Cultivation Nerd (xianxia)

Chapter 368 - Returning

The space around me stretched into pure white emptiness, a void without detail or warmth. It didn’t resemble the interior of a consciousness; instead, it felt like an artificial room designed for a single task, stripped of everything unnecessary.I liked it. It made it easy to differentiate when clashing against other minds, and there was no point in adding decoration here; I had no intention of ever letting anyone visit.

But there was one imperfection…

I fixed my gaze on the black wall in front of me. It rippled and bulged like trembling shadows given form, as if the memories of the Blood Step Immortal were battering against the barrier, straining to force their way into my mind.

He had left behind an almost complete copy of his memories as a trap, and it had taken an enormous amount of effort to isolate every fragment that didn’t belong in my mind, especially toward the end.

Thankfully, thanks to my two foundation techniques, I had a clear sense of what my mind was supposed to look like. I could also accelerate my thought process, giving me the breathing room I needed to fight off the sheer volume of his memories.

There was nothing more I could do here now. The rest had to be dealt with externally.

Time to wake up…

.

My eyes fluttered open, and it felt like I’d taken one of those midday naps that left everything sore, leaving me more exhausted than before.

At least the ceiling was familiar. I was in my own lab.

Looking around, I frowned. Everything was more organized. Changed.

Who had moved my shit?

I spotted Cai Hu sitting on a chair, writing something on a scroll. Forcing myself to turn over and sit up on the bed, I tried to stand, but my legs nearly gave out beneath me.

It took real effort just to stay upright. Not more effort exactly, but as if I’d forgotten how to walk, how much force it took to balance myself.

Was this what toddlers felt like when learning to walk?

Cai Hu turned when he saw me leaning against the bed like an old man. He narrowed his eyes.

“Do you feel… stupider?” he asked, watching me struggle to balance. He sighed and shook his head.

What was it with that apologetic look on his face?

“Not by much,” I replied jokingly.

Woah. My voice was dry and raw. Even speaking scraped my throat. What the hell had happened?

Cai Hu chuckled at my admittedly lame joke.

“At least that shows basic mental faculties, if you can still use sarcasm,” he said.

“I don’t think my words qualify as sarcasm,” I replied.

I started doing some basic stretches, leaning down to touch my toes and the like, wincing every time my sore body protested.

“How long have I been lying here?” I asked.

“About a month. A bit over a month, actually. It’s hard to keep proper track of time when we were underground,” he said.

Damn. Only a month? I was a cultivator. Why did my body feel this stiff?

“You were in a strange kind of suspended animation,” my teacher explained, clearly guessing my thoughts. “Your mind was barely active enough to keep your vital organs running. Everything else was devoted to dealing with whatever you were facing on the other side.”

So it was like leaving your phone at one percent battery all the time; it would eventually ruin the battery.

Even though I’d used my foundation technique to speed up my thoughts, I hadn’t realized that so much time had passed. More than a month.

Thankfully, I had that technique. Otherwise, it would have taken around fifty years to deal with all those foreign memories. Imagine waking up as an old man. That would have sucked.

“So… Song Song is okay and all that?” I asked.

I was genuinely worried her father might have used his technique to escape the sealing by slipping into her body. There was a reasonable chance his technique didn’t work like that, or he would’ve transferred bodies long ago, but assumptions weren’t facts.

And then there was the other concern. What if the Blood Step Immortal had left behind some kind of remnant will?

“She’s doing well, and she’s been quite an active contributor to sect decisions ever since you went unconscious,” he said.

That sounded like an answer with a hidden meaning. Had she done something bad?

“Has the Blood Step Immortal also been sealed?” I asked.

Cai Hu nodded. “Yes. And as you instructed me, I won’t tell you where he’s sealed.”

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“Why?”

“Because that’s what you told me to do. Just in case you’re taken over and this is all an act,” he explained calmly. “As an immortal, you’d have the patience to pretend for years. I’ll still teach you either way, but I’ll never tell you where he’s sealed. Just in case.”

Wow. I really had gone full paranoid on this operation, trying to account for every possible angle.

“I don’t care where he’s sealed as long as he’s out of the way for now,” I shrugged.

“Well, Song Song is fine physically,” he continued, “and mentally… she’s about as pleased as you’d expect. With you not around to keep a tight lid on things, she intensified the war efforts. But as far as I can tell, she hasn’t been possessed. Honestly, it might’ve been better if she had. While her father was just as deranged as the rest of that family, he wasn’t crazy enough to paint a target on their backs by antagonizing all the great sects at once.”

It seemed he was fairly confident I wasn’t possessed, because he slipped straight into rambling mode.

I smiled faintly, thinking about what I’d learned from the immortal’s memories.

Oh, the Blood Step Immortal was very much her father, and Song Song had inherited quite a bit from him. After all, he’d also enraged the entire world during his brief reign, getting himself ganged up on and killed just ten days after becoming an immortal.

