The Undying Immortal System

Chapter 465 – Life 119, Age 27, Martial Grandmaster 5

Compared to how we had developed body cultivation techniques back on the Nine Rivers Continent, Blackblade Hall’s experiments were both crude and needlessly cruel. That said, while the techniques ShouLi and I had developed were far more complex and complete than whatever the Hall was using, I did still have a few questions about what exactly they had done.

Therefore, while our army executed an orderly retreat, I moved through the pile of dismembered remains in search of survivors. Whenever I found someone who was still clinging to life, I pulled them into a secluded cavern on the Plane of Earth and sealed them away for further study.

After securing seven valuable specimens, I rejoined our army as it fled down the mountain, taking up a position at the rear to screen for any further attacks.

In the end, this precaution proved unnecessary. Blackblade Hall didn’t launch a second strike, suggesting that they were as eager to analyze the recent battle as we were.

When we got back behind our formations at the bottom of the mountain, our Masters began arranging tents and setting up training yards, transforming the place from an emergency fallback position to a proper, long-term encampment. Meanwhile, I pulled the elders into our cabin on the Plane of Woody Earth.

Kan and JiuLi still hadn’t regained their memories of their past lives, and neither YuLong nor Meng LuYao had ever spent much time researching body cultivation. So, I needed to cover the basics so everyone would know what we were up against.

“These are body cultivators,” I said, causing both a ‘reanimated corpse’ and an ‘abomination’ to appear in the middle of the room with us. “Despite how they appear, these are both living humans. The deformities on the one that looks like a corpse are what happens when you cultivate unfiltered wu. As for the other, I can only assume that it is a failed attempt at creating wu filters by grafting on beast parts.”

Looking down at the two wretched bodies, I let out a resigned sigh. “If this is the extent of what the Hall’s been able to accomplish, then we don’t have anything to worry about. However, they wouldn’t have been able to get even this far without a working cultivation technique. And, as far as I can tell, the technique they’re using is a modified version of the Rank 4 technique that we developed back on the Nine Rivers Continent.”

“How is that possible?” asked YuLong, frowning. “How do they have your technique? And how did they cultivate a Rank 4 technique before even breaking through to Rank 1?”

I gave him a wry smile. “The Earthly Dao. Each time we create a new technique, it’s absorbed by ‘the Dao.’ The Earthly Dao can then hand it out as a blessing. Altering the order the techniques are cultivated in isn’t too complicated, so it’s likely something the Earthly Dao can change as it pleases. In any case, if Emperor Li’s involvement wasn’t enough, this proves the Earthly Dao is behind this invasion.”

“Is this going to be a problem?” asked Meng LuYao, cutting to the heart of the issue. “How should we respond?”

“Not at this level. Rank 1 body cultivation isn’t very valuable. Cultivated bones, skin, and tendons aren’t enough to stop our weapons. Cultivated muscles might be, but as you saw, using enhanced muscles without first enhancing the rest of one’s body is a recipe for disaster.”

I looked between Kan and YuLong. “The two of you need to teach our recruits how to deal with this like we did with the last batch when we were in the Shattered Blades Realm. We don’t have much time left, but a couple of weeks of training should be enough to break a few bad habits.”

I paused, thinking about what the future might bring. “Rank 4 is where things will start getting dangerous. We shouldn’t have to deal with that here, but if the Li Clan’s invasion has Rank 4 body cultivators, they’ll be able to use the full power of their enhanced muscles without worry. If they reach Rank 5 and add in an enhanced nervous system, we’ll likely need body cultivators of our own to defeat them.”

“Do you think that’s possible?” asked JiuLi.

“I’m certain of it. The Earthly Dao has access to all the same techniques we do. It can hand out everything up to Rank 7, and if it hasn’t already done so, then it’s only a matter of time.”

For a moment, silence gripped the room, as we each retreated into our own thoughts.

“That’s where these guys come in,” I said, motioning to the Hall’s experiments. “They give us a plausible explanation for how we learned body cultivation. A few broken bodies aren’t much, but combined with the fact that everyone believes my ‘library’ came from the Li Clan, they should be enough.”

I looked around at my elders, my tone becoming more confident. “Importantly, it looks like the Hall hasn’t yet figured out the trick of using spirit fires to act as makeshift wu filters. Hopefully, this means that no one else has either. After we’re done here, we need to activate our tokens for the Howling Gorge Realm. There were a few wu-producing fire seeds in the Earth section of the Heroes Treasury. We need to grab them before the Saint figures out how valuable they are.”

YuLong cleared his throat, pulling the conversation back onto the mountain in front of us. “For now, let’s just focus on dealing with the Hall. They have body cultivators. What’s the plan for fighting back?”

With our Rank 2 and 3 weapons, fighting body cultivators who had enhanced their skin and bones wouldn’t be any different than fighting anyone else. These enhancements might provide certain defensive advantages, but they were of little value against refined weaponry.

Fighting those that had enhanced their muscles was a different story. As our disciples had already learned, if cultivators with enhanced muscles were willing to sacrifice themselves, they could launch powerful attacks that were difficult to defend against. If those corpse-like cultivators had been carrying proper weapons, their strikes would have been deadly instead of just painful.

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So, after leaving our impromptu meeting, Kan and YuLong focused all their efforts on training our people how to deal with such troublesome opponents.

