Chapter 7: Chapter 6: On the Way Back

CHAPTER

6

On the Way Back

I

They made their way back to the sect on Ke Li’s magical cloud. Tian Jin was the one controlling. None of them had controlled a magical cloud before, but Tian Jin quickly got the hang of it, so they left it to him.

It had already been a while since they left the valley, but it’d still take a bit over two days before they reached the sect. Thankfully, Ke Li’s belonging contained a map that they could use to find their way back to the sect, and after determining their position and in which direction the sect was, they had set off.

Currently, Duo Lan was the one channeling spiritual power into the magical cloud while Tian Jin recovered his spiritual stamina, who had taken the first turn  Once she ran out of spiritual stamina, Hao Zhen would take over.

While waiting for his turn, Hao Zhen decided to study his new spiritual skill.

Assimilating Ke Li’s skill seed had been a fairly straightforward process. Following Tian Jin’s instructions, he had enveloped the skill seed with his spiritual power then and pressed it against his chest. The skill seed had turned physically intangible the moment his spiritual power came into contact with it, so it entered his body unhindered.

The moment the skill seed had entered his body, his spiritual power pulled into his soul, almost instinctively, and within moments the skill seed entered his crux. The moment that happened, Hao Zhen had felt as if some connection had been established between him and the skill seed, and the next moment, he somehow knew all there was to know about Ethereal String Puppetry—how to use it, what it could do, and what its limitations were.

Once inside his crux, the skill seed hadn’t disappeared; instead, it remained floating inside it. To confirm what Tian Jin had said, he tried to use his spiritual power to move it back out of his crux, but found himself unable to. It wouldn’t so much as budge. As far as he could tell, assimilating a skill seed was indeed a one-way road.

Spiritual skills were divided into six grades the same way cultivation was. Not only that, each spiritual skill could have several forms, which were, essentially, versions and variations of the same spiritual skill, from what he understood. The higher the grade of a spiritual skill, the more forms it could have. Ke Li’s skill seed had been a red-grade skill seed, the lowest grade, so Hao Zhen only had access to the first form of Ethereal String Puppetry: Overwhelming String Puppetry.

Now that he had assimilated the skill, Hao Zhen understood just what exactly Ke Li had done the previous night.

Overwhelming String Puppetry gave the user the power to create an Ethereal String, which the user could attach to virtually anyone or anything. The user would then be able to control whatever was attached to the Ethereal String with their thoughts. If the target was a living being, however, they’d be able to put up resistance if they were conscious, and the higher the level of the target, the harder it was to control them. Overwhelming String Puppetry worked best if the target was at a lower level than that user. In that case, unless the target had abnormally high willpower, the user would be able to perfectly control them without any problems. On the other hand, if the target was at the same level as the user, or at a higher level, the effectiveness of the spiritual skill wouldn’t be nearly as effective unless the target had been rendered unconscious, in which case they wouldn’t be able to put up any resistance even if they were at a higher level.

As it turned out, the willpower of both the user and the target played a crucial role, which meant that the fact that Tian Jin had managed to resist Ke Li’s control made much more sense than Hao Zhen had originally assumed.

In order to try out the spiritual skill, Hao Zhen took out some items from Ke Li’s spatial ring. He then channeled his spiritual power into the skill seed inside his crux, upon which he felt the connection between himself and the skill seed being strengthened. Next, all it took was a thought from his part to conjure an Ethereal String. He did it instinctively, as if he had known how to do it all his life.

The Ethereal String extended out from his chest and attached itself to one of the items Hao Zhen had summoned: a small sword he had found inside Ke Li’s spatial ring. The Ethereal String took the form of a thin white line that was visible only to himself. It wasn’t something that could be sensed or seen by anyone else, even if they used Spiritual Sight.

The moment that the Ethereal String attached itself to the sword, Hao Zhen immediately realized that he had picked the wrong practice target. Ethereal String Puppetry, as there was nothing about the sword he could control. Apparently, the skill was useless if the target didn’t have moving parts, as it only gave him the power to control the target into doing things that they would be able to do themselves.

Hao Zhen then went through Ke Li’s spatial ring again, searching for something he could practice on, and eventually found a small wooden puppet, which he quickly took out of the ring. The puppet was about the size of a forearm, shaped like a human being and jointed. Hao Zhen assumed that Ke Li had gotten it precisely to test his spiritual skill.

The moment Hao Zhen connected the Ethereal String to the puppet, he instinctively understood everything that he could do with it. Over the next few minutes, he practiced controlling the puppet’s limbs with his thoughts, and once he got the hang of it, he started having the puppet walk back and forth. Before long, he had the puppet doing cartwheels, handstands, and flips.

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Using Ethereal String Puppetry came naturally to him, almost like breathing. Spiritual skills weren’t really something that required a lot of practice, as they were conceptual powers. They were different from spiritual techniques, which were applications of spiritual power—specific ways spiritual powers could be manipulated—and as such required practice to get it right. Then again, even among spiritual techniques, there were ones that could be almost instantaneously grasped, like Spiritual Sight.

As amusing as it was to play around with the wooden puppet, however, Hao Zhen knew that the true utility of Ethereal String Puppetry didn’t lie in controlling inanimate objects, but people. The skill wasn’t meant to be used to control actual puppets, but to use living beings as if they were puppets. Unfortunately, at least for the time being, there weren’t any living beings he could practice the skill on. For a moment, he considered asking Tian Jin and Lan Yue for help, but ultimately decided against it. He didn’t know them nearly well enough to ask them to serve as practice targets for his spiritual skill.

