Wizard: I Have a Cultivation System

Chapter 569: Chapter 23: Inner Alchemy Golden Core [Initial Glimpse]

"How could I possibly let my beloved toy become some lifeless thing you throw away after one use?"

Murphy looked at her.

"Even a child will eventually tire of a toy, forget it in a corner, or just toss it in the garbage."

The sweet smile on Cheris’s face remained unchanged; in fact, it grew even more brilliant.

"That applies to children, not to people like us."

"Have you heard of the lich transformation ritual?"

Murphy’s brow twitched slightly.

Without waiting for his answer, Cheris continued on her own.

"It is a path in pursuit of eternal life, where one strips their soul from its decaying, fleshly shell and seals it within a vessel called a ’Life Box.’ From that point on, they possess a nearly infinite lifespan."

"But, there’s a very interesting phenomenon. No matter how kind, benevolent, or compassionate a Saint the Wizard was before the transformation, once they become a lich, their alignment and mentality will irreversibly slide into cruelty, paranoia, and extreme selfishness."

"Do you know why?"

Murphy didn’t answer.

He knew Cheris didn’t need his answer.

"Because the self needs an anchor."

"We are already immortal."

"From a mortal’s perspective, beings like us already possess incorruptible bodies, inexhaustible minds, and life forms that do not wither with the passage of time."

"But our souls, our selves, can still decay."

"Or ’decay’ isn’t quite accurate. More precisely, we get lost."

"It’s like a Divine Spirit sailing in the depths of the Source Sea, going further and further, sinking deeper and deeper, until they can no longer see the lights on the shore or hear the prayers of their followers."

"We are the same."

"As we walk through the Source Sea, constantly slipping into its depths, the moment comes when the self can no longer return to the shore. That is when we become lost."

"We are luckier than the Divine Spirits in that we don’t need the faith of the masses to sustain our existence. We are unluckier in that our methods for anchoring the self are not necessarily more enduring than theirs."

"They at least have believers, tethering them to a position of ’being needed,’ ’being remembered,’ and ’being revered.’"

"And what about us?"

"We have nothing. So we get lost in the Source Sea faster and more easily than Divine Spirits. Silently, without so much as the SNAP of a breaking chain."

"And so the liches... they found an anchor."

"An anchor that is incredibly tough, incredibly firm, one that will never decay or break, even in the deepest parts of the Source Sea, even at the very end of time."

"Unfortunately, this anchor is the very embodiment of evil."

"But this anchor is also thick enough, sharp enough, and strong enough to bind a massive ship tightly to the shore without any other chains."

"Once one becomes a lich, they are inevitably evil. Because on that path, only evil is hard enough, eternal enough."

She took a small step forward, planting her bare feet on the lava. She tilted her small face up, her jade-green eyes staring straight into Murphy’s bottomless, pitch-black gaze.

"So, my little toy, I chose to become what I am now, and I chose to have toys."

"Therefore, I will cherish my toys. Seriously, patiently, and for a very long time."

She retracted her gaze and turned to face the incandescent white orb that was struggling within the Crimson sword-net.

"So—"

She raised her slender little hand, its nails painted with glossy black polish, spread her fingers slightly, and aimed her palm at the incandescent white orb—the one that had condensed from the dream fragments of a Divine Spirit and the final resting place of countless souls.

"To show how much I cherish my toy, this thing can’t be allowed to hurt you anymore."

The moment her voice fell, her fair, slender hand reached into the Crimson sword-net, as gently as if plucking a ripe fruit.

The incandescent white orb, which had resisted all of Murphy’s power to contain it, was as docile as a submissive cub beneath her palm.

She compressed it into a crystal the size of a walnut, shimmering with a faint golden light.

And she plucked it from the layered restraints of the sword-net with ease.

Murphy felt the power that had fought him for so long within the sword-net vanish in an instant, without a trace.

The four Crimson Longswords let out a soft hum of relief. The cracks on their blades were still shocking to behold, but they began to recover quickly now that their enemy was gone.

