Chương 560: Chapter 555: A Senior's Words Of Wisdom

"I'm not sure who I want to become," I admitted, leaning back a little bit.

"I know what I don't want to turn into. I refuse to turn into one of those cultivators who treat everybody weaker than them like they are walking resources to exploit. I refuse to lose sight of the reasons why protecting normal people matters. And I don't want to reach a high cultivation realm only to wake up and realize I've turned into the type of person I despised or don't respect." Lu Chenyang gave a slow nod as his expression grew thoughtful.

"As for what I do want to do?" I continued.

"I want to be someone who can help out when things go wrong. And I mean helping in ways that matter for the long-term. I want to be someone who understands enough about different situations to find real solutions instead of applying quick fixes that end up making the problems worse later on." The latter was especially important to me because I found that a lot of these protagonist types usually solved one problem, only to cause three other problems that were usually worse.

And unfortunately, the cultivation world was full of people like this.

"That is more honest than what most would say," Lu Chenyang replied.

"Most young practitioners out there would give some confident declaration about their personal dao or their ultimate cultivation goal. But you're admitting your own uncertainty."

"Is that a bad thing?" I asked.

"No," Lu Chenyang shook his head.

"It's actually refreshing to hear, and more realistic too. I've met plenty of cultivators who claimed they had certainty about their path, and most of those people either ended up dead because they were too rigid to adapt, or they changed their minds later and spent the rest of their long lives pretending they'd always believed what they believe now." He took another sip of his tea before he continued.

"The cultivation world doesn't encourage self-reflection. It's all about projecting confidence and strength, even when you're struggling or uncertain, no, especially when you're uncertain. Showing doubt is treated as weakness." That was something I had also noticed no matter which world I traveled to.

"That seems counterproductive," I said.

"How are you supposed to ever improve yourself if you can't even acknowledge the things you don't understand?"

"That's just how the system works. Cultivators who admit they don't know something are exploited by those who pretend to know everything. So, everyone learns to project this certainty, and then genuine learning becomes harder for them to do." The conversation reminded me of the advice Sect Master Yuan had given me about developing a dao. He warned me against forming weak daos that only served my own personal ego and didn't have a true purpose.

"Do you think that attitude ever changes when they get to the higher cultivation levels?" I asked.

"Are those powerful cultivators more honest about their uncertainty, or do they find more elaborate ways of hiding it from people?" Lu Chenyang let out a loud laugh at that, which stirred a few of the cats from their afternoon naps.

"I have no idea," he admitted.

"I've yet to reach that high of a level, and I've never been close enough to anyone who has to properly judge their internal honesty. From the outside, they all project confidence. But whether that's genuine confidence or it is polished pretense? I honestly couldn't tell you." I nodded, appreciating the honesty. The old man set his teacup down on the table and leaned back slightly.

"I will say this though. The few powerful cultivators I've managed to observe seem to make their decisions differently than the people at the lower levels do. They take their time. They consider more angles. That alone suggests they're less certain than they'd like to be, and they're always carefully weighing all the different possibilities because they understand how much they don't know."

"Or it might mean they have a lot more experience with making big decisions."

"True," Lu Chenyang acknowledged.

"Like I already said, I can't tell you." That was fair. We sat there enjoying the silence. The tea house continued its normal daily operations, customers coming and going while acting with their usual self-important attitudes. It was strange thinking about how you could have a real conversation in the middle of all this cultivation absurdity.

"What I've noticed over the years," Lu Chenyang spoke up again, "is that cultivators who act the most certain about their path usually tend to be the ones who have the least experience. They usually have one or two major successes, then they decide they understand how cultivation works, so they stop learning anything new. The only ones who admit having uncertainty tend to be either very inexperienced or highly experienced." The first one sounded like a typical shounen protagonist.

The type that I really did not want to be like.

"So, which category do I fall into?"

"I'm not sure," Lu Chenyang replied.

"You act inexperienced in a few ways." My eyebrows raised, curious what he meant by that.

"Like the way you ask questions, the things that surprise you, and your recent breakthrough to becoming an Oneiric Sovereign." This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. I nodded. Those were the actions of an inexperienced cultivator.

"On the other hand," Lu Chenyang continued, "you show a deep understanding of complicated concepts that should be beyond someone at your apparent stage. And your relationship with Du Yanze suggests you have experiences I can't begin to guess at." I hid a smile, I sounded like a very complicated person, it must be difficult for someone like Lu Chenyang to wrap his mind around who I really am. The old man picked his teacup back up and examined the remaining liquid inside it like it might have the universe's answers.

"If I had to guess, I'd say you're someone who's had some unusual experiences that taught you things most normal cultivators never get to learn. But you're also aware that those experiences don't constitute having a complete understanding of the world. You know enough to recognize how much you don't know yet." That assessment was uncomfortably accurate to hear.

My experiences dealing with the time loop, the Two Suns World, and all those various cultivation systems I'd encountered along the way; they'd taught me a lot, but they'd also shown me how vast and complicated reality was. Every answer I managed to find only ended up raising new questions. Every problem I successfully solved revealed deeper issues hiding underneath it.

