Cultivator’s Path to Infamy [Progression | Cultivation | Villain Lead]

Settling inside the dantian, the clump of new energy started sending out strange signals, aimed straight at his inner world.

Inside his world, everything shuddered at once. The cloud of the Dao of Death and the pubble of the Dao of Wood caught the signal and began pulling toward each other at incredible speed, forming a constantly spinning symbol, something like Yin-Yang, except instead of black and white, the two halves came out green and black. Once the symbol had formed and reached a certain spin rate, it stopped accelerating.

At the same moment the symbol in his inner world stopped speeding up, the clump inside his dantian began pushing out whatever energy remained in its new home, forcing out every last particle of it.

The instant the final particle of energy was driven out, the new symbol inside his inner world began pulling in massive volumes of Qi through his physical body.

Passing through whatever was left of his body, all the neutral Qi didn't head for the dantian the way it normally would during a cultivation cycle, it went straight to the inner world instead, straight into the spinning symbol.

Drawing that energy in, the symbol began converting it, reshaping the Qi to match what now sat inside the dantian, enriched, or rather, the combined energy of the two Daos.

Once the conversion was complete, the symbol began sending the newly processed Qi back through his physical body, straight into the dantian, which accepted it without any trouble at all. That first blending inside his energy source felt strange, for a moment, the dantian seemed to resist the sheer quantity of it, but the next instant, once it mixed with the small initial clump, the Qi began filling the dantian to the brim.

A few minutes later, once new gaseous energy had filled the dantian completely, the dantian began to contract, and the compression process for that new, gaseous energy began.

Essentially, An had started the breakthrough into Foundation Establishment all over again, only this time with entirely new energy. But because his subconscious couldn't get his regeneration process running, for whatever reason, he remained trapped in horrific agony, and because of that, he had no way of noticing any of this happening beneath the layers of pain and water above him.

At last, the energy inside compressed down and transformed into a single liquid droplet of Qi.

SSTHHHP!

Within a two-kilometer radius, the water and the earth beneath it simply vanished, creating a vacuum for a fraction of a second and leaving An's body hanging suspended in midair.

BOOOM!

Thousands of tons of water crashed down on top of him like a collapsing mountain, driving him into the riverbed, pressing him down with such force that all he managed was a single cry before finally losing consciousness.

Beneath the water and the earth now, a mass of rotting flesh, as if it had finally received the signal it had been waiting for, began to grow, taking shape into something resembling a human body.

His shattered, half-melted skull, its brain torn in several places, started rebuilding itself, working its way back toward its original form.

His last, burst eye withered and fell away, and a new one began growing in its place. The second, empty eye socket began changing too, a new eye taking shape deep within it.

All the skin and flesh that had rotted away started sloughing off the newly forming bones underneath.

Strangely, the bones grew simultaneously from two points at once, from the skull, where the brain had first rebuilt itself, and from the dantian, which had unexpectedly shifted its location.

The dantian now took over not just as a replacement digestive system, but as the origin point, practically an inseparable part of the spine itself, anchoring bones to itself through new veins, or rather, energy tunnels, through which flowed a liquid resembling blood, though ninety percent of it was made up of his new energy, his new Qi, with only the remaining ten percent still actual blood.

Running through these new energy veins, weaving around the bones, the new blood circulated around a new ‘heart’, which, once again, was the dantian.

His old heart, rotted through, had been discarded entirely from his system, cut from the new blueprint his subconscious was using to build his optimal new body.

Left without a heart or lungs, all that remained inside him were bones, and a throat connecting directly to the dantian, which had by now put down roots of its own.

His ribcage, finding no better option within his subconscious's design, simply rebuilt itself the way it had been before, only with sturdier ribs this time.

Every open space inside his body began filling in with massive, elastic masses of muscle, something like a sponge in texture. The muscle packed itself into every gap, nearly doubling his total body weight in the process.

Once the upper half of his torso had reformed, arms began growing from his shoulders, new bones first, then energy tunnels stretching out from the dantian, and only after that did flesh and skin start covering everything over.

At the same time, the lower half of his body began regrowing. Had An been conscious for any of this, he'd have breathed a sigh of relief, as his manhood came back exactly as it been before. The only difference was the missing bladder that had long stopped working, replaced, like everything else, with energy tunnels instead of veins.

A few hours later, his legs finally finished regrowing, completing the regeneration process.

The only visible physical change was that he'd come out a little leaner, giving the visual impression of being slightly taller, though his actual height hadn't changed at all.

Lying beneath the water and the riverbed, An still couldn't regain consciousness.

For the first time since arriving in this world, he experienced something like a dream.

On a loop: everything he'd lived through over the past several days, from the moment he'd sunk into full trance.

