Chapter 2 (Patreon)

A high school with lots and lots of girls. Good thing or bad? Oddly enough, it’s fine. I barely stand out, apart from being a guy and getting great grades. I haven’t joined a club—I couldn’t find one that takes regular trips into the countryside, and none of the others interest me.

Girls haven’t caused me any trouble, either. I’m not exactly sociable: I don’t make friends, I barely talk, and I’ve earned a reputation as a gloomy loner. Suits me just fine. I did have to turn down a couple of girls, though. Apparently even I’m somebody’s type, but I’m not looking for a relationship right now.

Incidentally, after I very politely turned down two girls, the Pervert Trio started giving me odd, pitying looks. They’re fun to watch. Their antics give me plenty of laughs, frequent bouts of secondhand embarrassment, and the occasional involuntary combo of the Palm-to-Face Technique. They wanted girlfriends so badly and talked about boobs so often that they scared girls away without even trying. All they had to do was act normal and stop clowning around.

Here in Kuou, boys are in such short supply that the girls are practically fighting secret wars over them. Schemes are hatched, dirty tricks are pulled, alliances are formed. I saw a gaggle of girls trying to invite a cute guy to a café. Nothing serious, of course—no orgy, whatever the Pervert Trio might imagine. Just kids playing at romance.

I finally brewed the pill I needed for a cultivation breakthrough, swallowed it, and successfully advanced. It took ages and a lot of work—the advancement itself, gathering the ingredients, and brewing the pill. The ingredients had to go through dozens of rounds of processing. I had to extract the right energies and components, refine them into a concentrate, infuse the whole lot with qi, and then process it all over again.

The starter pill is my pride and joy. I didn’t name it the Jade Pill for nothing. Its full recipe could go straight into my Legacy right now, because this booster can be made almost anywhere.

Decades of work led me to what I call Lesser Elemental Alchemy. Break an ingredient down into its elements, then recombine them to produce the property you need. Amplify it, or tone it down. Step by step, you “build” the ingredients you need, then use them to make whatever concoction you’re after.

For example, a rat-lion’s liver and chamomile that’s spent a hundred days soaking up the Sun’s power can be turned into a substitute for the salamander-eye extract in the original recipe. A weaker substitute, sure, but then you infuse it with qi, concentrate it…

Shame Lesser Alchemy can’t handle truly powerful ingredients. They’re too complex—almost beyond comprehension, I’d say. I doubt I’ll get anywhere with Greater Alchemy until I reach a higher level of cultivation. And I can’t even imagine where I’d find ingredients for more advanced drugs. Everything available here is too weak, and Water Dragon Bile is a pipe dream.

I’ll probably have to stick to mild support remedies and forget about serious pills. A bit hardcore, but what can you do? The downside is all the extra time I’ll have to spend cultivating. The upside is that there won’t be any sudden changes to my body for people to notice, or any pill side effects.

Today’s my first day back at school after my “illness.” Some of the symptoms were close enough to a bad case of the flu to fool my parents. Trouble was, I spent almost the entire week in the bathroom. Luckily, my room had its own—I’d talked Dad into that when we renovated. My body was purging impurities and improving itself, and the stuff that came out with my sweat… Brr. Gross. That’s the part I hate most. So I spent the week meditating in the shower stall, coming out only now and then to show Mom and Dad I was all right.

My reputation as a sensible guy who didn’t do stupid things helped a lot. In all the years I’d lived with my parents, I’d never broken their rules, never been caught lying to them, and never done anything reckless. I’d always been serious and responsible. Besides, I’d been preparing to take the miracle pill, so I’d staged a few similar “illnesses” before.

Mom and Dad were worried, but they believed me when I said I didn’t need to be hospitalized. It helped that I looked better every day and acted livelier around them. In the end, all it took was a visit to the doctor, a note for school, and treatment at home.

Getting stronger feels good. I drew a deep breath, savoring the energy coursing through my body and the flex of muscles capable of things an ordinary person would dismiss as fantasy. My whole body thrummed with power, and I could finally use some of the more advanced techniques. It’s hard to explain to anyone who’s never lived in a cultivation world. No matter how far you’ve come, there’s always further to go. That’s us.

Don’t get me wrong: for all my grumbling about practitioners, I like those worlds. I like the constant progress, I like being strong, and I want to be the strongest. Because the strongest make the rules. And who knows better than anyone what the world needs? That’s right—me. It’s always been that way, and it always will be. Whoever that “I” happens to be, they always know better than those stupid, narrow-minded “others”—even if they’ve spent their whole life sitting on their ass and farting into the couch cushions.

