Chapter 78
“My name is Li Daotian, a cultivator hidden in the mortal world. From a young age, I realized I was different. While other kids my age were still engrossed in cartoons, I was already crouching under the overpass near my home, blending in seamlessly with a group of fortune tellers, giving people readings without any sense of incongruity.”
“…Unfortunately, I always ended up being sent to the police station as a suspected kidnapped child, receiving ideological education to break away from feudal superstitions.”
“My parents blamed my grandfather for this. They always felt that this former fortune teller had a bad influence on me. They also constantly suspected that my mind was inherently abnormal.”
“But in fact, this had nothing to do with my grandfather.”
“Being out of place among ordinary people was something I was born with.”
“When I was too young, lacking common sense, I didn’t know why I felt so out of place with others. It wasn’t until I came across the concept of ‘immortals’ that I had an epiphany—”
“—Those immortals in legends who descended to the mortal world to experience hardships must be referring to me! Cultivating to become an immortal is my destiny! I, who am destined to ascend, am inherently different from mortals!”
“How foolish of me to have wasted ten years before this, living a boring life among mortals.”
“I was determined to make up for the wasted time with double effort. I began cultivation with 120% dedication, wholeheartedly striving for my destined immortality!”
“Regrettably, I couldn’t recall any cultivation techniques.”“It seemed this was an inevitable trial of my mortal experience. Before starting cultivation, I had to create a suitable technique for myself.”
“After spending two months using my library card to read all Taoist scriptures, my exasperated parents sent me to a mental hospital, not only confiscating my books but also depriving me of personal freedom.”
“…The path to immortality was indeed full of twists and turns. Had tribulations descended just as I set foot on the great path?”
“—Damn it, I won’t give up!”
“—Becoming an immortal is a task that goes against the natural order, and I’m prepared for it.”
“As long as I’m alive and can think, I can continue to organize the theories in my mind and create cultivation techniques. However, this tribulation had a significant impact on me. Inner demons took advantage of the situation, causing me to unknowingly stray from the right path in my mental confusion, all while believing I was walking the correct path of the great Dao.”
“During lunchtime, I ecstatically jumped onto a chair in the cafeteria and enthusiastically announced my cultivation system to everyone. Whether they were doctors or patients, I was happy to share my theories with everyone, hoping to gain more fellow cultivators.”
“—But I didn’t know that these were all errors that had strayed from the right path. The tribulation of inner demons was truly terrifying!”
“Fortunately, someone pointed out my mistakes on the spot.”
“—She was a forerunner walking on the correct great path. She became a spiritual mentor I would never forget in this lifetime.”
“—Although she didn’t acknowledge it.”
“She didn’t teach me any cultivation techniques, but she vividly described the scenes of the immortal realm before me: the diverse immortals and gods, the flowing spiritual qi, the extraordinary flowers and herbs that emitted wondrous light when nourished by spiritual qi… It was as if she had truly seen the legendary immortal realm with her own eyes. And I believed her.”
“—If I was an immortal who had descended to experience mortal tribulations, who said there couldn’t be a second one? This must be a reincarnated goddess even more powerful than me, who hadn’t lost all her memories!”
“Through the goddess’s authentic descriptions, I corrected many errors in my own theories and became more confident in treading the great path.”
“Indeed, blessings often come disguised as misfortunes. Although losing freedom was a great tribulation and disaster, it was accompanied by an even greater opportunity!”
“The place where the goddess resided was not a place of disaster, but a place of fortune.”
“I declared that the mental hospital was my home, we were all family, and when I cultivated and ascended in the future, I would take everyone with me, even the chickens and dogs!”
The sky was clear, and sunlight flowed like thick, sweet honey across the windowsill to the table.
The neutral pen that had just finished the last stroke was gently set down. In the sketchbook, a Q-version chibi character wearing a cape made from a white bedsheet made an excessively dramatic declaration to a circle of chibi characters in patient gowns surrounding him.
A hand casually closed the sketchbook.
Bai Yi looked up at the person opposite him, who was also the protagonist of the comic.
“Your mother was indeed the guide on my path of cultivation!”
“What an astonishing statement!” The words that had slipped out of the other person’s mouth at that time flashed through Bai Yi’s mind. He still remembered the feeling at that moment, as if a thin mist that had been deliberately obscuring his vision was suddenly blown away by a gust of wind, and the truth of the world unfolded before him.
