“Acquire wealth.” These two words were enough to describe the goal that Liu Wei had always followed when it came to his political decisions so far. There were many resources that could be used to accelerate one’s cultivation by leaps and bounds so it was only natural for him, who didn’t have access to the enormous amounts of generational wealth that the top cultivators of the pillar families possessed, to focus his efforts entirely on this prospect.

He didn’t care who held the power, he didn’t care for who won their struggles against whom and he didn’t care whether the sect was at peace or at war. He always went with the option that benefited himself the most financially. In practice that had meant switching sides between differing pillar families as an ally and, ever since he had gotten hold of the Enforcement Hall, promoting conflict with other sects as much as possible.

The Enforcement Hall wasn’t overly strong when it came to economic prowess, but it was the sect’s main center of martial power. That meant that it’s influence, though always great, was practically unrivaled during times of war. And that influence could in turn be sold for great amounts of wealth in the council.

Prior to his breakthrough, Liu Wei had intended to keep following this exact strategy. The power his new stage gave him would make him even more valuable an ally and using the wealth that would follow as well as the incredible personal wealth he had already built up, he had intended to force his progress through the last two stages.

He had purposefully never used those methods to increase his cultivation as long as he could still progress reasonably fast without them, as the usage of resources to further one’s understanding in the Dao Contemplation Realm eventually showed diminishing returns.

What he hadn’t expected was to run into a situation where he would see his wealth become practically useless to him.

Not only did this make his decision to delay his usage of them seem terribly misguided, it also meant that all his previous plans were completely useless now. This left Liu Wei in a situation where he truly didn’t know what to do next.

Sure, he could keep building his political power. Becoming sect patriarch wasn’t feasible because he lacked the support from the pillar families. They were called pillars for a reason; the sect was heavily based around their power. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t continue to increase his own. There were plenty of ways to do so. The problem was that political power wasn’t really a goal, it was the means to achieve one.

Truthfully, increasing one’s personal power through cultivation was little different, but at least that one didn’t have a clear upper limit so it allowed one to always delay the question of what to use that power for. Except to Liu Wei, it suddenly did have an upper limit now, so avoiding the question was no longer an option.

It was just that he didn’t have an answer. His physical needs were well and truly taken care of and it was highly unlikely that that would change at any point in the future. He lived in about as much comfort as a person could and he was a highly reputed elder of a powerful sect, at least regionally. He couldn’t come up with a single need that he had and yet his chest was home to a burning ambition that exploded with anger and disagreement at the thought of simply living out the rest of his life like this.

He truly didn’t know what to do.

The circumstances he was in had his head spinning, as he found himself surrounded by seemingly unsolvable puzzles as a direct result of increasing his cultivation. And so, not seeing any way forward for himself, he decided to do something he hadn’t done in more than a century. Something, that had no logical benefit whatsoever to him: Sleeping.

Cultivators in the realm of Dao Comprehension didn’t need to sleep. The most effective and pleasant method of resting that was accessible to every single one of them was meditation. Even then, they truly didn’t need much rest in the first place unless they had been wounded or otherwise exhausted by outer factors.

In fact, most found the idea of sleeping repulsive. They would need to give up their defenses, their thoughts and even their time for doing so, with no tangible benefit. They would instead be bombarded by the unordered, uncontrolled mishmash of thoughts their primitive instincts thought therapeutic to them in the form of dreams, when meditation could provide them with better results without any of the drawbacks.

Nonetheless, right now nothing seemed as appealing to Liu Wei as the thought of escaping this hellish maze of thoughts that he was trapped in for a while. He made his way to his personal treasury, where he dispelled the defensive formations and, once inside, searched through the large spatial gem that held his more mundane possessions.

When he had found and retrieved the bed that had gone unused for so long, he took it, left the treasury and simply put it in the middle of his living room. Upon laying down on it, he closed his eyes and concentrated to force all of his thought processes to a stop. And just like that, he slid away into the silent world of dreams.

…

He sat in a small boat, floating peacefully along a river. In his hands a fishing rod, on his head a straw hat, protecting his eyes from the sun that shone from a spotless blue sky. A supreme calmness permeated every aspect of the world around him.

A gentle tugging on the fishing line informed him that something had bitten. He needed just a gentle flick of his wrist to launch the fish out of the water and into the air, right towards him. Once it was in range, he expertly caught it with his free hand.

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A light but satisfied smile on his face, he turned his catch around. It was long and slender, its silver-grey scales glittering from the water that was left on them reflecting the sunlight. Its eyes…

He stopped. Staring at him were not the eyes of a fish, but those of a human. And he knew them. They belonged to a disciple that he had punished. And more importantly he knew the question that they were asking him: Why?

Suddenly the sky went black. Lightning streaked, thunder roared and a heavy rainfall hit him out of nowhere. The previously tranquil river was suddenly wild with activity as waves shook the boat and currents threw it around. It only took a few moments for the boat to capsize and for him to be thrown into the black water below.

