Cultivating in Reverse: My Sign-In System Wants Me Dead

Chapter 270: Chapter 270 - Karmic Dead and True Yang

Su Bai’s gaze remained on his master.

’Beings that could come back after death.’

The words sounded simple, but Lu Canghai’s expression made it clear that the reality had been anything but.

After a brief silence, the old man continued.

"The Naraka Realm was different from all of them."

Lu Canghai’s voice became quieter.

"Even now, I am not certain how much of what we were told was true."

Su Bai straightened slightly.

"What did you learn about it, Master?"

"That Naraka was a realm of punishment."

Lu Canghai paused.

"Those who understood it better than us said that souls burdened by certain karma could be reborn there. They suffered until that karma was exhausted, after which they could eventually return to the cycle of reincarnation."

Su Bai remembered Yue Cangyu explaining that the Six Realms were connected through reincarnation.

It fit.

"But the Great Fissure changed something."

Lu Canghai’s eyes darkened.

"The beings of Naraka suddenly had somewhere else to go."

For existences trapped in a realm built around punishment, the Human Realm had become an escape.

They came through wherever the passages allowed them.

Some looked almost human.

Others had bodies twisted by whatever punishment had shaped them.

Lu Canghai had seen things covered in burns that never stopped smoldering, creatures whose skin carried layers of frost despite standing beneath summer sunlight, and beings pierced through by broken weapons that somehow continued walking.

He did not know whether those wounds were part of their punishment or merely part of what they had become.

He had never wanted to know badly enough to ask.

"The first time we killed one, we thought that was the end of it."

Lu Canghai’s fingers tightened slightly.

"It was not."

Su Bai watched him carefully.

"Their bodies could be destroyed, but their existence was still tied to Naraka through karma. According to those who understood them, death outside Naraka only sent them back."

Su Bai’s eyes narrowed.

"They returned?"

"Eventually."

Lu Canghai nodded.

"The same ones could appear again after reforming there."

That was what had made the Naraka beings so horrifying.

A human cultivator could be defeated once.

An Asura could be killed.

A spirit beast could be slaughtered.

Even a Hungry Ghost could be destroyed if one was strong enough.

The Naraka beings simply came back.

Perhaps not immediately, but killing them did not solve the problem.

It just postponed it.

"We were fighting enemies whose losses meant something entirely different from ours."

Lu Canghai laughed softly, but there was no humor in it.

"Imagine losing ten people to kill something and finding out afterward that all you accomplished was sending it home."

Su Bai could understand why his master had described the Great Fissure the way he had.

The Animal Realm had overwhelmed humans through bloodline and numbers.

The Hungry Ghosts consumed things cultivators relied upon to fight.

The beings from Naraka treated death like an inconvenience.

Against all three at once, even understanding the enemy would have taken time humanity did not possess.

Lu Canghai stared toward the courtyard.

"That was when your father became impossible to ignore."

Su Bai froze.

He had been expecting Su Qingshan’s name eventually.

Even so, hearing it here felt different.

Lu Canghai’s eyes had already drifted somewhere far away.

"Su Qingshan had always been troublesome."

The words sounded like a complaint, but there was too much familiarity beneath them for Su Bai to mistake what his master truly meant.

For a moment, a trace of the old Lu Canghai returned.

"He was the sort of man who could save your life and make you regret thanking him five minutes later."

Su Bai could somehow imagine that far too easily.

The smile disappeared from Lu Canghai’s face.

"But during the Great Fissure, there was no one I trusted more at my back."

His voice became heavier.

"Your father possessed a mutated Spirit Root."

Su Bai listened without moving.

"The Primordial True-Yang Root."

Even the name carried weight.

Lu Canghai had never fully understood what made it different from an ordinary Yang-aligned Spirit Root.

He only knew what he had witnessed.

Yang Qi naturally suppressed ghosts, Yin creatures, and many forms of corrupted spiritual existence.

Su Qingshan’s Yang went further.

When it touched a Hungry Ghost, the creature did not merely burn, its spiritual body collapsed.

When it struck a being from Naraka, there was no lingering karmic presence, no remnant struggling to return, and nothing left for the Naraka Realm to reclaim.

