A/N
2 chapters combined into a 3.5k chap, enjoy
Chapter 770: Meeting A World Tree Sutra User
I stared at him.
Of all the things I had expected him to say, that was not on the list.
The old man held my gaze.
I heard Wen Suli exhale beside him. Qian's jaw tightened slightly. Ru Jian's mouth had opened slightly, which seemed to be his response to anything that exceeded his expectations. Even the jade beauty, whose default expression seemed to be somewhere between suspicion and controlled irritation, had gone still.
None of them had known.
That was interesting on its own. They had all been collected by the same person, presumably held in close proximity for some period of time, and in all of that, Dao Renqiu had kept this to himself. Either the Masked One hadn't known, or he had known and hadn't shared it with the others, or Dao Renqiu had simply never volunteered it.
I thought about what he had actually said.
He used the word was.
There was a version of that sentence that meant he had attempted the World Tree Sutra and failed, which would have meant he was standing in front of me as either a miracle or a tree, and he was clearly not a tree.
There was another version that meant he had successfully begun cultivating it and then stopped, which raised a different set of questions entirely, because changing cultivation methods wasn't something cultivators did lightly. It wasn't something cultivators could do lightly. The inner world didn't come with an undo function.
I looked at Dao Renqiu properly, and I started to understand why he had been staring at the Genesis Seed since he arrived.
There were several reasons why I hadn’t put much thought on it before.
An old cultivator's caution, assessing the most powerful thing in the room before deciding how to behave. Academic interest, because the Genesis Seed was unusual and anyone with serious cultivation knowledge would recognize that immediately. Wariness, because living things that could make decisions and pull souls out of statues were the kind of things that reasonable people watched carefully.
All of those were true, but Dao Renqiu's stare had carried something more than any of that.
Unfortunately, I had been too busy since there had been too much happening to pay his expression the attention it deserved and pick up on that.
I thought about the three World Tree Sutra cultivators I actually knew about.
The first one I had heard of was Zhang Wei.
That had been the very first day I encountered the method, standing in the Azure Peak Sect archive with the jade tablet in my hands, Senior Sister Liu warning me about something that she had personally watched happen. Zhang Wei had been talented and confident and absolutely certain that he could succeed where all others had failed.
He had started transforming within two weeks. Within a month he was rooted to the ground. Within six months he had forgotten his own name. He was a tree in some elder's inner world now, his consciousness either gone entirely or reduced to something that no longer thought in words.
The second one was Li Tianyu, former Sect Master of Azure Peak.
The cultivator who had split the Golden Sun into the red and blue suns in what was now called the Two Suns World, who had accidentally corrupted the Realm of the Chosen, who had crippled Tai Shan's inner world spirit in a duel and then spent decades failing to fix it, who had risen from ordinary origins to Civilization Realm in record time and then simply vanished, leaving behind a trail of consequences that I kept running into no matter which world I visited.
I was not sure whether Li Tianyu counted as someone whose fate I knew. No one knew where he had gone. The assumption in most of the records I had read was that he had ascended or died, but the evidence pointed toward something more complicated than either of those options.
The third was Xie Junhao.
The poor prodigy was a Realm Stabilizing Tree in my inner world right now, his consciousness still partially present in the structure of the tree, preserved but immobile. A young Stellar Realm cultivator from a small sect who had been coerced into Su Xuan's hands. The last vision the purified tree had transmitted before becoming Xie Junhao was of a young man transforming rapidly and violently, bark spreading across his skin with an urgency that left no time for anything except terror.
And now there was a fourth, except Dao Renqiu had used the word ‘was’.
That was the part that caught me.
Changing cultivation methods was not something a cultivator did casually, or really at all if they had any choice in the matter.
The most direct path was to cripple your cultivation entirely, use a treasure powerful enough to repair the damage to your foundation, and then start over from the beginning with a new method.
This worked in theory.
In practice it required a heavenly treasure that most cultivators spent their entire lives searching for without finding, and the willingness to throw away everything you had built, which required a very desperate or naïve person.