Bai Yi wasn’t actually completely unaware.
His birth mother, who grew up in an orphanage and a mental hospital, was able to conceive and successfully give birth to a child whose father’s identity no one could guess, even under long-term care and supervision… This was not something an ordinary person could achieve.
It was only natural that a child born to such an extraordinary woman would be extraordinary as well.
To say that Bai Yi had always been completely oblivious to his birth mother’s extraordinary nature would be impossible. But due to some consideration that he still found difficult to understand, he had never tried to explore those secrets.
He had lived an ordinary life for seventeen years. Accompanied by nightly nightmares, he lived in this mist-shrouded world along with all the mortals, mediocre people, scum, and lunatics.
Until the advent of the Nightmare Game system.
Bai Yi had no intention of passively accepting the arrangements of the game system, even if the person behind the system might be his father.
In any case, he was the chess player in control.
It was time for him to unveil those secrets he had never actively sought before—
Li Daotian, who had been living in the Seventh Hospital since before Bai Yi was born, provided him with a considerable amount of information. As he listened to Li Daotian’s narrative, Bai Yi recorded every word without missing a single one, and even drew a short comic strip on the side.
For an ordinary person, seeing the Q-version chibi character in the comic with hands on hips laughing loudly, along with his embarrassing and chuunibyou quotes, they would probably die of embarrassment on the spot and want to move away from Blue Star overnight.
But Li Daotian was clearly no ordinary person.
Looking at Li Daotian, who was excited and beaming with joy while trying hard to restrain himself, even putting on a reserved expression, his eyes filled with “I didn’t expect young friend Bai to be so admiring of my insignificant cultivation journey that he would specially record it in such a novel way to promote and let more people know, I’ll accept your admiration”, Bai Yi almost turned into a tsukkomi character.
“Hmm, let’s call it #Li Xianke’s Cultivation Notes#.”
For the sake of collecting useful information, he decided not to burst the tool man’s cultivation dream bubble for now, or tell him the cruel fact that in this world one could only practice martial arts and not cultivate immortality.
Bai Yi even cooperatively waved the sketchbook in his hand, his curved eyebrows radiant in the honey-like flowing sunlight. “Fellow cultivator’s journey of seeking the Dao is truly inspiring. It makes me want to record it and study it constantly~”
Li Daotian’s flying eyebrows indeed rose even higher.
He waved his hand insincerely, pretending to be modest:.”My little achievements are not worth mentioning. If it weren’t for fellow cultivator Bai guiding me on the great path back then, I would still be lost in the wrong path today. If only fellow cultivator Bai hadn’t been pregnant at the time and couldn’t be tired, I would have liked to have a long talk with her.” The fellow cultivator Bai he referred to was obviously not Bai Yi, but Bai Yi’s birth mother “Bai Xin”.
As he spoke, his mood became more uplifted. “With fellow cultivator Bai not here, it’s only right that I enlighten you, young friend. In fact, with your talent, you could discuss the great Dao with me just by dabbling in it these years. If you were to devote yourself to it wholeheartedly, you would surely go much further…”
Li Daotian put on a stance as if he was about to impart all his knowledge. It was as if he was about to officially transfer Bai Yi from an auditing student to a cultivation major.
…This scene gave off a strong sense of cult recruitment déjà vu.
Surprisingly, Bai Yi showed no signs of impatience, listening and responding all the way, seemingly able to converse with him quite engagingly, causing the nurse watching from afar to question her life choices.
“Mm-hmm, yes, yes, I think at this point it should…” While chatting enthusiastically with Li Daotian, Bai Yi didn’t forget to multitask and pulled out a pitch-black notebook. He sat not far from Li Daotian’s hospital bed and casually flipped it open.
Rustle… rustle rustle…
Lines of long-dried writing appeared on the pages.
[The promoter of the extinction of the immortal path, the creator of the glory of the martial way, the man without a path – Pei Hefeng, after drifting through the void for hundreds of years, returned to the mortal world.]
[The age of declining dharma has passed, and spiritual energy in the mortal world has revived.]
[His life-bound sword Hanguang, carrying his entire martial will, drew in the five domain spiritual veins that had recently revived at the moment of its descent. The surging spiritual tide swept across the mortal world like an ocean.]
[Originally, the spiritual energy concentration in the mortal world was just a small puddle. It would have taken decades of normal breathing of the earth’s spiritual veins to turn into rivers. The birth of the spiritual tide compressed decades into days, and the puddle had already turned into rivers.]
