There was a knock on my door and I frowned. I was losing track of time investigating my cultivation in depth. The deeper I looked, the more time I was losing. I had been thinking constantly over the reason, but there was no good explanation with what I knew about cultivation.
“Enter,” I said with a frown. An older man entered my cabin.
“Master,” the old man bowed his head. “I wanted to pay my last respects before I depart.” The voice sounded familiar.
“Come, let us have tea,” I said while trying to figure out who I was talking to. The old man sat down as I prepared some tea.
“You have been quiet for a long time. Even Elder Tan was getting a bit worried,” the man said. I weighed my thoughts and decided to get a second opinion. I doubt it would help, but losing time like I had, was not a good thing in my mind. It made the trip pass by more quickly, but I was unsure as to my lifespan. It could also be some effect as I got closer to the center of the Great World.
“I have experienced something unexpected,” I said as I poured out both cups of tea. It then hit me who this old man was. “Fu Shirong.” The man who had decided to come with me and who was handling travel arrangements for a while.
“Yes? What is the problem Master?” he asked. I shook my head slowly.
“I have been losing track of time,” I replied while I sipped my tea.
“While cultivating?” he asked and I nodded. “How badly?”
“Between you entering this cabin, and my last visitor, how long would you say it has been?” I asked.
“Not since the end of the Leaf Woof battle. That was over three decades ago,” he said.
“About thirty days from my perspective,” I replied and there was silence at that.
“Did you lose yourself in cultivation or something else?” Fu Shirong hesitantly asked while sipping his tea. For being so old, it had not lost its flavor. There was also a very small coating of dust that covered everything in the cabin.
“Something else. The deeper I tried to peer, the greater the impact on my perception. This shouldn’t be happening, which is concerning,” I explained.
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Fu Shirong said. “Do you want me to get Elder Tan?” he asked and I shook my head.
“No. The fact that I reacted to a knock on the door shows that I am not disabled. My personal age does not seem to be impacted either,” I replied. There was silence, while I was still trying to work out what had happened. For me only a short time had passed, but everyone else had experienced decades.
“I suspect it has to do with a limitation on the cultivation of the Great World,” I said out loud and sipped my tea, trying to put my thoughts in order. “More concerning is no one bothered me in the last couple of decades. Storms, leviathans?” I asked.
“We have handled all of it Master. The fleet has grown. The great pilgrimage to the center of the Great World. Many more cultivators have joined up. They often wonder if you are real, but enough people have seen you,” he answered.
“As long as we have kept moving towards the center of the Great World, then I have no complaint. But you did not come here to listen to my problems, you are leaving?” I asked.
“I am old. My cultivation has stagnated. Rather than continue onwards, I would rather settle down somewhere, on a mountain, looking out over a peaceful valley,” Fu Shirong said. He had clearly changed in the last couple of decades. But that was the nature of mortals, to change as their bodies decayed. Their hopes and dreams unfulfilled.
“You have my blessing and permission to depart. Take some money and supplies so you don’t encounter problems,” I said. Fu Shirong bowed his head deeply.
“Thank you Master,” he said. “I am sorry, I cannot help you any more after all that you have done for me.”
“Think nothing of it,” I said and he quickly left my cabin. I rang a bell and a servant quickly entered.
“This place needs dusting and the tea set needs to be put away,” I ordered as I got up. The servant quickly left to get supplies while I left the cabin. I looked at the withered face of Vice Leader Tan who was just finishing a conversation with Fu Shirong. He looked at me in surprise and then smiled.
“Greetings Senior,” he bowed his head.
“Junior,” I replied with a small nod. Fu Shirong had already left. Saying a second goodbye was pointless. “I have heard you have expanded the number of cultivators that are traveling with us?”
“It is the Great Pilgramige to the center of the Great World. Many senior cultivators or those hoping to see sights no one has seen before have joined us. Already our fleet it quite large, but we have encountered no serious problems,” he explained.
“It is fine. I am just curious,” I replied as we walked out onto the deck of the ship. There were other ships traveling with us along with other cultivators on board. I saw many of them quickly look at me in surprise.
