As soon as Shen materialized back on Earth, he felt something was lacking. It didn't take his high learning ability to realize it was the Concept Intuition modification, which had been removed from his mind when he left the Pioneer Tutorial.

It was a little disorientating to suddenly find himself without that, though the extra 10% learning ability of his Rising Star Title helped a little. Not much, but every bit counted.

He took a few moments to gather his thoughts while he took a look around.

Guardians were given perfect night vision, so he saw everything as clear as if he were in the open under the sun. The place he had slept for at least a few thousand years was a beautiful, glistering crystal coffin placed on a kind of stone altar in the middle of a small cavern.

Shen checked the crystal and found its name, Dragonforged Tempered Diamond, written in counter-relief on a corner of the material. He then recalled he didn't need that to find out what that object was.

"Inspect," he said.

Modified Time-Locking Coffin

Tier: B++

Enchantments: Time Lock (B+), Energy Conservation (B+), Energy Conversion (B+), Damage Resistance (B+), Decay Resistance (B+), Healing Trigger* (B+), Air Purification* (C+)

A lidless coffin. As long as there's enough energy, it'll keep any living being inside it alive by locking them in time.

It perfectly retains all energy placed inside it. Energy from any non-living source is consumed to its functions, especially the time-lock. It works more efficiently with Time-attuned qi.

It's made of Dragonforged Tempered Diamond, a rare and expensive material that can resist any amount of raw energy for at least 500,000 years.

This technology was only recently added to the Alliance. Despite using qi rather than mana, it would be a great addition to any A-rank hospital, as some injuries require specialists that might not be available when the patient arrives.

This specific coffin was modified in two ways:

1. Healing Trigger: it can only affect people who are injured and unconscious. Once they are healed, they will wake up.

2. Air Purification: an air-purifying magic formation was added to prevent a mortal from dying asphyxiated if they wake up in a sealed space.

Those modifications were inlaid on the formations already existent in the Dragonforged Tempered Diamond. This is a challenging material to work with. Therefore, enormous, exquisite craftsmanship was needed to add effects on top of everything the coffin already did without weakening the other effects.

It's highly suggested that you hide it well, as it will attract the greed of many malcontents.

That was a lot of information, more than he had ever seen in any item. Then again, it was the first B-tier item he ever saw, a B++ at that. It surpassed what a B+ should do yet fell short of an A- item, probably because it had one extra enchantment on top of the six expected of a B item, yet none was better than B+.

Shen touched the glass with a sad smile. If his theory about the equivalence between cultivation realms and Alliance ranks was correct, someone who had just entered the Ethereal Harmonizing realm would be the same as a C-rank, while those who mastered Laws later at that realm would be B-ranks.

His father had been a powerful Ethereal Harmonizing realm cultivator. Only the Immortal Emperor and his right hand were suspected of having ever reached the realm beyond, which should be the same as A-rank. Neither had ever admitted to it, but Shen's father had said it would be silly to put the Emperor in the same category as everyone else.

Also, from what he knew of prices in the Alliance, B+ items would be things only rich or stuck B-ranks would purchase. B++ items should be even more outrageously expensive.

That made this coffin alone proof of his father's care for Shen. Shen had no doubt he had been the one to provide it.

Unfortunately, he had to sell it.

Shen had no of walking around with it in an inconspicuous manner, and he wouldn't leave it lying around. He should be the strongest human around, but Alicia's warnings about atomic bombs were still fresh on his mind. He would rather not tempt fate.

"I want to sell this coffin," he said with a heavy heart.

| You cannot sell something you didn't craft yourself

Well, that was unfortunate. Then again, it was a nice way of preventing people from pillaging others and exchanging the stolen items for AP.

But what could he do with that coffin?

As he looked at it, he noticed a tiny bit of color amid the dust. He put his hand inside and felt something akin to sand on the bottom of the coffin. He pulled it to reveal golden beads only a little larger than grains of sand. They shone with qi, and he knew what they were even before Inspecting them.

Time-attuned Qi Stone

Tier: C+

A qi stone attuned with the Laws of Time.

The tiny, perfectly round beads explained all the dust in the coffin. As qi stones were spent, they turned into dust. He had wondered if someone had tried to drown him in the dust before, and maybe it wasn't too far from the truth. A lot of Time-attuned qi stones had been put in his coffin to fuel its functions.

He fished for all the remaining stones he could find and ended up with a handful.

Looking around, he found his backpack, the enormous shield, armor pieces, and his E- spear beside the "altar" where the coffin lay. He put the stones in the bag and looked at the other objects.

What would he do with all that and the coffin?

Shen frowned when he saw another glimmering thing below the shield. He moved it to find a small, round, white metal plate. He grabbed it and confirmed what he thought.

It was a recorder.

He had worried about how he would get to his clan's ancestral home. Maybe he didn't need to; maybe this would give him the answers he wanted. Or maybe not.

Only one way to find out.

