Chapter 122 - Ridiculous Discovery (Part I) (Patreon)

After concluding another round of medidation and digesting his gains, Lucian opened his eyes. He saw Wang Chen wake up and groggily sit up from where he had been lying.

Behind Lucian's cold gaze was a hint of greed and curiosity. He had opened the fifth meridian of his natural cultivation, the Reverting Yin Meridian. And he did that without digging through more memories. The previous one had been enough!

Which, in turn, seemed to prove that his theory was at least partially correct.

I need to attune my memories to my understanding of each meridian before cultivating, he thought. And this kid will help me willingly.

Paying attention to Wang Chen, he saw the young man clutch his head as if struck by a sudden headache.

“Sit back down,” Lucian said. “Take a deep breath and tell me how you are feeling.”

Instead of sitting, Wang Chen smelled an herbal scent in the air and frowned.

“Did you put medicine on me?” he asked, holding his head and shooting Lucian an incredulous glance.

“No,” Lucian denied. “I asked the servants to do so. Otherwise, the wound on your back would have scarred.”

Stumped by the unexpected gesture of kindness, Wang Chen momentarily forgot about his headache. Not once had he remembered Lucian helping him with anything!

Then, Lucian pointed at the wooden table with his chin. This made Wang Chen turn around and find it filled with food and drinks.

“Sit and eat,” Lucian said as though it were an order, before returning to feeling the flow of Qi within his body.

Smacking his lips, Wang Chen felt as though he were dreaming and sat down to eat. A few minutes passed before he swallowed half the food and asked, “Do you want some, Benefactor?”

Without opening his eyes, Lucian answered, “No, thank you.”

After that answer, Wang Chen stood up and ran out of the room.

What is this kid doing? Lucian thought, shaking his head slightly as he listened to Wang Chen’s heavy footsteps fading into the distance.

Noticing that Wang Chen was asking the servants where Grandmaster Miao was, Lucian let the matter go. Unless the young man tried to leave the warehouse, he had no intention of moving from this room.

The sixth meridian, the Greater Yin Metal Meridian, is too mysterious for me, Lucian thought, returning his focus to cultivation. It is connected to the lungs, to the so-called azure sea, to some feelings, and to the breathing techniques. Is the azure sea the bodily fluids?

He knew that breathing techniques involved the lungs, throat, and nose, and that once the sixth meridian was opened, those areas would be strengthened. However, he had no clue what bodily fluids had to do with the lungs, what the azure sea represented, or what feelings had to do with any of it.

Lucian understood there was a connection, but not what that connection was.

Attempting to deepen his understanding so he could select memories more attuned to the meridian, he suddenly thought about its name and had an insight.

Wait, it’s the Greater Yin Metal Meridian, he thought. Yin and Yang are beyond my understanding, but didn’t Xu Hua learn about the Five Elements? What was the mantra again...?

With a bit of mental effort, he remembered.

“Metal begets Water, Water nourishes Wood, Wood feeds Fire, Fire returns to Earth, and Earth forms Metal,” he muttered, a sense of enlightenment surrounding him.

Without the Greater Yin Metal Meridian, there would be no bodily fluids, Lucian thought. A mortal’s fluids are their blood, but more importantly, the water within them. The water inside them, the water of their tears, a lake in their soul—!

The thought made him freeze, and his eyes shot open.

With shaken eyes, Lucian muttered, “These cultivators... This is impossible.”

The moment he thought about tears, he was reminded of the azure sea and how Wang Chen said one's feelings were connected to the Greater Yin Metal Meridian.

While he did not fully understand the meaning, he knew tears were connected to sadness.

And tears of sadness can form a lake, Lucian thought, remembering the Archmages he had met. A lake that grows into the Sea of Consciousness.

Closing his eyes, Lucian attempted to steady his breathing. If he was right about his guesses, he didn't know how he would react.

Is it possible that cultivators have access to knowledge that Archmages spent thousands of years studying to barely theorize about? He questioned himself. Do they know about the Sea of Consciousness within us?

Lucian was deeply unsettled by the thought. The Sea of Consciousness was the term Archmages used to describe the accessible part of the mind, where memories, the soul, and one’s sense of self intertwined.

The name had been given because most people’s point of connection of mind and soul resembled an azure ocean, their experiences piling up drop by drop until they formed a sea.

Not everyone’s was the same, of course. Lucian’s Sea of Consciousness, for example, was pitch black.