And just as Cheris collected the incandescent white orb...

A silent roar suddenly exploded in the depths of Murphy’s consciousness.

A flood of countless pieces of information surged into the depths of his consciousness with unstoppable force.

Cheris looked down at the crystal in her palm, a flicker of satisfaction in her jade-green eyes.

She tossed it lightly, as if playing with a fascinating new toy she had just acquired.

"So, do you understand now?"

"How much I cherish you."

Murphy looked at her. The four Crimson Longswords, covered in cracks, began to slowly retract their light and merge back into his body.

"I understand."

Yes, Murphy understood.

Or rather, he had already vaguely understood back in the Old Realm.

Cheris’s words made it clearer.

And the knowledge contained within [Inner Alchemy Golden Core ’Initial Glimpse’] gave him the final piece of the puzzle.

If the more powerful an unobservable substance is, the weaker the Spiritual Power connection between its constituent particles...

Like the sparse, almost-void of outer space, where particles are separated by hundreds of millions of kilometers, connected only by the faintest threads of Spiritual Power...

Then what about the thoughts carried by these substances, the self condensed from them?

Naturally, they would be weaker, more distant, and slower.

Before he transmigrated, Murphy had read countless novels depicting Extraordinary Beings.

Back then, a question had always circled in his mind.

How could those powerful beings who had lived for thousands or tens of thousands of years still live in the same dimension as mortals?

The "dimension" here refers to the scale of time perception.

The strong possess greater Spiritual Power, faster nerve conduction, and more efficient information processing capabilities.

Their speed of thought could, in theory, be ten, a hundred, or a thousand times that of a mortal.

So, when they talked to mortals, listening to those slow, stuttering words where a single syllable took half a second, wouldn’t it feel like watching a PowerPoint presentation, frame by frame?

When they walked on mortal streets, watching pedestrians who slowly lifted their feet, slowly took a step, and took a full three seconds just to breathe...

Wouldn’t they feel restless?

Wouldn’t it be agonizing?

Even later, after Murphy himself embarked on the path of Cultivation and personally experienced the perceptual distortions of Dao Transformation, he began to understand cognitive anchoring.

The strong must maintain the living habits, thought rhythms, and emotional patterns they had before they stopped being "human."

Otherwise, over the long course of time, they would gradually forget how a "human" is supposed to think, feel, and exist.

Even so, this explanation still had a self-contradictory problem.

That is, the strong are not necessarily "human."

Aren’t there races born with extremely fast information exchange speeds?

Those strange creatures that use electromagnetic pulses as neural signals, those ancient beings whose very thoughts are light...

What, then, should they anchor themselves to?

They were never human.

Their speed of thought was that fast from the moment they were born.

The only thing they could maintain was their race’s innate timescale.

That shouldn’t be the "leisurely pace" seen in the eyes of mortals.

Murphy could never figure it out before.

Now, he understood.

It wasn’t that they "wanted" to be slow.

It was that their thoughts, in a non-combat state, were just that slow.

The interaction strength of the substance that constitutes the "self" of these eternal beings is far weaker and more distant than mortals can imagine.

A single thought of theirs is like the pulse of a star—one beat can be a hundred or a thousand years in the eyes of a mortal.

Like the breath of a star—a single inhalation and exhalation can span the rise and fall of several civilizations.

This is not a rhythm they choose.

It is the physical law of their existence.

They don’t deliberately slow their speech to accommodate mortals.

It’s that it truly takes them that long to say a sentence, form a thought, or complete a line of reasoning.

So long that a mortal can be born, grow up, grow old, and die before they even finish a sentence.

So long that a mortal civilization can rise, peak, decay, and fall in the time it takes them to furrow their brow.

So long that—

Murphy looked at Cheris before him, standing on the boiling lava, her bare feet tapping lightly.

So long that she appeared as a sweet girl-next-door, as youthful as a thirteen or fourteen-year-old girl.

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