Hearing the entire story, Stan let out a slow breath and let his shoulders drop by a fraction.
The whole story sat in his mind like a heavy stone. A cultivator who had drained an entire world of its cosmic energy, banished four races to a hidden pocket realm, and concealed Earth from the notice of the cosmos itself, all to protect two ordinary people from the possibility of being caught in the wars of the strong.
He went that far, Stan thought slowly. For something as simple as keeping two mundane people safe.
He wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or moved. Both, perhaps. He sat with the story for a moment, letting it settle.
Then a question surfaced; "Instead of doing all that, wouldn’t creating a stronger protection talisman for them have been simpler? Something that could shield them from any threat that came near them, without needing to restructure the entire world?"
The Void Sovereign shook his head; "You are thinking clearly, but I already considered that. The protection talisman I gave my parents was limited by their mortality. They could not comprehend Dao. Their bodies could not hold the resonance required to safely wear any artifact stronger than the one I gave them. If I had tried to force a higher-grade talisman onto them, it would have damaged them faster than any external threat. Instead of saving them, it would have killed them. So I reduced the talisman’s grade to the level their bodies could safely bear, and I reshaped the rest of the world so that they would never need more."
The answer landed in Stan’s mind and immediately connected to something. The Qi lake. The corrosive substance the researcher had found.
The Spirit Pool that dissolved every material it touched.
And yet, Stan had bathed in a lake of the same substance and been strengthened by it.
He understood, in that moment, the deep principle at the heart of what the Void Sovereign was describing. Higher-order substances required higher-order beings to interact with them. The Qi in the pool would have dissolved any modern human who tried to swim in it, because modern humans lacked the comprehension of Dao that would allow their bodies to resonate correctly with the substance. Stan had been able to swim in the lake because his comprehension of Space had reached a threshold where the interaction became compatible.
The Void Sovereign’s parents, mortal and untalented, could not have safely worn a talisman of higher grade for the same reason. They lacked the substrate.
To put it simply, thick amount of Qi should be thesame, causing damage to those who are foreign to dao, and the protection talisman is something created with Qi... The principle held.
Stan filed the understanding away.
He looked at the Void Sovereign across the table.
The tea between them was still steaming.
"So," Stan said quietly. "What do you want with me?"
The Void Sovereign smiled. "That, cultivator, is the next thing we should discuss."
He still has that calm smile as he set his tea down carefully.
"What I want with you," he said, "is not particularly complicated. I am close to being fully depleted. This split soul was designed to hold on until it could pass everything I made to a suitable inheritor. Its time is nearly done. I want to pass on my inheritance, my technique, my accumulated resources, the knowledge of the formation, and a set of items that will make your path considerably easier, to a cultivator who fits the criteria I set when I created this place."
He looked at Stan steadily.
"You are that cultivator."
Stan said nothing.
"There is, however, one condition."
Stan’s eyes narrowed slightly. "What condition?"
"The formation I built is failing. That is why Qi is beginning to fully return to Earth. When it fully collapses, and this is a matter of days, not centuries, every constraint I placed on the world will disappear. The vampires, werewolves, demihumans, and True Humans I sent to the pocket realm will begin returning to Earth. They will not return peacefully. They have spent thousands of years in a world of active Qi, cultivating without restriction, growing stronger under conditions that ordinary Earth has not offered since the Age of Dao. The version of them that comes back will be substantially more dangerous than the version I sent away. And they will find an Earth that has forgotten them, an Earth populated by mortals who cannot comprehend what has arrived."
He picked up the teapot and poured himself another cup.
"My condition is this. When Earth’s Qi returns fully, and the vanished races come back, you will use what I give you today to defend humanity. To ensure that ordinary humans are not, once again, treated as livestock. To ensure that the peace my foster parents lived under can, in some form, extend to the ordinary humans who will inherit the world after the formation falls."
He set the teapot down.
"You will not be able to save everyone. You will not be able to prevent every conflict. But you will be strong enough, if you accept my inheritance, to draw a line under the worst of what would otherwise happen. I want your word that you will draw that line."
He looked at Stan; "Do you accept?"
Stan considered it for a while... The condition was, on its face, straightforward. Protect humanity. Use the inheritance’s gifts to defend the world he had grown up in. He had, in various ways, already been moving in that direction, with his already growing strength he planned to protect his harem and his sister already, so extending that instinct outward to the whole species was, in the abstract, an acceptable extension.
But he was not going to accept without asking.
"What am I actually receiving? Specifically. What does ’my inheritance’ include?"
The Void Sovereign nodded with quiet approval. "A reasonable question. Let me be precise."
He gestured, and a small holographic display materialized in the air above the table between them, a soft, ambient projection of light that resolved into a scrolling list.