[At last, such a mortal world was barely able to accommodate a “shark” like Pei Hefeng that couldn’t fit in a small puddle.]
[Was all this really just a coincidental accident?]
Rustle… rustle rustle…
[As the spiritual tide surged, the “Martial Realm” that descended along with Hanguang’s master Pei Hefeng materialized with the input of massive nightmare crystals, randomly grabbing a batch of lucky viewers into it.]
[As a reward for changing the direction of an entire world’s progress, the martial world that had evolved to its peak was the scene template carried by the man without a path, Pei Hefeng himself.]
[In that prosperous martial world, dynasties had long been eliminated, replaced by top sects and powerful individuals dividing different territories. Towering above countless martial geniuses, the creator of this glorious era, Hanguang’s master Pei Hefeng, owned the twelve central cities of the world, which was his “Martial Realm”.]
[The scene template “Martial Realm” materialized by consuming a large number of nightmare crystals, combined with the massive collective consciousness absorbed by the “Web of Thoughts”, was enough to vividly and flexibly simulate one non-existent false character after another within it. It made every missing person who stumbled into it treat it as a real existence.]
[—As if they had really crossed through time and space to a glorious martial world. Or perhaps they had entered a time-space rift in the mist, arriving at a secluded paradise.]
[This vivid world and those lifelike people would not let anyone doubt that this was a fictional fabrication.]
[—When they naturally accept this setting and develop curiosity and desire to explore this glorious martial world, it’s time to guide them to discover the truth step by step.]
[After all, secrets discovered through great efforts and facts witnessed firsthand are always easier for people to believe than stories fabricated out of thin air by others, right?]
The pitch-black notebook flickered with an extraordinary light imperceptible to the naked eye. This was because after multiple instances of “what was written down came true” and the condensation of legendary status, it had begun to transform into something extraordinary, starting to give birth to extraordinary power.
Perhaps in some distant future, this notebook would truly acquire the characteristic of “whatever is written becomes reality”?
For now, this notebook that had just birthed a bit of extraordinary spirit could only automatically record some events that had already occurred—the greater the causal connection between an event and the notebook’s owner, the more likely it was to be automatically recorded by the notebook.
For instance, the disappearances into the fog area that Bai Yi had a hand in orchestrating.
In the faint extraordinary spiritual light, the words on the page seemed to emit light as well. A hand gently brushed over the writing, finally resting on a passage that had appeared not long ago—
[…Li Fufeng and his companion, who accidentally fell into the fog area while searching for missing persons and traversed to a strange world, gained the appreciation of the city lord of Daliang City with their knowledge and learning.]
[They thus settled down in Daliang City.]
[As time flew by, three years passed. The two investigators from the Special Case Investigation Team unknowingly became accustomed to this world, even reaching a decent level in martial arts cultivation.]
[Through various channels, they had gathered 71 “transmigrators” in Daliang City. Among them were missing persons from the five domains, as well as investigators sent by various countries initially. More transmigrators were scattered in other cities. And in places unknown to them, quite a few transmigrators had died in dangerous situations.]
[Some were executed for breaking the law, some were casually killed for offending the powerful, some died from accidents during exploration, some were inexplicably killed by beasts or bandits in the wilderness…]
This “Puppet Master’s Diary”, which had already birthed an extraordinary spiritual light, continued to reveal new writing. It said—
[—But these people do not deserve sympathy.]
[—Even on Blue Star, they were nothing but scum, garbage polluting the environment.]
[Their deaths seemed diverse, full of accidents and coincidences. But the entire Martial Realm, and the beings within it, were nothing but fabrications in the creator’s hands. Everyone was under the creator’s watch. Therefore, there were no accidental deaths. All who died were necessarily in accordance with the creator’s will.]
[They were just garbage that needed to be cleared away.]
After spouting a segment of over-the-top praise with chuunibyou values off the charts, this diary that had started to become strange seemed to return to normal—
[…Unaware of all this, the transmigrators seemed to have become accustomed to life in the Martial Realm. The elites among them had even climbed to relatively high positions in various cities, or become trusted individuals beside important figures.]
[At this time, a mysterious summons was sent to the twelve cities, and transmigrators with wide information networks all learned of the news.]
[—This summons came from the legendary capital.]
[—It might touch upon the deepest secrets of this world.]
[—Perhaps it was the opportunity for them to return home.]
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