Chương 555: Chapter 550: Source of Corruption

"Are your thoughts scrambled up from the rift?" Lu Chenyang asked.

"I already explained why doing that is impossible. The corruption is spread out everywhere, the source is guarded heavily, and we still have a Nightmare Enforcer hunting us down. So, if we did somehow manage to find where it originated from, we don't have the power or the resources to purify it."

"You told me that dream cultivators tried doing it before," I pointed out.

"Which means that it's something that can be done. And if we don't manage to succeed, we can at least go look and see what is happening there."

"All those cultivators were more powerful than we are! They had full teams, centuries of preparation, and specialized purification techniques, we have nothing at all." I looked over at the old man and studied him for the first time since we started running away. Lu Chenyang was three hundred years old, and he already reached the Oneiric Sovereign level for his cultivation, which meant he had extensive knowledge about dream realms and the corruption in them.

He should be acting confident, experienced, and self-assured, but instead he looked defeated before we even attempted the challenge. That told me just how difficult the task I intended to do was.

"Why did you help me earlier?" I asked.

"Back when you first met me? You could have ignored me, but instead you taught me dream cultivation techniques and guided me through this realm. Why did you do that?" Lu Chenyang stayed quiet for a long moment before he sat down heavily onto the cobblestones. He suddenly looked like he felt every single one of his three hundred years.

"Do you have any idea what it feels like to finally reach the peak of your cultivation and then you realize that it means nothing at all?" That question caught me off-guard.

"What do you mean by that?"

"I have been dream walking for so long that it honestly feels like it has been forever," he told me.

"I visited dozens of different dream worlds, collected thousands of techniques, and I achieved a level that most cultivators are only able to dream about." He waved his hand at himself gesturing toward the flickering spiritual projection that was representing his consciousness now.

"And what have I accomplished with all of that power? I survive. I run around collecting more techniques that I am probably never going to use. And then I return back to my sect so I can teach a few disciples who are going to follow the same pointless path that I did, and then I venture back out again to collect more useless knowledge."

"That doesn't sound pointless to me," I said.

"You are actively advancing cultivation knowledge and helping your sect—""I am maintaining my cultivation level," Lu Chenyang interrupted me.

"There is a massive difference between the two. Making real progress would mean reaching the Lucid Lawbearer realm so I could become someone who can change things. But I have been stuck at the Oneiric Sovereign level for seventy years now. That is seventy years of me visiting dream realms, fighting random creatures, and collecting techniques while accomplishing nothing meaningful at all."

He reached into his robes and pulled out a small token, it wasn't a physical construct, but more like a representation of the real thing that was back on his physical body. He started twirling it around with his fingers while examining it with this expression on his face that I couldn't identify.

"About three months ago, I visited a fortune teller. She was this old woman who was blind and she claimed she could read karmic threads. I was expecting her to give me the usual vague predictions about future opportunities or maybe warnings about some upcoming dangers."

"What did she tell you?"

"She told me that I was going to meet someone who could show me my purpose again," Lu Chenyang replied.

"She said it would be someone young who was inexperienced with dream walking, but they would be carrying this wisdom that I lacked. She told me that if I was kind to this person and if I acted like a genuine teacher instead of being the arrogant elder that I had become, then great things would follow." He looked up at me, and I saw something vulnerable showing in his expression.

"I have been alone for such a long time now, Senior Hou. I don't mean physically alone, my sect has thousands of members in it, but I am alone in all the ways that matter. Every relationship I have is purely transactional, and every interaction is calculated. When you spend three centuries treating everyone like they are resources you can extract value out of, you forget how to be human." I settled down beside him.

The Realm of the Chosen kept doing its usual chaotic stuff around us with different types of believers strutting past us having confidence in their own special nature. But there, in that moment, sitting on the golden cobblestones next to a spiritually exhausted old man, everything else felt distant to me.

"When Du Yanze was ready to kill me," Lu Chenyang kept going, "my first thought wasn't fear at all. It was relief. Having eighteen deaths in a single realm would be too much for me, so I would finally have an excuse to stop doing this. To not go back to the sect and to not continue this endless cycle of collecting techniques I don't need for a breakthrough that I am never going to achieve." Then he looked me straight in the eye while giving me a smile that was painful to see.

"But then I met you and I quickly realized that you were different. You have a lot of power, but you use it carefully. You are what, at the Dream Architect level now? Or maybe you recently advanced to Oneiric Sovereign? Yet you act like you understand things that I have forgotten despite me having three whole centuries of experience." He stood up and brushed the dust off of his robes.

"So, when you suggested that we should purify this realm's corruption my first instinct was to refuse. I wanted to explain all the practical reasons why doing it is impossible. But now that I am thinking about the fortune teller's words and about how great things would follow if I acted like a genuine teacher, I am starting to wonder if maybe there was a much greater reason for me traveling to this cursed realm..."

"You want to help me?" I asked, surprised despite the explanation he gave me. Because selfless cultivation behavior was genuinely rare to see since most practitioners usually operated on enlightened self-interest at best.

"I don't know if I want to do it," Lu Chenyang admitted.

