CHAPTER 2

The door to his abode shut with a click, and the servants in view hurried to the side. After enough pointed looks at the blood decorating his robes, Zhu realized he had to wipe it off.

Washrooms were ubiquitous within the manor, and it took little to find one. He kicked out the servant that occupied it and quickly set to wiping the bloodied cuff of his robes. He could only smudge the dregs of the crimson liquid that decorated the silk, but they were of dark material anyway. Zhu didn’t care to change his robes out. He had places to be.

His sandals, a comfortable and expensive pair, didn’t quite suit the dirt roads of the family compound, or the simpler garbs of those that traversed it. He preferred it that way.

The sun would soon crest the peak of the sky, showing that while the day had been difficult for Zhu, there was still much to go.

He took a busy path toward the family library, a short brick and mortar construction a cut below the polished wood of the family manor, and he was very mindful of the muddied patches and potholes along the way. In a place of cultivators, it didn’t take much for even a simple path like this to be damaged. It was just one more thing to irritate him.

Compared to a sect, the Liang family were worth less than nothing - but within their city, they were a prominent family. Zhu encountered dozens of distant relatives on his way to the library. Older and younger cousins, uncles and aunts, and many from much older generations that rushed past him toward the manor.

Even the family elders gave him a wide berth. Others avoided his gaze and swerved far out of his way. Only the occasional passers-by caught in their own world, or conversation, would walk by in arm’s reach.

Zhu had long understood it. In the eyes of others, it wasn’t worth speaking to him.

He was technically the family heir, but not one individual thought that Zhu would ever make it to the position of head, or otherwise become anything more than a leech. His father was muddled in his treatment of him, but not to the extent of giving the family’s reigns to a cripple. Everyone knew that. Money was wasted on Zhu, and he would never pay it back.

It was impossible for a talentless person to survive in this world. Zhu and the rest of his family had nothing in common bar name, and his father was the only reason he wasn’t bullied to the point of death. Cultivation was simply too important to an individual’s prospects. Whether in terms of lifespan, mental athleticism, cosmetic differences, or the higher levels of power gained through cultivation, it was too valuable. If you couldn’t cultivate, then even children could work harder and faster than you, and they wouldn't stagnate. Only the circumstances of Zhu’s birth let him live a semblance of an ordinary life, though it only accounted for so much, and it was built upon the backs of others.

In fact, his father had once exiled an elder of the family – a high position representative of both physical and political power – for putting forward the motion to relegate his status to another. Nowadays, it need not be said what would happen to an ordinary member of the family that bullied Zhu, and it wasn’t up to imagination. He had been bullied before, and such people disappeared.

Even if someone didn’t have bad intentions, it was difficult to approach someone like Zhu.

He was, as such, left bored and alone despite meeting eyes with dozens. From a distance, he was like a boat parting the ocean. Zhu, however, was completely and utterly used to this. He had far more important concerns to worry about.

Like this damned trek! It was easy for others to forget that the library crested a hill, but to Zhu, the sheer incline meant an extreme battle against fatigue that tested his meagre endurance.

Zhu focused harder than he could remember doing in recent times, and did in fact eventually make it. He collapsed at the top of the mound of dirt and took a minute to recover his breath, glazed eyes barely taking in the polish of the expansive family library. His hallucination drove him to cut his rest short.

The Library interior wasn’t nearly as bright as the outside, and the cool breeze that flit through the foyer offered great comfort to a bedraggled Zhu.

It was quaint, with enough light to read, but also little enough to allow one to easily move into a trance. A lack of windows and a variety of scented candles gave the building a strange atmosphere. It was a place that was difficult to convince oneself to enter, and it was even more difficult to convince oneself to leave.

It was this comforting, but eerie atmosphere, that had long since turned Zhu away from treating it as a place to spend his seemingly limitless spare time.

An elderly woman sat behind a stack of books and scrolls in the foyer, her eyes carefully absorbing the details of an aged scroll and the manual sketched within. Beside her, where the foyer opened into the greater library, rows of bookshelves were neatly allayed. Short tables, surrounded by thick square cushions, sat around the shelves sporadically.

