Chương 158: The Immortal Boy

When my eyes opened, I was floating in the middle of an endless space filled with crystalline fragments that stretched out in every direction as far as I could see. Each one of those shards was pulsing with this faint hungry light that seemed to be reaching toward my soul like it was trying to pull something out of me, like it wanted to feed on whatever I was made of.

The fragments had arranged themselves into patterns that reminded me of constellations, except these weren't constellations made of anything hopeful, they were made of things that were already broken and already fading. It took me a moment to actually work out where I was, and then it clicked. I was inside the crystal heart that the boy had been carrying wrapped up in that cloth!

The space around me was somehow both enormous and suffocating at the same time, like being caught inside an infinite hall of mirrors where every single reflection was showing you a different piece of a world that was dying. Well. This was new. The good news was that I had managed to pull control back from Han Renyi in the transition, and Han Renyi's consciousness was currently doing something that I could only describe as a very justified panic attack.

"Master where are we? What is happening? Is this death? Are we dead? We can't be dead. Father is going to notice I'm gone and Qingyi she'll—""Calm down," I said, trying to sound more confident than I actually felt.

"We appear to be inside some kind of crystalline heart structure. As for what is happening..." I paused and looked around more carefully at the fragments drifting through the space around us.

"That's what we're going to find out."

"Outsider." I turned, or did the mental equivalent of turning since physical directions felt more like loose suggestions in this place rather than actual facts. The boy from the shop was standing in front of us but he looked different now, his appearance had shifted into something that was simultaneously more and less human than before. There were stars scattered through his hair like embedded jewels, but they weren't bright healthy stars, they were dying ones, guttering and dim, some of them barely visible at all.

It felt like an accurate summary of the state of the world he was part of.

"Inner world spirits have restrictions placed on them," Azure said quietly in the back of my mind.

"One of the most important ones is that they can't harm humans without genuine cause."

"I did enter this world without being invited," I pointed out internally.

"Wouldn't that count?"

"If you had come as an invader it would, and you would have been stopped immediately, either killed outright or pushed back out. But you haven't actually harmed this world. Your presence has probably done the opposite." That was worth thinking about, but then Azure added something that pushed everything else aside for a moment: "Also, inner world spirits are physically incapable of lying." That was very useful information to have. Before I could do anything with it, the boy spoke again.

"You can come out of that body if you want," he said.

"It must be uncomfortable in there." I thought it through quickly. Everything Azure had just told me suggested that Han Renyi's body wasn't going to provide any meaningful protection if this spirit actually wanted to do something to my soul, the power he'd already shown made that pretty clear. But letting go of the only physical anchor I had in this strange space still felt wrong.

"You're also slowing down his healing," the boy added quietly.

"By being there."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

"His soul didn't fully recover from how close it came to dying," he explained, and he waved a hand and a crystalline image appeared between us showing Han Renyi's soul. I could see the hairline fractures running all through the structure of it, pulsing with a light that was weak and unsteady.

"Your presence is preventing the natural process from completing itself. Think of it like a broken bone that cannot set properly because someone keeps moving it without meaning to."

"Is that actually true?" Han Renyi's thoughts surfaced with a note of concern in them, and I felt him turning his attention inward for the first time and noticing the deep tiredness that had been sitting underneath everything, masked by my presence.

"I thought I was just tired from the fighting but..." He went quiet for a moment and then I felt something firm up in him.

"Master, if you staying is what's holding my recovery back then maybe…" The crystal fragments all around us shimmered softly and I noticed how they seemed to respond to something in Han Renyi's soul, like they were tuned to the same frequency.

"This space is part of the heart of this realm," the boy continued.

"It naturally helps the recovery of those who were born here. A few moments in this place without any interference would do more for him than years of ordinary rest would." This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Azure, is he actually telling the truth or is this a way to get me out in the open?" I asked internally.

"He can't lie," Azure said simply.

"Not even a little." I activated the Soul Ward rune first, better to be careful, and then I let go and stepped back out of Han Renyi's body and floated beside him. The sensation was like stepping out of a warm enclosed space into open cool air. Han Renyi immediately looked down at his own hands and flexed his fingers like he was checking they were still attached and working, and then his eyes found the boy standing there. The young master's mouth opened and closed several times without any sound coming out.

"You're really... you're actually..." The boy smiled at him and just for a second, I caught a glimpse of what he must have looked like before everything started falling apart around him, something ancient and knowing but with this thread of something lighter running through it.

"Sleep," he said gently. Han Renyi's eyes went heavy immediately and he slumped forward, still standing upright but clearly empty now, just a body with nobody home. I looked between my unconscious host and the being standing across from us.

"He'll be alright?"

"He'll be fine," the boy said.

