All the same, Zeng Fei would have to leave his domain soon as his consciousness was unable to tolerate the cold in here for much longer.

Because of this, he decided to rush through the other things he wanted to check, and then organise his thoughts and observations outside.

“Hey, Pingu. Do that slapping technique you were doing before.”

Having grown bored of standing there, Pingu was halfway to the lake, going to play.

Naturally, Zeng Fei put his foot down and ordered his unruly minion to return at once (translation: a combination attack of coaxing, pleading, and making funny noises so that he seemed more appealing than the lake; faced with such devilish tactics, the poor penguin never stood a chance).

And so, using his commanding voice and many years of life experience over his minion, Zeng Fei won the minor power struggle and re-asserted himself as the master in their relationship.

Pingu waddled back over and made the motions to execute Serpentine Slap, but his wings didn’t snap forwards at the blistering speeds of before, nor did they give off a serpentine aura.

The technique’s drop in power also looked to be greater than what Pingu’s drop in physical capabilities could explain alone. This revealed how important the technique grade was, that a drop from mortal to trash quality had caused such a large effect on performance.

Next, Zeng Fei fed the Green-horned Python’s core back to Pingu, no longer having any qualms about doing this now that he knew it was part of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art, and that the core could be removed at any time.

Pingu’s status returned to how it’d initially looked, with Serpentine Slap pushed back into mortal grade now that the negative modifier ‘Absence of serpent essence’ had disappeared.

When Pingu executed Serpentine Slap again, gone was the impression that he was flapping his wings at imaginary flies buzzing around him (or maybe until now he’d just been cheerily waving towards Zeng Fei, who’d misinterpreted it for a shoddy martial technique).

His wings now propelled and swished the air loudly, certain to give a crisp smack to anyone unfortunate enough to be in their way.

As Pingu repeatedly used the technique, the spiritual qi in the domain noticeably thinned, and Zeng Fei could perceive his own tank of qi being drained as a result.

No wonder Pingu’s summon had been cancelled so quickly during the fight, then, when the penguin had been guzzling down qi like an alcoholic who’d just been told the company was covering all expenses tonight.

Zeng Fei had to beg Pingu to stop using the technique before his qi ran dry again, before departing from the domain.

His consciousness returned to his body lying on the bed, and he wrapped himself in the coarse blanket, trembling to the core.

Once back to normal, the first question he addressed was where this System, hitherto unseen, had come from: the answer to which was clearly the Emperor’s Divine Art.

Why else would the Emperor’s notes have been included in Serpentine Slap’s description if not for some personal connection between the two?

The System as a whole seemed intimately linked to the Divine Art instead of being a personal cheat he’d received for transmigrating as why else would it only pop up for Pingu.

As Zeng Fei pondered on the topic, he realised that the spirit adviser had hinted as much when it’d said - after he’d asked how the long-deceased Emperor would be able to tell if he was hiding his identity as the Emperor’s successor - that the Heavenly Demon Divine Art possessed many astounding features not found in other techniques, including an entity that autonomously organised the Emperor’s troops.

Was that not precisely what the System was? Without Zeng Fei moving a muscle, it’d guided Pingu to seek out demon cores; and once he’d eaten the core, it’d bestowed him with a fitting technique.

With the System in place to micromanage his minions’ day-to-day growth, all the Emperor had to do was select their build paths through the specific demon cores he fed them.

When viewed that way, the System’s resemblance to game systems in the auto-battler genre was uncanny, leading Zeng Fei to his second conclusion: the Emperor must have been someone from modern-day Earth.

In light of that, could it be that the spirit adviser had been the one to summon Zeng Fei’s spirit over to this world to inherit its Master’s technique?

Maybe that’s why the spirit adviser had asked him to identify it on the first meeting, a test on how well-read he was on the xianxia genre, and therefore how well he could be expected to do in this world.

Assuming he was correct on the Emperor’s identity as an otherworlder, this implied two important things.

One, in proving that Zeng Fei’s transmigration was not an isolated case, it opened up the possibility there were more transmigrators out there in this world than just Zeng Fei.

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He’d have to be on the watch for anyone acting odd as other transmigrators had the dual-capability of being the most helpful people to him but also the most threatening.

Two, time must flow differently here in relation to Earth for the Emperor to have already become an ancient cultivator despite having presumably been someone from Zeng Fei’s era, and therefore transmigrated over a few years before him at most.

So maybe Zeng Fei could regain his old life back if he figured out how to return to his original body (the primary appeal not being his lacklustre old life, but rather the opportunity to get out of this murderhobo-infested cultivation world where your entire clan could be exterminated for looking at some random Dong or Wong the wrong way).

Or maybe that wasn’t possible, actually, seeing as his body must have become vacant when his soul left…

Did that mean he’d been declared dead already, or had another spirit taken over his vacant body in the same way he’d taken over Zeng Fei’s?

