Chapter 562: Life At The Slumbering Scholars Sect |
"The last stage is projection," Lu Chenyang said, and he leaned forward as he said it like he wanted to make sure I was paying attention to this part. "Once you've traced the object's spiritual signature back to whatever realm it came from, you need to establish a stable connection point between yourself and that destination. The way it works is that the object itself acts as the anchor on the far side of that connection, while your own spiritual foundation acts as the anchor on your side. You're building the pathway between those two points."
I nodded and tried to absorb every word he was saying because without Azure there to analyze from a dozen angles and flag potential problems, I was on my own so I couldn't afford to miss anything.
"The danger in all of this," Lu Chenyang went on, setting down his cup, "is that what you're doing is punching a hole through your own spiritual defenses to make the connection work. If there's something hostile waiting at the destination on the other side of that hole, it can come back through the connection toward you before you have any chance to stop it. This is why the vast majority of cultivators don't even attempt gate creation until they've reached Lucid Lawbearer realm, because at that cultivation level, you have enough raw power to slam the gate shut if something starts coming through."
"But you said you made gates when you were only an Oneiric Sovereign," I pointed out.
"I did, yes." A weak smile appeared on his face. "And I nearly got myself killed doing it the first three times I tried. The fourth attempt was smooth enough that I made the mistake of thinking I had it. The fifth attempt I opened a gate into a realm that was infested with thought parasites, and they came pouring through before I could close it. They spent the next two weeks trying to eat my consciousness from the inside out. The only reason I'm here talking to you is that the sect's healers are good at their jobs."
I went quiet for a long moment.
Dream gate creation was more dangerous than I had first assumed. There was a chance of it leaving me worse off than dead.
"So how do you stop that from happening?" I asked.
"Preparation, mostly, and a lot of careful attention to what you're feeling during the process," Lu Chenyang said, settling back in his chair. "You never attempt a gate when you're exhausted or when your mind is scattered, you always have someone nearby who can break you out of the trance state if anything goes wrong, and you pay very close attention to how the destination feels during the tracing stage. If at any point you feel something wrong, you stop and you walk away from that attempt."
"This," he said, "is the object I used when I made my own gate to the Realm of the Cursed."
What was inside was a meditation stone, the size of my palm, and the surface was covered in elaborate Xuan Yi calligraphy. Even doing nothing, it had a faint spiritual signature that I could feel from across the table, something ancient.
"Go ahead and hold it," Lu Chenyang said. "Don't do anything with it yet, get a sense of what it feels like."
I reached out and picked it up.
The moment my fingers made contact with the surface, everything snapped into place. A golden light, an unshakable certainty, the belief that I was the chosen one.
"Are you feeling it?" Lu Chenyang asked.
"Yes," I said. "It feels... certain is the word I have for it. Everything about it feels like it's certain of itself."
"That's Xuan Yi energy in its fundamental state," Lu Chenyang said, nodding slowly. "Conviction given physical form. Now, what you'll need to do in the first stage is what we call attunement. It's exactly what it sounds like. You hold that stone, extend your spiritual senses through it, and let the realm's signature come to you over a period of hours or sometimes days. Don't try to analyze what you're feeling. Just observe it and let your senses adjust to it naturally without interference."
I turned the stone over once in my hands, feeling the weight of it and thinking about the fact that this one object was a connection to an entire world somewhere on the other side of dimensional space.
"How long did it take you to complete your first attunement?"
"Twenty hours, give or take," he said, "but I was working with a realm whose energy system was unfamiliar to me at that point. You've spent time inside the Realm of the Cursed, you've worked with Xuan Yi energy, you've channeled it, tested it, and built a working understanding of how it behaves. The realm's signature isn't foreign to you like it was foreign to me."
That did make sense.
"After attunement comes tracing," Lu Chenyang continued, leaning forward a little again. "That's the stage where you follow the spiritual connection that the attunement established and you trace it back through the dimensional layers between realms until you can locate where the dream realm sits. Every object that has existed carries a record of everywhere it's been, everyone who has touched it, everything it was present for. What you're doing in the tracing stage is reading that record in reverse all the way back to its point of origin."
"And then comes projection?"
