CIATB Chapter 361 - A Crushing Defeat
Chapter 361 - A Crushing Defeat
I woke up staring at a perfectly clear blue sky, too perfect to be real. It took a moment for my thoughts to gather, and despite finding myself somewhere unfamiliar, I felt no panic at all.Where was I?
From the sensation alone, it felt like some kind of mental construct. Someone’s mind, perhaps. Or a space formed between minds.
What the hell was going on?
I stood up, and my heart nearly leapt out of my chest when I saw Song Song’s father sitting in front of me. A heartbeat later, understanding caught up.
I’d been in the middle of a fight.
And I had lost.
He sat on a simple wooden chair in the middle of an endless white floor beneath that flawless blue sky, the furniture absurdly out of place in such a vast nothingness. The Blood Step Immortal leaned back casually, studying me as if weighing a decision.
“Hm. Interesting,” he said calmly. “You’ve been mentally crushed five dozen times by now. So, what’s your plan?”
Five dozen?
How was I even still here?
“I’ve read your memories. And the memories of your boring world,” he continued, as if discussing the weather. “This must be your second Foundation Technique, preserving memories within the soul.”
“The last thing I remember,” I said slowly, “is getting mentally crushed by you and feeling like worms were eating my brain.”
No, those memories weren’t returning on their own. It felt more like he was feeding them back to me. Copies he’d taken before killing me.
As for the other times he’d crushed me… apparently, he didn’t see a reason to share those. A shame. From a research perspective, it would’ve been fascinating to know exactly how I’d "died" each time.
“Trust me,” he said, easily reading my thoughts, “you don’t want those memories. I’ve been mentally torturing you for several days in here. Outside, only seconds have passed.”
“Thanks for the consideration,” I replied with a smile. “But I’d still like my memories.”
“The reason you’re alive and not a drooling vegetable is your second Foundation Technique, isn’t it?” he asked.
“How would I know?” I shrugged and sat down cross-legged on the white floor.
“I’ve read everything,” he said. “You’re a clever kid. You erased all details of that technique from your own mind. But it’s something like mental restoration, storing memories in the soul. Something immaterial. Like a stamp. In your world’s terms… a copy and paste of neural signals.”
He paused, eyes sharp.
“You even made it so you don’t retain memories from the moments of mental death. That would’ve been useful to me, but it was a good precaution. It closes a major loophole.”
“Still no idea,” I shrugged again, mainly to irritate him.
It didn’t work.
“Heh. You think you’re smart, boy?”
“No,” I said honestly. “I think you’re smarter than me. You’d win ninety-nine fights out of a hundred. Plenty of people are smarter than I am. But if you were careless, unprepared, and didn’t care what happened next… then maybe that one percent matters.”
Ever since meeting him, I’d felt it in my gut.
It wasn’t just cruelty or coldness.
He didn’t care.
A man who’d lived twenty thousand years by jumping bodies and reincarnating endlessly was still human-ish at the core. But what did that kind of time do to a human mind?
What was left… after everything else wore away?
Was he someone who had simply grown bored of everything and decided to have his daughter cannibalize her mother’s flesh just for the novelty of it? After all, in the end, Song Song was just another body he could take over and eventually discard.
He felt like someone who had played the same game for so long that he deliberately chose an evil run, only to discover it was far easier that way.
“You know I can read even your current memories, right?” he asked.
“I know,” I replied. “But I see no reason to stop thinking altogether. Despite the situation, this is a very interesting development for me, and I think my understanding of you as a person has deepened somewhat.”
“Hm,” he hummed, tapping his chin. “What a psycho.”
I shrugged and didn’t bother responding. There wasn’t much point. It was painfully obvious he could overpower me in a mental battle without effort. I never stood a chance.
What the hell had my past self been thinking, believing this could work?
“Despite my age, it isn’t often that I get new challengers, especially not otherworlders,” he said. “So I think I should get to know you better. Do you think your few decades of memories could overwhelm mine?”
What was he getting at?
