A/N
2 chapters combined to 3k chapter to complete the 5 souls section, enjoy!
Chapter 776: A Pill's Cultivation Path
"You’re right, I never expected that to be your response,” I acknowledged with a nod, “but what’s the name of the pill?"
I wasn’t sure if it was impolite to ask such a question, but I didn’t really have the luxury to think too deeply about being polite.
A pill in the form of a human had just appeared in my inner world.
In a cultivation world, pills could be miraculously good, but could also cause unfathomable amounts of destruction, I needed to know which one the pill floating before me was, especially considering the attitude it brought with it.
Sun Li Hua looked at me for a moment, and I could tell she wasn’t entirely comfortable answering.
"The Heavenly Nirvana Pill," she finally said.
My expression didn’t change much, and when she didn’t get the reaction she expected, her eyebrows raised in surprise. She probably had expected me to recognise the pill and show a stronger reaction, but honestly, the name didn’t mean much to me.
The reason for that was simple: my alchemy knowledge was genuinely embarrassing.
It was one of the areas of cultivation I had consistently failed to invest in, partly because the subject was vast and complex and would take decades to properly understand without a cheat, and partly because I had developed a personal wariness around pills from early on.
Sure, pills worked, in fact, most of them worked very well, but the cultivation world had a long and well-documented history of pills that solved one problem by quietly creating another. The problems they created tended to live in the foundation, the deep structural layers of a cultivator's development that were difficult to examine and nearly impossible to repair once damaged.
A pill that accelerated your breakthrough might leave hairline fractures in your meridians that wouldn't become obvious until you attempted the next one. A pill that restored spiritual essence might introduce foreign qi that accumulated over decades into something your inner world eventually rejected.
I preferred to take them when necessary and avoid them otherwise.
Which meant that when Sun Li Hua said the name Heavenly Nirvana Pill, I was working almost entirely from my years of reading webnovels. In the novels that I had read, nirvana meant release and transcendence. And when applied to a pill, and combined with the word heavenly, there was really only one direction that logic pointed in a cultivation world.
“The Heavenly Nirvana Pill lets a cultivator return back from the dead?”
"Yes, if consumed before death occurs," she nodded. "The pill activates when the cultivator dies, their injuries heal completely, and they return to life."
I nodded slowly, understanding just how valuable the pill was.
A cultivator could walk into a fight they expected to lose, take the pill beforehand, and if they were killed, simply come back and continue where they left off. Having an ability like that changed how you approached every dangerous situation, and it changed how you valued your own life, how reckless you were willing to be, what enemies you were willing to make.
I could definitely understand why the Masked One had wanted her.
Actually, I understood why any cultivator would want her.
The fear of death was the central fact of cultivation life. Every tribulation, every duel, every expedition into contested territory carried that possibility, and all the power in the world only reduced the probability rather than eliminating it.
It didn’t matter if the cultivator was of the righteous path or the demonic path, most cultivators would do almost anything to escape death.
But abilities that went against the natural order always came with restrictions.
That was something I had learned repeatedly since starting down the World Tree Sutra path, and had gained a better understanding of with the addition of new souls in my inner world.
Ru Jian's age reversal kept him alive but turned him into a child.
Wen Suli’s Calamity Vessel Path could absorb tribulations but only three times and it would destroy the user.
Everything had its price, its window, its fine print. The more overpowered something seemed at first, the more carefully you had to look for what it was actually costing you. And attempting to defy the natural order at that scale would not come without a real cost.
I didn't have to wait long to find out what that cost was.
Sun Li Hua answered the question before I asked it.
She explained that the pill only worked for cultivators below the Life Realm.
That alone was a significant limitation, but I could understand why that restriction existed.
The gap between Stellar Realm and Life Realm was a fundamental change in the nature of a cultivator's relationship with reality. A technique that worked below that threshold often stopped working above it for reasons that had less to do with the pill's quality and more to do with what Life Realm cultivation actually was.
The second problem was timing.
The active window was twenty-four hours. A cultivator who consumed the pill and then survived the day without dying had wasted it entirely. Most people didn't know in advance when they were going to be killed.
You couldn't take the pill every day on the off chance something happened, because the resource cost of producing them was extreme and they couldn't simply be manufactured in bulk. And if you were ambushed without warning, without time to take it beforehand, you died the same as anyone else.
However, there was a way to get past that restriction and that was giving the pill sentience, a high task, but possible if you had enough skill and luck.
"So, your creator wanted a pill that could sacrifice itself for them?"
"Yes." She paused briefly. "I can sacrifice my life to return a cultivator to life. The cultivation level I can restore matches my own at the time of the sacrifice. He wanted me to reach Life Realm equivalent so that I could bring him back if he was killed."