"Then projection," he confirmed. "That's where you take everything the attunement and tracing have given you and you use it to construct the gate, anchoring one end of it into your own spiritual foundation and the other end at the destination you identified during the tracing stage. The gate stays open for as long as you're feeding energy into it or until you close it on purpose."
"So the gate needs continuous energy to stay open the whole time?"
"At your level yes," Lu Chenyang said. "When you reach Lucid Lawbearer realm and you're able to impose your own laws onto the fabric of reality around you, you can create gates that sustain themselves, but at Oneiric Sovereign level you're still operating within the existing rules of how dimensional space works rather than rewriting those rules, and operating within existing rules always costs more energy than making your own."
Lu Chenyang took the stone back from my hands and put it back in the box and closed the lid.
"I'm going to let you use this stone to practice," he said, "but not today and not tomorrow either. Before we get to practical work, you need to understand what you're doing enough that you're not going to get yourself killed in a practice chamber, that means a week of training under my direct supervision first. I'll also introduce you to the other disciples and elders who are here, get you set up somewhere to sleep and work, and then we'll begin the attunement process in a controlled setting."
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"Thank you," I told him, and I meant it because there was no reason for him to be doing any of this.
"Don't thank me until you've either succeeded or failed at this," Lu Chenyang said, with a small smile. "Either way you'll have a clearer idea of what it costs."
***
The next morning Lu Chenyang took me through the Slumbering Scholars Sect for the first time, because my arrival the day before had been chaotic enough that I hadn't gotten any kind of sense of the place, and seeing it in daylight made it clear that three mountain peaks sounded like a manageable description but didn't convey the scale of what was there.
The central peak was where the administrative buildings sat and also where the primary libraries were. The eastern peak was dedicated to cultivation facilities and private meditation chambers. And the western peak was living quarters for the disciples and guest accommodations, which was presumably where I would be sleeping from that point forward.
"This is the Archive of Collected Dreams," Lu Chenyang said as we walked into a building situated near the top of the central peak.
The name was not an exaggeration because the interior was staggering, with shelves going up five full stories and floating platforms moving between them when someone walked close enough. Every available surface was covered in jade slips and old scrolls that looked like they'd been there for a long time.
A young woman behind a desk near the entrance looked up when we came in, dark hair pulled back, wearing the sect's deep blue robes, and when she registered who Lu Chenyang was, her eyes went wide and she bowed.
"Elder Lu," she said, "we weren't expecting you to be up and moving around so soon after everything."
"I'm healing well," Lu Chenyang said. "Song Mei, this is Hou Hongyun, he'll be here with us for several weeks and I'm personally teaching him dream gate creation."
Song Mei's expression shifted from polite and professional into curious interest as she looked me up and down. "Oneiric Sovereign,” she murmured. “And recently, unless I'm reading you wrong. That's ambitious for gate creation work."
"Ambitious does seem to be a theme with him," Lu Chenyang said.
I just gave her an awkward smile.
"If you need research materials for anything you're working on just come find me, the Archive is open to anyone Elder Lu brings in as a guest." Song Mei paused and seemed to consider something. "If you're going to be starting with gates, you should begin with the lower collection on the second-floor eastern wing, we have somewhere around forty texts on basic dimensional theory up there that would be worth your time."
I thanked her and we moved deeper into the Archive.
I noticed she glanced after us once or twice before we were out of her line of sight, which I supposed made sense because news of a new person showing up to learn gate creation from a senior elder who was recovering from injury was probably the most interesting thing that had happened here in a while.
Over the next few days I met a lot more of the people who lived and worked in the sect, and the thing that struck me most about the Slumbering Scholars Sect as a whole was that everyone here was a scholar who happened to also be a cultivator rather than the other way around.
The culture of the place was built around research, documentation, and understanding the principles behind what you were doing before you tried to do it. This was very different from most cultivation environments I'd spent time in, and I found I liked it more than I expected to.
On the second day Elder Wan Shuhua had Lu Chenyang and me over for dinner at her private residence. She was an older woman with silver hair and deep laugh lines around her eyes. Her cultivation was at Lucid Lawbearer realm, which made her one of the senior people in the entire sect.