“We also need to test alternative ways to break this little mental loop you’ve put me in,” he continued, sounding faintly annoyed. “Despite the torture, you’ve deleted all memories of your plan. You can’t tell me anything.”
He sighed, clearly disappointed that torturing my previous incarnations hadn’t yielded results.
Honestly, I didn’t know why he bothered. He could already read my memories. Maybe he was just desperate to get out of this.
Frankly, so was I.
“Hm. I’ve found an interesting memory. Let’s take a look,” the Blood Step Immortal said.
My vision flooded with cascading rainbow light for a split second, and then the scene changed.
We were inside a small apartment with white walls, two bedrooms, and framed pictures of a couple with two children lining the hallway. The air felt cramped, mundane, and painfully familiar.
The Blood Step Immortal now lay beside me, reclining on empty air as if it were a bed.
I didn’t bother moving away. Distance meant nothing here.
A child stood nearby, leaning against one of the bedroom doors while raised voices echoed from the living room.
“You think I don’t know? You think I’m blind, you bastard? You dare come home like this?” a woman shouted.
The Blood Step Immortal glanced from me to the boy and raised an eyebrow.
“Huh. You looked better in your last life,” he remarked casually.
“Is that strange?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “Otherworlders usually come out better-looking after reincarnation. Though I once saw a woman who really got the short end of the stick. Ugly as sin.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, not particularly caring.
After some more arguing, my father stepped out of the living room. His dark hair was slicked back, and his deep blue eyes swept the hallway until they landed on me. He winced, as if a flicker of guilt crossed his face for forcing me to witness something like this.
I didn’t remember him reacting that way, but I’d been around seven years old when it happened, and I’d never really examined this memory in detail.
“Yeah, walk away just like that!” my mother’s voice echoed from the living room. “I will divorce you, you cheating bastard! Go back to your whores!”
He didn’t seem to care. Instead, he ruffled my hair with a guilty smile.
“C’mon champ, let’s go get something to eat until your brother comes back from school,” he said, taking my hand and leading me away.
The memory shifted, and suddenly we were in the backseat of a car. I sat in the front on a booster seat while my father drove with the window down, smoking. One hand rested on the wheel, the other dangled outside.
He wasn’t a smoker. I didn’t remember him ever smoking. But it seemed he had this time.
The Blood Step Immortal and I occupied the backseat as my father drove aimlessly, without any clear destination.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
I turned toward the Blood Step Immortal and felt a sliver of respect slip away as I saw him demolishing a KFC chicken bucket.
“Damn, this is some good food,” he said, casually using my memories to conjure both the meal and its taste.
Not long after, a phone floated in front of his face. He started watching one of the many YouTube videos I’d seen in my previous life; it was a Minecraft video from my childhood.
“How did you ever get anything done with such good food and entertainment?” he asked. “Perhaps instead of trying to invent techniques and studying all day, you should have created fried chicken and electricity. Phones too.”
Despite the serious, flat tone of his voice, it was hard to take him seriously while he indulged like that.
With every passing second, my respect for him eroded further.
What kind of shitty immortal was this?
“I’m more like a cheap knock-off version of an immortal,” he said, speaking in perfect English.
Then our attention returned to the memory.
After a long silence, my father spoke again.
“I took you with me so she wouldn’t stress about me actually walking out,” he said. “With you around, she knows I’ll come back eventually. Trust me, son, women are a headache. Never marry before thirty. You’ll understand one day… you’ll understand why I did this.”
“But you never wanted to understand him, did you?” the Blood Step Immortal beside me remarked, a smug smile smeared across his greasy lips.
The memory twisted again.
Now we were sitting on the wings of a flying plane, the wind rushing past, tugging at our hair.
“This is interesting,” he said. “This world might be more fascinating than I thought. Achieving flight with giant hunks of metal. In my world, only demons could fly and they were troublesome.”
He continued rummaging through my memories as if they were toys laid out for his amusement.
We drifted through different stages of my life, lingering on emotionally charged moments like my first girlfriend in high school… and what a mistake that had been.
