Chapter 566: Not Simply Hou |
Lu Chenyang was standing in the monitoring station of the dream walking facility and his eyes were locked onto pod seventeen where Hou Hongyun had been sitting inside meditating for the past six whole hours already. The jade monitoring slip that he was holding in his hand was pulsing as it tracked the young man’s condition.
Everything looked normal when he checked it. The heart rate was stable, the spiritual energy was flowing smoothly through all the channels, and Hou's consciousness was properly anchored to his physical body while his projection was off wandering through whatever realm he had decided to visit, which Lu Chenyang didn't actually know the details of.
Lu Chenyang should have felt relieved about all of this.
After everything that happened back in the Realm of the Cursed and after watching with his own two eyes as the Nightmare Enforcer tore his spiritual manifestation apart, he had been worried that something bad might happen during Hou's first independent dream gate attempt, so the fact that everything was reading as normal should have put his mind at ease. But his instincts kept screaming at him that something was wrong and he couldn't figure out why.
"Elder Lu?" Song Xu was walking over from the main monitoring desk, and her voice had that uncertain quality to it that she got when she wasn't sure if she should be saying something or not. "Pod seventeen's energy readings are going up. It's not at a dangerous level yet but it’s unusual for someone who only just learned gate creation."
Lu Chenyang looked over at the formation arrays that were surrounding Hou's pod and he could already see that the silver glow around it had grown more intense and was pulsing faster than it should have been at this stage.
"What kind of increase are we talking about?"
"Twenty percent above baseline right now," Song Xu said, she was checking her jade slip as she answered him. "Now it’s twenty five. The readings are saying he's channeling a significant amount of power through the gate connection, but the destination signature is..." she paused and Lu Chenyang could see the confusion on her face. "Elder Lu I can't figure out where it's pointing to. It's like the location doesn't exist anywhere."
That actually made sense to Lu Chenyang when he thought about it.
"Keep monitoring him," Lu Chenyang told her. "Write down any unusual patterns you see but don't do anything to intervene unless the emergency protocols activate on their own."
Song Xu bowed her head and went back to her station. Lu Chenyang stayed right where he was, standing there watching pod seventeen and feeling that unease in his gut that wasn't going away no matter how many times he told himself the readings were fine.
The energy readings kept climbing. Thirty five percent above baseline and then forty and the silver light that was surrounding the pod was getting brighter and brighter to the point where it was uncomfortable to look directly at it anymore.
"Elder Lu!" Song Xu's voice was alarmed now, and she wasn't trying to hide it. "The readings just jumped to sixty percent above the safe operating limits; the pods protective formations are compensating for it but…"
The jade slip in Lu Chenyang's hand suddenly grew hot, hot enough that he dropped it out of reflex.
Numbers that were supposed to be stable cultivation readings were scrolling by so fast that it was impossible to read any of them, and the spiritual signature that was supposed to show him where Hou was located had shattered into dozens of signals that were all contradicting each other.
"Everyone get back!" Lu Chenyang commanded. "Evacuate to the minimum safe distance right now, all of you!"
The disciples didn't need to be told twice, they were all scrambling toward the exit immediately. Song Xu stopped in the doorway though and looked back at him, her face caught between doing her job and the very reasonable fear that was taking over.
"Do you need us to alert the medical hall, Elder?"
"Go!" He didn't have the time or the attention to spare for coordinating right now because whatever was happening to pod seventeen it was happening very fast.
He made it to the pod and tried to activate the emergency extraction protocols, which were supposed to sever Hou's connection to whatever external realm he was in and drag his consciousness back into his body where it belonged.
His spiritual sense reached into the formation arrays and fed them the override command, but nothing happened at all.
He tried it again but this time he put significantly more power behind the command.
The formations should have responded to that instantly because that was their purpose, to provide a failsafe when something went wrong during dream walking, but the arrays just sat there unresponsive.
Lu Chenyang pushed his spiritual sense deeper into the system trying to understand what was blocking the protocols from working and what he found when he got down to the core of it made his blood freeze.
The formations were receiving and processing the override commands perfectly fine, but the problem was they had nothing to override because Hou's spiritual manifestation wasn't connected to the pod anymore.
The gate he had made had somehow cut the connection or transformed it into something unrecognizable, Lu Chenyang couldn't figure out the actual mechanism of it but the result was clear enough.
"That's impossible," he whispered.
Dream gates didn't work this way and everyone who studied dream cultivation knew that, the whole point of the technique was that you maintained a stable connection between yourself and your destination at all times, and severing that connection should have either killed the cultivator instantly or left them permanently stranded in the space between realms with no way home.
The energy readings were still going up. Seventy percent above baseline and then eighty and the silver light had become so bright now that it was blinding to look at.
Lu Chenyang made a decision because he couldn't just stand here and watch this continue.
If the formations couldn't pull Hou back, then he was going to have to get into the pod himself and try to do a direct spiritual intervention manually. This was dangerous to do because trying to grab someone's consciousness while they were in the middle of a gate transition could cause serious damage to both people involved, but leaving Hou stuck wherever he was seemed significantly worse than the risk.
