Calculating Cultivation

Chapter 110: The Great Desert

The scorching wind blasted my face as I descend the Last Mountains towards the Great Desert. While it was tempting to wear extra protective layers, my best protection would be my cultivation. Only a third of the cultivators who had journeyed with me decided to continue onwards. Most of them had decided to stay in Zama.

One interesting thing I learned before leaving was that the name of the city was carved into one of the older chambers, which was where it had come from. I had looked at the carved word, but nothing about it stood out to me. It was the same language used across the Great World, even if it didn’t have any meaning I knew of.

Perhaps it was an ancient name or a swear word of some kind. If I came all the way out here and got stuck, I might carve a swear word or two into the stone before my death. A minor mystery which had been intriguing for a couple of minutes, but it just didn’t matter.

I was more concerned about the approaching white sand. When I reached the sand that curved upwards on the side of the mountain, I noted the wind wasn’t blowing it, which was surprising. I reached down and gave the sand a poke and got a small shock. The sand was somehow electrically charged, which kept it all togeather.

The grains I had poked were swept up into the air. I observed them as they flew up and then were drawn back down. How interesting. With the strong wind constantly moving across the Great Desert, I would have thought they would have been swept away. I tried to think how that would even work and couldn’t work out the scientific properties of such a thing.

Why was the charge localized like that? How did the sand clump togeather? I did notice the sand grains smoothing out where I had poked them. Perhaps some combination of the heat and the wind? I shook my head and then set off into the Great Desert. The group of cultivators followed behind me with Junior Wei leading them.

She was determined to see what lay at the center of the Great World before her death and I could respect her determination along with the other cultivators. They had placed their trust into me, even though everything pointed to their certain death.

As we moved across the Great Desert, streams of white sand were blown up into the air from our steps before falling back down. The worst part was that for anyone trying to return, it would be impossible to find the tunnel back to Zama. There was no lighthouse on this side of the Last Mountains and the cultivators of the Great World would struggle massively going over the peaks, if their very blood didn’t boil first.

Thinking about the situation, this place would act to temper their cultivation, if they had gotten past the pre-breakthrough in order develop perfect bodily control. That would be the only way to transverse through the Great Desert.

If a cultivator did manage such a feat, they would be immortal and would look to travel. There were only two points of interest. The edge of the Great World and the center. Most people would head to the center. It would be a natural instinct to suspect there would be something there, since the way the Life Light was positioned in the sky implied the Great World was a circle, which was common knowledge.

After traveling for a while I paused to drink some water. While my body didn’t require much, the heat was absolutely brutal. If I couldn’t see energy, I would have suspected it was in the air and impacting me somehow. I looked at the ground and could see my shadow pointing behind me very slightly. I adjusted my feet to make sure I was level.

The sand dunes weren’t perfectly flat. They were angled in gentle waves. After making sure I was perfectly vertical, I checked my shadow again. I had drifted off course by a couple of degrees from heading towards the center of the Great World. Thankfully I was able to perfectly sense the downward pull, which was hopefully aligned perpendicular to the Life Light.

“Let’s get moving,” I said out loud and started moving in the correct direction a few seconds later. Each of the cultivators traveling with me had immense packs on their backs, under their heat resistant cloaks, packed full of supplies.

I also had restocked up on water in my spatial storage for this trip. There would be nothing out here in the Great Desert. The trip to the center would take at least five years. The water for the cultivators traveling with me would only last three years. That was using every water conservation technique to regulate their bodies that they could.

The hope was that we would come across some creatures with blood that would be processed into something drinkable. I didn’t want to go into my reserves, but if I had to, I would. We continued moving, the Last Mountains curved out behind us but became more hazy as we continued traveling due to the heat.

Since the Great World was flat, one could see quite a long distance unlike a curved world. The problem was haze in the air and the temperature wasn’t helping in the slightest.

After a week of traveling, we had to take our first longer break. Shovels were used to dig out pits in the sand, which were then covered with heat resistant cloth, both above and below. Even the sand under the top layer was incredibly hot. Small gaps at the top of the pits allowed the breeze to flow through and carry some of the hot air out of the rest areas.