"So, you're the young man who managed to make a friend out of this one," Elder Wan said, smiling across the table at me after we'd all settled in. From the corner of my eye, I saw Lu Chenyang look like he regretted agreeing to come. "That by itself is enough to tell me something about your character. Old Lu hasn't made a friend in several centuries."
"I'm not as bad as you're making it sound," Lu Chenyang muttered.
"You are," Elder Wan laughed, and then looked back at me. "And you want to learn gate creation? Tell me why."
I took a moment to think about what answer was both honest and useful to give her.
"There are places I need to get to," I said. "Techniques I need access to. People I need to be able to help when it matters. Having the ability to open my own gates means I don't have to depend on someone else to open a path for me every time I need to get somewhere."
"Independence," Elder Wan said, nodding like that was more or less the answer she'd expected. "That's a good goal. But I'll tell you something that most people who come to this sect looking to learn gate creation don't think about beforehand. The dream gate technique is a great responsibility. Every gate you open is an entry point into wherever you're standing, and every realm you visit leaves traces on you that you carry back whether you intend to or not. The technique does something to the people who use it over time even though most don’t realise it."
She took a pause as she poured tea for all three of us.
"That is why we are careful about who we teach this to," she continued. "Lu Chenyang vouching for you carries real weight here and I'm not dismissing that, but I want you to understand that when we invest the time and knowledge in teaching you this technique, we are making a judgment about who you are as a person and not about how strong your cultivation base is. So don't give us reason to feel that judgment was wrong."
"I won't," I said, and I meant that too.
"Good,” Elder Wan smiled. “Now tell me everything you observed about the time loop in that realm. Old Lu only gave me a brief description, but the theoretical mechanics of something operating at that scale is interesting to me so I want to hear it from you."
We stayed there for several hours after that.
Elder Wan asked pointed questions about the corruption in the Realm of the Chosen, the structural mechanics of the loop, and everything I'd observed regarding how Xuan Yi energy behaved in practice.
I was careful throughout to not mention that it was me who had created the loop in the first place.
What I enjoyed about the conversation was that she talked to me like I was a colleague whose observations were worth taking seriously rather than a junior person who needed to be taught how to think.
By the time we left, I felt both energized by the conversation and also like I needed to go lie down quietly somewhere.
***
On the third day Lu Chenyang handed me the meditation stone.
"We're going to work in one of the private training chambers," he said, "the sect has rooms built for gate creation practice with containment formations on every surface, alert systems that will flag if anything starts going wrong, and spiritual support functions built into the floor and walls."
The chamber was circular and not large, and there was a single cushion in the center of the room.
"Sit down," Lu Chenyang said. "Hold the stone. Close your eyes and extend your spiritual awareness through it. Remember, don't force anything, just observe and let what comes come."
I sat down on the cushion and closed my eyes while holding the stone in both palms.
I extended my awareness through it carefully and kept Lu Chenyang's warning about hostile realms at the front of my mind the entire time.
The connection opened up much more easily than I'd been bracing for, the stone's signature unfolding like something that had been waiting to be noticed.
I was feeling the Realm of the Chosen from a long way away and getting all of it at once: the golden light, the unquestioning certainty, and underneath all of that, the twisted energy that had wound itself through everything.
I pulled back fast.
"What happened?" Lu Chenyang asked from somewhere behind me.
"The corruption," I said, opening my eyes. "I could feel it even through the stone from here. It's everywhere."
Lu Chenyang nodded like this confirmed something he already knew. "That's a part of why I was considering never going back there again even before the seventeen deaths started adding up. The realm is more dangerous than most hostile realms. But you don't need to open a gate to that specific realm to learn the technique, the stone is a practice anchor, once you understand the mechanics fully, you can use any object from any realm."
That was useful to hear.
I settled back and tried again, but this time I made a deliberate choice to stay near the surface of what the stone was showing me without going deeper into the corruption underneath.
As I lost myself for who knows how long in meditation, I finally came back to myself and opened my eyes to see that Lu Chenyang was no longer in the room. There was a different cultivator sitting near the door instead, young looking, somewhere in his twenties probably, and he was staring right at me.