…

He stood before a crowd of people. Everyone was listening to his words; he was teaching them. He talked of cultivation, of the realms and their stages, of the history of how this process had been developed by the ancestors of their people.

His words were hungrily devoured by his students, they were anxious not to let a drop of the knowledge given to them escape.

He paused for a moment, to give them time to finish their notes. He let his eyes wander through the crowd while he waited, scanning them in satisfaction of his lesson.

Suddenly his eyes met another pair of eyes, looking up at him. They weren’t the eyes of a keen listener. And he knew them. They belonged to a girl, a girl that he had once punished. They screamed at him the question: Why?

Suddenly every single person in the crowd looked up. Every single one of them had a pair of eyes that he recognized. And all of these hundreds of pairs of eyes were asking him the same question: Why?

…

An old hut on a mountain… Why?

…

A busy street… Why?

…

Floating high in the sky… Why?

…

Walking through a dark forest… Why?

…

Liu Wei awoke with a gasp. His heart was pounding, his breath went fast and he was drenched in sweat. For a while, he just laid there, staring at the ceiling and catching his breath.

After calming down a little, Liu Wei separated himself from the blanket that was stuck to his back and sat up. Looking outside he saw that it was the middle of the night.

Never in his hundreds of years of life had he experienced anything that had attacked his mental state this brutally. The fact that his own brain was to blame for this experience was nothing short of absurd.

He had chosen to sleep with the hope of escaping the feeling of helplessness for a while, instead he had been drowned in it. He shivered as he inadvertently remembered the thousands of pairs of eyes that had had stared at him.

How was it that even remembered them so well? He didn’t remember the names any of the people they belonged to, not the offenses they had committed, not the punishments he had handed them. So why did he remember their eyes?

Liu Wei frowned, pushing the images to the back of his mind. There were more important problems to tackle right now. Only, the images refused to be moved away. The more he tried to ignore it, the more intense the eyes seemed to be staring at him.

His frown deepened. This was unprecedented. Control of his own mind was something he had been training for hundreds of years. He refused to have a simple dream wrestle it away from him.

Moving to the floor and into a meditative position, Liu Wei evened his breath and sharpened his focus. For a moment, his mind was still, devoid of any thought, like the undisturbed surface of water.

Then, in an instant, he slammed the entirety of his consciousness with all of its weight against the silent wall of eyes staring him down.

That worked. Of course, it did. As the eyes receded, Liu Wei felt a tension he hadn’t even allowed himself to acknowledge release its grip. Only to pause when he realized that a single last pair of eyes was still there, still staring at him.

He examined it, carefully. It was like all the other ones, yet somehow it was different. It seemed oddly familiar and while it asked the same silent question as the others, this one didn’t seem to be directed at him.

The realization hit Liu Wei like a landslide. These eyes were not those of some disciple, it were his own.

Had he had any capacity to pay attention to his body, he would have been thankful to already be sitting on the floor because the dizziness that hit him, as all of his mental barriers broke down and long suppressed memories came pouring in, would otherwise have thrown him of his feet.

Alas, he was entirely occupied taking in the scene playing in his mind.

He saw a version of himself that no other person alive would be able to identify as him anymore. The unimportant outer disciple that he had been, long before his talent would begin to shine and long before he would climb the ranks despite his humble background, was suspended in a deep bow before the towering figure of an elder.

Liu Wei could feel the fear, feel the confusion that his past self had felt back then. The scene was a perfect mirror of him punishing a disciple.

Why did this scene shock him so much? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known that he had been on the receiving end of punishment back in his days as a disciple.

The fact remained the same: The strong could lord over the weak as they wished. Such was the natural order. Why did this explanation suddenly feel so empty? It was something he had known and practiced for nearly all of his life. Something all of the other elders would agree with him on.

No, not all of them! A picture of Elder Rong flashed before his eyes.

There were elders that rejected this order. And the more Liu Wei thought about it, the less it made sense to him.

Both the cowering disciple and the mighty elder were him, just at different points in his life. If those two roles could be occupied by the same person, what sense did it make that one of them should have the right to treat the other that way?

None. That was the answer. What separated them, be it time, talent or fortune, was after all entirely out of their control.

Liu Wei felt a crack forming in his very sense of self. His personality, his beliefs, his entire outlook on the world was founded on the very thing he was currently questioning. If his superiority in power did not make him superior in right, who was he to act in the way he did?

One crack turned into many as all of his flimsy attempts at justification failed before his own ruthless questioning.

Liu Wei couldn’t bring himself to stop, even though he knew full well that what he was doing was seriously dangerous. A cultivator as old as himself couldn’t just turn over and renounce all that their world-view was based on. If his self-conception was to fully collapse under this pressure, he ran the risk of literally becoming lost in his own mind, perhaps forever.

It was already too late to go back though. He had opened doors that couldn’t be closed anymore, not by any means he possessed. He needed to somehow form his sense of self anew and he needed to do so sooner rather than later if he wanted to survive this whole ordeal.