Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 171 - Offering Gifts to Those Who Can Spread Legs

Chapter 171: Chapter 171 - Offering Gifts to Those Who Can Spread Legs

Rua stood beside him.

She was, he noted, several inches taller than before — not physically, the breakthrough hadn’t altered her height — but bearing. The specific postural adjustment of a body that now occupied a different stage and was, without conscious intent, distributing its weight differently.

Nascent Soul Early.

She stood in the morning forest with her torn leather and her loose hair and the expression of a woman who had been comprehensively taken apart and then had her foundation entirely replaced with better material, and was looking at the territory she had lived in her whole life and finding it noticeably smaller than it had been this morning.

Her eyes found him.

He was not looking at her.

She looked anyway.

’’’

The village was inside the forest.

Not hidden — present in the specific, deliberate way of something that had decided not to disguise itself because the thing that lived here had never needed to hide from anything. The structures were built from old-growth cedar, the engineering functional and well-made, the specific product of generations of builders who understood materials and had no interest in architecture as statement.

The women who had not been in the clearing were here.

Forty-three of them, by his count. The ambient life signatures he had mapped from a hundred miles out resolved into faces — various ages, various cultivation stages, the consistent thread of the amber eyes appearing in different faces at different intensities, the founder’s bloodline expressing its echo at different degrees through the generations.

All women.

Except one.

He was given a robe at the village’s entrance — one of the larger ones, clearly taken from the men’s storage that this tribe apparently maintained for the occasions when male visitors appeared, which was probably infrequent enough that the robe had not been used recently.

He put it on.

He sat where they placed him — at the center table of the clearing, the specific place of honor that the tribe’s spatial customs indicated, which he identified by the way the arrangement of nearby women oriented toward it.

Food arrived.

He ate.

The chieftain sat across from him. Three of her senior warriors flanked her — Core Formation Late through Peak, the amber eyes at their brightest intensity in these three, the founder’s bloodline speaking loudest in the women who had trained their cultivation hardest.

The husband sat at the chieftain’s left.

He had a bowl of food he was holding and not eating.

"The Scarlet Grove tribe," the chieftain said, "has had a dual cultivator training their warriors for the last three months. Their strongest fighter has broken through to Nascent Soul Early by their methods." A pause. "Their cultivator is at Nascent Soul Mid. He has been—thorough."

"I see," he said.

"Our competition in one week is a combat trial. Three warriors per tribe. Our best three are at Core Formation Peak." She held his gaze. "Rua’s breakthrough changes the count to one at Nascent Soul Early."

"It does," he agreed.

"If you were willing to stay for one week—" She stopped herself. The expression of someone who has made an ask they are not certain they have the right to make, and is aware of this, and is doing it anyway because the arithmetic required it.

He looked at her.

He looked at her husband.

The husband was looking at the chieftain with the expression of a man who wanted very much to have an opinion about the current direction of events and was conducting an internal assessment of whether he had the standing to express it.

He didn’t express it.

The jaw was tight.

’Interesting,’ Cang thought.

"I can help prepare your warriors," he said.

The chieftain’s shoulders settled — the specific microscopic release of a woman whose tension has been at a level she considered operational and has received a response that resolves one significant variable. Not dramatic. Just the adjustment of someone whose body had been at a particular level of operational readiness and had just received permission to lower it one degree.

"The tribe is grateful, senior," she said.

"Tell me about your three candidates," he said.

She gestured.

Three women entered the clearing from the far path.

They arrived in a line, with the unconscious formation instinct of warriors who had been training together long enough that they moved in relationship to each other without deciding to. They stopped before him. Their eyes dropped in a brief, formal acknowledgment.

Eighteen. Nineteen. Nineteen.

The physician’s assessment ran, and what it found was—

Young. Very young by cultivation-world standards, but the Void Return territorial saturation had done to them what decades of careful training hadn’t done to cultivators twice their age elsewhere: their bodies were already dense, the meridians already expanded, the cultivation potential sitting in them like compressed material waiting for the specific pressure that would make it express.

All three at Core Formation Early.

All three with the amber eyes at their brightest — the bloodline running strongest in the young, where the founder’s echo hadn’t been diluted by decades of other things.

All three looking at him with the specific, wide, honest attention of young women who had just walked into the village and found a man at the center table who was not the husband, and whose bodies were receiving the passive herb integration at a range of approximately two meters, which was insufficient to be overwhelming but was absolutely sufficient to be ’noticed’.

They were noticing.

He looked at them for exactly the length of time the assessment required, and then he looked at the chieftain.

"Combat assessment first," he said. "Show me how they move."

The next hour was the physician’s practice.

He watched them fight. He said nothing for the first six minutes — just watched, the specific comprehensive observation of someone who was reading not the technique but the body that was executing the technique, the meridian patterns expressed in movement, the specific blind spots that each young warrior’s cultivation base created in their reflexes.

He spoke.

Not extensively.

The specific, surgical communication of a teacher who understood that extensive instruction landed on top of existing habits and produced layered confusion, and that the useful correction was the smallest one that produced the largest adjustment.

The youngest one — eighteen, her name was Lira, the amber eyes at their absolute brightest — moved differently after the second correction. Not better. ’Differently’, in the specific way that suggested better was incoming.

He pulled an herb from his spatial ring.

The ring had not been visible until this moment, which was the design — the Heavenly Demon’s storage ring was not an architectural ring but a dimensional one, invisible in standard light at any distance.

His hand produced the herb from somewhere that looked like it shouldn’t have had room for herbs, and the specific quality of what he produced drew attention.

The herb was — old. Very old. The Eye of Truth value on it was in the range of cultivation resources that tribes like this one would not see in a generation.

The specific warm resonance of it in the morning clearing air was like a temperature change, noticeable to anyone with a functioning cultivation base.

He turned it once in his fingers.

He held it out to Lira.

The eighteen-year-old’s amber eyes went from the herb to his face and back to the herb with the specific, very young quality of someone who had not yet developed a complete relationship with the concept of ’this is a gift with conditions’.

"For the correction you made in the third stance," he said. "The footwork adjustment. You did it in one repetition. That’s worth something."