Chapter 568: Goodbye Slumbering Scholars Sect |
Several disciples came out from one of the nearby buildings and they were carrying trays that had food and drinks on them, and as soon as they appeared, the formal atmosphere of the gathering dissolved and people started moving around and talking to each other like it was just a normal day.
Liu Qing, the quiet Dream Architect girl who had been sitting with me during meals for the past few days, walked over to me holding two cups of tea and she offered one of them to me with a small bow.
"Thank you for the conversation we had about dimensional stability," she said, "your perspective really helped me understand why my research kept running into the same problems over and over again, I've made more progress in the last three days than I made in the two months before that."
"I'm glad it helped," I said, and I took a sip of the tea which was really good, it was probably from the sect's own cultivation gardens where the plants grew while being infused with spiritual energy all the time. "Your research approach was already good to begin with, you just needed to change some of your underlying assumptions a little."
"Your insights were important," she said, and she looked like she really meant it, "I just wanted you to know that."
Then Feng Shan came over to join us, and he was holding some pastry that looked like it had spiritual herbs stuffed inside it. "Senior Hou, I really have to ask you about this," he said with a lot of excitement in his voice, "that technique you used when the pod exploded, the part where you absorbed the chaotic energy before it could cause damage to the facility, was that something that Oneiric Sovereigns can normally do?"
I thought about the red and blue sun energies that had both come bursting out at that moment. "Not exactly something that's normal, no," I told him, "I have access to some cultivation methods that are a bit unusual."
"I thought that was probably the case!" Feng Shan said and he got even more excited when he heard that, "the energy signatures didn't match anything that we have in our archives at all, Elder Mei spent two entire days trying to figure out what they were."
"Did she figure out anything?" I asked him, and I was genuinely curious about what a dream cultivator would think when they looked at sun energy signatures.
That was a pretty accurate way to put it. The sun energies really did come from a different cultivation system, the Two Suns World which I was starting to believe was more than just some senior cultivator's inner world.
More disciples kept coming over after that to ask questions and say things to me, and I spent the next hour just going around talking with various members of the sect and answering their questions about cultivation and sharing some things I'd noticed about dream qi manipulation.
I was just generally trying to be helpful to people where I could because these were good people who had taken me in without asking for anything in return and the least I could do for them was actually be present during this farewell ceremony they had gone to the trouble of putting together for me.
Master Huang came over at some point, he was the old instructor I had watched teaching basic forms to students over the past few days, and he had a warm smile on his face when he approached.
"Young Hou, I wanted to tell you how grateful I am for that conversation we had about teaching methodology," he said, "you really helped me understand why certain students struggle with concepts that seem obvious to me."
"When you have a lot of experience with something, it creates blind spots," I said to him, "once something becomes natural to you, it's easy to forget how hard it was when you first started trying to learn it."
"That's exactly it," he agreed, nodding his head, "I've already been adjusting the way I teach based on what we talked about and I'm already seeing real improvement in several of the students who were falling behind before."
The conversations went naturally from one thing to the next as more disciples came over to join in and others left to go back to whatever they were supposed to be doing. At one point, I ended up in a discussion with three inner disciples about where the theoretical limits of dream construct complexity actually were, and at another point, I was helping a struggling outer disciple understand what was going wrong with his meditation technique and why it kept failing no matter what he tried.
It felt surprisingly normal when I thought about it. Even though I was just a fragment of consciousness that had come from another world, even though I carried around memories that belonged to both Hou Hongyun and Ke Yin at the same time, this moment of just being around other people and having real conversations felt genuine.
Eventually the crowd started to get smaller as disciples headed back to their regular duties and the sun had clearly moved quite a bit across the sky since we had started, I realized I had been here at this farewell ceremony for more than three hours already.
Lu Chenyang came over once the last of the disciples had gone. "Walk with me," he whispered.
We left the courtyard together and started walking toward his residence, following the same paths I had walked a number of times over the past few days, and neither one of us said anything until we made it to his private garden.
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"You're still planning to go to the Sunken Dream Palace," Lu Chenyang said.
He wasn't asking me, he already knew the answer.
"Yes."
"I really wish you would think about this differently," he said, and his voice was heavy with worry, "my cultivation future isn't something that's worth your life, Hou, you're young and you have real talent and there is so much ahead of you."
"We've already had this conversation," I replied, and I tried to keep my voice gentle when I said it, "my decision hasn't changed."
"Then let me come with you," he said, and now there was urgency in his voice, "my spiritual projection might be damaged but I can still fight at the Divine Architect level, two cultivators working together have better odds than one person going alone."
"No," I said firmly, "you're still recovering from what the Nightmare Enforcer did to you and the Sunken Dream Palace is dangerous even for Lucid Lawbearers who are healthy, in your current condition you wouldn't even make it through the outer chambers."
"Then at least let me arrange for some backup to go with you," he tried again, "the sect has connections with several Lucid Lawbearers who could…"
"Lu Chenyang." I turned so I was facing him directly. "I understand that you're worried about me and I appreciate it, but this is something that I need to do and I need to do it in my own way."