He put both of his hands on the edge of the pod and started channeling his own dream qi into the connection point.
The pod exploded.
Lu Chenyang's defensive sphere was up before his conscious mind had even registered what was happening because three hundred years of cultivating had made certain reflexes automatic.
The explosion itself wasn't actually as catastrophic as it could have been because pod seventeen had been built with safety measures specifically designed to direct excess energy upward rather than outward, so the physical damage stayed contained within a certain radius.
Scorched stone, shattered formation arrays, and fragments of jade and silver ended up scattered all across the floor, but that was the extent of the physical destruction.
What made Lu Chenyang's soul actually shake was something that had nothing to do with the physical blast at all.
He recognized dream qi in what had been released, the silvery essence that was the foundation of their entire cultivation method and that part made sense. But there were three other completely distinct energies mixed in with it and every single one of them was completely wrong for this environment and shouldn't have been there.
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The first one felt like dream qi but it wasn't dream qi at all, it was something that moved through reality rather than around it.
Lu Chenyang had encountered regular spiritual qi before during his travels to normal cultivation sects and this was similar to that but it carried so much more weight and presence to it, like it had been compressed and refined to a degree that mortal cultivators simply shouldn't have been able to achieve.
The second energy was red at the edges of his perception, it felt hungry when it touched his senses and made every single one of his instincts tell him to put distance between himself and it immediately.
Exposure to this energy would transform him into something unrecognisable.
The third energy was what made Lu Chenyang's hands actually shake.
It was blue light and it was almost impossible to see among all the chaos of the explosion but to someone who had felt it before it was unmistakable. This was the exact same energy that had taken over his consciousness back in the Realm of the Cursed and tried to force him to open a gate to somewhere dangerous, the same presence that corrupted cultivators without them ever having the slightest idea that anything was happening to them.
And somehow all three of these energies that had absolutely no business being here had just been released from inside Hou Hongyun's dream gate.
Lu Chenyang held his defensive sphere in place, keeping himself protected and also keeping the scattered energies from reaching the disciples who had evacuated and were now clustered at the doorway, talking in shocked voices.
He ignored all of it and kept his attention on what was left of pod seventeen.
The smoke started clearing slowly and the scattered energies began losing their coherence as they spread out further from their source, the facility's ambient formations kicked in to absorb and neutralize the foreign qi before it could cause any further damage to anything.
Then someone walked out of the smoke and with a casual wave of their hand they absorbed all of the remaining foreign energy before it could spread far enough to affect the surroundings.
It was Hou Hongyun.
He came out of the destroyed pod unharmed, his robes weren't even scorched, and the expression on his face was calm and almost peaceful looking, as if he had just gotten up from a pleasant afternoon nap rather than from a pod that had just exploded.
But then Lu Chenyang saw something that made his heart stop.
The left one burned red like embers that were dying down and the right one gleamed with that blue that Lu Chenyang had just been thinking about, then both of them went back to their normal pale blue grey color.
It happened so quickly that he wasn't sure if he had imagined it.
"Brother Hou," Lu Chenyang called out to him, lowering his defensive sphere but keeping his spiritual sense extended to monitor Hou for any signs of hostile intent or corruption. "Are you alright?"
Hou stopped walking and his head tilted just slightly to the side, like he was listening to something that Lu Chenyang couldn't hear at all, and his eyes went distant and unfocused for about a second or so.
That was exactly how Lu Chenyang had looked when the blue energy had been in control of his actions back in the Realm of the Cursed, that same hollow stare with the attention divided between the physical world and some other presence.
Was Hou receiving commands right now?
Was the corruption telling him what to do in a voice that only he could hear?
Then Hou blinked and came back to the present moment and he smiled at Lu Chenyang, a bright smile that seemed out of place given the catastrophic energy release that had just destroyed the pod he'd been sitting in.
"I've never felt better actually," Hou said and his voice sounded normal, warm and familiar, exactly like the voice of the young man that Lu Chenyang had spent several days teaching dream cultivation theory to.
But something was wrong and he couldn't shake the feeling even when he tried to reason himself out of it.
Lu Chenyang looked at Hou closely, drawing on the centuries of experience he had with assessing the true state of cultivators beneath whatever surface they were presenting.
Physical appearance meant essentially nothing when it came to this kind of assessment because corrupted cultivators almost always looked completely healthy right up until the moment they lost themselves entirely, so he needed to look at deeper indicators than just what his eyes were telling him.
Hou's cultivation level hadn't changed, he was still at Oneiric Sovereign which made sense given the short time he'd been gone, and the Crown of Clarity was still stable around his spiritual foundation without any of the fracturing that you would normally see when a cultivator had gone into deviation.
But the aura that was coming off of him was something else.
Lu Chenyang had to work to keep his reaction off his face when he felt it.