The more common path was transition.
A cultivator who started with a Human Ranked fire method and later found a Heaven Ranked fire method could evolve their cultivation rather than abandon it, as long as the two methods shared enough underlying structure for the inner world to adapt without collapsing.
Most outer sect disciples started exactly this way, with whatever lower-ranked method their sect provided, hoping to find something better as they advanced. Wei Lin had been the exception rather than the rule, his father providing a Beyond Heaven method from the beginning. I had been an exception in a different direction, choosing a remnant method that most people with any sense would have put back on the shelf.
But there was a third path, and it was the strangest of the three.
There were records, old ones and not widely discussed, of cultivators whose dao had been so fundamentally altered by circumstance or experience or catastrophe that the cultivation method built on that dao had changed along with it.
The new method that emerged bore no necessary relationship to the old one. It could not be predicted or steered. It simply became what the cultivator's dao had become, and if the cultivator was fortunate, the new method was compatible enough with what remained of their inner world to continue from there rather than requiring a complete restart.
The identity crisis required to reach that point was not something most people wanted to think about too carefully. For your dao to transform that completely, something had to have happened to you that reached all the way down to the foundations of who you were and rearranged them. Most cultivators would describe that process in terms that made it sound theoretical. I suspected that the reality of it was considerably less clean.
Right now, it was time to find out what happened to Dao Renqiu.
"When you say you were a World Tree Sutra cultivator," I said, "what do you mean by that exactly?"
Dao Renqiu looked at me for a moment before answering.
"I mean that I cultivated it," he said. "For around four months, then I stopped."
"How?" I asked.
"I grew up in a mortal village," he said. "Nothing remarkable about it. Small, the kind of place that doesn't appear on any map that matters. When I was fifteen, an elder found me."
He paused.
"A Life Realm elder," he continued. "His name was Elder Shen Boyi. He came to the village on what he claimed was a routine inspection of the surrounding spiritual geography, and he stopped when he sensed my soul strength." A brief, dry pause. "He offered my family wealth in exchange for taking me as his disciple."
I kept my expression neutral, but I knew where this was going before he finished the sentence, because I had learned enough about how the cultivation world operated to recognize the shape of this kind of story.
A Life Realm elder did not go out of his way to offer wealth to a mortal family for the privilege of training their child unless that child had something the elder wanted. And the things a Life Realm elder wanted from a fifteen-year-old Qi Condensation disciple with a strong soul were not the kind of things you announced in polite company.
"I’m guessing he didn't take you back to his sect," I said.
Dao Renqiu looked at me with something that might have been faint surprise.
"No," he said. "He explained that his sect did not take mortal-born disciples. That bringing me back openly would create complications. That for my own protection, it would be better if our arrangement remained private."
"And you believed him?" Qian asked with a look of disbelief on his face.
"I was fifteen," Dao Renqiu said. "He was a Life Realm elder. He was the first cultivator I had ever met, and he was generous. He gave my family enough to live comfortably for multiple lifetimes. He arranged for a private residence for my cultivation. He gave me a method he said would let me do great things." He stopped. "He gave me the World Tree Sutra and told me it was a rare and powerful method. That most cultivators would never have access to something like it. That my powerful Soul Essence made me uniquely suited to it." A pause. "He wasn’t wrong about those things. He simply omitted the part where the intended outcome was not my advancement."
I already knew what had happened.
The World Tree Sutra was a method that transformed cultivators into trees when they failed it.
A Life Realm elder who needed a Realm Stabilizing Tree to break through to Civilization Realm had very limited options. Acquiring one through conventional means required either enormous resources, dangerous expeditions into contested territory, or the kind of luck that most cultivators could not count on. Or you could find a mortal child with an unusually strong soul, tell him he was special, hand him the most dangerous cultivation method in existence, and watch.
The Azure Peak Sect's approach was different.
