AnnouncementA/N: At the end of this chapter, I'm introducing some high-level terms. I'll be expanding on them more through the gods' POV throughout the story, but I felt some basic expnation would be helpful here:

  Spoiler- Ascendants: anyone who has broken through the power cap of a world, and gained the ability to exert their will on part of it

  - Divine Ascendants: gods who derive their power from worship, and act as a medium between a concept and mortals. The concept is subtly changed on the world based on the god's understanding of their concept (e.g. without Zeus, we might not associate lightning with judgement). As they grow in power, their concept solidifies into a natural w, and they tend to work towards the progression of a world or universe. They are generally detached from mortals, but may introduce agents to help them in exchange for faith to keep improving their concepts.

  - Demonic Ascendant: gods who derive their power through devouring energy, and act as overlords and defenders of their people. They tend to py the antagonist from a Mortal perspective, tempting those of weak will into sacrificing themselves in exchange for temporary power (e.g. Lucifer making deals in exchange for souls). Mortals within a demonic territory tend to be stronger overall, as they have endured hardship and have stronger wills than those who submit themselves to a Divine authority (excluding zealots, who take an aggressive stance on proselytizing). On a pnetary scale, they are necessary to help defend the world from external threats, such as pnar invasions or space-time turbulence, as they have more raw energy to use.

  - Sage Ascendant: Sages promote the bance between the Divine and the Demonic, and work to strengthen the world as a whole, and generally work either by themselves or with a retively small group. Their methods tend to be closer to the divine, as they grow concepts into ws, but they choose to create territories that they rule, and gather both faith and resentment, which brings them closer to demonic methods. All true creator gods are sage ascendants, as the creation of life inherently requires a banced approach. In this story, Jian and Lingling will follow the sage development path, bringing the concepts of Home (Jian) and Family (Lingling) into the world, as well as creating a new race of beings, and working to solve the bance issue between soul masters and soul beasts.

  [colpse]Discimer: I do not own Soul Land or its associated characters

  Running through the woods, a young girl with dark blue hair, violet eyes could be seen. She drew the hood of the bck cloak she wore down over her eyes as she ran, as though it might hide her tears from her pursuers.

  'Run north,' her mother had told her, whispering as softly as she could over the crackling fire and screams of the rest of the house. 'Get away from this pce. The capital may be grand and glittering, but it's truly just gilded bones.'

  The girl had been running for nearly a month now, only stopping in small vilges to buy some food once she had put enough distance between herself and her family home.

  'That spoiled brat,' she thought to herself, clenching her fists in anger at the memory and trying to suppress the fresh tears that threatened to leak down the channels of the st ones. 'I tell him to leave me alone, and he sends killers and thugs to my family home. How despicable.'

  The girl had always been a bit precocious, and at 4 years old, she had no interest in other people. A rich young boy, about 10 years old, who apparently had never been told no in his life, kept pestering her at one of her parents' dinner parties in the manor. She told him to leave her alone and rushed to her parents, asking if they could take her away without causing a scene. Her parents obliged her request, and the party ended early, with the guests from the Seven Treasure Gzed Tile Sect leaving, taking the spoiled brat with them.

  Not a week ter they were attacked at midnight, with butchers in human skin wearing masks coming to torch the house she had lived in all her life. If it weren't for her mother, she'd likely be a sve by now. Not that their family had ever been much better, but at least under the wing of the Imperial family they had some measure of protection, and could pretend that they were a normal soul master cn.

  While they were waiting for the Imperial family to step in and save their family, they heard the voice of one of the men, "Find the brat, the young master has decided on her as a sve for her insolence." At that moment, the girl, along with her father and mother, knew there was no help coming. It would all be covered up by someone or another. The girl's father decided to make a st stand for them to escape through the garden. Fate, however, was cruel to the family. Her mother got stuck in a rose-bush, and she knew there was no more escape when her husband fell. She gave all of her supplies to her young daughter, and all but demanded she escape.

  The girl stumbled over a root, further scarring her hands and knees, and breaking her from her thoughts. In that moment, her course slightly altered from her goal of a small northern vilge, towards a slightly more southern city on the coast.

