Chương 569: Chapter 564: Invasion?

So there I was in the tournament arena with thousands of spectators all around me who were getting more and more frustrated with every passing minute because of what they were seeing, or more accurately because of what they weren't seeing. My eyes were closed in meditation but I could hear everything, every single complaint and confused murmur and annoyed sigh coming from the crowd that surrounded me on all sides.

"This is ridiculous," somebody said from somewhere behind me.

"They've been like this for six hours now, six hours, how is this supposed to be a tournament final?"

"I paid fifty spirit stones to here," another person grumbled, and you could hear the pain in his voice when he said the number.

"Fifty spirit stones to watch two people sleep." I kept my breathing steady and maintained the meditation posture while my spiritual essence was out there somewhere separate from my body, off doing the fighting in the Dream World while I sat here looking useless. The irony of the situation was not lost on me at all. Here I was, one of the two finalists in this grand prestigious tournament, and I had about as much idea what was happening as any person in the audience did.

"The screens aren't even showing anything useful," a woman complained somewhere to my left.

"It's them walking around that dream realm doing whatever it is that dream cultivators do apparently." She wasn't wrong about that. I opened my eyes to look at the formation screens that were floating above the arena, and they showed two figures moving around in the Dream World, Hou and Tian. But watching dream cultivation from the outside was not very exciting because most of what happened occurred within dream realms that the screens simply had no way to display.

Elder Wan had tried to explain all of this to the crowd earlier in the day.

"The Dream World operates on different principles," he'd told everyone.

"Much of the combat and cultivation occurs in spaces that cannot be observed from the outside. We can only see their physical forms moving through the Dream World itself." That explanation had not satisfied anybody. The crowd wanted to see action, they wanted techniques clashing and visible displays of power and explosions or whatever, instead what they were getting was two young men who occasionally sat down to meditate and then stood up again and walked to a different spot.

"At least in the other rounds you could see them fighting each other," a young disciple near the betting pavilion said.

"That battle in the Mortal Martial World was exciting to watch. This is, I don't even know what this is." The left screen showed Hou which was me, the right screen showed Tian which was Wu Kangming's wisp, though Tian believed he was me, which was a deeply strange thing to deal with. Watching someone else move around and make decisions while believing they were Ke Yin was like looking into a mirror that had something wrong with it.

Tian had my mannerisms, my way of thinking through problems, and probably even my tendency to narrate everything to myself internally as it was happening. But he didn't seem to have any awareness of Azure or my world walking abilities at all. He was just a version of me that had been stripped of everything that made me useful in a fight. After becoming a Dream Disciple and recovering those fragmented memories of the tournament, Tian had made the choices I recognized I would have made in his position.

When that sword master who had been training him offered to continue traveling together, Tian had declined politely and gone home to his family instead, because family came first and that was such a fundamental part of who I was that even a fragment of my consciousness with limited memories held onto it without question. Going home had reignited all the old expectations about him being the prophesied Dreaming King.

His parents had been overwhelmed with joy when Tian showed them he could now cultivate dream qi, his father Yue Tianming especially, and word had spread through Moonhaven City that the prophecy was back on track and moving forward again. Marriage proposals had started arriving within a few days of that. Powerful families from all across the Dream World sent representatives without shame. The Ming Clan offered a million dream stones and access to their private cultivation grounds.

The Zhou family promised political connections that would guarantee Tian a position in the regional government. The Silver Moon Sect went further than anyone and offered their sect leader's daughter along with three secret dream walking techniques as part of the dowry arrangement. Tian had turned every single one of them down without hesitation.

"I'm not interested in political marriages," he'd told his mother when she tried to convince him to at least go and meet some of the candidates she'd been looking into.

"If I marry someone it will be because we chose each other, not because our families worked out a business arrangement and we happened to be part of it." That was word for word what I would have said. His father had understood. His mother had been disappointed but she'd accepted it.

And Tian had thrown himself into cultivation like there was no tomorrow, calling in every favor the Yue clan was owed, leveraging his reputation as the prophesied child to get access to resources and training opportunities that most cultivators his age would never see. The results had been remarkable to watch from the outside.

In a matter of weeks, he had moved from Dream Disciple all the way through Lucid Novice, Thoughtshaper, Nightbound Adept, and Dream Architect, each breakthrough coming faster than the one before it like his spiritual foundation had been there waiting for this chance to show what it could do.

By the time he reached Oneiric Sovereign, even experienced elders watching were saying that they were amazed at the speed of his advancement, but the cost of all that advancement had been significant, and you could see it if you knew what to look for. Every resource spent, every favor called in, every treasure consumed to fuel those breakthroughs had required some payment, and the Yue clan's wealth which had been built up across seven generations had been spent on getting Tian to where he was now.

His parents hadn't complained about any of it. They saw it as an investment and as the fulfillment of the prophecy they had believed in for their son's life. On the screen, I was watching Tian standing in his father's study which looked a lot emptier from how I remembered it looking weeks ago. A lot of the cultivation artifacts that had decorated the walls were gone, sold off at some point to fund training costs. The furniture had been replaced with simpler pieces that did the job without being impressive.

