Chương 549: Chapter 544: Junior Becomes Senior

Du Yanze stood and started scanning the area. The scene he'd caused was not the kind of thing that went unnoticed even in a world like this. A small crowd had now gathered at what they had calculated was a safe distance, and they were watching a dishevelled young man have an intense argument with empty air while simultaneously crushing an old cultivator inside a giant golden hand.

"Is that Du Yanze?" a merchant whispered to the man next to him.

"The Du clan's young master?"

"Can't be." The second merchant shook his head.

"That boy disappeared a week ago. And Du Yanze was always weak. Whoever this is, he's at least World-Writ Sovereign." A woman with a shopping basket leaned in toward them.

"It's him. I'd know that face anywhere. But what happened to him? He looks like he hasn't slept in weeks."

"I'm more interested in who he's talking to," a city guard muttered, "there's no one there."

"He's gone mad," someone else said.

"Poor boy, he must have suffered some kind of cultivation deviation."

"Mad or not, look at what he's doing to the old man," another voice added.

"Should we call for the city guard?"

"I am the city guard," the guard said.

"And I am not getting anywhere near a World-Writ Sovereign having a mental break. That is above my pay grade." While Du Yanze was distracted, Lu Chenyang took the opportunity to scramble in my direction.

"Look, the old man's trying to escape," someone whispered.

"No, he's not escaping," another voice corrected.

"He's crawling toward... nothing? What is he doing?" Lu Chenyang's lips were moving quickly, and although the crowd couldn't see me, they could hear fragments of what he was saying, whispered urgently into what appeared to be the space in front of him.

"Why?" he hissed.

"Why do you know this dream being? And why are you acting like though this world is real? These beings, they're manifestations of dream qi. Nothing more. They don't have souls. They don't have consciousness the way you and I do. They're like characters in a story, following their scripts. Many young cultivators fall into this trap. They believe the dream world is real. They start forming attachments to the beings inside it, and their cultivation suffers for it." He tried to grab my arm.

His hand passed through my spiritual form without any resistance, and the failed gesture seemed to upset him more than anything else he'd said.

"Don't make that mistake. I have seen promising cultivators lose decades because they couldn't separate dream from reality. This Du Yanze, whatever he is, he is a dream construct. A sophisticated one, I'll grant you that. But whatever relationship you think the two of you have, it isn't real." I thought about telling him the truth.

The truth being that this wasn't a dream world in the sense he understood the word, that it was an inner world created by a Civilization Realm cultivator, that the people inside it were as real as anyone he'd ever met in the physical world, who had real souls and consciousness, and that Du Yanze was a living person trapped in an impossible situation rather than a mindless construct running on a loop. But I decided against it. The first reason was that Lu Chenyang probably wouldn't believe me.

He had been dream walking for three hundred years. His model of how these places worked was built into his bones at this point. Telling him that his entire framework was incomplete would produce defensiveness, not insight. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. And even if he did believe me, it wouldn't change his behaviour in any useful direction. He would still see this world as something to exploit.

Knowing the inhabitants were real wouldn't make him treat them better. It might make it worse, because then he would be consciously choosing to ignore their reality rather than simply not knowing about it.

"I appreciate the warning, but I know what I'm doing." Lu Chenyang looked like he wanted to argue, but then he looked past me, Du Yanze was turning back toward us, so the old man immediately fell silent and stepped back. That's when I noticed that Lu Chenyang's whole bearing toward me had changed. Before, he had been friendly in the patronising way that older cultivators were friendly to promising juniors. Now his posture was something else entirely.

He stood slightly behind me and slightly to my left, which was the position a subordinate took when standing near someone they considered above them, and when he looked at me, there was calculation behind the caution. It wasn't difficult to work out what had happened. He had watched a cultivator powerful enough to kill him without effort submit to me. The change in his behaviour didn't surprise me. In the cultivation world, this was how things worked. Power determined the shape of every interaction.

It didn't matter that I looked like a Dream Architect with no particular status. What mattered was that someone vastly more powerful than Lu Chenyang recognised me as their master, and that information alone was enough to rewrite every assumption he had made about me since we met. I didn't love it, but I understood it.

"Divine Master," Du Yanze said, now looking a little more stable.

"Why have you returned?" I glanced at Lu Chenyang, still very aware of him.

"I made it to the finals. One thing led to another, and I ended up back here." It was vague enough to reveal nothing useful to the old man while still being technically true, and Du Yanze would understand that I couldn't speak freely in front of him.

"The finals," Du Yanze repeated. Something that might have been pride flickered briefly across his exhausted face.

"Of course you made it to the finals. I knew you would." He straightened, and some of his old determination seemed to come back with the movement.

"Whatever you need from me, Divine Master, I will do. My cultivation, my knowledge of this realm, my life if that is what you require. All of it is yours." I didn't hesitate.

"I need to borrow your body again," I asked. Beside me, Lu Chenyang's eyes widened. The bluntness of the request shocked him. He was probably thinking that you don't just ask someone that, and that possession required negotiation, compensation, formal agreements, but he didn't understand my relationship with Du Yanze.

"Yes, Divine Master." The time looper bowed deeply.

"My body is yours whenever you need it." The answer made the old man look like he was about to experience a spiritual deviation from shock alone, but I ignored him to focus on Du Yanze. There was something in how he agreed that made me uncomfortable. Last time, he had asked questions, a lot of them. If it was safe? How long I would need the body? What did I need it for? But this time, he didn't hesitate, he just accepted. I studied Du Yanze more carefully. Physically, he was fine.

Sure, there was the wild hair, bloodshot eyes, and stained robes, but the time loop cured any physical damage that he might take in a cycle. The problem was the mental side. Each reset shaved off a little more of his sanity, his sense of who he was, his ability to remain connected to anything. I felt a genuine pull of guilt. I had done this to him.

My solution to saving the realm from otherworldly corruption had trapped him inside an eternal cycle of loneliness, and I had no good answer for that beyond hoping this visit improved his circumstances at least a little.

"Thank you," I whispered.

"I'll try to make this quick." Du Yanze smiled, and this time the smile made it to his eyes, a little.

"Take all the time you need, Divine Master. Knowing you're here, knowing I am not alone for a while, that is worth more than you can know." I didn't know how to respond to that, so I just walked up to his physical form and reached outward with my consciousness to begin the transfer. Even weakened as I was in this spiritual state, I could sense the compatibility between us. We had done this before, and the resonance from that possession was still present, making the process easier than it had any right to be.

My spiritual form started to come apart, breaking into threads that flowed toward him. His body stood absolutely still, entirely relaxed, no resistance anywhere in it. Our consciousnesses overlapped briefly, his awareness and mine running parallel for a moment, and then I took primary control and felt his awareness settle into the background to watch without interfering. I opened his eyes and flexed the fingers of one hand to test the connection.

Lu Chenyang was staring at me with an expression that was somewhere between awe and fear. He had just watched something that normally required months of preparation and substantial resource investment happen in seconds, without complications, without visible effort. I turned toward him. The old man bowed immediately.

"This junior greets..." He paused, unsure what to call me.

"Senior."