Su Bai’s pupils contracted slightly.

"He could stop them from returning?"

Lu Canghai looked at him.

"He did not stop them from returning."

His voice became unusually solemn.

"He erased what would have returned."

Silence fell across the courtyard.

Su Bai had already known that his father had been extraordinary.

He had heard fragments.

He had seen the reactions of people who remembered Su Qingshan.

Yet those were different from hearing what the man had actually done while the Six Realms were tearing into one another.

Lu Canghai slowly exhaled.

"Against the Hungry Ghosts and the beings from Naraka, your father was their worst possible opponent."

The creatures that relied on spiritual bodies burned beneath his Yang.

The beings that treated destruction as temporary discovered an enemy capable of making it permanent.

Human cultivators had spent enormous effort repeatedly driving Naraka creatures back.

Su Qingshan simply removed them from the battlefield forever.

Lu Canghai still remembered the first time everyone understood what was happening.

A Naraka creature that had already returned twice charged through the battlefield.

Su Qingshan met it head-on.

There had been no grand speech, only a sun-bright radiance erupting across the ruined ground.

When the light faded, the creature was gone.

It never came back.

After that, whenever Su Qingshan appeared, cultivators who had been exhausted enough to collapse somehow found enough strength to continue.

Lu Canghai smiled faintly.

"He became our light."

Su Bai said nothing.

For once, he could not think of anything sarcastic enough to lessen the weight of those words.

Lu Canghai continued.

"That did not mean he could win the war by himself."

His tone hardened.

"The Asuras were still pushing against the Devas. Beast clans were crossing wherever the passages remained stable. Hungry Ghosts appeared without warning, and Naraka beings continued forcing their way through."

He shook his head.

"If the Devas had not held the Asuras back, the Human Realm would not have survived merely because we had Su Qingshan."

Lu Canghai looked directly at Su Bai.

"Even if there had been dozens of him."

That was the scale of the Great Fissure.

No single genius had saved the world.

Su Qingshan had simply become one of the people who made survival possible.

Somewhere between battles, humanity had stopped asking who belonged to which sect, which clan, or which territory.

For a time, surviving the next passage opening had mattered more.

Lu Canghai fell silent.

The wind moved gently through Clear Cloud Peak.

Nothing around them resembled the place he remembered.

There were no burning cities, no beast cries shaking the mountains, no Hungry Ghosts stripping spiritual energy from the land, and no Naraka beings walking out of fire after cultivators had already killed them once.

Only the courtyard remained.

Lu Canghai closed his eyes briefly.

He had spent years putting those memories somewhere he did not need to look at them.

After his foundation was damaged, there had been even less reason to return to that part of his life.

The Great Fissure belonged to a Lu Canghai who had still believed he and Su Qingshan would have centuries to complain about it afterward.

That man had never imagined sitting here decades later, explaining everything to Su Qingshan’s son.

Lu Canghai opened his eyes.

Su Bai sat across from him.

The resemblance was not perfect. It never had been.

Yet there were moments when the angle of his expression, the calmness in his eyes, or the irritating way he listened without showing what he was thinking made an old memory surface before Lu Canghai could stop it.

He stared at his disciple for a little too long.

Su Bai eventually noticed.

"Master?"

Lu Canghai looked away.

"You look annoyingly similar to your father sometimes."

Su Bai’s eyebrow rose.

"I’m not sure whether I should apologize."

"You should."

Su Bai considered that seriously.

"I’ll think about it."

Lu Canghai snorted.

The heaviness in the courtyard loosened just enough for him to breathe normally again.

Yet Su Bai did not forget what he had heard.

The Six Realms were no longer names.

The Devas had crossed into the Human Realm with all their power and pride. The Asuras had tried to take it. The myriad beasts had followed instinct and bloodline. The Pretas had brought hunger that could devour far more than flesh. And Naraka had sent enemies for whom ordinary death was merely a road back home.

At the center of those memories stood Su Qingshan, burning brightly enough that even creatures already condemned to Hell had learned to fear the light.

Su Bai lowered his eyes.

There were still too many things about his father that he did not know.

After today, that number had only grown.