The forest was dark in the most literal sense.

  Darkness at its core was the loss of information. It was the corrosion of senses, physical or spiritual. At the edge of the forest was an absolute blackness that threatened to consume all there was.

  “Do you have a way of seeing through it?” Forn asked me.

  “Not yet, but I will in a second.”

  I stuck a finger in the darkness and went to work.

  The darkness here wasn’t complicated enough to engulf me. Almost everyone could manipulate laws on a lesser level, but that depended on the world around them and the complexity of the laws.

  Forn here could probably remake a universe in an instant, but that mainly depended on the strength of the world around. If she was on earth then she would be practically omnipotent. On Ah-Marin she’d have a lot less control, mainly due to the strength of the realm itself but also due to the nature of the world being at a higher level.

  And here, within the Cosmic Forest, she’d have to struggle just to cut down a tree.

  But I was different. I had studied laws and understood them at a higher level than anyone else of a similar rank. Forn could walk into the darkness and will her senses to grow stronger or create a small light and will the light to overpower the dark. It wouldn’t light up the forest but it would let her see through it.

  Her power of growth and plant life far outpaced mine. That was the fault of an array master. At the fifteenth rank, a cultivator’s general understanding of laws would be so profound that they could effectively manipulate anything aside from celestial realms, making my understanding of laws entirely useless.

  But we weren’t at the fifteenth rank, and my generalized understanding of laws gave me immense versatility. And more importantly, I could weave together lesser laws and make something even better. I could make arrays.

  My hand glowed as the small compact array came into existence.

  I was limited with what daos I could use, but I still had freedom with laws. I weaved together a small but complex array, something that ate darkness and turned it into life. It was only at the strength of a high ninth rank, so I expected the darkness within the forest to consume it quickly.

  I threw it into the darkness, and for a second, the entirety of the area in front of me flashed into clarity. I saw eyes, shapes, and forms, all standing and staring at me with a blank look of hunger.

  They were waiting for me to come to them.

  “Interesting, cooperation? No, it's more like mutual tolerance. They want to attack me all at once and fight over the leftovers. Is that why you haven’t left?”

  Forn said nothing but just nodded. She was staring into the forest with trepidation.

  “That’s how they hunt,” she answered. “They know their natural advantages, and none of them will leave the dark to fight you. But if you step into their domain, they know they have the upper hand. They can hide, you can’t.”

  I thought about what she said, stepped back for a second, then stepped forward.

  I walked into the forest, and for a single blazing instant, the animals fought to tare through me. All of them attacked with darkness and claws and such. Blood flowed, and death bloomed as carnal instinct and animal mindsets took over.

  Wolves, bats, rats, crows, and insects all tore through the spot where I stood.

  Forn’s eyes widened for just a second until she caught on.

  Then another burst of light came in, this one much stronger than the last, and it drove most of the beasts away. They were all the thirteenth-rank, but most of them had been wounded and the few that weren’t saw me standing and decided to leave anyway.

  I reached through the darkness and picked up the remaining corpses. They were all muddled and cut, and most of them had been blasted apart into pieces, but I took all I could get.

  “An illusion?” Forn asked.

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  “Yep,” I replied.

  “How?”

  “Gods trust their senses too much. The more powerful a being, the stronger their senses and the more complexity is required to forge an illusion, which is why we trust our senses so much.”

  “Yes, I understand all that, but you don’t practice the dao of deception, so how?”

  I studied my spoils. Most of it was usable. All parts contained enough dark and life nature to help me create a specific type of array. I answered Forn as I kept talking.

  “Well, I do practice it a little bit. But most senses touch upon what’s there. You don’t need to mimic the complexity of the soul or anything like that, just mimic what the senses touch. Laws, daos, aura, stuff they can naturally feel. I didn’t make a false version of those things, some of them would have sensed that. I just created an array that outputs them.”

  A second me appeared right next to her and for a second, she couldn’t tell who was who.

  Then her senses tried to drill even deeper, and she frowned.

  “Why is it so dense?” She asked.

  She was referring to the amount of aura the illusion projected.

  “It’s not. It’s mostly empty, it just emulates density at a surface level.”

  Then she raised her spear and attacked it. The illusion’s eyes widened as a hole appeared on its chest. The real me faded away, as if it were the illusion and the illusion with all the realness of me fell onto the ground.