“There is still quite a ways to go. Decades more,” Vice Leader Tan said. “I have appointed my replacement for when I pass. Junior Wei has been listening to me for quite a while.” A middle aged woman stepped forward from the other cultivators standing on the deck of my ship. She bowed deeply.
“Junior Wei greets Senior Yuan Zhou,” she said. I gave her a slight head nod and then looked back at Vice Leader Tan.
“Do as you see fit, as long as our progress is not stopped. If there is ever a serious problem, you can disturb me,” I said this both to Tan and Wei. No wonder why senior cultivators kept their distance. The moment you get to know someone, they were leaving or dying.
“Of course. Is there anything you need before you go back into seclusion?” Vice Leader Tan asked me. I considered the question.
“Do you know of any stories where cultivators have lost time while cultivating or their perception of time altered?” I asked. Vice Leader Tan frowned as he considered my question.
“No. Nothing comes to mind. Not even legendary tales,” he replied. I let out a soft hum at that answer. It was not the one I wanted, but one I expected. There was something weird going on and it was annoying I could tell what the root cause was.
“Senior, I may have information,” Junior Wei said and bowed deeply. Already she was proving herself useful.
“Speak,” I ordered, hoping to move things along.
“There is a substance used by the Wood Sect, supposedly some kind of rare sap. It blocks one’s perceptions of time. Often it is used for individuals going into a long term meditation. I know this, since I was part of several trade caravans that exchanged for this sap,” she said.
“How does it work exactly?” I asked.
“All I know is that it blocks perception of time passing. It isn’t a poison and I have never heard of it being used in combat. It is often used as a recreational drug by rich people,” she said.
“Does it actually slow down body processes?” I asked.
“No. It only impacts one sense of time,” she answered. I was poisoned. Those idiots had poisoned me.
“Check on me every ten minutes,” I replied and focused on my body. Instantly someone was gently shaking me.
“Senior,” I looked back up at Junior Wei who had a nervous look on her face. The fact that I felt no time pass was very bad.
“How does one get rid of this poison?” I asked.
“It should pass naturally, otherwise I have no idea, Senior, my deepest apologies,” she said. The poison was interacting with my advanced cultivation in a weird way. My body was beyond basic processes and was mostly static. It was mostly unchanging. When I focused my attention internally, the poison was either triggered or my other senses had dulled enough for it to take effect.
It wasn’t dangerous either, in the slightest. That was why my danger sense didn’t trigger and I could be easily roused. When I killed the cultivators in the battle, they could have easily been using techniques to spray such a substance into the air and I inhaled it. I had thought the dying gasps, were just that. Instead it was something far more insidious. They had probably hoped to overdose me in battle, messing with my perception of time.
Instead, the poison impacted me in a different way. Making me lose time if I focused internally. That also prevented me from countering the poison in any reasonable manner. That left unreasonable methods for countering the poison.
“How interesting, a poison that doesn’t trigger my danger sense,” I muttered while making sure to pay attention to the moment I existed in. It would be embarrassing to lose any more time to such a ploy. Time to make sure it was all gone and to purge my physical body.
I began stripping right there on the deck. “Wash these clothes multiple times and prepare a new set of robes for me. I will return shortly after taking a bath,” I said while handing my clothes over to a nervous servant who was averting their eyes. I then leapt off the side of the ship into the water. It was decently warm. We were clearly getting closer to the center of the Great World. The water near the edges had been almost freezing. Also the Life Light was slightly higher in the sky.
I swam next to the ship for several minutes next to the side of the ship in the port we were docked at, even taking the time to rinse out my mouth with the filthy salt water. Hopefully that was enough to get whatever traces of this time sap were on me cleaned off. Once that was done, I climbed back out, where a white robe had been prepared and was held up by a servant.
“Get buckets of fresh water,” I ordered and waved off the robe. I was handed a towel to cover me while servants rushed back with buckets and barrels of fresh water, pouring them over me. The salt water was rinsed off and I took the time to rinse out my mouth. I then took the robe and put it on and was brought over to a large table set up on the deck with a range of food and drinks.
