A/N
It's half-term holidays here so things are a little hectic with family wanting to go out and do stuff. I was only able to write 1 chap today, sorry about that, but I hope you enjoy it!
Chapter 771: The Incomplete Transmigrator
The old man was staring at me like I had just reached into his chest and pulled something out that he had kept hidden for most of his life, and the truth was that I hadn't done anything particularly clever.
All I had done was make an educated guess based on a theory, asked a carefully worded question, and waited. That was it. But the look on his face told me the guess had landed somewhere real, and now he wanted to know how I knew his deepest secret.
"The World Tree Sutra specialises in world walking," I said, keeping my voice easy. "I was just curious whether the practice affected you in any way. Dreams, impressions, that sort of thing. It's something I've been trying to understand about the method."
Dao Renqiu was quiet for a moment; his eyes went distant and focused on something that existed only in his own memory.
"No," he said finally, looking back up at me. "I had those dreams long before I ever cultivated, before I even knew what cultivation was.”
There it was.
That was exactly what I had been trying to find out.
I had been right.
It seemed that there really was a connection between transmigration and success in cultivating the sutra.
"Can you tell me more about them, these dreams of yours?" I asked.
A complicated look moved across the old man’s face, he looked at the Genesis Seed behind me for a moment, then back at his own translucent hands, then at nothing, finally he let out a long breath.
"I'm a dead man floating in your inner world," he said. "What's the point in keeping secrets?"
So, he told us.
***
Dao Renqiu didn’t remember the dreams perfectly, which made sense considering he only had them as a child and they slowly began to fade from his mind, but even from the pieces that he could still remember, a picture formed.
What he described was a world with no spiritual qi.
In fact, there were no inner worlds, no cultivation realms, no tribulations handed down from the heavens.
This was a world that ran on something else entirely, a system of classes and abilities that awakened in a person just like cultivation talent awakened here, except the categories were different.
They were categories no one in this world would be familiar with, but I recognised them from my past life.
Mages, paladins, warriors, craftsmen, and so many more.
These were roles that determined what a person could become, and how far they could go.
In that world, Dao Renqiu had a different name, Rennin.
Rennin had a father, who had awakened as a Battle Commander, a rare and prestigious class that produced generals and heroes, and a mother who had died young enough that Rennin had no real memory of her face.
His father had great expectation that his son would follow him, and that the bloodline would continue in the same direction it had always gone, producing warriors, producing strength, producing power that earned respect in a world where respect was measured by what you could destroy.
Unfortunately, Rennin had not awakened as a Battle Commander, instead, he had awakened as a Blacksmith.
As soon as Dao Renqiu had revealed that; I knew what was going on.
After all, I had read enough of those kinds of stories back on Earth, the ones that always started the same way. The overlooked child with the unglamorous ability, the class that everyone around them treated as a disappointment, and the father's silence being louder and more painful than any criticism.
In those stories, the Blacksmith always turned out to be secretly the most powerful class of all. The protagonist spent years proving everyone wrong, forging weapons that changed the course of wars, building a legend out of the material everyone else had discarded.
And I was pretty sure, if given enough time, Rennin would have followed that path.
Unfortunately for him, he hadn’t gotten that far, his story ended prematurely when a low rank beast had killed and then ate him.
And it wasn’t even in a grand battle or during some moment of dramatic confrontation where his abilities were finally recognised. The Blacksmith had been killed before any of that in a cave in the middle of an abandoned forest where no one would ever find his body.
When Dao Renqiu finished speaking, the silence lasted about three seconds before Ru Jian broke it.
"You know, I’ve had some interesting dreams too," he said. "One time as a Qi Condensation cultivator, I dreamt that I was the First Disciple of a sect that sat on top of a cloud mountain, and my sword could split the sky in half. When I woke up, I was very disappointed." He paused, a nostalgic look on his face. "The sword though, the sword was excellent."
Wen Suli was watching Dao Renqiu with a pitying look.
"Dreams reflect what the mind cannot process while awake," she said quietly. "To have seen all of them, you must have had a difficult childhood."
I could tell that she meant it kindly.
She thought he was mentally fragile, and she was wrong about that, but I understood why she had arrived there.
Qian made a short sound that was not quite a word.
“Are we really sharing dreams now?” he said.
The jade beauty said nothing, she still seemed hung up on the Elder Shen Boyi taking advantage of a child situation.
Dao Renqiu did not respond to any of them.
From the look on his face, I could tell that this was the reaction he had expected.
It was probably the reason why he had never revealed it to anyone before.
People would either think that he had a vivid imagination or a traumatic past.
As for me, I was thinking about how his situation was different to my own.
