Cultivation Nerd-Chapter 316 - Silent Wind Death Sutra

Wu Yan flew toward us, her long black hair streaming behind her like a banner as she wobbled on her flying sword.

Clinging to her was Fu Yating, rigid and pale, gripping Wu Yan’s waist like her life depended on it. Her expression was pure instant regret. The sword trembled beneath them, not in a majestic, Qi-fueled show of power, but with the unsteady rhythm of someone still new to this form of airborne travel. Wu Yan’s stance was tense, eyes narrowed, lips pressed thin as she fought to maintain control.

Usually, Wu Yan would sprout those bat-like wings of hers and fly under her own power; that was what she trained for. But with a passenger, that wasn’t an option.

When they landed, Fu Yating practically leapt off the sword, looked at me, and exhaled in relief.

“Next time, I’d rather walk here than fly,” she said, her voice shaky.

“I’ll personally take you back after this meal,” I reassured her, trying to hide the laugh pushing at my throat.

It was… cute seeing her like this.

Fu Yating seemed even more relieved, then turned to Song Song, who was watching the scene with an amused glint in her eyes.

“Thank you for welcoming us, Lady Song,” Fu Yating said, fixing her expression and posture, and bowing politely in a display of tradition that no one here cared about.

Wu Yan, seeing this, gave a mumbled greeting of her own.

“Don’t worry about the small stuff,” Song Song said with a wave. “Come in and let me show you some of the cool designs I asked for in the house.”

Then she looked at me and frowned. “Some people judge my taste. But they don’t have a single bone in their body that understands what a good house looks like.”

How exactly was a bone supposed to know what a house looked like? Pretty sure that wasn’t a saying here… or anywhere I’d been.

I shrugged and followed the girls, choosing not to point it out, even though Wu Yan and Fu Yating had clearly noticed too.

The inside of Song Song’s immaculate white mansion gleamed like polished marble, almost sacred in its spotless quintessence. I wouldn’t have pegged her as someone who cared about order, but not a speck of dust was in sight.

The real surprise wasn’t the floors or the carved pillars; it was the furniture. A pink bed dominated the main bedroom, flanked by matching rosy chairs, pillows, and a fluffy rug that looked straight out of a teenager’s dream room.

The clash between austere luxury and playful color was… uniquely Song Song. Yeah, that’s the polite way of putting it.

In the dining room, chandeliers shaped like blooming pink diamonds cast a rosy glow throughout the space. An enormous table, long enough for fifty, stood at the center, painted the same vibrant pink as the chairs around it.

The place looked like a candy shop and a noble’s banquet hall had been smashed together. Lavish, absurd, and unapologetically Song Song.

“This is not dyed wood either,” she said, her voice echoing in the empty room. “There are trees in certain forests that grow pink. I had someone fetch them for me.”

I sat at one end of the table, Song Song at the other, with Wu Yan and Fu Yating in the middle, clearly trying to avoid showing favoritism. Wu Yan followed my dear fiancée’s lead, and she was the one making sure not to offend.

Good, while Song Song acted rather casually with me, and I could get away with doing almost anything under her watch. It gave the illusion that Wu Yan and Fu Yating might be able to do the same.

I ignored the politics and turned to Wu Yan.

“Are you close to another breakthrough?” I asked, noting the strange patterns in her Qi.

“Yes,” she said. “But I’ve had to hold myself back. I wasn’t ready to add a new technique yet, though I have a rough idea of what I want.”

I nodded, though part of my mind wandered to when she’d first used her Foundation technique. She’d imitated me perfectly in appearance, Qi signature, everything. The disguise was flawless, except she started picking up my personality traits along the way.

Thankfully, that seemed to have been a temporary issue.

Or not a drawback at all. It could be a feature, and the longer Wu Yan stayed in my form, the more she inherited.

One day, she might even start inheriting my memories if she had stayed in my form longer.

We were careful now. Very careful.

Even so, I buried the worry gnawing at the back of my mind.

