Upon death, memories of my past lives were stored in my soul. As time passed, they would slowly be pushed further down, causing me to not think too deeply about them unless I actively sought to recall something.

Sitting in my tiny shack in the Su Clan, I focused on the memories from the life that just ended and did everything I could to keep them from fading. I needed to understand what happened to me. I needed to understand what went wrong.

My soul was in tatters. Fighting against my body for so long. Cutting itself away and breaking my mind into two. My soul had experienced more trauma than I had ever thought possible. I had pushed myself to the absolute limit to defeat my cultivation-mad body, and I had only barely been able to force myself in a position where it was possible to bring that life to an end.

Memories of my past life passed over through my mind. I started to remember everything that happened with M–

My soul began to collapse even further. I quickly created a barrier in my mind, willing a wall to block me from thinking about the last years of my life. I wasn’t ready to face that. Not yet.

I took a deep breath.

If I only counted gains and losses, my last life was a huge success. I had gained hundreds of millions of credits, skills beyond what I could have hoped for, and ideas that could change the entire continent.

On a personal level, though, the life had been a complete mess.

What went wrong? When did everything start spiraling out of control?

I thought back to when I had created my dantian. I wasn’t being careful. I’d made mistakes, and it was leaking qi from the very beginning, but I had never considered it important enough to go back and fix. Possibly, my errors at that stage had caused my mental state to become more unbalanced than it should’ve been. Possibly, ascending to Lord had some kind of amplifying effect on the mental state of cultivators that I was unaware of. I just wasn’t sure.

When I had purchased the cultivation technique from the system, I had requested it to do three things. The first was to enhance my personability. In retrospect, this had clear limitations. My social skills have always been limited. The cultivation technique only did its best to force me to act in what I thought was an appropriate manner, but my own limitations stopped it from being as effective as it otherwise might have been.

When addressing my ministers, I did my best to be what I thought was required, to be ‘lordly.’ When I talked with Her, I did my best to appear to be a friend. When I talked with the various clans, I tried to be a good negotiator. These attempts were all flawed by my own inability to handle the different situations.

This was most evident in how I had dealt with the queen. I had been told not to reject her, but how was I supposed to do that? She was the type of person who wouldn’t take no for an answer. How do I approach a situation where I can neither agree nor refuse? I don’t know how to handle that. My inability to do so is what caused that interaction to end so poorly.

From what I could tell, though, that part of my cultivation technique had little impact on how things ended. It did its part, and it was part of the reason I acted the way I did, but it was the other two aspects of my technique that had determined the final outcome.

I designed my cultivation technique to be exactly what I thought I wanted: dedication and focus. Focus on what I wanted to do. Dedicate myself to a task. I had never survived more than 80 years after a restart, but cultivators are supposed to be able to live for hundreds. For a Lord, it was possible to live to be 400 years old. If I were to live that long, dedication and focus had seemed to be important traits that would keep me on track and doing what I needed to do.

Well, it worked. I set myself the goal of getting the fire seed as early as possible. Early in that life, I had felt lost and undirected, so I had decided to simply follow Her wherever She felt She needed to go. After I set out on my own, though, it was the cultivation technique that kept me working and moving forward.

I had to acknowledge that I probably wouldn’t have achieved even half of what I did in that life if it weren’t for the cultivation technique continually forcing me to improve my alchemy and formation abilities and to research how to connect the two together. I was grateful that it had helped me in that regard. Even after everything, I couldn’t help but feel that having those impulses pushing me forward was extremely beneficial.

However, the problem was that I had completely lost control of them. The more I dedicated myself to the task of getting the fire seed, the more the dedication from the cultivation technique seemed to reinforce itself. The longer it went on, the harder it was to focus on anything that didn’t directly relate to acquiring the fire seed as soon as possible. At the end, I wanted to die. I needed to die. But I couldn’t kill myself. Anytime I tried to think about doing so, I was snapped back to thoughts of how to push further forward in acquiring the seed. Tricking my mind that a path toward certain death was the best way to acquire the seed had been my only recourse.

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I didn’t know what the right balance was, and I didn’t know how to achieve that balance. I wanted to have the ability to put myself into a state of hyperfocus, where I could ignore everything around me, but having it completely out of my control was unacceptable.

I could not let my cultivation technique control me anymore. I need to find a way to control it.

With the general whys and wherefores firmly planted in my mind, I tried to slightly lower the wall protecting myself from what happened at the end.

My soul shuddered.

I had read Her letters to SuYin. That meant they were now part of my mental library, and they would stay there for as long as I lived. I would never be able to forget what She wrote in them. I could put it out of my mind, but it would still be there, waiting for me.

