Chương 426: Whispers Abound (X)

If I'm gonna be friends with someone... I at least have to see who they are, no? Since his status window is the cheapest, I splurged a bit (though I really can't afford to anymore) and spent 100 to see it. [--Creator's Eyes Used] [100 points spent to partially view target's Status Window] [...] [Target: Jing Kang] [Age: 1, 109, 399 (Resonant Cycle, Body),??? (Mind)] [Talent: Mortal] [Cultivation Realm: Peak Qi Condensation] [Cultivation Method: Writ of Ren (???)] [Cultivation Arts: Will of a Heart (???), Silent Prayer (???), Song of Anātman (???), Glimpse of Naraka (???)...] [...] [Traits] [Borrowed Years, Unclaimed Name (???) -- a drifting soul that even Dao loses track of, let alone the Heavens. He cannot be divined and he cannot be cursed. He does not possess the karmic signature necessary to be witnessed by the Heavenly Law] [Half-Realized Emptiness (???) -- on a path toward anātman, having touched its edges] [Deviant of Dao (???) -- a mortal who has transcended the binds of human flesh, escaping the Laws of Nature] [Witness of Kalpas (???) -- their age does not reflect their years] [Kind (???) -- kindness forged through eternal suffering. Can never commit an act they personally consider evil] [--Other traits are currently inaccessible] [...] [Assessing suitability...] [...] [Countless anomalies detected. The host is privy to just one] [...] [Man of Flesh (Dao) -- embodiment of a half-realized path, struggling upstream. Inheritor of Blood that had flown through mankind since the Dawn of Creation] [...] [Recommendation: Host, as-is, is woefully ill-equipped to assist the target in any capacity. Rather, Host should seek wisdom from them] [...] [Final Assessment: cannot be framed within the confines of assessment; defies natural forms and aspirations. Being of Dao, through Dao, but unbound from Dao. He cultivated not to ascend but to prevail] Huh. Alright. Fuck you, system.

Fuck you and your 100-point bait, you self-serving jackass. I've never come this close to just straight-up pissing myself out of pure, unadulterated terror. Forget Long Tao. Forget that girl with the spirit of some random Emperor in her. Forget everything and everyone else, me included.... who the hell is this guy?! No, no, no--this ain't no guy. This is... well, I've no clue what the fuck this is.

All I know is that I need to put as much distance between us as physically possible and pray to all the gods and spirits and whatnots that he forgets about me and finds some new toy to play with. This ain't Lao Shun with his few centuries of boredom finding something that stirred the life in him; this is... No, I can't even begin to quantify it, as he defies everything I've learned from this world. By all accounts, he is weak. He's 'just' a 'person'.

His talent is worse than this body's original one; he's 'only' at the peak of Qi Condensation, but there are just so many fucking question marks everywhere that I dare not even think about what he can do. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Weak? Of course. He's as weak as a rabid dog on cocaine and a boatful of amphetamines against a sleeping baby. Why... just why do I have to come across weirdos like this? Shouldn't they be bothering kids and not me?

I'm just a guy with a system that takes the protags and helps them do what they were gonna do anyway! And yet, here I am, accosted by some dude that's (bodily? What the hell does that even mean?) over a million years old, and two others whose status windows I cannot even begin to comprehend. Which begged the question-- why was it only 100 points? There's absolutely no way that the system would make a 'mistake', and there's no way his status window should have cost just 100 points.

It means that the system thinks me knowing it is important. It also means that me knowing the second most expensive one is also important, but the most expensive one is probably more of a 'eh, best not yet'. And you know what? I'm just gonna ignore them all. That's right, baby. Denial's back in business!

"Friends? Of course, Fellow Daoist," put on that smile, Jakey, and let the winds blow through your brains, cleaning it completely.

"A man can never have too many friends, I've learned."

"Indeed," he smiled rather oddly as I did take my sweet time replying to him. I'm just happy that his Kindness literally cannot be structurally measured, apparently, but it's also worrying as it says that he cannot commit evil acts... so long as he believes them evil. What if he thinks killing some asshat like me isn't evil? Oh boy.

"Are we done?" I'll from now on reference them by their status window costs, and the 2000 guy was the one who asked the question.

"... we are," the 100 guy replied after a momentary silence. Done with what? With me? Oh boy, here it comes. My second death.

"Ah, just one thing. Dao is a Song, Fellow Daoist, and is sung by all of creation. From dawn through day and through night, its melodies are resonant cords strumming the strings of souls. But... no one can hear the Song. No one, Fellow Daoist," he reiterated as all three stood up in eerily perfect symphony.

"Remember that."

"Uh..."

"No one can hear the Song," he repeated as they began to walk away, the last of his voice resonating in the depths of my mind." Only the melody." and off they went. I frowned, watching their backs fade from my sight as they turned and left the inn. They were scarily similar to another thing that tends to piss me off with its vagueness--the system. This was also the very first time ever that the system didn't even provide a recommendation of any kind.

Instead, it was the opposite: it recommended I seek wisdom instead. Was that the wisdom? That nobody can hear the Song of Dao?

Well, whether it is or not, I'll commit it to memory and ascribe it to some vague guy that was kind of cool but ultimately not that important. Yup, nothing weird or noteworthy about that guy.... haah. Should I have spent my points and checked the statuses of those two, too? Probably, yeah. I yearn for the days when fear won't paralyze me and make me revert back into the spineless coward who only wants to remain rooted in his indifference and apathy. Besides, something bugged me--there were three of them.

That man, even if not directly stated, was very clearly the embodiment of 'Humanity'. Were those two, then, embodiments of Heaven and Earth? Is that why they were more expensive? And yet, it still didn't make sense. Though he's, technically, the oldest person I've ever encountered, a million years is still... well, not that long. In fact, I'm fairly certain that Long Tao had lived longer than that, actually. Then again, there's that '???' next to his Mind age, which, to be fair, can mean any number of things.

His situation can be similar to mine, where this body is thirty and a change, but the mind's seventy and a change. Even if I want to burrito-roll him up and toss him in the depths of my mind, I have a gut feeling we'll see each other again. How soon or how far, I don't know. Perhaps, the next time around, I'll have seen enough weird shit across the plethora of status windows that seeing something I've never seen before won't completely fry my brain. Ah. One can only hope.