The heat was horrendous. I had never pushed my physical abilities like this before. While I had been in harsh environments, this was on the verge of being completely impossible. I was resisting the heat to some degree, but I could feel my energy being drained more than usual. I focused on trying to mentally adapt to this state.

The cultivators who were traveling with me were attempting to adjust their biology however slightly to handle the heat. The problem with what they were doing was that they had to actually process the heat instead of deflecting it like I did. When it was time to head out half the group decided to turn back.

That left me with 43 cultivators including Junior Wei. Some of them believed in me beyond any reason. Others were desperate to see the center of the Great World. A large portion of them were nearing their death and wanted to do something before they finally died. Rather than trying to cling to what life they had left, they wanted to experience an adventure before finally dying.

Regardless of those reasons, we set off once more through the Great Desert after I confirmed the correct direction to head using the Life Light and making sure I was perfectly perpendicular. Every time we stopped I made sure to check we were headed in the right direction. Each time I had to correct our heading by a few degrees.

It was too easy to get lost in this blinding whiteness. It was like the environment was trying to burn my eyes out as well as burn up my body. Even when I closed my eyelids, I could still feel and see the light coming through them.

When we crossed a particularly high dune I would look behind us at the blurry Last Mountains and in front, hoping to spot the spec I had seen before from the top of those mountains. Unfortunately the haze from the heat was much greater closer to the ground, making it much harder to spot anything in the distance.

There were no creatures or plants as we traveled, just white sand. Endless white sand and heat. The more I traveled, the more I thought about cutting a hole through the Last Mountains to flood this place with water. I would kill for a couple of clouds right now. At least the heat was dry heat and not like the humidity of the Great Jungle.

It was tempting to get out water to drink, but I didn’t need to. I just wanted to, the same with letting myself sweat. The heat was so much it felt like my soul was on fire occasionally. The cultivators that were traveling with me were doing much worse. I had no doubt that eventually some of them would start dying or giving up hope.

Half of year of traveling and there was no change. On the boat I could focus solely on cultivation. In the Great Jungle the trees and creatures were interesting. Out here, there was absolutely nothing except sand and heat.

Everyone began digging pits for another break when I heard a clang. “Senior, I found something,” one of the cultivators called out and everyone went over to take a look. The lesser cultivators made sure to clear a path for me.

I saw some stone, the kind that made up the Last Mountains. Checking the slightly exposed part, it was completely flat. Either worn down or cut in some way. “Let’s dig this up. Even if it is just a hunk of rock we can take a longer break here and use its shade,” I declared.

Everyone went to work except for me, digging around the chunk of very hard stone that we had found. It soon became clear that it wasn’t natural, since we found a ninety degree corner and seams where the rock had been molded back togeather in places. Heat resistant sheets were put on the nearby sand to stop it from flooding the pit we were making.

After a while a doorway was found and the sand dug out. The interior was just a small room, but it was blessedly cooler than the outside. “There is writing here, Senior,” Junior Wei called out. I went over and took a look on the wall.

The ninth shelter. Placed here by Zama the Eternal and her loyal followers.

Oh, that was interesting. Clearly Zama was a powerful cultivator in the distance past. If they had gotten past their pre-breakthrough which was most likely and reached the same level as the Cultivator Killer they would be immortal.

They would have carved out chunks of the Last Mountains and brought them along as shelters. Since this was the ninth shelter, it was clear the goal had been to create a chain of rest points, where supplies could be stored, with the goal of creating a long enough chain to reach the center of the Great Desert. If you had unlimited time and wanted to get to the center of the Great World, this would be one option.

It also made sense we ran into one of these shelters, since both Zama and I were following the same path. There was some deviation, and it was highly unlikely to stumble on this, but nowhere near impossible. Instead of a 2D area, it was more like a thick line.

