From the core of the world, Arin watched the threads of influence spread—scrolls, relics, songs, systems—each one a foreign seed taking root in the minds of his children. For a long moment he simply observed: the caravans that chanted new verses, the leviathan that gathered its brood around a glowing orb, the villagers who fell into fevered devotion after touching a fallen star.
He had seen the nineteen artifacts (he corrected himself—eighteen) enter his world and felt, in the void that answered him, the codified knowledge of conquest. The Law of Subjugation sat in his mind now like a fact of physics: half the intelligent minds following another Dao, and the origin rewrites; at least one percent loyal, and it endures.
"Eighteen," he said aloud into nothing. "They have only just begun. Right now nearly ninety percent of my people still follow their original paths."
The number steadied him. Ninety percent. Not yet doomed. But not safe either.
He counted the constraints as though they were variables in an experiment. The artifacts could not simply be destroyed—violence against them would trigger higher-level retribution and, more importantly, break the Balance the void enforced. He could not erase the foreign Daos outright; he could only affect them locally, partially, subtly. Worse: the invaders could pour more seed-energy into any artifact at any time. The system they'd chosen to exploit was designed around perpetuity.
"Massacre is poison," he thought, recalling the cruel patterns of his old stories. "Even if I kill those who fall, the artifact will simply pick another host. I can't seal them completely; the rules forbid it. I can only work inside my domain." He felt the practical necessity harden into a plan. "Then I will make my world resist by turning their advantage into a liability."
He remembered novels from his former life—the rewards that motivated heroes, the dungeons that bled power, the merit systems and karmic balances that governed choices. Inspiration is a strange sort of void energy, he thought, and just as fertile.
"Yes," he decided. "We'll fight not by prohibiting choice, but by shaping incentives and constraints. Let them feed, but only into emptiness."
Using Void Energy in ways he had not yet used—less to create matter than to inscribe rules—Arin executed four layered countermeasures. Each was surgical, legalistic, and designed to work within the Balance.
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1. The Status Window
First: a perception overlay for every sentient mind in the world.
He carved a thin, universal interface into the ley lines and the minds of living things—a status window. It was not visible to eyes as such; it was a clarity, a sudden understanding that would present itself when a being looked upon another: a pale glyph, a color shift, a quiet ping in the mind. It would tell whether a person (or creature) followed the native cultivation methods or an outside Dao.
Arin bound it to multiple senses—sight, empathy, attunement—so cultivators would quickly know allies from converts. It was subtle; it could be ignored by the reckless, but not unlearned. Where foreign Daos had been most active, these windows flickered faster, warning communities to the presence of corruption.
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2. The Dungeons of Draindusk
Next, he turned each artifact's point of contact into something his world could metabolize.
Where a relic, scroll, or system had anchored, Arin folded the foreign resonance into a main dungeon—a center of concentrated alien Dao energy. From each he let spiderwebs of smaller minor dungeons spread along the veins of influence the invader had already used. They were not traps in the moral sense; they were structured sites of concentrated, consumable energy.
Any living thing drawn into a dungeon—whether a converted follower or a native defender—would encounter accumulations of alien Dao: echoes, projections, condensed laws. Combat there would not be merely carnage. Each strike that destroyed a projection, each defeat of a converted being, would drain a sliver of the artifact's power. The artifact's efficacy would recede as its energy was consumed.
This was slow alchemy rather than blunt force. A dungeon had to be cleared repeatedly; artifacts would not die in a single assault. But the more the world fought in those places, the weaker the foreign seed became.
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3. Merit for Purging
To turn action into motive, Arin created merit—an in-world currency of spiritual recognition.
He wove a rule: eliminating a being actively following an outsider Dao, or clearing a dungeon node, would grant merit. Merit accrued, and merit could be spent to bolster talent lines, speed cultivation, and even aid breakthroughs. He made it scale—not merely a numerical reward but a real, measurable increase in a cultivator's ability to refine Qi: better meridians, stronger dantians, accelerated condensation toward the Golden Core and beyond.
He knew exactly who would be drawn: those stuck on the brink—the peak Golden Core cultivators trapped by the world's energy constraint. For such practitioners, merit was a promise: fight the invasive Daos, and you might finally move. Their hunger would fuel the purge.
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4. Karma to Balance Kill-Hunger
But reward without restraint drives fanaticism and ruins societies. To prevent descent into endless slaughter—where merit becomes justification for massacre—Arin added a balancing law: Karma.
Needless killing, slaughter for greed, the murder of innocents, and hunts that doubled back on non-cultivational targets would not grant merit; instead, they would accrue karmic weight. Karma would manifest as increasing friction in one's meridians, slowed refinement, misfires in breakthroughs, and social ostracism—real, hard blockers to long-term progress. It would punish short-sighted violence and encourage careful, deliberate cleansing of parasite Daos.
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He stepped back and watched the patterns configure themselves like currents in a sea.
The status window would reveal corruption.
The dungeons would centralize it and make it consumable.
Merit would incentivize those with grit to act.
Karma would prevent the world from unravelling under its own teeth.
It was not a final answer; it was a path. It bought time. It would not stop reinjection—artifacts could be refueled from outside—but it made the cost of expansion far higher for the invaders. Their Daos would now be a war of attrition inside his laws.
He considered the moral calculus, the long game. This defense would turn his people into hunters and executioners—yet it also handed them agency: choice to defend origin, path to strengthen the loyal, a governed way to purge corruption. He had no desire to force belief, only to preserve the capacity for original belief to survive.
He breathed, feeling Void and Origin hum together.
"Begin," he told the world.
Across continents, in the minds of kings and the dreams of commoners, a new awareness began to spread: faint at first—a small symbol, a clarity when looking at a stranger—and then, at the edges of forests and in sunken reefs, doors opened to places of concentrated alien light.
The game had changed. The invaders would not win by simple seduction anymore. They could inject more, yes—but each injection now drained if his children fought back. The only path the eighteen had left was not rapid conquest but slow attrition.
Arin watched the first warriors set out for the nearest falling-star site and felt, for the first time since creation, the steady pulse of a world defending itself.