Unintended Cultivator-Chapter 57Book 10: : Why Me?

Sen was sprawled on the ground with his arms outstretched to either side as he stared up into the infinite nothingness above. He found that less exasperating than looking at the three younger versions of himself that did nothing but glare at him in anger and disappointment. Not that he hadn’t tried to escape their judgmental gazes. At first, he had simply tried to walk away from them. He never saw them move, but they always managed to be the exact same distance away. Running had produced similar results.

Next, he had sought to escape this unsettling place. While it looked like he was surrounded by endless darkness, he didn’t know that was the case. He might be able to escape by simply flying high enough to find a surface he could smash. His countless attempts to manipulate qi to fly, form a platform, and, eventually, to do anything at all had proven futile. Not only could he not manipulate qi in this place. He couldn’t even feel it inside of him. It wasn’t that he felt cut off from qi itself or that he’d been returned to some frail mortal state. He still felt like he’d gone through all his advancements. He was certain that qi permeated this entire place. He just couldn’t get at it.

He had tried striking out at the ground with his fists and feet. He hadn’t hurt himself in the attempt, but he’d made no discernible damage to the ground either. If this was some kind of prison, he had to admit that it was a very effective one. He just didn’t think that was the case. What kind of prison could manufacture such convincing younger versions of him? Nor did he think this was a dream. It was all more than strange enough to be one, but it lacked the haziness and randomness he’d come to associate with dreams. Those nightly visions were never this coherent. Not in his experience anyway. If it was reality, though, it was a reality he had never encountered before.

All of that had left with just one option. Talking with the alternate versions of himself. That had proven less than helpful.

“How do I leave this place?” he demanded.

The other three looked at him with unchanging expressions and repeated their earlier words.

“You look like a noble.”

Updated from freewёbnoνel.com.

“You’re soaked in blood.”

“You have no balance.”

It was his turn to glare. Not that it had any visible effect on the other Sens.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“You look like a noble.”

“You’re soaked in blood.”

“You have no balance.”

Sen had tried a handful of other questions with identical responses. He’d lost his temper then and tried to grab one of them. His hand closed on empty air. The other three appeared to be the same distance away that they had always been. He knew that they hadn’t moved. He’d been looking right at them. But they had evaded him all the same. That was when he decided that he might as well stretch out on the ground. It was pretty clear that he wasn’t going anywhere. No need to stand forever. He idly wondered if he’d killed himself with that last stunt and landed in one of the thousand hells. No, he thought. If I’d died, I wouldn’t remember everything. I’d have had to drink that forgetting soup.

If he wasn’t dead, yet, and he wasn’t in the world he knew, it begged the question. What was this place? He had the intuition that he should know what was going on, but it continued to elude him.

“Something must have happened right at the end,” he muttered aloud. “Something I don’t remember.”

“You look—”

“I know. I know. I look like a noble. Thanks for the reminder!” shouted Sen.

“Why?” demanded the youngest-looking him.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Sen sat bolt upright, his gaze boring into the ragged-looking youth. Something had changed. He just didn’t know what. His immediate impulse was to try to wrangle something different out of the other ones, but he stopped himself. This change was important. He knew that much. He also knew that he needed to understand what had happened before he came here. While it pained him to do it, he let himself drop back to the ground and resumed his observation of the darkness above. He forced him to look back at those last terrible minutes of consciousness, even if most of his mind wanted to shy back from all the pain that had come in those moments.

He remembered flying over the palace. He’d positioned himself. He’d activated the formation. There had been that all-consuming light. Sen forced himself to focus on that moment. Something had gone wrong there. He juggled the memory back and forth, trying to shake loose anything new from it. It took long enough to recognize the problem that Sen was embarrassed that he hadn’t seen it sooner. Lightning was hellishly bright, but not that bright. Not to his enhanced eyes. Still, it had been blinding. For that to be the case, there had been too much of it. Far too much of it.

He’d done his best to set up the formation to draw down a relatively modest amount of lightning compared to all of the lightning those clouds had been capable of producing. Once it had come rushing down, though… With an obvious realization and some basic information in hand, pieces of that jumbled mass of memory started to arrange themselves into something he could understand. He couldn’t let all of that lightning run wild in the city. He’d intended for the formation to direct that lightning to him, but all of the smaller formations had been seared away. He'd grabbed it and dragged it to him.

Sen sat up again on the ground. He’d been mistaken. That moment was when it all went wrong. He’d grabbed the lightning, but some of it had been imbued with the divine qi in the spikes on the palace wall. Or the heavens added a bit of their own before I grabbed it, he thought with mounting anger. While he’d managed to keep most of the normal lightning contained in a sphere around him, the lightning with the divine qi in it had slammed into him. Three times. More importantly, it had primarily assaulted his core. The way it was supposed to do during a tribulation for the ascent into the nascent soul realm. He’d been given a tribulation before he’d advanced.

“They cracked open my core,” he whispered in horror as he reached for the spot below his navel.

He hadn’t been ready. He had known he wasn’t ready. It was why he hadn’t pursued advancement. Fu Ruolan had warned him that the transition into the nascent soul stage required certain kinds of wisdom and self-knowledge. Trying to advance before that meant certain failure. It almost always meant death. He remembered the pain now. He was no stranger to pain. He had endured things that no living being ever should. He clawed his way through those trials of agony over and over again. Clinging to life. Clinging to sanity. Refusing to give in.

But that pain had been impossible. Vast beyond reason. The kind of pain that shreds minds and souls indiscriminately. It had tried to unmake everything he was. There were blank spots in his memories there. He suspected that the pain had simply erased them entirely. Somehow, he had clung to one last, desperate intention. He had converted the rest of that lightning into a version of Heavens’ Rebuke and sent it crashing down on the spirit beasts’ formation. He honestly had no idea how he’d managed it. He knew his own limitations better than anyone else. He shouldn’t have been able to accomplish that.

Perhaps the heavens had intervened a second time, knowing that if he lost control of that technique at that moment, the spirit beasts would have nothing left to stay for. The capital and everyone inside of it would have been destroyed by his hand. He supposed he would never know, or at least he wouldn’t know until much later. Certainly not before his ascension. If he ascended. If he survived whatever was happening to him right then and there. His core had been cracked. The nascent soul that had been developing inside of it was exposed. This wasn’t how things were meant to happen. That soul should have merged with him, except he was absolutely certain that had not happened.

Still, he also wasn’t dead. Was he trapped somewhere in between? Tribulations and advancements always went hand in hand. If he’d gotten the tribulation and survived, then he should have become a nascent soul cultivator. But I wasn’t ready, he thought with growing apprehension. He turned his gaze to look at the younger versions of himself who continued their ceaseless vigil.

“Self-knowledge,” he said aloud. “That’s what you are. The self-knowledge I didn’t attain that I need.”

“Why?” repeated the youngest version of him.

“Why, indeed?” said Sen. “And why am I being forced to do this backwards?”

Except, he knew the answer to that question. He’d taken too long. The heavens had gotten tired of waiting for him to advance. So, this was their answer. His cultivation had been ready. His core had been ready, apparently. His body had been able to endure the tribulation. Almost everything had been in place for that next step. The problem was that he couldn’t attain the next cultivation stage until he learned what he had to learn. Until he did, he had the feeling he was never going to leave this place.

Rubbing his face with his hands, Sen asked, “Why me?”