Asking permission to leave the school was even more straightforward than I thought. Mistress just shrugged and said, "You're talented, so try not to die."
That was it. However, Han Meiying drew me into her room before I left the peak and asked, "I'm told you're going out to temper yourself."
I didn't really like that expression, temper oneself. I wasn't a piece of steel that needed to be tempered or annealed, so I just shrugged and said, "I'm thinking of it more as a vacation, but I'm sure there will be significant violence and risk." I mean, there always was in this world.
She nodded and asked, "You've never taken one of the cultivation methods I offered you. Why?"
I snorted, "I already have a very high-quality cultivation method, and I cultivate quickly. Most demonic cultivation methods have serious drawbacks that I'm not interested in incorporating into my cultivation base. Also, my cultivation method requires my cultivation base to be very pure, so if I tried most of them, I'd probably explode." It wasn't that I couldn't use any other methods. Otherwise, I would have been a lot more leery of accepting the method from Grandma Mei. But although some would be compatible, most would not be.
There was one cultivation method in the list that intrigued me, though. It involved keeping a number of souls imprisoned inside my own soul, which I thought might be compatible. It was mainly an auxiliary cultivation method, meant to increase the density of your true Qi that you have gathered using a different, primary method.
You could use it on regular people, snatching their souls out of their bodies, but it worked much better if the souls were from ghosts that had formed naturally. Still, it wouldn't increase my cultivation speed that much.
Plus, it was... intimate. Not sexually, but keeping multiple people prisoner inside your own soul sounded intimate no matter what way you phrased it, especially when part of the method involved agitating them so that they were active and not in a torpor. The more they reacted to stimulus, the more they assisted your cultivation.
Still, I was interested in it, even if I was unsure if I would practise it. Just the way to imprison souls and not just spirits was incredibly valuable to me. Still, there had been a lot more useful things that I had picked first. The last technique that I picked was a way to remove real memories and insert fake memories into a person's mind, kind of like a permanent version of a number of Enchantment spells that temporarily brainwashed someone. The one before that involved searching a person's memories.
Both of those spells could only be used on people at least one greater realm weaker than I was, but I still thought they had a lot of promise.
I was off the hook with the devilish contract that I had inherited from Merildwen. Its hooks were no longer in my soul, but Judge Wu's situation was much more nebulous.
He signed me up for his Netherworld Amway scheme without my consent. As far as I could tell, there was no magically enforceable contract on my soul that would render it to him if I didn't pay the rest of what he claimed I owed him before I died. However, he was literally part of this world's afterlife system, and it might be that my soul would go to his court to be judged in any case.
One would think that the Netherworld Kingdom would be set up to exclude souls that had a pre-existing relationship from seeing a particular judge, but if there was one thing I had noticed in my years living here it was that nepotism and the like were the rule, not the exception. I could see whoever was responsible for setting dockets at court to see me, and give face to Judge Wu by shuffling my soul to his courtroom.
If so, then it didn't really matter if he didn't have my consent because he could fuck me over regardless. It might be a sin to be overly harsh to a soul if you were a judge, but there had to be a reason these guys wanted to accumulate so much merit from virtuous deeds. Perhaps it was just so they could do whatever they wanted some of the time, and if so, he might send me to debtor's hell for "owing him money."
So, having a positive relationship with the bully was in my best interest, even if it annoyed me. That meant that my soul-jar athame was vital. If I lost it, it would be a big deal, so learning how to restrain a soul on my own was useful. This auxiliary cultivation method was probably the next item on the list I would pick.
She nodded and said, "Since you don't have any specific plans while you're out... vacationing, would you be interested in the occasional job? You're a good match for us."
"What is us?" I asked suspiciously. I thought she must be some kind of officially sanctioned demonic cultivator. It wasn't really that surprising that we had such things, as a lot of demonic spells were super dangerous and super dangerous things equated to being super useful.
