Chapter 870: One Loss Is Worth A Thousand Wins (Patreon)

Ignoring the pain that shot through my ribs, I pressed my good hand against a broken bench to help push myself back to my feet. My arm was shaking, but somehow, I managed to get an elbow under myself. Just because I had been defeated, it didn't mean I should stay down, I should at least try to stand on my own two feet.

“You still refuse to kneel?” Cao Yu looked down at me with a sneer as his right hand thickened into a golden spectral claw. “You dare look up at this young master with those eyes? Very well. A peasant who refuses to use his knees has no need for legs either.”

As the five talons angled down at my legs, I tried to activate Blink Step, but the backlash from my avatar had scrambled my control over my energies, so all I was able to manage was a weak flicker of the rune.

Just when it looked like a simulation was actually going to cripple me, a whisper rang out through the arena, “enough,” which stopped the claw an inch from my knee.

“Who dares interrupt this young master?” Cao Yu roared, but the effect wasn’t as intimidating as he had hoped due to his whole body being frozen mid-swing. “Do you have any idea whose son—”

His words were cut off as the air changed and that same stillness that had made the steam above the teacups hang motionless back in the council hall now swept over us, causing his golden energy to turn into wisps.

“D-d-dao?” Cao Yu sputtered, his face paling. “That’s a dao!”

I could understand why he was so terrified. As impressive as these simulation rooms were, like how they could copy a cultivator’s cultivation rank, techniques, and domain, what it couldn’t copy was a dao. All it could settle for was the impression of a dao, so a real dao wasn’t something the simulated opponent could stand against, which explained why he sounded like he was being bullied.

“Senior! Esteemed Senior! Honoured Ancestor! This young master… no, this little one had eyes but failed to see Mount Tai!” In his fear, his fan slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. “My father, the Grand Elder, will kowtow to you personally! My grandfather will kowtow! All seventeen generations of my ancestors will climb out of their tombs to kowtow to you, Great One!”

With his body still locked into place, the best he could do was blink rapidly in a motion that imitated bowing fast and deep, but Lin Youran ignored him and swung his legs off his cloud to stand up.

The last time I’d seen him on his own two feet was when I had met him for the first time and he had greeted me alongside the other elders, but he had quickly jumped back into the cloud the first chance he could get.

Now, he was walking down through the stands with a slight frown that told me he considered every step a personal sacrifice, until he stopped beside me and held out his hand.

“Thank you,” I said, taking his hand while wincing as my ribs shifted.

As he pulled me to my feet, behind him, Cao Yu was still bobbing his eyes.

“Junior Brother! Senior Brother! Esteemed Elder! This little one must have been blind not to realise that you walk beside such a powerful senior! Those insults were a test! Yes! I was simply testing your dao heart, and you passed! You passed magnificently! Your weeds were the finest weeds this little one has ever seen! And the robe, please, take my robe, you are more deserving of it than this blind one, the silkworms were—”

Without turning around, Lin Youran exerted more of his dao on the young master, causing Cao Yu’s eyelids to droop mid-sentence. “—raised…dew … spirit… peaks…” His head tipped forward until he plunged face-first into the rubble.

A soft chime rang through the arena, cutting through the loud snores that were coming from the arrogant young master.

OPPONENT DEFEATED. SIMULATION COMPLETE.

With the battle finished, Cao Yu dissolved into specks of light, and around us, the melted stands and the split stage pulled themselves back together tile by tile. Seeing the arena recover, I put more blue sun energy into my Woodweave Seal.

“That was an impressive attempt,” Lin Youran congratulated me.

“I still lost, though,” I sighed, rubbing the back of my head with my good hand.

“Mmm…that is the problem with you prodigies.” He shook his head as though he wasn’t one himself. “Everything goes well for you, so you never learn how to lose, and then it happens. One day, when you face an opponent you can’t beat, the loss bruises your pride. And sometimes it even creates a heart demon. Then you spend the rest of your life stuck at the same stage.”

I understood the message because I had read that exact arc in dozens of webnovels where the genius who had never tasted defeat loses once and spends the next hundred chapters losing his mind. When I had realised what kind of world I was in, I had promised myself that I would never become that guy, and yet here I was, sulking because I lost to a simulation at the peak of my own realm.

“Master, if it helps, I’m glad you lost,” Azure said.

“Thanks…?” I replied internally, confused why my inner world spirit would want that.

“If you had won today, you’d walk into that duel believing that a few tricks could beat someone close to a thousand years old.”

That was true. I had used the techniques that had got me through so many adversities, it was easy to grow comfortable and overconfident.

“Losing here only cost you a few injuries,” Azure continued. “But if you lost on the Martial Stage against someone like Elder Gong Ru, that would cost you more, and losing to a real enemy outside the sect could cost you your life. So, I am happy that we found out your weaknesses now, while you still have a hundred and forty days to fix them.”