The recorder had two thin, delicate crystal runes on one side. The rune on the center of the recorder was larger, while a smaller one rested at the edge. Shen left the side with the runes up and injected qi into the device.

The crystal runes shone with white light as the thing started working. Shen was saddened but not surprised when the central rune cracked, and the recorder started shooting a mess of colors at the cave's ceiling.

Recorders weren't supposed to last thousands of years; people were supposed to replace them. The image function wouldn't work, though Shen could probably recover it if he found a good craftsman. Fortunately, the smaller rune worked, filling the cave with his father's voice.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Hello, son," the man said with a voice more tired than Shen had ever heard. Shen's eyes teared up at once. "There are only two possibilities for you to be hearing this. Either someone found you and let you listen to this recording as proof of my wrongdoings, or my betrayal paid off in the end. I hope it's the latter."

Shen was glad for the pause that followed that declaration. Betrayal? What betrayal? His father was one of the rocks that stabilized the Eternal Empire! He would never betray anyone!

Was this treachery? Had the Feng Clan's enemies left this here for Shen to find out?

"I forbade everyone from talking about the reason behind your mother's murder. But if you used qi to activate this disk, you became a cultivator; thus, I have no right to veil the truth from you any longer. If you were captured by our angry clansmen or my enemies... You can only blame this old man for lacking in his preparations."

It looked like Feng Yang would make another pause, but he continued

, "Your mother could no longer bear children after you were born. She was killed because the elders wanted me to have a child with someone else, and I refused to take a concubine."

Then the pause came, and Shen felt the world spin. His D-rank legs, with all the might of D- strength and the training of a level 6 D+ movement art, suddenly felt weak. He sought a wall to support him, but he was too far and just fell, sitting on the ground.

The untold words were the true brutal ones: Shen's birth had crippled his mother, and his inability to cultivate had sealed her fate.

He had killed her as surely as if he had put a dagger through her heart.

"I kept my distance from you throughout the years to protect your life," his father continued, his voice getting softer. "Yet, I never stopped watching you. I saw you grow, and I saw you make the same mistakes of your mother's youth.

"When you were five..." he trailed off. "No, maybe it's better we don't go down that road. It's too presumptuous of me to reminisce through time and space with you after my betrayal.

"Suffice to say, you're your mother's son. It was my blessing to see her through your every action as you grew up. The Heavens may hate all cultivators, but they were kind to me for sixteen years. For that, I shall be eternally grateful.

"You inherited your mother's sense of responsibility, so I won't tell you not to blame yourself for her death. You will need time to process this. And one day, you'll understand it was not your fault.

"Alas, today is not that day.

"But I can share something with you to lessen your burden. The poison that the elder used to kill your mother should not have acted so fast. It only did so because she had already been poisoned before.

"Someone used poison to kill while you were in her womb. You survived thanks to her Path, but that's why she couldn't bear children anymore, and that's why she was killed."

Shen dearly wanted his father to reminisce on the past—until he heard that truth.

Someone had poisoned his mother?!

It was still his fault for making her a target, but the shock and guilty were quickly getting overwhelmed by sheer ire.

Who dared to do that?!

Feng Yang continued, "The blame is mine alone for failing to protect the woman I loved. Still love. She came to me as merely someone with a compatible Path and turned into the greatest treasure of my entire life.

"You were the second greatest. It pains me to this day that it took me her death to realize it. When I did, I searched for a way to heal you on the tallest mountains and deepest abysses.

"It wasn't just a matter of crippled meridians, as I told you, but something more profound. The best physicians declared your very soul had been twisted in a way that prevented your meridians from healing. I spent years and fortunes in my search until I found the Divine Seer one day.

"The Immortal Emperor alerted me of the man's nature. He was an alien infiltrating the Eternal Empire. He was being watched closely to understand his goals. Yet the truth remained that he had never failed in his predictions.

"I paid the price to hear him speak, and he told me the Great Cosmic Blueness could heal you if you were alive tens of thousands of years in the future. I just needed to put you in a formation that let you be alive by then.

"It was a fantastical tale, yet no other path had brought results. You were getting closer to death by the day, no matter how many treasures you consumed.

"So I committed my first betrayal to save you."

There was a heavy pause then. It pained Feng Yang to speak of that.

Either this was a magnificent forged confession...

...

...or his father had indeed betrayed someone.

Shen's heart clenched in pain at the mere thought of that possibility.

"My apologies," his father said. "I find myself thinking a lot about everything these days. I don't regret it, yet I regret it was necessary.

"I was talking about my first betrayal. The Feng Clan's most treasured possession was the last of the three Eternal Tokens received by our founder for services rendered to the Immortal Emperor in the establishment of the Eternal Empire itself. It let us ask anything of the Emperor, and as long as it was worth the same or less than what our founder did for him, the Emperor would deliver.

"I used it to beg him to heal you.

"After months of secret examinations and consulting his best physicians, he said your situation was more complex than anything he had seen before.

