Chapter 553: Retreat |
I stared at the blue calligraphy floating above the shrine.
Lu Chenyang had been standing at what we had figured was a safe distance away, and he had been fully conscious and in control of himself, and then suddenly he hadn’t been. The blue sun energy somehow managed to reach out and hijack his consciousness like he was some puppet on strings.
Which shouldn't have been possible.
Lu Chenyang was a genuine Oneiric Sovereign, so his spiritual defenses were supposed to be strong. Except the blue energy went ahead and bypassed all of that without trying, and it turned him into a tool to do whatever it wanted.
Seeing that made me seriously wonder what it could do to me if it did that to him so easily.
I was operating as a spiritual manifestation that was possessing Du Yanze's body.
My actual soul was back in the tournament arena anchored inside my physical form, and the Genesis Seed was there too giving the original me its natural purification and protection against corruption. But out here? I didn't have anything except for whatever leftover protection I managed to get from creating my spiritual projection out of qi that the Genesis Seed already purified for me.
I had no idea how long that protection was going to last, or if it would work against the blue sun energy directly attacking me.
The smart move was obvious.
"We're leaving," I told him while backing away from the corrupted structure.
I made sure to keep my eyes locked onto the blue calligraphy just in case it acted.
Lu Chenyang didn't argue with me. He pushed himself off the big boulder he was leaning on and followed me, though his movements were still looking unsteady. The terror hadn't left his eyes. Whatever he experienced during those few moments he was being controlled, it shook him badly.
We hurried down the mountain path fast with neither of us saying a word to each other.
I wanted to put as many miles as possible between us and the shrine before we even thought about stopping to take a rest. The blue sun energy trying to force open a dream gate was obviously deliberate and targeted. It knew what it was doing. Which meant it would probably try doing it again if we stayed too close to it.
The golden city finally came into our view when we managed to reach the foothills.
Looking at it from this distance, it looked peaceful and prosperous, with all those believers strutting around unaware that their reality was slowly being poisoned by a corruption they couldn't even see.
It made me feel angry.
All these people were victims, they never asked to have their thought patterns twisted, and they never chose to have their ability to doubt things and self-reflection stripped away from them. Some otherworldly entity infected the foundation of their realm, and now they were stuck suffering the consequences for it.
And I couldn't even fix it for them, at least not now.
The frustration of having that limitation burned inside my chest because I had the knowledge, I understood what the problem was, and what I needed to do about it. Except I lacked the tools and resources I needed to implement the solution. The only thing I could do now was document whatever I found out, and hope that whenever I returned with the proper preparation, the realm wouldn't end up having deteriorated beyond saving.
We travelled for another hour before Lu Chenyang spoke up.
"Can we stop?" His voice sounded rough and exhausted, it was more emotional fatigue than physical. "I need to rest. Process what happened."
I went ahead and looked around so I could check our surroundings.
We managed to end up in this relatively quiet area on the city's outskirts near a small park where people usually came for meditation. There were a few believers scattered around the place, with every one of them sitting on their own designated stone and proclaiming their blessings out loud to anybody sitting within hearing distance.
"Alright," I said. "This place seems safe enough.”
We managed to find an empty spot beneath a large tree. The shade it gave us provided some nice relief from that golden light that seemed to permeate everything inside this realm. Lu Chenyang sat down heavily with his back leaning against the trunk, while I settled down nearby, making sure I still maintained my awareness of our surroundings in case that Nightmare Enforcer decided it wanted to make another appearance.
For several minutes, neither of us bothered saying anything.
Lu Chenyang sat there staring at his hands and occasionally flexing his fingers around like he was checking to make sure they still belonged to him. The silence between us wasn't uncomfortable, but it definitely felt heavy with unprocessed emotion.
Finally, the old man looked up at me.
"What world does that blue energy originate from?" he asked. "I felt something when it was controlling me. A sense of where it wanted me to open the gate to. But I don't recognize the spiritual signature at all."
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I sat there and considered how I should answer that. The truth was complicated and dangerous, the less Lu Chenyang knew about the Two Suns World, the safer he would be. But he still deserved some kind of explanation after what he went through.
"It's not a world you'd want to dream walk to," I told him. "You need to trust me on that. Because whatever curiosity you might be feeling, or whatever intellectual interest you have in studying a new energy system, it's not worth taking the risk."
"Is it really that bad?" Lu Chenyang asked.
"It's a lot worse," I replied. "The corruption in here is manageable because it's diluted and spread thin across the realm. But at the source? It's concentrated enough to rewrite your personality without you noticing it happened. You'd sit there thinking you were making your own choices and following your own goals, when in reality, you'd be following its programming."
The old man went quiet for a moment while he processed that information, and then he gave me a slow nod.
"Alright. I won't ask you anymore questions about it. You're probably right about living in ignorance being better in this case."
I felt a huge wave of relief that he wasn't going to push me for more details.
Lu Chenyang had proven himself to be intelligent and thoughtful, so if he said he'd drop the subject, then I believed him. But I hoped there wasn't any of that blue sun influence lingering around inside him, because I already saw how the two suns could cause a cultivator to betray their promises.
The conversation lapsed back into silence.
