Walking the streets of the Harbor of Stars made my stomach start doing push-ups to relieve the eerie sense of uncanniness that the place exuded.

Despite the fantastical wonders surrounding us; the magically walking cutlery shop, the carpets with living paintings, the singing lobsters for sale, and the mass of colorful people around us ranging from humanoids with animal features to a walking onion; even Nelly’s cheer gained an uneasy edge .

Whether due to the strength of their souls, or something the Alphahole had done, the loops the local echoes were trapped in were even simpler than those at the Xianxia spaceship or the jungle village.

Ad infinitum, a perpetual face-slap loop played out between a Young Master and Mistress, both of whom repeated the same challenge without ever drawing their blades. A hat weaver lifted her wares up and offered it with a passionate sales pitch, even if there were no buyers before her. And most disturbingly of all, a scene which made my intestines and kidneys join my stomach in the push-ups, was the sight of a small chalk-stained child stealing a loaf of bread. He sprinted out with the baker on his heels, only to glitch backwards seconds later to replay the scene.

“Um. This might make interviewing them difficult. Not saying I’m not up for a challenge, but… it is a challenge,” Riko said, looking to me for advice.

“Karen, thoughts?” I asked calmly.

“Calm down, sheesh!” She all but gasped, huffing as Karen does. “The echoes with any personality must be hiding. You can force the rest to snap out for a bit with strong enough Dao, though it only works if you don’t ask them anything outside their ‘roles’. Let me fill up my Toxic Attention energy, and I’ll catch you a few echoes to interview…” She scanned the people passing by and, like a shark, locked onto a young couple trapped in a loop where they simply held hands.

Karen marched over, her face scrunching up with imaginary indignation. “YOU! You there! Why are you being so lazy instead of helping me?”

Though I could not understand Xianxia, his body-language did the universal: “I don’t work here lady.”

To which Karen replied, “Yes you do! Don’t lie to me. I can see when…”

While she unleashed a nauseating barrage of Karen techniques upon the poor hapless echoes, I followed the kid at the bakery. Something about the kid struck a painful cord, drawing a deep frown upon my Chadified heart. The only reason I stood here and he replayed the same moment was the luck of the draw.

A soft hand brushed my arm. Nelly’s fingers entwined with mine, squeezing to remind me that she’s here with me. “It’s not your fault.”

“I know.”

“It’s theirs. Bunch of gutless degenerates. How can they leave entire cities of the non-cultivators behind, and then go ‘adios’ into a new world? I bet they could’ve repaired that other ship if they wanted to. Like, what were they thinking? ‘Oh noes, I can’t fit my new super-duper-ching-chong-elixir pill and this little orphan onboard at the same time. Woe is me, I must make the hard choice and toss the kid overboard for the greater good.‘ Did their brains get cartoonified by Dao Storm, ‘cos I just don’t see how this happened.”

The kid had cracks on his feet from running on coral streets, tattered seaweed pants, and a broken nose. In the span of the bread theft, his eyes went from hungry greed to terrified desperation, before the loop replayed. Earth is my priority, I told myself. We can’t help everyone.

And if Earth is saved, we might not have to.

“Might makes right is one hell of a drug. Combine it with longevity and a culture that values power, face, and glory and you have pure crack for the soul. Now sprinkle on some sects and clans that function like cut-throat for-profit corporations, and you’ve got yourself a cocktail to excuse any and all atrocities. It’s easy to see how a rank-and-file cultivator wouldn’t even think to question an elder telling them that their moral backbone is a weakness, because it prevents them from being “rational”. They’ll stop questioning it in a few years and forget they ever did in a couple decades.”

I felt a shiver in the Dao and gazed up at the tallest tower. An enormously powerful presence was bleeding enough energy to fold the local reality into a pretzel ten times over.

Fifth’s fate was a dark reminder that not even Alpha Cultivators were immune to the tempting promises of power. One misstep, and you might find yourself possessed by the ghost of Alphahole.

I squeezed Nelly’s hand back and looked at the scrunched up angry face of the love of my life. Before I knew it, I’d kissed her. “I love you.”

“Hehehe! Love you too big man.” She draped her arms around my shoulders and climbed up to nuzzle my face.

I was thankful to have her and my Happyland friends. They were the pillars of steel which kept my soul on course.

From my pocket, I fished out a golden hieroglyph tablet that I’d looted from the mummified dragon’s tomb and tossed it to the enraged baker with a casual thumb-flick. I nodded upwards and said, “Keep the change,” ignoring whatever the shopkeeper stuttered back in Xianxia.