He had a good point. Failure was where a cultivator grew the most, and if I was being honest with myself, I had learned more from this one loss about my weaknesses than from all of the battles that I had won.

“Good, I wasn’t wrong about you,” Lin Youran said, probably noticing the change in my expression. “I knew you would understand.”

His cloud drifted over to him, and he plopped back on it. Once he was comfortable, he continued.

“Now, let me tell you what I saw. Your movement is the best thing you have. You were able to hit Cao Yu before he finished speaking because the technique was almost instantaneous. It is very impressive. And coupled with that branch of yours, it would be difficult to injure or kill you with a single strike.”

I agreed with that. I always favoured movement techniques since if you couldn’t defeat someone, then at least you had the chance to escape if things turned ugly. And the reason he mentioned was exactly why I mainly used the Partial Manifestation technique defensively.

“Then there’s your three unique energies,” he went on. “The red one sits in the marks on your skin utilises formations in a way I have not seen before.”

I nodded since it made sense that a cultivator would assume that the runes were just formations used in a different way. Only someone that was an expert in formations would notice the real difference between them.

“With the blue one, you were able to build a domain without projecting your inner world, so when he destroyed it, the backlash didn’t affect your inner world, which is something most Stellar Realm cultivators would kill for.”

That was one of the main reasons why I preferred to paint domains with Lightweaver techniques rather than the typical qi cultivator way, though it would be awesome to manifest my inner world during a battle, especially with how powerful a Genesis Seed was, even the manifestation of one.

“That golden giant of yours was very close to a Life Realm cultivator, it was a shame that you didn’t have the energy to sustain it and enough control over it to make the most of it.”

I sighed because I knew that if I had mastery over my golden sun energy, no one within my cultivation realm would be able to stand toe-to-toe with me, well, unless they had a dao. Clearly a dao triumphed over everything.

“The reality of your situation is,” Lin Youran said. “Because your qi techniques can’t handle the power of Stellar Realm qi, you simply won’t be able to defeat the stronger Stellar Realm elders with your unique energies, no matter how many of them you have. Ma Gang’s palm would burn through your labyrinth in a breath, and Duan Hui would happily trade a few broken bones to get his hands on you. Never mind Gong Ru himself, I don’t want to imagine what he would do to you as you are now.”

I held back a wince at the thought of the old man getting his hands on me, but honestly, this situation was ridiculous. How was it acceptable for a man pushing a thousand years to challenge someone who hadn’t even turned twenty? Not only does he not feel any shame, he invited the whole sect to come watch.

“Gong Ru has no shortage of techniques, but no matter how many techniques he collects,” Lin Youran said, “he will never awaken a dao. That is where you have the advantage.”

After watching the old man waste his efforts on petty drama, it was obvious why no dao had picked him. Someone that small-minded would never be able to open themselves up to a dao. So, if I could awaken a dao, I should be able to overwhelm him similar to Elder Lin Youran did.

“There are several methods to awaken a dao,” he continued with a lazy wave of his hand. “Some take centuries of meditation, others need a battle between life and death, though for one as close to forming as yours, we’ll use the fastest way, but it is the most painful, so prepare yourself.”

“That’s fine,” I said, thinking how I had died more times than I could remember in ways that I doubted few could relate to. “I can handle pa—”

I didn’t even get the chance to finish my sentence because it suddenly felt like someone had punched through my chest, grabbed onto my heart, and was squeezing with all their might. My face reddened, and my breathing stopped as I doubled over until my knees hit the tiles.

What the hell was going on?

This couldn’t be spiritual pressure. I had stood before Rank 9 cultivators and I’d come face to face with two otherworldly beings, so I had no issue shrugging off the spiritual pressure of anyone below the Civilisation Realm.

This was something else.

This wasn’t targeting my physical body or my cultivation, this had shot straight towards something deeper than any of that. It was challenging the core of who I was – my dao?

“This method uses one dao to force the awakening of another,” I heard Lin Youran’s voice over me but with my vision darkening, I couldn’t see where he exactly was. “Some claim that it is dangerous, but as long as you have a strong sense of self, you will be fine.”

I had no idea where he was getting his confidence in me from, but with my head spinning, it wasn’t like I could ask. To make it worse, I could hear in the background of my mind, Azure giving me a lecture on how nothing good comes easy, which was convenient for a being that had never felt pain to say.

“We will continue this every day until your dao grows strong enough to fight back on its own, so fight through the pain and meditate on your dao.”

Meditate? How the hell was I supposed to think about anything when I was fighting to just stay conscious?

A/N

Next week, we'll have a timeskip and cover the important parts of the training period

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