Chương 570: Chapter 565: Ke Yin Meets Hou

I stood there and watched as Hou scratched the back of his head in that awkward pose that I recognized because it was the same thing I did whenever I knew I messed up and wasn't sure how to say sorry about it, which was a strange thing to watch yourself do from the outside.

"Sorry," Hou said.

"I should have told you before showing up in your inner world like this, but I didn't have any way to contact you from the Dream World, so here we are." That was true; we didn't have communication talismans that worked across dimensional barriers, and the Dream World was cut off from the cultivation world on purpose. You could only get in through the tournament's access or through dream cultivation techniques, which most people didn't even know existed.

"It's okay," I said.

"I was surprised more than anything. The Genesis Seed seemed to know you were me anyway; it didn't try to attack you when you came through the gate." Hou relaxed a bit when I said that.

"I was scared it was going to destroy me the second I stepped through."

"It would have," I explained.

"Any person who enters an inner world without permission gets treated like an enemy, but you're not someone without permission, are you? You're me, so the Genesis Seed felt that and stayed still. If I hadn't told it to trap you myself, it probably wouldn't have done anything to you at all." Hou looked up at the giant tree that was towering over both of us; the Genesis Seed's branches were moving even though there was no wind inside the inner world.

"Well, I'm glad I didn't get destroyed when I arrived, at least."

"You almost did by Master," Azure said. I looked at Azure with an expression that said I didn't need him to bring that up right now.

"I panicked, alright? Someone was breaking into my inner world, so what was I supposed to do, let them walk right in like it was nothing?"

"A reasonable precaution," Azure replied.

"But maybe next time you should check who the intruder is before ordering them to be destroyed."

"Next time someone breaks into my inner world, I'll make sure to greet them nicely first," I muttered. Hou was trying not to smile while watching us argue back and forth.

"To be honest, I did break in without warning you first; if I was in your position, I think I would have done the same thing."

"See, he gets it," I said, not mentioning out loud that, of course, he would have done the same thing since we were the same person.

"Anyway, I was watching you on the viewing screens the whole time; I saw you training with Moon and her cubs, and it looked like it went well."

"It did," Hou confirmed.

"Moon was a good teacher considering she was a spiritual beast who could have killed me without trying. The cubs were cute too, but saying goodbye to all of them was harder than I thought it would be." I knew what that feeling was like; you get attached to places and people and then you have to leave them behind, but that's what cultivation life was.

"I could see from the screens that you were learning how to make dream gates," I continued.

"But I didn't think dream gates could connect to inner worlds, I thought they only worked for dream realms."

"Yeah, so there's a lot to explain," Hou smiled at that.

"I think it would be easier to show you instead of trying to describe all of it." He raised one hand with the palm facing out toward me, and I understood right away what he was suggesting. Memory transfer through spiritual contact was faster than trying to explain everything in words. And more importantly, you got the full picture, including the emotions and all the context around the events, instead of a description of what happened. I stepped forward and pressed my palm against his. The memories came at once.

I experienced everything that Hou had gone through from the beginning when we were separated at the tournament: waking up in the Dream World without any memories or cultivation, finding out that his body had no talent for cultivation at all, meeting the sword master Jian, befriending Tian without realizing that Tian was supposed to be the opponent he needed to defeat, sacrificing himself for that same rival, waking up in that cave with Moon and her cubs, and then all the weeks of training after that where he learned how dream qi worked.

The breakthrough to Dream Disciple felt strange to feel secondhand, dream qi worked on different rules based on belief and manifestation, which made it feel more like a philosophy than a cultivation technique.

Then came Moon teaching the advanced things: the Lucid Novice advancement, the horrible experience of dying over and over again in nightmare realms while he learned to control his fear and keep his sense of identity intact, Moon patiently explaining everything to him, and her cubs climbing all over him every time he tried to meditate.

The memories of him advancing through Thoughtshaper and then Nightbound Adept went by faster in the transfer than those stages had felt in real time, but I could still feel how much effort was behind all of it and how mentally exhausting it had been to keep pushing his mind past its limits over and over. And then, the first dream gate.

Hou had been trying to make a gate to some safe training area where he could keep advancing without any interference, but instead, the gate connected to the Realm of the Chosen, the same inner world I had visited during an earlier round of the tournament. That shocked me when I felt it in the memories. Dream gates could reach inner world with inhabitants and spiritual ecosystems that belonged to real cultivators, which meant dream cultivators were world walkers without even knowing it.