I used the time to organize my thoughts, reviewing everything I managed to learn about the corruption's structure and the Realm Stabilizing Tree. Azure would want a complete report whenever I returned to my physical body, and the more details I could manage to remember, the better prepared we'd be for a return trip.
After a while went by, a different question occurred to me, it was something that had been bothering me since I first learned about dream gates back when Moon gave me that demonstration.
"Senior Lu," I spoke up. "You mentioned earlier how you gained access to this realm through preparation and resources. How does that work anyway? I know dream gates form connections to realms that happen to resonate with a cultivator's dao, but I suspect there has to be more to it than just having natural resonance."
Lu Chenyang looked up, and I could see some of his earlier teaching enthusiasm returning to his expression. The question apparently provided him with a welcome distraction from having to dwell on his possession incident.
"You're right about natural resonance being a part of it," he said. "Whenever a Dream Architect first forms their internal gates, those initial connections happen automatically based on whatever their spiritual affinity is. But doing that only gives you access to a handful of realms at the most."
He shifted his position around to get more comfortable while he settled into his explanation mode. "If you want to access any additional dream worlds beyond your natural gates, you have to use a creation technique. It's an advanced thing to do, and it usually isn't taught until a cultivator reaches the Oneiric Sovereign level at a minimum. The process is complicated and it requires extensive preparation."
"What kind of preparation are we talking about here?"
"The most important requirement is obtaining something directly from the target realm," Lu Chenyang explained. "It has to be a spiritual or physical object that originated from there. The item acts like an anchor point, it's a reference that your dream gate can lock onto. Without it, you're trying to open a portal leading to nowhere."
That made a lot of sense from a spiritual mechanics perspective. Dream gates operated by dimensional traversal, so having something from the destination would provide you a stable coordinate inside the spiritual dimensions, which gave you something concrete to aim for instead of relying on vague impressions about a realm's nature.
"So, how did you manage to get an item from this realm without having been here in the first place?" I asked.
"I bought it at an auction," Lu Chenyang replied. "A Lucid Lawbearer was selling items he'd managed to collect from different dream worlds. One of them happened to be a meditation stone coming from this realm, and it was carved with Xuan Yi calligraphy. It cost me half my savings at the time, but it was worth it."
"Physical objects can be taken out of dream worlds?” I asked, surprised. “I thought everything in here were spiritual constructs that would dissolve whenever they were removed from their native realm."
"That's true for most dream worlds," Lu Chenyang confirmed. "And it's also true for most cultivators too. But once you manage to reach the Lucid Lawbearer realm, you gain the ability to stabilize dream constructs, which makes them persistent even outside their origin realm. It's one of the major advantages you gain from advancing to that level."
He leaned forward a little bit, and his earlier exhaustion seemed to fade away as he became more engaged with the topic.
"Think about it. Lucid Lawbearers can impose their own personal dream laws onto reality. Which includes the law that certain objects are real and permanent regardless of whatever realm they're sitting in. So, they can take items from dream worlds and bring them straight back into the physical world."
I sat there and processed that. The implications of it were significant, because if high-level dream cultivators could extract resources from inner worlds, that would end up making those worlds valuable to have. Especially any worlds that had unique cultivation materials or artifacts in them.
"So that's why this realm having the time loop is so valuable, isn't it?" I said as all the pieces started clicking together. "The loop means the resources never deplete. A Lucid Lawbearer could harvest the same rare materials over and over again, selling them off in the physical world for massive profit."
"Exactly," Lu Chenyang confirmed. "Though the extraction process takes a significant amount of spiritual energy to do and it can only be done a limited number of times per visit. But still, the potential wealth you can get is enormous. If the word got out about this realm's time loop, you'd have every major sect out there fighting to gain access to it."
A new question formed in my mind.
"But if this realm is so valuable to have, why did that Lucid Lawbearer go ahead and sell the meditation stone in the first place? Wouldn't he want to keep the access all to himself?"
"He sold it before the time loop existed," Lu Chenyang replied. "Back then, this place was another moderately corrupted dream world. It was interesting for study purposes, but it wasn't special. The Lucid Lawbearer had visited it, collected samples from it, and then moved onto other realms. He probably needed to some quick spirit stones for something and decided it was better to liquidate some of his collection."
That made a lot of sense.
The time loop was my own creation; it was something I'd implemented during my first visit here so I could slow the corruption's spread down. Before that, this realm would have been another one of the many inner worlds accessible to dream walkers. It might have been valuable for its unique Xuan Yi system, but it wasn't exceptional.
Now though? With the time loop sitting in place? This realm had become something far more significant. Because having the ability to harvest renewable resources would make it a massive target for all the powerful cultivators out there. I was feeling very grateful that the Dream World was sitting under the Azure Peak Sect's control, which limited who could access these inner worlds.
An idea started forming.
If I wanted to travel to other inner worlds to better prepare for my battle with Wu Kangming, I'd need to learn to create dream gates of my own. And I already possessed something unique that would allow me to dream walk to a realm that would almost guarantee that I regained my full abilities for the finals.
All I needed to do was convince Lu Chenyang to teach me how to create a dream gate.
Comments 1