Cultivation Nerd (xianxia)

Chapter 411 - Test Subject: Ice

Ni Shi's life had been quite dull, and he lacked much of the experience someone who had lived for thousands of years should have possessed.But his time sealed hadn’t been without benefits. He had comprehended the element of water further than most.

Not like he had anything else to do while sealed. So he developed all kinds of water-related abilities, from illusions to mental techniques. Combined with his bloodline, if he still had the lifespan, Ni Shi was confident he could have reached the peak of the Nascent Soul Realm.

He walked around the large laboratory he had come to, just in case something went wrong with the experiment Liu Feng was trying to conduct.

The place had navy-blue walls, with yellow lines running across them like golden veins. Ni Shi placed a hand on one of the walls and sensed an abundance of Yang-like energy flowing through it.

As for the rest of the room, there was a cabinet filled with elixirs and pill bottles, and a table held various instruments that looked more like torture devices than medical tools.

In the center of the room stood a metallic bed with strange, thin tubes descending from the ceiling, each filled with the same golden liquid flowing through the veins in the walls.

Liu Feng stood beside the bed, his eyes gleaming a strange shade of blue as he stared at Ye An, whose true body lay exposed before him.

Ni Shi didn't understand much about how human attraction worked.

He found their wartless skin and hair growing in strange places disgusting, and he had never understood how some beasts overlooked that enough to produce hybrid descendants.

Ye An's body was exposed, but it had been utterly ravaged.

She was missing both legs and both arms. The ends of the stumps were covered in black spots, her left breast had turned a dark color from frostbite, and a sheen of ice covered her eyes.

She was likely blind by now. How had she lived for so long despite a condition that Liu Feng called an Extreme Physique?

As far as Ni Shi knew, through nothing but sheer grit.

Extreme Physiques were strange. They were the closest thing humans had to a bloodline. Yet they almost always killed their owners before they reached their early twenties.

“Ye An, I'm now going to begin the procedure,” Liu Feng said, speaking loudly.

He wouldn't have spoken like that without a reason. She had likely lost much of her hearing as well. What a miserable woman.

Ni Shi wouldn't have wanted to keep living like that. So part of him admired Ye An's willpower.

“What do you plan to do now?” Ni Shi inquired. “Are you going to have her attempt a breakthrough to the Nascent Soul Realm?”

During the three years Ni Shi had known Liu Feng, the man had proven himself knowledgeable in almost every field.

But with a body so badly damaged, her Qi in complete disarray, and barely any consciousness left...

The chances of Ye An successfully breaking through were infinitely close to zero. Ni Shi knew just how difficult it was to reach the Nascent Soul Realm. Failure meant death, and there was no second attempt.

“No, I'm going to seal her completely for now. We have analyzed the situation thoroughly, and sadly, the odds were never in her favor. My research isn't finished yet either…” Liu Feng sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “The best I can do for now is buy time and hope that, in the future, I can deal with something like this.”

“You seem confident,” Ni Shi smiled.

Despite his words, Liu Feng's eyes never wavered.

Well, they never did in any situation. It was a bit creepy sometimes.

“This is the best I can do for Ye An,” he said. “We have had our conflicts. When we first met, she was chasing a girl I later grew to become friends with before she died during a calamity. Ye An also tried to kill me when we met. So I never really forgave her, or at least never cared about her enough to push myself for her.”

Ni Shi nodded, acting like the thousand-year-old monster he was. Inside, however, he was salivating like a hungry dog.

This sounded like a very interesting story!

There was some mysterious girl, and all sorts of exciting details that would make for excellent gossip.

Did the wife, Fu Yating, know? Was this unknown dead girl some unrequited first love?

Just imagining the current Liu Feng as the protagonist of some tragic romance play nearly brought tears to Ni Shi's eyes for not having met the guy sooner.

There were so many unspoken things he wanted to know!

Sadly, people like Song Song, Wu Yan, and the bald swordsman were all very tight-lipped about their lives before entering the Misty Mountains.

Jiang Yeming was the most loose-lipped, but she was a different kind of creepy from Liu Feng, always wearing that distant gaze. Even she rarely spoke about what had led them to the Misty Mountains.

“Wasn't she already sealed before? I don't remember seeing Ye An during the last couple of years,” Ni Shi said.

“She was more in suspended animation, where part of her consciousness remained active. Now there will be none of that, and we can only hope the seal holds,” Liu Feng explained.