His gawking and the attention of a few passerbys gave me a small boost in Big Dick. As I knelt, I funneled that energy into my eye-contact with the kid and empowered some words with [Universal Alpha Language], “Me big man. Me look for friends of other big man. Know where find?”

For the briefest of moments, the echo flickered with static, and the fog that haunted all their eyes as his big sea-green eyes gained a shine. The kid nodded furiously, hugging his loaf of bread, spouting something in Xianxia, while pointing at various landmarks visible on the street-level.

Smiling, I stood back up and ruffled his gritty sea-salted hair. I said, “Thank you, kid,” and used the rest of my remaining Big Dick energy to give the kid with a Chad Buff. “Even if today sucks, that doesn’t mean you’ll never have the power to change it. [Every Step Is A New Chance To Change Your Life Around.]”

Ever so slightly, the energies of Dao around us trembled.

Nelly sniffed the air.

He may not have understood a word, but that gleam in his eyes told me he’d understood their meaning. Tears appeared in his eyes, but beneath them burned determination. He said something in Xianxia and I nodded.

The kid’s and baker’s echoes reset to how they were.

Except, this time, he marched up to the goods with confidence. This time, when he picked up the bread, rather than running away with it and being chased by the baker, he snuck under a crate and ate it while the confused baker failed to find him.

I chuckled. “Good enough.”

“Kinda smelled like Dao Storm, but backwards,” said Nelly, still sniffing. “Think that could work to heal Maxson and Ivanov?”

I contemplated it briefly with maximum Big Brain. “It could open them up for change, but I don’t think caricaturization can be undone with just powerful Dao. If that were the case, the Memetic sects and Deity level cultivators could have healed this world before all this… But we’ll find a cure. Dr. Maxson and Ivanov will be their old selves before you know it, don’t you worry.”

Going by the intensifying screeching, Karen’s approach hadn’t yielded any useful results yet. That, or she simply enjoyed harassing people. I was fairly certain she enjoyed harassing people. It has to be one of their sect’s recruitment criteria.

I hollered at her, rescuing the terrified couple, and led us to a big mosaic dome that the kid had pointed out.

***

A short walk later, inside a vast domed greenhouse roofed by a mosaic replica of a midday sky, right next to a patch of ground mangoes.

We were met with physical evidence of this city being an Alphahole’s domain. Imprints of large knuckles on the walls and broken furniture hinted of a man of impressive stature with anger management issues that were almost terminal to those around him. Metal collars and thin revealing dresses of the women tending to the vegetable fields spoke of possessiveness and lack of empathy towards employees, not to mention casual objectification. And finally, as the last rep of the proverbial set, the palm-shaped bruise on the face of the young cultivator lady in charge sealed any suspicions more smoothly than the golden collar she wore.

The scent of Alphahole lingered in the air. You couldn’t mistake that stinging musk of tainted testosterone, anger, and blood. A smell nearly as rancid as that of a forbidden Alpha Cultivation technique involving a thrice worn gym-sock.

Riko and the others set up the camera, and coaxed some of the ‘employees’ to come closer for a quick interview.

I kept my gaze locked on the violently twinkling dark-blue eyes of the gold collared cultivator, as she strode towards me. The sheer volume of Qi around her made her rather skimpy sapphire robes and long brown hair wax as if underwater. Ghostly needle-coated tentacles of an abyssal beast faded in and out of existence as they slithered around her body. Their every move sent ripples through my Dao.

She was a high sage, if not saint realm cultivator.

Her power far eclipsed that of any even the Humming Blade sect elders and definitely dwarfed the strength of any cultivator or beast I had faced thus far (aside from Karen, but she doesn’t count).

Her voice was harsh and had the boom of a being thousand times her size. I couldn’t understand the words, but I could tell she’d asked who we were.

“I am Titan Maximus Chadman, the Seventh head of the Gigachad sect.”

She scowled and spat out a blade-sharp reply. Outlines of her ghostly tendrils grew darker as they grew in number, encircling her like a deadly cage of flesh.

Karen moved to stand between us, but I raised my arm and halted her.

“Thank you for the sentiment, but no need to help. Go translate what the echoes say for Riko,” I said, and strode to meet the cultivator with wide arms and an equally wide smile. With casual ease, I slipped into her ghost-tentacle infested personal space, and draped a friendly arm around her shoulders to walk alongside her.

