Chapter 101: The Wanderer’s Curiosity
"Ah! How?! How did that weakling manage to corner me?!" Breathing hard, wounds refusing to close from the pill that had gone off right under his abdomen, shredding his stomach like a sieve.
'I have to run! Just this once! Next time we meet, you're finished!' Lu Shen's bloodied fists clenched until they cracked, his face twisting with rage, fury, and humiliation.
"Hm?! Who's there?!" Stopping short, he pressed his back against a tree, eyes darting wildly around him.
"I just wanted to ask you something... Actually, ask you to show me something."
A calm, unsettlingly neutral voice spoke, suddenly, right by his ear.
"Wh-who's there?!" His whole body started to shake, his insides twisting from a fear clawing its way up from somewhere deep inside his soul.
Spinning around, he found a cultivator standing a few dozen meters off, arms hanging loose at his sides, dressed in slightly dirty, tattered robes, with disheveled hair.
His first thought, looking at this young man, was beggar. But the longer he stared, especially once he caught those green eyes, glowing faintly in the dark forest, Lu Shen's legs nearly buckled under him. Bracing a hand against the tree, he fought down the fear and forced himself to meet that gaze.
"Wh-what do you want?" Gathering his nerve, he finally managed to speak. His finely honed instincts were screaming that real danger stood in front of him.
'Oh? From what I saw earlier, I figured he'd try to act tough... And that fear of his, does he have heightened senses? Sharp instincts, maybe?' After studying Lu Shen for a few seconds, An finally spoke. "Back in that fight, you used an immortalflame."
The moment he said it, Lu Shen tensed hard, pressing himself even harder against the tree trunk.
"You've got the wrong idea. I don't want your flame. I just want to understand something... Sigh, just activate it for me. Just for a second." Standing a little apart from Lu Shen, An took a step back, trying to put him a little more at ease.
Realizing he didn't really have a choice, Lu Shen reluctantly activated his flame and gathered it in his palm.
Studying it closely, An gave a small nod. "Just as I thought..."
"Wh-what?" Lu Shen couldn't stop himself from muttering, confusion written across his face.
"How do I put this... that so-called immortal flame of yours is really just a parasite." Reading the Qi around the flame, and the flows tying Lu Shen to the fire, An confirmed his own theory. 'During the fight, there was too much Qi being thrown around for me to fully work out how these flames function... Guess following him turned out to be the right call after all.'
"Parasite? What do you mean by that?" Lu Shen asked with disbelief in his voice.
"The moment you 'bonded' with the flame, it started feeding on the Qi you pull in during your cultivation cycles. And judging by how it's feeding on your Qi right now, not to sustain itself, but to cultivate on its own, it's taking more than twenty percent. Am I right?" An tilted his head slightly.
Lu Shen just nodded. "But in a fight, when I use the flame, it draws on the energy I've already-"
"Not quite. When it activates, the flame only burns through a little under one percent of its own reserves to ignite, if you want to call it that. The other ninety-nine percent still comes straight from the host. So really, what you've got is a parasite that only ever takes." An smiled slightly, finally putting together what this so-called magical thing actually was. The first time he'd seen a flame like it, back at the Alchemy Tournament, something about it had struck him as off, though he hadn't dug any further at the time. This time, he'd finally worked it all the way through.
"That's not possible... The Elder told me the flame feeds on the host's Qi to grow stronger, and draws on that stored Qi when it's used. That it becomes an inseparable part of the cultivator, a secret weapon." Frowning, he looked at An.
"Heh... your Elder's either a liar, or... never mind. Bottom line, he's wrong." An thought it over and decided to put it differently. "The flame gives you an edge in a fight, but what it takes from you beforehand cancels that edge right back out. Put another way, without the flame, your cultivation's higher and your combat strength is higher. With the flame, your cultivation's lower, but your combat strength goes up. Roughly a wash, overall... Though if you're already at peak state, only then are there advantages... Except the flame's still eating your Qi the whole time, so your dantian and your body never fill up all the way, not even close to a hundred percent."
Wide-eyed, Lu Shen listened as this kid, younger than him by the look of it, casually broke down concepts he himself only half understood.
"My advice, if you want a better shot at breaking through to Foundation Establishment realm, get rid of the flame before you swallow that pill. At least for the breakthrough itself. After that, do whatever you want, reconnect with the thing again if you're really that set on the dumbest idea imaginable." Having said his piece, An turned and started to walk off.