Over the following two weeks, they ran our people through countless sparring sessions and did their best to instill our disciples with new habits. Most people’s qi vision wasn’t developed enough to determine whether or not an opponent had enhanced muscles, so they needed to act as if everyone had enhanced muscles. When sparring, if they blocked an attack directly, they lost. Attacks could only be dodged or deflected.

Since we couldn’t simulate the power or speed of muscle-enhanced cultivators, the value of these sparring matches was somewhat limited, but with what little time we had to work with, it was the best we could do. The training that Meng LuYao provided, meanwhile, was both simpler and far more effective.

She constructed illusions.

Not gentle, elegant illusions, but illusions of the ugliest shapes her mind could produce. The corpses and abominations that we had faced were only the starting points. She forced our people to fight against bloated, maggot-ridden husks, stitched-together brutes with three heads and six arms, and massive insects that were made from slime-covered shadows.

With only two weeks to prepare, Meng LuYao didn’t have enough time to make this an accurate combat simulation, but that wasn’t the point. She just needed to make sure that our people didn’t freeze up when faced with monsters that they had never seen before.

While everyone else was training, I entered seclusion to study our captives.

My initial goal was to see if there was anything I could learn about wu filters from the Hall’s experiments with grafted body parts. I was also interested in seeing if we could use such grafts as qi filters, allowing us to become horn or claw cultivators.

It didn’t take long to abandon this idea.

Whoever had performed these grafts had been an extraordinarily skilled surgeon, if ‘surgeon’ was even the right word for it. Somehow, they had connected the bones, muscles, and nerves so cleanly that the abominations could use their grafted limbs as naturally as the ones they were born with. However, this only applied to the physical body, not the energy body.

The surgeon had tried to align the creature’s acupoints. I could see where they warped its energy body to force certain connections, likely with the help of some unknown blessing. However, the placement of human and beast meridians were simply too different. Forcefully connecting a human’s energy body to a beast’s physical body had created ugly gaps and seams, allowing toxins and impurities to pour through even when the creature was unconscious.

With the proper knowledge and blessings, grafting body parts like this might be possible, but even if it were, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the effort.

Something else that bothered me was how these people behaved.

When they spilled out of the mountain tunnels, they attacked without hesitation or fear. However, the moment I pulled them away from the fighting, they instantly calmed down and started cultivating. Most were missing limbs and were covered in bloody wounds, but they didn’t act like they were in any pain. They just lay where I put them and cultivated.

My world didn’t have any qi or wu that matched the energy that was already in their bodies, but again, they didn’t seem to care. They just drew in whatever energy they could, further corrupting their foundations.

This couldn’t be the result of cultivation madness. Most of these people no longer had a real cultivation base, and their behavior was strange even by a madman’s standards. They were acting like automatons, carrying out preset instructions.

Wanting to probe deeper, I went to my mental library and grabbed a technique that I had always avoided: the Soul Scrying Technique, which allowed me to use my soul to study the soul of another.

I had once considered using this technique on Kan and JiuLi to learn what reincarnation had done to them. Unfortunately, like all soul techniques, it came with severe drawbacks. If my soul was weaker than my target’s, the technique would leave me exposed to a counterattack. If my soul was stronger, however, using the technique could overwhelm my target and tear their soul apart.

Since there was little chance that these test subjects had overly powerful souls, I didn’t need to worry about a counterattack. And since I didn’t care overly much about their continued health, I didn’t need to worry about causing damage. So, I activated the scrying technique and filtered the impressions I received through my soul visualization technique.

The moment my perception sank into the first captive’s soul, I felt nauseous. The corruption of the man’s soul was even worse than the corruption of his body.

Whoever had been experimenting on these people had injected poison qi directly into their souls. My visualization technique should have displayed the man’s soul as a field of flowers. Instead, all I saw was a festering swamp. The soil had turned to sludge, and the few plants that remained were brittle stalks with blooms that looked more like sores than petals.

Worse, the decay wasn’t uniform. Whole patches of the landscape were simply missing, carved out into clean-edged hollows. The remaining ground sagged inward toward these voids, as if the spirit was trying—and failing—to heal them.

After several long hours of study, I increased the pressure of my scrying technique and destroyed the man’s soul in its entirety. He would be back for the next time loop, and he might end up suffering the same fate again, but for the rest of this one, he would be able to rest in peace.

Returning my senses to my own body, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to calm myself.

I had once been warned that the followers of the Devil Saint were skilled in soul techniques, and what I had just seen made it clear that at least one such person resided in Blackblade Hall. The only injuries that might truly be able to kill me were injuries to my soul. So, was pushing forward with this assault really a good idea? Wouldn’t it be safer just to to just run away?

Maybe, but I would almost certainly have to confront the followers of the Devil Saint at some point, and while Blackblade Hall was affiliated with the Devil Saint, there was no way he would send his best and brightest to some remote corner of the Heroes Domain. I needed to use this opportunity to learn more about what I was really up against.

That said, I needed to play this smart. If there was even a hint that my soul was in real danger, I needed to immediately retreat back through time. If I did that, I wouldn’t have a chance to grab anyone else. Therefore, I needed to be prepared.

“System, I should still have a reset point from before we entered the Shattered Blades Realm. Move it forward to this point in time.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 1 credit. 57,953 credits remaining.

With this done, I still had more than a week and a half before we launched our final assault. So, I accessed my library and brushed up on all of the soul techniques that I had been neglecting over the years.