Poison God's Heritage

Chapter 932: Anchoring Delusion

I stayed silent, because the words struck something I had felt but had not managed to name. The Dusking Sun noticed and continued, his tone losing most of its mockery as he explained. “I mean, isn’t it obvious, you’ve yet to anchor your domain… haven’t you seen the other suns? My domain is that of the beast, and I’ve anchored it into myself. I’m basically always in my domain, and it is always applied to the world around me. The Red Sun’s domain is savagery, blood, murder, and slaughter. And you noticed that too, same goes for the rest of the suns, well, former suns now, since they all went a stage higher…”

The ship fell quiet again after he said that, and for a moment all I could hear was the steady breathing of its formations and the faint creak of cooling metal. I had seen it, of course. I had seen it countless times. The Dusking Sun was standing there without releasing his full power, and yet the air around him still carried the faint impression of fang and claw. It was not an illusion, not killing intent, not even a conscious pressure. It was his nature, quietly imposed upon the world simply because he existed. The Red Sun was no different. Even when he restrained himself, there was always a sense of violence waiting under his skin, as if battle did not begin when he moved, but when the world admitted he was present.

“So that’s the missing link,” I said, not quite asking and not quite accepting. “The tribulation didn’t fail. I did not fail either. I just haven’t anchored the domain.”

“Exactly,” the Dusking Sun replied. “You are between Heaven and Sun because the heavens recognized your right to become one, but your own path has not been made stable enough to shine. A Sun is not just someone with a strong domain. A Sun is the anchor of that domain. The domain must be able to exist through you even when you are not actively casting it, but without spilling uncontrolled and harming everything around you.”

I looked down at my hand, flexing my fingers slowly. Delusions. That was the name of my domain, and already the problem was obvious enough to be irritating. A beast could be anchored without turning every ally into a beast. Slaughter could be anchored without making every nearby companion immediately slit each other’s throats. Even flamboyance, as much as it pained me to admit it, could be expressed through presence and aura without turning the world into a theater for dramatic fools. But Delusion was a more troublesome thing. Delusion touched perception, interpretation, self, mind, and truth. If I anchored it incorrectly, I wouldn’t become a Sun. I’d become a walking plague that made every poor bastard standing near me question whether his own eyes were trying to kill him.

“So I basically need to make my domain of Delusions… a reality… should I just start lying to people?” I asked, half because the thought was absurd and half because absurd thoughts sometimes had a way of becoming uncomfortably useful.

The Dusking Sun gave me a look flat enough to hammer nails. “If you think that’s the limits of your domain then I’ll be disappointed.”

“I’m just kidding, but my domain is a bit special you know… it isn’t something that can simply be manifested without it harming others…” I said, and this time the joke faded halfway through. I could already picture the consequences too well. Someone walking near me might see a door where there was a wall, or believe poison was water, or think an ally was an enemy. If my presence alone twisted the senses of those around me, then every companion would become collateral damage. I had many ways to kill enemies, and I did not need to add accidentally turning my own allies insane to the list.

“You don’t say…” the Dusking Sun replied, though there was less sarcasm in his voice than his words suggested. “Well all I can tell you is, even the Flamboyant Sun had managed to express his domain, and you know how powerful he can be in a battle. His path is ridiculous, loud, and impossible to ignore, but he does not destroy the minds of those who stand beside him simply by existing. That is the difference between anchoring a domain and letting it leak out like a broken jar.”

That comparison annoyed me because it was good. A domain was not meant to be a cracked vessel spilling power everywhere. The Suns did not walk around unleashing the totality of their comprehension at every moment. Their anchored domains were expressions of their core, not uncontrolled disasters. The Dusking Sun’s did not force everyone into savagery. It simply made the world aware of the beast. The Red Sun’s slaughter did not make allies butcher each other. It made violence more honest around him, sharpened the edge of battle, and declared what he was.

I sat down in the center of the control chamber, crossing my legs on the metal floor as carefully as I could without letting my injuries complain too loudly. The Dusking Sun did not interrupt. He simply leaned against one of the reinforced pillars near the viewing wall, watching me with the patience of an old predator who had seen enough young monsters claw their way through comprehension to know that too much help would do more harm than good. Still, it was his explanation that had placed the missing piece in front of me, and without it I would have kept glaring at my own cultivation like a fool expecting the answer to apologize.

Delusion was not illusion. That was the first distinction I had to carve clearly into myself. An illusion showed the senses something false. Deception led the mind to a wrong conclusion. A lie contradicted truth. Delusion was more intimate and more dangerous than all three. Delusion was not merely seeing what was false, but believing it deeply enough that the mind began to live according to it. It was the sick man insisting he would survive when every physician had already prepared his grave. It was the weak cultivator believing he could stand before monsters that should erase him. It was the poisoned body deciding that death was not death, but fuel.

That thought made my Qi stir.

I had lived by delusion long before my domain had been named. When I first began, I was an old, sick, broken thing with ruined meridians and a body that had every right to collapse. The world had looked at me and declared me finished. I had disagreed. Poison was death, and I decided it would cultivate me. Weakness was a sentence, and I treated it as a delay. Broken meridians were the end of a path, and I decided they were merely a difficult puzzle. None of those thoughts were reasonable at the time. They were lies. Worse, they were delusions. But because I acted upon them, endured through them, refined them, and paid their price in blood and agony, some of those lies became true.

The Dusking Sun spoke again after a while, his voice softer this time, less like a lecture and more like he was placing stones across a river so I could decide whether to step on them. “Do not think of anchoring Delusion as forcing others to believe whatever you wish. That is crude. It is the path of someone who only understands the surface of their own Dao. The anchor should not be the lie itself, because if you anchor the lie, then yes, you will poison everything around you. The anchor must be the one who decides when falsehood is permitted to challenge truth. In your case, that one is you.”

I opened my eyes slightly, staring at the formation lines running through the floor beneath me. “So the domain isn’t the madness,” I said, slowly, tasting the shape of the thought as I spoke. “It is the command over madness. The point where falsehood receives permission to exist.”

“Closer,” the Dusking Sun said. “A Sun does not shine by accident. Its light may fall everywhere, but its core is stable. If your core is unstable, your domain becomes calamity. If your core is stable, then your domain becomes law.”

I muttered “Law…”