After a while, realizing that there wasn’t much of a point anymore in playing around with the puppet anymore, Hao Zhen returned it to Ke Li’s spatial ring and lay down on the cloud, watching the white clouds floating above, so close he could almost touch them. He then started thinking about everything that had happened so far, going through the recent events, then pondering on his plans going forward.

Du Qing wasn’t the only thing he was concerned about. He his head was filled with questions. How had he regained his memories? Why did this world share so many similarities with cultivation novels? What was his role in all of this? He couldn’t think of any answers. Everything was a mystery. He did have some suspicions, however.

Hao Zhen stole a glance at Tian Jin, who had his eyes closed as sat in meditation.

Although Hao Zhen couldn’t be certain of it, he believed that Tian Jin was connected to all of this. If his assumption that this world treated Tian Jin as if he were some sort of protagonist was correct, it meant that there had to be something special about Tian Jin to warrant such treatment. There was also the fact that Hao Zhen had regained his memories of his previous life after Tian Jin had hit him last night. He doubted that was some coincidence.

One of the possibilities he came up with was that since Tian Jin’s spiritual skill had the power to negate magical things, maybe what happened was that there had been some magical seal of some sort on his mind, in which his memories of his previous life were sealed, and that this seal had been destroyed when Tian Jin used his spiritual skill on him.

That, to him, was the answer that made the most sense, but there was no guarantee that was indeed the case. First, he’d have to look into whether magical seals were indeed a thing to begin with, and whether they could be used to seal memories. There was also the fact that this only raised more questions: Who, exactly, had sealed his memories of his previous life, and why had they done so? Not mention when and how.

For a moment he considered talking about this with Tian Jin and asking him whether he knew anything about what was going on, but he quickly decided against it. As far as he could tell, Tian Jin wasn’t a bad person,  but he wasn’t willing to take any chances. He didn’t know what the significance of remembering his previous life was, and until he better understood the situation, he didn’t plan on revealing what had happened to anyone—even more so someone he had only known for less than a week.

Nevertheless, he believed that even if he couldn’t directly ask Tian Jin for help in figuring out what was happening, Hao Zhen reckoned that he’d at least do his best to stick around him for the time being. Considering how much of a trouble magnet Tian Jin was, this would be dangerous, but Hao Zhen needed to know what was going on. Now that he had regained his memories of his previous life, he couldn’t just pretend that nothing had happened and return to his old life. There was something going on, and he was confident that Tian Jin was the key to finding out what exactly it was.

There was also Duo Lan. Hao Zhen didn’t know what exactly was the deal with her. If it hadn’t been for Tian Jin, he’d have probably assumed that she was the one with protagonist status, in light of what her life had been like since she had entered the Outer Cort. But since Tian Jin was there, so he didn’t know what to think. If his theory was correct and Tian Jin was a protagonist of some sort, then Hao Zhen reckoned that he was supposed to be minor character. Duo Lan’s role, on the other hand, wasn’t as clear. As far as he could, she could be a rival, a love rival, or even another protagonist. After all, even if cultivation novels usually only had a single protagonist, it didn’t meant that the same would apply to this world.

Hao Zhen groaned in dismay. There were just too many questions, too many unknowns, and virtually zero answers. Coming to the conclusion that agonizing over the situation wasn’t doing him any favors, and instead just wasting his time, he decided to do something productive and start cultivating instead. Now that he had his memories of his life as Amyas Auclair, cultivation felt even more boring than it had been before, if that was even possible, but it also meant he now understood much better just how essential power was to cultivators, so he persevered.

Over the next day, they took turns channeling their spiritual power into the magical cloud, and even though they had one less person to help power the magical artifact, between the three of them they managed to make it work. They spent most of their time in silence, either resting to recover their spiritual stamina or cultivating, though they ended up having to limit their cultivation time because cultivation also used up spiritual stamina. Or at least Hao Zhen had to. As Tian Jin and Duo Lan were both second-level redsouls, they had double his spiritual stamina, so they weren’t as affected.

It was in the morning of the second day that Tian Jin broke the silence. “We should be arriving at the sect in a couple of hours.”

Hao Zhen, who had been resting with his eyes closed, opened his eyes to look at the boy, then stared off into the distance. Hearing Tian Jin’s words, he felt a pit in his stomach. In just a couple of hours, they’d need to report Ke Li’s death to the elders of the sect, and whether they’d be able to get away with their lie would be revealed. If they didn’t…

“I think we should review our stories a few more times,” Hao Zhen said, trying to suppress his anxiety. “Just in case the elders decided to question each of us individually.”

Tian Jin and Duo Lan didn’t appear to be nearly as worried as he was, but they still agreed to it, and they spent the next few hours ironing out all of the details of their story, making sure that there was nothing they had missed and that their stories matched perfectly. By the end of it, Hao Zhen still didn’t feel all that confident, but he couldn’t think of anything else they could do. Not only that, it wasn’t as if there was any time left. Just moments ago, Tian Jin had pointed out, in the distance, the mountain range where the Blazing Light Sect was at.

Tian Jin then started slowing the spiritual cloud, and only a few moments later, Hao Zhen caught sight of the buildings of the Viridian Mist Sect under them, thousands of feet below, sprawling throughout the valley.

They had arrived.

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