Interlude
I was pleased with Sgt Li Sung Wan and Corporal Bubbles Chang. They were just what I was looking to find. They were body cultivators. Unlike the spiritual cultivators who had opened their mana gates and become awakened beings, they had “failed” to awaken, and their bodies had drawn in the elemental essences to strengthen themselves, similar to a Spiritual Cultivator going through bone cleansing to reach body of stone, or palace transformation to reach body of iron, they had drawn enough elemental essences into their flesh to be entirely superhuman in strength, speed, endurance, and even senses. In fact, while the spiritual cultivators regarded the path of body cultivation as a failure, it was the very path Astrella and the Ogresses took. Their bodies were hardened against the corruption of demonic chi the way a spiritual cultivator before they entered the Yang stage was not. They were chi blind, but their bodies were spiritual hardened in a way those spiritual cultivators who had opened mana gates and formed mana channels were not.
Sgt Li Sung Won was speaking now to his troops.
“Listen up, this is Captain Bolverk and Lt Astrella. They saved us from the vampire horde that took Fort Defiance, and they did more than that. They killed the demons behind it. Killed them, and ate them. Now I know you have been thinking the same as me, how can mortals with swords and bows, spears and shields hope to stand off demons when the proud sons of heaven in the sects are cowering in fear behind their own walls. They have an answer. They come with a god that does not hide in the Celestial Realm, a god that wants to get down in the blood and the mud with us. A god that wants to teach you how to wield the power of dragons, and feast on the souls of demons like they seek to feast on the flesh of our fallen brothers. Do you want to learn to fight? Or do you want to wait until the demons come, and hope some proud immortal will come down from his mountain, dressed in silks and dripping with treasures, to risk his life for your peasant ass?” Sgt Sung Won asked.
Corporal Chang Qua asked the question his men were muttering. “Who is this god, and what do we have to do to grow strong enough to face demons?”
It was a fair question. The gods set the laws of heaven to put order to the universe, they raised the dragons to keep that order, and then they allowed the immortal ascendents to join them in the Celestial Palace to stand forever above the world and contemplate the great matters of the soul and existence. They did not muck about in farmer’s fields, nor in the screams and clash of the battle line.
I could read my straight-line and stepped forward. I bared my chest, showing the three linked triangles of my Valknut, looking like three interlocking mountains, the symbol was that of Odin’s own, jokingly referred to as the “insert spear here” mark of those dedicated to the Victory Father, and Feeder of Ravens (because he granted us victory all times but one, but we fed the ravens one way or the other).
“I carry inside me a piece of Odin, the Victory Father, the Battle Glad, the Feeder of Ravens, and the Lord of the Mound. Those who fight in battle are his, as are those who fall in it. He loves best those who know no fear, and he has picked the battlefields from the highest heaven to lowest hell to learn the secrets of the spirits, and to gain power over them. I tell you this truth, the living have mastery over the dead. The higher mysteries of cultivation the nobles keep from you, the ways of the sects and temple, you need them not. You need only a body and the will to drive it beyond limits, you need only a heart that embraces life, that chooses when death stands on every side, to laugh in the joy of the last day, and hurl yourself into the fray. Do this, his secrets he will share.”
Nothing I said was a lie, but I was only about seventy percent sure it would work for other people. I mean I had a feeling it would, and Odin didn’t say no, and I could feel him looking out through my eye at the soldiers. I turned to Corporal Chang Qua and ordered him.
“Remove your breast plate, I will put my hand on your heart, and let Odin put his mark on it. He will open your heart mana gate, and I will teach you the way to use the elemental essences your body cultivation has already given you, and the mana you were told you could not touch, to become something greater than the immortals. You will become a demon hunter. You will not just grow strong as a dragon, fierce as a tiger, you will be able to fall upon the demons like sheep, and consume them. You will be able to take their demonic chi into yourself, and feed it to the fragment of the god inside you. You can not just fight demons, you can purify what they have soiled.” I knew this was true, the Kitsune had showed us how when we rescued it from the demons. Chi allowed us to reach out and draw in the corruption, but elements woven into our flesh mixed with the divine touch of the god were what allowed us to burn it away.
As Sgt Li Sung Won knelt, Astrella grabbed Bubbles and told her. “Listen, no sense stripping in front of these idiots, besides, there is more I have to show you that he is forgetting.”
I don’t know what she was talking about. I had spent lots of time working out how to teach how to awaken spiritual cultivation in a body cultivator, modeled after what Astrella and I had done. Well, not really, because I couldn’t exactly teach them how we did it. Astrella and I were what this world called Dual Cultivators, which is a nice way of saying we blended our souls when we blended our bodies when we made love; we tore open each others body, mind and soul with the power we poured into each other, making love with such fury the sky’s brewed tempest, the earth rose up, fire danced on the wind and springs shot up from the earth. I mean, give me that old time religion! It’s not like I could teach the men that. No. Give them Odin, and have the old bastard rip open their heart to help them circulate. Teach them how to meditate and gradually open the other gates. Then train them how to push the elements they draw in with the chi to reenforce their body, rather than wasting it as impurities. We were teaching mortal cultivation, not a path to immortality, not a rejection of the world, but an embracing of it.