She waved a hand and said, "We don't have a name. Once a group has a name, it will leak and then you're halfway to having files started on you by rival sects. We're officially recognised though, and we just... keep an eye out, occasionally do other things. I cannot say any more unless you agree to join."
Join, now, huh? I narrowed my eyes, "And what if I say no? Are you going to silence me to keep this unnamed group a secret?"
She looked at me like I was stupid, "Of course not, Junior Sister. Protecting the school and its disciples is our primary job." She coughed, "You just won't remember this meeting the exact same way as I did if you do decline."
Oh. Yeah. I mean, she had been the one to use the Water Press Spell to make me copies of the memory search and modification techniques. Right in front of me—in seconds, too. She obviously was a master at them. And I had suspected that she was a Golden Core cultivator, too. I guess that was basically an admission of that fact.
"Give me a moment to consider," I said and frowned.
I tried to decide whether or not I should feel upset at the implicit threat to put me under a brain whammy and mess around with my memories, but it would be pretty hypocritical. The capability of doing this exact thing for potential subordinates, later on, was one of the main reasons I had picked the memory modification technique in the first place. The slightly smug look on the Senior Sister's face told me she was following my failed attempt to get righteously indignant at her.
Still, I had more secrets than the average person. I didn't want anyone to know where I came from or what I could do. Fortunately, just going rummaging around in reading someone's mind wasn't something one could do lightly. Recent memories were one thing, but a full brain scan of your long-term memory could be traumatic.
Even a master of the ability, which I had no doubt she was, would find it difficult to do it to me without leaving me a drooling mess if I fought her, which I definitely would. In fact, I quickly but firmly made a vow to myself to always do so if I found myself in that situation as a way to detect this type of attack while looking for other ways to defeat or detect it.
It was theoretically possible she could have tried to build up a fake memory of my recovery, but it would have taken days or weeks. Until very recently, I had a packed schedule every day and over fifty subordinates.
There was no way I could have been sequestered for days to get over the minor brain damage a forced, full brain scan would cause me. The more recent an event was, however, the easier it was to do. There was no way that my memories were fake unless practically the entire school was in on it, too.
"I'm not really looking for a full-time job," I said with a sigh, giving her the eye, "That's why I'm calling it a vacation, Senior Sister."
She smiled creepily, "It's not a full-time job, and the jobs are optional—unless the mountain is burning down, then we might try to order you to do things, but that would be an existential threat to the school, and all students would be getting orders of one kind or another."
"Are there any downsides at all? Also, there is no reason not to tell me more if your plan is to erase or modify my memory if I decline," I told her sceptically.
She shrugged, "I wanted to see how you would react to the threat. I might have only made you swear an oath instead." Then she pursed her lips, "Some of the things we do can be a little distasteful sometimes, as we occasionally make deals with demonic cultivators outside of the school. That said, since we often then deal with them, it is generally a net positive in terms of sin."
While I liked her little pun there, I honestly hated how this world handled that. You could literally do something incredibly evil and then spend a while "doing good", and it would balance the scales, and you'd be square as far as both karma and the Netherworld Kingdom were concerned. There were some things that I didn't think any amount of penitence or good deeds could absolve, in my opinion.
The entire Netherworld bureaucracy reminded me of a group of money changers that dealt with sin and merit instead of coin, setting up inside the temple. Where was Samson when you needed him, eh?
I suppose it wasn't any more repugnant than the religion I had grown up with, where you could do any amount of terrible things, and then so long as you repented and accepted Jesus, then you were square and heaven-bound. Due to my childhood, I had very ingrained opinions that some things weren't forgivable, and that has led me to be sceptical about religion while growing up.
That I fundamentally believed that there were some things that were unforgivable meant that I didn't particularly like the idea of degrading my fraying morals any more than I had to, though. It might be hypocritical, given all that I had done, which would have been enough to get me tried by the Hague, followed by a 3-part Lifetime miniseries, but that was neither here nor there.
Still, so long as I could decline, it might be worth it to see what the benefits would be. I finally nodded, "Okay, I'll join your unnamed conspiracy. What do we do?"
