Cultivation Nerd (xianxia)

Chapter 364 - The Curtain Closes Both Ways

After he said that if I kept reading other people’s memories, I would eventually be influenced by them and become a different person.We were in a mental projection state, so I couldn’t even turn to give him the blandest look imaginable for stating something so painfully obvious. Of course, memories changed people.

I already knew that. I’d been studying the effects ever since Wu Yan used her first Foundation Technique to alter her appearance, after which her manners had subtly shifted as well. She had been embodying her element of change a little too deeply at the time.

To mitigate that, I usually extracted only the useful memories, cut them apart, and reconstructed them into emotionless, movie-like sequences. It was annoying, and it dulled the learning experience, but I didn’t mind paying that price.

As I sifted through the murky darkness in search of another worthwhile memory, a chill crept down my spine. Somehow, his mind and his memories were freezing. Ice spread along the edges of his mental energy, crawling outward in delicate lines.

The Blood Step Immortal sighed.

“These Extreme Physiques always produce Core Abilities that drift beyond the rules we normally rely on when forming Core Techniques,” he said. “My mental energy is nowhere near what it was when I was an Immortal, or even when I forged bodies to the peak of Nascent Soul. Still, this is no joke. I can’t hold out much longer. We’re running on compressed time, and she’s already nearly sealed me within minutes.”

Ye An.

I didn’t particularly like her as our first meeting involved her chasing an innocent girl, but she was undeniably useful.

“I wouldn’t know as much about Extreme Physiques as you,” I said. “You were the one studying them.”

“Heh. You knew that even before reading my mind,” he replied calmly, his voice coming off as flat and empty. “It really was my bad luck to face an opponent like you. It’s irritating. There’s no fun in it at all. The last man I met with a technique like yours kept all his memories every time I crushed him mentally. You, on the other hand, cut them off. Torturing him was entertaining; he always woke up screaming.”

“Is that supposed to intimidate me?” I asked. “Because it’s working.”

“Intimidation?” he said mildly. “Of course not. Why would I bother when you’re already frightened enough to soil yourself?”

“Exactly,” I replied. “Why waste effort on an already weakened opponent?”

“I never considered you an opponent,” he said. “This has always been more of a conversation. Your plan was clever. But in truth, my defeat came from my own carelessness.”

I almost laughed. Twenty thousand years of life, and this was the result. He was surprisingly petty.

As for reading his memories, I was willing to take the risk. I’d come here fully prepared to die today, or worse. Being influenced by his memories no longer felt frightening by comparison.

Part of me was even tempted. If I survived this, I wanted to try new techniques, and those required exposure to the adverse effects of taking on someone else's memories.

With my second Foundation Technique, as long as the original engram remained imprinted on my soul, recovery was simple. Delete all memories, activate the technique, and paste the original memories back into place without outside interface.

“You have an unnaturally high tolerance for absorbing memories,” he said. “Your obsession seems to suppress their outward influence. I even relented and allowed you access, hoping you’d be possessed by them. But instead, you’re like a parasite.”

“A parasite that refuses to leave," he clarified.

I glanced at the edges of the mental space as they continued to freeze. Since I felt no pressure at all, it was clear that he was the only one being affected. And yet, he still spoke as leisurely as ever.

Even after reading his memories and seeing the world through his perspective, I didn’t understand him at all.

“You devised an elaborate plan,” he said, “but I thought you’d be more cautious. Instead, you keep pushing forward recklessly. Tolerance to being influenced by my memories doesn’t mean immunity. After all, I have obsessions of my own. All immortals do.”

“All people are obsessed with something,” I replied.

Perhaps he’d lived so long thinking of himself as something above human, like some higher species, that his thoughts had begun to warp. No matter how much time passed, he was still human. A cruel, unhinged kind of human sure, but human all the same. There was no need to elevate himself beyond that.

“Not quite,” he said, his tone faintly amused, as though he knew something I didn’t.

