Cultivation Nerd-Chapter 353: Crazy in Hiding

Autumn crept in quietly, painting the sect’s courtyards in shades of amber and rust. The sharp chill in the mornings carried the scent of fallen leaves, and even the wind seemed calmer as if the world itself were taking a breath after months of unrest. The border skirmishes between sects had eased, though not ended; the lull felt less like peace and more like exhaustion.

Cai Hu, my teacher, had once attempted to maintain a sect-wide spring array throughout the other seasons, but it drained too many resources. In the end, they had to settle for ordinary weather. Of course, I kept my own spring arrays around my house and the library.

Even so, things had been a bit lonely lately.

I hadn’t seen Song Song in nearly two months, not since she entered secluded cultivation. The silence she left behind was strange. Normally, she’d appear at the worst possible moment, smirking, teasing, doing everything in her power to derail my peace. Her interruptions had always been a constant irritation… one I’d apparently grown used to.

Now, the quiet felt sterile. No sarcastic remarks, no sudden laughter, no chaos breaking through the hum of the library. I’d thought her presence was the problem, but without it… the stillness itself was almost annoying.

I pushed the thought aside and turned to something that always steadied me, research.

My attempts to grant semi-sentience to Qi constructs had failed for now, so I had shifted focus to studying beast bloodlines and how they shaped innate talents, and how they might be replicated or supplemented through arrays and alchemy. The results so far have been promising, except for some embarrassing aspects.

Leaving the front desk behind, I slipped into the shadowed aisles of the library. The faint scent of parchment and ink faded as I passed the deeper shelves. Polished floors gave way to rough stone when I reached a narrow stairwell hidden behind one of the bookcases. Torches along the wall flickered to life as I descended, their flames burning blue, tuned to recognize my Qi signature.

The deeper I went, the cooler the air became, tinged with the metallic scent of experiments long finished. At the base of the stairs stood a reinforced door etched with faintly glowing runes. I placed my palm against its center, feeling the weave of energy hum in response before the seals unraveled like a Rubik's Cube.

Behind it was my lab. Crystals pulsed softly from their sockets, scattering light across the walls, which were covered in diagrams and notes. Rows of instruments gleamed faintly under the glow of suspended arrays.

Every time I came here, the world above went away. Down here, I could work freely without thinking of anything else. It was beautiful.

At the center of the lab rested a massive lion’s claw, suspended within a tank of pale blue liquid; the vitality potions I’d acquired from the sect. Tubes fed in and out of it, drawing blood and injecting various reagents in precise, alternating intervals.

The claw alone was the size of a small carriage, the runes carved along its surface glowing faintly as they reacted to the mixture.

This was the same claw that Song Song had once tried to serve us for dinner, proudly announcing it was our surprise meal.

I’d learned a great deal from this claw since then, enough to theoretically design a method for Speedy’s breakthrough to Foundation Establishment.

The lion’s species was from a royal bloodline; the kinds of beasts where it wasn't strange for them to have a Nascent Soul Beast every thousand years or so. Its bloodline leaned heavily toward offense with overwhelming force, but its defense and agility were almost equally absurd. Even now, I hadn’t managed to scratch the claw’s surface on my own. Its bloodline was perfection in every sense.

By comparison, Speedy’s lineage was ordinary. A basic turtle bloodline with steady, durable, and long-lived, but lacking the potential to ever advance past Qi Gathering. Still, what turtles lacked in speed or strength, they compensated for with their lifespan. Given enough time, even the impossible became possible.

“Well, it’s not like his bloodline will really change,” I murmured under my breath, adjusting the formation lines around the containment tank. “But if I can graft a trace of monstrous vitality into him, it might be enough to push him through the barrier.”

That was all Speedy needed, momentum. Once he broke into Foundation Establishment, he’d gain full sentience, and his cultivation would accelerate naturally.

If I were being honest, though, I already suspected he had some form of awareness. The way he watched me work, the way he seemed to respond before I told him something, it was human-like. However, that could also be my own biases and a desire to humanize him, given how dear he was to me.

Thankfully, his defenses were strong enough that even if the process went awry, he wouldn’t suffer any permanent harm.

Ideally, I would’ve waited another year or two to perfect the method, but I no longer had that luxury. Time was not something I could count on.

Alchemy wasn’t my field, so I’d reached out to some… less conventional contacts, specialists whose interests aligned with mine. I’d invited them here today to collaborate on the medicine that would guide Speedy’s transformation.

