Chương 589: Chapter 584: The Price of Shortcuts

The stone corridor on the other side of the Hall of Shattered Reflections was honestly pretty boring compared to what I just went through, which was actually a relief, because after seeing about a hundred versions of my own face staring back at me with that expression they all had, boring was what I wanted right then. Nobody else was there. Just me, and the walls, and the quiet. So I was first. That was something at least.

That didn't last very long though, because maybe thirty seconds later Pan Jun came walking out of the mirror entrance and I had to admit that I didn't expect that at all. I had figured one of the expedition leaders would come out first and if not them, then Tian or maybe Xie Ling, but Pan Jun? He was not even close to the top of my list.

And he wasn't just out early either, he was completely untouched, no cuts, no burns, no dirt, his robes hanging perfectly straight without a single crease in them, as if he had been taking a walk through a garden somewhere instead of confronting the worst parts of himself. I figured his heart demon trial must have gone really well. Good for him, I thought.

"Welcome back," I said.

"That was fast." Pan Jun turned and smiled at me.

"Fast," he said, and the way he said the word made something in the back of my neck go tight.

"We got done fast. Yes. All of us did. Together." I frowned at him.

"All of who?"

"Me. And me. And, the other me," he said, and then he tilted his head over to one side at an angle that a person's head didn't normally go, and he wasn't being poetic about it either, he was talking about three actual separate people, I could hear it in how he said it.

"We all agreed it was taking too long. Didn't see the point in it. So we just, accepted what was offered. Much simpler that way." I opened my mouth to ask what he meant by that, but I didn't get the chance because Xie Ling came through the mirror right then. Her white robes were torn in maybe four or five different places and there was dried blood at the corner of her mouth that she hadn't bothered to wipe off.

She was walking with her shoulders held very stiff and careful which told me her ribs were probably in bad shape, but her eyes were still sharp. The woman was still tracking everything in the corridor the second she stepped into it. She looked at me. Then she looked at Pan Jun. Then her face did that small tightening thing it does when she is angry but didn't want anyone to know she is angry. She seemed genuinely offended that two people had beaten her out.

"The first trial was brutal," she whispered, and then she walked past both of us and stood by herself against the far wall, which was typical of her. She survived her heart demon, and that was that, she wasn't going to be sharing any of the details with us, not now and probably not ever. Xu Feng came out next, and he looked like he had actually been in a fight. The edges of his robes were burned black, and he was limping pretty badly on his left leg.

He looked around at all of us standing there and let out this long breath and shook his head slowly. I got the feeling he still didn't quite believe he had made it out.

"That was something," he said, and then he went over and sat down against the wall.

"My other self was really annoying. Kept going on about how I wasted my whole life making friends instead of cultivating. As if I have not already thought about that about a hundred times on my own." He stopped talking then, because he had finally noticed the smile that Pan Jun still had on his face.

"You alright there, Pan?" Pan Jun looked over at him and for just a second, something went across his face that could have been confusion.

"I'm fine. He's fine. We're all fine." Xu Feng gave me a look, and that look said "what is wrong with him", very loudly, but to his credit he didn't push it. Li Na came out so quietly that I didn't even notice her at first. She was just suddenly there, standing near the mirror with a small cut over her left eyebrow and dust all over her gray robes but otherwise she seemed to be in one piece. She went and stood near Xie Ling without saying a word to anybody.

The two of them just stood there together being silent, which I think was the closest thing to friendship either of them has. And then we waited. And then we waited some more. The corridor went off in both directions and there was nothing in it, no doors, no side passages, nothing except us and the stone.

The mirror entrance was the only way in or out that any of us could see, and when I pushed my spiritual sense through it, I could feel the other mirror still sitting in there, the one that connected to whatever the next trial was going to be.

"Where's your friend Tian?" Xu Feng asked, after what had to have been twenty minutes of nobody saying anything.

"He should be out by now, right?"

"Song Wei and Shen Bolin too," Xie Ling said. Her voice was still cold but there was worry underneath it somewhere. Although knowing her the worry was probably not about whether they were alive, it was about how the rest of us were supposed to get through the remaining trials without the Lucid Lawbearers protecting us. Still, it was a fair point, and I had been chewing on the same thing already.

Wu Kangming was a protagonist, the kind of person who falls into situations that should kill him ten times over and then walks out of them with his hair barely messed up. And Song Wei and Shen Bolin had both done this trial forty years ago, they knew what was in there, they had more experience with this place than everyone else in our group put together. So where were they? I got my answer about a minute later when two figures came through the mirror at basically the same instant.

I think Song Wei was slightly ahead of Shen Bolin, but I couldn't actually say for sure. What I could say for sure was that both of them were bleeding. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Song Wei had a long deep cut running across his left arm that was still dripping onto the floor, and there was a burn on his shoulder that had been made by something both sharp and very hot. Shen Bolin had a cut across the ribs on his right side and a burn sitting near his chest. They matched.

That was the thing. They matched each other exactly. The two of them glared at each other for a good few seconds, then they both turned their heads away at the same time with their jaws clenched so hard I honestly thought I was going to hear something crack.

"What happened?" I said, mostly to myself, but Song Wei answered anyway.

"The trial," he said. Shen Bolin didn't say anything at all, he just went to the opposite wall from Song Wei and started pulling bandages and medicine out of his storage ring. The message there was clear, which was don't ask any follow-up questions. But I wasn't thinking about their ancient grudge anymore.

I was thinking about how those wounds lined up with each other's techniques, and there were only two ways that happens: either they both coincidentally faced attacks that looked the same, or they had fought each other inside the Hall of Shattered Reflections. That wasn't possible, right?

"Ah, there they are," Pan Jun said suddenly, and his voice was bright and pleasant.