Her position of Elder was denoted by the silver amulet that hung around the collar of her decorative robes. To a bystander, Zhu’s colourful and accented garb, which looked – and likely was – extraordinarily more expensive, to the point of being wasteful, would have painted him to be a more important character.

It simply wasn’t the case.

“What do you want?”

The tone was gruff and words pointed. The elder’s countenance wasn’t welcoming, but it wasn’t to the point of pushing Zhu away. There was no benefit to ridiculing a fool.

Zhu bowed respectfully. “I would like to ask the honoured elder for guidance.”

The sheer novelty of his words had the elder frozen for a moment. What assistance could a cripple need in a library that contained little except for cultivation techniques and battle skills? She carefully rolled up the scroll and placed it neatly on a small pile atop the desk.

“And what guidance would that be?”

He didn’t dally.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“What is most important to cultivating, talent or comprehension?”

A walk through the family compound had quickly turned into a gathering of information. If he couldn’t do anything about the consequences of his own murdering, then the least he could do was understand an insanity that he was willing to come to terms with.

An unbelievably strong part of him believed that his hallucinations were real. If they were, then he had to understand them before he acted on them. He didn’t want to make a poor decision if his choices had further reaching consequences than he readily understood.

Zhu vaguely understood that he was giving hallucinations - of all things - more thought than he'd ever put into anything else, but he wasn't pretending to be smart.

Instead of answering his question, the elder instead dismissed him.

“It’s a matter of context, both are naturally imperative.”

Zhu opened his mouth to explain, but the librarian cut him off.

“I don’t want to know. Go to the sparring grounds. If you have personal concerns, look at the results of others and decide for yourself.”

When he turned away to do just that, the elder shook her head and muttered, returning to her scroll.

“Tch, why did I have any expectation for a cripple?”

Her parting words were said without regard for volume, and Zhu lowered his head on the way out.

…

The area around Zhu was vacant, which was strange compared to the crowd of onlookers huddled together about the sparring grounds. Even here, he was ignored. It would be shocking if he stepped across the boundary and issued a challenge, but that would never happen.

“This doesn’t help,” he muttered, watching pairs of fighters pummel each other with strange and brutal attacks, engaging and retreating, dancing and shuffling with a mix of simple and intricate movement styles and techniques. In exchanges that meant little to him, they beat each other black and blue, bruised their limbs in both attack and defence, and Zhu found himself wondering why they fought at all.

He couldn’t follow what was happening. He didn’t know who was winning where, and neither could he sense their cultivation levels or understand their levels of comprehension by watching them battle. Zhu couldn’t see the intentions behind the techniques on display by simply laying eyes on them, not at his level, and he couldn’t know the difference in difficulty for comprehending the different skills.

Perhaps to anyone else his age in the clan, it would be possible to glean useful information. They could guess the levels of cultivation on display, note the exceptionally difficult techniques, see clearly the disparities prevalent to difference in cultivation compared against the difference in martial arts, and come to their own understanding. For Zhu, with an absolute zero in his own comprehension, he could hardly discover these things.

He did, however, understand the absolute basics. It would be impossible to live to his age in a family like his and be unaware. He would have to settle for his own, uninformed, lower-level deductions.

Those with good comprehension could understand difficult techniques and adapt them. Those with good talent could easily cultivate to higher stages. Talent was a necessity in striving toward immortality, allowing a cultivator to transcend to higher cultivation levels quicker, but a genius of comprehension could slaughter those amongst the same level.

Zhu was a rare case who not only wasn’t good at either cultivation or comprehension, but had absolutely zero skill in both!

“Zhu?! You’re not here to fight, are you?”

An unwelcome grip took Zhu by the shoulder and tugged away back from the fights. He almost tumbled to the ground, but a certain part of Zhu felt that it wasn’t even the offender’s intention to affect him so much.

“Careful of the line! You don’t want to create a misunderstanding, eh cousin?”