My “secret” laboratory wasn’t as secret as I liked to pretend. The Core Elders all knew of its existence. They simply had the sense not to ask what I was doing in it.

I folded my hands behind my back and stared at the claw suspended in the blue liquid. The glass was spotless and perfectly reflective. For a moment, I caught my own reflection in its surface. My expression was blank, eyes flat, as though I were a stranger looking back at me.

At least I was getting better at hiding my worries. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

And yet… Song Song wasn’t the one weighing most on my mind.

She could handle herself; she always could.

No, the one I truly worried about was Wu Yan. She had been spending more and more time inside the Silver Road Mirror, vanishing for hours, sometimes days. It was becoming harder to explain her absence to anyone who asked… and harder still to ignore the feeling that the longer she stayed inside that artifact, the more it was changing her.

I felt a bit sorry for Wu Yan that she had to stay so isolated, hidden away from everyone else. But once she broke through to Core Formation, she wouldn’t need to conceal her abnormal progress anymore. When she reached Nascent Soul, she could easily kill anyone who even looked at her the wrong way if she wanted, and nobody could do anything about it.

She just had to make it that far. Once she did, even if something happened to me during the war or when the time came to deal with Song Song’s father, I could face it with some peace of mind.

Wu Yan wasn’t simply a disciple to me. She was something closer to a daughter and a child the world had cast aside and branded a monster. Saving her meant taking responsibility for her, for everything that came after.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Hopefully, one day, she wouldn’t need me anymore.

That, after all, was the unspoken goal of every parent: to raise someone who could survive without them. Even so, the instinct to shelter her was hard to suppress.

I sighed, pushing the thought away, just as a ripple of Qi brushed through the library above. Someone had entered the library.

A Core Elder, judging by the density of his presence. That would be the man I’d invited.

I sent out a brief Qi pulse to signal my location, then lowered the defensive measures around the stairwell before he forced his way through them. A faint hum followed as my Qi guided him toward the concealed corner entrance.

Moments later, footsteps echoed down the narrow stone steps. The torches flickered to life as his figure emerged from the gloom, a broad-shouldered man who looked more like a barbarian berserker than a cultivator. The blue flames painted his sharp features in shifting light, and the twin fang tattoos across his cheeks seemed to move with the shadows. His tightly braided hair was bound with thin strips of beast leather, not the silken cords favored by sect elites.

He looked nothing like a cultivator. He never had.

Rumor held that he came from the barbarian tribes north of the sect’s borders between the Blazing Sun and the Titanic Sword Sect. Despite his origins, he’d risen through the Blazing Sun Sect’s ranks with startling speed, though he never adopted the polish or mannerisms of the refined cultivator.

Muchen, Core Elder of the Blazing Sun Sect a seven... No, eight-star Core Formation now, a Level 6 Array Conjurer, and a Tier 6 Alchemist.

He studied the chamber, scratching his chin as his gaze landed on the massive claw suspended in the vitality fluid.

“Impressive place,” he said at last, his voice carrying the gravelly ease of a man unimpressed by most things. “Especially that cat paw. How did you get your hands on the body of a Nascent Soul beast? And a royal type, no less?”

“I have a couple of friends who decided to lend a helping hand,” I replied evenly.

“Then your friends must like you quite a bit.” He chuckled. “Song Clan women can be quite supportive, I guess. Though some of my friends who married into that family would say otherwise.”

He laughed under his breath. “One of them got his throat slit in his sleep. That clan’s all kinds of messed up.”

He had no idea how right he was about that.

“It took me almost ninety years to get something like this,” he said. “At least to reach a point where I could even get my hands on a Nascent Soul beast’s remains.”

Despite the way he downplayed his own position in the sect, Muchen was anything but ordinary. At present, he was probably the strongest person within our ranks, aside from Song Song’s father or my teacher, who could win under very specific conditions.

And that made him dangerous.

He didn’t seek power or authority. He wasn’t trying to climb the sect hierarchy, and in my experience, it was always the ones who didn’t crave leadership that proved most unpredictable. Song Song’s father, for example, never fought for power either yet he had his hand in every jar.

Even now, Muchen was clearly hiding his true cultivation. If I hadn’t been refining my sensory techniques recently, I never would’ve noticed. Eight-star Core Formation was no small feat. He was young too, and less than two centuries old, and already within striking distance of Nascent Soul.

