<On the Nine Ancestral Lands: A Fragment Found in the Records of The Demon Emperor>

Past the Nine Circles lies the territory that most Warriors spend their entire lives pretending does not exist, because the existence of things far beyond what one can reach produces a despair that the mind prefers not to sustain.

The Nine Circles are comprehensible. They have names and stages and measurable progress, and the warrior who stands at the Eighth Circle can point at the Ninth and understand, at least abstractly, what direction to walk.

Past the Ninth Circle, the territory has different rules.

An existence that breaks through the Ninth Circle does not advance to a Tenth. There is no Tenth. What occurs instead is Ancestral Transcendence, a process as different from cultivating through the Circles as a river is different from the rain that fed it.

The existence sheds the shackles that bound it to the ground, and within itself, it begins to form a Land.

The First Ancestral Land is called Primum.

In the language of scholars who have studied such things, Primum means the beginning, the first, the foundation. Within the existence of one who has achieved Primum, a small expanse of earth and sky forms, no larger than a village in its earliest stages, a territory of created ground that lives inside the Ancestor and extends outward from them into the world as their floating domain.

Those who achieve Primum leave the ground behind permanently and take to the sky, because the ground can no longer contain what they have become!

The Second Ancestral Land is called Campus.

The land within expands into vast plains, and rivers begin to run through the internal territory with the certainty of water that has found its course. The power that a Campus Ancestor projects outward reshapes the landscape beneath their floating domain by the simple fact of their presence above it.

The Third Ancestral Land is called Silva.

Forests grow within the internal territory, thick and ancient, and for the first time, life can survive within the Ancestors existence. Small creatures, simple vegetation, the first evidence that the land within has become real enough.

Silva Ancestor can feel every living thing within hundreds of miles through the roots their internal forest extends outward beneath them.

The Fourth Ancestral Land is called Mons.

Mountains rise from the plains of the internal territory, and the Ancestor’s presence in the external world becomes absolute in the way that mountains are absolute, shaping everything around them simply by occupying space. Mons Ancestors are recorded in the oldest texts as beings whose arrival at a location could be felt by every cultivator within a radius that maps had difficulty containing.

The Fifth Ancestral Land is called Mare.

Seas form within the existence, deep and endless, and the internal territory becomes a genuine world of its own with oceans running between its continents of formed land. The power of a Mare Ancestor extends to the actual weather of the external sky, and the clouds that float above the Lands of Stone are their domain to command.

The Sixth Ancestral Land is called Caelum.

The sky within the internal territory becomes real, stars appearing above the internal seas for the first time, and the Ancestor’s domain extends to affect the actual heavens.

Caelum Ancestor are mentioned in records so old that the language they were written in has been dead for longer than any current empire has existed, and the mentions are always brief because the beings who recorded them understood that brevity was the appropriate response to what they were describing.

The Seventh Ancestral Land is called Cosmos.

The stars within the internal land multiply and organize into patterns that reflect the arrangement of something far older than the cultivator themselves, as if the internal territory has begun to remember a blueprint it was always supposed to follow. A Cosmos Ancestor can reshape geography in the external world with the casual application of will, moving mountains and redirecting rivers the way a common being moves objects on a table.

The Eighth Ancestral Land is called Aion.

Time bends near such a being. Not dramatically, not in the world-altering way of something from stories, but measurably, the passage of seconds near an Aion Ancestor moving at a rate that instruments built to track such things can detect.

Within their internal territory, seasons pass in full cycles that have nothing to do with the external world’s calendar. They are, in the most literal sense, existences that have become partially unmoored from the flow of time that governs everything else.

The Ninth Ancestral Land is called Genesis.

The records that mention Genesis are not records so much as rumors, accounts of accounts, descriptions of descriptions, the scholarly equivalent of whispers passed between Ancestors who were not sure they should be whispering at all.

Every source agrees on one thing. An existence capable of forming the Ninth Ancestral Land carries within itself the capability to produce another Lands of Stone from its own being. Not to reshape or influence or command the existing world, but to generate a new one from the substance of their own existence, a world complete with its own ground and sky and potential for life.

No verified Genesis cultivator has ever been confirmed.

---

The pig-faced Ancestral Celestial’s warm expression was gone.

His small eyes were fixed on Damian, and the winds that had risen from the River below pressed against everyone present with the same indifference.

"After the Nine Circles," he said, and his voice had lost the warmth and kept the measurement, "one undergoes Transcendence. The shackles of the ground are shed. And within one’s existence, a Land begins to form."

He paused.

"In my case, the land that formed was the first. Primum. The beginning. A territory of earth and sky within my existence that extended outward and became the floating domain I have maintained for longer than your power can imagine."

He let that land.

"I am Zhuque." He said the name as a fact, without the performance of introduction. "First Ancestral Land. Primum Ancestor. What I carry within my existence is beyond what a Ninth Circle being can imagine, not as a dismissal, but as a statement of the distance between what you can conceive of and what I am."

His eyes moved across Damian’s frame again.

"If another being had exceeded the Nine Circles and arrived at this stage, someone young would not have built and extended their internal land sufficiently. Their power would be weak. Feeble. The soil of a Primum barely tended."

He tilted his pig face slightly.

"For such a being, young and newly arrived at what Transcendence produces, to stand before a genuine Ancestral Celestial and insult them, to threaten them, to speak to them as you just spoke to me."

His voice dropped further.

"What fate other than death could there be?"

...!

BOOM!

The words pressed outward with a Mana that exceeded anything the River of the World had felt above its surface in a very long time, the authority of a First Ancestral Land existence releasing a fraction of its pressure into the external world as a demonstration of what the rest of the fraction implied!

Serala’s wings caught the force of it and she steadied herself, her eyes burning bright.

The Demon Emperor on the boat behind Zhuque had gone very still.

The crimson-eyed woman had turned her gaze from Damian to the space above him.

Damian looked at Zhuque.

He felt the Primordial Source burning quietly in his chest, stellar obsidian light running through him with the continuity of something that had been there since the night above the Dominion and had not gone anywhere since.

Transcendence? Primum? Ancestral Land? Okay!

He had a Land within his existence and a floating domain in the sky and centuries of development that a young man newly arrived at the same stage would not have matched, and he had to die to such a being?

Who had decided that?

Who had established that the process of Transcendence and the formation of an Ancestral Land was the supreme framework? Who had decided that the hierarchy of power was organized around Ancestral Lands and that everything else organized itself beneath them? Who had made that determination and on what authority?

Damian looked at the Primordial Source within.

The Primordial Source looked back at him.

Damian’s eyes were cold as obsidian when they returned to Zhuque’s face.

So what if this being had undergone Transcendence?

Who decided that just because he had undergone such a process, he was stronger?

Who decided that?!