"Whatever is necessary to protect the school. The school's biggest threats come from demonic cultivators these days, so the school needs people who not only know how these types of techniques work and how to counter them, but it needs people who can plausibly mingle amongst demonic cultivators. We've established multiple minor demonic sects just for this purpose," she said with a smile and produced a stack full of books as well as a much more edgy, black Daoist robe.
She then explained some more. The sects we started were small and mostly involved in trade. That allowed us to meet with an outsized number of demonic cultivators and collect information. We even ran the black market in a number of cities. The cults we founded even accepted new disciples like any demonic sect, but usually in a decentralised manner, kind of similar to the Hidden Flowers Fairyland.
There would be small outposts of one of our fake cults in most large cities within a million li from the school. It was a straight intelligence-gathering operation. Apparently, a long time ago, the school had been surprised by a developing demonic sect and almost destroyed. Never again, I suppose?
The real decision-makers in the enclaves were all members of the Silver Serenities School, which allowed us to ensure that the rank-and-file members didn't go beyond the pale while also collecting the required information. Just the fact that most of the enclaves focused on the trade of contraband meant that they weren't blood-crazed maniacs anyway, but it was still better to have some "adult supervision."
I looked at the stack of books and quirked an eyebrow, "What's all this?"
"The top one is the cultivation method you were interested in but haven't asked me for yet," she said.
I sighed, as I never told her I was interested in it. She continued, "The rest are a handful of other, mostly pretty middling, cultivation methods. About half of them are demonic; others are not. You might take a turn being a rotating elder in the Shadowmark Consortium, or maybe you see someone who you think might make a good spell fodder there. You're specifically allowed to, and encouraged, to share these techniques with them."
Ah, I had wondered why she had never once required me to swear an oath not to disclose any of the evil magic she taught me. If I pretended to be some dark magic deacon, then I might need to teach these things to such people. Or, more likely, give them copies and not care if they actually learned anything, died or made it to the "cult."
I considered. Would that be a "sin"? Maybe, but only very slightly, especially if I only taught people before they became really bad. The world didn't consider demonic techniques any different than any others, mostly. Unless it was the "infant torture manual", karma and the Heavenly Dao considered a spell to drain a person dry of Qi the equivalent of a sword technique. Both killed you. Maybe the former did it a little more painfully, but it was all pretty much the same.
The fact that I knew it would likely be abused would be a small hit to my karmic virtue, but surprisingly little. The imposed objective morality of this world was big on personal responsibility. To be a real sin, someone would have had to actively implicate their teacher, asking them the equivalent, "Teacher! Please teach me this spell so that I may murder orphans! Only your help will allow me to kill the most I can! If you don't teach it to me, many innocent orphans will survive my wrath!"
Honestly, now that my eyes were open to the idea, I could think of ways to easily set up fake "evil sects" of my own and harvest their members like radishes for both karmic sin units and straight virtue.
No, no... I wouldn't do that. Haha, of course not. Big Sister Han interrupted my plotting, saying, "Actually, I recommend you read and comprehend them all. You came to the school with a nice cultivation method, and that is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Knowing how other cultivation methods work will help your own comprehension, and you should be able to intuit and then simulate at least the Qi Gathering stage of each of these entirely without practising them." She squinted at me, stared at me for a long moment and then added, "Perhaps more."
I nodded slowly. I had studied the differences between the Five Phase Method and my own cultivation technique and thought it useful, so I could see what she meant. But I had never bothered to buy the rest of that cultivation method, even though it was cheap as chips.
I took the edgy robes and stack of books and left, flying on my cloud to the Swordlight Peak. I didn't fly up the peak. I wasn't a member, and that would be rude as hell. My Mistress would literally beat the shit out of me if I did, as being her disciple would implicate her as well. I cast Sending,
It ...might be possible, but I couldn't presently see how to do it unless the recipient knew a fair amount of Wizardry and specifically how the spell worked. You'd at least have to understand the principles behind the method that spells like Message and Sending pump the message into your brain or soul to make yourself some flag that the modified spell could detect.
