Cultivation Nerd (xianxia)

Chapter 363 - Intellectual Bullying

Though I couldn’t explore the memories of how he became an Immortal and knew I wouldn’t be able to digest twenty thousand years of existence anyway, I was still curious about other things.Even if I died after this, I would have saved Song Song and satisfied my curiosity about many truths buried. That alone made it worth it.

After that, neither I nor the Blood Step Immortal bothered with pointless offers.

There was a surefire way for him to deal with me despite the loop. He had already complained about it and how my soul continued to re-imprint my memories, no matter how many times he crushed my mind. He knew the reason as well as I did. This was a mental space. My soul wasn’t truly here. He couldn’t destroy it unless he broke free, and to break free, he would have to defeat me in a mental battle.

He could attempt something else.

He could absorb my memories, then devour my soul as it tried to re-import those copied memories.

But that would leave a thorn embedded in his own soul.

If, one day, he encountered an Immortal capable of killing him permanently and chose to self-terminate and reincarnate instead, what if that thorn interfered? What if, in that infinitesimal moment, it delayed him by a fraction of a second?

That uncertainty mattered.

Whether I could truly do that or not was debatable. But by his own admission, my Foundation Technique was engraved into my soul. If he absorbed it, then he absorbed the technique as well.

All of it was theoretical.

The real question was whether he was willing to take the risk.

Even if everything went perfectly, we couldn’t kill him. At best, we could seal him. He wouldn’t lose, but would he gamble on never losing?

And who knew how many other traps I had prepared and then erased from my own memory, just in case I failed?

In the end, none of that mattered anymore. For all I knew, he possessed some absurd method that could overturn every contingency I’d built.

At that point, the only thing left was to enjoy what remained.

Since these might be my final moments, I decided to continue exploring his memories of his old world.

After the battlefield where he died, I swam through the metaphorical lake of his past, searching for the strongest turbulence. Memories that still affected him even now. I didn’t have time for everything. I needed the ones that mattered.

When I plunged into one of them, the world pulsed, and the memory unfolded.

We stood inside a humble house on the outskirts of an unfamiliar town. The technology was unmistakably medieval.

The man within the memory had dark hair and average features, but his ink-black eyes were haunted.

This was the Blood Step Immortal, before he was anything of the sort.

He sat alone in the living room, reading a book written in red ink.

Or blood.

Outside, the sun was gone.

An eclipse had swallowed the sky for over two decades now, and even he barely remembered a time when daylight had looked normal.

The eclipse was the mark of the world’s doom.

A sky that no longer forgave humanity.

But while the Blood Step Immortal was drowning in despair, realizing there was little chance of saving this world, the front door to his house opened.

A blonde woman stepped inside, smiling, holding a two-year-old girl in one arm and guiding another, four years old, by the hand.

The younger child had brownish-blonde hair, while the older girl was fully blonde, clearly taking after her mother.

The Blood Step Immortal looked up from his book, and the haunted look in his eyes receded as he met his wife’s gaze.

Before either adult could speak, the four-year-old let go of her mother’s hand and charged forward at full speed, wrapping her arms around his leg.

“Pops!” she cried, squeezing him tightly.

“My parents were killed by blood mages when I was young,” the Blood Step Immortal said beside me, watching the memory unfold with cold eyes. “When my two girls were born, I promised I would eradicate blood mages across the world… and that I would always return to them. No matter what.”

His voice faltered.

“I…” His eyes hollowed.

“For twenty thousand years?” I asked. “No matter how strangely time flows between worlds, they’re dead by now.”

I didn’t bother being tactful.

“Right. Twenty thousand years,” he murmured. “They passed so painfully slowly… Irila. Irina. I’m sorry…”

Though his words were flat, there was unmistakable softness in his eyes as he looked at the two girls.

How?

How could he look at his daughters like that and then treat Song Song and Song Sia like disposable toys, subjecting them to endless cruelty?

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As if sensing my thoughts, he turned toward me.

“I do it the same way you kill enemies more easily when you believe they deserve it,” he said. “And the same way you continue defending a mass murderer like Song Song.”

“People are complicated,” he continued calmly. “Even after twenty millennia, that has never stopped being true.”

He sighed and returned his gaze to the memory, genuine affection visible in his eyes.

It looked wrong on him. Like it didn’t belong.

Was this manipulation? I couldn’t see the angle it was.

“There have been children in this life I was fond of,” he said quietly. “Ones I tried to be a good father to. But unlike you, who reincarnated as Liu Feng and fused with him, I was reborn here as a baby. This world was never mine. These children were born from bodies I merely occupied. They were never truly mine.”

He stared at the scene, lost in thought.

“Well,” I said, eyes still on the girls, “that’s one way to rationalize it.”

Then I smiled thinly.

“How do you think they ended up? Chewed apart by monsters? Torn to pieces by beasts? Starved to death? Or tortured by cultists?”

I didn’t stop there.

I wasn’t the kind of person who took the high road.

I wasn’t a benevolent saint.

This man had inflicted unimaginable cruelty on someone I cared about.