Sitting down, I began to eat. While my body would normally burn up anything I consumed, there had to be a limit. Eventually I would either throw up, or waste would come out the other end, and I would keep eating and drinking. Consuming food and drink focused my mind on the present and would hopefully force my body to metabolize or process the time sap that I had breathed in. By now it would have passed through my lungs, into my body.
Trying conventional poison removal tactics wouldn’t work, like puking my guts out or hoping it would pass out of my body. If the poison had remained inside of me for a couple of decades, then it wasn’t about to dissipate on its own. The best hope in my mind was force my body’s metabolism to engage, with the hope that the poison would be metabolized as well.
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After all the Wood Sect cultivators I had killed, I doubted any would be willing to help me. And even if I wanted help, turning back was not going to happen. The poison was incredibly annoying, but didn’t impact my ability to fight or to live. It just made it impossible to work on my cultivation.
In fact the poisoning probably happened before the large battle. I had already been losing a bit of time, but it had gotten worse after the large battle. I could only imagine how much poison had entered my body. Something that didn’t trigger my danger sense was incredibly insidious. I had never heard about such a poison in the past.
It really wasn’t a poison, more of a narcotic with mind altering properties that impacted a person’s sense of time. “If I stop eating, shake my body,” I instructed to whomever was listening.
I kept eating while I focused on the food that had entered my body. A massive headache hit me and I reeled back gasping. “Senior, are you okay?” Junior Wei asked me. I waved her off.
“This sap is quite an insidious poison,” I muttered. The moment I focused on my body internally and my digestion process, my body and mind felt like they were separating. My body was speeding forward while my mind stayed still. The poison was in my brain or my soul. Probably the first one, but I couldn’t discount the second.
“We are in port, any chance there would be some sap for purchase here?” I asked.
“We have passed far beyond the domain of the Wood Sect, Senior. The only option would be to go back,” Junior Wei said.
“That is not happening. I am not wasting time returning,” I picked up a slab of meat with my hands and began shoving it into my mouth. I needed to eat far too rapidly in order to overwhelm my mind to pay attention to decorum. I focused on the food entering my body once more, focusing on the feeling of eating.
I then diverted part of my attention to my brain, while paying attention to the food in my body to not lose track of time. “Ah!” I let out a soft shout and reeled back in my chair. Curse those Wood Sect Cultivators. The sap was everywhere in my brain. I could sense the very minor energy difference it had to my physical body.
Turning to the side where there was a wood bucket, I puked up food and blood. The problem was trying to focus on the sap while not losing track of time. Focusing on it, caused a minute amount of energy to enter the sap, which overwhelmed my natural defenses to such things. Or I was using certain parts of my brain to focus on my body in detail, which was linked to my sense of temporal perception.
Regardless, the sap was being energized when I inspected my body. My ability to introspect my own body was being turned against me. I had to give it to the Wood Sect. It was beyond clever. A poison that was not a poison. It wasn’t a threat to my life in any way. But it crippled my attempts to advance my cultivation and to remove it.
While I was confident I could remove it, it would be due to my body decaying. I had inhaled too much of the drug. Immense quantities of it and it had contaminated my entire body to an extreme degree. Without a supply, there was no way to concoct an antidote. It had metastasized to my brain.
I finished the current plate of food, and another plate was served to me. I continued to eat and drink without reservation. I didn’t have much hope of flushing the poison out after so long. And it was in my brain. I still thought with my brain. The next cultivation bottleneck was transitioning away from a physical based body to an energy based body.
If I broke through, then that should solve this issue. But that was even more impossible than dealing with the poison at the moment. Even worse the poison stopped me from attempting to improve my cultivation. The deeper I looked into my body, the more I lost sense of my track of time.
While chewing down on some more roasted meat, I focused back on my brain. I could sense the poison, like tiny tumors, scattered everywhere. Taking it the slight fluctuations of energy that passed through them and releasing their own back into my brain.
It was painful just to see that much. I focused my attention just a bit more, and the poison began outputting a lot more energy. I stopped focusing on the poison and returned my attention back to eating while I considered what I had discovered.