The tentacles froze in shock. Her eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets. Her face twitched so violently I feared she was struck by whatever caused the echoes to glitch.

Other echoes tilling the fields paused, stunned by the sight of someone handling their slave master so easily.

My organs began to flex as Big Dick energy flooded them.

She must’ve sensed it. The woman’s palm blurred as she launched an attack at me. I received it with an empowered [Alpha Slap], turning the attack into a down low, thus multiplying my Big Dick energy generation. She attempted to strike me again. This attack I parried into a high five. My heart immediately organized a cross fit course for the rest of my organs to keep the enormous Big Dick energy I was generating from exploding my body.

A score of needle-covered tentacles glowed with cold blue energy as the gold collared woman screamed out a thirty-syllable long technique name. Stone tiles of the walkway crumbled beneath us as if they were styrofoam. The tentacles whipped at me with sonic booms, latching on and squeezing with pressure straight from the abyssal depths. Countless needles bit into my flesh and dug into my muscles like finger digs into stretchy rubber. Which is to say, none of them could penetrate Muscle-on-Muscle armor further reinforced by [The Final Butt] technique overloaded with Big Dick energy.

Her tentacles squirmed around me harmlessly. Wisely, they avoided touching my buttocks, for the technique enhanced its glory to such dangerous levels that both men and women had to be cautious of staring at it directly. Tentacle monsters, given their natural proclivity to perversion, had to be doubly as careful.

I let out a content breath as the tendrils massaged my back, leaning lower to be eye-to-eye with the cultivator, who kept on trying to slam various tentacle techniques into me.

She might not know it, but she’d already lost.

The more she struggled against my casual efforts, the more her underlings gawked. The more her underlings gawked, the more Big Dick energy I gained. And the more Big Dick energy I gained, the more casual I could be about her efforts to fight me. This was the sweet-spot Alpha Cultivators could sometimes establish amidst battle. A situation where Big Dick energy created an infinitely self-sustaining loop.

I directed some of the excess energy to speak in [Universal Alpha Language], “You know Fifth Gigachad Armstrong Mansson. Me know Fifth Gigachad Armstrong Mansson.”

In the abyss of her dark blue eyes flashed old sunken wrecks of recognition, pain, longing, and obsession. She said his name, followed by words that I understood to mean something along the lines of, “Don’t you dare hurt him, he’s just misunderstood!”

I’d seen this crazed devotion towards the abuser before in past residents of Happyland. If only I’d known how to speak Xianxia and had the words of Dr. Edelfelt, perhaps I could’ve cured her. But I still did the best I could.

“Me understand,” I replied in [Universal Alpha Language], “You come talk to camera. Talk Armstrong Mansson and feelings. Talk everything. Armstrong Mansson sees talk and Armstrong Mansson understand you.”

She blinked, confusion sailing over her eyes, hesitation right behind it.

“Come with. Try talk. If not work, then ok to stop,” I added, leading the cultivator towards a little studio Riko and the others had set up.

Or would have, had a strong grip not grasped me by the shoulder.

The stench invaded my nose.

“Armstrong Mansson!” the cultivator swooned in a Xianxia accent.

A calm deep voice behind me replied to her, “Shut up, bitch.”

Somehow, she swooned even harder, nearly fainting.

Big Dick energy recoiled like water splashed on boiling oil in response to a huge surge in local asshole energy. I let go of the cultivator and slowly turned whilst removing the hand from my shoulder.

The hand slapped mine away and grabbed my wrist. “Who are you to challenge me, boy?”

Boy?

My Big Dick energy shuddered.

I locked eyes with the scar-riddled Gigachad of a man who stood before me, matching my imposing height and musculature. His peppered greasy hair was styled in a casual a-hole style and his full graying beard was trimmed to an immaculate perfection.

“The one who’s here to beat you, old man,” I replied.

Asshole energy recoiled like a kicked puppy (not that I know how kicked puppies act), unused to being rebuked with such boldness!

He glared at me with powerfully charged [Eyes of the Alpha].

I returned the technique.

“The women are mine,” said Aphahole, his words almost a growl. Several of said women swooned.

“If they choose to be,” I said, causing hope to swell in those who’d rather not ‘be his’.

Dao crackled like invisible lightning. Gray sparks rose from his eyes and blue from mine. Big Dick energy and Asshole energy coalesced as we stared at each other, growing in tandem like twin tornadoes. Their influence began to manifest in floating specs of dirt and slowly growing cracks on the tiles.

Then, before anyone had time to blink, the first strike was thrown.