His shoulders dropped and he looked defeated. "You're impossibly stubborn, you know that."
"You've said that to me before," I said, and I smiled slightly.
We both just stood there for a moment without saying anything.
"I don't know if I'm going to see you again after this," Lu Chenyang said quietly, "the Sunken Dream Palace has killed so many cultivators over the centuries and even if you have special abilities that other people don't have, even if you're more capable than you've actually shown me, that place is deadly to anyone who goes there."
"I'll come back," I told him, "with the Celestial Dream Lotus."
"You can't promise something like that," he said, and he looked at me with eyes that had lived long enough to watch too many talented young cultivators die before their time, "nobody can make a promise like that."
He was right about that, from where he was standing I was just walking toward almost certain death because of guilt and a sense of obligation that he thought was misplaced, he had no way of knowing about the protection the Dream World gave me or that dying wasn't permanent for me like it was for other people.
But I could see in how he was looking at me that he thought there was something else going on.
"Are you certain that you're making this choice on your own?" Lu Chenyang asked, "that there aren't other factors influencing your decision?"
He was talking about the blue sun energy, he was worried that something was controlling me like he had been controlled back in the Realm of the Chosen.
"I'm certain," I said, "this is my own choice and I'm making it with full understanding of what the risks are, I'm not being controlled or corrupted by anything, I just believe that I have a real chance of succeeding where everyone else has failed before and I think that chance is worth taking."
Lu Chenyang still didn't look like he fully believed me but he nodded slowly anyway. "Then I don't think there's anything I can do except wish you good luck and safe travels."
He reached into his storage ring and took out a jade pendant that had intricate formations carved all over it. "Take this with you, it has a fragment of my spiritual essence inside it, and I bound protective techniques to it, if you run into any danger, you can activate it."
"Lu Chenyang, you can't afford to give something like…"
"It's already done," he said, cutting me off, "I made it during my peak years, please just let me do at least this much for you."
I took the pendant from him and held it in my palm where it felt cool, and I could sense all of the careful work that had gone into making it because something like this took decades of effort.
"Thank you," I told him, "I'll be careful with it."
"Make sure that you are." He straightened up and his posture became more formal. "Hou Hongyun, you came into my life in a way I never expected, whether we end up seeing each other again or not, I want you to know that teaching you over these past days reminded me of why I started cultivating in the first place, I feel like you gave me back something I had lost a long time ago."
"You're a good teacher and you've been a real friend to me," I said, "I'm grateful for everything."
We grabbed each other's forearms and his grip was still weaker than it should have been, which reminded me again of the price he had paid to protect me when the Nightmare Enforcer came.
"Travel safely," Lu Chenyang said, "and if you actually do manage to get the Lotus, which I still think is impossible but apparently you're determined to make me wrong about that, I'll be here waiting."
"I'll see you soon," I said.
I turned and started walking toward the main gate of the sect, I could feel him watching me from behind until I went around the corner and passed out of his sight.
The gate guards both bowed when they saw me approaching, they had both been at the farewell ceremony and there was no trace of the suspicion they had shown when I first arrived at the sect.
"Safe travels, Senior Hou," one of them said to me.
"May your journey be fruitful," the other one added.
I nodded to both of them and walked through the gate.
The mountain path went down from the elevated position where the sect was built toward the valley that stretched out below it and I had already studied all of the maps that Lu Chenyang had given me and memorized the route I needed to take, the Sunken Dream Palace was about five thousand li to the north but I wasn't planning to go there directly.
From the information I had gathered, there was a Lucid Lawbearer named Song Wei who was putting together an expedition to go to the Sunken Dream Palace. He was the one Lu Chenyang had told me about before, the one who had gone farther inside the palace than any other person in the past hundred years before being forced to turn back, and during that expedition he had lost an arm and then spent the years after that doing research trying to find better ways to deal with the dangers inside the palace.
Now he was getting ready to try again and he was looking for skilled cultivators to bring with him on the expedition, and the group was gathering in Stillwater City which was about three hundred li north of where I was.
Going with them made sense from a tactical standpoint, Song Wei knew more about the Sunken Dream Palace than any living person did and his strategies and everything he had learned would be valuable to me even if I ended up needing to go on alone once we reached the deeper chambers.
Also traveling with a group of Oneiric Sovereign cultivators and Lucid Lawbearers would also give me a good chance to watch how they used their abilities and really understand what that cultivation realm actually was.
I made sure the wooden box with Lu Chenyang's gifts was secure in the storage ring that Grandmother Hou had passed down to me before I left.
The path ahead of me went on and on, winding down through the mountains toward all the valleys that lay beyond them, and somewhere in this world Tian was out there chasing his own goals, probably still trying to restore his father's cultivation, and at some point we were going to meet again and the tournament was going to come to its end.
But before any of that there was a lotus I needed to find, and a friend I needed to heal.
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