“I bet it will. After all, you're a Level 7 Array Conjurer, and that isn't nothing,” Ni Shi encouraged him.

Even he felt a little bad for Ye An...

Just a little.

After all, he had seen far worse.

*******

I stared at Ye An's broken body, and despite not necessarily being too fond of the girl, this was too cruel a fate for me to wish upon anyone.

The sad part was that the research needed to heal her wouldn't be finished anytime soon.

It would take much longer than I had initially anticipated. These three years since moving to the Misty Mountains had made that painfully clear.

I raised a finger and gently touched Ye An between her brows.

As a recent four-star Foundation Establishment Cultivator, I activated my fourth Foundation Technique.

God's Favorite Eye!

Closing my left eye, I carefully guided the Qi within my retina, and Ye An's fleshly body lying on the table transformed in my vision into a humanoid mass of muscle.

This was one effect of my fourth Foundation Technique. I could see the miniature streams of Qi flowing through another person's body.

This text was taken from NovelPhoenix. Help the author by reading the original version there.

People could normally sense Qi. They couldn't see it like this in such microscopic detail. It was like how people could see blood, but not every cell.

Then I activated my first Foundation Technique.

Time De-Accel!

Everything slowed down. It felt like watching ropes of cold blue flame flowing through Ye An's body.

Beautiful.

I gently traced my finger from between her brows to the tip of her nose, then to her left ear, down her neck, and then slowly between her breasts until I finally reached her dantian. After repeating the motion several more times, the Qi inside Ye An's body gradually began following the same path.

Then I slowly drew a spiral just below her stomach.

The Qi within her dantian immediately began swirling like water inside a bucket.

Though she could no longer speak, Ye An was still awake. Or perhaps only half-awake.

“By the time you wake up again, years will have passed. Perhaps even a full decade. But for you, it will feel like a split second,” I reassured her.

Seeing Ye An like this, whatever petty resentment I still held over her trying to kill me when we first met slowly faded away.

Well, I still couldn't bring myself to forgive something like that. But I would begin putting genuine effort into finding a way to heal her. Not merely because it was an interesting problem to solve.

Ye An's mental energy gradually weakened until it entered a fully dormant state. Until I was the one guiding the flow of Qi through her body.

Normally, foreign Qi would be instinctively rejected whenever it entered someone else's body. But Ye An was half dead. Her body could no longer defend itself properly.

“What kind of Core Technique are you trying to create with all these non-combat Foundation Techniques?” Ni Shi inquired.

Asking something like that was rude. Foundation Techniques were among a cultivator's greatest secrets. But at this point, it hardly mattered if he knew.

“It will be a technique to help me understand the mysteries of this world,” I told him.

The five senses were limited, and even the ability to sense Qi could only take someone so far. That was assuming my mind wouldn't turn to mush the first time I used my Core Technique.

Either way, that was still far in the future.

As the last of Ye An's will drifted away, dark spots began appearing across her body, a manifestation of extreme hypothermia from within. The wounds she had been suppressing finally surfaced, and she would have died within seconds if I had done nothing.

But where I had been tracing circles over her flat belly, a ring of dark letters appeared, halting the spread. Her Qi stabilized at the peak of Core Formation, yet her spirit roots continued gathering Yin Qi even while she was unconscious.

Even if she didn't want to attempt a breakthrough, the overwhelming accumulation of Yin Qi would eventually force her to.

That was the real problem.

Even her Core Technique, which allowed her to seal her spirit roots temporarily, had only bought her a handful of extra years. She could no longer use her cultivation to keep them under control.

Ice began seeping from the dark circular seal on her abdomen, slowly covering her body and turning the room around us into something resembling a giant freezer.

The tears in my eyes began to freeze, interrupting my Foundation Technique, and I had to keep a gentle stream of Qi flowing through them so they wouldn't freeze shut.

As for the hand I had been using to draw circles over Ye An's abdomen, the flesh beneath my fingernails had frozen, making it feel as though the nails would fall off at any moment.

Thankfully, with my enhanced vision, I could see the strands of icy Yin Qi spreading outward, and I gently dispersed them with my own Qi. Through it all, I never stopped drawing the seal on Ye An.

A piercing pain assaulted my lungs with every breath, so I used a translucent jade construct of Qi to create a sphere around my head. The ice grew around her like expanding foam, sealing her inside a massive iceberg. I slowly retreated, maintaining my distance while continuing to monitor the circulation of her Qi.

Once everything was finished, a web of ice covered the room, with Ye An sealed at its center. Her spirit roots were still absorbing and producing Yin Qi, but at a much slower rate than before.

