Chương 175: Developing A Technique

The thing about traveling around with a group of cultivators is that it's never really quite what you would expect it to be going in. In novels its usually shown as either being silent meditation the whole way or nonstop profound discussions about the dao and what it all means, but the reality of it, which I was discovering for myself, involved a whole lot more complaining about bugs then anyone ever seemed to mention in the books.

"I swear," Chu Feng muttered, swatting at something that looked like it might be a spirit mosquito buzzing near his face, "these things just keep getting worse every year. Who even needs beast waves to worry about when these little demons exist?"

"Stop wasting your energy on that," Su Yue advised him, though I noticed at the same time that she was quietly maintaining a thin barrier of heated air around her own body without drawing attention to it.

"We need to conserve our qi for whatever is waiting for us up ahead." She had a point. We were making decent time along the mountain path but traveling at high speed for an extended period was still pretty draining on all of us, and the last thing any of us needed was to show up at the village already exhausted before anything had even happened.

It was during moments like this one that I found myself wanting to get some actual cultivation practice in, but the bumpy terrain we were moving across required too much of my attention to spare and I needed to keep my energy conserved for whatever we were going to run into later. That being said, it didn't mean that everyone had to just sit around doing nothing the whole time. Inside my inner world Yggy was hard at work.

The little vine had been practicing connecting itself to my various runes, which was something we hadn't really dared to try back when we were still in the Starhaven Realm since I always needed to use the red suns energy for one thing or another, whether that was for actual battling or just for bluffing my way through a situation.

"No, no, not like that," Azure's voice echoed inside my mind as another one of Yggy's attempts fizzled out.

"You're trying to force the connection to happen. Think of the runes like doors. You don't break a door down to get through it, you find the right key for it instead." Yggy made a gesture that somehow managed to convey both frustration and stubborn determination at the same time, which was impressive for something that didn't really have a face to express emotions with.

"Maybe try starting off with something simpler," I suggested to it silently.

"The Fundamental Rune is built to work with red sun energy from the start. Since that's what you're made out of..." Yggy perked up at the suggestion and its tendrils wove themselves into a more organized pattern than before. This time when it reached out for the connection there was a lot less of that forceful pushing from before and more of a resonance, I guess? It was hard to put into words exactly, but it felt right when it happened.

"Much better than before," Azure said approvingly.

"The energy flow is a lot more stable now. Though we should probably wait until we're somewhere safer before we try anything more advanced than this." He was right. The last thing any of us needed was for Yggy to accidentally trigger an explosive seed rune while we were trying to move through here stealthily. For now, it was enough progress for the vine to familiarise itself with how runes worked.

"Tell us about your family," Su Yue said, breaking me out of my thoughts.

"What's it like having normal parents? Most of us came out of cultivation clans so it's hard to even imagine what it would be like growing up without all the pressure and the politics." I had to think about how to answer that one. The original Ke Yin's memories painted a picture of a pretty simple but happy life, a father who taught patience through the art of tailoring clothes, a mother who could somehow make even plain congee taste like a feast...

"It was normal I guess," I said finally.

"No grand expectations placed on me, no ancient legacies that I had to live up to. Just life, basically."

"That sounds really nice," Su Yue said, her voice going soft.

"It was nice." And that might have been the truest thing I had said all day if I was being honest with myself. Whatever else might be complicated about my current situation, the original Ke Yin's parents had been good people who genuinely loved their son, and they deserved to be protected no matter what.

"What can you tell us about the village?" Chu Feng asked, glancing back over his shoulder at me as we walked.

"There's a stream that runs right through the center of the village," I replied, piecing together fragments of memory as I spoke.

"The water's full of tiny fish that glow at night. The local kids like to catch them in jars and..." I trailed off there because I had suddenly realized I wasn't even sure if that last part was actually a real memory or just something I had made up on the spot to fill in a gap.

"You seem a little hesitant talking about your village," Liu Chang murmured.

"It's complicated I guess," I admitted to him.

"I haven't been back there since I joined the sect."