"The sleep will actually help his soul heal faster. But I also didn't want him listening to what we're going to talk about." Fair enough. I nodded.

"You said you needed my help." The sadness came back into his face, and he raised one hand. The crystalline space around us completely changed. Suddenly we were surrounded by images of the Starhaven Realm, but not the parts I had seen or traveled through, these were the edges, the places people didn't go, the parts of the world where reality itself was coming undone at the seams. Mountains crumbled away into nothing while forests just stopped existing.

"This is my family," the boy said, barely above a whisper, and the despair in those three words was something I felt rather than just heard, because for all the power he clearly had, he was standing here watching his world dissolve around him piece by piece and there was nothing he could do about it on his own.

"How did you find me?" I asked, partly because I wanted to know and partly to give him a moment before we kept going.

"I felt the energy you used," he said, and another image appeared showing the moment I had healed Han Renyi during the fight with the mercenaries.

"I would have come to find you immediately after that but..." He gestured at the dissolution happening in the images around us.

"I've been occupied trying to keep the worst of it from happening all at once."

"So it's this specific energy you're interested in," I said, though I already had a fairly good idea where this was heading. He nodded and the images shifted again to show the flow of energy throughout the realm as a whole, and it was genuinely fascinating to see because I could watch exactly how the world's native rouqi interacted with the fragments of blue sun energy I had introduced into it. Wherever those two touched, the decay actually slowed down and in some places even reversed a little.

"Without the Celestial Sovereign, this world is coming apart," he said.

"Only life realm energy can slow the deterioration down, or something close enough to it to function the same way."

"Is there no way to stop it entirely?" He was quiet for a moment, thinking.

"Life realm energy can give the rouqi here a chance to change, to develop into something that can sustain the world on its own again. If even one cultivator here managed to reach Tier Seven, it would give us centuries more. And if someone reached Tier Nine..." He looked at me and for the first time since we'd arrived in this place, there was something like real hope in his expression.

"So Tier Seven here is equivalent to Life Realm cultivation in the main world," I said, working through it. It made sense when you thought about it, the energy needed to actually sustain a world would naturally sit at that level. He nodded.

"Why not just ask Life Realm cultivators from the main world to come help?" I asked.

"They'd have more than enough power to…" His expression closed over immediately and the dying stars in his hair flickered with something that was close to anger.

"They wouldn't come here to save anything," he said, cutting me off before I could finish the thought.

"They would come to consume it. Even in the state it's in now, the energy here would be too valuable to them to leave alone. I had no choice but to hide this realm from the main world entirely." He paused then and looked at me with an attention that felt different from before, sharper, more focused.

"Though I have been wondering how exactly a Qi Condensation cultivator managed to find their way through barriers that are supposed to be invisible to anyone below the Life Realm." I held his gaze and didn't offer anything in response to that. Some things were better kept to yourself, especially when dealing with someone who couldn't lie but was capable of passing information along to others.

"What actually happened to the Celestial Sovereign?" I asked instead.

"And the other high-level cultivators?" He let out a slow breath and the stars in his hair dimmed a little more.

"Something catastrophic. Something that has already killed cultivators at the Civilization Realm level and countless others at the Life Realm."

"Civilization Realm?" I asked.

"The realm after the Life Realm," he explained.

"It is…was the level my Master reached before he died." The way he stumbled slightly over the tense and the small pause before he chose his words, told me more about how he was carrying that loss than anything else could have.

"You still haven't told me how he died," I pointed out, because whatever had killed a cultivator four major realms ahead of where I currently stood was something I very much needed to have some information about.

"I know," he said, and the frustration on his face was genuine.

"It isn't that I'm choosing not to tell you. I am literally not able to." That was interesting, an enforced restriction of some kind or something else entirely.

"What is happening in the Main Realm goes far beyond any of the sect conflicts or the usual struggles between righteous and demonic cultivators," he continued.

"It is something that only people who have actually reached the Life Realm will be able to begin to understand properly." That made me think about the Azure Peak Sect and the way the pressure there had been building in ways that felt deliberate, like preparation for something, like they knew something was coming and were trying to get their people ready for it before it arrived. The boy's eyes sharpened suddenly and the dying stars in his hair flickered with curiosity.

"What is interesting though, is that you clearly have access to energy that functions like Life Realm energy, and yet you are very clearly not a Life Realm cultivator." I couldn't help the small smile that came to my face.

"You won't answer my questions, but you want me to answer yours?" He actually laughed at that, a real laugh, brief but genuine.

"A Qi Condensation cultivator walking around with Life Realm energy," he said, shaking his head like he still couldn't quite make it add up.

"Alright. I won't ask how. But I am going to ask whether you would be willing to use some of that energy to help keep this world from dying." The smile stayed on my face.

"That depends on what you're offering in return."