“We will take a long rest here,” I declared and pulled out my sword. Everyone began to settle in and there were some small smiles as everyone cooled off in the shelter. The stone of the Last Mountains were surprisingly heat resistant.

I brought up my sword and began writing.

Cultivator Yuan Zhou of the Heavenly Alliance rested herewith his loyal followers.

Everyone glanced over to what I had carved into the stone with my sword. It would probably never again be seen or understood, but it was a whim that had come on me. I sat down in a corner of the room that had been left open for me and drank some water. The rest of the room was packed, but even the close proximity to other people was still cooler than outside.

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I could feel my body crying out in relief. The Great Desert was just too brutal. Especially since there was no night and day cycle. The Life Light was constant giving no reprieve. “Do you think they made it, Senior?” Junior Wei asked me.

“You mean Zama reaching the center of the Great World?” I asked.

“Yes, Senior,” Junior Wei answered. I could tell everyone else was listening in.

“We are about a tenth of the way there and this is the ninth shelter. That means over a hundred shelters might have been laid down. If they were, then I could see Zama going the distance as possible. But moving and building these shelters would have taken a tremendous amount of work without any kind of spatial storage,” I said while looking about the small shelter.

“But all of you made it this far without me needing to use my spatial storage device. So, it is possible. It would just be a massive investment in time and resources. And if she did make it, the question arises about what actually is at the center of the Great World,” I finished my explanation. Many of the cultivators nodded at this.

I closed my eyes to enjoy the cooler temperature. I dosed off to sleep, instead of just resting my eyes.

I woke up and looked about as I rubbed my eyes. “Senior, we found something,” Junior Wei said. I got up and went to the center of the shelter where part of the floor had been broken apart. There was darkness below.

“One of your followers wanted to check the thickness of the floor and dug outside, just in case there was something below. Once the floor was discovered to be thicker than the walls or ceiling, we broke the seams where the floor had been welded with the other stone blocks,” Junior Wei explained.

I pulled out my sword, and enlarged the hole so I could easily jump down. Before I did that, I looked carefully into the darkness below me and could make out another room. I leapt downwards into the room and looked about.

It wasn’t a room but a tunnel. Based on its orientation, it was clearly going from the Last Mountains towards the center of the Great World. The darkness stretched on in either direction with no sign of light, beyond what was coming through the hole above me.

The walls and floor were made of stone from the Last Mountain. I moved out of the way and more cultivators quickly descended. “How bold. How daring,” I muttered. Yes, there were shelters, but they had probably been built to help manage air circulation. Looking up, besides the large hole I could spot tiny finger sized holes that led up through the walls of the structure above and there were small piles of white sand beneath them.

If someone could use biological processes to stay alive, then the value of time would be less. This was not just a project, but a mega-project to build a tunnel from the Last Mountains out to the center of the Great World.

“How far do you think it goes Senior?” Junior Wei asked me.

“Quite a ways hopefully. The amount of work and stone needed to build this structure would have to be immense,” I muttered.

If one had thousands of years and was powerful, it would just be a matter of organization. Zama could gather up cultivators and have them build this structure. But where was the quarry? Why was the city called Zama far smaller than the amount of stone needed for all of this?

The answer came to me as I considered the orientation of this tunnel. If it was a straight line, there was a chance it wasn’t pointed at the city of Zama. There had probably been another city or work area and it was wiped out by whatever was managing this place. The current Zama was probably the slave quarters. The cultivator Zama clearly had an ability to work with and manipulate this hard stone.

The residents of Zama quarrying the stone as part of the tax, would support this idea that it used to be a kind of slave encampment for cultivators. The Cultivator Killer poking the bottom of the Great World might have destroyed the original Zama or vice versa. It was hard to say if those events were related, but it was possible.

No, the shelters didn’t make sense if they were just meant for air. The shelters were built first most likely. Then this tunnel was built since they had failed in some way. Either from creatures or the environment got worse in some way. Otherwise, it would just be easier to make a vertical pipe of some kind, instead of an entire structure above ground.

