A/N
2 chapters combined into a 3k chapter for better readability.
There were a few comments about Wei Lin's situation and also Ke Yin's formation studies, I decided to include the answer to both questions in this chapter. Enjoy!
Chapter 782: A Future Without a Harem
I walked as fast as I possibly could without breaking into a run.
As I passed disciple after disciple, I could hear the whispers starting up just like they always did.
"Was that Elder Ke Yin? Why is he walking so fast?"
"Something must have happened in there."
"I heard he was in that room for five days. Maybe he ran out of spirit stones."
"He's a Legacy Disciple. He doesn't pay spirit stones."
"Maybe he saw something terrifying. Like a really difficult simulation opponent."
"Or maybe,” now the voice had gone down to a whisper. “He was in there meeting someone and it didn't go well."
"Do you think it’s a woman?"
"It's always a woman."
I didn’t bother to look back. There was no point. I turned a corner and the voices faded, replaced by a different cluster near the outer courtyard who had opinions of their own.
“That's him. The one who skipped a realm.”
“I heard he destroyed his own quarters.”
“I heard it was half the residential district.”
“I heard he did it on purpose, to intimidate someone.”
“I heard he did it because he wanted to impress one of the girls.”
I had not done it on purpose, and I had definitely not done it to intimidate or impress anyone.
That felt important to clarify to myself even if I had no intention of clarifying it to anyone else.
The avatar had erupted because I had reached for the Golden Sun energy without fully understanding it yet, which was a mistake that was completely avoidable in retrospect, but that was how most mistakes felt.
What did not feel avoidable, in retrospect, was the aura outburst when I had walked out of the simulation room. That one hit me more than the pavilion. The pavilion had been empty. The corridor outside the simulation rooms had not been empty. Seven disciples, all of them there to use the training facilities, and the next moment, they had been flat on the ground before I even realised what was happening.
I had pulled the aura back the moment I noticed, but a second of Stellar Realm pressure was more than enough to leave a person shaken, and some of them had looked traumatised, one of them had even been trembling.
I had apologised because I meant it.
In the cultivation world, people at my level generally did not apologise when something like that happened because accidental spiritual pressure was considered a natural consequence of standing near someone powerful. The person on the ground was expected to feel grateful they had encountered someone at such a high level, as if being briefly unable to breathe was a valuable cultivation experience.
I found that philosophy exhausting.
Power was not something I had ever particularly wanted for its own sake. It was a tool that made the things I cared about more achievable, and the difference between me and the young masters who walked these corridors radiating pressure on purpose because they enjoyed watching people flinch was more than temperament.
I really didn’t understand the appeal of having people bow and scrape and arrange their entire behaviour around your comfort. It looked like loneliness dressed up as authority, and I’d seen enough of it to know that the cultivators who collected deference the most aggressively were usually the ones who were most terrified of existing without it.
That was not the type of person I had any interest in becoming.
My thoughts shifted to the girl from the corridor.
I didn’t even know her name.
Hell, I’d been out of the room for maybe five seconds, and she’d given me an invitation that had nothing to do with discussing cultivation or cultivation techniques.
Honestly, I probably hadn’t handled it gracefully.
A flat "I'm not interested" while walking backward was not exactly a demonstration of social sophistication, but the alternative had been to stand there and engage with it, and I hadn’t wanted to do that either.
The last thing I needed was for her to think that I was playing hard to get.
“Master,” Azure piped up. “I think you made it pretty clear you’re not interested. I’m not sure what else could make it more clear than saying the words ‘I’m not interested.’”
“You underestimate a human’s ability to see things in the version of reality they live in.”
I didn’t blame him for not being able to relate.
Humans were completely different to inner world spirits.
I suppressed a shudder as I thought about something I had read about on Earth on an online forum how a woman who interpreted a restraining order as a sign her boyfriend was 'playing hard to get.'
Yeah, the mind could be terrifyingly creative. The only thing more dangerous than wishful thinking was wishful thinking backed by cultivation. I just wished it didn’t have to be like this, but I had known that this was coming sooner or later.
"Master," Azure said, "You know that cultivation law in most major sects encourages powerful cultivators to take multiple companions. Your bloodline, at this point, is considered…"
"Please don't finish that sentence."
"I was just pointing out…"
"Azure."
Fortunately for me, he fell quiet.
But I understood the point he was making.
As cultivation level rose and sect status rose with it, certain social dynamics shifted because this was a world where power determined survival in the most literal sense, attaching yourself to someone powerful was probably one of the most rational things someone that didn’t have power or talent could do.