The method sat in the archive with warnings attached to it. The sect never forced anyone to pick it. They never told anyone the failure was acceptable. But they also kept the method available, and if an overconfident disciple chose it and turned into a tree, the sect benefited from the tree.
That was a morally complicated situation, but it was a different situation from what Dao Renqiu was describing. The sect presented a risk clearly and let people decide for themselves. Elder Shen Boyi had done the opposite. He had hidden the risk and guided a child toward it.
I would not have been surprised if there were other sects running similar operations more quietly, convincing themselves it was for the greater good, that producing a Civilization Realm elder was worth the cost of one disciple who had not understood what he was agreeing to.
“He told me the signs of transformation were signs of progress,” Dao Renqiu's face darkened. "My hands started feeling heavier, my skin had a texture to it that was not there before. I told him when he returned from one of his trips, and he told me that was the method awakening. That it meant I was succeeding where others had failed." He looked at his hands, which currently existed as the translucent spiritual form of an old man. "I believed him. I had been practicing for only four months at that point, and I was proud of what I thought I was achieving."
"How did you escape?" I asked, thinking this man must have heavenly luck to survive something like this at Qi Condensation Realm.
"I did not escape," Dao Renqiu said. "I was found by an elder from the sect, Elder Ruan. He had suspected for some time that Elder Shen Boyi was engaged in something that didn't align with sect rules, and he had been following the thread of it quietly for months. When he found me, the transformation was still in its early stages." He exhaled slowly. "Elder Ruan told me the truth about what was happening. All of it."
"How did you take that?" Ru Jian asked with wide eyes.
"Badly," Dao Renqiu sighed. "I had spent four months being told that I was making progress that only a once in a millennia type of prodigy would make, only to find out that the person I had trusted completely had been planning to use me as a cultivation resource. If Elder Ruan hadn’t shown me how to destroy my cultivation before the transformation progressed further, I would be a tree right now.”
"Was it…was it painful?" Ru Jian asked with a curious look.
I understood why he was asking, after all, it was rare to meet someone who had intentionally crippled themselves. Being crippled was a cultivator’s worse fear.
"Yes, very," Dao Renqiu said. "But I would rather have had a few years of pain than become a tree."
That was a sentiment I agreed with completely.
"Oh, so it was Elder Ruan who gave you your current method?" Ru Jian asked. "The blacksmith technique?"
I glanced at Ru Jian when he said it.
A blacksmith cultivation method?
I had encountered a fairly wide range of cultivation paths in the time I had been in this world, and blacksmith methods were rare enough that most cultivators went their entire life without meeting someone who practiced one.
They were typically tied to the tempering of materials, the forging of constructs, the application of precise force to produce specific results. It wasn’t the path most young cultivators gravitated toward, because it lacked the dramatic visible power of fire or lightning or sword cultivation. It required patience, technical understanding, and the willingness to build things slowly and correctly rather than accumulating power quickly.
"He took me as his real disciple after that,” Dao Renqiu confirmed, nodding. “He said the blacksmith path suited my foundation, that the Genesis Seed transition had left structural traces in my inner world that actually complemented the tempering principles of that method." He paused. "I think he chose it partly because he knew I would never be tempted to return to wood-based cultivation after what I had experienced. The blacksmith path is entirely different in character. There is no tree at its center. There is a forge."
"What happened to Elder Shen Boyi?" the jade beauty asked with a righteous look in her eyes.
Dao Renqiu looked at her and let out a bitter laugh.
"The sect acknowledged that Elder Shen Boyi’s actions had been inappropriate. He received a formal reprimand and was restricted from taking disciples for three years."
The jade beauty's expression did exactly what I expected it to do.
"A Life Realm elder tried to turn a child into a tree," she scowled. "And he was banned from taking disciples for three years."
"He was a Life Realm elder," Dao Renqiu said. "And I was a Qi Condensation disciple with no sect backing. The sect was not going to cripple a resource over an incident involving someone who had not yet contributed anything to the sect's standing. I understood this. I still understand it. That does not mean I agree with it."
