Chapter 404 - Error 404
What if he didn't accept my deal?
That was quite a question to drop on someone when the negotiations had been going so smoothly.
My answer was going to put a damper on the mood. But there was no point lying.
“I will leave you here,” I said without missing a beat and shook my head. “Otherwise, the risks for me are simply too great.”
Ni Shi remained silent for longer than was normal. His tiny metaphysical toad body wriggled slightly as he thought.
“After you take control of me, I want to place a Blood Seed in your heart,” he finally said.
“Blood Seed?” I asked, unfamiliar with the term.
“Through our mental connection, the seed remains linked to the blood of its creator, me in this case. If I die, it will sprout inside your heart.”
“Can I receive the prerequisite memories and the technique itself first?” I asked.
There was no way I was going to trust his explanation at face value. For all I knew, he could activate the Blood Seed with a single thought and make me his slave.
Ironic of me to think that, but whatever.
“Of course,” Ni Shi nodded.
A small sliver of memories flowed toward me. Not enough to overwhelm my thoughts. Just enough to transfer the technique and its history.
After the incident with the Blood Step Immortal, I had learned to roughly gauge how much information someone was sending. It was similar to estimating a file's size before downloading it.
I accepted the transfer. Images and writings appeared within my mind.
The memories contained a brief history of the technique. They explained how Blood Seeds had once been used among beasts to prevent betrayal.
Heh. The higher a beast climbed in cultivation, the more human-like they became, including all the scheming and betrayal that came with it.
The Blood Seed had once been widely used, but that changed during an ancient war between humans and beasts. The beasts had relied upon Blood Seeds to secure their alliances.
The humans responded by creating assassination teams.
They targeted a handful of Nascent Soul beasts, and because of the Blood Seeds, the deaths cascaded through entire alliances.
The devastation was so severe that later generations modified the technique. The newer version allowed users to manually disable the effect, preventing enemies from exploiting it in the same way.
Even then, the technique never fully recovered its popularity. Many clans eventually declared it taboo.
It was interesting. Even back then, beasts in the central continent had developed cultures sophisticated enough to create taboos. How advanced were they now after thousands of years?
Logically, the revised technique worked well enough. Yet emotions, traditions, and history continued influencing their decisions.
Just like humans.
I nodded within the mental space and carefully considered my response.
Lies were troublesome. Once a person started lying, they usually needed additional lies to support the first one. Over time, the entire structure became increasingly annoying to maintain.
Honesty, however, could sometimes be costly.
I sighed and smiled at the miniature frog patiently waiting for my answer.
“I haven't tested it before, but I'm fairly certain I have a way to survive significant damage to my heart,” I admitted. “Though it remains only a theory.”
“Why did you have to say that?” Ni Shi groaned.
My understanding of artificial hearts and machines used to sustain patients waiting for transplants was rudimentary at best. But with how versatile Qi was, the concept alone might be enough.
“I believe honesty is a virtue,” I said with a smile.
While lying to him would provide immediate advantages, I was looking further ahead than that. After all, a friend who owed me a favor was worth far more than a temporary ally bound together by convenience.
“So the Blood Seed isn't as restrictive as you initially thought. But I'm sure you have something else like it,” I told him.
Of course, the Blood Seed was likely his best option. Otherwise, he wouldn't have offered it to someone who effectively held his life in his hands.
Still, I was willing to put myself at some risk. I was no longer the weak-hearted office worker I had once been. And this wasn't even a particularly significant risk in my eyes.
“I swear, you humans are always either weak-willed or completely insane. Why can there never be something in between?” Ni Shi sighed, his tiny frog figure rubbing its chin. “Do you think I spent my younger years studying Restrictive Contract Techniques? The only other one I know would tie our lives together. If you die, I die too.”
Oh.
It was somewhat surprising that someone who had lived for several millennia possessed such a limited collection of techniques.
“So? What now?” I asked.
“Screw it.” Ni Shi rubbed his slimy toad head. “This demon will give you some of my essence poison, which I can detonate with a thought, the same way you can activate your technique. Do you dare accept it?”