This is why women in this world were more open to becoming a wife or even a concubine to a senior cultivator because they desired protection, resources, access, and a degree of security that independent cultivation might never provide for most people.
The logic behind it made sense, but it still made me uncomfortable being evaluated as a resource rather than a person, even when the person doing the evaluating was not being cruel about it.
If I ever got around to thinking about marriage, and at my current rate of surviving dangerous situations and advancing through realms at speeds that alarmed people, that was not guaranteed, then I would look to avoid the trap that a lot of protagonists made, which was adding every beautiful woman to their posse.
No, just the thought of dealing with multiple women exhausted me.
And that was something that hadn’t changed from my days on Earth.
I remember back then whenever I searched for a novel to read, the harem tag had been an instant skip, every single time without exception. And if I couldn’t deal with it in a fantasy novel, then I definitely couldn’t deal with it in real life.
I wanted to be with one girl that I genuinely loved and she loved me back.
Something like what my parents had, a tailor from Floating Reed Village and a woman who laughed at his bad jokes and corrected his measurements. They had nothing in the cultivation world's terms. No cultivation, no status, no connections. They had each other, they had figured out something that most powerful cultivators never would.
This is also something my parents wanted for me, unfortunately, my mother also believed, with the absolute confidence of a mother who had known her son since birth, that she had better instincts about who I would love than I did. She was wrong about that, but there was no world in which I was going to successfully convince her of it.
I shook the thoughts of marriage and romance out of my head as I rounded the final corner and saw my pavilion.
The sect's formation workers moved fast, apparently, because what had been rubble when I walked away from it was now a fully restored structure that had been refurbished.
The roof was clean and straight, the walls had been re-faced with better stone than the original, and someone had added a second set of shutters on the upper floor windows that the old pavilion hadn't had. Even the wooden steps leading to the entrance were new, cut from a warmer-toned timber that caught the late afternoon light differently than the old ones.
It looked better than it had before I accidentally destroyed it.
Standing outside it, talking to two men in work robes with formation guild marks on their sleeves, was Li Hao.
He had his hands on his hips and was leaning slightly forward to look at one of the window joins, saying something in a low voice to the man beside him. There was sawdust on his outer robe that he had not yet noticed, and his hair had escaped whatever he had used to tie it back at the start of the day.
It seemed that the young master had really put in the work.
The formation worker pointed at something near the door frame. Li Hao nodded, made a small gesture, and the man pulled a brush from his kit and adjusted something I couldn't see clearly from where I was standing.
Li Hao stepped back and looked at the whole structure again.
The young master was smiling, but the moment he turned and saw me, it disappeared.
"Elder Ke Yin,” he bowed deeply. “The work is done. I apologise once again for the circumstances that led to it being needed."
"It's good work," I said, honestly. "Better than the original."
The corners of his mouth moved before he could stop them.
"T-thank you, Elder Ke Yin. I…yes. Thank you."
The silence that followed was awkward.
"Is there something else?" I asked.
He hesitated. The hesitation was brief but I caught it.
"I was wondering," he said, and the formality in his voice had developed a slight crack, "if Elder Ke Yin might consider mentioning to Master Yang Bo that the task was completed to a satisfactory standard."
I nodded.
"I'll tell him you did well," I said. "That the quality was better than required."
The careful young master face dropped entirely and what replaced it was a young man who had spent almost a week working hard at something and wanted credit for it.
"Thank you," he said, and I could tell that he meant it.
Then he appeared to realise this wasn’t befitting of a young master of his status, so he composed himself with visible effort, bowed again, and left as quickly as possible, probably worried that I would change my mind and call him back.
I watched him go.
I didn’t have very complicated feelings about Li Hao.
The young master had done something stupid and small and self-serving, the cultivation world produced people like that in quantity, and he had paid for it in the most concrete way available, which was sweating through his robes while putting timber together.
Whatever the experience had done to him was between him and whatever he decided to do with it. But there was something I found satisfying about the fact that he had done the work properly.
"Thank you both," I said, looking at the two formation experts properly now. "The work is very good."
The older of the two, a broad-shouldered man with chalk dust on his forearms that he hadn't entirely gotten off, gave a small inclination of his head. "Straightforward repair. The original construction was solid enough. We reinforced the interior formation channels while we had access." He glanced at the window frame. "If you encounter any instability in the eastern room's spiritual energy circulation, it's the new channeling nodes settling. Should normalize within a few days."
"Appreciated," I said. Then, because I was curious and because I had been thinking about formation work since I let it slide during tournament preparation: "The reinforcement on the channels. Was that a new anchoring method or standard grid extension?"