  As the desperate girl continued her journey, Nezhi was fighting for his life against five soul ancestors and a soul king, not 10 kilometers from that lonesome girl's position. He had managed to divert all of the attacks that were unched towards his brother in arms, but he was stretching himself to the limit doing so. He swung his sword, once again intercepting what would have otherwise been a fatal blow aimed at Hao's head, when a sense of pressure releasing burst forth in a shockwave, causing the five soul ancestors to stumble slightly.

  Hao opened his eyes, seeing the ragged state of Nezhi, as well as the scarred ground of the clearing. He looked at his brother in gratitude, before turning to the bandits, his silvery eyes hardening into icy moons with both rage and resolve.

  Summoning his staff, he whispered the incantation for his first soul skill in his mind, causing a bck-blue glow to envelop both it and himself, hardening the staff to the point of steel and increasing his strength. He strode forwards towards the bandits, ans with another glow, his second soul skill activated, causing the wind around him to pick up, blessing both him and Nezhi with faster speed and mild regeneration.

  Watching the pace of the battle begin to shift, the bandits weren't idle, drawing their daggers and clubs, with the soul king's bear martial soul having allowed him to recover from Nezhi's test reposte. No words were said as both sides flew into action.

  Hao's staff intent flooded the battlefield as he spun his Martial Soul, causing fast energy attacks to trip and hammer into the bandits. Nezhi, now no longer relegated to defense and redirecting attacks, lit his fifth soul skill, and his sword intent wove gracefully through the clutter caused by Hao, forcing the soul ancestors to defend.

  The soul king bandit grew enraged as he found himself trapped in a maelstrom of wood and steel. He also activated his fifth soul skill, causing his eyes to turn red and he began cwing at everything around him, lost in bloodlust with only a single goal: kill. The sacrifice of his mental energe forced his body into overdrive, and each attack was nearly twice as strong as before.

  The battle continued on, with both sides narrowly avoiding fatal injuries but gaining several wounds that would scar regardless of when they found a healer. Finally, the bance broke as Hao tripped one of the weaker bandits successfully, and Nezhi timed his sword swing just right to take off the man's head.

  With this action, there was a brief pause, as though the world allowed a moment of mourning before the battle erupted again, twice as fierce as before. Hao, recognizing the severity, activated his fifth soul skill he had acquired but had no chance to familiarize himself with. The bck ring shone, and with a twist of his staff, his focus sharpened, and his intent redoubled, matching the strength of his previous physical attacks. His fifth soul skill was called "Monkey King's Vision", which increased his focus and increased the strength of his energy skills. His speed, as well as Nezhi's under the effect of his auxiliary skill, increased sharply, as did the soothing healing of the wind.

  With their newly enhanced strength, and the loss of an enemy, the duo made short work of the bandits before finally getting a chance to catch their breath.

  "You have good timing, brother, I don't know how much longer I could have sted." Nezhi said, gulping down air like a desert wanderer might drain a fsk of water.

  "Not just timing, it seems luck is on my side as well," Hao replied through deep breaths, drawing a dented scale with carvings out of his jacket pocket.

  During the fight, one of the bandits had unched his spear at him, and Hao was sure that he was going to die. He remembered his son's words to him as he left, making him promise to come home. When the spear hit him, it struck the scale he had pced in his breast pocket, denting it, but otherwise leaving him alive.

  "It seems I'll have to thank my son when I get back for being so thoughtful that he saved my life." he finished his earlier sentence with a hollow chuckle. The brush with death was too real to joke about freely.

  Nezhi stood there, looking at the dented scale with shock and a little awe. "It seems either you have the luck of the Angel God, or your son does and she decided that you're not going to be leaving your son in this world just yet."

  "You might just be right about the tter, my friend." Hao replied, and his face took on a questioning look, "I wonder if these bandits were the ones who lit the fire st night. We should trace them back to their base to check for any clues as to where they came from. These men aren't cold-tempered enough to hail from this far north, and I don't want southern nonsense pguing the nds around the city."

  "Good call," Nezi replied, "Just remember, I'm bming you for our extended trip."

  Hao shivered at that, dreading the scolding eyes of his wife when he got back. 'I'll have to make a stop for a gift, or she'll never let me hear the end of it,' he thought to himself.

  The two men gathered all the valuables off the corpses of the bandits, put them in their storage rings, and set up a quick pyre for the bodies to repel any hungry beasts. After they finished resting and the fire died down, they buried the ashes and began following the tracks back through the forest.

