Molting the Mortal Coil

Chapter 867: The Great Pod

The inn proved to be very useful. The next day, Sage got a chance to speak to some of the humans who had lived in the Great Pod for some time. They were able to tell him about a lot of details that the Whale Sword Sect members wouldnt care about. Not because they were hiding information, but because they werent humans there were many concerns or customs that would be completely alien to them. This was truly a city made for all these Cetaceans and the accommodations for humans were only a side note. Luckily, the humans living here had been able to set things up in a comfortable fashion, but when heading into the giant bay that made up the majority of the Great Pod it was very much a foreign place.

While there were many buildings on the bottom of this bay, they were more exceptions rather than the rule. These whales and dolphins lived in a three dimensional world without walls or boundaries. Unlike humans who created structures to protect them from the elements, these creatures spent their whole lives completely immersed and surrounded by danger. There was also the fact that these beings didnt have hands and their culture or society was not formed around building and creating things to empower themselves. Their world had a completely different foundation. Over time and with close contact with human Cultivators it had many overlapping pursuits, but instead of invention and construction, they focused on art.

Instead of creating objects, they created music. Songs that wove together music, poems, storytelling, and even art. Sage spent the next few days attending different events that consisted of varying levels of art. The first few were about the song themselves, basically concerts, and were quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, they werent all as enjoyable for him. Without the ability to enjoy the songs as images like the other Cetaceans it was much like being a blind person going to the cinema. He could only experience a small part of what was going on.

Sage also learned about the Keepers.

In a society without paper and without the ability to carve words into stone, there was the question of how they collected and passed down their knowledge. Without a good system of inheritance then how could their society continue to grow and accumulate? For a time they had created the roles of historians, individuals that were charged with passing down certain information. The job began as a heritage and soon they had too much knowledge for only one family. They split into different lines, each of them cataloging different areas of knowledge. Over time there were disasters. If the line responsible for carrying on poetry died then the predecessor and successor had to try and fill in the gaps.

Eventually they developed a new profession they dubbed as a Keeper. Instead of a single family line or even a few individuals carrying any bits of knowledge, the cetaceans split the rich history of their civilization into small parts. Instead of a few individuals being treated as walking libraries, they broke the knowledge down into many books that were then shared by most of their people. Keeper was the official designation for those who had accumulated enough of these books, and Sage was surprised to learn that nearly a quarter of the cetacean population were Keepers. Of course, book was not a very good term for these bits of knowledge as they were all auditory and perhaps better to call a symphony, consisting of many movements or segments.

To be a Keeper was a very prestigious profession among the cetaceans as they basically received a sort of stipend from the rulers of the Great Pod. From what Sage learned he was impressed by this sort of distributed storage protocol. It reminded him of cloud computing, ensuring that nothing would be lost even if some of the individual servers, or Keepers, were to fall. Each of the Keepers had deep and diverse knowledge of a huge number of songs, as their title was only earned after reaching a certain threshold of information. They were responsible for reciting their songs to others and received pay from their government. I suppose that makes them History Teachers then, right? Or maybe Professor might be more fitting. Music History, perhaps?

There was such a rich history that he could only barely scratch the surface of, that Sage seriously started to consider if he could Merge with a cetacean. They werent an egg laying species, but he could try to use the longshot of Soul Resonance. He was sure that if he did it enough times then it was sure to work eventually. The problem of course being that the failures would turn into his eternal enemies and they would also know all his secrets. Forcible sharing all your memories with someone was not a good way to make friends. It was actually a pretty horrible crime and he only dared to use it when his life was on the line or against those who were already his mortal enemy. If they were already committed to killing him, then he would no longer hold back. Especially since hed made a rule to kill anyone that Soul Resonance failed upon. There were too many people that he cared about who could be harmed if his secrets were revealed.

If he truly wished to Merge with a cetacean and didnt want to completely abandon all his morality, the only acceptable solution was to have a population of them upon the Inner World. Then, if the Soul Resonance failed they would not be able to spread his secrets to the outer world where it would put people in danger. Of course, Sage didnt have any cetaceans on the Inner World, and even if he did it was still pretty reprehensible to force them to share memories with him. Maybe if those Pirates came to try and murder me again, I could justify taking them captive, but that Captain seemed too smart.

Sage had considered offering them to become the rulers of the seas on the Inner World and if they accepted the deal then he would also never go behind their back and force Soul Resonance upon them. He considered perhaps trying to arrange something with cetacean criminals, but he eventually gave it up.

While Sage couldnt really experience the full majesty of the song images and song movies, he was able to learn a lot more from their other unique capability. Cultivation. While he knew it was something that was possible, these were the first Demonic Beasts that he had seen performing their own cultivation. It was even more amazing to find many different schools of cultivation and to learn that they were constantly innovating. Perhaps the other legendary beasts he heard of had done the same thing long ago to create their impressive heritage, but he could only speculate about that. What was even more amazing was that there were humans and other Demonic Beasts who were part of these sects and schools. Sage knew first hand how different cultivation could be in different types of bodies so it was impressive to know they didnt just know how to cultivate but they could alter their cultivation techniques into a more universal form that other races could practice.

It also turns out that the Orcas and the Whale Sword Sect were actually outliers among the cetacean cultivators. Unlike these two groups, most of the cultivators here were not reliant upon their large bodies to fight. Instead, their methods involved sound and their songs. A few of them did incorporate their large and powerful bodies but not as a physical weapon, but as a sort of sounding box or amplifier to magnify the power of their voice. There was only a single school for toothed whales that used Qi to amplify the power of their bodies, and the Whale Sword Sect for cetaceans like Narwhals to train with their natural weapons. For the other cetaceans there were more than a dozen other cultivation schools training various types of song and sound for combat and self advancement. Even the prestigious Keepers usually trained in cultivation as it helped improve their memory and make it easier for them to do their job.

A few days later, Sage was listening to a song at an undersea restaurant when he ran into a former acquaintance. The scarred nose of a huge Orca moved in front of him and a dark eye met his own.