At the same time, he extended a tendril of mental energy. It contained an explanation of how the technique worked.
I smiled.
Damn.
I almost felt bad saying this.
Once you understood how a technique worked, developing a countermeasure was often not that difficult.
“Well, the thing is–”
“I don't care if you can counter this too. Just shut up and take it,” Ni Shi interrupted.
He continued staring at me with a frown, making no effort to hide his annoyance.
There was a reason oath-making techniques had largely fallen out of favor. If they couldn't reliably force powerful or skilled people to honor their word, what use were they?
“You are a weird human,” he grumbled.
Then, as if remembering something, he added: “Also, the mist here slowly corrodes everyone's mental energy, so be careful. The array was intentionally designed this way because even as a Nascent Soul Cultivator, my mental energy alone wouldn't have been enough to contain all those otherworldly creatures.”
“Huh, so you refer to yourself as a cultivator?” I asked.
The way people described themselves often revealed how they thought.
“How is that the thing that stood out to you the most?” He sighed, looking increasingly regretful about cooperating with me. “Anyway, the Mist Array uses the mental energy it drains to create a metaphysical barrier. Technically, it has no physical borders, yet it exists throughout the mist.”
He was simplifying things considerably. But once we escaped this place, we would have plenty of time to discuss the details. The barrier itself was fascinating.
While I would classify it as a Level 7 Array, it was significantly stronger than a normal one. Most likely due to the unusual way it had been constructed.
“I agree,” I nodded.
“Good, Liu Feng!” Ni Shi cackled. "Let us overturn this world together!"
Then his voice distorted. Within the blink of an eye, we returned to reality.
No time appeared to have passed.
Our conversation had occurred in a fraction of a second.
I found myself standing before Ni Shi's gigantic toad body once more.
Its blue skin looked noticeably slimier than before.
There was no longer any need for words between us.
I simply nodded.
Then I felt an impossibly fast bubble of Qi form just below my stomach.
My Qi immediately surged through my body, swirling violently as though it had suddenly been injected with adrenaline.
Huh. Having this foreign Qi inside my body was strange. It wasn't being rejected by my own Qi at all.
That was interesting.
More importantly, it provided a substantial boost to my cultivation. This alone demonstrated the benefits of becoming one of Heaven's Favorites.
Just this gain would shave years off my projected timeline for reaching Core Formation in my fifties.
Well. Time to uphold my side of the deal.
I sent a gentle strand of mental energy toward the toad once more.
This time, I paid closer attention.
Huh. There really was mental corrosion occurring. It was simply incredibly slow.
Since entering this place, perhaps 0.01% of my mental energy had been drained. The loss was so small that even someone skilled in mental techniques would struggle to notice it without specifically looking for it.
As my mental strand touched the toad, I activated my technique.
Eight Mind Phantoms.
Ni Shi accepted.
I felt the Sky Grade Technique take hold as it connected to him.
It felt...
Easy.
As it always did.
This technique was created to control others.
Just how easy would it be to control people? The thought briefly crossed my mind, as it had many times before.
I immediately discarded it.
Then I opened my eyes and looked at my companions. Everyone here was intelligent enough to realize that something had just happened.
“This time I will break the array,” I said. “We need to leave quickly afterward, just in case the barrier collapses.”
Ye An frowned. Then, after a moment's thought, her expression relaxed.
Nothing else needed to be said. I was also concerned about the immortal who had appeared earlier. But those worries could wait.
After all, whoever had arranged this entire situation likely hadn't gone through all this effort only to let me die immediately afterward.
Ye An hadn't spent as much time with me as some of the others. Even so, she understood the implication.
I wasn't simply releasing the beast. Precautions had already been taken.
Either way, I was having trouble suppressing my smile. With a Nascent Soul powerhouse backing me, this was both an opportunity and a noose slowly tightening around my neck.
“Congratulations.” Song San clapped lightly. “Having a powerhouse helping you from now on... I always knew you had it in you.”
