Chapter 872: Who Am I Truly? (Patreon)

A hundred days into the torture that Lin Youran called training began like the days before it, the sleepy elder snoring on his cloud in the corner of Room Seven and Cao Yu strolling around me, fanning himself while pressing down the dao that he had borrowed on my shoulders.

Even though I had progressed far enough that I could stand, I had decided to sit down in the traditional cross-legged position best suited for meditation as it helped me focus while the young master yapped on.

“Look at you sitting there with your eyes shut as though you are an enlightened sage.” Cao Yu tapped the top of my head with his folded fan. “Tell me, peasant, has this young master’s Dao of Imperial Repose finally broken your will? Do you now understand the difference between the heavens and the earth?”

Seeing that I wasn’t answering, he pulled a small teacup out of his sleeve.

“What an awful rug you are, perhaps you can be this young master’s tea table instead. Yes, what a splendid idea.”

With a soft clink, a cup settled on top of my head, and a second later, warm tea splashed against my scalp as he poured.

“Stay still,” he scolded. “My father’s tea table has more dignity than you, and it is carved from wood.” Taking a sip made his nose wrinkle. “What is this? This tea tastes like peasant! This…this is your fault!”

As much as I was beginning to question the sanity of whoever made this simulation character, I had to admit that it was actually very beneficial for training. It had only been a month or so ago that his comments had been able to rip my focus to shreds, but now I’d finally been able to do what Lin Youran had asked me to on the first day, which was meditate.

I could remember wondering how anyone could meditate under pressure that made it almost impossible to stay conscious, but the more I suffered under it, the easier it became to detach myself from the pain.

So, the crushing ache behind my breastbone, Cao Yu’s voice, or the quiet voice telling me to lie down too, I could push them all to the side and direct my attention towards that stubborn, half-formed thing that was trying to push.

I wasn’t entirely sure for how long I stayed like that, but sooner or later, I felt something within me shift. It began with my heartbeat, which slowed down until there was a beat per minute. My breathing followed, falling into the same pattern. It was then that a strange calm spread from the centre of my chest out to my fingertips.

That was when the questions started.

These were questions that I’d spent the past year trying not to dwell on.

The first one was who even was I?

Before entering this world, I had been Kane Walker, an accountancy student in his early twenties. An innocent victim that had been shoved into traffic, killed while heading to morning classes without knowing why. No one called me Kane, no one knew what my real name was, so was I still that person after everything that I’d experienced in this world?

But did I even want to be that person?

The one who had lived in a flat with three others, yet always felt like an outsider looking in. The one whose mother only called to make sure that appearances were being maintained, and that the right relationships were being created. The one whose father, even when physically present, wasn’t really there at all.

At that time, the only true happiness I felt was from reading about cultivators who had sworn brothers and loyal companions, and wondering how it would feel to have people of my own, but all of that had been wishful thinking until I woke up as Ke Yin.

This was someone who was the son of a tailor in a village that no one in the Cultivation World would bother to visit, except someone did. Old Man Han had seen something in the young Ke Yin. It was unfortunate that he couldn’t live the life he was meant to live, and he couldn’t reach his potential. And it was through being him that I was able to experience what having a mother and father that actually cared about you felt like, or at least they were able to show their love. But even that had been difficult to accept, how could someone feel comfortable pretending to be someone else’s son?

However, through what I had experienced in the beast wave, followed by the encouragement that they had given me during the tournament, it was only then that I truly became their son. And my relationships with Wei Lin and Lin Mei had been genuine. They didn’t know the original Ke Yin, I was the only one they knew, and slowly but surely I had made real connections with them.

Then there was my life in the Two Suns World where I had woken up as Tomas, a villager from Porvale. With the world’s fate resting on my shoulders, I had first tried to do everything myself, because that was all I knew. Yet setback after setback showed me that wouldn’t be enough, it was then that I recruited a team of my own, formed with people that trusted me and whom I trusted. It was only when working together that we were able to succeed.

