Chapter 68

Déjà vu

Leo yawned and stretched lazily, waking up to a silent home. Usually, by the time he got up, Yue and Liang were done bathing, and were exercising somewhere nearby. Today, however, he was alone. Well, not alone alone, since their mud huts had already been repurposed as animal shelters. He had the idea of creating quite a few extra ones but held back because he didn't know how to destroy them without manually doing so, and he'd have to essentially destroy most, if not all of them, when he decided to plunk down the longhouse.

He went for a quick bath before making breakfast for the animals, and then practicing just a tiny bit afterward. Watching his pair of Disciples inspired him ever so slightly, so he always took out at least an hour of a day to practice--whether it was meditating upon his cultivation method, or practicing either of the two arts he had, or whether it was quite literally just absorbing Qi and cultivating, he dedicated an hour a day to it. It was too little, he knew, but it was the most he could do without going absolutely berserk with boredom.

The rest of the day was spent gathering materials for the longhouse--clay was easy enough as he got it mostly from the pond as well as the cut-down part of the forest, but so were the remaining materials. With a bit of hard work and some luck, he figured he'd have every single ingredient by tomorrow.

Come evening, the animals gathered once again for dinner, seemingly in greater numbers ever since his vegetable stew became meat stew. With Yue and Liang gone, he didn't have to pull out random bits of physics knowledge to entertain, and he could go back to what he originally used to do: sing.

There was a bit of a scare to it, however, as he realized he was forgetting lyrics to quite a few songs. None of his dearest, but the ilk he used to listen to as a kid at the parties. Just yesterday it took him over an hour to remember the lyrics to Bye Bye Bye, song that used to be everywhere in the early 2000s. He must have heard it thousands of times, but it had seemingly bled out of his brain silently over time.

It was a grim reminder that just because he was now a cultivator didn't mean that he was impervious to forgetfulness.

Another night passed rather silently and uneventfully, with the deepest belief that tomorrow would be the same--but it wasn't. Before he woke up naturally, he felt himself being yanked by his clothes. When he opened his eyes, he saw both Milky and Blackie pulling at his sleeves, and even Gray was by their side, suddenly barking.

"Ah, what is it now..." he mumbled, still half-awake, as he got up and left the mud hut.

The pair of panthers fled off toward the east, while Gray stayed back 'guarding' his hut. Leo followed, feeling somewhat nostalgic--it hadn't been that long since he found Song and Lya in the eastern part of the forest, and now he was being led over there once again. A bit of fear crept inside of him that something might have happened to Yue and Liang--perhaps they were ambushed just outside the forest and didn't even have the time to rip the Void Scroll or, perhaps, didn't want to, considering how close they were.

However, as Milky and Blackie were hurried, but not necessarily panicked, he talked himself into believing it wasn't the pair of kids, but possibly someone or something else.

He paused when they chanced upon a familiar spot, an odd look appearing on his face. Almost down to an inch where Song was, there was another person--just like Song, they were hurt and bleeding and just barely breathing, but now that Leo was just a tiny bit more experienced, he could tell that the person lying there was rather strong, perhaps stronger than even his Disciples.

Seeing how the panthers brought him here, though, it was unlikely that the person would pose too much danger, so he took out a waterskin from his robes and carefully sat up the unconscious man, pouring a bit of juice into them.

The man looked to be in his forties, perhaps a bit younger as the wounds and blood probably added a few years. He had short, black hair and rather ragged and scarred skin, as though he had a major war with acne back in his youth (one that he unfortunately lost). Though the man's bloodstained silver robes hid it slightly, when Leo picked him to carry him back to the camp, he realized that the man was on the heavier and bulkier end of things.

Using Qi, he inspected the man's body and realized that he was wounded rather severely--perhaps not so much in the body, as most wounds didn't seem long-term dangerous, but the man's dantian, the source of all cultivation, was cracked and leaking Qi like a maw of a river. Leo panicked briefly, hurrying back toward the camp though not quite knowing what to do. Unless his stew of fruit juice had the magical ability to repair a dantian, there was little else he could do.

Blackie and Milky followed him, occasionally speeding ahead as though to scout, but always returning.

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Leo put down the man rather gently inside one of the huts, undressing him carefully. It was also there that he began to notice a certain pattern that left him a bit horrified--the man was, by all accounts, tortured. That was why the wounds, at the first glance, didn't seem dangerous long-term as they were intended to inflict as much pain as possible. The robes, at points, seemed almost stitched into the skin, so he had to use the water to slowly diffuse the two.

He felt a pang of pain in his heart as he watched the shallowly-breathing man lying down--there was seldom an inch of the body that was unwounded and untouched. It wasn't just the fresh wounds either as there were plenty of aged and withered scars to go around. Those, however, seemed to be battle wounds at the very least and not the result of being purposefully inflicted as much pain as possible. For a moment, Leo worried who the man was--but quickly shook his head. He trusted the intuition of the pair of panthers, only now catching himself in the thought and recognizing that it should not be all that reassuring... and yet it was.