As Li Sung Won grunted as the Valknut burned into his skin, he gave a shout as energy flared over his body, surrounding him in a blessed light that shone from his flesh, with a feeling of strength and purity. Well, it was a bit dramatic, but I guess Odin is doing his own Public Relations with special effects. I certainly didn’t glow when I opened my first. Of course, I also didn’t die being hung by the neck and speared, so I guess there was some wiggle room in the whole special effects thing.
I told the men to form a line, and that I would invest them one by one with a fragment of the god, and teach them how to meditate, to open their mana gates, and then Astrella would teach them how to use the elemental essences their bodies were already drawing in to grow stronger. As I invested each soldier, Sgt Sung Won asked me a question.
“Is that how you and Astrella learned to use both body and spiritual arts?” He asked, not knowing why I couldn’t show him that way.
As I opened my mouth to deflect the question, I became aware of the cheering in my head, the rising excitement of that fragment of a god that lived in the back of my head. What was he so excited about. Taking oaths and giving tattoos was about as exciting as digging trenches. Necessary, but not really fun. As I wondered what Odin was so excited about, I wondered what was taking Bubbles and Astrella so long. I had performed the initiation on fifteen of the soldiers, and they only had to do Bubbles. Why weren’t they back?
Odin whispered in my mind “Sansi Island.” Which was strange, that was the famous island of all women witches. What could that have to do with us in this world today?
Just then I heard a cry. A cry of fierce and unmistakable joy, followed by another louder deeper one, a rising chorus of ecstatic female shouts. Great green vines shot up around the command tent, then grew heavy with flowers. Rain fell from a clear sky only to burn off as fire blazed up in a ring around the command tent as the heavens and earth seemed to swirl around the command tent that Bubbles and Astrella had disappeared into for Bubbles initiation. I thought to myself, there is no way. The only time I have seen that reaction was when Astrella and I………
Just then the earth shook and the command tent rose as the earth beneath it rose half the height of a man and two voices cried out together in unmistakable bliss.
A full platoon, less Astrella and Bubbles stopped everything, and waited. A few minutes later, Astrella emerged, tying her robes back together. Bubbles had her tunic on, but not tied together. She brushed past me and grabbed Sgt Li Sung Won.
“Come on. I just learned something FABULOUS. I have got to show you. Don’t worry, I promise I will at least start out gentle!” She said as she dragged Sgt Li Sung Won off to the tent, as Bubbles passed me, I noticed she was blushing, had Ogress sized hickeys on her neck, and had all of her mana gates open.
Astrella slapped me on the ass and laughed happily.
“That Odin of yours was right. I could teach her the exact way you taught me. Got all her mana gates open and everything. The two of them have already been dual cultivating pure body for ages, so why not teach them to do it right.” She said smiling happily.
Odin told her. My god, who was laughing his ass off in the back of my head, let me lead a glorified enlistment parade while he was leading my dearly beloved to have a lesbian magical sex fest while got to teach a whole platoon how to sit down and breathe quietly. Here I was, recruiting for my god his first new human followers in this world, and he seduced my wife, and another woman.
My god is an asshole.
“So,” Astrella said cheerfully. “Now that you have all got a fragment of the god inside you, who wants to learn to meditate?” She boomed in a voice that brooked no argument. We all sat and began to meditate, thinking about the earth, the wind, fire, water, the flow of life in the woods around us. Right about the time I was beginning to feel the elements respond to my thoughts and enter my lungs with every breath, I heard more cries of passion and love making. I could feel the earth pulse with its approval as the spirits of land and water, of fire and wood, of the sky above felt the passionate fusion of two souls bound in love, and blessed by the joining power of a fragment of a god.
My Sgt and top corporal were in there making love, and I was out here teaching a platoon of soldiers how to meditate.
Yes.
My god is an asshole.
On the other hand, I could feel the soldiers smiling as they settled in to their meditation. Their bodies were already full of the elemental essences, more than any non awakened should have. They could feel the purity, the unity, and the sacredness of what their Sgt and Corporal were doing, and they would learn in the days ahead the very real power that came from embracing unity with this world, with nature, and with spirit, rather than turning away from the world on the cold path of spiritual cultivation. One platoon wasn’t an army, but one platoon trained not only to resist, but to feed off of demonic chi was the beginning of a weapon that could well change a war the demons were well on the way to winning.