Even the spiritual formation arrays that had hummed with power were dim now, their energy stones removed and sold like everything else. Yue Tianming sat behind his desk looking older than he should have. The strain of maintaining his damaged cultivation while pouring resources into supporting his son's advancement had done real damage to his body, his hands trembled slightly when he thought nobody was paying attention to them, and his spiritual pressure flickered.

"I'm leaving for a while," Tian said, and his voice came through the viewing formation clearly even if most of the audience wasn't bothering to pay attention to this particular conversation. Tianming looked up from the ledger he'd been going through.

"Leaving? Where are you going?"

"The Northern Territories first, there's a Nightmare Realm there that might have what I need. After that, I want to go to the Celestial Archive in the Eastern Provinces because they have texts on cultivation restoration that I can't find anywhere else." Tianming put down his brush slowly.

"Tian, we've talked about this before. My cultivation damage is old and it's stable. There's no need to go rushing off into dangerous territory just because…"

"You sacrificed your cultivation to create me," Tian cut him off.

"I'm not going to accept that and keep moving forward like it didn't happen. Every single advancement I make, every time I break through to a new level, I'm reminded that all of it came at the cost of your future." Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"It was my choice," Tianming said.

"A choice I have never once regretted."

"And this is my choice. I can't undo what was already lost but maybe I can find something out there that stabilizes your condition and stops the degradation, gives you more healthy years even if I can't restore your cultivation to what it was." Tianming got up from behind the desk and came around to stand in front of his son.

"You don't owe me anything, Tian. Nothing at all."

"This isn't about owing," Tian said back to him.

"It's about family. You would do the same for me. You already have done the same for me. Let me try to give back even a small part of what you've given." I watched Tianming's face change, the pride and the worry mixing together making me think of my own father's expression whenever I told him about what I'd been doing in my cultivation.

"How long will you be gone?" he asked.

"I don't know. Months at least, it might be longer, depends on what I find and where the trail leads."

"The Northern Territories aren't safe. The sects there don't recognize our regional government at all. If something goes wrong out there…"

"I'm an Oneiric Sovereign now," Tian said, and there was a small smile when he said it.

"There aren't many people in the Northern Territories who can threaten me at this point, and I'll be careful, I promise." Tianming pulled his son into a hug, it was a little awkward but real.

"Your mother is going to be upset," he said after they separated.

"She's always upset when I leave. But she also knows she can't keep me here forever." Tian picked up the traveling pack he'd put together.

"I already said goodbye to her before I came to see you, and if I let her see me one more time she's going to come up with seventeen new reasons why I should wait another day before going." That made Tianming laugh, though it turned into a cough partway that he tried to cover up. Father and son walked out to the estate entrance together.

"I'll send messages when I can," Tian said at the gate.

"The communication talismans should work fine as long as I'm within the same dimensional layer."

"Don't take risks you don't have to take for my sake," Tianming said.

"Whatever you find or don't find out there, just come home in one piece, that's all me and your mother want, that's all any parent wants." Tian nodded and walked through the gate, and he looked back once and raised his hand in farewell before turning toward the city's edge where the transportation formations were and not looking back again after that.

The screen tracked him walking through Moonhaven City for a while and people recognized him everywhere and whispered to each other as he went past, the prophesied child, now confirmed to have the cultivation talent that everyone had been hoping for all along. Some people called out greetings. Others watched him with awe or calculation depending on the person. Tian ignored all of them, focused on where he was going and why. That single-minded trait reminded me of myself.

When I decided on something, I followed through on it and I didn't get pulled off course by what people thought about it or expected from me. I shifted my attention across the arena to where Wu Kangming was in his own meditation position. His eyes were open and he was watching the screen that showed Tian's journey. His face was blank from years of practice, but I noticed the small things. How his jaw tightened whenever Tian made a decision he hadn't expected.

How his fingers pressed harder against his ring when Tian talked about what family loyalty meant to him. I found myself wondering if he was watching Tian's determination to repay his father's sacrifice and thinking about his own situation with his family, the Wu clan that had walked away from him, the arranged marriage that had collapsed, the debts and obligations that tied him to people who didn't care about what happened to him anymore.

And it had to be strange for him too, watching his avatar make decisions like me, knowing that somewhere deep in his spiritual consciousness there were memories of being me, thinking like me, choosing things based on my values instead of his own. When those memories returned to his real consciousness after the tournament finished, he was going to have to figure out how to put all of that together into something coherent.

"This is the worst tournament final I have sat through," somebody said loudly enough to cut through everything else around me.

"My grandfather told me about the final from two hundred years ago, two outer disciples fighting in the Shattered Sky Realm, techniques that cracked mountains, battles that went on for days, this? This is two people walking around and lying down."

"The cultivation level is impressive though," another voice said.