I had died and woken up in so many bodies that I honestly didn’t know whether there was anything left that belonged only to me, but I began to realise that it didn’t matter that if the bodies changed, the names changed, or even the worlds changed, in every single one of them, I was the same person at heart, and I always did the same thing.

Which was to help others, make friends, pay back every debt I owed, and bring back home anyone who had nowhere else to go. But why did I do all of this? It was because that lonely accountancy student who ate dinner by himself had promised that if he ever got a second chance, he wouldn’t spend it alone. And even if my paranoia did make that difficult, I had made genuine steps in that direction.

So that is why right now in my inner world, there were Leech-kin children wading into a lake that smelled of their old home because I had refused to leave them behind in a dying world. That is why the Lithari were able to do what they loved most, which was dig and dig. And that is why even a stone like the Stone Emperor could lecture without being ostracised. My inner world had become a centre of connections for all of creation.

Hell, even my techniques, like the Dharma Vessel, drew its strength from the people I cared about.

That…that was who I was.

It was easy to say that with words, but as soon as I accepted that at a fundamental level, the half-formed thing inside me unfolded to fill my chest with warmth. Without anyone needing to tell me, I knew what it was, this was the Dao of Connection.

Since this was a dao that had no element to build a foundation on, it was considered by the major sects to be a more difficult path to tread, and no one really knew how to categorise it. There were those that claimed it was similar to the Dao of Karma because both dealt with cause and effect, and if that was true, then maybe I could learn something valuable from the Sect Master. But there were others who said that it fit the same category as the Dao of Space because it could link one place to another. Yet the definition that I preferred was those who didn’t restrict it, they said that the dao governed the relationship between things, whether that was a root and its soil, a master and his disciple, or a cultivator and his inner world.

There was another reason why it was a rare dao to cultivate.

Most cultivators in the world agreed that the path of cultivation was a lonely one, so when a dao came along and demanded a cultivator admit that others had shaped him, that went against everything they believed. Then again, I wasn’t most cultivators, I had no problem admitting that my greatest strength came from the connections that I’d formed, as cheesy as it sounded.

But the dao was a personal thing, so it wasn’t right for them to judge me or for me to judge them. As for what the Dao of Connections meant to me, I understood the moment that I felt it. If you wanted to define a connection, there needed to be at least two directions, and sometimes what travelled down one side could travel back along another side.

Like a spider web, every connection had a starting point, a core, and in this case, it was me.

I was the place where all of those connections that affected my life met, whether that was what made Lin Youran stand up for me, or the friends I had made along the journey, what mattered was that I never had to stand alone. If anything wanted to push me down, it would need to push against everything I was connected to as well.

With my eyes still closed, I could finally see what Lin Youran had been doing to me for the past hundred days. There was a thin grey line that ran from the cloud in the corner to the array in the floor, another ran from the array into Cao Yu, and from Cao Yu, a thick, heavy line stretched straight into my chest. The pressure had never been anything more than a connection between his borrowed dao and my sense of self. But if he was connected to me to pressure me, that meant that I was connected to him, and I could return the favour.

Opening my eyes, I stood up, which caused the teacup to slide off my head and shatter.

“What… what are you doing?” Cao Yu stumbled back a step with his fan frozen in front of his face. “Bow! The Dao of Imperial Repose commands you to bow!”

Jabbing his fan at me caused a heavy weight to slam into my chest, but this time, it slid off me because it couldn’t find anything to push against.

“Why…why isn’t it working?” His voice cracked, turning to face Lin Youran. “Senior! Senior, the peasant is broken!”

Taking a slow breath, I pushed back along the line between us.

As my dao spread, wherever it passed, it found every connection Cao Yu relied on, the line to the array, the line to the stars of his inner world, and the line to the dao he had borrowed. Now that I had found it, I could turn it back against him.

So, clenching my teeth, I pushed it all back at once, immediately forcing him to his knees.

“This young master… is kneeling?” Cao Yu whispered, staring up at me in horror.

In the corner of the room, Lin Youran was no longer snoring. In fact, he was sitting upright, and his eyes were wide open without a hint of sleep in them. “What an excellent dao.”

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