The darkness before me shifted. Cold mist gathered, swirling and condensing into a humanoid shape. The Blood Step Immortal emerged from it.

“By now, you’ve sifted through a fair number of my memories from my previous life,” he said, a strange glint in his eyes. “Even if your real interest lies in the world itself, most of what you’ve seen centers on my family.”

He was scheming. Obviously, and since this was a mental space, that glint was deliberate, meant to make me second-guess myself. Ridiculous as it sounded, such things did work on overthinkers.

“When someone reads another’s memories,” he continued, “they live that life. They feel sympathy. Regret. Guilt. It isn’t rare for a person who intended to kill their opponent to hesitate after seeing their memories. That’s why even the strongest cultivators tread carefully around memory techniques.”

He smirked, watching me closely, keenly aware of the effect his words might have, and ready to shatter any illusion forming in my mind.

“What?” he pressed. “Are you beginning to feel sorry for my daughters? Look closely, what’s happening inside you?”

What was he aiming for?

I narrowed my imaginary eyes, about to dismiss him outright, when I sensed something off.

A faint ache lingered at the back of my heart.

It wasn’t crushing despair. More like the dull heaviness after watching a slice-of-life anime with a sad ending.

I did feel a little sorry for those two daughters. For being abandoned. For living in a doomed world. For how their story would end.

That feeling had existed the moment I saw them, long before this conversation. Their father was gone. Their world was collapsing. The outcome had never been in doubt.

That worried me enough that I made a mental note. Later, I’d seal everything I’d taken from the Blood Step Immortal and rewatch it in an emotionless, reconstructed format. A memory turned into a film carried far less influence.

Still… I didn’t truly care.

I’d stopped letting emotions dictate my choices a long time ago.

Look at this world. Injustice. Abuse of power. Endless suffering. If I were a better man, I’d roam the land and help, truly help. Even with my relatively modest strength, a Foundation Establishment cultivator could save hundreds. Maybe thousands.

But in the end, my selfishness always won.

And I did what I wanted.

“Your past world didn’t give you much of an advantage,” he chuckled. “Things like atomic bombs that would be useful here are impossible to build. The industry simply isn’t there. Still, it gave you some… unique perspectives.”

I didn’t mind his words and slipped into another memory.

This one felt random, even compared to the others.

The Blood Step Immortal stood aboard a wooden ship, dressed plainly, working as nothing more than a common crewman.

I stepped to the edge and looked down. There was no sea beneath the hull, only an endless expanse of white clouds drifting far below, as if the ship were sailing through the sky itself.

Which it was.

The sky above was locked in a constant eclipse, the moon blotting out the sun. Its pallid light stained the clouds below, giving them the appearance of blood-tinged mist.

Along the sides of the vessel, runes carved into the wood began to glow, their light pulsing softly as a low, unfamiliar hum spread across the deck. Further ahead, on the ship’s second section, stood rows of cannon-like structures. They were square rather than round, rigid and angular, clearly nothing like the cannons I was familiar with.

“You had flying ships in your world?” I asked, rhetorically.

I thought this was supposed to be a low-fantasy world.

A horde of demons pierced through the clouds. A sharp hum followed, then a burst of blue light flared from beneath the deck. Energy blasts roared out of the Prana Cannons below, detonating in the distance as flying demons were torn apart midair.

Prana Cannons were a form of black technology; devices that gathered ambient energy, compressed it at a focal point, and discharged it forward. They weren’t the product of conventional engineering, but of rituals, followed by crude welding and assembly.

Even so, they weren’t as effective as one might expect. They took far too long to charge.

By the time the cannons fired again, the ship was already surrounded. Crew members scrambled, loosing arrows in frantic volleys as red-skinned creatures swooped in, far too fast. Claws sank into the sails, shredding them. The ship shuddered violently as its control panels failed, and the entire vessel began to plummet.