I had to admit, even though that was extremely selfish, it was a smart solution to the problem.
A soul didn't need to be consumed.
So, if the creator died, the pill, if it had sentience, could locate his body and sacrifice itself to resurrect him directly. There would be no twenty-four hour window to worry about and no need to consume the pill beforehand. All you needed was a conscious being with the ability to choose when to use its power.
Which raised a question. Why would she sacrifice herself for someone else? What would make a conscious being with her own thoughts and her own experiences willingly choose to die for another person?
Sun Li Hua answered it without me asking, because she had clearly been building to this part.
As she spoke, I just listened.
***
Sun Li Hua’s creator's name was Alchemist Feng Zhao.
He was a Life Realm cultivator of middling power but exceptional skill in the specific narrow discipline of high-grade pill creation, a man who had spent centuries working toward a single achievement that would make him matter.
He had produced the Heavenly Nirvana Pill through a process that took over a hundred years and consumed resources that would have funded a small sect's annual operations.
When Sun Li Hua emerged from the furnace as something that breathed and thought and spoke, he had been the first person she had ever seen, and he had decided that this was an asset he could shape.
He had been kind to her for a long time.
That was the part that cost her the most to say, and I understood why.
Feng Zhao had been like a father to her.
The man had named her, taught her to speak, taught her to read, answered her questions about the world. He had told her she was special, that there was nothing else like her in the cultivation world, that she was extraordinary, and he had not been lying about any of that. He had also called her his greatest achievement, introduced her to visiting cultivators as his masterwork, and brought her gifts after refinement attempts.
The refinement attempts.
A pill did not cultivate the way a human did.
There was no inner world to develop, no qi to compress and refine, no spiritual sense to expand.
A pill grew stronger by surviving refinement. The process was exactly what it sounded like.
Feng Zhao would seal Sun Li Hua inside a furnace and apply heat, pressure, and alchemical techniques designed to break apart and reconstitute the fundamental spiritual structure of a pill at a higher level of integrity.
If the pill survived, it emerged stronger. If it did not survive, it was destroyed.
For a being with consciousness, this meant something different than it did for an object.
I had thought body cultivation sounded unpleasant. The stories I had heard about cultivators who pursued physical tempering paths described processes that involved breaking the body down and rebuilding it repeatedly, enduring pain that most cultivators would not voluntarily approach.
I had never been particularly drawn to that path, and I’m really glad the Azure Peak Sect didn’t specialise in it.
But being burned alive was a different category of experience entirely, and Sun Li Hua had done it repeatedly. The first three refinements had been survivable, each one leaving her with a higher cultivation stage.
Surviving the Copper Furnace Tempering allowed her to breakthrough to the equivalent of Qi Condensation Realm. The Silver Furnace Tempering was equivalent to the Elemental Realm, and the Golden Furnace Tempering was equivalent to the Stellar Realm.
And each time Sun Li Hua emerged from the furnace as a more powerful pill, Feng Zhao had praised her. Told her she was brave, told her she was exceptional, told her that when she reached the Heavenly Furnace Tempering, she would become something that had never existed in the world before, and that he would be there when she came through.
She had believed him, for decades, she had believed him completely.
The Heavenly Furnace Tempering was different.
The gap between Golden Furnace and Heavenly was more than a step, it was a wall.
And I understood why.
If she could survive the Heavenly Furnace Tempering, she would emerge as a Life Realm pill.
She had entered the furnace for the fourth time and understood almost immediately that the previous three had been preparation for something she had not been equipped to endure. The only reason that she had survived the first attempt was because Feng Zhao had pulled her out early, and even then, her spiritual structure had partially collapsed and required years to stabilize.
Despite the failure, they had tried again, and again.
The pattern repeated each time.
Sun Li Hua would reach a threshold inside the furnace where the reconstitution process began to tear apart more than it rebuilt, and just as she was dying, Feng Zhao would extract her before the damage became permanent, and they would wait until she recovered and try again.
Throughout it all, Feng Zhao had continued being the fatherly figure, never once blaming her for the failure. This only served to make her feel more guilty and wonder what she was doing wrong, trying harder each time because she wanted to succeed for him.
It was only later, looking backward, that she understood why he had treated her nicely.
Feng Zhao was patient and gentle because she was expensive and difficult to replace, and as long as there was a chance she might eventually succeed, losing her to a failed refinement attempt was not in his interest.
However, when it became clear after enough failed attempts that she would never reach the Heavenly Furnace Tempering, he began to change.
First, the refinement attempts stopped.
Then the visits began.