How many realms had cultivators visited over the years that were actually someone else's inner world without anyone knowing? And just how many dream beasts were real inhabitants of those worlds just living their lives before some randomer entered and treated them like expendable resources?

The memories kept going: Hou entering the Realm of the Chosen and getting pushback from the realm itself, meeting Lu Chenyang who was there for his own reasons, and the old cultivator teaching him advanced techniques even though he had no reason to help a stranger. Then came Du Yanze again. I felt Hou's guilt when he saw the state Du Yanze was in. The man looked awful in the memories; he was thin and exhausted, and his eyes had the look of someone who had seen too much.

Somehow he had been keeping himself together the whole time, running purely on the drive to find someone who could help him end the nightmare. But when Hou asked to possess him again, Du Yanze agreed without any hesitation at all because he knew Hou would help him, and he knew this visit meant things were moving toward fixing everything. Together, Hou and Lu Chenyang found the source of the corruption. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It turned out that it wasn't just the blue sun kanji floating above the shrine like they had thought at first; it went deeper than that. Underground, there was a Realm Stabilizing Tree that had merged with the mountain and spread its root network through the realm. The blue sun energy was using that tree as a system to distribute the poison through every bit of Xuan Yi that passed through the realm's spiritual channels. The solution was simple to understand but impossible to do right now.

I needed to enter that realm with the Genesis Seed, connect the Seed to the tree, and let them work together to clean out the corruption, because the Genesis Seed was built for purifying foreign energies and the Realm Stabilizing Tree was a very large plant when you got down to it. Between the two of them, they could fix the realm. But I couldn't do any of that while I was a spiritual manifestation in the tournament.

I would have to come back after everything was over with my full cultivation and all the resources of my inner world available to me. The memory of what Lu Chenyang did hit me harder than I expected, even though I was experiencing it secondhand. I watched through Hou's perspective as the old cultivator put himself between us and the Nightmare Enforcer, and I felt the moment when his spiritual projection was torn apart.

He knew going in what that was going to cost him: his cultivation future was gone, his ability to walk through dreams was possibly destroyed forever, and he did it anyway without hesitating because those seconds he bought were the seconds Hou needed to get away. No wonder Hou had promised to go get the Celestial Dream Lotus for him. You don't let someone do something like that for you and then forget about it.

You pay it back regardless of how dangerous it is and regardless of how small your chances are, even if it means dying hundreds of times in the Sunken Dream Palace. The last part of the memories showed what Hou was planning. The problem that he had encountered was that dream qi couldn't copy higher-tier energies like qi or sun energy because the gap between them was too fundamental to bridge with dream techniques.

So, the solution he had found for that problem was to find a way to bring the real thing to him, and that was by using a dream gate to link his body in the Dream World directly to my inner world. When it was done, I let go of his palm and stepped back, trying to sort through everything I had just experienced.

"That's a lot," I said after a moment. Hou nodded.

"Yeah. It's been a busy few weeks." I looked at him and tried to get my head around the fact that I was having a conversation with myself as a separate physical person. Sure, everyone has arguments inside their own head, but this was different, he was standing right before me.

"So," I said, breaking a silence that had gone on too long.

"Let's talk about what you need. You want access to the full cultivation base?"

"Dream qi can copy other energy types, but only on the surface," Hou replied with a nod.

"For basic things and simple techniques that works fine, but for anything difficult? For the kind of power we're going to need to deal with someone like Wu Kangming?" He shook his head.

"Dream qi can't do it, the medium isn't capable of handling that level of complexity."

"And a permanent channel would fix that?" I asked.

"I think it's worth trying," he said and gestured at the dream gate still hanging in the air behind him. Its edges were stable, but you could tell it was taking constant energy to keep it that way.

"This gate is already proof that it can work, it connects directly to our inner world, so if we can stabilize it and make it permanent, then I could draw on the real cultivation base instead of faking everything with dream techniques." I looked at the gate more carefully than I had before.

The structure was more sophisticated than I expected from someone who had only learned how to make dream gates, but then again, Hou had the advantage of knowing this destination better than any other place because it was part of him.

"So if we connect our inner world to your body in the Dream World, you would be able to use qi, the sun energies, and maybe even the Genesis Seed's purification abilities," I said slowly, working through what that meant.

"Exactly," Hou confirmed.

