Chapter 176: A Troubled Soul (Patreon)

“Are you ready to start?”

“Yes, Elder Wei. I believe so.”

Lixian Shen’s expression was tense, but determined.

“Then let us go ahead with it. Please take off your mask.”

She obliged, sliding off the ivory mask to reveal the charred, leathery skin that covered half of her face. Seeing it again, Liu Wei felt another wave of admiration for the woman. He knew now, from the time he’d cultivated with her, that the scar burned with renewed pain every time she contemplated or utilized the Dao of Fire. To have made it so far as a cultivator despite that was a testament to an iron will and an indomitable spirit.

The admiration Liu Wei helt for Lixian Shen had certainly influenced his decision to aid her in reaching the Dao Contemplation Realm. He hadn’t come to the sect intending to interfere in its succession struggle, yet that was quite exactly what had ended up happening.

His scheme to push Tang Luli into foolishly trying to contact his allies at the demonic cult had necessitated bringing Lixian Shen, his only remaining rival, to the edge of her breakthrough. Strictly speaking, they could also have simply bluffed him, but that would have left them without a path forward, had he refused to act.

Now though, that Tang Luli was dead, the demonic cult destroyed and Liu Wei had found out the truth about the scheme around the assassination, there was, strictly speaking, no need to assist the Burning Thorns Sect’s new leading elder any further.

Liu Wei would soon depart for Moonlake City to prepare his return to the Lunar Peaks Sect and didn’t plan on returning here for the foreseeable future. Lixian Shen had readily aided him with everything she could, but the help he had provided her in regard to her position in the sect and her cultivation was already plenty enough repayment for that.

Still, he felt the need to finish what he had started, now that he had already gotten her this far. Aiding her in her breakthrough wasn’t too time consuming for him, and it would make a massive difference for her. The help of an established cultivator of the Dao Contemplation Realm mostly negated the risks associated with breaking through, both the potential soul damage one could incur and the real chance of complete failure. It also massively reduced the amount of preparation necessary to make an attempt.

“Please sit down.”, Liu Wei said, directing Lixian Shen to the center of the formation he had prepared.

There was also the fact that helping her break through would drastically improve the situation the Burning Thorns Sect would find itself in after he had left. By now, the news of their former patriarch’s death had well and truly spread to every corner of the realm, and without the presence of a Dao Contemplation Realm cultivator, it wasn’t hard to imagine other sects trying to take advantage of the situation, especially if Lixian Shen were to fail her first attempt at breaking through.

The sect, despite having been an enemy during the war, had hosted Liu Wei for a long time now, and leaving them open to such a risk didn’t seem right. A more calculating part of Liu Wei’s mind also didn’t forget that a Burning Thorns Sect under Lixian Shen’s leadership could serve as an ally in the future.

Part of what made the Pillar Families as powerful as they were was the relationships they maintained with many of the territory’s minor sects. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that most of the Lunar Peaks Sect’s subordinate sects were truly subordinates of its Pillar Families first and foremost. Gaining the Burning Thorns Sect as an ally could potentially be highly useful at some point.

Liu Wei injected some of his Qi in the formation to activate it before heading over to Lixian Shen and sitting down behind her. She had already exposed her back and he put his flat hand right between her shoulder blades with just enough pressure that it wouldn’t break contact were she to unconsciously stir.

“I will be injecting additional Fire Qi into you. Simply focus on circulating it. You will feel it interacting with the formation as you do so. Ready?”

“Yes.”

Lixian Shen decisively nodded.

“Good.”, Liu Wei answered and began.

…

Elder Wei’s presence felt like the morning sun. Gentle, warm and benevolent and yet unthinkably great and majestic. It dwarfed Lixian Shen’s own, and yet that only served to reassure her.

She felt a warm tingle in her back as his Qi began flowing into her, merely a trickle at first but soon a mighty stream. It was pure, the purest she’d ever felt, and there was a deep feeling of profound knowledge contained within it. It didn’t leave any doubts about belonging to the most powerful cultivator of the Dao of Fire that the peninsula had seen in a millennium.

As Lixian Shen began to circulate the warm energy, she immediately understood what Elder Wei had meant when he’d told her it would interact with the formation. The movement seemed to animate, imbuing it with a new intensity that directly interacted with her soul. As the Qi completed its circulation through her body, she felt it pushing the boundaries of her soul outward.

As Elder Wei injected more of his Qi into the cycle, Lixian Shen felt the understanding of the Dao she had built up warp and condense in ways she hadn’t thought possible. Slowly but surely, something deep inside her was changing. It wasn’t just her understanding that was expanding, her entire being was following alongside it. She was growing.

The feeling was exhilarating. There was barely any part of Lixian Shen’s mind that was free to ponder, her entire focus taken in by the new realizations about the Dao of Fire she was experiencing, but the little that could spare a thought could only appreciate, just how right it all felt.

And then, things went wrong.

It began as a distant, undefinable ache that she could barely even locate. Then, all of a sudden, it was a searing burn, centered around her scar and expanding outward. It was the same old, familiar sting that she felt every time she pondered the Dao of Fire, but the intensity of it was unlike anything Lixian Shen had ever experienced.

In a matter of seconds, the entire world was pain.

…

When Lixian Shen fell forward abruptly, Liu Wei’s first instinct was to immediately abort. He’d witnessed a failed breakthrough in person once before. The senior member in question had lost consciousness from the strain on his soul. The subsequent rampaging of Qi through his body had damaged his soul so heavily he’d never been able to make a second attempt before his age caught up to him.

