[ Tao: The modern ]
The problem was my girls.
Or say, their attitudes.
Months in the wild had recalibrated their moral compasses against ignoring avoidable suffering. They would find trouble, look at me, and I would inevitably intervene finding no harm. It was not mutant patriotism. It was just me losing a private war against their objective morality because I could not stand their disappointed expressions.
Ning playfully applied her lightning. Ziyun manipulated temperatures unseen. Yuyin became a walking salve, mending fractured spirits with a gentle touch. Their interventions remained small. Mine crossed a dangerous threshold until I became aware of some machinations below us..
Outside Marrakesh, in the harsh midday sun baked ochre walls of the medina, I resurrected a dead child.
The boy's father had already witnessed me cure measles. I should have refused the lifeless body, but reality felt dangerously responsive, as if actively scripting my future. Reviving the dead violates local cosmic laws, I reminded myself, glancing upward. I preferred to avoid the gaze of high cosmic entities. Working quietly, I sutured the boy's fraying soul fragments, wove in ambient energy, and breathed a nascent spirit into his lungs.
The father's raw, animalistic relief was jarring. In the ruthless cultivation worlds, such unadulterated joy over a fleeting mortal life simply does not exist. His weeping gratitude struck an unexpected chord in my borrowed human vessel.
Yet, beneath his praise, my spiritual sense snagged on a jagged edge of malice. It was not an immediate threat, but a dark seed germinating in his future. Studying his subconscious tells, my mind effortlessly constructed a karmic map of his nature, charting the grim possibilities he was destined to unleash.
I took that quiet revelation, filed it away in the dark recesses of my mind, and moved on.
***
The year 1987 almost arrived, shifting human desire into something louder and bathed in neon. Malls became temples of plastic abundance. To truly experience the friction of this mortal era, we voluntarily dampened our divine senses, compressing our cosmic awareness down to a human scale.
We stood in crowded aisles watching people fight over dolls with religious intensity. The air in the department stores smelled faintly of ozone, sprayed perfume, and freshly minted polyester, vibrating to the synthesized beat of pop music pumped through overhead speakers.
I bought a Sony Walkman, genuinely admiring the elegant, magic-less engineering of human intelligence. The ladies appraised the tiny brass universes of Swiss analog watches and the sharp weaves of Italian silk, comparing them favorably to artifact level robes from our home world. We dressed our ancient cultivator souls in acid washed denim and Ray Ban sunglasses, looking inexplicably like rock stars on sabbatical.
While they enjoyed the aesthetics, I examined the crude foundations of the coming age. I bought a Macintosh, listening to the hum of silicon and realizing humanity was unknowingly building the nervous system of a future god. Even the military industrial complex was accelerating, driven by conventional, earthbound suppliers like the Stark Corporation under the commerce figurehead Arno Stark. It was just simple metal and ballistics for now, but the spark of the future was there.
We spent months in uncomplicated indulgence. We felt the thunder of Queen concerts few months before, sailed luxury yachts from Rio to the Maldives, and watched the Concorde stitch continents together at twice the speed of sound.
[ Long Yuyin : The Strange World ]
By dampening our senses to feel human in city, we invited human vulnerabilities.
At a mega concert, my empathic abilities were nearly swept away by the crushing wave of the crowd's raw emotion. Tao guided us to comparably quieter venues afterward out of consideration for me.
Not everything was peaceful. In a suffocating Bangkok nightclub, where the air inside was a cloying soup of humidity, spilled beer, and cheap tobacco smoke, a mutant woman with pheromone manipulation decided we were easy prey.
Her ability was a crude subset of my own, flooding the room with a manufactured stench of desire and anger. She isolated Tao, sensing a faint, suppressed epsilon level signature on him, and tried to coerce him into her local syndicate. When her biological control completely failed to register on him, panic set in. She produced a gun.
Tao looked at the weapon with mild academic interest. He did not resort to physical violence. That was entirely beneath him. He simply let a fraction of his spiritual pressure descend, locking her in place without theatrics.
"With innate abilities like yours," he told her with profound disappointment, "your ambitions could have been architecturally significant. Instead, you are robbing a simple man in the dark. What a disappointment."
He took the gun, admired the engineering, and handed it back. Somewhere in the brief exchange, the heavy steel became brightly colored plastic. She stared at the water toy in absolute terror as he casually summarized her existence.
"You are all just stories. No right and wrong. Just try to survive more chapters."
I materialized behind her, leaking a responsive killing intent. Tao shook his head, signaling restraint.
Yes, with just few years to live, maybe, I would have lived boldly like this too. I withdrew the aura but delivered a single, measured backhand slap. It felt surprisingly grounding for my flesh brain.