“It’s disgusting behaviour,” the jade beauty spat, “and you shouldn’t justify it for them.”
The old man didn’t know what to say to that, so he just stayed silent.
But I understood what he was trying to say, more than I wished I did.
Having a Civilization Realm cultivator in your sect was more than prestige, it changed what the sect could protect, what it could access, who it could negotiate with. The leap from Life Realm to Civilization Realm was the kind of advancement that altered the entire strategic position of whatever organization the cultivator belonged to.
Against that scale of potential benefit, the suffering of one Qi Condensation disciple who nobody in the sect had ever met before was simply not weighted heavily enough to justify real consequences against the elder responsible. The fact that it had not worked out was unfortunate in the eyes of the sect. The fact that Elder Ruan had interfered was something the sect tolerated because he was also too valuable to punish.
That was how the math worked, and it was still one of the things that I hated about the Cultivation World.
As for the jade beauty, even though she could come across as aggressive, seeing this side of her was something that I actually liked, because it told me something useful about her that I hadn't been able to read from her posture or her silences.
Whatever had happened to her during her time in the Masked One's collection, whatever had made her cautious and difficult and unwilling to give her name, the part of her that found the calculus of power versus justice offensive had stayed intact.
But as interesting as Dao Renqiu’s backstory was, I was thinking about something else, something that had been sitting at the edge of my attention since he revealed his identity as a previous World Tree Sutra user.
Most people assumed whether a cultivator of the World Tree Sutra survived or turned into a tree was related to the power of the soul. Sure, it was well established that a high Soul Essence was a requirement to begin cultivating the sutra, but that couldn’t be all of it.
After all, Zhang Wei had a strong soul and still failed, Xie Junhao had been a Stellar Realm prodigy with a strong soul and had failed violently and quickly, and Dao Renqiu had a powerful soul and had begun transforming within months.
But I had not transformed.
And I didn’t think it had something to do with me being more talented than them or something similar. That would be arrogant of me to assume, and likely wrong.
The only significant factor that I could think of was my special circumstance.
How I wasn’t a person who was originally from this world.
I had been born in a different world entirely.
My name before all of this had been Kane. I had grown up on Earth. I had died on Earth and arrived here in a body that was not mine. That was not a theory. That was something I lived with every day, the baseline fact of my existence in this world.
As for Li Tianyu, he had also not transformed.
And there were many reasons for me to suspect that he might share a similar background to me.
Sure, the world he was originally from didn’t have to be Earth, but I had a strong suspicion that Li Tianyu was in fact a transmigrator who had somehow isekaid to the Cultivation World. That would backup my belief that the Two Suns World had chosen both him and me to save it for that reason.
So, the question was whether that special origin was a prerequisite for cultivating the World Tree Sutra successfully rather than being consumed by it. And if that was the case, was there a relationship between how far the cultivator was able to cultivate the sutra and how much they remembered of their original identity, or did that not play a factor?
I had no idea, but I needed to find out, and this might be my only chance to do so.
The problem with testing that theory was that testing it required me to essentially announce my own situation to a group of people I had known for less than an hour, one who had given me a placeholder name and one who hadn't given me a name at all.
I needed to approach this carefully.
"Can I ask you something," I said to Dao Renqiu.
The old man’s eyes met mine, and for a second, an uncomfortable look crossed his face.
Clearly, this subject was difficult for him to speak about, which made me appreciate that he had already revealed as much as he did.
“You can choose not to answer,” I added with a casual tone.
"Yes," he finally said. “You…you can ask.”
"Have you ever had memories that didn't belong to your life here? Dreams, maybe, or images when you were deep in meditation. Things that felt real but that you couldn't place any origin for. Another world, maybe. A different kind of life."
The other four looked at me with expressions that ranged from confused to uncertain to something that might have been concerned about what kind of question that was and why I was asking it.
But it was Dao Renqiu's reaction that drew my attention, his eyes had widened.
"How…,” he whispered. “How did you know that?"