"We were waiting for you. We know you took the same path. We all made the same choice in the end, didn't we. Three of us. One person. One choice. Easy." Song Wei's head snapped around so fast that I thought he was going to hurt himself. Shen Bolin's eyes went narrow. Both of them stopped what they were doing with their injuries and put their entire attention onto the Mid-Stage Oneiric Sovereign who was standing in the middle of the corridor staring at nothing at all.

"You took the shortcut," Song Wei whispered.

"The easy path," Pan Jun said, and his words were starting to slur into each other a little bit.

"The one that makes everything stop hurting. That gives you the answers without any of the struggling. We all took it. We're all enlightened now. We're all the same." Xie Ling moved forward a step and her hand shifted into a defensive position.

"What shortcut? What is he talking about?" Shen Bolin answered before Song Wei could open his mouth.

"The Dreamgod Ascendant who built this palace built shortcuts into the tests. If you are strong enough, or more accurately, if you are willing to accept it, you can skip the confrontation with your heart demon."

"That's what the whispers in the first trial were offering," I said, because I remembered them now, all those voices down in the Drowned Vestibule that kept telling me to stop, to give up, to let go.

"They were offering shortcuts."

"Yes," Song Wei said, and nodded.

"If you accept a shortcut, you gain enlightenment. Instant understanding. Every answer you could want, put directly into your mind, with none of the work of earning them."

"So what's wrong with that?" Xu Feng asked, but he asked like he already knew he wasn't going to like the answer.

"The shortcut is not true enlightenment," Shen Bolin spat out with an expression of disgust on his face.

"It is a fragment. A piece of the Dreamgod's own consciousness. When you accept it, you are accepting a piece of another person's madness, and it merges into you, and after that you start to see yourself as being one and the same with the man who built this place. Some people take a shortcut once and manage to hold onto their own identity in spite of the contamination. Others." He looked at Pan Jun.

"Others do not." Pan Jun was smiling again.

"Three of us," he said.

"Me and Song Wei and Shen Bolin. We're one person now. Aren't we. We all took the enlightenment. We all see it so clearly now."

"I absolutely did not," Shen Bolin growled.

"Neither did I," Song Wei said, although there was something in his voice that was less solid than Shen Bolin's had been.

"We faced our trials properly."

"But you faced each other," I said, and both of them went still like they'd just been caught.

"Your injuries match your techniques. You didn't fight your heart demons in there. You fought each other." Shen Bolin's jaw went tight. Song Wei was quiet for a long moment before he said, "The trial showed us versions of ourselves that included our relationship. Our rivalry. It was... complicated."

"That is one way of putting it," Shen Bolin muttered. A heart demon could take the form of a lifelong rival, that much I already knew, so it made sense that the trial would arrange things so that the two of them fought each other instead of fighting some copy. I was curious about how they had both managed to pass at the same time, but that wasn't the important part.

The important part was that both of them had faced their trials properly, in whatever twisted form that had taken, and Pan Jun hadn't, or at least that's what they claimed. Apparently, Pan Jun had looked at his heart demon, done the math on how much effort it was going to take to beat it, and taken the shortcut instead. And now he had a piece of something very old and very broken inside his head.

"Can it be fixed?" Li Na asked. Her voice was so soft that I nearly missed it.

"Can you take the fragment out?" Song Wei and Shen Bolin looked at each other, and it was the first time I had seen the two of them communicate without wanting to kill each other, which told me a lot on its own.

"No," Song Wei said eventually.

"The fragment belongs to the palace but it is now embedded within him. Removing it would mean cutting out part of his consciousness. He would be permanently damaged even if you managed to get the foreign piece out."

"So he's stuck like that?" Xie Ling's voice was sharp. I couldn't tell if it was anger or pity underneath it.

"Forever?"

"Yes," Shen Bolin said.

"The fragment is integrated too deeply now. He thinks of himself as three people because the fragment is convincing him that he is one person with three aspects. Eventually, if he stays in this place long enough, or if he accepts enough shortcuts, then he will...." He stopped there, but he didn't really need to finish it.

"He would think he was the Dreamgod himself," I said. Song Wei nodded slowly.

"Yes."

"Does that usually happen," I asked.

"When someone accepts more than one shortcut, do they always end up believing they are him?"

"Usually, yes," Song Wei said.

"The contamination builds on itself. Each fragment reinforces the ones already there. Eventually the cultivator's own personality gets buried underneath layers of the Dreamgod's consciousness, and they begin manifesting his techniques, his way of speaking, and even his memories. After the third or fourth acceptance, it progresses very quickly." Shen Bolin turned and looked at Pan Jun, and there was nothing in his expression at all, which was somehow worse than if there had been.

"If this one keeps going down that path, I will kill him. I have done it before, more times than I care to count, and I will do it again. The palace is contained for now. But if a person becomes the Dreamgod's fragment completely, they become a walking contagion. I will not allow that. I can't." Nobody spoke up for Pan Jun. Nobody said that was unfair, or excessive, or that we should try something else first. That was just how the cultivation world worked.

If your choices put everyone else at risk, and you couldn't be reasoned or saved, then you were expendable. It was harsh, it was merciless, but it was the way things were. Pan Jun didn't seem to notice that he had just been sentenced to death. The guy was still standing there smiling, still talking quietly about how they were all one. Xu Feng was very carefully looking at a spot on the wall. Li Na had grown even quieter than she normally is, which I wouldn't have thought was possible.

Xie Ling was standing rigid with her jaw working, I could tell she wanted to say something but had decided it would be a waste of breath. I made myself stop thinking about Pan Jun and whatever was left of his future, and I turned my attention instead to the problem that had been getting bigger in my head for the last several minutes. Tian still wasn't out.