This should buy us another decade.

It would also allow enough Yin Qi to accumulate for Ye An to attempt a breakthrough when she awoke. But if my research remained incomplete by then, there would be nothing more I could do.

By now, she should have gone mad from the pain. Instead, she had used her Core Technique to seal even her pain receptors.

More importantly, an incredibly powerful will had carried her this far. Ye An had almost reached her thirties through sheer determination alone.

I took a storage ring from my pocket.

It was Ye An's.

She had entrusted it to me. It contained everything she had gathered and stolen over the years. Knowing her, it was probably mostly stolen things.

After seeing some of the contents, I was now certain she had killed Hu Jin. The so-called man loved by the heavens.

That was yet another piece of evidence supporting my suspicion about who had orchestrated the entire scheme to turn me into another heaven's favorite, destined to kill an immortal.

I rubbed my chin as I stared at the dark spots covering Ye An's brutalized body.

“It seems like my presence here wasn't needed. Nothing went wrong. What are you going to do now?” Ni Shi inquired.

“Now we continue our daily lives and slowly learn more about the world, like always. While trying to maintain a work-life balance. After all, I have kids to raise,” I said.

Ni Shi chuckled before forcing the frost-covered door open and walking out of the room. The moment he stepped outside the laboratory, he disappeared to who knew where.

When we had first made our contract, I always assumed he would spend his time exploring the world after being sealed for so long. Instead, Ni Shi always lingered around the Misty Mountains. Getting involved in useless gossip and the daily drama of the handful of people living here.

I walked out and carefully closed the frost-covered door behind me, making sure the array around the room was functioning properly.

After all, I didn't want the entire library above ground to freeze over too.

I rubbed my hands together for warmth and dismissed all the techniques I had been using to protect myself from the cold. I didn't hurry. Instead, I slowly left the library, enjoying the quiet while wondering where I should explore next in search of Yin and Yang treasures to study.

But as I stepped outside, I sensed the three little misfits in the nearby forest and went to check on them.

All three were squatting beside a tree. Liu Ma was trying to wipe his bloody hands on the grass while Song Gu helped by pouring water from her gourd over them.

Huh. That was surprising. I rarely saw those two cooperate. Which meant they had almost certainly done something stupid together and were now covering for each other.

“I told you not to squish it,” Liu Sha said while ignoring them and staring at the small dead bird lying beside the tree. “Father explained that he went through a lot of effort to get these birds inside the array because they have short memories and wouldn't make good spies for other beasts. Their chirping is relaxing too.”

He remembered that? Liu Sha really was well-behaved.

Unlike his twin.

Unlike the Blazing Sun Sect, where ordinary animals were never allowed inside the barrier because they might evolve into spirit beasts or become spies for beasts of the same species, I had intentionally introduced a few harmless animals here.

Mostly birds of a particular mountain species with memories comparable to a goldfish's.

“Song Gu threw the stone first. She's the one who killed the bird,” Liu Ma argued. “If it's anyone's fault, it's hers.”

Without missing a beat, Song Gu flipped the water gourd she had been using to help Liu Ma wash his hands and splashed the remaining water directly onto his head.

“Hey!” he complained.

“You're the one who picked it up and squished it just to scare me!” she shot back.

“The bird was already dead when you threw the rock at it, stupid woman!”

She threw the gourd straight into his face.

“Ow!”

“Who are you calling stupid, you idiot!”

The two immediately started fighting.

Normally, Liu Ma would have had the advantage, but after countless battles, Song Gu had learned a few tricks. Namely, keeping her pockets full of small rocks to throw at him while he hid behind trees.

Unfortunately, the tree Liu Ma chose was the same one Liu Sha was standing by. Instead of hitting Liu Ma, one of the stones struck his twin brother.

“Ow.”

Liu Sha rubbed his forehead before hurriedly running away.

“You two are always fighting! Can't you both just stop acting like this all the time?" He said as he ran, and when he was a safe distance away, added, "I'm going to tell Father about this!"

Smart kid. He made sure to be away from rock-throwing distance before talking shit.

That instantly caused Liu Ma and Song Gu to put aside their differences and chase after their common enemy.

These kids...

Well, they were still kids. It wasn't like one dead bird was that big of a deal. Still... I already knew Liu Ma was going to be a troublesome child.

Sometimes I wish I could just hand him an iPad. An iPad kid would be better than setting things on fire or playing with dead animals.