I’d build paradise on Earth. First, though, I’d have to level up properly, make the rounds of the celestials’ abodes, and, in the grand tradition of the Great Enlightened Ones, beat the shit out of every last one of them while yelling, “You motherfucking piece of trash, get over here…”

Ambitious? Hungry for glory? No doubt about it. But endless reincarnations give me a real shot at it. I can’t take my pills, my progress, my disciples, or my artifacts into the next life, but all my experience carries over. That gives me an enormous advantage over the average practitioner: I already know what to do and how to do it. Centuries of work, gathering knowledge, deciphering the treatises of the Great Ancients…

Ooooh… That last one’s a whole story in itself. Every practitioner who lives long enough starts thinking about standardization: shared terminology, a common foundation. There’s a problem, though. Cultivators have a hard time dealing with their equals. Weaker people? No trouble at all. They become your entourage—the ones who do everything you don’t want to waste your time on. Hunting down alchemical ingredients, rare ores, and artifacts. Cooking, cleaning, keeping you comfortable.

The fattest toad surrounds himself with little frogs who stroke his ego and take care of his every need. They’ll lap up every word you say, because you are the Wisest One, Whose Visage Shines with Divine Wisdom and Whose Kick Up the Ass Sends You Soaring into the Heavens. That last part is often literal.

But someone more or less your equal… First you have to kick their ass. Or get yours kicked. Settle who gets to be the senior research fellow, so to speak. Practitioners can get together, pool their knowledge, and write a treatise… Trouble is, nobody outside the group will understand their terms or descriptions. Another group could write a treatise on exactly the same thing in completely different words.

And that’s a pain in the ass! I’ve read thousands of texts, and I had to figure out each treatise on its own terms, then fit it into my own framework. After heroic feats of scholarship like that, I’d often go looking for a fight. As experience has shown, asserting dominance over assorted trash does wonders for one’s peace of mind.

The trick is not to get carried away. Just beat them up without killing them, then look suitably wise as you explain to the stunned cultivators that it was a lesson. You only did it because you care about them, really. They’re promising young men and women—they just seem to be advancing a little too slowly.

And that’s usually all it takes. The entire battered sect starts strutting around with their broken noses in the air and cultivating like mad. The Great Practitioner is watching them, after all! How else could they see it? He beat the shit out of every last one of them, so obviously he’s Great! And he did it because he thinks they’re talented. It was a lesson!

That’s the cultivator mindset for you. Didn’t kill them? Didn’t rob them? Just gave them a thrashing? Then he must want what’s best for them: a dose of fatherly encouragement and some guidance thrown in for good measure!

The funny thing is, those little stress-relief sessions often brought out genuine talent in the sects I’d beaten up. Sometimes people even tracked me down to thank me!!! Once, a young man who’d belonged to one of those sects showed up… And the motherfucking bastard had broken through to heights I’d dreamed of reaching for dozens of lives! Lucky piece of trash!

I nearly broke my face trying to smile at him like some kindly old sensei, proud of the student who’d surpassed him.

The worst part was, the guy really was absurdly lucky! A textbook xianxia protagonist: he’d shown up with a whole harem and even managed to absorb a couple of Ancient Practitioners’ Legacies on his travels! His entire cultivation journey came down to dumb luck and sheer determination.

When that lucky bastard finally disappeared into the mist with his battalion of women, after thanking me one minute and bragging to my face the next, I was so butthurt I could’ve spat blood. Actually, I did. Twice.

That last memory got me riled up, so I kept my eyes down as I headed to the staff room. I was keeping my spiritual pressure in check, of course, but I might still hit someone with my killing intent just by looking at them. I’d have to work on controlling that.

The last thing I needed was students—girls and boys alike—pissing themselves in fear. And a reputation as the guy with the death stare… not exactly ideal. I couldn’t see a single upside to it.

“Good morning, Shijimu-san!” I bowed to my homeroom teacher as we crossed paths on my way to the staff room. Good timing.

“Ah, Chiba-kun! Good morning!” She smiled, genuinely pleased to see me. “All better? How are you feeling? You look great!”

“Thank you, Sensei. I’m doing fine.” I handed her the doctor’s note. “Here’s my note from the hospital.”

“Good.” She was still smiling as she took the signed and stamped paper. Teachers liked me. I showed them respect, worked hard, got good grades, and behaved myself. “Chiba-kun, have you changed your mind about joining a club?”

Clubs. I winced inwardly. At Kuou, they aren’t mandatory, but they’re encouraged. Students are supposed to do something besides study—find a shared interest that benefits society, brings them together, helps them grow. I don’t need any of that.

Too bad my homeroom teacher won’t stop trying to shoehorn Chiba Taro—a good kid, but a very withdrawn one—into some club or other.

“I’m sorry, Shijimu-san, but I still don’t have the time.” I shook my head gently. “You know I take wushu and kendo classes.”

“What about yoga?” she asked, surprised.