  Two days ter, they arrived at a set of tents hidden in a series of caves by a cliff, where they found a few more stolen valuables, as well as a small chest of gems and an envelope filled with orders. As the two men read through the orders, their faces paled, and they looked at each other in shock.

  "Hao, we've got to get rid of any evidence we were here. We can't weather this kind of storm. They have titles backing them, and I don't know how high up this young master is, but I'm not taking any chances. Make it look like the bandits ran off with half the pay, and got themselves dead in the forest while their fire caught on their tents after a few days." Nezhi ranted with urgency, practically demanding they distance themselves from this matter as much as possible.

  "You're not wrong, Nezhi. Let's do that, but we keep the orders and the goods. If shit hits the fan, I want to be able to send this up the chain and get some backing. Spirit Hall has been encroaching on the interests of the rge Sects and the High Nobles for a while now, this would give them some moral ground and secure our safety in an emergency." Hao replied, feeling a cold sweat trickle down his back.

  As he put away the paper, he thought about the contents of the dread orders they had stumbled upon:

  [ CAPTURE YE LINGLING, AND RETURN HER TO THE SEVEN TREASURE GLAZED TILE SECT'S YOUNG MASTER WANG. HALF PAYMENT UP FRONT, HALF UPON DELIVERY. SECOND HALF FORFEIT IN THE EVENT OF THE GIRL'S DEMISE]

  The duo scattered some still-embered coals towards the tents, making them catch and help sell the story, before leaving the area at all haste and covering their tracks as they went, both yearning to get as far away as possible and return home.

  While Hao and Nezhi were racing against time to escape from the dreadful schemes creeping up from the south, Jian and the rest of the family went on as usual, working at the inn and trying to distract themselves from their worry. With Xia and Mei both pregnant, Mei was taken in to the Lu household to be taken care of, while Xue and Chen came to help Jian take care of them.

  One day, five months after Hao and Nezhi left, Jian looked over the staves he had made to practice with his father when he returned. Looking over the freshly cquered product of his hard work, he felt a sense of accomplishment. Nodding in satisfaction, he set them by the empty hearth to dry, and began thinking of his next project to keep himself busy while his father was away.

  He was about to turn five, and his alternate self had begun to study herbs with the local apothecary in an attempt to learn to prolong his grandparents' health. The apothecary recognized this as a means to channel his worry into something productive, and took him as an apprentice to give the kid something solid to fall back on when the worst happened.

  One thing Jian noticed is that when he was dreaming, he didn't feel the emotions of his other self. He figured that his dreaming was just to gather knowledge, and while he was a little curious about how it worked, he was rather gd that it was all intellectual. He thought that if his other self had a wife, and if he himself felt those emotions, he might have trouble keeping himself grounded in this world ter in life.

  Freeing himself from the distracting tangent, Jian refocused on his next project: creating a compendium of herbal knowledge in this world. While he knew that there were books in the cn library, he hadn't paid much attention to them in the past. With the new direction given by his dream, he decided that now was a good time to start. First, he'd compile the knowledge the cn had, complete with references to the knowledge, and then he'd use what he learned from the apothecary to learn more about the pnts, and begin to make some basic remedies to keep on hand.

  Goal set, he got to work collecting the books and listing all of the common pnts. Blue-silver grass, star spirit grass, red ginseng, astragalus root, he noted down all of the herbs that were unfamiliar to him, and then began listing all the herbs he knew of from his dreams. Lavender, rosemary, thyme, oak, and willow; more and more herbs were added to his list as he worked his way through two worlds worth of pnt lore. Once the lists were complete, he began comparing them. What he immediately noticed was that while not all of the herbs from his dream world were the same, many were either simir, or at the very least seemed to share an origin. Clovers were actually called wasproot here, which caused quite a few headaches.

  It seemed that while on Terra, bumblebees managed to evolve from the fae taming wasps, simir to how humans tamed wolves to create dogs, the struggle for survival here and the fact that pnts could live and grow and think meant that there were fewer species that depended on external forces for pollination, and more that focused on some sort of parasitic or offensive propagation. Blue-silver grass actually seemed to be strangely docile, which actually made him quite wary of the pnt. With its abundance, there was no way for it to evolve or survive without a backer, and a backer wouldn't keep it around for no reason.