Then college, with another girl. This one had been more studious, more grounded, and far less chaotic.
After that came my office-job years, a date with my girlfriend of three years.
We were in my apartment this time. The place was bland, furnished with dark wood furniture and a plain queen-sized bed with a white mattress and red covers. I’d bought the red covers because I thought they’d look cooler when we slept on them.
A woman stepped out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around her body and another draped over her head as she dried her hair. She wiped her face, then sat in front of the mirror and began applying her makeup.
I—and by that, I mean my memory-self—smiled through the entire thing.
“Oh, I forgot my lip gloss in the bathroom,” she said, winking at me before adding, “Please simp for me, my dear boyfriend.”
She walked closer to the bed. Before she could get too close, I raised a hand and said with a mocking smirk, “No thanks. I don’t want you to have dry lips. What if our kids come out with dry lips just because of this?”
It was dumb. Lame. Not funny at all.
She still laughed, chuckling as she walked back toward the bathroom, even adding a bit of exaggerated, villain-like laughter as she disappeared inside.
She was mocking me. I knew it.
But that was how our relationship had always been. We never took things too seriously.
Loving her was easy.
There was never any tension when I was around her. I could speak without thinking, say whatever crossed my mind, because I knew she wouldn’t take offense. Not to me.
My memory-self pulled a small box from beneath the pillow and stared at it. After a moment, he opened it. Inside was an engagement ring.
Just then, she walked back into the room, lips glistening. She licked them as she looked at me, then climbed onto the bed.
I hurriedly shoved the box back under the pillow and smiled at her.
“Just go with the flow, boy,” she said as she pinned my arms above my head.
“I do not consent, cougar!”
“Just let it happen!”
It was an inside joke between us. She was two months older than me, and we liked to flip the script sometimes to keep things fun on the weekends. During workdays, we were usually too tired to do anything more than cuddle.
Like always, she didn’t have to think much when she was around me.
We shared a single brain cell when we were together.
He was trying to stir my emotions, prodding at my memories.
“You really lived a boring life,” the Blood Step Immortal said. “Most of your memories involve office work. This was the only one I found that might evoke some kind of emotion from you.”
I didn’t answer.
I just looked at her, with her flowing blonde hair like spun gold, her blue eyes so vivid they felt like they could haunt your dreams.
After our little fun time, she was sleeping, and my memory-self stared absentmindedly at the box with the ring inside. He gripped it tightly, glanced at her, and found his words lodged in his throat.
“One day, you will understand,” the Blood Step Immortal voiced the thoughts I’d had back then.
“If you wanted to make this more emotionally impactful and gain some kind of advantage,” I said calmly, “the memory of when we broke up would’ve been more effective.”
The world around us blurred again, and we found ourselves standing atop a flying plane, like a ship sailing through a sea of clouds. It was a fabricated memory.
“You really are one cold bastard,” the Blood Step Immortal remarked.
“True,” I admitted. “Now that I’m here, nothing from my previous life really matters that much. I’m having too much fun with my studies, and I even enjoy battles where my enemies reveal brand-new techniques.”
I spoke honestly. There was no point lying when he could read my mind like an open book.
“Heh. And you consider me cruel,” he mocked.
I shrugged, unconcerned. If I were weak-minded enough to suffer an identity crisis just because he paraded my memories in front of me, I never would’ve come here to confront him in the first place.
What I had in my previous life was gone. There was no way to reclaim it.
So what was the point of clinging to it?
We were at a stalemate. I could do nothing to him, and he could crush me mentally as many times as he wished without achieving anything meaningful.
Sure, each mental reformation probably consumed a sliver of energy. But it was so minuscule, so efficient, that it hardly mattered.
Just as we both schemed in silence, the space around us twisted, and we returned to the white-floored world beneath the perfect blue sky, the coagulation of our clashing minds.
“Huh?” The Blood Step Immortal hummed, genuine surprise flickering across his face.
The world twisted again.