**

At least they escaped, Lu Yang belted into his soul.

At least they escaped.

It was the thought that kept his lips sewn shut as they cut his skin with daggers, broke his bones with hammers, and used bewitching arts to try and confound his mind.

At least they escaped.

It was like a song resonating throughout his entire being, a godly sermon keeping him afoot with reality when the darkness swelled and swallowed the entire world. Even when they bared his soul naked, and he felt his innermost core being stabbed with blades, he endured. The pain was temporary, after all--soon, his body and spirit would perish, and become one with Y'ttwan, the God of Mercy.

He didn't know when his mind finally gave out--at some point, he ceased seeing colors and shapes, and the voices blended into a noise he couldn't discern. It was as though his spirit dissevered itself from his body in a desperate attempt to harken death.

Thus, he awaited--he awaited the cold arms of the undying mother, the falling ashen skies, the murmurs of the ghastly brethren, and the finality of life. And yet, it never came.

Lu Yang opened his eyes slowly. He was lying on his back, his eyes just barely discerning the shape of an unknown roof above him. He was in pain--everywhere. It seemed as if his inner self was on fire, and as though there were a thousand fire ants crawling over his body. But, at the same time, there was something else--there was an invisible force pulsating like a beating heart, keeping the death at bay.

Inspecting himself, he was quickly shocked--the broken dantian which signaled the end of his cultivating days was no longer leaking Qi. Rather, the hole was slowly mending, bit by bit. In fact, every inch of himself was. None of it made sense. He wanted to know why, to know how, so he forced himself to ignore pain and sit up.

Ordinary-seeming robes slid off of him, and a patch of light entered his vision. He was in a rather small hut, it seemed, so he desperately crawled toward the round blindness, emerging on the other side on his knees.

Trees sprung around him like grass, tall and mighty, and between them and among them and on top of them and below them, he saw life thriving. Dozens of animals suddenly shifted their heads and looked at him--it was akin to being watched by the Court of Gods, and he felt himself become insignificant and meaningless, like a blade of grass.

"Huh?! Hey, what are you doing?!" a somewhat angered voice startled him. He looked to the side where he saw a rather tall man suddenly stand up and walk toward him. He had long, black hair and wild, unkempt beard. Lu Yang couldn't see through him--it was as though he were a mortal, and alive and dead both at once. "Are you trying to aggravate your wounds further?!"

"I, I'm sorry, I..."

"Haah," the man said. "I'm preparing dinner right now. Are you well enough to sit?"

"I think... so?" Lu Yang mumbled, still confused. There were just about a million questions swirling in his head, yet he couldn't pass any one of them past his lips.

"Come on, I'll help you," the man gently helped him out of the hut and even put on the robes, all while Lu Yang was too preoccupied having a panic attack over finally recognizing some of the surrounding animals. They were no ordinary beasts, or even Demonic Beasts---rather, they were Immortal Spirits, the very same ones that his Clan had revered for hundreds of years.

"Am... am... I in the... Nameless Forest...?" he queried with a shaky voice.

"Hm? Yes. Wait--you don't know? I thought you ran here."

"No, I..." he was in the Nameless Forest, a place of both worship and horror. Even if his Clan revered the Immortal Spirits, they never dared cross the border and enter the forest. That spelled doom, even for the strongest of his Ancestors.

"Come here," the man slowly walked him over to the roaring campfire and sat him down. It was there that Lu Yang felt his nostrils expand as his stomach rumbled like thunder. Silence befell the forest as he lowered his head in shame, feeling the odd stares wash over him. "Don't be embarrassed. Who hasn't had their stomach growl once or twice? This one time, I was maybe fourteen? My parents took out my sister for her birthday dinner to this rather expensive restaurant, and because I had gym, I mean I trained rather hard earlier that day, I was fully spent. As soon as I smelled food, I ripped one even louder than yours. The entire restaurant turned and started laughing. You know what I did?"

"What?"

"I laughed too," Lu Yang looked up and saw the wide, beaming grin on the man's face. "Don't care too much about these fellas. They aren't any better when it comes to waiting for my food. It should be done in a few minutes. How are your wounds? I'm hardly a healer of any sort, so I could only wash them and not much else. I don't even have any healing pills with me."

"They're fine," Lu Yang said, relaxing somewhat. He didn't know what the hell was happening, but even if he died here, he would have died finally bearing witness to what he always dreamed of seeing--the Immortal Spirits. "It hurts a bit, but I'm getting better."

"That's good. You were in an awful state," the man said, smiling gently toward him. Lu Yang expected the question, and was prepared to be as honest as he could... but the question never came. "Alright, here's some fruit juice--my own concoction. You guys, stop staring at him. It's rather impolite. Ah, right, the story. Uh, this is probably going to be hard to follow, so don't worry too much. I was telling these guys the story about Jack and the Beanstalk. So, Jack had sold his cow..."