I didn’t understand my relationship with Her. Even after reading the letters, even after everything, I still felt scared of Her. I could believe that She meant me no harm. I could believe that She, the woman, only wanted a friend and companion, but even after SuYin explained more about how it worked, I was still afraid of Her blessing.

I could appreciate what SuYin said about how it affected Her, about how it drove Her mad. I could accept that it might not be as omniscient as I had convinced myself it was. What I couldn’t do was convince myself that it was benign. No matter what, one truth remained above everything else. I never knew what She was thinking. I only know how She appeared to act.

That thought made me laugh. I only knew how She appeared to act, but I didn’t know what She was thinking. Was SuYin any different? Did I have any better idea of what anyone was thinking? All I saw was the mask they wore, and everything else was a guess.

Thinking back through everyone I had known in this world, everyone I knew in my previous world, how well did I know what any of them were really thinking? I didn’t have the tools to understand people. I didn’t have the capacity within me to grasp how anybody really felt.

Did people like me? Did people want to help me? Throughout everything, I’ve always assumed the worst about people. I always assumed they just wanted to take from me. so I began to focus on what I could take from them.

Elder Mu in the Twin Mountains Sect. When he had transferred me to the Eyes, I cast aside any obligations I felt I had toward the man, but was Elder Mu truly so heartless to me? What if he was only doing what he thought was best for me and my understanding of his actions was completely off base?

What about Jiao? She treated me like a friend, but after being sent to her faction, I began to treat her as nothing more than a random business partner I barely knew.

I treated everyone as if they were mercenaries only looking out for their own interests. In doing so, I became what I thought they were.

I needed to be better.

Taking everything into account, I decided to make two purchases.

First, I needed to purchase something I’d been putting off for far too long. I had convinced myself that I would be able to control the mental influences of cultivation techniques if I used them properly. I had convinced myself that if I had the perfect cultivation technique, with the exact mental effects I wanted, it wouldn’t be so bad. These were lies that I could no longer keep telling myself. I needed a real solution.

Long ago, I had tried to purchase a cultivation technique from the system that didn’t have any mental influences. I learned that would be impossible, so I gave up on the idea and instead focused on personal improvement to try to overcome the situation. I took my susceptibility to cultivation techniques as a personal failing. While that may be true, I couldn’t continue with the status quo. I needed to change something.

“System, I want to purchase resistance to the mental effects of cultivation techniques without lessening their effectiveness. I want to purchase as much resistance as possible for 25 million credits.”

Mental Resistance to Cultivation Techniques. Cost: 25,000,000 credits. Confirmed. 175,000,000 credits remaining.

I didn’t know how much 25 million would help me. It was possible that such a purchase would barely have any effect at all. I didn’t care. I needed to do something. I needed to feel like I was doing something to protect myself.

The second purchase was something else that I needed. It wouldn’t help me cultivate. It wouldn’t help me become more powerful. It wouldn’t help me reach immortality. It would only help me live a more normal life.

“System, I want to purchase an aptitude for learning how to read other people's thoughts and emotions based on their behavior. A comprehension boost for social skills. I want it to help me learn to understand how people feel. I want it to help me understand the true thoughts of even someone like Her who may have their emotions suppressed or controlled, whether by their blessing or another entity. I want this to at least help me with anybody that doesn’t have a blessing specifically guarding them from being read in such a way. I want to purchase as much comprehension as possible with twenty-five million credits.

Increased social comprehension. Cost: 25,000,000 credits. Confirmed. 150,000,000 credits remaining.

I spent a quarter of my credits on two things that would not help me advance, but they were things that needed to be purchased. I could worry about becoming a better cultivator, becoming a better Lord, becoming a better alchemist… I could worry about these things later. I needed things that would help me be a better me.

I had many more credits to spend, but I wasn’t in a rush. I didn’t want to jump back into the grind of trying to become the best cultivator in the world. I wanted a simple life. I wanted… I wanted to be able to relax. I had to take some time for myself.

Even as those thoughts passed through my head, urges within me pushed me in a different direction. I thought about the fire seed that I had spent so much time and energy trying to acquire. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been worth everything I’d put myself through. I wanted to know. I wanted to at least see the seed, to hold it, and to know if it was worth it.

I decided that I would live a quiet life, but at the same time, I wouldn’t waste my time.

Deciding on a course of action, I chose my destination. I needed to travel a long way to get where I needed to go, but the thought of going to the Blue Wind Pavilion… The thought of running into a young girl at the entrance… I couldn’t handle that situation. I had to do something different.

“System, how much to teleport me directly to a discrete spot in the capital of the Brilliant Sun Empire?”

Cost 26,725 credits.

In the past, that amount would have been an impossible dream, but now it was a rounding error.

“Confirm.”

Purchase confirmed. 149,973,275 credits remaining.