The older worker looked impressed that I had noticed that. Most elders probably never bothered to ask about the intricacies of formation work.
"Hybrid approach," he said. "Grid extension for the primary paths, anchor reinforcement at the junctions. Are you familiar with channel architecture?"
"Second level certification," I said. "Formation Guild. I've been working through junction theory but haven't had time to practice it recently."
“Second level at your age is fast progression." He nodded slowly. "You'll hit the wall at third level that most people hit. The theory gets significantly more abstract. But if you can work through it, the jump to fourth opens up a different class of work entirely."
"That's the goal," I said.
His companion, who had been quiet throughout, looked over his shoulder at me as they turned to leave. "You'll probably pass us eventually. Might want to slow down and actually enjoy the third level for a while before you do. There's a lot of interesting work there."
They walked away before I could figure out how to respond to that, which was probably for the best because the response would have been awkward regardless.
I stood in front of my pavilion and thought about formations.
I genuinely liked them. There was something about the logic of formation work that fit with my brain comfortably. I had gotten to second level faster than the standard timeline because it hadn’t felt like work to me.
Third level was where the theory became a lot more exciting
It was where practitioners were able to include elemental energies into formations.
To breakthrough to the third level, I needed to create a formation that safely channelled two opposing elements in a single array. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time in the past few weeks to delve into the theory and give it a try.
Soon, I told myself, after the immediate crises resolved.
And I’d also keep the words of the formation expert in mind.
Usually, I found myself rushing cultivation, and I had legitimate reasons to do so, but cultivation, whether it be formation or some other discipline, deserved to be enjoyed and experienced. I didn’t want to one day look back and have regrets.
I turned to the pavilion and placed my hand flat against the outer wall, where the new timber was still slightly pale compared to the surrounding structure.
"Sorry about what happened before," I said, which was a strange thing to say to a building, but I’d rather come across as strange than have the building develop sentience and a grudge against me. This was a cultivation world, after all, stranger things have happened.
Inside, the layout was familiar. The main room, the stairs, the upper floor with its view of the courtyard. My meditation mat had been replaced. The formation work was intact. Everything was as it should be.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at my hands for a moment.
There was a lot that still needed to be done, but the one I kept coming back to was Wei Lin.
Sect Master Yuan had put him into a deep sleep to slow the spread of the corruption, and had made it clear that this wasn’t a solution and that there might not actually be a cure. But now we knew that there was a cure, and that cure was a Realm Stabilizing Tree.
Even though I had multiple Realm Stabilizing Trees in my inner world, once a tree had spread its roots into an inner world, it was almost impossible to remove it without damaging the tree or the inner world itself.
So, Sect Master Yuan was watching the sect networks, contacting people, pulling on threads of information that only a Civilization Realm cultivator with centuries of political presence could access. If an uncorrupted Realm Stabilizing Tree existed anywhere on this continent, he would find out about it before anyone else would.
In the meantime, Wei Lin would stay asleep, that was the only option.
As for me, I needed to be ready for my next trip to the Two Suns World.
The difference between this loop and the previous ones was that I knew what was waiting.
I knew the barriers could be closed, that the purification could work, that the World Tree network worked like it was supposed to when given the right push. I knew that Elder Thorn had some connection to Golden Sun. I knew that even if we did succeed in preventing the Otherworldly being from entering, there was another problem, a hidden one, the lich-like being.
I knew more than I had ever known going in.
What I didn’t know was whether it would be enough.
But all of that had to wait until I had given myself something that even Stellar Realm cultivators needed occasionally, which was sleep.
Sure, at my level, I could go weeks without sleep, but being able to was not the same as it being good for you. The body could manage without sleep, but the mind was a different question. There was something that happened in sleep, the actual unconscious hours, that even refined spiritual energy couldn’t fully replace at my level.
So, I lay back in bed and looked up at the ceiling.
The timber ceiling was new. There was a small imperfection in one of the joins near the east wall where two boards had been cut very slightly uneven. I’m sure if I pointed it out to Li Hao, the young master would lose sleep over it, but I found it comforting for reasons I couldn’t really explain.
"Goodnight, Master," Azure whispered. "You deserve the rest."
I smiled at the ceiling. It had been a while since we’d said goodnight to each other.
"Goodnight, Azure."
With that, I closed my eyes and welcomed the darkness.
A/N
Tomo, we return to the Two Suns World!
Just a heads up, I plan to complete the Two Suns World's main storyline in this arc so it'll be longer than the Stealing the Moon arc.
I hope you enjoy it!