Ning and Ziyun froze her accomplices in ice without a word. Tao snapped his fingers, filtering the crowd's perception to erase the disturbance, and we finished our drinks in peace and later marveled at the sputtering amber glow of a nearby streetlamp and the distant neon buzz of a highway motels.
That night was so peaceful... I found myself, almost without thinking, wanting to try reenacting that episode. Just a sudden, quiet impulse on the bed. He gave in this time, so gently. It felt... deeply freeing for my soul until some one else barged in the middle.
***
The final incident happened outside Tucson, marking the exact point where Tao stopped pretending that playing human meant accepting mortal disrespect.
A local crime boss who collected human beings like property sent six armed thugs after Tao over a perceived slight. Tao stood in a parking lot at nine in the evening, observing the men tightening their grips.
"I was just starting to think better of this civilization," Tao murmured.
He converted the six men into temporary statues, freezing their momentum and leaving them there to reconsider their life choices. Reaching out with his mind, Tao pulled the boss directly from a moving car miles away. The man flew over, floated in front of us like a tethered balloon we saw on street. A brief glance into his mind revealed a sprawling network of human trafficking.
To brawl with such a creature was inefficient and beneath a cultivator. Tao bypassed the flesh entirely. He stripped away the man's humanity, reshaping his physical and spiritual form into that of a rhesus monkey, and casually arranged his follower to go and banish him to a traveling circus in Maharashtra. He was sentenced to spend his days throwing things at tourists while possessing the full awareness of exactly why he was in a cage.
Later, a flicker of mortal empathy surfaced in Tao. He questioned us, if the punishment was too cruel and briefly considered reversing it. Reaching out with our divine vision, we checked on the trafficker to see if the man was suffering the profound helplessness of his former victims.
He was not. The thug had escaped his circus cage and was thriving well among the local monkey ladies population, indulging in his new animalistic base desires with enthusiasm. He had adapted to the lower existence far more comfortably than intended.
Realizing the man truly possessed no soul worth saving, Tao concluded he had not gone nearly far enough. He left the creature to his absolute degradation and never changed him back.
[ Ye Ziyun : The World Between Wonders ]
In between the human noise, we sought out the planet's strange thresholds. We visited the Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca, where people built their entire world from floating totora reeds.
The high-altitude air was biting and thin, carrying the damp, earthy scent of the golden reeds that bobbed rhythmically against the icy blue water.
We stood in Mexico's Zone of Silence, where radios died and compasses lost their convictions.
We roasted sweet potatoes over Turkmenistan's Darvaza crater and explored Romania's Movile Cave, a sealed underground kingdom where blind life thrived entirely on sulfur and darkness.
Further down, hidden streets revealed the planet's magical economies. We observed covens, witches purchasing magical heartstrings and found subterranean caverns where the rejected had built thriving communities.
Crossing the Atlantic, a heavy, dormant resonance surged from the crushing depths of the Puerto Rico Trench. Tao sensed it immediately ~ not an active border, but a sealed tomb. It was the lost kingdom of Talokan, a vibranium-infused underwater realm sunken and entirely erased from the world's memory.
Deep below in the dark, the mutant named Namor lay sealed within the ruins of his empire. Even in stasis, his slumbering aura radiated the suffocating arrogance of an ancient sect patriarch merely waiting for his destined release.
Recognizing the trapped god-king as just another un-activated narrative script, Tao had no interest in waking him. He simply flew on. He had all the knowledge about everything we asked, almost made us question whether he was a native here all along.
We skipped the stretches of the Middle East we had already explored and continued eastward across the Pacific. Along the way, we made a brief stop at our secluded island to reinforce the magical and psionic veils we had left in place, ensuring curious travelers and wandering fishing boats would continue to overlook its existence.
From there, we crossed the ocean once more and arrived on the Indian subcontinent. Honestly, we were treated as one of many foreigner group that came here just to seek the so called spirituality. Several genuine comments were heard from them.
Apart from that, the place had its own charm, though the overcrowded trains literally made us speechless after one enthusiastically offered us a ride on top, ticket free.
It was there that one of our more amusing adventures unfolded.
What began as a series of fake weddings for the sake of local customs somehow became legally recognized ceremonies. We were in vibrant garments having same experience from different places with some difference in ritualistic interactions.
Xiao Ning, naturally unwilling to let Tao enjoy even a moment of peace, promptly reported him to the authorities for marrying every one of us. She told us later, she was pissed at being the third wife even though, in our relation, she was the first to be with him.
The truly remarkable part was that Tao refrained from using any supernatural abilities. Instead, through nothing more than convincing local conversation in their own language, shameless confidence, and a few well-placed bribes, he somehow convinced the officials to congratulate us rather than prosecute him. We walked away with their blessings.
By the laws of this world, we had apparently become husband and wife.