"Ah, I see." His tone carried a note of understanding in it.

"The distance between being a mortal and being a cultivator can be a hard thing to bridge sometimes." The real distance wasn't actually between being a mortal and being a cultivator, it was between the person they thought their son was and whoever or whatever it was that I actually happened to be now.

"What made you want to become a cultivator in the first place?" Su Yue asked me. Another tricky question to navigate. The original Ke Yin had apparently been discovered by one of the sect's scouts who had noticed his spiritual sensitivity at some point. But the actual details of why the original had accepted the offer when it came were fuzzy to me even now.

"Curiosity mostly," I said.

"I always felt like there was something more out there somewhere, something beyond just the ordinary world that I knew. When I got the chance to pursue that..." I shrugged and let them fill in the rest of the blanks on their own.

"What about all of you then?" I asked before they could get the chance to throw another question my way.

"Where are you all from originally?" Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"Capital City," Liu Chang answered.

"Though I haven't actually been back there in years now. Too busy with sect duties most of the time."

"White Sky City," Su Yue said.

"It's up near the border between the Eastern and Northern Continents." We all turned to look at Chu Feng then, who seemed a bit startled by the sudden attention being on him.

"Oh, uh, nowhere special really. Just another village out there."

"Which village?" I asked him.

"It's... you probably wouldn't have heard of it. It's a really small place." Chu Feng waved his hand vaguely in the air like that explained everything.

"But enough about all that, what kind of defenses does your village actually have? Walls? Watchtowers? Any good hiding spots around the place?" I gave him a curious look. The subject change wasn't subtle in the slightest and the questions he was asking seemed oddly specific too, though I figured someone with his apparent combat experience probably would think about things like that.

"Standard village defenses," I replied carefully, not wanting to give away too much.

"Wooden walls, a handful of guard towers. Nothing that would actually stop a real beast wave if one came through."

"What about escape routes?" he pressed further.

"Underground cellars maybe? Any cave systems nearby that people could use?"

"Chu Feng," Su Yue's voice had a warning note creeping into it now.

"You're making it sound like we're planning a raid instead of a defense mission here." He at least had the grace to look a little embarrassed about it.

"I just like being prepared is all! Remember what happened over at River Fork." An uncomfortable silence fell over the whole group after he said that. I got the impression that I was missing some important context here.

"What happened at River Fork?" I asked carefully, trying to read the room. The three of them exchanged glances with each other before Su Yue finally sighed and spoke up.

"It was supposed to be a standard defense mission honestly. Small village, a manageable beast wave, nothing we hadn't already handled plenty of times before. But..."

"But we got cocky about it," Chu Feng finished for her.

"We thought we had everything under control. Didn't bother checking all the escape routes properly, didn't verify the village's actual defensive capabilities ahead of time. Just assumed everything would work out fine in the end."

"It didn't work out fine," Liu Chang said quietly.

"The wave ended up being a lot stronger than we had expected going in. It came from multiple directions at once instead of following the predicted path we'd mapped out. We had to fall back into the village itself, but some of the buildings we had planned on using as shelters weren't structurally sound enough to hold up..."

"Chu Feng got hurt," Su Yue added on.

"Badly hurt. A stage eight beast caught him off guard and just tore right through his defenses like they weren't even there. And then during the evacuation afterward he disappeared on us."

"I already told you, I found a cave to hide in," Chu Feng protested, but there was something off in his voice when he said it.

"I just needed some time to recover from the injuries is all."

"For three whole days?" Su Yue challenged him.

"With injuries that should have killed you outright? And without leaving a single trace behind for the tracking formations to even find?"

"I got lucky."

"You got something," she muttered under her breath.

"We still don't know what really happened to you that day." I listened to their back and forth conversation with growing interest. On one hand their concern for each other seemed genuine, there was real worry in Su Yue's voice when she talked about thinking Chu Feng had died out there. But on the other hand...

Well, let's just say that in my experience, which admittedly came mostly from reading way too many cultivation novels, people who mysteriously survived certain death usually turned out to have some secret technique or hidden power up that they weren't telling anyone about.