The person most likely to know the answers to these questions, as well as the route to return, was the spirit adviser, making Zeng Fei’s action plan very simple: get strong enough to break into that damned cave, grab the negligent spirit adviser by the collar, and start screaming abuse in its face. He wanted to see it ‘ohoho’ its way out of that one.

Oh, and to get answers from it during the interrogation process.

Naturally, Zeng Fei wasn’t so spiteful that he wanted to do this solely because it’d tricked him once or twice (okay, he was, but that was besides the point). Rather, it was because of something else the spirit adviser had done that Zeng Fei had been too late to clock on to.

To understand, you had to begin with Serpentine Slap’s description, where it was plain to see the Emperor had stolen the technique from a sect known as the Venomous Court.

This by itself wasn’t anything surprising given the spirit adviser’s mention of the Emperor’s fondness for acting like a highwayman and shaking down any cultivators unlucky enough to run into him, eventually progressing onto robbing the banks (sects) directly.

While such conduct would have made him many enemies, it shouldn’t have been enough to make the entire cultivation realm group up against him; stealing techniques was not an uncommon phenomenon to begin with, especially amongst rogue cultivators.

The only reason stealing techniques wasn’t more popular was: A, it created needless enemies; and B, doing so was more likely to worsen your combat prowess over the long term than improve them.

This was because learning a technique to proficiency required you to put in substantial time and effort, rare resources too in a lot of cases. Hence learning many unrelated techniques that had little affinity with you nor each other was seen as spreading yourself thin; in actual combat, the people who did so almost always lost out against counterparts who’d gone narrow and deep.

The Emperor had gotten around this disadvantage by creating a Divine Art that acted both as a unit creator and a repository of knowledge to train his units with.

No wonder, then, that the other cultivators had been so frightened of his potential; the longer he lived and the more techniques he stole, the more powerful his army of minions would grow, each of them specialised in different Dao Schools.

In effect, the Heavenly Demon Emperor had transformed himself into the equivalent of an aircraft carrier in this world: a mobile sect that could park itself outside your doorstep and wage war at any time. With such capabilities, world domination was less of a pipe dream and more a matter of time as long as he picked off the opposition one by one.

That’s probably why, even after killing him, the ancient cultivators had gone further in destroying all records of him: to ensure that no one in the future would be inspired by him and come up with a similarly batshit cultivation technique.

As for the spirit adviser’s crime in all this, that was for saying that Zeng Fei wouldn’t get in any trouble as long as he didn’t start robbing cultivators willy-nilly like the Emperor had done.

Even better, he wouldn’t even have to as the Emperor had said his successor would inherit everything, which must include the stolen techniques as well: this must be what that library next to the ritual circle had been for.

As to where those scrolls had disappeared off to, Zeng Fei’s best guess was they’d somehow fused with the Divine Art during the ritual; after all, how else could the System have gifted Pingu a suitable technique without already possessing the knowledge?

Once you understood why the entire cultivation world had feared the Heavenly Demon Emperor (or more specifically, his created Divine Art) it became equally obvious that the spirit adviser’s assurance that Zeng Fei would be fine as long he didn’t start robbing people was ludicrously naive.

After all, if the survivors of the final confrontation had hated the Emperor enough to scrub every record of him, what were the chances that they hadn’t prepared for the eventuality of him returning, either through a second body or by passing on his will to a successor?

In every story with Heavenly Demon Emperors, whenever they were struck down, there was nothing they liked to do more than to pretend they were in a cutscene: theatrically professing the futility of the heroes’ actions and promising them that the baddies would rise again to take revenge before long, the whole shebang.

All the evidence pointed towards this Emperor acting no different, especially when the sole demand he’d made of his successor had been one intended to ensure his enemies would know he was the one responsible for siccing this mad-dog on them.

There left no room for doubt: the Emperor’s enemies were 100% prepared for round 2.

It could be those same guys were alive even now - old powerhouses in the xianxia setting could live for literal millennia after all.

But even if they weren’t, they’d most definitely set up some sort of agency or secret group to act as world protectors, just in case their arch-rival was playing the long game.

This all went to say that Zeng Fei was royally fucked now: in his eagerness to slap sense into Dong Ju, he’d summoned Pingu in front of countless disciples, foolishly believing the spirit adviser’s words that it’d be fine.

It was too late to put a lid on this Pandora’s box either seeing as rumours about novel techniques spread quicker than the speed of light.

There was no point in regrets now - better he get himself strong enough to beat up the useless spirit adviser, and also to defend himself in case the Emperor’s old enemies came knocking.

I may be fucked, but I have the time to give myself a fighting chance at saving myself, Zeng Fei reassured himself.

Unfortunately, this was only half correct.

He was fucked; and it was too late, as he’d discover by the morrow.