His memories came to him in fragmented dreams, and he had never connected them to a past life.
My memories of being Kane were not dreams and they weren’t blurry.
As soon as I woke up in this body, I knew exactly who I had been before.
I knew my name, my city, my family, the make of the phone I had dropped in a puddle six months before I died, the sound of rain against my bedroom window.
These memories were complete and they were mine.
What I had struggled with, in the early days, wasn't remembering Kane, it was accepting that Ke Yin was real. That this life, this body, this family, these friendships, this ridiculous and terrifying and occasionally beautiful cultivation world, was actually mine now, and not some elaborate dream I was going to wake from.
And the worst part had been the imposter syndrome, the fear that I would be exposed as a thief, and the crippling guilt of pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Fortunately for me, as time passed, it became easier to accept that this was my life now, and Ke Yin’s family was my family.
But Dao Renqui’s words triggered something I hadn’t thought about for a while.
Even though my memories didn’t come as dreams, I knew someone else’s whose did.
During one of the tournament celebration meals, my mother had been reminiscing about the early years, and how young Ke Yin, her Ke Yin, the one who had grown up in Floating Reed Village and learned his father's trade and been tested for spiritual sensitivity by a passing cultivator, had sometimes woken from sleep talking about places that didn't exist.
She had assumed it was the imagination of a child, had smiled and gone back to her work.
I had noted it at the time and set it aside, because there had been more immediate things demanding my attention, but now it sat in front of me again, next to what Dao Renqiu had just described, it was hard to ignore what that meant.
What if the original Ke Yin had been a transmigrator too?
I don’t mean the kind I was.
It didn’t sound like he was someone who arrived with full memory intact and spent months negotiating the grief of it.
I meant the kind Dao Renqiu was. Someone for whom the past life existed as impressions rather than clear recollection. Dreams of a world that felt real without understanding why. A name, a family, a life glimpsed through a fog that never quite cleared.
But then a stranger thought appeared in my mind.
What if I was thinking about it all wrong?
What if Ke Yin had always been Kane, and something had changed at the moment of death, some junction between what he was and what he had been, that had taken away some memories and restored what was always there?
If that was true, then I had not displaced anyone.
I had not taken a life from someone who deserved to keep living it and left them wherever they were now. The body, the family, the name; they had always been mine. I just hadn’t been able to accept it until something broke loose.
Before I could lose myself in that rabbit hole, I shook the thought out of my head.
There wasn't enough information to do anything useful with it.
I didn't know what had caused the shift, if there had been one. I didn't know what the original Ke Yin remembered or didn't remember. I didn't know whether the soul I was was continuous with his or something separate entirely.
The philosophy of it went in circles very quickly,
I could figure that out another time, a time where I had more pieces of the puzzle that was my identity.
What I had to focus on right now was Dao Renqiu.
The old man had been a transmigrator who didn't know he was one.
And that incomplete self-knowledge, I suspected, was exactly why the World Tree Sutra had nearly consumed him.
The Sutra required more than ability and soul strength, it required something more fundamental, an identity that existed outside the systems of this world, a point of reference that the Genesis Seed couldn't simply absorb or overwrite.
Without that anchor, the Seed had begun doing what it always did when a cultivator couldn't hold their ground against it, it had started pulling him apart to make room for itself.
Whether Dao Renqiu had managed to form the Genesis Seed because of his own latent transmigrator nature providing just enough of that otherworldly energy, or whether he had accidentally world walked and dismissed it as a dream, or whether Elder Shen Boyi had supplied that component deliberately as part of his scheme, I couldn't determine yet.
Any of them were possible, they all raised questions, and beyond that, there were more questions I wanted to ask.
I wanted to know how far his Genesis Seed had developed before he destroyed it.
I wanted to know whether he had world walked, and if so, which worlds?
I wanted to understand what the blacksmith cultivation path that Elder Ruan had given him looked like at its deepest level, because Dao Renqiu had mentioned a forge at its center, and I was curious what that meant in practice for someone with the structural traces of a World Tree transformation in their inner world's foundations and had a background in being a Blacksmith from another world.
But I could read the old man from here.
Telling that story had cost him something real. He looked lighter in one sense and depleted in another. His eyes had gone back to the Genesis Seed, but the look in them was different now, exhausted.
Pushing him further tonight would be a mistake and damage the trust that I had created.
The conversation we needed to have should happen privately.
"Thank you," I bowed to Dao Renqiu. "That was more than I had any right to ask for."
He looked at me for a moment, then he gave a short nod and returned his attention to the Genesis Seed.
I looked at the others.
For now, there were four other stories in this room, and I had not heard any of them.
And if they wanted to live in my inner world, they needed to show some goodwill.