Cultivators at the Stellar Realm, men and women, from different sects and different backgrounds, came to see her.
Feng Zhao gave the excuse that they were simply social introductions as he wanted her to fit in but that she had eventually understood were something else based on the looks they were giving her.
It was the look of desire.
The only reason she had recognized it was because she had begun to understand human nature, and understanding human nature meant understanding what it looked like when a person decided that something they owned was more useful as currency than as a companion.
The realisation that her father, her creator, was only using her almost broke her.
Somehow, she had gathered herself together and decided to escape.
She planned carefully and waited for the right moment, executed it well enough that she genuinely believed for a short period that she had succeeded. The relief of thinking she was free had been real. And then she walked directly into the Masked One's collection.
At the time, she had thought that her luck was bad, that the Masked One had found her by accident. It was only later, through her experiences with the Masked One, that she realised that Feng Zhao had sold her. The entire escape had been either anticipated, permitted, or arranged to deliver her to the buyer without a scene. She still wasn't certain which, and she would probably never find out.
When she finally finished speaking, she went quiet.
I didn't say anything because I needed a moment to let what she had told me arrange itself properly in my head.
All this time, I had wondered why she was being more difficult than the others, but it all made sense now.
Sun Li Hua had been created as a cultivation resource, given consciousness, then groomed so that one day she could be used to selfishly benefit her master. And when she wasn’t able to fulfil her purpose, she had been sold to someone else against her will.
Every human being she had encountered had treated her as a thing to be evaluated, acquired, or spent.
That was a level of trauma that few ever recovered from.
No wonder she hadn't wanted to give me her name.
I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable giving any information about myself if that had happened to me.
The question running through my mind right now was how to deal with her trauma.
Sure, I could give words of reassurance that I wasn't going to use her, that her ability was her own and not mine to claim, and that I understood the difference between a conscious person and a resource, regardless of how either of them had come to exist.
But I had been around enough people in enough complicated situations to know that when someone has spent decades having their capacity for trust systematically destroyed, words from a stranger, even if they were true, do very little work.
They get filtered through everything the person already knows about how the world operates, and what comes out the other side was just more noise that sounds like every other thing someone has said before they proved they couldn't be trusted.
And I couldn’t blame her for that, so I said one thing, simply, without trying to build a case around it.
"I promise that I won't treat you that way."
She looked like she was preparing to argue. I could see it in the set of her jaw.
"Nothing I say will convince you," I said, before she could open her mouth. "I know that. I'm not asking you to believe me right now. I'm asking you to give me a chance to be wrong about what you expect from me. That's all."
She stayed quiet for a long moment, then looked around at the world around her, at her new home.
"One more chance," she whispered. "Humans get one more."
"Thank you," I said, and I meant it because I could tell it took a lot out of her to give it another try.
She held my gaze for another moment, as if checking whether there was something else underneath the response, then she seemed to accept that there wasn’t and nodded.
I thought about something that might help.
"You’re free to explore but before you go," I said, "fair warning. Near the garden quadrant, there’s a little who has been watching you since you arrived and is definitely going to try to be your friend whether you want her to or not."
Sun Li Hua looked at me, and for the first time since the Genesis Seed had pulled her out of whatever was left of the Masked One's collection, the corner of her mouth moved in a way that was not entirely hostile.
"The small one?" she asked.
"Her name is Little Bloom, and she’s always looking for new friends to talk to."
“Friend…” Sun Li Hua whispered as she looked in the direction of the garden.
Then she moved, flying off toward the northeast quadrant in a straight clean line, and within a few seconds I could see Little Bloom's excited spiral as she noticed her approach from across the inner world.
I watched them for a moment. I had no idea how that was going to go.
Sun Li Hua had a lot of trauma when it came to relationships, and Little Bloom had exactly no filter and an entirely genuine approach to everything she encountered. It was possible the combination was going to be a disaster. It was also possible that Little Bloom was exactly what Sun Li Hua needed, because Little Bloom's attention came with no agenda attached to it. She didn't want anything. She just wanted to exist in your vicinity and show you things she found interesting.
If anyone in my inner world could make Sun Li Hua feel less like a resource and more like a person who was just allowed to exist, it was probably a small sapling who had never once thought about using anyone for anything in her life.
With that done, I turned and flew upward.
The Blood Moon was waiting, and it had been waiting since I dragged it into my inner world.
This had been the center of an entire world once.
The cultivation anchor of a civilization that had developed across thousands of years, the object that the Leech-kin had organized their spiritual lives around long before any of them had ever heard of the cultivation world I came from.
My inner world had suns, and it had a child star.
What it had never had before was a moon, especially not a Blood Moon.
The question was: how would its presence affect my inner world?