A little over a half hour later, Xiao Li darted from the top of the peak, flying down on a ridiculously oversized flying sword. I snorted. Of course, he got the most ridiculous flying treasure possible. He waved to me and said, "Ohohoho! Congratulations! You can come up the peak with me to my house if you want. Or have you turned in your dwelling yet?"
I shook my head, "No, I haven't. Let's go there. Besides, I have to give my servants proper going away presents, too."
We flew back to my house, and I watched Xiao Li's flying sword shrink down into almost a letter opener size, which he put in a spatial treasure. Well, that made it more convenient. The damn thing had been the size of two or three surfboards. He had mainly been standing on it as if it was a surfboard. That was in no way comfortable, but I'd discovered that sword cultivators tended to be against the idea of comfort. Or, at least, they claimed to be.
We'd see if Xiao Li decided to ask to ride on my extraordinarily soft and comfortable cloud instead. I could increase or decrease the size of my cloud as well to hold maybe four people if I wanted to.
"Are you still interested in leaving the school for a while?" I asked him, double-checking that his plans were still the same.
He nodded rapidly, "Do you think we could ask Senior Sister Xi Mengyao to come with us?"
I grinned. I didn't mind, although that would pretty much mean we'd have to delay our departure. She liked to win the tournament every year because the first-place prizes were really good. I shook my head, "Not at all. The more of us, the better, I'd say. I'd ask Junior Brother Liu, too, except he hasn't quite broken through yet and is still sequestered."
I frowned and said, "What should our plan be, though? I'm alright with just wandering around aimlessly, but Senior Sister Xi might not be."
"The Sky Guards Army!" he said instantly.
If you just took it by the name, the Sky Guards Army sounded even more regimented than our school. The truth was that it was just a mercenary group, though. A semi-official mercenary group. You had to be in the Foundation Establishment and pass a trial mission before you could get membership, but after that, it functioned very much like an Adventurer's Guild, except that all of their missions were against "evil."
Considering they were semi-official in almost every country we knew of, I suspected that a very strong power was behind the group, and if so, then it might be similar to how the young master handled charity in his dynasty—a pragmatic virtue farm, in other words. Luck was very real in this world, and being the person or group behind a large organisation that was responsible for the systematic elimination of evildoers would reap an excellent harvest.
I suppose it didn't have to be a cynical project like that, but that was what I generally expected.
It suited me just fine, though. I was going to suggest we go down to the south and investigate some things Li Hua had told me about her country. They had been having a war against demonic cultivators, specifically ones that used some kind of zombies that I was interested in.
But there was no reason we couldn't do that too. The chance that the Sky Guards had a mission to do just that was pretty high. We'd just have to qualify as members first.
I smiled, "I don't really have that much a relationship with Senior Sister Xi. She's a fellow member of your Peak, though, so you'll have to ask her. I bet she will want to stay for the tournament, though."
Xiao Li sighed at that and nodded, "There's no way I can beat her, right now! So I was hoping to leave before it, as my Master expects all of the disciples at Swordlight Peak to compete if we're in the school at the time. You're right, though. She'll definitely want to take an easy victory again this year."
"At our level, fighting a reincarnated immortal is hard," I said, shaking my head.
That got Xiao Li to look at me oddly, and I asked, "What?"
"There's rumours that you are a reincarnated immortal, too. No diremonster normally cultivates as fast as you do. Plus, you know tons of spells. Grandma thinks that might be likely, too, even," he said wryly.
That wasn't entirely true, but I could see why the number of spells, to say nothing of my formations and talisman artistry expertise, would give that impression. Nobody had talked to me about it, though. In a way, I did have memories of a past life, and I couldn't even say that they were useless because they weren't.
