Tribulations were no joke.
After all, they were the mechanism through which the Heavens tested whether a cultivator had earned their advancement or should be punished for daring to challenge it.
Most cultivators that were fully prepared and faced their Stellar Realm tribulation were unable to pass it and were erased by the Heavens. And now that I had passed my Stellar Realm tribulation, I could understand why that was.
As for Life Realm, I could only assume the difficulty and danger would be beyond estimation, especially for a World Tree Sutra cultivator like myself. As for the Civilization Realm, the surviving records described things that sounded less like tests and more like the universe trying to correct a mistake.
So yeah, if someone could absorb the tribulation, take it into themselves and nullify it, then they were worth an amount that I couldn't calculate cleanly because every major advancement a cultivator made carried with it the high possibility of dying at the moment of breakthrough, and someone who could remove that possibility was, in the right hands, an almost impossibly valuable resource.
And in the wrong hands they'd be something else entirely.
So, that seemed like a very overpowered ability to have.
Which was why there were so many questions running through my mind.
How did she get the ability?
What were the limitations, because there must be some limitations, right?
"My master gave me a remnant Heaven Rank method called the Calamity Vessel Path," Wen Suli continued. "It doesn't have a future. There's no ceiling worth reaching. You cultivate it, and what you get is the ability to stand in the path of someone else's tribulation and take it into yourself instead." She paused. "It's a very complete technique for what it does. It just happens to have been designed entirely to serve other people's needs rather than the practitioner's own."Three times.
A remnant Heaven Rank method?
From my experience, it seemed that Heaven Rank methods were extremely powerful, but came without significant drawbacks, and the danger only increased exponentially when it was a remnant method.
“How many times can you use it?” Qian asked, a look of interest and disbelief on his face.
"Three times," she said. “And after the third, you either die from the accumulated heavenly pressure, or your cultivation collapses entirely and you return to being mortal."
The jade beauty's expression turned sharp, and she put into words my thoughts better than I could have.
"So, they cultivated you like you’re some crop," she said. "They found someone with the right spiritual configuration, handed her a method that would never let her go anywhere, and waited."
The disgust in her voice was thick enough to be almost physical. You didn't react to exploitation with that kind of heat unless you had personal experience with being on the receiving end of it. I didn't know her story yet, but I was starting to understand its shape.
Wen Suli didn't argue.
"By the time I understood what the method was," she said, "I was already too far into it. Starting over from nothing at that point wasn't a real option."
"How many uses do you have left?" Qian asked, always the one to ask the practical questions.
"One," Wen Suli said. "I used the first for my master's Life Realm breakthrough. The second I traded for a service." She paused. "There was a cultivator at Peak Life Realm who wanted to advance. I told him I would help him get to Civilization Realm if he settled accounts with the people at my school who'd built the system that used me."
"Did he?" the jade beauty asked.
"He killed those responsible," Wen Suli said. "He let the rest live. He's…he’s a good man."
Then she looked straight at me, to see what I was thinking, and whether I would stick to my promise of not taking advantage of them, or if this new information changed the situation. From the wary expression on her face, I could tell that she fully expected the latter.
And I couldn’t blame her for thinking that.
It was extremely tempting even for me.
Most righteous cultivators would put their morals to the side to bypass a deadly tribulation.
And I could understand why that was.
After all, I had watched the heavens decide that my Stellar Realm trial should involve collapsing an entire inner world. There was no version of my Life Realm tribulation that would be easier than that, and the Civilisation Realm tribulation was the kind of thing that killed cultivators that were basically demi-gods regularly.
If I could skip one of those, I would reach stages that I might not otherwise survive to reach.
But I couldn’t do that to her, or to anyone for that matter.
The main reason was simple and didn't require elaborate justification.
Wen Suli had spent her entire cultivation life being a resource for other people. She'd been cultivated by her master, traded by herself, abused by the Masked One, and now she was here in my inner world as a soul without a body.
Using her remaining technique would be participating in the same pattern she'd been caught in her whole life, just from a different side of it. I wasn't willing to do that to anyone. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my morals just to make my life easier.
The smaller reason was one I was slightly more reluctant to admit.
The Stellar Realm tribulation had been one of the most stressful experiences of my cultivation life since there was no time loop to fall back on, but it had also produced more growth, more genuine expansion of what I was and what my inner world could hold, than anything I'd deliberately pursued.
Whatever the Life Realm tribulation looked like, it would come from the same logic. The Heavens weren't gentle, but they also weren't stupid. There was something in the design of those trials that the shortcuts couldn't replicate.
So yeah, Wen Suli didn’t have anything to fear from me.
"You can make this place your home," I said, giving her a soft smile. "I won't ever ask you to use that technique on my behalf. If you decide you want to, because you choose to, because you want to contribute in that way, then that's your decision, but it won't come from me."
She looked at me for a moment.
"Thank you," she said.
I knew why I'd said it the way I had.
It wasn't entirely altruistic.
A person who felt genuinely at home somewhere, who had chosen it rather than been placed in it, who knew their contribution was valued, became protective of it. I didn't know what quality of life was available to Stellar Realm souls in an inner world, I didn't know what they could build here, what shape their existence would take, but I hoped it would be enough that they'd want to keep it.
I looked at Qian and the jade beauty.
"Who is next?" I asked.
The jade beauty's expression said she wasn't interested in moving on schedule.
Qian smiled. It was the first time I'd seen him smile, and I had to admit, it made me feel a little uncomfortable.
"I suppose it's me," he said.
He'd been a young master of a small clan, not prominent, not wealthy by the standards of major factions, but sufficient. His childhood had been the standard architecture of that kind of upbringing: instructors, expectations, competitions with other young masters from comparable families, a steady diet of being told that he was important and would become more important.
He'd advanced reasonably and he'd been cultivating at Stellar Realm for several decades when the Masked One had found him.
"Why?" I asked. "What did he want from you specifically?"
Qian looked at me and the smile was gone now.
"I don't know," he said.
I looked at him. He looked back at me. There was nothing aggressive in his expression and nothing defensive, which was actually more interesting than if there had been. He was comfortable with my skepticism. He wasn't trying to talk me out of it. But he hadn’t given enough information for me to feel comfortable with him staying in my inner world.
Before I could follow the thread anywhere useful, something else happened.
From somewhere near the center of my inner world, a light rose, weak and unsteady.
It was a soul, human-shaped, with similar features to my own.
The blood-red eyes were the most recognizable thing about it.
It was Ke Jun, and he looked like a true mortal.
There were no signs of the Civilisation Realm aura that he had previously possessed.
He flew up from the center of the inner world and drifted toward us.
I was about to greet him and ask him how the merger went when he pointed at Qian.
"You need to kill him," Ke Jun said. His voice was thinner than it had been, the Civilization Realm resonance stripped out of it, but the instruction was clear. "And you need to do it now."
Everyone in the vicinity went very still.
I looked at Ke Jun. I looked at Qian.
"What? Why?" I asked.
Ke Jun's eyes didn't move from Qian's face.
"Because he shouldn't exist," he said.