The room was very still.
But the Void Sovereign took another calm sip of his tea before continuing. His voice was calm, the calm of a man who had lived with this specific truth for so long that speaking it aloud no longer produced any particular difficulty.
"I hate cultivators. All of them. Regardless of race. Because cultivators killed my biological parents when I was young."
He paused; "Ironically, I had to become one myself if I wished to have any hope of dealing with them."
He set the tea down and smiled; "During my path of gaining strength, I encountered a couple who took me in. They were not talented. They could not comprehend Qi. They lived ordinary, mortal lives. They raised me as their own son, and I swore, the moment I understood what they had done for me, that I would protect them. That I would ensure the fate my biological parents had suffered would not touch them. That the chaos and endless wars the cultivation brought to Earth would not consume the small, quiet lives they had made."
He looked at Stan directly; "So I made a plan."
He gestured around the chamber, which Stan understood to mean the entire inheritance, and by extension the entire underground world he had glimpsed at the beginning.
"When I transcended, when my cultivation reached the level required to enact a project of this scale, I created a vast pocket realm linked to a planet-wide formation. I anchored the formation to Earth’s spiritual foundation and to the great spirit tree that served as this world’s Qi source. The formation, once active, did two things. First, it continuously absorbed Earth’s ambient Qi and drained the tree of its capacity to generate more. Second, it monitored every being on Earth for cultivation potential. Any human who reached a level I considered dangerous to my parents, any human capable of exceeding the protective talismans I had given them, was quietly teleported to the pocket realm. Any vampire, werewolf, or demihuman capable of threatening ordinary humans was teleported as well."
Stan sat very still. The pieces began assembling themselves in his mind.
"The Great Withering," he said slowly. "The Night of Vanishing."
"Both my doing. Both consequences of the same formation. The vampires, the werewolves, the demihumans, the True Humans, all of them were pulled into the realm to preserve Earth’s quiet. The Qi’s departure from Earth was the same formation, feeding the realm’s expansion. The realm I let you glimpse when you first arrived here is where they all went. They still live there. Their descendants live there. Their societies persist there. They simply no longer live here."
Stan absorbed this in silence and Void Sovereign continued; "I also concealed Earth from the perception of the higher cosmic civilizations that would otherwise have taken interest in it. Earth became, from the perspective of the greater cosmos, a forgotten backwater. A world with no Qi, no cultivators of note, no reason to visit. A place beneath their attention."
He paused; "All of it for two people. My foster parents. Ordinary, untalented, mortal people who had raised me."
He picked up his tea again; "I never asked permission. Not from anyone. Not from the races I displaced. Not from the humans whose potential I limited. Not from the Earth itself. I made the decision, and I enacted it, and I have no regrets. My foster parents lived peaceful, ordinary lives. They died naturally, of old age, having never been touched by the wars or the ambitions of cultivators. To me, one peaceful lifetime for them outweighed the ambitions of every cultivator on Earth combined."
He looked at Stan levelly; "You may judge that as you wish. I have long since made peace with the moral weight of the decision."
Stan absorbed the story in silence. The scale of it was staggering.
Not the killing but the engineering. A single cultivator had, out of grief and love, restructured the fundamental spiritual physics of an entire planet to protect two ordinary people.
It was, by any measure, the most extreme act of familial devotion Stan had ever heard described.
It was also, he realized, exactly the kind of act that the Introduction to Earth book had been carefully sidestepping. The book had described the effects of the Night of Vanishing and the Great Withering without naming any cause.
The cause was, apparently, sitting across the table from him drinking tea.
The Void Sovereign continued; "The version of me that sits before you is only a split soul. My main body transcended long ago. It wanders the cosmos now. I do not know precisely where it is, or what it currently does. This portion of my consciousness was left behind, tied to this inheritance, tasked with a single function."
He smiled slightly; "The formation is old. Older than any structure I ever built. And formations of this scale weaken over time. The recent return of Qi to Earth, the emergence of the Spirit Pool your generation discovered, was the first sign that my formation is beginning to fail. When Qi returned, this inheritance awakened. It was designed to activate automatically at that moment. It was designed to summon the first qualifying human cultivator it could detect."
He gestured to Stan; "That was you."
Stan finally spoke. "You said you don’t know the history of Earth after the Withering."
"Correct."
"But your memories, the fragments in the temple. I watched centuries of Earth’s history through them. You witnessed the entire Age of Dao."
"I witnessed everything until the moment my formation fully activated. Once Earth’s Qi began to drain in earnest, I fell into a long dormancy tied to the formation’s power flow. I saw the Withering begin. I did not see it finish. I have no direct knowledge of anything that has happened on Earth in the past several thousand years."
Stan raised an eyebrow; "Doesn’t your consciousness reach beyond this chamber? Can’t you just scan the rest of Earth and see what’s changed?"
The Void Sovereign smiled slightly. "My main body could. I cannot. This split soul is limited to the regions of Earth that carry ambient Qi. At present, that is essentially only the Antarctic region where the Spirit Pool emerged. The rest of the world remains a blank space to me. I would need Qi to spread far more widely across Earth’s surface before I could passively observe it."
"You have a lake of Qi in your inheritance. You could use some of that."
The Void Sovereign shook his head; "Expending an enormous quantity of preserved spatial Qi merely to observe the mundane state of a planet is not something I choose to do. The Qi has more valuable uses. Beyond that, I do not have full control over this inheritance. I can guide it. I can save aspects of it. I can direct the trials. I cannot personally deploy its resources for arbitrary purposes."
Stan tilted his head; "Well, I’m shocked by all this, I never expected it. The fact you’re answering all my questions very easily is even more shocking."
The Void Sovereign smiled, and this smile carried the small, wry acknowledgment of a promise being kept; "I said I would explain everything when we met. I am a being of my word."