"Well... it is possible, I suppose. I haven't awakened any immortal memories yet," I said carefully. I didn't like lying to Xiao Li, so I tried to do it as little as possible, and this statement was technically true, the best kind of true. All of the memories I had from my past life were one hundred per cent mortal ones.
Mrs Mei didn't like talking much inside the school—especially since Xiao Li was Pai Mei's personal disciple, who was at the same level she had been. It would be easy to be discovered, and a helpless Nascent Soul remnant soul could be very useful to people on the same level, so she didn't particularly trust anyone except Xiao Li himself.
She also had to spend most of her time regenerating. I wasn't sure what the process was to get back to full strength once one's nascent soul was damaged, but that she still sometimes talked to him here was a good sign.
"I'm going to go ask Senior Sister Xi if she wants to come with us!" Xiao Li said excitedly and ran out of the villa.
I nodded at his fleeing body. I had to dispel all the Arcane Locks and Glyphs of Warding that I had placed on this villa. It wouldn't do if the next owner blew themselves up when they couldn't open the front door, after all.
I had goodie bags for each of my servants. They were practical presents consisting of spirit stones and pills. Both Qi and Blood pills as well as healing pills.
Xiao Li, and presumably Mrs Mei, had created the equivalent of healing potions, but they had changed the ingredients so much that the alchemical recipe wasn't anything near like what I had given him, so I didn't feel comfortable accepting partial credit for the discovery.
Plus, I had already given the school novel talismans and helped invent an entirely new kind of magitech formation. I didn't want anyone to suspect I had attainments in alchemy, too. It might lead someone stronger than me by the ankles and shake me until all my gold coins and secrets fell out of my pockets.
Especially because I had negative attainments in alchemy, Xiao Li tested it systematically over weeks while we were travelling. If I watched him making a pill, then my very attention on the ingredients would slightly reduce the pill quality, somehow. He couldn't explain it, except that it happened.
Little Fang'er was inconsolable when I told everyone I was leaving, and it took a couple of minutes of hugging her to calm her down. The head butler looked like he wanted to punish her for the outburst, but I stared daggers at him. The girl was only thirteen. Besides, I had little doubt that she would be in the school herself maybe by her eighteenth birthday, so he would be wise not to make things hard on himself unnecessarily.
Xiao Li arrived with good news. Good news because I didn't want to stay around. "Senior Sister Xi is willing to go adventure with us, but she is already a member of the Sky Guards. So she suggests we go on alone, pass the membership trial mission and then come back to collect her."
I grinned, "So we can leave now?"
He frowned, "Give me at least three days! I need to settle some things here and talk to my Master."
I sighed and said, "Alright." I suppose it was unrealistic to expect to leave on the same day I had broken through, unless I was going solo.
---xxxxxx---
"Thank you for agreeing to work a shift, Senior Sister," said the older man, who was a deacon in the Outer Sect. Since we couldn't leave, I decided to try to figure out more about the portals that connected the school with Cloudsoar City. I knew that only Foundation Establishment cultivators could open them, but... how? It had to be a magical device of some sort because you didn't have to be an expert in spatial techniques.
Obviously an important disciple of the school didn't have to take turns sitting in the portal room, waiting, so he seemed to be quite appreciative of the fact that I was doing so, oblivious that my deeper intentions were to absorb as many arcane secrets as possible. What a fool! Mwahahaha!
"So, the way this works is pretty simple..." he went to explain the process, and I frowned. It did use a lot of Qi, so I could see why Qi Gathering disciples couldn't do this. I asked, hand reaching towards the orb on a pedastel that the older man was touching, "Can I try to make a portal myself?"
He held up his other hand to stop me, saying quickly, "Only one hand can touch the beacon." He then removed his hand from it and said, "Sure, go ahead. I think you're strong enough that you could open a portal multiple times without using all of your Qi."
My hand froze, pulling back almost as if I had touched something hot. The way he said that made me have a flashback of the most annoying quest in a video game that I had played religiously in my past life. The visceral feeling was so strong that it made me recoil.