The hostile tone alone was enough, even before he saw the interloper.

A large frame and sturdy body, with hair neatly tied back and wearing plain and durable robes, their identity was obvious.

“Randall, get your hand off my shoulder.”

It was his young uncle. Zhu forgot some things, but he couldn’t easily forget this person. There was a history of conflict in their bloodlines, a battle of succession – but it was something to do with the elder generation, and Zhu didn’t know the details. He did know, however, that Randall’s lineage would head the family if not for Zhu’s.

Unfortunately, his father had a soft spot for this person. Randall would probably be his father’s replacement in a decade or so. He was only three years older than Zhu, but already in the peak of the Body Refining realm – the ninth stage.

With the resources that their family had on hand, each stage in the body refining realm required about a year of closed-door cultivation, enhancing the body with ambient spiritual energy and cleansing it of impurities. It was expensive to maintain long sessions, possible only with copious quantities of medicines and frequent meals, and the results weren’t particularly worthwhile at the lower stages.

Add on the time that had to be spent acclimatizing to each stage, the time spent training the body and comprehending martial techniques and mastering their proficiencies, and the time required quickly multiplied. The gains were disproportionate to the time and resource investment. Only rich families or sects could afford to easily create Body Refining cultivators of the later stages.

Beyond that, only talented elders and those with great contribution to their family later stepped out of the Body Refining realm. Stepping into the next realm was said to be the start of true cultivation. Their family could barely afford to create someone like that, and only a handful remained in the family.

In fact, there was where the answer laid in Zhu’s question to the librarian. To poorer families, rich comprehension was considered far more valuable than talent, because it wasn’t expensive to acquire copies of martial arts techniques. A poor family could be very strong among their peers if their comprehension ability was strong, even if they couldn’t cultivate well; few amongst the poor could afford to cultivate far. They weren’t spitting out late stage body refiners and certainly not anything above that.

But to Zhu, if he held hope to cultivate without the need for resources, what good was comprehension or talent? What good was a family to him at all...?

“Of course, little prince. I was helping you just now, that’s all.”

Randall casually dusted off the sleeves of Zhu’s robes, paying careful attention to the spots that Zhu had failed to wring of blood. “But I wouldn’t stay here, unless you came to watch uncle show off some moves, hm?”

There were no more words to be said. Randall turned on his heels and stepped into the sparring grounds, immediately challenging one of his acquaintances to a duel. He was what Zhu should have been, strong and competent. Talented.

In fact, compared to most in their city, especially in their generation, Randall was nearly untouchable.

It was difficult for Zhu to bear, and Randall wasn't particularly rude to him.

His fists clenched. If his nails weren’t carefully trimmed, perhaps they have gouged flesh from his palms for all the force that his anger drove through his fingers. He knew that his skin was soft enough for that to happen.

[Battle Intent Detected!]

Heavenly Techniques now accessible. Exchange Karma to use Heavenly Techniques!

[Seal] unlocked! Temporarily restrict target’s cultivation! Effect dependent on cost.

Available:

[Seal!] Cost: Karma (Variable)

Zhu had always felt jealousy regarding his young uncle.

[Reminder!]

Quadrillions of cultivators defy the heavens each day. The host of the [Heaven System] must not hesitate to kill and disable cultivators!

Remaining time to live: 22Hrs

Zhu froze, and his gaze automatically drew back toward the figure of his uncle and one of his cousins warming up, where it lingered.

He had… a timer?

What happened in twenty-two hours?

[Tutorial!]

The host of the Heaven System must act within the interests of the Heaven System, must disable, and must kill cultivators.

If the host fails to act in accordance to the Heaven System, the host will be found in contempt of Heaven.

Remaining time to live: 22Hrs

Zhu shivered, but nobody paid him any mind.

His uncle and their sparring partner were already exchanging blows. Zhu already had a vague idea of something that he could do, but one question lingered at the forefront of his mind, inviting hesitation.

Did his uncle deserve to die…?