“What is the idea of your new technique?” Song Song asked.

“I took inspiration from you,” Wu Yan said to Song Song. “The new technique that you're practicing. I want something that would allow me to change my soul, its shape, and even control it too.”

My heart immediately dropped, and despite trying to control my expression, my brows furrowed.

“Remember the last time you tried something like that?” I asked her. “Changing your soul might be much more permanent, and you might be unable to return to your previous state.”

Wu Yan turned toward me, her face calm, and nodded. “One of the basics you taught me was that I should lean on my element, and not shy away from it.”

I winced at her bringing that up. It was true, and perhaps in her case even more so. But the illogical part of me just didn’t want her to get hurt.

Despite everything, in the back of my mind, Wu Yan was still that defenseless little girl I found in a windmill tower.

As far as I could tell, Wu Yan had complete control over her body thanks to her element and none of the usual drawbacks an Extreme Physique would bring. By all accounts, the experiment was a success.

However, this “experiment” was difficult to remain impartial about.

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“I understand. Just… be careful,” I told Wu Yan, my voice sterner than I intended.

I wanted her to walk her own road. But part of me still wanted to shield her from the world and everything in it that could harm her.

Perhaps the right thing to do was to let go of those instincts and trust her not to endanger herself needlessly.

It was difficult. Nobody’s judgment was perfect, and even the best decisions could crumble under pure bad luck.

“I haven’t quite mastered that technique myself,” Song Song said, sounding utterly unbothered by the risks. “But I could still show it to you.”

Then she turned toward me. Usually, she could read me like a book. But lost in her own excitement, she asked outright:

“How about we try crashing our techniques against each other?”

By “techniques,” she meant her soul attack and my space technique.

I stared at her, studying that pretty face ill-suited for such reckless ideas. How did her mind even work? Did she just think the idea sounded cool?

She was basically suggesting we pit an unstoppable, unavoidable physical attack against a soul strike that couldn’t be blocked.

“If we were to do that, how would either of us not get hurt in both the physical and metaphysical sense?” I asked.

Song Song shrugged and turned back to Wu Yan.

“I’m going to show you how my technique works after the meal,” she said.

Wu Yan nodded, clearly a bit too trusting.

“Be careful with Wu Yan,” I reminded her.

Fu Yating coughed, suppressing laughter that almost spilled out. She clearly knew what I was worried about and found our dynamic entertaining.

Well, at least someone was having fun.

I was going to stick around, just to make sure Song Song didn’t pull something outrageous.

I trusted Song Song with everything, from my life to the kind of treasure that could turn someone into a god. I’d bet ninety-nine percent she wouldn’t use it.

I trusted her in everything, except when it came to safety measures.

That was why I made sure to remind her.

Song Song smiled and nodded, but her eyes told me she was just humoring me so she could get back to doing whatever she wanted.

“I’m also coming along to see,” I said.

“Of course. You could even give me pointers too. You’ve always had a knack for techniques, and I’m not ashamed to admit you’re better than I am at that,” Song Song said.

I nodded at her blatant compliments, knowing she was only buttering me up to get me off her back.

“When is the food going to come?” I asked, glancing around. There wasn’t a single servant or living being in this house as far as I could sense.

“It will be here soon, don’t worry,” Song Song said with a smile. “It likely won’t be as tasty as Fu Yating’s cooking, but it will definitely be more exotic. I had a hard time getting my hands on it.”

That was not good news. Because “hard to get” from Song Song could mean she searched far and wide… or that she outright stole it. She hadn't escaped my sensory range in recent times, meaning she never went outside the sect, so there was a higher chance that she stole it from somebody.

“I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that,” I said, raising a brow.

My Qi sense stretched across the sect’s mountain. Nobody was approaching. Sure, a Core Formation expert could hide from me, but they weren’t about to act as waiters.

Song Song smirked, and I immediately understood.

“Oh, so the food is already here?” I asked.