I looked suspiciously at the smooth orb on the pedestal. It was a perfect sphere, so it wasn't the same. Still, I half-expected an obnoxious voice to say in my head, 'A new hand touches the beacon' after I placed my hand on it.
That quest was so obnoxious that it was standard procedure for me to open a treasure chest after defeating a boss, Draugr, in an underground ruin, see the beacon, immediately close the chest, and walk away.
There were times when something in your brain just clicked. You learned a new fact, and then an entire series of deductions fell into place in your mind like a series of dominos falling. I suddenly knew where Mom and Dad were.
Shit! I had to warn them. I was about to run off, but then I realised where I was and debated my options. I was kind of committed to staying here for the next six hours or so, so I couldn't run off. I mean, I could, but it would damage my reputation.
We had determined, with tests, that the relative time rate was a little over twenty-one to one.
So, I was being irrational. The chances that what information I could tell them would save their lives in the next fifteen minutes was miniscule. Fine, I would stay here.
I caused one of my ... Qi tentacles... for lack of a better word to enter into the orb so I could more easily understand its user interface. That was another thing I had noticed. Nobody else walked around with their Qi tentacles out. Otherwise, I would be able to see them with my spiritual sense.
My Mistress hadn't mentioned anything like this to me about expected etiquette in this realm, but she was kind of flaky about etiquette. It was clear, though, that it was considered impolite to just have them waving around, so I quickly retracted them all into my body when I hadn't noticed any other Foundation Establishment cultivator visibly using theirs. It was a little uncomfortable, but so had been some of the outfits I had worn before coming here. It was just something I would have to get used to.
This orb was a communication device. Someone on the other end could send me a message, and it also had a function where I could input a lot of Qi and set a few parameters. I figured this was the portal part.
Eager to see how it worked, I just started pouring Qi into it, not changing any of the options. At the same time, I used my spiritual sense to look very carefully at what was happening.
After a moment, a portal in the room opened. You could see through it to see Cloudsoar City, and I waved a hand at the other attendant there, who looked a little confused when nobody came out of the portal. It was a small drain keeping the portal open, but hardly anything compared to opening it in the first place.
I let it close and nodded at the other man, "It seems pretty straightforward."
We talked a bit more before he left. Instead of focusing on what I was going to tell my... Merildwen's parents, I decided to think about how this portal worked.
Most of the energy came from the device itself; that was clear. It was almost as though the Qi that I pumped into the device was like the initial electricity used to create an arc. An electric arc ionised the air, which then became conductive and allowed a circuit to form. It took a lot of energy to strip the air of its ions, but once done, it didn't take that much to maintain the plasma channel.
The Qi I had spent had created an exceptionally narrow channel between the two ends of the device, and then once created, the device used a ton more energy to widen the connection until it was a full portal that a person could walk through. It was quite interesting to watch how it worked, although I didn't know if I had learned anything useful.
Shit. I had been hoping that I would be able to think about how that worked for hours, but really, it was quite simple.
What was I going to do? I did remember a fair bit about the Elder Scrolls, but nowhere near what I think they needed to know.
It made me curious about the false lich they had fought. I would have thought that an actual Dragon Priest might be out of their weight class, but it might have been possible to easily defeat one due to the differences in the two magic types. I was pretty sure Hold Monster would be effective on one, for example.
If I was going by just the video game and not the lore, their battle tactics weren't anything to write home about. They summoned Draugr and used Destruction magic, mainly, and that was it. They were also reportedly quite arrogant. They also might have underestimated them if they hadn't sensed a lot of "Magicka" around my parents.
I knew what I should do, and I just didn't want to do it. Merildwen would have access to the entire internet at her fingertips, so she could tell me all I needed to know about Nirn. I should use Sending to contact her, but I had been putting that off... or rather specifically ignoring that it might be a possibility at all.
Finally having parents that loved me was a heady feeling, even if they were a universe away and I didn't want her to take them back from me. Worse, I didn't want them to discover that I was just pretending to be their daughter.