'H-he's not going to kill me? What? But he's wearing Heavenly Soul Sect robes! He's just... going to leave?' Unable to believe it, Lu Shen watched An's back, barely breathing, until it vanished into the darkness of the forest.
….
'Eh, here I thought immortal flames were some kind of gift from the heavens, and it turns out they're just leeches, sucking away every drop of Qi you've ever built up...' Kicking a few loose stones along his path, An kept wandering, no direction in mind.
'That explains why cultivators above Qi Condensation never bothered trying to steal one of these flames, even back at the Alchemy Tournament... only disciples in the first realm ever actually use them. Maybe the flame just can't scale up to match a Foundation Establishment cultivator, and ends up useless past that point... Or maybe I'm missing something, since I've never actually seen a Foundation Establishment cultivator carrying one. Maybe it works differently once you hit that level. Who knows.' Stopping, he looked back toward the camp, sensing it had emptied out completely by now.
Turning his head slightly, he felt massive surges of energy concentrated in one spot. 'That's probably the gorge between the mountains everyone kept talking about, the so-called escape route.'
Turning away from the gorge, away from the raging battle, he kept walking, unhurried. 'No point going to watch how that turns out... Better to keep working through how to modify the Evergreen Qi technique.'
Then, without quite meaning to, he shifted direction slightly. 'Maybe I should go dig through the central ring? Might find something there that helps with this problem I've got with the technique.'
Settling on a rough plan in his head, An headed confidently toward the central ring.
"Hm?" He came to a sudden stop.
BOOM!
Throwing a palm out in front of him, he caught a spear that came flying out of the forest at incredible speed.
Looking down at his hand, specifically, at the blood on it, he thought, 'Foundation Establishment energy?' Frowning, he activated his Qi at once and wrapped it around both hands.
Whoosh!
Launching forward, tearing straight through the trees in his path, shredding them apart with nothing but his own body, An opened his palm and pressed it flat against the ground.
Sending a massive wave of vibrating energy straight down into the earth, he leapt back.
The instant he moved, a spear shot up out of the ground exactly where he'd been standing, and behind it emerged a cultivator, hood pulled down so low only his mouth showed.
"Ptooh!" He spat out a few clots of blood and wiped his slightly blue-tinged mouth.
Reaching out a hand, he started drawing the spear back toward himself, then suddenly tensed. "Hm?"
Hundreds of Qi Blades slammed into a single point on the spear, right at its center.
Crack! Crack!
Wrapped tight around the spear like a hedgehog's spines, every one of those Qi Blades detonated at once, obliterating the spear and everything around it, turning earth and trees alike into scorched sand.
"Yin-Yang Reversal!" Crossing his hands, the cultivator tried to activate his technique, only to feel a horrifying surge of energy bearing down on him. The pressure alone was enough to nearly snap his fingers.
"UGH!" Abandoning the technique halfway, he released every bit of Qi he'd gathered, afraid of what the backlash would do to him otherwise.
"AAH!" His released Qi collided with the incoming Qi Spear, straining with everything it had to stop it, but the energy spear cut straight through his clump of Qi like it wasn't even there, not slowing down in the slightest.
"Yang Attraction!" The veins along the cultivator's arms flared bright red. His skin began to crack, though no blood came out, as if the cracks were nothing more than patterns, or runes.
Timing it just right. 'Now!' The cultivator thrust his hands forward, pressing them lightly against the still-accelerating spear, and started nudging it off course, ever so slightly.
"UGH-AAH!" He'd managed to deflect the Qi Spear, but he hadn't accounted for the energy packed inside it. The moment it struck the ground, the spear released everything it had stored, and the shockwave alone nearly knocked him off his feet.
Eyes wide, he locked onto An, and froze completely.
Barely a few dozen meters away, An stood there, head tilted slightly, watching him, seemingly staring right through the lowered hood into his eyes.
Standing there in silence, the cultivator tensed. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, he was cut off.
"Your next attack's going to be your last... I didn't kill you because you're not giving off any killing intent, which tells me you attacked because you didn't expect me to be standing in your way." An took two steps to the side, settling into what looked like the perfect angle to strike from.
Hearing the words, the calm certainty in An's voice, the hooded cultivator answered, a little unsteady. "You're right. I really didn't expect to run into anyone out here, and I attacked because... let's just say, the advantage goes to whoever's faster." He kept his eyes on An's face, especially those strange green eyes, which stirred up some odd feeling in him, like goosebumps crawling up from somewhere deep in his soul.