“I had to give it up because I didn’t have enough time,” I said, barely stretching the truth. Yoga had only ever been a convenient explanation for why I meditated so much. The classes had served their purpose. As far as everyone else knew, I was focusing on school and martial arts training while continuing yoga on my own. After eight years of classes, that was easy enough to believe.

“Goto-sama has named me his senior student, so kendo takes up a lot more of my time now.”

“That’s…” My teacher looked a little stunned. Master Goto was famous throughout Japan. Being named his senior student meant training with him personally, and it was a mark of serious skill.

“Congratulations, Chiba-kun! That’s quite an achievement! But the school kendo club…”

“I’m sorry, Sensei.” I gave a small bow of apology for interrupting her. “I know this will sound rude, but I don’t mean to offend anyone. Unfortunately, the school club has nothing to offer me. There’s no one there who could push me to improve. Please forgive me, Shijimu-san.”

Another bow. I had no desire to sour things with my homeroom teacher. She was good at her job and took her responsibilities to her students seriously. Snapping at her for that would be a shitty thing to do.

But joining the school kendo club meant competing. I had no intention of letting anyone win—I couldn’t stomach that—so I’d kick everyone’s ass. I wouldn’t even need qi or techniques. Plain old skill would be enough. And I’d do it again, match after match. Winning would bring fame, and I still hadn’t decided whether I wanted that or whether it would actually hurt me.

The thing is, a practitioner who’s advanced even a single stage can easily live to be a hundred and fifty. I’ve gone much further than that. Right now, my lifespan tops out at around five hundred years. But that’s right now. I’m not going to stand still, and even here on Earth, a century of steady cultivation could push that to a thousand without too much trouble. In a cultivation world, I could use what I know to extend that millennium many times over.

The problem is, I’ve never managed to live out my full lifespan. There’s always someone burning to yell, “You motherfucking piece of trash, get over here!” and beat me into a state incompatible with life.

Anyway. Five ordinary human lifetimes is a bit much. So what will I have to do? Right—switch identities before people start wondering why old Chiba-san still hasn’t kicked the bucket! Making myself look old won’t be hard, but I’ll still have to “die.” That’ll be much easier if I keep a low profile.

An old man remembered only by his children and grandchildren “drowns” while swimming in the ocean. On the other side of Japan, a young man washes ashore who “doesn’t remember a thing.” The important part is changing my fingerprints and iris patterns. My face is another matter: I can make it look older or younger easily enough, but I can’t actually change my features yet. Which is why I’d rather stay out of the spotlight.

I was a little disappointed to learn just how famous Goto-san was. But Dad had worked hard to get me into his dojo, and the master himself was the real deal. I’d never been especially drawn to sword fighting—I preferred the guandao—but if you want to win, you need to know how your opponent fights. Besides, Japanese fighting styles might catch my enemies off guard if I ever ended up in a cultivation world again.

“That’s a shame. A real shame,” she sighed.

“I’m sorry.” I gave her a rueful smile. “May I go, Shijimu-san?”

“Yes, of course. Do your best in class, Chiba-kun!” She smiled and winked, as if there had ever been any doubt about my grades.

“I will, Sensei. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Chiba-kun.”

Well, that went well, I thought as I headed to class. An important stage of my development was behind me without a hitch. Now I needed to focus on cultivation and my studies. I’d need excellent grades to get into a prestigious university someday.

Cultivation worlds often tell physics and common sense to fuck right off, sure, but passing up a chance to broaden my horizons would be stupid. What I learned here on Earth might even help me reach enlightenment someday.

Lost in thought, I gave the student council president and her vice president a slight bow as I passed them. The president, Shitori Sona-san, struck me as quite attractive—both in looks and in character. Calm, composed, serious. She was slender, her hair cut into a neat bob. Her glasses suited her ridiculously well, framing a sharp, intelligent gaze. She was about five foot seven—short by my standards, given what cultivation does for the body—and carried herself with the poise of someone who’d been well brought up.

Most importantly, she was damn good at her job. Teachers and students alike respected her, and she handled her duties with care and skill. I’d never heard of her making a single mistake—and I knew how to listen.

She was exactly my type. A wife—the mother of my heirs, the person closest to me—was someone I needed to respect as well as love. It’s hard to respect someone who’s just a pretty little flower. A woman with a mind of her own, who knows her business and gets results? Much easier.

Besides, a busy wife lets a man keep what’s left of his nerves. Give his better half too much free time, and she’ll make an art form of destroying the rest—purely for the love of it.

Maybe I should take a closer look at Shitori-san after graduation, with matrimony in mind.

I glanced back for another appreciative look at her figure… and found both girls studying me intently. Huh. To what did I owe the honor? The school’s celebrities had never paid me any attention before. I hadn’t said any of that out loud, had I? No. Definitely not. So what was this about?

I gave them a friendly smile and a nod, then kept walking, trying to work out why they were staring.