Thread by @BlaBlaBla__Me

Title: Survivor’s One-Way Road

🪷 #JiangCheng-centric, Accelerator-centric
🪷 Crossover: Toaru series
🪷 Multi-parts; update whenever
🪷 Self-indulgent

Thread fic because I can’t get the idea out of my head (aka. not well-planned). Proceed at your own risk.

Note:

Even though it is a crossover, it’s more of a transmigration of some characters to MDZS Universe.
My thought while I write this: Jiang Cheng needs someone who won’t die so easily and won’t hesitate to yeet unreasonable people in MDSZ to the moon by his side.

Note (cont.):

There won’t be much reference from Toaru series, though I’ll drop them once in a while for context.

In genera, you don’t need to know Toaru series to follow the story.

Part 1 — « Joke on the Wheel[Orbit] of Fate »

It was two full moons after the successful siege on the Burial Mound, when Lotus Pier is still trying to recover from the blood and ash that covers the surface of their lakes, that a strange phenomena happened.

The sky clouded over within the duration of a few incense sticks, and the winds blew rampant.

It looked like a storm was coming, which wasn’t out of the ordinary in Yunmeng, if not for the current month which should not attract any monsoon.

The inexperienced disciples of Yunmeng Jiang thought it a mere act of nature, but Jiang Cheng was not so naive.

There were many consequences of living through a war, and one of them was paranoia. A future could veer off a cliff to its death from just passing curiosity after all.

Black clouds converged and covered the sky in the distance, blocking out sunlight.

It reminded Jiang Cheng of the trace of demonic energy that haunted his dream. The very same one that lingered around Wei Wuxian and consumed him at the last moment of his life.

But this was on a scale which surpasses the Nightless City.

If a deranged demonic cultivator who worships the very name of their grandmaster managed to surpass Wei Wuxian and recreate demonic techniques this powerful,

then Jiang Cheng cannot disregard the destruction that would surely abound, less so when it was in his own territory.

So he squared his shoulder and took a few of his best disciples.

The site of abnormality was to the east of Lotus Pier, where the land was dominated by forests and sparse communities. That was the only blessing that Jiang Cheng was glad of as his heart beat in his chest.

The wind that beat at his face rendered his eyes and lips dried as he thought of the kind of abomination that would be waiting for him.

The group were still a distance away from the location when a ray of light pierced through the swirling black clouds.

Jiang Cheng watched it play out as if time slowed down to mock him.

They were in the air, but the vibration in the ground shook them to their core. Strong blasts of winds rushed along the ground, kicking up dust like sea waves behind them.

A disciple at the back of the group gives a short, surprised cry at the sight.

The travel formation of Lotus Pier had to travel higher up in the air to not be struck by the dirt storm. The trees underneath them bent backward from the strength of the winds,

branches and leaves waving along like a thin blade of newborn grass under a waterfall.

The site of impact was deep into the forest, far enough from the closest village that the dust storm shouldn’t reach,

but it wouldn’t be long before the people took notice that the storm was anything but normal. The lack of qi training could only keep them ignorant for so long.

Jiang Cheng pressed his lips together.

Whatever this powerful thing was, he had to deal with it fast, before the news traveled to the cultivation world.

He almost reached an agreement to have Jin Ling stay at Lotus Pier with Jin Guangshan.

All these months, he squashed any excuses that the Jin sect leader could bring up to undermine Yunmeng Jiang’s ability to protect Jin Ling and built Lotus Pier from the ground up to stand tall once again in front of the sect leaders.

All so that he can take Jin Ling home.

He had worked himself to the ground to get his baby nephew out of that sly man’s grasp, powering through sleepless nights and exhaustion deep in his bones.

He wasn’t going to let these black clouds and light beams take the chance from him.

The impact made a boom like thunder, so loud that their ears pounded.

Immediately, Jiang Cheng could feel the sudden spike in some strands of qi, so intense like nothing he had ever felt or heard of before.

Spiritual energy laid dormant, while gravity and charges went haywired.

He could hear sparks in his ears. It reminds him of when Zidian danced in his hand. And for a short heartbeat, Jiang Cheng felt as if he was falling, dragged down by something invisible, before he corrected himself and maneuvered Sandu to maintain the course.

A loud shriek came from behind him. Jiang Cheng turned and quickly plunged down to save a disciple mid-fall, no doubt affected by the sudden pull.

The rest of the disciples wavered, feeling the force that attempted to lure them to the earth but catching themselves just in time.