This was the first time the Blood Step Immortal had ever boarded a flying ship.

It would also be the last.

Which I could understand. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience.

Later on, it hardly mattered anyway. Demons held an overwhelming advantage in the skies, and flying ships were eventually deemed impractical for warfare.

Amid the chaos, the mental construct of the Blood Step Immortal sat astride a broken mast, gripping the ruined sail as the ship fell.

“This thing moves slowly,” he said. “Nothing like the planes from your world.”

He rose, balanced himself on the beam, and walked along it with casual ease.

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“I tried everything to return to them,” he continued. “I made too many mistakes in my first life for my daughters to grow up as orphans as well. That’s not an easy thing to swallow.”

He stopped at the edge, staring down into the clouds below.

“When I was younger,” he added, almost absently, “I told Brunhilde that the children were a mistake. That I regretted them. I want to go back to that moment. Hug her and apologize.”

For once, I didn’t make a snide remark and let him talk.

“Twenty thousand years, and that woman is still haunting me,” the Blood Step Immortal said, staring over the edge with cold eyes. “I gave up on that dream of returning to my world long ago.”

He seemed unusually talkative, and if he was scheming something, then so was I.

“My parents were killed by Blood Mages,” he continued. “I was so preoccupied with erasing that stain from the world that I never noticed what was right in front of me.”

My mental energy pressed forward, gaining ground. I felt something swell in his chest, something like sadness, though dulled by time, and it seemed distant.

“Someone who hopes for a second chance, someone who wants to try again,” he said quietly, “will manifest a reincarnation technique. The technique of a loser. Someone who likely cannot become an Immortal again.”

He let out a short, self-mocking chuckle.

“I intended to take over Song Song’s body once she reached a higher cultivation,” he went on. “I would stack my current cultivation on top of hers. With the Age of Immortals approaching, it feels… uncomfortable being anything less than a peak Nascent Soul Cultivator.”

“So you planned to possess her and build an endless chain of Immortal descendants,” I said, finishing the thought as his mind laid itself bare. “But you died too early. You broke the technique before it could mature and sealed your own ceiling.”

The Blood Step Immortal sighed, finally sounding tired.

“You won this confrontation,” he admitted. “There’s little I can do now. My body and mind are already in the final stages of being sealed by a seventh-level array. I won’t be able to hold on much longer.”

He didn’t look like a defeated man.

He looked like someone who had lost a round of thumb wrestling.

After seeing his memories, I understood why.

This was someone with an incarnation technique. He didn’t perceive loss the way others did. Death wasn’t final; it was a pause. A delay.

He didn’t struggle. He didn’t panic. He didn’t fight desperately for survival.

Why would he?

Endless reincarnation techniques sounded powerful on paper, but they eroded something essential: urgency. The instinct to stay alive.

If he had truly devoted himself to cultivation, if he had spent even a fraction of those twenty thousand years pushing toward the peak of Nascent Soul, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

But I understood him. How many millennia had he actually cultivated? He likely reached the peak of Nascent Soul many times before, through thousands of years of indoor cultivation in a dark room doing nothing else.

Assimilating descendants was easier than another century of closed-door cultivation.

“What,” he mocked, reading my thoughts without effort, “are you disappointed?”

“You shouldn’t expect much from someone who was an Immortal for less than two weeks. Besides, I’d rather let the Age of Immortals pass before I emerge again. Too many of them carry death prophecies. I’d rather not test my luck.”

My frown deepened.

This didn’t feel like a victory.

It felt like when an older sibling beats the younger senseless in a mock fight, only to raise their hands at the end and declare the younger one the winner.

The so-called winner was bruised, and the loser stood untouched.

So who had really won?

“I have the feeling that you can escape,” I told him.

“What kind of impression do you have of me?” He snorted, a mocking glint flashing in his eyes. “Nobody is invincible, or has some secret way to escape absolutely every disadvantageous situation. That’s a very paranoid way of thinking.”