I would say he had about a twenty percent chance of taking the next step; that was how impressive he was. Those chances could very well increase under the right circumstances.

“I’m honored that Senior thinks so highly of me,” I said, bowing slightly.

Muchen might’ve looked more like a bandit or some rogue mercenary than a scholar, but his strength was undeniable. Even Zun Gon, if he were still alive, might not have been his equal.

“Well,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back, “let’s get to why you called me here. I’ve got an offer for you too, but we’ll get to that later.”

“An offer?” I asked, my curiosity piqued but choosing not to press him. “Very well. The process I’ve been working on could be considered a rudimentary form of bloodline enhancement, essentially tricking the body into accepting a higher genetic structure temporarily.”

As I spoke, I began walking him through the theory, the framework of the arrays, and the sequence of Qi infusions designed to bypass natural bloodline resistance. I explained the projected effects on Speedy’s body, referencing other beasts on which I had tested weaker variations in small-scale experiments to measure rejection and adaptation rates.

Muchen listened in silence, his sharp eyes scanning the diagrams that flickered to life on the crystalline projectors as I spoke. When I finished, he nodded thoughtfully, glancing once more around the lab.

“Your research is impressive,” he admitted. “Even though we both studied Nascent Soul beasts, we clearly took different paths.”

“Oh? How so?” I asked, genuinely intrigued.

“I focused on the practical side,” he said. “Crafting arrays from their blood, forging pills from their remains. I did well enough with the arrays, which got me to Level Six as an Array Conjurer. But the alchemical side? Not much to show for it. Still, it seems like you went for a deeper understanding of the creatures themselves… and judging by this,” he gestured toward the suspended claw, “it worked out far better for you.”

I smiled faintly at that. “Perhaps. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky.”

He chuckled, low and amused. “Luck’s part of talent, Elder Feng. And if you keep walking this path, you’ll need both.”

What I was doing and what he was doing were two entirely different things.

He’d looked at a beast’s corpse and wondered how to turn it into pills and potions and how to distill it into something to increase his power.

I, on the other hand, had looked at that same corpse and wondered how to use it to help Speedy.

The difference was small but essential. My creation was poisonous to humans and useless to them. It wasn’t meant to strengthen people; it was designed for a single purpose, to push one creature past its natural limits.

That single shift in perspective had changed everything about the results we achieved. And from the way he spoke, it was clear he’d worked with an entire Nascent Soul beast corpse, while I had only a paw.

Still, I wasn’t naïve enough to think he was telling the whole truth. Men like Muchen always held their cards close. Maybe he was hiding his findings, perhaps not. But either way, it didn’t matter. Everyone had their secrets.

“So, can you still do it?” I asked.

“Of course.” He glanced over the notes spread across my table, eyes scanning the arrays and ingredient lists. “With research this thorough, you’ve done half the work for me. If I couldn’t brew this, I’d be a disgrace to my craft.”

He smiled faintly. “Still, it makes no sense to make something like this. It’d only help weaker beasts, ones without a proper bloodline. Humans would just end up with a toxic liver and mild to major poisoning, depending on cultivation.”

“This isn’t for me,” I said simply.

He studied me for a heartbeat longer, then gave a quiet laugh. There was something in his eyes that said he knew something I didn't.

“Huh. Your teacher was right, we’re really alike,” he said with a grin, as if letting me in on a private joke.

That was… not the answer I expected. But whatever Muchen meant by it, I let it pass.

If I lived long enough to face the consequences of what I was doing today, then it would mean I’d already won my bet with fate.

The lab settled into its usual rhythm, with the faint hiss of alchemical steam and slow drip of condensation sliding down the chamber walls. Between us, conversation came and went in quiet waves, only talking when we found something interesting to discuss.

I didn’t trust Muchen. But I couldn’t deny that I enjoyed this. Talking to someone who understood the craft, the obsession.

Then, without warning, everything changed.

The air trembled. A tidal wave of Qi swept through the sect, so dense and pure it bled through every barrier, pressing down on the world like the breath of a god. Even this deep underground, I felt it wash over me in a warm and violent wave. A sharp metallic scent followed.

Muchen’s head snapped toward the direction of the surge. His lips curved into a slow, knowing smile.

“That girl’s impressive as always,” he murmured.

The walls thrummed and the floor pulsed faintly beneath our feet.

Song Song had done it. She’d broken through to two-star Core Formation.

And every cultivator in the Blazing Sun Sect felt it.