The poison was acting as a filter for my perceptions. It was tied to the key locations in my brain. The more I focused, the more the poison became agitated, which caused the pain. Normally I would focus and feel with my energy what something was, like an extra limb or sense. This information was translated by my brain.
The poison was beyond clever, since it would match the strength of a person’s cultivation. The stronger the cultivator, the more energy the poison was able to absorb. It would then release that energy slowly back into the brain, causing one’s perception of time to be messed with, while still getting feedback.
Focusing intently used the parts of my brain where the poison was concentrated, allowing it to become more active. When I focused on my brain itself, I was getting feedback that didn’t match what I was seeing and the poison grew more agitated, since my focus increased the amount of energy a small fraction, upsetting the balance the poison had created.
While it might be called a sap or a drug, it was ultimately a poison for me. The effects truly were crippling. If I pushed to observe it more, or attempt to remove it, it would output more and more energy in a way my brain was not meant to handle. I would suffer a brain bleed at best, and my head would explode in the worst-case scenario.
Consuming food and drink might help, but this was a plant-based drug. And from its sap as well. Refined through millennia of selective breeding. There was no chance I would be able to remove it on my own. I needed someone else to go in and remove the sap from me.
Or I could attempt to remove it myself before we reached our destination. I would have a couple of minutes at most to remove the poison, which in turn would be centuries from an outside perspective. The problem was it was spread out and interlocked with various portions of my brain like a cancer. Directly intercepting the signals between neurons.
Since the poison was empowered by the cultivation of the cultivator who used the stuff, there was a good chance I would be cutting out a portion of my own brain while trying to remove it. And it had to come out if I wanted to improve my cultivation. Other people might think losing large chunks of time would speed things up, but they were idiots.
I needed to make every moment count to improve my cultivation and to figure out how to improve it. Wasting time lost to this poison was a death sentence.
After I finished eating, I inspected my body in ten minute intervals. The poison remained. I attempted to slowly just impact one small portion of the poison in my brain. But I was shaken awake just as I got a look at the poison.
Sitting in my cabin, another cultivator was sitting off to the side with a glass of sand. They would check in on me every ten minutes, unless I ordered otherwise. Even though I wasn’t focused on my cultivation, I didn’t want to lose more time.
I would have my minions inquire about cures, or similar poisons in the cities we passed by, but I wasn’t optimistic. At this point, things were so bad that I was even considering turning around. I would lose around forty years going all the way back and returning, but the trip to the center of the Great World was far longer than that.
The people following me would be quite upset losing so much time which was another consideration. The ship was being seen to by cultivators who had elected to go on a pilgrimage to the center of the Great World. If they left me, then it would be much more difficult to travel.
Sure, some would stick around, but I could also see resentment building. I wanted to scream in rage, since I had never even considered such a poison. One that doesn’t harm and might even be considered beneficial. The real problem was my danger sense.
It was something that was innate to each cultivator, that grew stronger with their cultivation. The most I knew about it was that danger sense was derived from the fluctuations caused by a cultivator’s death or injury rippling through time itself. The shock of being hurt or killed, was greater the more powerful the cultivator, which increased the danger sense.
Senior Yang Heng said it was an innate part of being a cultivator, and there were many explanations. The real danger was something that could kill without trigger this danger sense. He mentioned this in relation to cultivators or weapons using temporal techniques, which was considered beyond advanced and incredibly risk to pursue as the focus of one’s cultivation.
That was why Chaos monsters were so dangerous as well. They could bypass cause and effect, which would bypass a cultivator’s danger sense to varying degrees. As for danger sense being something echoing through time itself, he had said better minds than me had considered such a question but if they had discovered anything he did not know.
I needed my body to reject the poison on its own and expel it. To force my cultivation to resist the poison. The problem was that the sap blended in very well into my brain and took in my energy and released it. It was the perfect method of stealth and its impact evaded my danger sense. Since it would only kill me by sucking up my time and I would die a natural death eventually.
If I couldn’t continue my journey of cultivation, it was better to die than to give up. I had made this choice many times in the past and I made it again. It was time to take a risk, but I had finally come up with a possible solution to deal with this problem. I began focusing on my internal energy and increasing the amount in my head as slowly as possible. I was shaken every ten minutes and gave a response while doing this, making sure I did not lose track of time, which I wasn’t.