“So,” I pressed, “do you?”

“Kind of, yeah,” he shrugged. “But our minds are currently intertwined. Who knows how many memories I’d lose if I tried to sever that bond by force? Perhaps millennia of memories would be gone. Not everyone has a technique that automatically protects the mind.”

How would someone who could endlessly reincarnate feel about winning or losing a fight?

They wouldn’t care.

I could feel it in him. He didn’t see this as a loss at all. That was why the discomfort sat heavy in my chest, because even now, he was already thinking about the next time he would wake up.

“Anyway,” he said, sounding bored, “get through the Age of Immortals and keep Song Song alive. I’ve spread my bloodline all across the continent, but her body and talent were something I worked hard to… to…”

The Blood Step Immortal frowned.

“Does your teacher really need to be paranoid enough to stack a Level Seven Confusion Array on top of the seal?” he sighed, waving a hand dismissively. “Whatever. Screw off. I don’t mind losing, but that doesn’t mean I want to keep staring at your face or reading your thoughts while you analyze every angle of this situation like a freak. It’s incredibly annoying.”

I blinked.

And I was back in reality.

.

As I opened my eyes and woke from all that troublesome business, the world felt wrong.

The ground around us had frozen solid. A localized blizzard raged, snow and ice swirling violently as Song Song’s father was encased in an ice coffin. Dark, writhing inscriptions crawled across its surface, surrounded by a square barrier. Inside that barrier, the empty space was flooded with a dark green poison, courtesy of Song San.

I tried to move my hand.

My mind believed I moved normally, but my body didn’t respond. Thought and flesh were out of sync, desynchronized so severely it was nauseating.

Opposite me stood the Blood Step Immortal, frozen, sealed, and immobilized. His dark eyes were locked onto mine; there was awareness in them. The inscriptions carved into the ice writhed harder, as if straining to suppress something that refused to go quiet.

And yet… there was no anger in his gaze.

He didn’t look upset about losing.

Was he planning something? Had he shown me only the memories he wanted me to see? Had I been nudged toward a carefully curated version of him? Or was I simply overthinking again?

For now, there was nothing I could do about it.

Worse, he’d left behind a time bomb.

Twenty thousand years of memories.

The only reason I was still conscious was because my first Foundation Technique was running at full power, forcing my mind to operate at blistering speeds just to keep from being crushed. But if this continued, those memories would eventually overwhelm me.

I had to seal them.

Difficult, but doable.

My teacher had sealed the Blood Step Immortal with arrays. Ye An had sealed him further, her Core Technique locking down her own Extreme Physique in a way that excelled at suppression. By all logic, the Blood Step Immortal’s consciousness should have been nullified by now.

Which meant what remained was only memory.

And that distinction mattered.

If this were his true consciousness, I would already be dead. In the real world, he absolutely had ways to interfere with my soul and if he touched that, my second Foundation Technique would unravel along with it.

I steadied myself, preparing to deal with the influx–

–and then his eyes moved behind the ice.

My heart slammed into my throat.

“You’re really something,” the Blood Step Immortal’s voice echoed inside my head, calm and amused. “To still be standing.”

What?

How?

“What?” my teacher whispered in panic, his voice ragged and barely audible. “How can he still do this?”

That was when I realized the truth.

He wasn’t speaking only to me.

He was projecting his voice externally like a mental wave.

My teacher staggered to my side. His eyes were bloodshot, crimson tears leaking from his nose and dripping off his chin. His aura was in tatters. His cultivation had dropped by an entire star.

There was barely any Qi left in his body.

He had overdrawn everything. Ruined his foundation and with it… any chance he ever had of breaking through to Nascent Soul.

Fuck.

“Damn, what a monster. You’re only barely a Nascent Soul Cultivator, and yet you can still stay conscious after a level seven seal that was supposed to suppress even your consciousness and mental energy,” Cai Hu grumbled, wiping the blood from his nose as he massaged his forehead.