No vows had been sworn before Heaven, no ancestral rites had been observed, and no promises had been made before our parents. Such a union carried no weight upon our cultivation, nor did it invite any heavenly backlash. It was merely a mortal contract.
Even so... calling him my husband was unexpectedly delightful.
One day, when we return home, I intend to make that title true in every sense that truly matters.
There were also some extra ordinary events like minor dimensional anomalies ~ micro-fractures in the Earth's dimensional membrane. We found a contingent of the Masters of the Mystic Arts in some panic over what their monitoring spells registered as a massive dimensional encroachment.
It turned out to be nothing more than a flock of highly foul-mouthed, sleazy goats that had wandered through a tear from one of the lesser Splinter Realms ~ the fragmented, localized pocket dimensions that house Marvel's minor Hell lords and lesser demons.
Rather than unmaking them, we spent a genuinely entertaining afternoon manually rounding up the bleating, swearing beasts. We casually folded space and dropped the entire herd, right before the bewildered sorcerers as if invasion was right onto them.
It was a service to their perspective. People guarding the boundaries of reality using whatsoever methods, they can have some free time to deal with actual apocalyptic invasion and not waste magic on stray demonic petting zoo.
***
[ Tao's perspective : Administrative Problems ]
My 'now legal wives' then took a temporary leave into the Myriad Miles Map for much needed cultivation. They had spent years outside without a proper session, and I insisted they rest. I also needed some much needed meditation.
Earth's surface scenery was admirably flat compared to the floating mountains and starlight rivers of higher realms. However, its relentless microscopic bustle was truly remarkable. But while contemplating this world, I realized I had a personal administrative problem.
My internal universe was growing, and my tenants had started filing complaints. The ancient souls, beasts, and cultivators I had accumulated over lifetimes convened a committee. They claimed their newly refined territories were desolate expanses with barely enough Qi to sustain spirit forms. They were looking at me like a cosmic slumlord.
I spent my evenings landscaping. I grafted World Tree saplings as spiritual anchors to tame the chaotic energy bleeding through the realm's edges. Studying Earth's resilient flora with genuine interest, I copied the Amazon, the Alps, and the Sahara after sizing them more than 300 times. I pasted them into my domain, recalibrating their genetics and compensating for spiritual density. I built complete, self sustaining nature reserves inside my own soul.
It worked perfectly. I watched with private amusement as a sect elder wept over a patch of replicated dandelions, mistaking them for the exotic Golden Sun Herb to replenish his lost yang energy. His gratitude was entirely misplaced, but out of pity, I quietly altered the plant's cosmic properties to make his delusion a reality - a self fulfilling story.
But something doesn't feel right to me, the world is functioning ordinarily... even the omniscience that comes with being the creator also returned nothing. I inspected a few times, but couldn't trace even with great expanse and fate divine dao.
But the complaints ceased.
Left alone, I turned my attention back to the road outside. One night, I spotted a massive Shi'ar spacecraft hiding in Neptune's shadow. Not everything required my intervention. I shifted my attention back to my campfire.
With time on my hands, I wondered if any threads of my first life's ancestry remained here, or if someone like me had ever been born again. The reality was so grounding that I nearly forgot this wasn't the world I came from.
***
[ The Himalayan Ascension ]
Tao traveled east and then north alone. Honestly he doesn't know what came over him. It was a sudden thought that he could go check the snow or something.
As casual as that.
As the altitude increased, the accumulated belief of millions peeled away, leaving something raw and undomesticated. The Himalayas were not merely mountains. They were the result of ten thousand years of ascetics punching upward with their souls, wearing the veil between the earthly and the divine incredibly thin.
Spending consider time in the local culture and finding things interesting enough, he moved on. Approaching Kamar-Taj,yes even name remained same, he noted; Tao folded his existence inward until local reality stopped registering his approach.
He felt something worth to discover about magic inside, like a calling his mind has made. He didn't pay attention to what it is, but focused on the journey.
Kamar-Taj's defensive architecture was layered like geological strata. It appeared as a mundane shack, but beneath the illusion lay a grand achievement of eldritch architecture. It was an impenetrable lattice of interwoven curses and protective wards.
Tao sifted through vast combinations of array Dao, Asgardian arcana, and the dark knowledge of the Darkhold his mind holds. He could have executed an intricate sequence to conceal his presence, burn through the mystic weave, and heal the tear behind him.
Instead, he bypassed the complexity entirely by letting the reality do it for him. He raised a single hand and spoke to the wards with absolute authority.
"Open for me."
The universe obliged.
Stepping into the carved space, he immediately spotted the Sorcerer Supreme. It was the same limited mortal who had once tried to capture Tao on the island years ago.
Yet, the Sorcerer Supreme was not the one who stopped Tao in his tracks.
She was.
The Scarlet Witch.