The spiritual presence that Hou was putting out right now was comparable to Lucid Lawbearers that Lu Chenyang had actually met in person, not in terms of the raw power behind it because the cultivation base itself was still at Sovereign level, but in the quality and density of it.
Song Xu and the other disciples were slowly making their way back into the facility now that it seemed the immediate danger had passed and they were all staring, at the destroyed pod, at Elder Lu standing between them and Hou, at the young cultivator who had walked out of an explosion that by all rights should have put him in the medical hall for a month at least.
"What happened Elder Lu?" Song Xu asked. "Should we be calling the guards?"
Lu Chenyang thought about it because the smart answer to that question was yes, you contain the potential threat, alert the sect leadership, and let cultivators who are more powerful than you make the call on whether Hou was actually a danger to the people around him.
But something made him hesitate before giving that answer.
Hou was just standing there calmly in the ruins of the pod, he wasn't making any aggressive moves at all, and his expression when he looked around at the damaged equipment showed something that looked more like regret for causing the damage than hostility toward the people in the room with him.
When his eyes met Lu Chenyang's they were clear, rational looking, they didn't have the fanatical certainty that Lu Chenyang had seen before in people who were deep in that particular corruption.
And Lu Chenyang remembered what Hou had said before he went into the pod, that he was doing something different from standard techniques, that he had methods that other dream walkers didn't have access to, that the gate he was making would go somewhere that no one else could reach.
"No need," Lu Chenyang said at last. "Clear the facility though, I want only senior monitoring staff staying while we figure out what actually happened here."
Song Xu nodded and started organizing the exit of the junior disciples, their whispers and speculation filled the chamber as they filed out, all of them trying to figure out what kind of dream walking accident was even capable of completely destroying an entire pod like that.
Lu Chenyang waited until the room was mostly emptied of people before he said anything else.
"Brother Hou," he said. "I need complete honesty from you right now. What happened in there?"
Hou's smile got a little smaller. "I created the gate that I was trying to create and it worked. The dream pod just wasn't built to handle the energy requirements for maintaining that kind of connection so it failed, pretty catastrophically as you can see. I'm sorry about all the damage, I'll cover the cost of repairs."
"That's not what I'm asking you about." Lu Chenyang said. "I sensed four different types of spiritual energy in that explosion. The dream qi makes sense. But there were three other energies in there, and one of them felt identical to the blue energy that corrupted the Realm of the Cursed."
Hou's expression turned neutral. "Did it?"
"Don't do that." The patience that Lu Chenyang had been maintaining finally started to fray at the edges. "I have three hundred years of cultivation experience behind me, so I know when someone is deflecting from a question. That blue energy tried to take over my consciousness and force me to open a gate to somewhere dangerous, and now you have just emerged from a destroyed pod carrying that exact same energy signature all over your aura. So I will ask you again; what happened in there?"
For a long stretch of time Hou didn't answer him and he just looked at Lu Chenyang with an expression that was hard to interpret, calculating maybe, or sympathetic, or something that might have been resignation.
"I connected to a private dream realm," Hou finally said. "The gate formation I used is more complex than the standard dream walking techniques that you would normally teach here. The energies you picked up on are part of my own personal cultivation method, they're not corruption Lu Chenyang, they're tools under my control."
"Tools," Lu Chenyang repeated. He wanted very much to believe that. "Tools from the same source that can drive cultivators insane."
"The same source yes," Hou said, and at least he was acknowledging it rather than denying it. "But I've processed them differently than they would be encountered in the wild. Purified them so I'm not being influenced against my will in any way. Lu Chenyang, I'm asking you to believe me on that."
Lu Chenyang studied Hou's face looking for any indication of deception or the delusion that corrupted cultivators often had about their own state, because what made the blue energy so dangerous was that it made its victims genuinely believe they were in full control of themselves even when they weren’t.
But Hou was holding eye contact with him without flinching and without the defensive hostility or fanatical certainty that Lu Chenyang had seen in people who were deep in that particular corruption.
"Your attention went somewhere else," Lu Chenyang said. "Right after you came out of the pod. You were listening to something for several seconds and you weren't here while it was happening."
"I understand why you're worried about me," Hou said gently. "After what you went through in the Realm of the Cursed and especially after you sacrificed your own cultivation future to protect me from the Nightmare Enforcer, you have every right in the world to be worried about anything that looks like corruption. But I'm still me, I promise you that. If anything, I feel more like myself right now then I have in a long time."
Lu Chenyang wanted to believe that. He really did, but he also noticed that Hou had neatly avoided actually answering the question he had asked.
Was this really the same Hou Hongyun that he had met back in the Realm of the Cursed?
Or was this something else that was just using Hou's face to play out a role?
Lu Chenyang didn’t know the answer to that question, and not knowing was more terrifying than the exploding pod had been.
"Brother Lu, I had something I wanted to ask you about actually," Hou said, breaking through his thoughts. "Could you give me all the information you can gather about a cultivator named Tian?"
Lu Chenyang stared at him.
Tian?
What in the world did Hou Hongyun have to do with the Child of Prophecy?
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