In an effort to prevent such an outcome, Liu Wei quickly extended his presence, reaching out to take control of the immense amount of fire Qi in Lixian Shen’s body – only to find his control actively resisted.

Focusing his soul sense on her, he realized Lixian Shen was still actively circling the Qi; she hadn’t lost consciousness. He could also immediately see what the problem was: Much of the Qi she was circling was heavily corrupted – impure, volatile and filled with false realizations and half-truths about the Dao of Fire – and damaging her soul as a result. She had to be in unbelievable pain right now.

For a moment, Liu Wei wasn’t sure how to proceed. He could forcibly wrestle control of the Qi away from Lixian Shen and extract it from her body. That would neutralize the threat quickly without giving it time to permanently damage anything.

It would, however, also let this breakthrough attempt end in failure. Lixian Shen would need months if not years to before she could make another one, and given that he couldn’t wait here for that long, she’d have to make that one without his help. Given what had happened this time, she’d need to prepare extremely carefully the next time which, given the sect’s financial state, would likely drag out for several more years, all of which the sect would need to survive without a proper leader.

Liu Wei made a split-second decision: As long as Lixian Shen was conscious and continuing her breakthrough-attempt, he’d try to support her. That meant, first and foremost, that he’d need to find a way to deal with the corrupted Qi.

It was Qi the like of which one might find in the lowest level of cultivation drug, the sort that would be sold on a black market but that alchemists at the Lunar Peaks Sect would simply throw out as a failure in embarrassment. Qi that had absolutely no business being anywhere near a breakthrough to the Dao Contemplation Realm.

No fully fledged Dao Attunement Realm cultivator would ever have Qi of such terrible quality. Besides, most of the Qi Lixian Shen was circulating was Qi Liu Wei had injected into her himself and that had been about as pure as fire Qi could possibly be. Something had to be corrupting the Qi as she was circulating it.

Liu Wei carefully followed the Qi’s stream through her body, but the source of corruption was difficult to make out among all the already corrupted Qi. After a moment of consideration, Liu Wei injected a single strand of pure Qi into the maelstrom and followed it as it made its way through her body.

There!

As the Qi traveled through Lixian Shen’s facial scar, it warped, its alignment with the Dao being twisted into something unrecognizable. The scar was the source of corruption.

Liu Wei chided himself as he tried coming up with a solution. He’d evidently underestimated how heavy the scar wore on Lixian Shen. Given she’d been able to cultivate somewhat normally, he’d thought she’d had it handled, but that was evidently not the case. The scar was an injury inflicted upon her by her own element and it was disrupting her connection to the Dao of Fire.

Solving this problem wouldn’t be easy. Cutting the scar out of the circulation was out of question: In order to facilitate the breakthrough, the understanding of the Dao contained within the Qi needed to warp the entirety of the cultivator’s soul into something new. Since the soul and body of a soul cultivator were unified into one, this meant that it had to pass through the entire body, not just part of it.

For a while, Liu Wei didn’t know how to proceed. Then, finally, an idea formed in his mind.

He put his second hand on Lixian Shen’s back, right below where the one he’d used to inject her with Qi was still resting. Then, he began to subtly pull at her Qi again. He wasn’t trying to wrestle control away from her entirely, merely enough that he could influence the cycle as she drove it. It was a little more difficult because he had to precisely moderate the strength with which he pulled, but a moment later, he had succeeded. It was time to try out his idea.

Careful not to interrupt the continuity of the cycle, Liu Wei subtly rerouted the flow of Qi into himself. As some of the corrupted Qi began flowing into him through his lower hand, he injected new, pure Qi back into the cycle at the same rate through his upper one. To his satisfaction, the cycle continued uninterrupted.

To a cultivator of Liu Wei’s level, corrupted Qi like this could barely even be qualified as an inconvenience. The mere presence of his soul was enough to fully purify it mere moments after entering his body.

The scar continued corrupting the new Qi as it passed it, but Liu Wei’s purification was quicker. Slowly but surely, the Qi circulating through Lixian Shen’s body began to clear up. After a while, her muscles, which had been visibly tense the entire time, relaxed and a little later, she sat up straight again.

As Liu Wei settled into the steady cycle of corruption and purification, he suddenly felt something stir deep inside his soul. It was a feeling that had been utterly foreign to him when he’d first experienced it a couple years earlier, but that he now recognized as an epiphany.

Back when he had lost his ability to cultivate, it had been an epiphany that had allowed him to diagnose and address the issue. Since then, he’d experienced quite a few of them while studying mortal philosophy, a phenomenon he was still intending to investigate in depth at some point.

Every epiphany felt a little different and their impact on cultivation also varied – though it was usually quite small – and this one somehow felt quite significant. He looked forward to absorbing it and investigating its origins, once he found the time. Right now, that time was not.

Focusing back on Lixian Shen, Liu Wei realized that he’d been momentarily so focused on his epiphany that he’d missed the beginning of a change: The amount of corruption the scar inflicted on the Qi that was passing through it had begun to noticeably lessen. Over the next minutes, Liu Wei watched as it continued to do so until it had fully disappeared. The Qi that flowed through Lixian Shen was perfectly clear again.

Then, a profound change went through the woman.

For a moment, her soul contracted. Then, with a force that caused a ripple in the Dao that Cultivators of the Dao Contemplation Realm would be able to feel from a great distance – not that there were any close enough besides Liu Wei and the captive Shadow – it expanded into something more.

She had reached the Dao Contemplation Realm.