"They've both reached Oneiric Sovereign in the Dream World, and that's not something that happens even for people who have been doing dream cultivation their lives."

"Who cares about dream cultivation though? It's not even real cultivation, it's all mental projection and consciousness, nothing happens." I stopped paying attention to the argument and looked at the screen showing Hou instead. My avatar was currently lying in a dream pod at the Slumbering Scholars Sect, looking unconscious from the outside but attempting something related to dream gate creation based on what I could see of the situation.

The fact that he'd made it to Oneiric Sovereign realm at all meant he'd found somewhere good to train during whatever time he'd spent with the pandas. Lu Chenyang was standing near the pod watching Hou's vital signs with a concerned expression even though he was trying not to show it. The old cultivator was still weakened from his spiritual injuries but he'd insisted on being here personally to oversee this.

"His spiritual pressure is fluctuating," a younger disciple said, checking one of the monitoring formations nearby.

"The gate creation looks unstable."

"It's his first attempt at this," Lu Chenyang replied.

"Some instability is expected. As long as the core structure holds..." Hou's body twitched inside the pod, the first movement in several minutes.

"Elder Lu, his consciousness is separating from his body completely. That's not supposed to happen during gate creation, is it?" Lu Chenyang moved closer to the pod and held his hand above Hou's chest without quite making contact with him.

"He's not creating a normal gate. This is something different. Something I have not seen before." I had no way of knowing which dream world Hou was planning to travel to because I didn't have access to his memories, so I could only guess at what he was trying to accomplish. Then there was also that promise he'd made to Lu Chenyang about retrieving the Celestial Dream Lotus, which when I'd first heard Hou say it out loud I'd felt this mix of being proud of him and feeling exasperated.

Of course, that a version of me would promise something that was impossible in order to help someone who had shown him kindness, and the fact that Lu Chenyang had been injured while protecting Hou would have made it a matter of personal honor to repay that debt no matter what the cost was. The Sunken Dream Palace though. I wasn't sure even I would go through with attempting that.

The danger was real, even though we had the Dream World's protection, there were outcomes worse than death that lived in places like the Nightmare Sea.

"Master." Azure's voice cut through my thoughts.

"We have a problem." My focus sharpened because Azure sounded worried, and he never sound worried without a good reason.

"Someone is trying to breach your inner world," he said.

"It's happening right as we speak." That made no sense to me. Nobody should be able to breach into my inner world without my permission, the Genesis Seed's defenses against unauthorized intrusion were as close to as complete to anything I'd encountered, even Civilization Realm cultivators would think before trying to force their way through something like that. I closed my eyes and pushed my consciousness inward.

The tournament arena disappeared around me as I entered my inner world as a spiritual projection, the familiar landscape coming together around me piece by piece, the four quadrants with their distinct environments, the two suns moving through their endless orbit above everything, the Genesis Seed at the center of all of it.

"There," Azure said, appearing beside me and pointing toward the center of the inner world directly above the Genesis Seed. A distortion hung in the air above it. Reality looked like it was being stretched and pulled and twisted into a shape that it wasn't supposed to be in. Slowly and then faster the distortion widened and became more stable and took on cleaner edges, someone was creating a gateway directly into my inner world.

"Why isn't the Genesis Seed responding to this?" I asked, because the ancient plant consciousness would normally react badly to any kind of intrusion, but right now it appeared to be dormant and unbothered.

"I don't know," Azure said, which was not something he said often.

"It's aware of the breach, I can tell that much, but it's choosing not to act on it. Which means it doesn't perceive whatever is coming through as something that threatens it." The portal finished stabilizing, its edges locking into a gateway shape with clean boundaries. A figure came through it, their features still blurred and unclear from the distortion that comes with traveling between realms like this. The Genesis Seed still hadn't done anything.

It sat there ignoring what should have been treated as a hostile invasion of the space it was responsible for protecting. I reached toward it to get its attention. For a moment nothing happened. Then I felt that consciousness shift and focus on the figure that had just come through the gateway. The pressure that came down stopped the figure mid-step. The smart decision here was obvious. Let the Seed handle it.

Whoever or whatever had come through that gate had entered my inner world without permission and that was hostile action by any definition I could think of. The Genesis Seed could end the situation in seconds without any help from me. But then the distortion cleared from the figure's features, and I realised who I was looking at. Copper brown hair, pale blue eyes, with a face I had been watching on tournament screens for the past several hours. This was Hou. My own avatar from the Dream World.

Somehow, he had managed to create a gate directly into my inner world and come through it. I couldn't help smiling. The sheer audacity to attempt it, the risk involved, the fact that it had worked, this was such a Ke Yin thing to do that I had to be impressed by it even while also recognizing how badly wrong it could have gone.

"Oh," I said, while signalling the Genesis Seed to stand down.

"It's you. Or I suppose what I mean is, it's me." A/N Lots of exciting stuff happening post tournament, you can binge read right now on Patreon!