“Do you think they screamed their father’s name as they died?” I asked quietly. “Or maybe they called out to you as they starved, alone, in an apocalyptic world with nothing left.”

As for him trying to hurt me with words, there wasn’t much he could say that would.

“I was an Immortal for ten days,” he said. His eyes were still, like stagnant pond water, untouched by emotion. “Then I was killed.”

He paused.

“I was forced to use a Sky Grade Technique to seize my twin brother’s body to survive. That ensured my Immortal technique would forever remain incomplete. I had no blood-related descendants.”

He chuckled, but there was no joy in it.

“The previous Sect Leader has now been an Immortal longer than I ever was,” he continued. That same hollow smile lingered. “Even if I had lived a few years, you would have seen what it meant to be an Immortal. But ten days? Ten days of memories is easy to defend.”

“You will never see them,” he said. “Those memories.”

“Fuck,” I muttered.

He didn’t need to read my thoughts to know what that realization meant.

“I had barely ascended,” he went on calmly. “Still injured from the Heavenly Calamity when I was killed. And yet even then, the world unfolded before me. I learned secrets you will never know. Things you will never understand.”

That was enough.

I tore myself away from the memory.

I had no interest in listening to him romanticize ten days of divinity.

Instead, I plunged deeper into his memories, my thoughts racing around what he had just revealed.

He had never taken over a descendant.

Not truly.

He hadn’t had children when he ascended, because he believed he would return to his original world once he became an Immortal.

Return.

Since our minds were now entangled, our thoughts bled together freely. Outside interference had evened the playing field just enough to make resistance pointless. He had already read my mind. Defense no longer mattered.

So I read his.

And despite seeing the world through his eyes, I still couldn’t understand him.

Why would he want to return to an apocalyptic world?

Yes, he had left behind a wife. Daughters. But did he truly not see what he had become? He was no better than the cultists who had destroyed that world, arguably worse.

At least the cultists had madness to hide behind. They were fanatics. Delusional. The Blood Step Immortal was none of those things.

He was terrifyingly logical. He could empathize. He understood suffering. He comprehended the consequences.

And yet–

“Now my technique can only transfer my consciousness through bodies born of my bloodline,” the Blood Step Immortal said as he lingered beside me while I sifted through his memories. He casually used his mental energy to seal several of them, clearly just to irritate me. “And the closer the body is to the one I previously inhabited, the more power I can inherit from it.”

“Once someone becomes an Immortal even once, replicating that feat is next to impossible, even more than usual,” he continued. “I can only transfer my consciousness. My Immortal technique is truly a weak one. It was meant to be so much more than this… if only I had true blood descendants in this world.”

“But that was the technique you wanted, wasn’t it?” I said. “One that could find those related to you by blood.”

His death shortly after becoming an Immortal hadn’t been a coincidence. Neither was his refusal to have children in this world. It had all been intentional.

Even with the memories of that event locked away, the truth was obvious.

He had wanted to use his Immortal technique to reunite with his descendants from another world.

After all, Immortal techniques were absolute.

But that realization carried another implication. Either Immortal techniques had limits… or his daughters were already dead, leaving nothing to reunite with.

“Your Immortal technique was meant to be a power-stacking one, wasn’t it?” I said. “By taking over your descendants, you would inherit endless Core Techniques and talents. But it never worked out.”

“Yes,” he replied. “And the heavens and fate likely had a hand in that.”

From that answer alone, I could tell he could no longer read my thoughts. There was no reason to lie at this stage.

Which meant things outside weren’t going well for him. His mental power had weakened significantly.

“Really?” I said. “I thought the heavens didn’t possess intelligence or consciousness to scheme like that.”

“Perhaps,” he replied. “But that assumes foolish Immortals don’t try to interfere, working with fate, attempting to bend the heavens to their will. Those who used such methods against me eventually paid the price by trying to play with forces they had no actual control over.”

I nodded, continuing to sift through his memories in search of anything worthwhile. By now, it was clear that aside from protecting a handful of memories, he was no longer resisting. He was likely preparing for one final struggle.

Whether he succeeded or not hardly mattered. The gap between us remained vast. I wasn’t going to waste effort building defenses now.

Besides, his stories were… interesting.

Despite everything, we were being oddly honest with each other.

“Immortals come in all shapes, sizes, and personalities,” he said as his form blurred and melted into the background, shifting from my right side to my left like a shadow. “But almost all of them share one trait: they despise restraint. They love bending the rules of the world.”

“There was an Immortal who collected hair,” he continued calmly. “He slaughtered entire sects just to obtain a single strand. And then there was the Sharp Triangle Immortal, who wiped out a great sect back when the continents were still whole, all because he saw a group of outer disciples of said sect bullying a beggar.”

I nodded absently, still combing through his memories. Most of what remained were fragments from his childhood or moments with his wife, things that no longer held much interest.

“Take this as a warning,” he said at last. “Be careful when reading other people’s memories.”

“They can change you.”

His voice faded, growing distant, like someone speaking from the far end of a long corridor.