"That sounds about right."

"My advice," Lu Chenyang kept going, "is to keep that attitude of uncertainty while you advance. Don't let some success convince you that you've figured everything out. Some of the most dangerous cultivators I've ever encountered were the ones who achieved great power and then decided they understand the fundamental nature of reality based on their limited experiences."

"You mean like the people who treat all the dream realm inhabitants like they are non-sentient constructs?" I asked with a teasing smile. Lu Chenyang flinched slightly when I said that.

"Yes, like that," he coughed.

"I'll admit I'm one of those people. I've spent centuries assuming these dream realms contain nothing except spiritual automatons who are following predetermined scripts."

"But you're finally reconsidering that now?" I asked.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"Your confidence that this realm can somehow be saved, your unique relationship with Du Yanze, and the way you talk about trying to protect the people living here; it suggests you see something that I've been blind to. But centuries of belief doesn't change easily, even whenever you intellectually acknowledge the fact that they might be wrong." He looked over at me, and his expression grew serious.

"That's something you need to keep in mind while you continue cultivating. Whatever deep understanding you manage to develop, and whatever truths you eventually discover, you have to remain open to the possibility that you're wrong. Or at the very least that your knowledge is incomplete. The moment you become certain you have all the answers is the moment you stop being able to learn any new ones." I appreciated the advice.

It aligned with what I'd already been thinking about regarding my dao and my personal cultivation philosophy. A truly strong dao needed to be able to grow and adapt to things without somehow losing its own core principles. Having rigid certainty was the enemy of genuine development.

"Thank you," I lowered my head respectfully.

"That's helpful guidance."

"You're welcome," Lu Chenyang replied.

"Consider it my payment for you saving my life earlier today. Though I suppose I should probably be thanking you for that too."

"We can call it even," I suggested. Lu Chenyang let out a small smile at that.

"That sounds fair." We finished drinking our tea while our conversation slowly drifted over to much lighter topics. Lu Chenyang began telling me stories about some of the stranger dream worlds he'd visited over the last few centuries. Like one realm where gravity operated based on your emotional state instead of using mass. And a particularly unsettling world where all the inhabitants were convinced they were the only real person existing there and everyone else was a fake illusion.

Hearing about that last one made me wonder if it was also being affected by the corruption too, but I decided not to ask him about it. We'd had enough heavy discussion for one afternoon. Eventually, Lu Chenyang suggested we should go find that quiet courtyard so we could finally begin my dream gate instruction. This was what I wanted so, I readily agreed to do it, and I quickly settled the bill despite Li Hua's insistence that customers of our importance should get to drink for free.

We managed to find a peaceful residential area that had a nice small courtyard garden. There were a few cats sleeping away under the shade. The location felt private and secure, and it was far enough away from the main streets that we wouldn't be disturbed by people. After activating a privacy technique that I didn't recognise, Lu Chenyang settled into a meditation posture on top of a flat stone, and I sat across from him.

"I'll walk you through the theory first," he said.

"The technique has three main stages to it, but understanding the core principles is crucial before you try any of them." That made sense. Experimenting new techniques without understanding usually led to disastrous effects. It was always better to learn the theory first.

"Dream gate creation operates on the core principles of spiritual resonance and dimensional anchoring," Lu Chenyang began explaining.

"You need to establish a strong connection between your own internal spiritual space and the target realm. The physical object coming from that realm acts like a beacon, it is something your own consciousness can lock onto across the dimensional boundaries." He took a quick pause, checking to make sure I was following along.

"The first stage is attunement," he kept going.

"You hold the object and extend your spiritual senses through it. You don't analyze or categorize what you feel from it. You just need to observe it. Let the object's unique spiritual signature wash over you. Doing this can take you hours or days depending on how foreign the energy system is."

"How do you know when you've successfully attuned to it?"

"You'll feel it happen," Lu Chenyang replied.

"The object's spiritual signature will start to feel familiar to you, almost comfortable even. It's like recognizing a friend's voice while they are inside a loud crowd. That's when you can officially move on to the second stage." He shifted his sitting position slightly.

"Stage two is tracing," he said.

"Every object carries deep memories of where it originally came from, and they are encoded into its spiritual structure. You're essentially reading those hidden memories, and following them through the dimensional layers to reach the object's source realm. This is the most dangerous part because you're projecting your consciousness across significant distances. If anything disrupts your connection, the backlash can damage your spiritual foundation." I committed every word he said to memory.

Everything he was saying was gold. Practical instruction like this would greatly speed up my progress in creating dream gates.

"The final stage is…" Lu Chenyang stopped talking mid-sentence. His eyes grew wide and his spiritual pressure flared out as his senses extended outward, frantically searching around for whatever had managed to penetrate through his privacy technique. The teaching enthusiasm that had been on his face had vanished, replaced by pure panic. I felt it arrive a moment later.

That horrible wrongness hanging heavy in the air, and that terrifying sense of reality being rejected, and the oppressive spiritual pressure that made every instinct inside my body scream at me to run away. It could only mean one thing: the Nightmare Enforcer had found us.