"Maybe he really did just get lucky," Azure offered up, though even he didn't sound particularly convinced of his own suggestion.

"Maybe," I thought back to him.

"Or maybe there's a lot more to our nervous friend over there than meets the eye."

"Speaking of which," Azure changed the subject, "I've finished going through the analysis on those Three Leaf Clover techniques. I think I can help you develop something similar using regular qi instead of rouqi. It won't be quite as potent as a properly established technique would be, but..."

"But it might still be enough to make a real difference," I finished his thought for him.

"Especially against the lower stage beasts we'll probably run into." That was the thing about beast waves that people didn't always realize, while the high stage beasts were obviously the most dangerous part of it, it was often the sheer number of weaker ones that caused the most actual problems for a defense.

They'd wear you down over time and force you to waste energy on basic defenses until eventually you'd end up making a mistake against something you really should have been able to handle without any trouble at all.

"The basic principle behind it is simple," Azure continued.

"Instead of trying to directly affect the stronger beasts, we create an area of spiritually charged pollen that naturally seeks out and clings onto anything that has active qi circulation going through it. The pollen itself isn't powerful enough to do much of anything to the higher stage beings, but the lower stage beasts should find it disorienting at the very least."

"Like spiritual catnip or something?"

"More like spiritual hay fever," Azure corrected me.

"But yes, the basic concept is similar to that. The key part is making it subtle enough that the stronger beasts won't notice it and just destroy it outright, while it still stays effective against the weaker ones in the area." It was an interesting approach when I thought about it. Most combat techniques out there focused on direct damage or some obvious clear effect, but something like this was almost like applying formation theory to a battle technique instead.

Creating an environment that favored you rather than trying to just overwhelm the enemy head on with raw power.

"How long do you think it would take to develop properly?"

"With your current understanding of the Primordial Wood Arts combined with the information we got from the Three Leaf Clover techniques? I'd estimate we could have a working version ready by the time we reach the village. It won't be perfect by any means, but..."

"But perfect is the enemy of good enough," I finished for him.

"Especially when we're working against a deadline like this one."

"Exactly. Shall we go ahead and begin then?" I nodded mentally to him and then realized I had been silent for several minutes while I was lost in this internal conversation. The others had kept going with their own discussion about past missions in the meantime, with Su Yue currently in the middle of describing what sounded like an especially chaotic encounter with a group of spirit bears at some point.

"... and then Chu Feng decided that the best way to deal with all of them was to create a tornado out of nowhere."

"It worked!" he protested loudly.

"It worked on the bears, sure," Liu Chang agreed with him.

"It also worked on three different houses, two merchant carts, and someone's prized spirit herb garden that they'd spent years growing."

"I paid for all the damages afterward!"

"That's really not the point here," Su Yue sighed heavily.

"The point is that sometimes the flashy solution isn't actually the best solution." I listened to their banter with half an ear while Azure started walking me through the theoretical framework for our new technique in more detail. It was interesting watching how the three of them interacted with each other, there was clearly real friendship there between them, but also an undercurrent running underneath it all. Concern maybe? Suspicion? It was hard to pin down what it was.

"Master, are you worried about the mission itself, or are you still thinking about Chu Feng's mysterious survival back at River Fork?"

"Both," I admitted.

"Something feels off about this whole situation if I'm being honest. Beast waves don't just happen randomly out of nowhere, something has to be driving the beasts to move in such large numbers like that. And Chu Feng..."

"It could be nothing at all," Azure replied.

"Could just be trauma from his last beast wave experience making him extra cautious about all of this." He had a fair point about that. But was I maybe reading too much into the whole thing? After all I was hardly in a position to judge anyone else for hiding secrets, given my own situation and everything that came with it.

"Let's just focus on what we can control here," I decided.

"Let's work on getting this pollen technique complete. If Chu Feng turns out to be hiding some secret technique or a hidden master somewhere, well that honestly wouldn't be the strangest thing I've seen since coming to this world."

"True enough, I suppose," Azure agreed.