Opening his eyes, Xavier saw a scene from his dreams of long ago. It was his room in his childhood home from so long ago. He was born in this house; he spent eleven years happily growing up and being loved by his parents. When his parents died on a mission for the Cult, he felt lost and holed himself up in this room for days or weeks at a time, only leaving the house to buy food before quickly returning.
After half a year, he left his house and began training in the martial arts of the clan. This house was where he lived till it was destroyed along with all the buildings of the Cult by the Heavenly Aliance during the Cult's civil war. The home he was grew up in and hoped to raise a family in had been reduced to ash, and now only existed as a faded memory of times long since passed. He had returned to where his home stood twice. The first was not long after it was destroyed, he almost died several times before he barely escaped. The second time was as an old man in his mid-fifties while trying to hide from bounty hunters.
He was able to explore more his second time and discovered a secret of the cult that changed his life for the next five and a half centuries.
Every time he dreamed of this place his old memories would come flooding back along with sadness. He could remember this room after all this time, but what his parent's voices sounded like and their what their faces looked like had long since faded into nothingness. Only strong feelings of love, happiness, and a bitter sadness remained.
Standing in front of his beat-up dresser, he could help but gaze at his mother's hand mirror. It was the only personal item he had of either of his parents other than several sets of clothes. He imagined that he currently looked like a sentimental fool with a stupid looking smile on his face. That was until he slid his fingers along the top of his beat-up dresser and pulled back his hand in pain.
He was grimacing in pain as he tried to remove a massive splinter from his finger. The splinter piercing his skin hurt, digging it out hurt more. And the more he felt pain, the more he realized he wasn't in a dream. But the thought of waking up in his past wasn't something he could accept just because he felt a little pain. So, he punched the edge of the beat-up dresser.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck... fuck!"
Xavier was cradling his arm against his stomach. He was in a great deal of pain, and he was happy about it. In his 600 years he had been trapped in illusions many times, but they had always had flaws. Feeling pain was always the biggest flaw, illusionary pain felt dull and unreal, but the pain he was feeling now was anything but dull and felt very, very real.
The last thing he remembered before waking up here was being in treasury of tomb and fighting for a relic that held the secrets of time. He had used a ghost to fake his death and waited for the last few cultivators to kill each other, and when the last cultivator picked up the relic, Xavier stabbed him in the back with his bident. But the cultivator's defensive treasure altered his bidents trajectory allowing him to survive the attack but still be poisoned. When the cultivator turned around the look on his face was of pure rage. The cultivator held his arms out like he was aiming the relic at Xavier and began to pour all his spirit energy into the relic and screamed "die". But soon his faced had a panicked look, then finally of fear as his body began to denigrate into dust and be absorbed into the relic. When the last of the cultivator was absorbed, the relic began to crack before shattering and releasing a bright light.
Xavier had viewed the relic as his only hope to continue to live. He had extended his life with drugs and heavenly treasures and had even absorbing the life fore of his enemies just to survive as long as he did. But nothing last forever, his body could no longer tolerate those methods. He only had two hopes to extend his life, breakthrough his current cultivation level and advance to the Nascent Soul stage, and the second was to use the power of time to slow down or reverse his quickly approaching death.
Breaking through to the Nascent Soul stage was impossible, he was too old to do it in a normal way and forcing the breakthrough would require him to go hunting to collect rare treasures with nowhere enough time to do it, or for his sect to place enough value in him to provide the materials, but he was a 600-year-old Golden Core ranked cultivator from the outer courtyard who failed to make elder several times. He would have better luck asking his enemies to provide the materials then getting help from his sect.
From the moment he had heard of the relic, he had placed all his hopes on it. At most he had 3 years left to live and the relic was the only way he could see to live longer. He had hoped that the relic would slow down his ageing enough to gather the materials to force his breakthrough or maybe reverse his age enough to breakthrough the normal way. Of all his hopeful fantasies about the power of the relic, he never gave much thought about going back in time, but here he was.
Looking around the room Xavier began to try to figure out when he was in his past. His mother's hand mirror on the dresser means it was after the death of his parents, and the clothes he was wearing he was still training as a martial artist, picking up the hand mirror he saw lots of bruising on his face. It took a bit to shift through the hazy memories of his past, but he soon remembered that the bruising was from his first martial arts instructors, instructor Atkins. The bastard like to beat his students instead of training them, but after four months into training instructor Atkins was found dead, he had been stabbed in the back over one-hundred times.
"This should be around my twelfth birthday give or take a month."
Xavier began to think of the timing of his regression, if he had been sent back a year earlier, than his parents would still be alive. He could protect them by cultivating enough to kill the martial artists that lured them into the trap that took their lives. But he wasn't sent back far enough, his parents were dead, and in three years the Crimson Blood Sword will conspire with outsiders to assassinate the Heavenly Demon for control of the Heavenly Demon Cult, two of the Heavenly Demon's eleven children will survive the assassination attempts and the cult will be split into three, during the fighting of the three factions the Crimson Blood Sword's new allies will betray him and lead the martial artists of the Heavenly Aliance through the cult's defenses and massacre everyone from the cult, and as one of the few hundred that survived Xavier will spend the next fifty years being hunted.
This is what happened in the past, what will happen in the future, Xavier would need to think about what to do and whether to interfere in the cult's fate or not. He never really had strong feelings for the cult when it still existed and after five and a half centuries of being a cultivator, the Heavenly Demon cult didn't really mean anything to him. In fact, nothing from this time meant much to him, he had no great enemies he wanted to take revenge on, no great treasure troves to unearth, no great loves he couldn't live without. He was just an old man nearing his death who had been given a second chance.