"And it would also mean you could potentially send support or resources if I needed them, though I'm not sure how physical objects would work going through a dream gate, so that would probably need some testing." That did seem useful. I could pass him information about what Tian was doing since I had a front-row seat to everything happening in the Dream Realm, and then there was the question of Azure, who could provide the support and analysis that had saved me more times than I could count.

Hou had been managing well enough on his own, but having Azure available to him would give him advantages that he couldn't get any other way, and if cultivation had taught me anything at all, it was that you could never have too many unfair advantages. We both looked at Azure at the same time, he had been quietly watching our conversation and was almost certainly already running calculations about whether this was even possible.

"Azure," I said.

"Is this doable? Can we create a permanent channel like he's describing?"

"It is possible," he said after a few seconds.

"The dream gate gives us a stable connection point, and the fact that the Genesis Seed recognized Hou as Master tells us that the spiritual signature is compatible enough to work with. Making the channel permanent would mean modifying the gate's structure somewhat, adding stabilization formations, and setting up energy flow in both directions, but yes, it can be done."

"What are the risks?" I asked.

"For Hou, the risks are minimal," Azure said.

"He would gain access to higher-tier energies that his dream cultivation body might have trouble containing at first, but since the spiritual foundation is the same, the adaptation should happen relatively quickly. For the inner world, the risk is somewhat higher because we would be creating a permanent connection to an outside location. If that location was ever compromised and hostile forces reached Hou's position, they could theoretically use the channel to follow it back here." I thought about that carefully.

The Dream World was under Azure Peak Sect's control and had limited access, but limited access wasn't the same as no access, and dream cultivators existed who weren't friendly. If someone ever managed to capture or possess Hou's body while he was in the Dream World, they might be able to use that connection to get into my inner world. But on the other hand, the Genesis Seed would sense any hostile presence, and unlike when Hou arrived, it wouldn't hold back against an actual threat.

That was only if I didn't just cut off the connection from my side first, which was probably the smarter response anyway. I was about to agree, but then I remembered what Sect Master Yuan had warned me about. He had told me not to try annexing inner worlds during tournament battles, and he had mentioned other World Tree Sutra cultivators who had been overwhelmed when they tried to make too many connections.

He hadn't told me what happened to them, but the warning had been clear: the cultivation method had a pull toward connecting to worlds, and that pull could become something you couldn't control if you weren't careful about it. I had already connected to the Starhaven Realm, which was one world, and the Two Suns World had connected to me rather than the other way around, so I wasn't sure that one counted. The other inner worlds I had visited during the tournament I never had the chance to connect to any of them.

But the Dream World was different from all of those. This was an inner world where the inhabitants were dream cultivators who could walk between realms on their own. The spiritual complexity of it was on a level higher than simple pocket dimensions or small inner worlds, and I only had access to it right now because of the tournament.

Once the final was over and my spiritual essence merged back together, the access would be gone, and the Dream World would be cut off unless I could somehow learn to adapt dream cultivation for the cultivation world. I couldn't afford to lose that, not now that I had started to understand what it could do. But the risk was also real, and Sect Master Yuan wasn't someone who gave warnings without a good reason behind them.

If he had told me to be careful about connecting to multiple worlds, then there was something he knew about what could happen that I didn't. The World Tree Sutra might start trying to absorb the Dream World, it might grow into something I couldn't manage, or it might draw the attention of something that saw it as a target or an opportunity.

But the alternative to taking that risk was giving up everything Hou had built: the knowledge about dream cultivation, the techniques, the relationships with Moon and Lu Chenyang and everyone else he had met in that world. All of it would disappear when the tournament ended, and I would have the memories of it but no way to actually continue down that path. That wasn't something I could accept.

The Dream World represented a cultivation system that I had only barely started to understand, and the potential in it for growth and for developing abilities that could help me with everything I knew was coming was too valuable to walk away from just because there might be risks. And also, wasn't that what cultivation was in the first place? You take calculated risks, you push past boundaries, and you keep moving even when the path forward isn't clear to you.

Every major breakthrough I had ever achieved had been risky and all of it could have gone wrong, whether it be cultivating the World Tree Sutra, integrating the red and blue sun energies, or world walking itself. But it had all been worth it in the end. I looked at Hou and saw the same look on his face that I had.

He needed this connection as much as I did, because without access to the full cultivation base, he would always have a ceiling on what he could do in the Dream World, which meant he would just be another talented dream cultivator, and that wasn't enough to defeat someone like Wu Kangming. But together, with dream cultivation backed by the full power of the Genesis Seed and both sun energies, that combination was something that hadn't existed before.

"Let's do it then."