"But I think I need to do it. If we succeed, then maybe I will finally understand what has been missing from my cultivation all these years. And if we end up failing..." He gave a shrug.

"Well, at least I will have tried doing something meaningful for once instead of sitting around surviving." I felt a surge of respect for the old man. It took a lot of courage to acknowledge the emptiness inside your life and to recognize that having power without any purpose was hollow.

"Alright then, let's go find this corruption source and end it."

"Are you confident we can succeed at this?" Lu Chenyang asked me.

"Honestly? I have no idea," I stood up.

"But I can't leave this realm corrupted without at least giving it a try, the implications of it are too serious."

"What implications are you talking about?" Lu Chenyang looked confused.

"It is one single dream world. It is unfortunate for the beings who live here, but these aren't people with real souls. They are dream constructs following their programmed patterns." I began to correct him, I wanted to explain how inner worlds contained genuine consciousness and real living beings in them, but I caught myself.

Lu Chenyang's entire worldview was deeply ingrained into him from having hundreds of years of experience, challenging it directly now would make him turn defensive or it could maybe cause him to spiral. Instead of doing that I said: "Does it matter whether they are real or not? Leaving corruption to spread still feels wrong to me." The old man spent a second considering that.

"I suppose you are right about that. The dream realm will eventually collapse if we leave it unchecked, and that would end up affecting the physical world's stability. So, there are practical reasons to fix it if we set aside all the philosophical questions about their consciousness." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Exactly," I agreed while letting him maintain his normal framework of the world.

"So, about the Source Tracing technique, you taught me the basics for it, but I'm going to need some more detailed guidance so I can locate the origin point." Lu Chenyang's teaching mode instantly reasserted itself and his expression became more focused.

"The technique I showed you before was simplified so it would be safe. If you want to track the corruption all the way back to its source, you need to enter a much deeper meditation state and follow the threads a lot further."

"How much deeper?"

"Deep enough that you will be vulnerable," he said, looking serious.

"When you become attuned to the flow of the corruption, you can't defend yourself effectively at all. You will need someone there watching you who is ready to pull you out if something goes wrong."

"Are you volunteering to do it?"

"I am already committed to this," Lu Chenyang said.

"I might as well see it all the way through properly." We found a relatively quiet area sitting behind a large statue of someone who was proclaiming themselves as the "First Among the Chosen." I settled myself down into a meditation posture while Lu Chenyang took up a defensive position nearby.

"You have to remember," he told me, "you are not trying to fight the corruption or change it in any way. You need to observe it and track it. Let the dark threads guide you upstream to their source." I closed my eyes and extended my spiritual senses outward. The Xuan Yi energy sitting inside this realm was everywhere and it felt thick and cloying. Most of it felt normal, or at least as normal as belief-based reality manipulation could be considered.

But all those dark threads were still sitting there acting like twisted currents flowing against the natural patterns. I focused my mind on the nearest thread and started following it backward. The technique was a lot easier to do than before since my understanding had deepened by the practical experience I had now. The thread connected to another thread and then to another one to form this increasingly complex web where every single connection revealed more of the corruption's structure to me.

Time became meaningless while I followed the pattern around. The threads led me through the city, out into the countryside, across rivers made of gold, and through forests where every tree fully believed it was the descended heir of the World Tree. The corruption was everywhere, and it was woven so thoroughly into the structure of the realm that trying to separate it would have meant unmaking the entire world. But there had to be an origin point somewhere.

Somewhere out there someone introduced the very first bit of corrupted Xuan Yi, and from that one initial infection, everything else spread out. I pushed myself deeper and followed the threads back through years, decades, and centuries. The meditation state I was in was profound now and my awareness of my physical surroundings was gone. I existed as pure consciousness tracing these patterns through time and space. And there it was. Sitting at the very edge of my perception I finally felt something different.

It wasn't a thread, it was a node, a specific place where the corruption flowed out from instead of flowing through. It was the source. My eyes snapped open.

"I found it." Lu Chenyang looked relieved.

"Thank the heavens for that. You have been sitting there meditating for six whole hours and I was starting to worry that the Source Tracing managed to trap your consciousness." It was six hours? It had only felt like a few minutes to me.

"I'm sorry for worrying you."

"Do not apologize for it. Just tell me where we are going." I pointed my finger toward the distant mountains that were barely visible sitting on the horizon.

"It's there. Over in the sacred peaks where the creator of this realm supposedly achieved his enlightenment. All the corruption originates from a site that has profound spiritual significance."

"Of course it does," Lu Chenyang muttered to himself.

"Nothing is ever simple when it comes to these corrupted realms." We started traveling again but this time we were being more careful about it. The Nightmare Enforcer was still hunting us and trying to move through open territory was too risky. Lu Chenyang suggested that we should follow the trade routes so we could blend in with normal travelers instead of using obvious spiritual techniques that would draw attention to us. The whole journey took us three days to complete.

And during that time, I learned more about Lu Chenyang than I ever expected to. He ended up telling me about his childhood growing up in a minor cultivation family and how he showed some early talent for dream cultivation but then struggled to advance past the Lucid Novice realm for decades.

