaced the arrival of that detonation.

  They did not outpace the light, nor the one who had become its emanation.

  Itinay's eyes widened as Orday, her master, appeared above them.

  The immense barrage of spines simply melted into nothing, obliterated by the shear radiance of her appearance.

  Orday appeared as her students had known her while merely immortal, as a beautiful maternal woman with long and wavy black hair, eyes burning with solar sclera, and pale blue-shaded flesh glowing softly along each gentle curve and joint.

  Only now she was more, far more. No longer bound to the physical, she was a being of manifest light. Her hair was a black, ever-collapsing nebula of voluminous dark gas. Her body a construct of luminosity wrapped around seven tiny but irrepressible stellar furnaces. Light burst from her toes and fingers as she moved, and though naked, her perfectly formed body conceded nothing but absolute mastery to any observer.

  “Impossible! Impossible!” the Entwining Blight raged. Oily qi, crimson and ruined, dripped from his form, a cloth rung out and torn. “How could you possibly ascend? Such a pathetic stargazer as-”

  “I have little time,” Orday spoke. Her voice was soft as silk. Its echoes whipped clouds across the sky and stirred leaves for hundreds of kilometers, but harmed nothing. “And you are worthy of none of it.”

  “Begone.”

  Orday waved her hand.

  Light in every shade visible to mortal eyes and countless more beyond that radiated outward with that motion.

  The Entwining Blight simply disintegrated. The most powerful cultivator in the world, perhaps the most powerful that had ever walked its surface, simply ceased to exist.

  If there was resistance, it accomplished so little as to be completely undetected.

  Nor was this all that act accomplished. Itinay felt the celestial wave sweep across the hills. It touched all things in earth and sky between it and its return to the heavens. Every demonic cultivator; every demon; every speck and flake of plague mass in the path of that radiant radiation was erased.

  Dozens of treacherous cultivators. Hundreds of thousands of demons. They were no more.

  It went deeper than this. Itinay breathed and felt how the air that entered her lungs was completely clear of the cloying, wretched qi of the demon plague itself. Light had cleansed it from this place, opened a patch of the earth free of its festering and omnipresent corruption not covered in formation flags for the first time in decades.

  It would not last. The unseen minute forms that carried the plague to all portions of the world would soon recolonize this space, but for now it was pure. A free breath of the world as it once was.

  Nothing Itinay had encountered before could compare to this act. Such power, expressed so casually, was beyond even the greatest of cultivators should they all work in concert. This was an act far beyond immortals, the expression of true divinity.

  A moment later, the consequences of such power were laid bare. The sky bent and cracked. Huge masses of air buckled and surged about. The ground shook. Trees were toppled, rivers spilled over their banks, and landslides raced down every hill. Distant faults in the mountains, dormant for millennia, snapped together. Earthquakes tossed the hills in a hundred different directions. To the east, where the hills met the lowlands, a dozen new volcanoes kindled, fires bursting skyward. Qi flows roiled, tensed, and ruptured. Storms of unstable power raced outward across the planet in every direction, destruction to be shared globally.

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  A little ball of dust. Itinay recalled her moment of clarity, the vision of the cosmos, then. Such a thing could not withstand the true attention of the heavens. Divinities, the sage masters of such forces, operated at a scale too great for their world. They could not be contained here.

  Her mother, she understood with wonder and sorrow intermingled, could not stay. She was already gone, in some sense. This glowing vision was a mere afterimage, an expression of intent left behind as she shifted to the next layer of existence.

  “My daughters,” Orday looked down at the sisters and smiled. “You have made me proud this day. The enemy, the plague, is not defeated, but you have won a victory, and through it, the preservation of the future.” She reached back and pointed towards the fragmented formation where the world's surviving mortals huddled. “I have used excess qi to layer a hidden land over these uplands. It will be the refuge of those who survive. Guard it well, grow strong, and await the chance to reclaim the world. In time, I am sure that all of you will join me among the stars.”

  Hidden lands, tiny pocket worlds sealed away, where well known creations of spatial dao, but Itinay somehow knew that this one would take shape at a far greater scale than any other before it. A true microcosm of the earth capable of harboring sufficient strength that one day they would be capable of more than simply hiding.

  A great gift, not merely salvation today, but hope for the future as well.

  “I love you all, my daughters,” the smile faded to an expression filled with immense sorrow but not a scrap of regret. “Knowing that to ascend was the only way to save you served as the truth necessary to carry me the final step over the last wall. Be happy, prosper, and grow; I know we will meet again.”

  Every one of the twelve had ten thousand things to say, whole lives worth of emotion, memory, and love to throw forth.