“Wait, is she going to eat one of us?” Wu Yan asked calmly.

…Okay, that was a terrifyingly accurate assumption when it came to Song Song. The fact that Wu Yan said it so innocently and without worry was definitely something we needed to work on.

She might be normalising how weird people like Song Song were after spending so much time around her.

“Behold, the great feast,” Song Song declared, waving her hand.

From her storage ring emerged a lion’s paw the size of a horse. It was unskinned, covered in thick golden fur, its claws gleaming like polished obsidian.

The limb landed on the table with a dull thud. Despite being severed, it radiated a potent Qi that thickened the air, a lingering authority of the beast that once ruled its domain. Even dead, it pressed faintly against my cultivation base, my body instinctively recognizing the danger it had carried in life.

“This is something I found while rummaging through my clan’s treasury for a Sky Grade technique,” Song Song said proudly. “A body part of a Nascent Soul beast.”

I had already guessed as much, though the vitality still clinging to it was unnerving.

“How are we supposed to eat this raw?” I asked.

Even stripped of its life, the flesh of a Nascent Soul beast was leagues beyond what our teeth could bite. The gulf between Core Formation and Nascent Soul was astronomical.

“I tried cooking it over fire, but it didn’t work,” Song Song shrugged.

I sighed, stood, and pressed my palm against the paw. It resisted the suction of my storage ring, but once I wrapped it in Qi, it slid inside.

Turning to the others, I said, “Even if we could cut it, that doesn’t mean we can chew it.”

Song Song narrowed her eyes. “You think you’re slick, don’t you? Just pocketing part of a Nascent Soul beast like it’s nothing.”

“I’ve got beef strips and ration bars. If we’re hungry, we’ll eat those,” I replied, not waiting for protest. I dumped a quarter of my stores onto the table, divided the portions with Qi, and returned to my seat.

She would let me keep the beast part. Song Song was cool like that, but her narrowed eyes said clearly: I know what you’re doing.

I didn’t care. The prospect of studying a Nascent Soul beast’s body in my not-so-secret laboratory was too enticing.

Fu Yating sampled the jerky, chewed, grimaced, then looked at Song Song.

“Do you have any ingredients I could use to make a proper meal?”

“I don’t really have a pantry,” Song Song admitted.

All this mansion, and no pantry. Judging from Fu Yating’s expression, she thought the same.

After the bland but courteous meal, we stepped outside into the yard. Thanks to the spring array I’d erected, the grounds weren’t buried in snow.

Still, the mansion looked ugly, no matter how much greenery surrounded it.

Song Song crouched. “I’ll show you the technique, but keep your distance. It’s lethal.”

“Yet you wanted to test it on me?” I asked.

“Because I was confident you’d survive,” she said without hesitation.

Gods help me, I never let myself relax around her when it came to safety. Reckless as ever, she trusted far too much in my durability.

We retreated near the entrance, about a hundred feet from her position at the array’s edge.

Then her presence vanished. She remained visible, but my mind struggled to comprehend her existence. A strange, unsettling sensation.

She traced a horizontal line in the air with one finger.

Nothing happened. No sound, no ripple of Qi.

Then a chill slithered down my spine, sharp as icy needles. My instincts roared. I lunged back, dragging Wu Yan and Fu Yating with me, covering a hundred feet in a breath. We landed outside the array, snow crunching underfoot, my chest tight from the invisible force that had nearly pierced me.

My core ached, pricked by phantom blades of ice. Even at this distance, the technique’s remnants lingered.

Wu Yan and Fu Yating were pale, sweat beading on their brows. They felt it too.

Song Song smiled. “Silent Wind Death Sutra. An assassination technique. I haven’t mastered it, which is why everyone still feels that instinctive fear. But I’ve finally reached the stage where I can mute my soul and presence.”

That was… alarming.

Before I could speak, Wu Yan dropped cross-legged into the snow, her Qi spiking sharply.

She was breaking through. Right now.