Except in the dream, he felt all of it from the very start, every bit of pain that had hounded him again and again, replaying at a faster and faster pace.

Living through it dozens of times over, An tried to cut himself off from the pain, using sheer stubbornness, forcing his own sensitivity down through nothing but sheer will. Trapped in that endless, cyclical dream, his mind felt cut down to almost nothing, able to focus on the pain, but unable to reflect on it, unable to analyze any of it.

Cycle after cycle, living through that hell. The screams that had followed him through it all fell silent at some point he couldn't place, leaving behind only a hollow, exhausted stare.

His ‘open’ green eyes, nearly extinguished, staring into nothing, kept losing another sliver of their light with every cycle.

Floating in that dream, he merged completely with the pain, accepting it fully as part of himself, as part of something ordinary, like clenching a fist, or blinking, because he couldn't see any other way through it.

.

.

"Ah... Aa-agh! AH! AaaarGH!"

Snapping back toward consciousness, phantom pain crashed over him in waves, one after another, refusing to let him open his eyes.

"AAAAH!"

Screaming with everything he had, tearing at his own throat from the sheer force of it, he fought to pull himself back into reality, to reclaim some control over his exhausted mind.

BOOM!

Finally pulling himself together to some degree, fighting his own body's fierce resistance, An gathered a massive clump of Qi behind his back and detonated it, blasting himself up out of the earth.

Not even sure where he was, he flew, or rather surfaced, still accelerating without pause, manipulating the Qi around him with everything he had.

Tearing through the surface of the river, An shot toward the distant shore like a released arrow, a hissing shriek piercing the air around him.

Whooosh!

Reaching the shore without slowing down at all, he plowed through several trees, shredding them apart, before finally slamming into the ground, half-burying himself in a massive crater of his own making.

"Haa... Ha..." Half-buried, eyes wide, he lay there dragging in huge gulps of air, which traveled straight down his throat into his dantian before simply dispersing and leaking back out through his pores. "Wh-what was that... That pain! Agh..." Phantom pain shot through his body like electricity, over and over, the instant he so much as thought about it.

"Need t-to calm down... Whooo..." Taking another deep breath, he suddenly realized something was off.

Activating his Qi, he froze all over again. The energy in his body, in his dantian, felt both intimately familiar and completely foreign at once.

Starting with the Qi itself, he found an invisible connection between his dantian and his inner world.

Closing his still-twitching eyes in the real world, he opened them inside his own inner world and went completely still. For a long while, he simply stared at the enormous, spinning symbol in front of him.

Working up his nerve, he drifted closer and began reading the information off it. 'A merging of the Dao of Wood with the Dao of Death... But I never gave a command like that... Did my body do this on its own, while I was unconscious? No. My brain steered the whole process. It directed it exactly where it needed to go.'

Reaching out to touch the spinning particles inside the symbol, even his spiritual body went pale. 'I remember, right when I finished my experiment merging the two clumps into one... just an instant before the pain hit... a thought crossed my mind, about the possibility of swapping out my energy for something new... Damn it...'

While still inside his own inner world, part of his mind was checking his physical body and dantian at the same time.

'My heart, lungs, and everything else, of which I already had precious little left...' He glanced down at his lower body, and once he'd confirmed everything there was exactly as it had been, he let out a breath. 'Every organ's gone, and the dantian's taken over completely, it's not just my digestive system anymore, it's my heart too... though "heart" doesn't really cover it anymore.'

Digging deeper still, he kept going. "Energy tunnels instead of veins, carrying some kind of modified blood..." As he reached each new discovery, his own brain seemed to supply the explanation, as if some deeply buried knot of his mind, the one responsible for the whole transformation, was now trying to deliver a full report back to the central consciousness these smaller, separate knots all fed into.

'Visually, I haven't changed at all... I just weigh almost 170 kilograms now. All because everything that used to be my organs got replaced with layers of flesh, porous, sure, but still flesh.' Pressing a finger into his stomach and chest, he felt both firmness and elasticity in his own muscle.

'My bones, my muscles too... their density's gone up considerably, which raises the ceiling on what they're capable of. In other words, my physical strength's gone up a little.' Tensing and relaxing his body, he could feel just how much strength was hiding under his own skin.

'Hm... my body went through the Foundation Establishment breakthrough a second time... Only partially, but my Qi should've-' Focusing on one particular aspect of his own body, he suddenly smiled.

'My vitality's gone up, because the Qi from the Dao of Wood fully enriched every tiny particle of it, making each one a little bigger, though not more numerous. Because of that, the total volume and density went up, and even got purer... which in turn boosts my regeneration and lifespan.' Reading through his own numbers, his smile only grew wider once he realized his lifespan had jumped a full three hundred years, pushing it past the twelve-hundred-year mark. 'Heh, at this rate I'll turn into a tortoise before long, with numbers like these.'