  None had the time to speak so much as a word. Orday took a single step and vanished upward. A streak of multitudinous light was the last image that passed beyond.

  No goodbyes. Their mother was gone. They were left to process this alongside the strange victory that had been torn free of doom by a single moment of unsurpassed power. Little enough time to grieve, Itinay knew it in her bones. By the time she recovered the strength to stand again her tears were dry. Other sisters, equally cognizant of their new circumstances, rose with clear faces.

  Iaray, second eldest, took up her oft-chosen role of default speaker. “We must act quickly.” She pushed beyond mourning forcibly. “Bloody Roam and his forces remain. They could be here in hours at worst.”

  No one knew exactly how powerful the second greatest of the demonic cultivators truly was, but his forces counted nearly one hundred immortals. Of the orthodox alliance, qi senses made it absolutely clear that the sisters were the only ones at that level to have survived the night. They were, none of them, even close to ready for battle.

  “We must guide the remaining mortals, and all other still-living cultivators to this new hidden land,” Iaray declared the obvious simply so that it might be agreed upon directly. “It is also imperative that we take whatever strength this battlefield offers.” They could feel this too, countless artifacts, talismans, and weapons left behind by the fallen. While all that the Entwining Blight and the others obliterated by divine action had carried was gone, those who had fallen earlier left behind a bounty of almost unprecedented potency. A war chest that the future would need.

  “Lastly, painful though it is, we must set fire to all that surrounds us,” Iaray's expression turned grim, though fires already burned in many regions nearby as the world struggled with the backlash of power that nearly cracked it. “That way we can obscure the location of this battlefield across the largest area possible.”

  There was no need for debate. They had known each other for centuries. Proper task division was innate.

  Itinay spent twelve hours gathering artifacts from the dead and tossing the bodies of their fellow orthodox cultivators into the flames. This was all the time it took to guide the remaining mortals through the shimmering gateway that marked the boundary between spaces. They had to tear open the storage bands of the fallen, and their own, and haul their contents across in great nets due to the twisted spatial dao of that entry. A messy scramble indeed, rushing to leave nothing lost and no trace behind.

  They pushed the mortals further, making them walk beyond the gate until they dropped. These terrified souls complied. Lesser cultivators, though the product of a hundred sects, were happy enough to cede leadership, and its countless frustrations, to the sisters. Respect for the strong came naturally to those who walked their path.

  They named the hidden land Mother's Gift, after Iay's suggestion. The sect they founded beyond the gateway would be the Celestial Origin Sect, after the path their ascended master had cultivated and taught. Orday, fifth ascended sage, patron goddess of the land of mountains and rivers she herself had crafted, was known to those who came to live there as the Celestial Mother.

  Itinay did not know who was the first to use that last term, but she considered it perfect.

  “We will have to endure a very long time,” Iaray declared what all were thinking as they shifted from emergency survival to planning the campaign to come against the plague. “Not centuries, millennia. Our mother granted us this refuge, but we lack the strength to fight and win. It will take many generations of cultivators, our growth and the enemy's decline, for that to change.”

  All agreed. They put their strength behind resettlement and reconstruction. Any other voices, with different plans, were persuaded to obey. In time, their noise would fall silent. Only a sect united behind the teachings of a singular goddess would remain.

  Orday had delivered the only true victory in a century of warfare. Itinay considered all objections pointless. She made countless plans, evaluated endless contingencies, and then cultivated steadily as the years turned to decades, then to centuries. The sect grew, it faced challenges, and stasis stretched out, but always she knew this to be temporary.

  Eventually, no matter how long it took, some unexpected occurrence would trigger a change. When that happened, she would be prepared. The next victory would follow her design.

  Far away, across the great oceans, surrounded by deserts and the shattered fortress of the valiant decoys who had led him a merry chase before finally surrounded and fed to the plague within, a massive man in black metal armor sat atop a shattered pile of masonry and stared in recollection of the pillar of light that had burst out on the other side of the world. His qi senses, linked to the plague itself now, extended across almost the whole planet.

  He knew what had unfolded. The Entwining Blight and all his forces, he felt those deaths alongside the ascension of a new sage. Their enemies vanished, either slain or hidden beyond the boundaries of space. His followers, hunting for loot in the wreckage, fumed to learn this, but they had not the strength to disobey him, a status he intended to sustain endlessly.

  Standing and flexing the full potency of his qi, Bloody Roam looked out to the horizon and found nothing to challenge him for the very first time in over five thousand years.

  Orday had made him master of the world. Content with that, he intended to hold that title forever. Anything that dared to threaten that eternity would be purged.