His family gave up on him and focused all their resources on the promising children instead, so Lu Chenyang ended up leaving them to join the Slumbering Scholars Sect where achievement mattered a lot more than your bloodline did.

"I finally reached the Thoughtshaper realm when I was fifty-seven years old," he told me while we walked along this golden road.

"Most of the cultivators sitting in my generation had already achieved that level by the time they were thirty. But I was incredibly proud of myself. I managed to do it through pure effort without having any family resources or inherited techniques to help me."

"That is impressive."

"I thought it was too," Lu Chenyang replied.

"But then I spent the next eighty years stuck at that level. Everyone who advanced 'normally' kept on progressing while I stayed sitting behind them. I eventually managed to reach the Nightbound Adept level through sheer stubborn persistence. Then I hit Dream Architect. And then Oneiric Sovereign." He took a pause so he could let this merchant caravan pass us by where every wagon driver was convinced that their specific goods were the most valuable things in the entire realm.

"By the time I hit that point, I was already two hundred years old. And I finally realized that I spent my entire life chasing the cultivation of other people. I never developed my own path, I was always trying to catch up to people who were naturally more talented than me."

"But you are sitting at the Oneiric Sovereign level now," I pointed out.

"That is objectively successful cultivation."

"Is it though?" Lu Chenyang asked.

"What have I accomplished with having that power? What kind of mark have I left on the world? Because if I died tomorrow, would anything change at all?" I honestly didn't have a good answer to give him for that. It was a question I asked myself a lot of times before.

"The fortune teller told me I had been stuck for seventy years because I lost sight of why I cultivated in the first place," Lu Chenyang kept going.

"Back when I was young, I wanted to prove my worth to my family so I could show them that bloodlines didn't determine everything. But once I finally succeeded and proved they were wrong about me, I didn't know what I was supposed to do next." We kept walking in this comfortable silence for a little while. The landscape slowly started shifting from all the opulent cities into more natural terrain while we got closer to the sacred peaks.

The corruption was more visible around here since there were these dark streaks staining the golden light making it look like oil mixed in water.

"What about you then?" Lu Chenyang eventually asked.

"You are young and you already advanced to Oneiric Sovereign in what, maybe a decade or two? Having that kind of rapid progression usually only comes from either having desperate need or burning ambition. So which one is it for you?"

"It's neither of those," I answered truthfully.

"I cultivate because there are things I need to protect and problems that I need to solve. Having the power is a tool for me to use for those purposes."

"Hm." Lu Chenyang spent a second considering that.

"So, you are doing tool cultivation. It is practical, but it can be potentially limiting. What happens when you finally solve all your problems and protect everything that matters?" That was a good question, and it was one I hadn't thought too deeply about before.

"I'll find new things that need protecting," I replied, satisfied with my answer for the time being.

"The world isn't short on problems."

"That is... a decent cultivation philosophy to have," the old man admitted.

"It is definitely better than mine. At least you have a renewable source of purpose." The sacred peaks started looming larger while we kept walking. Getting this close, I could feel the corruption radiating off them like heat coming from a fire. Whatever happened up here ended up being catastrophic for the spiritual stability of the realm. We finally reached the base of the mountains on the evening of the third day.

Lu Chenyang wanted us to rest before we attempted making the final climb, but I could feel the time pressing down on us. My upcoming duel with Wu Kangming was going to happen soon and I desperately needed to improve this whole situation before that happened.

"We should continue going," I said.

"The source is close to us now." Lu Chenyang didn't try to argue with me. We started climbing straight up the nearest peak while following this narrow path that wound between rocks that were all carved with proclamations about divine favor. Every single stone sitting in these mountains believed it was chosen, their collective self-importance ended up creating this spiritual pressure that weighed heavily on us like it was physical force. The corruption kept growing thicker and thicker the higher we climbed.

And then, sitting there at the peak of the sacred mountain, I finally saw it. It was a shrine. The ancient stone was carved up with all elaborate calligraphy that described the enlightenment of Su Xuan and his whole ascension to becoming the Self-Crowned Sovereign. The shrine itself was glowing with this intense golden light that was incredibly beautiful but also terrible to see. And sitting underneath all that light was the roiling corruption.

Dark energy was pouring straight out from all the cracks in the stone and spreading outward in all directions to infect the entire realm. This was where it all began. This was where the blue sun energy first got introduced into a cultivation system that was built entirely on pure belief.

"That is the source," I whispered. Lu Chenyang stared at the shrine with this dawning horror on his face.

"This is the spot where the realm's creator achieved his final breakthrough. This entire site is sacred to every single being who lives in this world. Purifying it would be like... like destroying their entire concept of enlightenment itself."

"I know," I said.

"But we don't have a choice." I took a step forward so I could approach the corrupted shrine. The dark energy immediately started reaching toward me acting eager and hungry. This was it. This was the source of centuries of spiritual decay. It was the origin point where someone decided to try enhancing their cultivation using power they didn't understand. And now I needed to figure out how I was going to fix it.