Before anything else could be said, another figure stepped into my field of vision.

A man in green robes, a porcelain mask concealing the grotesque face beneath it.

Song San.

Unlike my teacher, there was a clear, almost buoyant joy in his eyes. His steps had a faint spring to them, and even through the mask, I could feel the smile he was wearing.

“Father is only resisting for now,” Song San said calmly, confidently. “He’ll be out of it soon. And if not…” He tilted his head slightly. “I can always research a poison that destroys consciousness outright. We no longer have to worry about Liu Feng’s mind being intertwined with his.”

He turned toward me.

“You’re there now, right? There’s light in your eyes, but–”

He paused, rubbing his chin.

Cai Hu coughed. “Yes. His mental energy has stabilized.”

Song San nodded, then shifted his attention back to his father. He approached the barrier, stopping just short of it, and an ugly, delighted cackle slipped out from behind his mask.

“Ha. Your mental power is eroding fast, Father. How long do you think you can keep this up?” he mocked. “Between my poison and all these seals, you’re finished, old man.”

Song San was here to get his father out of the way, because as he saw it, their father would always support Song Song.

I knew better than to ever explain the full picture to someone as sharp as him. Who knew what conclusions he might draw or what schemes he might cook up with that information?

“I don’t know why that guy wants you dead,” Song San added, jerking a thumb toward me, “but I was thrilled when he approached me with the idea.”

As expected. Even if I’d told him little, Song San clearly knew far more than he let on.

He laughed again, pacing in slow circles around the array imprisoning his father.

“It’s a good spring day to seal you like this,” Song San said lightly. “My mother also died on a spring day.” His tone was almost cheerful. “They said she tried to assassinate Song Song. As if that wasn’t common among the other concubines.”

I hadn’t known he carried thoughts like that, buried deep in that poison-soaked mind of his.

“No,” the Blood Step Immortal’s voice cut in coldly through a mental wave. “She died because she learned something and revealed the Song Clan’s secret with her final breath.”

“She was sent to investigate by the previous Sect Leader,” he continued. “A suspicion he developed after killing the former Song Clan Leader.”

Song San froze.

His posture stiffened, his gaze sharpening as he instinctively retreated several steps, clearly startled that his father could still speak.

That was his flaw.

Song San was a genius, but his arrogance often left him exposed. Just like when he’d dared challenge his sister and nearly ended up butchered.

“Then…” Song San said slowly, eyes widening, “…you sent Song Song to kill a concubine the Sect Leader didn’t even care about.”

“A message between powerful men,” the Blood Step Immortal replied evenly. “One worthless life for another. It preserved the balance.”

“She never uncovered anything,” he continued. “And the previous Sect Leader already knew what I was and how I reincarnated after our fight.”

Song San’s eyes narrowed. This time, however, there was no shock in his expression. He didn't seem too surprised by the reveal.

“You and your mother were nothing more than puppets to that man,” the Blood Step Immortal said. His voice carried a half-finished chuckle as the dark inscriptions crawled across his body like a living suit, sealing him completely. “Though it’s not as if you were any better in my eyes. To me, you were all just toys… something to pass the time until the perfect vessel was complete.”

For the first time since I had ever met him, there was raw, bloody rage behind Song San’s gaze. His jaw clenched so hard I could hear his teeth grinding behind the porcelain mask.

With that finally over, I turned toward my teacher, forcing my focus through sheer will.

“I’m going to be… offline for a while,” I said. My thoughts were already unraveling, struggling to contain twenty millennia of alien memories before they could sink their hooks into me.

Shock crept in. Darkness began eating away at the corners of my vision.

“Offline?” my teacher demanded, alarm sharp in his voice. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I never answered.

The world dropped away, and I pitched forward, gravity taking me headfirst toward the ground.

Despite everything. Despite the pain, the chaos and the uncertainty, I felt relief.

Song Song was finally free.