Now that I carried almost a full copy of his memories, I understood the backstory behind that hatred. The specific memories were sealed away, but my understanding of the events remained.

…Right. I should get those memories out of my head.

I closed my eyes and jammed a finger against my forehead, forcing my focus inward. The dark wall in my mind loomed before me, radiating a suffocating pressure, holding twenty thousand years of memories behind it.

I pushed.

Nothing.

It was like pressing my face against solid stone. The wall didn’t budge, not even the slightest tremor. Still, I kept going, teeth clenched. I had no other choice. Those memories sitting inside my head, sealed or not, were a loaded gun resting against my thoughts. If they cracked open, they would shred me from the inside. The only reason I had won against them in the first place was because I had been overly prepared.

I pushed harder.

Seconds dragged into a minute, and then the pain hit. Not a dull ache, but a sudden, brutal pressure that exploded behind my eyes. It felt like my skull was being pried apart, like something inside my head was clawing for space. My vision blurred, white spots dancing as the migraine surged into something far worse, sharp, splitting, and unbearable.

Then it felt like my forehead tore.

A wet, nauseating sensation followed, as if flesh and bone were being stretched past their limits. A black, cloudy mass began forcing its way out, inch by agonizing inch, dragging pain with it.

It was like trying to shove an apple through a straw.

And the straw was my forehead.

“Fuck!”

The word came out broken as stinging tears welled in my eyes. My hands shook violently, my stomach churned, and every instinct screamed for me to stop. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I bore down through the pain, through the screaming pressure, until something finally shifted.

The resistance gave way.

With a sickening pull, the dark sphere tore free. My head throbbed violently, the pain lingering like a fresh wound that refused to close.

Cai Hu, my teacher, was standing off to the side, watching all this with morbid curiosity.

“What?” I asked weakly.

“That felt almost like watching someone give birth,” he said.

“Fuck off,” I muttered, managing a weak chuckle as I leaned back against the bed, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand.

In my other hand was a black jade sphere formed from my Qi, containing twenty thousand years of memories.

“It’s strange how proficient you’ve become with mental energy, especially combining it with your jade technique,” he said. “I crippled a man once who had a Sky Grade mental technique. Even he couldn’t control mental energy like this. He certainly couldn’t extract memories, and his cultivation was three stars higher than yours.”

“Thanks for the compliment, teacher,” I said.

“It wasn’t a compliment,” he replied. “Just a statement of fact. Do you think you could teach me how to do this? Better mental control does improve array work.”

“Sure,” I said. “But when it comes to Earth Grade techniques like Dancing Jade Armor, it’s better to master one technique to the point where it can do multiple things, rather than learning a new technique for every situation.”

He snorted. “I wasn’t born yesterday. And it was probably me who taught you that line of logic. Still, most people never push that philosophy to such extremes. At this point, the name of the technique doesn’t even fit anymore. We should change it.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Changing the name would be disrespectful.”

“Disrespectful to what legacy?” Cai Hu chuckled. “The man who created it never even finished the Earth Grade framework. You completed it. There’s no reason to preserve his name.”

I shook my head again, making it clear my mind wouldn’t change.

Though I didn’t care much whether my name would be remembered throughout history for any discoveries I made, or whether my creations would be renamed by others, I knew that people valued such things differently.

The Dancing Jade Armor Technique had carried me through too much. I wasn’t going to spit on its creator, someone who had indirectly helped me as well.

“Sure, have it your way, my stubborn disciple,” my teacher grumbled. He sighed and shook his head. “Anyway, what are you going to do now? Finally talk some sense into that girl who’s killing anyone who looks at her the wrong way?”

“No, not for now,” I shook my head. “There are still some personal matters to handle.”

After all, I needed to recover the memories of the plan I had deleted. Nearly two months were missing from my mind, and knowing myself, I would never erase something permanently, only seal it. Completely deleting memories would be excessive and inefficient.

I sighed and stretched, then went through some brief exercises until my motor functions returned to normal. Still, in the near future, I would need to increase my physical training for at least half a year to regain my peak condition.

Being in a half-dead state had weakened me more than I liked.

Sure, I was still physically stronger than the average cultivator at my stage. But some of the research I planned required me to be at my absolute physical limit.

After all, I was never going to get another chance to observe the actual maximum of a two-star Foundation Establishment cultivator.

Physical strength rarely mattered at this level of combat, which meant that maintaining a strict training schedule in the future would be difficult. I could only trust myself to do it properly. That was easier than having someone else do it.

“Oh, right,” Cai Hu added casually. “The Blazing Sun Immortal stopped by about a week ago. Asked a few questions. Wanted to know what you gained from the Blood Step Immortal.”

He paused, then grimaced. “I nearly shit myself. He was standing right in front of me, clearly using Qi, and I couldn’t sense him at all.”

I frowned, then pushed the thought aside.

There were more important things to deal with right now.

Like my own missing memories.