The reason he hadn’t initially considered that the azure sea might refer to the Sea of Consciousness was that it implied that a mere Qi Gathering cultivator could grasp concepts elusive enough to trouble mages throughout the ages.

If they can understand how a person’s mind works, this means that when the mental seed infections were cleansed from those teenagers, someone could have done it by affecting their Sea of Consciousness!

After thinking this much and part of his surprise faded, Lucian began to feel excited.

I need Wang Chen to cultivate more! If he can gain such insights at the Qi Gathering realm, then what about the Qi Refining or Qi Condensation realms? What about when I force him to reach the Nascent Soul realm?

Then, he noticed his emotions were a bit out of control. Taking a deep breath to settle them, he calmed his mind. His eyes, which held a hint of eagerness before, were now cold once more.

There’s a way to test it, he thought. A way to test whether the Greater Yin Metal Meridian is connected to a person’s Sea of Consciousness!

Just as Lucian recalled the first time he had consciously entered the black space within his mind, he heard footsteps approaching. Annoyed, he stood up and coldly watched the door while suppressing his anger at being interrupted.

Soon enough, a puzzled Grandmaster Miao and a fearful Wang Chen appeared.

“Grand Cultivator, I swear this isn’t Benefactor Lu Xian!” Wang Chen said, trembling.

Grandmaster Miao frowned, glanced at Wang Chen, and shook his head.

“I had my doubts when I sensed Bo Xian’s cultivation realm,” he said, correcting the name. “But this is him. He’s using a technique to conceal his true cultivation. A very good one, I must say.”

Patting Wang Chen on the shoulder, Grandmaster Miao didn’t even nod toward Lucian before leaving. He had only bothered to come down because Wang Chen had given him an excuse to check on Lucian face to face.

Meanwhile, watching Grandmaster Miao leave, Lucian sat back down and nodded toward Wang Chen.

“Finish your food and wait a moment. Then we can continue your cultivation session,” he said, closing his eyes.

But Wang Chen didn’t sit. With trembling lips, he asked, “Why are you being kind to me?”

He wasn’t used to Lucian doing anything good for others, much less taking the initiative to arrange food and medicine through servants.

Instead of answering directly, Lucian said, “If you ever doubt who I am, simply feel the connection between us and the depth of fear in your heart.”

To his surprise, Wang Chen replied, “That won’t do. The fear has lessened a lot, and the connection is hazy at best.”

Frowning, Lucian opened his eyes to examine Wang Chen. From his perspective, Wang Chen’s connection with him as a ghoul felt the same as before.

With his mind preoccupied by the theory about the azure sea being the Sea of Consciousness, he pushed the concern aside for later. This wasn't him ignoring something important. It was more that the previous theory shocked him greatly!

“I’ll investigate this while helping you cultivate,” Lucian said. “Now eat. Once you grow a bit stronger, we’ll proceed with that plan.”

Momentarily puzzled, Wang Chen’s eyes widened in understanding. “You said it could take a few weeks,” he said with a trembling voice. “Won’t that be dangerous? We can’t be hasty.”

Remembering the story he had fabricated to justify rescuing Bai Xiaomeng later, and being too distracted to maintain all its details, Lucian simply nodded.

“Things have changed. Now eat.”

For some reason, Wang Chen felt more comfortable when Lucian acted commanding and mysterious, so he nodded and returned to his meal.

Meanwhile, with his eyes closed and legs crossed, Lucian immersed himself in another memory, this one concerning his own consciousness.

And as usual, unknown to him, dozens of green tangible melodies drifted through the sea of his memories, surrounding a beautiful woman. The moment they detected a resonant memory, these melodies moved toward it, like blind men suddenly granted sight, destroying other memory fragments along their path.

The melodies moved when resonance occurred, but each time they did, they multiplied and destroyed more fragments.

Of course, there were far more memory shards than they could clear, so it would take time before the Resonant Sea Ancestor was freed from them.

While most of the memories they destroyed were from long ago and didn’t show Lucian at all, a few seemed to have been drawn there by weird silver currents. Some were about the monk Shui Dui, whom Lucian met in Ganshou Village, while others concerned the nameless servant he had turned into a ghoul, and that Grandmaster Miao had long since locked away.

Those memories were silently erased and could only be assessed directly by Lucian's soul from now on.

After discarding those shattered fragments, all the melodies converged upon a pitch-black memory shard, revealing the scene Lucian had focused on.