My plan to deal with the poison was to adjust the poison itself. I would increase the energy in my head over time, more and more. Eventually the level of energy in my head would be incredibly high. I would then normalize the amount of energy in my head, which would reveal the poison, since it would retain that high energy state.
I would be able to observe the poison and remove it without succumbing to its effects. The energy used to observe and remove the poison from my body would be below the threshold for triggering it. That was how I knew it was something used in desperation.
If the poison was really insidious, then I wouldn’t be able to increase the energy of the poison after it had set in place, in my brain without my knowledge. However, the sap was still in flux. The trick was not increasing the energy too quickly. It was incredibly slow, taking weeks of slowly increasing the energy in my head slowly.
I had cultivators check on me every ten minutes, to make sure my perception of time was not being impacted in the slightest. I wouldn’t take the risk of losing years or even decades to this poison. After the first five weeks, I had an understanding of how quickly I could increase the amount of energy in my head.
It would take an entire year of slowly increasing my energy, before the energy in my head reached the level of when I was focusing my observation on my brain. It was incredibly tedious and frustrating. If I ever went back in this direction and had a chance to stop. I would be eradicating the entire Wood Sect.
The frustration I felt about this sap was beyond immense. I had lived a long life, experienced many set backs, but this one was one I felt the most frustrated about. Not because it was the most impactful. Aoyin had a far greater impact, but that was a situation I had no control over.
Getting poisoned was something I should have expected and prevented. I would be paying attention to my breathing and what I was breathing very carefully while in combat going forward. Getting poisoned like this, was something that should have never happened to begin with.
One year of constant focus, with reminders of every ten minutes, I had managed to increase the energy in my head to match the energy I used when I focused on my brain. One of the nice things about the poison was that it somehow completely mitigated the need for sleep. I could go without sleep for long periods of time already, but somehow the poison was impacting my brain in a way I didn’t understand. The fact it was beneficial in any way made it incredibly frustrating. With a couple of tweaks, it would be a powerful medicine.
But I was going to remove the poison if possible. Even with its benefits, the downsides was too great. I let the energy drop to normal in my head, and I felt a slight headache.
I then focused my attention on the poison that was coated to parts of my brain. There were several points it was located on, but I could inspect it closely without being caught in the moment. I could respect the Wood Sect and what they had come up with, but they were still going to die horribly if I could manage it.
Now I just needed to figure out how to remove it. Focusing my energy, I tried to use a slight amount of force, to push the poison off of a neuron. I was shaken awake. I needed to increase the energy in my head even more before attempting to remove it. The energy from trying to remove the poison caused me to lose my sense of time. I had been hopeful that wouldn’t be the case, but I wasn’t going to get off that easy unfortunately. I went back to flooding my brain with energy and slowly increasing the amount for another year.
Once it was high enough, I should be able to remove the poison from my brain without losing track of time. At least that was my hope.
There were billions of neurons in my brain. About five percent were covered in poison, which equated to around five billion neurons. Removing the poison from my first neuron took around a day. If that pace kept up I would spend around 13.6 million years. I needed to fix 10 million neurons a day to get this done at a reasonable pace.
That was something I was used to. Picking up the pace and this was just an added step to my cultivation. I managed to get one done around once every ten minutes, which meant instead of 13.6 million years, I would need around 95,000 years instead.
I considered living with the poison, but the problem was that if the energy spiked in my head then I would lose track of time. Also, I had a constant headache from the portions of my brain with the poison on them, from the lack of energy now present. I needed to inspect the poison more in depth and understand how it worked to counter it wholesale.
The headaches might get worse, but my hope was my physical body would adjust and slowly begin rejecting the poison. After spending several weeks trying to remove the poison more quickly, I flooded my head with energy once more, slowly increasing the amount. The headache had gotten worse after the second time and it would undoubtedly get worse after this third time of increasing the energy and then cutting it off.
Hopefully I would be able to remove the poison more easily then. I would have to see if it changed after another session of increasing the energy and then setting things back to normal.