His words sounded complimentary.
They weren't.
This was merely his way of revealing that he knew I possessed a beast-control technique. Though, to be fair, everyone here had likely already figured it out by now.
Well...
Almost everyone.
Wu Yan was my shapeshifting disciple.
She was complicated.
Her overwhelming talent had stunted her growth in other areas.
“So, what are your plans, boss?” Song San asked.
I frowned.
I had never liked how much of a fake suck-up he could be.
Instead of answering, I focused on the array and began considering how to free the toad.
Breaking the seal itself wasn't particularly difficult. The difficult part was ensuring that the rest of us survived whatever happened afterward.
“How about I help by corroding the seal with poison?” Song San suggested, almost as if he had read my thoughts.
He took a step forward. But the smile on his face grew noticeably more strained as his sister glanced at him out of the corner of her eye.
Song Song never played around. Even though she wasn't releasing killing intent, her intentions were obvious.
Crystal clear.
Song San had never been in more danger than he was today.
Because I now possessed a Nascent Soul backer.
And he knew it.
“I have recently been working on a poison that corrodes the soul, though I haven't perfected it yet. I have learned much during the process, including how to corrode barriers,” he revealed.
“Corroding barriers?” I raised a questioning brow. “That is a very powerful counter against Array Conjurers.”
Are you trying to build this to counter me? was the unasked question.
I rubbed my chin and stared at the mist around us.
Since this mist array didn't have a physical barrier, Song San would have a hard time corroding it. Perhaps I should develop something like this myself to combat people like Song San.
Like always, he forced me to improve, and I liked that about him.
“No need, I can handle this one myself,” I reassured the group.
I wouldn’t trust Song San with a potato, much less trust him enough not to do something that might get us all killed here. Even with a Nascent Soul creature backing me up, I was always cautious around people like him.
The smart bastards.
I created a translucent green cube in my hand. The fist-sized thing rotated and hovered just above my palm, with strange lines running along its translucent surface that converged toward its core.
This was a prototype of an old technique I tried when I ran part of my processing through an item, kind of like going from calculating numbers in your head to using a calculator. But the experiment had been a bit of a failure beyond the experimental data, since the process required me to stand still while my mind was stretched too thin. Even acting as a connector was too much when processing information.
The cube hummed, releasing a pale green light.
I couldn't break the mist array, and raw power wouldn't work either, as it was one of those conceptual arrays. There were no walls or borders here, just mist. And no matter how hard Song Song punched it, the mist wouldn't dissipate.
Also, I was not a powerful enough Array Conjurer to handle something like this by breaking it outright.
But the best way to solve this was to trick the array. To make it think that this cube was the giant toad, Ni Shi.
I tried copying Ni Shi's Qi signature and mental waves, preparing to trick the array into applying its restrictions to the cube.
Oh?
This seal on Ni Shi was much lighter than I expected. Barely even requiring the cube's processing power.
In a sense, it wasn't absolute in power. It was just a lot of jumbled-up rules that made the array stronger. This was like reading a sketchy contract that looked fine at first glance, only for more and more clauses to appear the deeper you looked.
I think I missed my calling in my previous life as a sketchy lawyer with a list of dubious clients.
It was a strong seal that showed the Array Conjurer who made it was quite skilled.
I had assumed this could be a Level 8 Array, but now I was leaning more toward it being a Level 7 Array crafted by a very skilled user who had created clever rules to strengthen it.
Some really brainy asshole made this…
But in the end, seals like this were something I specialized in, and they were relatively easy for outsiders to break.
It was simple.
Just create a second toad mental-energy signal that the array would recognize. The array had been designed to contain one toad, not two. Its entire logic would break.
It would be like running faulty code.
The array would crash into itself...
But I stopped right there.
Wait.
It felt like this whole thing had been made for me.
Then, in that split second, as my concentration slipped, a sharp stabbing pain erupted from behind me. The sensation was sudden and violent, as though a red-hot spike had been driven straight through my back.
Someone had stabbed me in the back!