Primum Ancestor.

Damian looked at Zhuque and felt nothing that resembled the appropriate response to standing before a being that had exceeded the Nine Circles and formed a Land within its existence. No awe. No recalibration of plans. No fear working its way up through his cultivation and needing to be managed back down!

His mother’s soul was burning on the other side of this River.

That was the only fact that had weight here. Everything else, Zhuque’s authority, his centuries of Ancestral Land development, the pressure his Primum had just released across the water, arranged itself around that fact and found that it didn’t change the fact at all.

He had to cross this River. He had to find where the Demon Emperor held her. He had to bring her back. Whatever stood between him and that outcome was an obstacle to be moved, not a ceiling to acknowledge.

And none of them could even comprehend what THE Primordial Tongue or THE Primordial Source was.

Damian felt this with a certainty that didn’t need confirmation, the intuitive certainty of someone who had touched something and understood, through the touching, that no one else in the Lands of Stone had touched anything like it.

The Hallowed Voice had been the most knowledgeable being he had met, and the Hallowed Voice’s knew nothing.

Its information described no hierarchy he recognized. No Circles. No Ancestral Lands. No framework that Zhuque’s speech assumed was universal.

THE Primordial Source did not participate in the systems it sat above.

He placed his hand on Serala’s arm to steady her against the pressure Zhuque had released, a brief firm contact, and then he looked ahead at the three figures on the white-gold boat with the obsidian light running through his eyes.

He activated Primeval Source Manipulation.

The world changed.

The three figures simply became legible in a way they hadn’t been before, their existences readable in the language of THE Primordial Source, which was a language that cared nothing for what a being called itself or what stage it claimed to occupy.

He looked at Zhuque first.

|Weak Null Source Lifeform. A Lifeform trying to climb the ladder of power. Its Source is weak and disordered as it has not even begun to wonder about its Way. Due to this, manipulation of its Source through Primeval Source Manipulation is possible.|

...!

He looked at the crimson-eyed woman.

|Weak Null Source Lifeform. A Lifeform trying to climb the ladder of power. Its Source is weak and disordered as it has not even begun to wonder about its Way. Due to this, manipulation of its Source through Primeval Source Manipulation is possible.|

He looked at the Demon Emperor.

|Unranked Source Lifeform. A Lifeform too weak to attain a ranking of its Source. Due to this, manipulation of its Source through Primeval Source Manipulation is possible.|

...!

This was how THE Primordial Source saw all three of them.

This was exactly how it saw them.

Damian processed the discrepancy between Zhuque and the Demon Emperor without reaction. Zhuque read as a Weak Null Source Lifeform, which was a higher designation than the Unranked the Demon Emperor carried, and the gap between those two descriptions presumably explained why the Demon Emperor had run to Zhuque rather than facing Damian at the Dominion alone.

He was curious about the full shape of that gap, curious in the way he was curious about all structural information relevant to what he needed to do.

But his mother came first.

The Demon Emperor had the answers about where she was being held. He had to remain alive until those answers were extracted. That constraint was the one that mattered, and it shaped what he was going to do next.

Zhuque had no such constraint on him.

Damian shifted his obsidian vision and found Zhuque’s singularity. He focused on it the way he had focused on the Murderous Saint’s, the light expanding outward to reveal the internal structure, the arrows pointing in their respective directions. He looked past the arrows, past the downward one that represented what he had used against the Murderous Saint, and he looked at what Zhuque’s singularity contained.

He saw the Ancestral Land.

A small landmass floated around Zhuque’s existence, trying to project the image of something grand. Green things grew on it, vegetation arranged with the care of something that wanted to be perceived as ancient and established, and the sky above the internal territory held the particular quality of a sky that had been there for a long time. It was attempting majesty. It was attempting the weight of centuries!

It spread outward from Zhuque’s singularity with the intention of impressing upon whatever observed it that here was something that had earned its position above the Nine Circles and knew its own worth.

Damian looked at the foundation.

Cracks ran through it. Actual cracks in the ground of the internal territory, looseness in the soil, places where the foundation of the Ancestral Land had been built on something that had not fully solidified and had never been addressed because nothing Zhuque had encountered had ever pressed on the weakness hard enough to make addressing it necessary.

It was feeble.

The feeble of something that had grown up without real opposition, had developed in the absence of anything that could threaten it, had accumulated centuries of unchallenged expansion without once being required to make its foundation firm.

Damian looked back at Zhuque’s face.

"Your Ancestral Land," he said, and his voice carried across the River of the World with the same evenness it always carried, "is feeble. The cracks in your foundation are visible to me."

He tilted his head. "For now, I want to see exactly what such a land can accomplish."

The obsidian light in his eyes didn’t waver.

"Go ahead and attack."

BOOM!

The words arrived in the air above the River and sat there.

Zhuque looked at him.

The pig-faced Ancestral Celestial, who had been on the receiving end of insults that would have ended lives less than an hour ago, who had issued a statement about death that had shaken the air across the River, who carried within his existence a territory of earth and sky that had been developing since before the Lands of Stone had their current name, looked at this young man telling him to attack.

He began to shake his head.

The shaking became laughter. It came out of him in a building wave, the incredulity of a being that had heard something so far outside the range of what it expected that its first response was amusement rather than anger!

The laughter grew, and the Demon Emperor on the boat behind him looked between Damian and Zhuque with the expression of a being watching a situation develop past all the parameters his calculations had prepared for.

Then Zhuque stopped laughing.

A radiant illusory landmass erupted around him!

BOOM!

It emerged from his existence in an expanding corona of light and presence and cultivated authority, a territory of formed ground and sky made real by centuries of Ancestral Land development, and it pressed outward across the space above the River of the World with the weight of everything a Primum had accumulated behind it.

The green of the internal vegetation showed through the edges of the projection. The sky above the territory blazed. The pressure it imposed came down on the air, on the water, on Serala’s wings and the River’s surface and Damian’s skin and everything present within its reach.

The River below them roared louder!

Existence above the water registered what was happening and found no category for it!