This time, we stood inside a white medical chamber with an ancient air. Incense drifted through the space, and strange crimson writings and arrays covered the walls.
A ritual.
I was certain this was not one of my memories.
I glanced at the Blood Step Immortal. He remained calm, unreadable. Though he could read my thoughts, I couldn’t glimpse even a fragment of his.
A woman lay on a birthing bed, her face pale. Beside her stood a man holding a newborn in one hand, staring at it as though it were worthless filth.
“Please don’t kill her,” the woman begged weakly.
The man—of course, the Blood Step Immortal—handed the baby back. The woman clutched it to her chest.
“Next time, I want a son,” he said flatly. “If you fail again, I will have Song Song eat you alive. You’re her mother, but she will do it because she is my daughter.”
“You know,” the Blood Step Immortal said casually as he watched his past self, “I was quite fond of Song Song when she was a child. Of all the children I’ve had in this world, she’s my favorite. If I’d had a son with similar talent, I would’ve spared her.”
The woman sobbed, hugging her newborn tighter.
“Don’t worry, Song Sia,” she whispered. “Mother will always protect you.”
Oh.
So Song Song and Song Sia, the same woman who tried to kill her during her Foundation Establishment breakthrough, were full-blooded sisters.
“I tried creating a second Song Song with her, but she was as useless as her mother,” the Blood Step Immortal said. “I even kept that newborn meatbag around during her formative years, hoping to make something useful out of her… but it ended up as nothing.”
“So you orchestrated it so she would eventually learn that Song Song had cannibalized her mother…” I sighed.
“I was only partially involved in that,” the Blood Step Immortal waved it off casually, as if discussing weather. “Our dear Shan Yi, the Blazing Sun Sect Leader, orchestrated many things himself and had a much larger hand in it. Song Sia may have been Song Song’s full-blooded sister, born of the same mother, and I had hoped to create a second Song Song by keeping her around. But she was untalented, at least not to the level I desired. Still, I kept her during those formative years, trying to find some purpose for that meatbag. There was nothing.”
I could move past the memories of my previous life… but this–
These two fucking scumbags had used and tortured two young girls who couldn’t even defend themselves. Song Song was forced to eat her own mother. Song Sia was toyed with, discarded, and viewed by her father as nothing more than useless flesh.
Rage surged through me. My fist clenched. My teeth ground together.
And in that instant, he turned toward me.
The intensity in his eyes was suffocating.
Shit. He sensed it, an emotional weakness.
But just as he was about to act, a flowery, sickly-sweet scent bloomed in the air.
The Blood Step Immortal’s mental energy bubbled and twisted violently. For the first time, I could feel him actively manipulating his mental power, rather than letting it flow naturally as before.
I still stood no chance, but that insurmountable gap from earlier was no longer absolute.
And that smell…
This was a mental plane. There should have been no scent at all.
The Blood Step Immortal’s calm gaze drifted upward, and understanding flickered across his face.
“Something from the real world is affecting my mental energy,” he said slowly. “Poison…? Song San?” A faint scoff followed. “That child truly takes after his mother.”
His gaze snapped back to me, narrowing slightly. “So this is your plan? To trap me here while those outside weaken my mental energy, then use your Sky Grade Technique to control me?”
“No idea,” I shrugged.
Now that things hadn’t completely collapsed, now that there was hope, I smiled.
I stopped defending myself entirely and instead let his memories slam into me.
I reached out.
I tried to absorb his mental energy. His memories. Everything.
It was dangerous.
But who gave a shit?
This wasn’t a playground where people got to dawdle and hesitate.
“How about we explore your memories instead?” I said calmly. “After all, we’re here to get to know each other. I bet your life was far more interesting than mine.”
He stared at me.
His face remained expressionless, but I could feel his displeasure.
I had been ready to sacrifice everything when I challenged him.
I hoped he hadn’t come into this with half-assed conviction.
Of course, he could still read my thoughts. His gaze sharpened.
“Do not overstep your bounds, brat,” he said.