That was why the floor was sealed up. The chain of shelters was probably used to help make sure the tunnel stayed on track and maximized the use of resources. It was mind boggling how much effort must have been put into this and made me even more worried about how bad the center of the Great World was going to be.

For someone who did all of this, they had to have been powerful. It was like the Great World itself. To build something like it or the Forever City, their power and ability had to be incredibly high. Even if it was a group, the top level people wouldn’t be pushovers. The more I looked up and down this tunnel, the more it appeared that Zama was between the Cultivator Killer’s cultivation and my own, which meant that she might have gotten past the first breakthrough.

“Who discovered this?” I asked.

“I did, Senior,” a cultivator came forward and bowed.

“Good instincts, here,” I pulled out a spirit stone and tossed it over. The cultivator caught it with wide eyes. “Draw as much energy as you can from that into yourself. It may allow you to get past your breakthrough.”

“Thank you, Senior!” the man said with a lot more enthusiasm. I gave him a low value spirit stone because I wanted to motivate these people to look for stuff like this and take risks. Now was the time for all these people I had brought along to step up and show their worth.

“Will we use the tunnel, Senior?” Junior Wei asked me. I was tempted to just say yes due to how cool it was underground, but there were other considerations. If there were going to be traps or creatures hiding, this tunnel would be a perfect spot.

Still, almost anything was better than the immense heat that was cooking everything above. After half a year of going through the Great Desert it was absolute misery. I felt my brain was cooking under that constant heat of the Life Light.

Even in the tunnel it was warm, but it wasn’t furnace warm. “We will take this tunnel. If we need to exit, I can always cut our way out,” I replied. We then set off right away since we had already rested up. There was a staleness to the air, but it was still breathable.

It only took a day before we ran into a cave in. The stone was shattered, not cut, and the white sand had flooded the tunnel. “It couldn’t be that easy,” I muttered.

“We might be able to dig through, Senior,” Junior Wei said but I shook my head in the almost darkness. There was a bit of light coming through the sand, like a soft glow.

“Blaaag,” a cultivator suddenly bent over and puked out blood. Everyone paused to look at them. He kept puking out his blood and chunks of his internal organs before finally dying. I went close to his body and began to inspect it.

There were fleshy lumps growing under his clothes. “Does anyone else have abnormal lumps growing?” I asked out loud.

“I stopped their growth right away,” one cultivator said. Three more spoke up saying something similar. I nodded slowly at this.

“I should have thought of this,” I muttered. It was cancer caused by radiation. Normally one’s cultivation would protect a person, but the people who spoke up were the weakest cultivators traveling with me.

“What is happening?” Junior Wei asked me.

“Radiation,” I replied and there was a moment of confusion. “Deadly light. It ruins one’s body causing abnormalities and other issues.” My cultivation protected me while the cultivation of the people traveling with me was much more suspect.

“What do we do?” Junior Wei asked. I shook my head at that question.

“Trust in your cultivation.” Was this what stopped Zama from reaching the center of the Great World? Unlike one of these micro-cultivators, it was highly unlikely I would be able to extend my life using their techniques. After all the practice and knowledge, I had gained, the skill just wasn’t there. I also refused to spend countless eons building or rebuilding a tunnel to make my way to the center of the Great World.

I pulled out my sword and retreated down the passage while all the possessions of the dead cultivator were taken away. I swung my blade carving a hole upwards. Sand rushed down into the tunnel, but it eventually came to a stop and light began to shine through the hole. I exited the tunnel along with everyone else.

Once I was outside, the heat struck me again. There was a good chance there was radiation as well. I had ignored such things for a long time, since it had very little impact on cultivators. The amount of radiation needed to threaten a cultivator was immense. So immense, that there were probably other hazards in the area instead.

I double checked the direction we needed to go and we set off. Five more cultivators perished in the next month due to radiation poisoning as the Life Light literally burned the life out of their bodies. The rest of the cultivators were struggling, but I was not going to stop no matter what. After all the headache, frustration, and time to get this far, I was not about to turn back no matter what. Until it became physically impossible, I was going to reach the center of the Great World.