"He explained your situation to me in detail. The poison used on you made your soul incompatible with your body. It should prove lethal, but when you were in your mother's womb, her Path gave you a way out. She unconsciously inverted your meridians to desynchronize your body and soul. The crippling was merely a consequence of the very thing that let you live at all, as short as that life was fated to be.

"The Emperor admitted he wasn't well-versed enough in soul therapy to undo the changes to his existence, but he could change you into something else. Doing that, however, would reveal his true power, which he was hiding due to an unknown peril he was feeling thanks to his Path.

"He suggested many solutions, but the only one that was viable was hiding you in plain sight. He would change the entirety of humankind in a way that looked natural, including every living cultivator. That way, when he changed you too, you would be just another naturally evolved person instead of proof of his power or a fascinating mutation that might attract even worse attention.

"In his wisdom, he decided it should not be done against people's will. He convened with the Empire's Seats, who assembled their Governors, who talked to their Regional Representatives, and who asked the opinion of most clans and sects. Almost all agreed to the changes, as it would make us all stronger.

"You don't have the perspective to understand the power and cost involved in such a change. Even I barely grasp it.

"And he did so for a single token.

"That was the immensity of his gratitude and appreciation for our founder and the Feng Clan. I'm still in awe of his kindness to this very day.

"Yet, even after changing all humanity just to heal you, he found out your situation was still beyond his ability to fix. Your new existence was synchronized as expected, but it didn't restore the reversed meridians as he had hoped. Once again, he reminded me that he wasn't specialized in soul therapy.

"He said healing you required knowledge that could not be found in the Eternal Empire. He would ask his physicians to research it, but the chances of them succeeding before you passed were slim. Therefore, the solution was freezing you in time for a few dozen years, and his people would be ready then.

"I accepted.

"Three thousand years later, he summoned me and said he was terribly sorry. It wasn't a matter of power, which he had plenty of, but of knowledge. Neither he nor his people knew what to do, and what he had already done by changing humanity, mobilizing his best researchers for thousands of years, and keeping you frozen in the meanwhile had been enough to repay the token.

"And even then, he returned the Eternal Token to me as a sign of goodwill.

"That was the day, my son, that I found out not even absolute power is absolute. Men plan, the Heavens laugh. The Emperor's confidence and my hope were equally shattered by mundane ignorance."

The following pause felt even heavier than before.

That tale was absurd and tragic. And yet, Shen found himself crying in relief.

After all the talks and considerations about the Immortal Emperor's fallibility in the tutorial, it was in finding that he had been wrong that Shen felt comforted. Not at the Emperor's ability to fail, but in his kindness. To go to such lengths and even return the token later...

That was the Immortal Emperor from the tales he had grown up listening to. His past wasn't a totally sheltered lie.

Yet it also made Shen wonder. How important was it to keep the Eternal Empire secret if that honorable man asked Shen to even kill the innocent for it?

But more importantly, he wondered about absolute power.

That was the goal of his Path. Was it wrong? Or was the Immortal Emperor simply not as "absolute" as Shen expected the peak of power to be? Probably the latter, but Shen would keep his father's words in mind.

The tale wasn't over. "After that," Feng Yang continued, "I tried to have the clan to spend more resources on you, but the Elders' patience had run thin. I was left with one choice only, to do as the Divine Seer had said. You were too weak to be taken from stasis; doing so would have you dead in a few weeks at most.

"So I committed my second betrayal.

"I sold everything the clan and I had, including my honor and soul, and made debts that can't be paid for thousands of years. All that to buy this coffin, modify it a little, purchase enough Time stones to fuel it for the tens of thousands of years the Seer predicted, and find a way to hide from everyone, even the Immortal Emperor. That is how I find myself in this cave beside you.

"I sent the elders a letter exposing my treachery and the reasons behind it. It was the least I could do. I doubt they will show it to anyone, as it will serve for nothing but confirm the clan's debts and expose their lack of judgment and foresight.

"What I did, my son, goes against everything I taught you. It goes against everything I believed in for most of my life. The clan is our strength, and individuals are valued by their power because it's for the benefit of the entire clan. The weak shouldn't be culled, but wasting resources on them would be a disservice to the collective. That is the right, honorable path.

"Yet, the very clan I dedicated my life to took my wife and would have left my son to die to save resources. I had to make a choice.

"I chose love over honor, family over the collective, your life over mine.

"I regret nothing.

"I shall die here, standing vigil over the one person I have left in the entire universe, and I shall die confident of having made the right choice.

"Hate your hypocritical father if you must, son. I will take it gladly, for it will mean you survived long enough to despise me. That is all I ask."

Shen was crying copiously by then. There were so many conflicting feelings in his heart that he didn't even know where to begin untangling that mess. But above all, he felt love and gratitude for the man who had sacrificed everything for him.

"Thank you for the privilege of hearing you call me father," Feng Yang said, and Shen could hear the tears in the man's voice too.

"May you tread your Path with love."

The recorder turned off.