Each one of them could feel it, the concentration of qi so unbelievably condense that it felt as if their cores were burning in response.

But there was nowhere to go but forward.

The mystery wasn’t going to resolve itself. In a span of a short moment that felt like an eternity,

when each beating heart felt like it was stuck in their lungs, they arrived at the edge of the crater, where the light crashed into earth.

Sandu hovered close to the ground as Jiang Cheng stepped down.

Blue sparks lit in the air, snapping at the end of his hair, and Zidian’s purple counterpart hissed in response.

“I feel really light…” A senior disciple observes from behind Jiang Cheng. He could hear them jumping a couple times.

Jiang Cheng glanced at the ground and saw dust floating in the air, almost unnoticeable by unattentive eyes.

“Keep your guard up!” He shouted, trying to see past that cloud of dust that began to settle.

“We’ll use the visibility-clearing talisman,” a disciple said.

Before Jiang Cheng could warn them that using a qi talisman directly in an unknown volatile qi environment wasn’t a good idea, gentle breezes swiped above the ground, dispelling dust to the other side of the forest that now became a clearing.

His worried reprimand died in his mouth as he saw the center of the destroyed ground.

There wasn’t another Ghost General, nor an enhanced version of it. There wasn’t a corpse of a demonic cultivator whose cultivation betrayed its owner either.

Jiang Cheng circled around the white figure. That was the only thing he could come up for at the moment.

The person in the middle of the destruction was a personification of white.

Their shoulder-length hair was the color of clouds on a sunny day, and their skin was pale.

Jiang Cheng has never seen anyone who looked so much like snow on the tip of trees in Cloud Recesses.

The person wore odd clothing, Jiang Cheng observed the shapes and cuttings of the fabric, with white lining over white clothes and white fur around the neck.

More than anything, from the mysterious figure’s shoulder blades sprouted a pair of pure white wings that were the size of their body.

The wings reached around the person’s front and laid in contrast with the dirt underneath.

Golden feathers scattered around as if the scene was a majestic bird after molting.

Jiang Cheng was careful as he approached the figure.

It was impossible to say from just their face and what he could see of their figure what gender they may be, but from his bottom that looked like some kind of pants, he leaned more toward a male.

The white person looked to be a bit younger than Jiang Cheng himself, but it was hard to tell exactly how much younger. He was also shorter than Jiang Cheng, and a lot skinnier, almost sickly so.

But despite the fragile appearance,

there was no doubt that this winged person was the one who created all this destruction from propelling into the forest.

Why, then, does he have only a few bloody scratches that didn’t speak of the severity of the event?

“Zongzhu, what should we do?” His third-in-command asked with uncertainty in her voice.

She is an experienced cultivator, a survivor of the war, but a human with wings falling from the sky wasn’t an everyday situation that she was trained for.

“Holy shit, are those real wings?” The younger disciples whispered among themselves.

“Looks real to me.”

“Is this some kind of new yao? Did they mutate or something?”

“Wait, something’s happening with the wings!”

True to their words, the white wings glowed for a brief moment, before it broke down into specks of light and disappeared. All the golden feathers on the ground disappeared with them.

Jiang Cheng could feel his disciples tensed up, preparing for anything to happen, but it was the sight in front of them that caught them off guard once again.

Under the wings were two other figures, this time easily identified by both their facial features as women.

Or a young woman and a girl.

Headache built at the back of Jiang Cheng’s head at the absurd direction that today’s expedition was heading for.

Kidnapping? Child sacrifice?

They both have short, brown hair. And obviously related. Their similarity was hard to miss.

They laid in the white person’s embrace, the small girl in between them, protected by the wing that had most likely acted as a cushion in their fall.

Still, Jiang Cheng glared suspiciously at the strangely lack of injury.

Unlike the white figure, they didn’t have a single scratch on them.

When the light struck, Jiang Cheng expected many things. A Xuanwu-level demon. A demonic cultivator going insane. Resentful spirits accumulating. But those things didn’t usually come in white, did they?

“Zongzhu?”

Jiang Cheng knew what to do. He eyed the small girl, who was the same age as his youngest group of junior disciples, and felt bad for what he was about to do. But Jiang Cheng knew better than to let his guard down.

“Tie them up with all the binding talisman we have. We’ll put them in the arrest house.”

In the distance, the Wheel of Fate laughed.

— END OF PART 1 —

Let me say this out of the box, I don’t focus much on how qi and science work together or against each other. So…gratuitous imaginary qi theory warning?

Or someone please send me some readable resources on relationship between qi and physics.