The worst thing that could happen was that there was nothing. No matter how much I looked on top of the higher dunes, I never spotted anything in the distance like I had from the top of the Last Mountains. This entire place was one giant microwave. That was probably why I felt out. The heat mattered, but at a certain point there was just too much radiation.

It didn’t even have to be ultra-violet or gamma radiation. There was an endless amount of infrared and microwave radiation with how bright everything was. That was probably the worst part, the brightness. My eyes had enjoyed the tunnel, now it was back to near blinding white sand with a blinding white star overhead. Even with my eyelids closed, the light was too much. It was tempting to go back in the tunnel and hide out there for a while, but that wouldn’t solve anything.

I either needed to keep moving or turn back. While digging might seem like an option at first, it just wasn’t possible. We had no way to easily move the sand and make a tunnel. We also had no idea how long the tunnel would need to be. The tunnel was worth about a day’s travel out of this hell, which was a nice break, but ultimately it was just a respite.

Another month of travel across the Great Desert and we didn’t come across any more structures. They could be buried, or the angle we were traveling on was off slightly. While I was only off by a couple of degrees at most each time I checked when we stopped, we could still easily miss anything out here, even if it was above the sand.

I paused as I looked at something I had a hard time making out, exactly what was happening for a couple of seconds as the rest of the cultivators came up behind me. I then realized it was a massive sandstorm headed in our direction.

“Dig,” I ordered and I even took a spare shovel to help out. We began digging into the top of the sand dune as the massive sand storm kept approaching. At least we could see it coming from far away. After half an hour of painfully hot digging, we had made a covered pit like we would when we rested only deeper and with no gaps at the top. The cloth was secured tightly down while we hunkered in our makeshift shelter.

I could feel the ground rumbling and the hear the sound of lighting strikes as the storm passed over us. Even with the layers of cloth, an occasional breeze and a handful of sand snuck its way into our pit. The temperature thankfully decreased while the sandstorm passed over us.

Many cultivators, including myself, took the time to rest while it was slightly cooler. When I woke up the storm was still raging. “How long do you think it will go for Senior and what caused it?” Junior Wei asked me.

“Impossible to say. It could be that whatever controls the Great World does this occasionally. A powerful cultivator. Or some weird quirk of the weather. It has been about a day, I would be surprised if it goes any more than another day or two,” I replied. I ended up being right as the sandstorm ended half a day later.

We carefully dug our way out of three feet of sand. Not fun, but it could have been worse. I was kind of hoping some sort of structure would be revealed when we emerged, instead the Great Desert was the same just like it was before, without any difference.

As the cultivators gathered up the heat and sand resistant cloth, I worked out the direction we needed to travel once more. A glance in the direction we had come from and to our sides, showed that the sandstorm was either a line or a wave emerging from the center of the Great Desert, since it had approached and left perpendicular to our travel direction.

What would have been nice was some kind of glider. The problem was that the wind was almost always blowing away from the direction we were traveling in. A sand skimmer or some type of glider might allow a person to leave, but it would be impossible to travel in the direction we wanted. Maybe a zig zag pattern might work, but that just sounded even more frustrating.

There was nothing to do but endure as we continued to travel across the Great Desert. Thankfully after the initial round of deaths, the rest of the cultivators were hanging in there. It was tempting to go faster and leave them behind, but I brought them out here and they had already paid off thrice already. Once by discovering the building, then the tunnel, and then the radiation.

None of these helped me that much, but they gave me more information which was nice to have. They just needed to pay off once and it would be worth all the time dragging them along with me. I guess digging the pit to survive the sandstorm might count as well. But such an event wasn’t a real threat to me and I could have survived easily without their help.

It was impressive how these cultivators had put their faith in me, or in the faith that something was out here. It was hard to say if I would have embarked on such an expedition if I was in their shoes. The risks were just too immense, and they could easily die. It made me wonder if my seniors thought the same thing when they looked at me, thinking I was crazy. But they wanted to see what would happen, so they didn’t say anything.