  Forn looked about in horror for a few moments before looking at where I was with piercing senses and frowning.

  “That wasn’t funny,” she commented.

  I smiled as the dead me faded into nothingness.

  “Part of the illusion is reliant on first impressions. I naturally emulate no powerful laws and that means that I have no complex nature to mimic.”

  A fake version of Forn materialized next to her. She had her exact appearance with life leaves growing in her green hair and skin. Her clothing was made of wild hide and tied together with blooming vines. Everything from the earth-stained nails to the somewhat animalistic gaze in her eyes was there.

  “You can’t emulate my growth law or wild dao,” she commented.

  I shook my head.

  “Huh, I think I’ve seen something like this before,” she added.

  “A technique can probably emulate a similar outcome. As long as the laws and daos you're mimicking are just a projection of yourself, then it doesn’t matter how complex the nature is as you would always have a high level of mastery over your own nature. The more important part of the illusion is the second half.”

  “The second half?” She asked.

  Then I disappeared.

  “For the illusion to take effect, the original has to be hidden.”

  Forn looked around, desperately trying to find where I had crawled off to but then realized she couldn’t. Her senses pushed into everything, trying to discover me like she had last time.

  “How?” She asked.

  “A stealth technique,” I replied appearing right next to her.

  “Yes, but I have a perception technique. How did you bypass it?”

  “I didn’t. You perceived me.”

  She squinted for a moment, and then she sniffed.

  “Oh, I see.”

  Laws varied in complexity, but the complexity of the laws here was relatively low. Forn had a growth law that was equivalent to her rank, but that was because she was a cultivator. The ambient laws and daos exuded by this part of the forest were of a lesser rank, somewhere around the tenth or ninth. I could manipulate that level of law pretty easily and if I operated a basic stealth technique and then covered myself with those laws, it added a whole new layer to hide under.

  I went back to poking at the spoils of the previous battle. All the insects and animals had attacked the projection, thinking it was the real me and taken out a good chunk of their own numbers in the process, though I doubted they cared much for the loss.

  No, the important part was what they left behind. I was only able to blend in with the ambient laws of the forest because it was of a low enough rank. If say I had blended in with the law of water, like the one that guarded the Grove of Life, I would be out of luck.

  I kept working at the array. While I couldn’t manipulate laws of a certain complexity, I could still use them in some ways. The laws and concepts left behind by the corpses were all of the thirteenth rank. I couldn’t control a single bit of that by myself.

  But I could still use it with an ample amount of preparation. It just took a whole lot more effort and time.

  The manipulation of laws relied on two things. One was how much you understood them, and the other was how much your nature aligned with them. My nature didn’t align with any law, but that also meant it didn’t push me away from any law either. It would be hard to work with fire if you were made of water or darkness if you were made of light.

  Another factor was the action itself. A fifth-rank cultivator with a gravity-based law might be able to manipulate their own weight or the weight of their enemies, but they couldn’t turn off gravity for everybody.

  It was the same here.

  I was building an array around the most complex bits of the darkness, choosing to control the natural consequences of the law rather than the law itself. My array was like a water wheel, slowing and using the force the law naturally caused. I couldn’t defeat gravity, but I could still use it to a certain degree.

  One part fed the law qi as the law itself was just an expression of power, not power itself. The other part took that tainted qi and mixed it up with a myriad of other laws until I got the specific type of law I wanted.

  There was light in that array. It worked to degrade some of the law of darkness and make it of a lesser quality, making it easier for me to work with.

  There was stealth dao, which really pushed on the hiding quality of darkness, and there was even nature dao.

  I was trying to make a cloaking array, something that fit in with the natural dark and life nature of the area I was about to step into. I could have used the ambient laws within the area, but darkness naturally had a hiding effect, and the creatures there probably had some level of countermeasure towards it.

  Using a higher level of darkness would allow me a higher level of stealth. And even if they did see through it, they would think I was one of their own and think twice before attacking me.

  “Alright, I’ll be going in now.”

  is 27 chapters ahead, but two chapters will be released tomorrow.

  And again, the new fiction.

  New chapter of AIR coming Monday.

  Also give this one a read, you can say you were there before it got popular. Do it for your inner hipster.