'Sigh, even though right now it almost feels like that pain might've been worth it... I only have to think back on it and my toes start curling.' The smile that had just appeared vanished from his face just as fast.

He kept reading through the information about himself.

'Hm... it's still strange, having two main anchors in my body now, the dantian and the brain. They're technically two separate organs, but in practice, they function as one, duplicating information and roles between them, apart from a few specific quirks... Interesting.' Studying the two remaining organs, a piece of information surfaced from somewhere deep in his own brain.

'Only destroying both my brain and my dantian at the same time would actually kill me now... In any other case, my healing factor should stop that from happening. Though, actually, that's not quite right either. If I overload my mind badly enough, my regeneration might just fail to kick in at all, simply because there's no command telling it to... Come to think of it, any cultivator at Foundation Establishment probably has to lose either their heart or their brain to die quickly... Hm. I should look into this more carefully at some point.'

Finishing his inspection of his physical body, he activated his Qi.

Wooosh!

The sheer concentration around him lifted everything into the air, kicking up a curtain of dust.

Leaves on the trees and the grass itself withered instantly within a radius of several dozen meters.

Watching, eyes wide, An began slowly increasing the density of the Qi he was releasing.

The vacuum around him kept expanding, his energy devouring the air around it, freezing the plant life in some strange, suspended state. Everything living wilted to the very edge of death, and held there, right on the brink.

Once he'd pushed that radius out to nearly several hundred meters, he felt he'd hit his limit.

Deactivating his Qi, An expected everything around him to snap back to normal. It didn't. Whatever had withered started actually dying, since oxygen hadn't had time to fully return to that whole stretch of land yet.

Watching this, he frowned slightly. 'Something's not quite right here... The symbol inside my world is split evenly, both energies carry equal weight. So why...? Ah! I didn't account for the land I'm standing on. Demonic energy is basically neutral Qi plus impurities plus Death Qi. The concentration of demonic energy in this particular place is way too high... so one of the elements is winning out. Is that it?' Landing on something like an explanation, he frowned again. 'No. That's not actually why my Qi should behave this way... My own energy shouldn't be adapting to its surroundings like that. This has to be about novelty, about not fully understanding, not having enough experience working with this Qi yet.'

Thinking it over, he shifted his focus back into his inner world.

Hovering in front of the spinning symbol, he started working through it. 'My Wood functions in this pairing like some kind of Dao of Life... The reason is that the Dao of Wood is, by itself, extremely close to a Dao of Life, practically identical, as far as I understand it. Not that I'm really in a position to talk about a Dao of Life when I don't even understand it myself... but at the same time, I have this feeling I'm at least partly right... Because I can only perceive a single element, just the one. Whereas every other cultivator, without exception, carries traces of Life Qi mixed into their spiritual roots, just in a ratio so small that only high-grade measuring artifacts could ever detect it... assuming the scraps of information I dug up in the Scripture Pavilion were even accurate.'

Brushing lightly against the spinning symbol, 'My Wood element, being both primary and singular, has taken on the role of every element at once, constantly generating, constantly creating something new out of itself... That's probably part of why the Dao of Wood chose me in the first place. Wood Qi and Life Qi have so much in common that it's exactly why my Qi can affect plants the way it does, essentially giving them life, giving them a shot at mutation, at evolution. In the end, my Wood element must have picked up a piece of what makes the Life element what it is, not just because of me specifically, but because those two elements are already so close to begin with.'

Ignoring everything around him, he sank fully into his own thoughts. 'The moment I opened my eyes in this world, the Dao of Death had already started taking root inside me... To truly know it, to truly understand it, you have to know what death actually is. Feeling it, standing right at its edge, fighting for your life over and over, things like that only deepen your understanding of that Dao. But for the Dao itself to choose you, to let itself take root inside you, no, that's not enough on its own. You have to actually die. Your body has to die. Your soul has to feel true darkness, the true cold of the void... I still don't know exactly what happened to my soul, or how it ended up here, but I know one thing for certain: the moment I died in my first world, the Dao of Death found its home inside my soul. As strange as that sounds.'

Looking down at his own palm, at the veins barely visible beneath his skin, watching what looked like blood, but was really energy, flow through them, An lowered his head and let out a breath. "Who... what am I now? What am I even turning into..."

After sitting motionless like that for a long while, just thinking, he suddenly shook his head. 'Who cares who or what I am? Doesn't matter which path you choose, everyone ends up in the same place eventually. All I need to do is trust my own path, the one I chose and the one I'm still carving out for myself. I just need to keep climbing this ladder, step by step. Only up from here.'

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