Chapter 871: A Hundred Days to Stand (Patreon)

If someone had been able to peer into the time jade, they would find that the leaf floating in it had finished turning brown, which meant that a hundred and forty days had passed inside of the formation. And oh boy, did Lin Youran keep his word about making me experience the torture which he would describe as training.

Back on Earth, I’d read countless webnovels where the author would summarise the training with a paragraph or two about the months of hardship they had gone through without bothering to go into the details.

I understood why, it was because we all wanted to jump straight to the part where everyone’s jaws dropped.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t skip through those pages, I had to live them, and it hadn’t been pretty. It was easy to only see the results and not think about the cultivator lying on a simulation room floor with drool on his chin, trying to remember why he had wanted power in the first place, and why he had agreed to be the subject of a training technique called the Myriad Burdens Dao Tempering Method.

A name like that alone would have been enough to deter the more weak-willed cultivators, but I didn’t have the luxury of considering failure, I had to go through what Lin Youran referred to as “the pressing” whenever he could be bothered to name it at all.

After suffering under it daily, I had learned a few things about it.

The first was that power was useless against it, whether that be red sun energy, blue sun energy, golden sun energy, or Stellar Realm qi, it didn’t make a difference. The technique didn’t care for anything except for my sense of self, which made it difficult to defend against since who truly understood their true self?

What made it worse was that the pressure worsened with doubt.

If I ever wondered whether the Dao of Connection was truly mine, the weight doubled or even tripled. It was only when I stopped thinking and allowed that stubborn, half-formed thing inside me to push back on its own that the pressure eased enough for me to breathe.

They say that with cultivation progress comes insanity, and I could easily name a dozen or so cultivators to back up this claim, what I hadn’t expected was for the laziest cultivator in the sect to follow that pattern.

It was only later that Lin Youran had explained to me that since an unborn dao was fragile, if the pressure ever outweighed the cultivator’s sense of self, it would cripple the dao before it could form, and that was something impatient masters in other sects had done to their own disciples more times than they’d care to admit.

Fortunately for me, no matter if Lin Youran’s eyes were shut and his cheek were squashed against his pillow, he never made that mistake. Somehow, the sleeping elder knew the exact moment my vision began to turn white, and it was then that he would ease off, but he also knew the exact moment I grew comfortable and would press down again. I had no idea how he found the right balance, but it just went to show that Lin Youran was one of those cultivators that casually did things that would shock the world all the while refusing to accept they were anything more than ordinary.

“Master, I could think of another cultivator just like that,” Azure piped out.

“That’s different,” I replied mentally. “I just don’t want to grow a big head, that’s all.”

That was true. I would rather underestimate myself than walk to my death because I thought that I was special and that the world would protect me, though being on the good side of karma did help.

As for Lin Youran, true to his personality, the elder had only gotten directly involved on the first day with the pressing. On the second morning, he laid a palm on the central array beside his time jade and let a thin grey thread slide out of his hand into the formation.

“What are you doing?” I had asked.

“Delegating,” he had yawned.

Since a simulated opponent could never copy a dao by itself, if a cultivator lent a thread of their own dao to the array, the formation could weave it into the opponent, letting it wield the real thing as long as its owner was present to power it up.

Through the short breaks that the elder allowed me, I was able to learn the name of the dao that he followed. It was the Dao of Leisure, which wasn’t a dao I was familiar with if I was being honest.

The core of it was focused on effortless action.

Why waste any energy when heaven and earth had been moving perfectly well long before he was born and would continue to do so after his death? I found it difficult to believe that the man could grow stronger by simply sleeping. That was ridiculously overpowered even in a world like this. I couldn’t imagine what the old me back on Earth, who napped through every lecture he could, would have done to acquire something like that.

So while Lin Youran had grown more powerful while snoring away on his cloud, Cao Yu had stood over me with a borrowed dao and the smuggest expression the heavens had ever allowed on a face.

It had truly been a humiliating yet humbling experience.

Even now, I could remember how on the second day, my face had carved an imprint on the cold stone while an embroidered boot pressed down on my neck. I hadn’t been able to do anything about it because my arms had refused to obey me, and my eyelids had kept sliding shut.

But what was more terrifying was the quiet voice that sounded exactly the same as mine whispering suggestions that the floor was comfortable and that there was no reason to get up again.

Somehow Lin Youran had known about the voice, he had warned me that if I even once obeyed it, I would lose a part of myself. That at my core I would accept failure. And that would be the end of my journey to the dao.

So out of pure spite to not let a fake young master with a fan be the reason my dao died before it was born, I had forced my eyes to stay open.

“Look at this,” Cao Yu had said, snapping open his fan. “The peasant has finally found his proper place. Tell me, does the floor taste of your home village?”

“Says the guy using someone else’s dao,” I mumbled into the stone.

“Someone else’s?” He gasped and pressed a hand to his chest. “You must be mistaken. It was the very heavens themselves that bestowed upon this young master the Dao of Imperial Repose. Truly a worthy dao for the son of a Grand Elder because only an emperor can afford to rest while lesser men like yourself toil!”

“It’s leisure,” a sleepy voice muttered from the corner, followed by a snore.

Cao Yu’s ears turned red, but instead of responding, he continued on about the Dao of Imperial Repose as though he hadn’t been publicly corrected. And it was like this, flat on my face with an arrogant, deluded, young master stomping down on my neck, that I spent the next few weeks.

Yet slowly but surely I began to make progress.

By the end of the first month, I had worked myself up to my knees.

Sure, sweat had been dripping from my chin onto the stone, my whole body had trembled, and my palms had been pressed flat against my thighs because they were the only thing stopping me from tipping forward, but I had been able to stay upright for almost an hour. As sad as it sounded, I had never been prouder of kneeling in all of my lives.

“At last!” Cao Yu cried, throwing his arms wide. “After thirty days, the peasant has finally learned how to properly kneel before this young master! Now lower your head and kowtow three times, and I might allow you to polish my boots.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m only taking a break before I stand up.”

“Senior,” he cried out, spinning around to face the corner. “The peasant mocks me! Lend this young master more dao so I can put him back where he belongs!”

“No…” the cloud mumbled. “More dao is more effort…”

To Cao Yu’s displeasure, after the end of the second month, I was on my feet. It didn’t matter to me that my legs had been shaking so badly that my knees knocked together, at least I was standing.

“What is this? Why are you on your feet?” he demanded, taking a step forward. “Who gave you permission to stand? Sit back down at once, this young master did not approve this!”

I took a step towards him, which made him drop his fan.

“Esteemed Brother! This young master knew from the first moment that you had the bones of a sovereign!” he bowed so low that his jade crown nearly scraped the tiles. “It was the senior that forced this junior to do all of these things as a test of your dao heart, and it is clear that you have passed—”

At that exact moment, my left knee had buckled, forcing me to throw out an arm to catch my balance.

“Ha! You wobble! What kind of sovereign?” Cao Yu straightened at once, dusted off his robes and scooped up his fan. “Back to the floor, you mud-stained peasant!”

There had been plenty of times where Azure reminded me that nothing good came easy, while I seriously wondered whether a scripture with no techniques in it was worth any of this. Yet all of that humiliation and torture had been worth it at the end because after a hundred days of suffering, something inside me had changed.

I had done it. I had actually awakened a dao.

A/N

Hey guys, no chap tomo since I'll be flying out so won't have access to the internet, but the good news is that I've scheduled chapters for Wednesday, Thursday, and also the rest of next week. This means that with the exception of tomo, you'll get your chapters as normal. Since everything is already scheduled, I probably won't be active in the comments since I'll be focusing on enjoying my holiday.

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