Shaking his head, the cultivator smirked slightly. "As for that bit about my next attack being my last... I'll have to disagree. I haven't even used my real techniques yet."
All he got in response was: "Pfft!" Watching, surprised, as his opponent nearly burst out laughing, he felt a flash of humiliation and frowned hard.
"Oh, sorry... That wasn't meant to insult you or bruise your ego or anything... How do I put this... I'm just not great with people." An tipped his head back toward the sky, trying to peer through the dark crimson clouds above.
Caught off guard by the response, the hooded cultivator didn't know what to say.
Remembering where the conversation had left off, An lowered his head again. "Oh, right, about why I'm so confident... It's all down to your Qi. Specifically, the path it takes." He raised a hand and traced something in the air with one finger.
Not following at all, the cultivator frowned. "What does that even mean? The path of Qi?"
"Exactly that. How your Qi activates, the route it takes through you, the pattern of that route: which muscles it runs through, which veins it wraps around... Once I've read the pattern from your earlier uses of Qi, from when you used your techniques, I can tell roughly which one you're about to use before you even open your mouth to shout its name." Rolling his eyes slightly, An added, "I've never really understood why you all shout the names out loud like that... Like it somehow makes the Qi travel faster."
Standing frozen, listening to all this, the cultivator finally couldn't hold it in. "Has anyone ever told you you're kind of strange? And how could you possibly read the pattern of my Qi? That's not even possible..." Relaxing slightly, he couldn't help but ask.
'People used to call me strange back then too... Even in this new life, all the emotional whiplash from stress, from trying to figure myself out and find my own path, just made it worse. But then I found the kind of peace the Dao of Death and the Dao of Wood gave me. Which is honestly a little strange to say out loud... I feel more like myself now than I did back in my first life. It's like I've actually found some peace. Even knowing that at my current stage, having just broken through to Foundation Establishment, I'm still nothing but an insect next to this world, anyone annoyed enough could crush me on a whim... somehow, none of that matters quite as much anymore.' Tilting his head slightly, thinking it over while reading the emotions off the hooded cultivator, An decided to explain.
Pressing his hands together, "Picture these two hands as layers. Now picture Qi, and the world that came out of that Qi, as made up of countless layers just like that. Every layer holds 'something' inside it... Let's not get hung up on what exactly that 'something' is. You'll have to figure that part out yourself if you want to keep climbing the ladder of cultivation. So, cultivators below Golden Core can only ever see and understand the first layer. That's your answer, right there: to read a cultivator's Qi pattern, you need to see and understand more than just the one layer." Explaining it slowly, An turned his head toward the gorge.
Listening, the cultivator lowered his head and stayed silent for a long stretch, several minutes at least.
Finally, he looked back up. "Then how can you see more than I can, when we're both in the same realm? And I'm pretty sure you only just broke through yourself, not long ago."
"Hm, almost every cultivator's got something special about them, some have two hearts, some have two dantians, some can talk to beasts, some can kiss their own ass..." An smiled slightly and shrugged. "I got lucky. I just understand and see a bit more than most people do."
'A few lines about that kind of thing were buried in some junk records in the Scripture Pavilion back on the Outer Platform... All sorts of strange deviations recorded in there. I still don't know if this counts as a Special Body, some gift from the heavens... or just an ordinary bodily mutation that Qi happened to make worse.' An's mind wandered while the hooded cultivator mulled over what he'd just heard.
"Hmph. Alright, now I get where your confidence is coming from... but honestly? Doesn't seem all that fair." Feeling a flicker of envy at the young man's peculiar gift, the hooded cultivator spoke up.
"Fair? This world isn't fair to begin with. Besides, judging by how easily you pulled off that Yin-Yang technique, you've got some kind of mutation of your own going on too. So you're really not in much of a position to complain about 'fairness'... Eh, you know what I mean." Turning slightly, An started walking away at an easy pace.
"I've probably overstayed my welcome here. Good luck, Demonic Path cultivator." With a small wave goodbye, An took a step and disappeared into the dark forest.
Watching him go, the cultivator pulled out something that looked like an old book, flipped it open to a blank page, and jotted something down.
Closing the book carefully, he thought, 'Right. I need to get moving.' Activating his Qi, he tore off deeper into the forest, leaving a trail of afterimages behind him.