  While Jian was preoccupied with his paranoid thoughts about grass overtaking human civilization, his mother was starting to really worry about her husband. Mei, Nezhi's wife who was staying with them, was also quite worried, as she was eight months pregnant and the baby would be arriving sometime this month. The two of them tried their best to remain calm, but with each passing day their anxiety only grew.

  "They should be back soon," Xue soothed the two hormonal women, trying her best to maintain hope and keep them from harming their health with the excessive stress from their husbands being out hunting for almost six months. "I'm sure it just took a while to find the beasts they were looking for, no exciting adventures for them."

  "They better be back soon," Xia snapped, her stress bleeding off as she realized that she shouldn't be angry with her mother at this time.

  Xue let out a light chuckle, smiling and looking at her daughter as she watched her pn to help her calm down work wonders. This had become an almost daily occurrence for the two, with Xue giving the two women an outlet for their stress, and then letting the guilt at snapping calm them down some. She didn't take their anger to heart, she remembered how painful it was when it was her in their position.

  "By the way, daughter, where is my smart little grandson?" Xue asked, quite curious where that rambunctious child had gone off to these days.

  "Oh, he's been on a kick about herbal medicine these days, muttering about making sure that we're healthy. I think he's been taking samples and documenting everything about any herb he can get his hands on." Xia boasted, gd to be able to talk about her son, "Personally, I find it adorable that he wants to take care of us, but I think once he started reading the cn books he went off on a tangent. He looks so smart carrying around those notes of his, though, doesn't he?"

  Xue chuckled, agreeing with her daughter. She'd noticed Jian floundering for something to do after he finished those wooden staves of his, and seeing him throw himself into books and pnts afterwards had worried her. He seemed desperate for anything to keep his hands busy to take his mind off his father's long absence. She just hoped that everything worked out alright.

  As the women talked deep into the night, a certain goddess had finished observing her newfound follower and the world he lived in. The world he was from was strange, with one God eerily simir to that caananite upstart from a few millenia in the past. It had started our fine, and it seemed that there would be a thriving civilization blooming in the middle east, but a chance encounter between his son and Apollo had revealed that beneath the genial facade lurked a tyrant bent on world domination. The Greeks and the Egyptians, who had been spited by him once, had joined forces to suppress his influence, and help bolster his son to keep the madman's attention focused within.

  He had long since fallen to his own war angels, and in the aftermath the god's son had risen to providence, bringing the djinn into the fold and forming a demonic nation near the bck Sea. It was a welcome development for the world, especially with that monkey sage to the far east helping to mediate. The mortals were thriving, especially with the wish-granting scheme that the new lordship was cooking up. The weak-willed were culled, and it led strong leaders to rise up and develop the country.

  The goddess Hestia let out a hum as she pondered over the subtle changes she had seen in the world's fate. It seemed that the gods in that universe were heavily involved with leaving legacies, and the new successor of the war angels was meant to unite the continent. Originally, it was her mother that was meant to succeed, but someone was tampering with fate, and not for the better.

  What was most concerning was the absence of sage ascendants, and the suppression of demonic ascendants. While she might find their methods distasteful, Hestia knew deep down that worlds required bance. It seemed that this divine influence was meant to keep the demonic faction suppressed, while paving a path for their own successor to rise and repce them. And from the soul that she saw shuttling through the void, Hestia estimated this successor was being hand-picked as well.

  It seemed that her follower may have to become a champion after all, and with his soul peeping over in the Gaelic Isles, he would probably be influenced by the supernatural lore there... Realization hit her in the face like a truck. A sage was being sponsored by the world, and she was willing to bet that there was an akashic connection between the two in order to project the soul here. It seemed that while he was meant to be influenced by the fae, he had chosen her solely because he felt she represented the concept closest to his heart. Hestia had no intention of interfering with the rise of this sage, but what was the value of being powerful and alone? She could at least guide someone to him that could become his equal. If it worked out, wonderful. If not, at least he'd make a friend.

  Seeing the tragic young girl that was alone and afraid, she gave her a gentle nudge towards her believer. What happened after that was none of her business, but if she judged their characters right, they'd shake the world with their rise. Seeing the impending chaos, she decided to call over her old friend Loki, he'd definitely get a kick out of this, and with Terra getting a bit boring she was worried that he might stir up another world war if left to his own devices. How he managed to stir up all that trouble over the assassination of a single Svic cultist, she'd never know