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

Chapter 272: Chapter 272 - Strange Movements and Ancient Gains

With the artifacts settled, another matter returned to the front of Su Bai’s thoughts.

Unlike the Great Fissure, this one concerned what was happening right now.

"Master, there is one more thing."

Lu Canghai immediately heard the difference in his voice.

Su Bai began by recounting what he had learned from Ning Shuang.

He did not waste time explaining things that did not matter.

He told Lu Canghai about the unusual movement she had noticed among demonic cultivators, including groups leaving areas that had previously remained quiet and some disappearing for unusually long periods.

Not all of those movements had pointed toward Fallen-Star Sanctuary.

That alone had bothered him.

Su Bai continued with what he had seen during his own seven-day journey back to Radiant Sky Sect.

Small groups of demonic cultivators appearing near mortal settlements.

The pattern had not been clear enough for him to call it proof of anything, especially with so many forces moving because of the Sanctuary.

But after hearing Ning Shuang’s account, he could no longer dismiss it as coincidence.

Lu Canghai did not interrupt.

The faint amusement left his face almost immediately.

By the time Su Bai finished, the old man was no longer leaning comfortably against his chair.

Lu Canghai’s fingers tapped once against the arm of his chair before stopping.

"You saw these demonic groups yourself on the way back?"

"Several times."

"And they were not moving toward the Sanctuary?"

"Not all of them."

That answer made Lu Canghai’s expression tighten.

Li Xuanzong and Jian Wushuang had already left because stronger demonic cultivators were appearing in places ordinary disciples could no longer safely handle.

They were also investigating signs that members of righteous forces might be cooperating with the demonic side.

At first, those incidents had seemed like consequences of the chaos surrounding Fallen-Star Sanctuary.

Now there was another possibility.

Lu Canghai looked toward the distant horizon.

"If everyone were after the Sanctuary, their movements should eventually converge toward it."

Su Bai understood where his master was going.

"But some of them are moving elsewhere."

"Or were never moving toward it in the first place."

The courtyard fell silent.

Neither of them tried to name a conspiracy they could not yet prove.

They did not know what the mortal settlements had in common beyond the fact that demonic cultivators kept appearing near them.

But there was enough to make coincidence increasingly difficult to accept.

Lu Canghai’s eyes hardened.

"The Sanctuary may have drawn everyone’s attention at exactly the wrong time."

Su Bai looked at him.

That possibility had occurred to him on the journey home.

He had simply hoped he was reading too much into scattered movements.

Lu Canghai rose from his chair.

The conversation that had begun with Fallen-Star Sanctuary and wandered decades into the past had finally returned to the present.

Only the present no longer seemed quite as simple as it had that morning.

"I’ll send word to the Old Witch," Lu Canghai said.

Su Bai nodded.

Lu Canghai took several steps before stopping.

His expression had become unusually grim.

"The demonic forces gathering around Fallen-Star Sanctuary never bothered me. Everyone understands why they would go there."

What bothered him were the groups going somewhere else.

Lu Canghai had survived long enough to distrust patterns that made no sense.

His voice became quiet.

"If they are not gathering around the treasure..."

Su Bai’s eyes narrowed.

Lu Canghai did not finish the thought.

He did not need to.

...

After Lu Canghai left, the courtyard finally became quiet again.

Su Bai remained seated for a while before leaning back and letting out a long breath.

For someone who had only just returned home, he had already learned far more than expected and somehow ended up with even more things to worry about.

At least there was one matter he could deal with immediately.

His storage.

Su Bai swept his spiritual sense through his storage rings before opening the System Inventory as well.

Between the two, he had stuffed away far too many things during his months inside Fallen-Star Sanctuary.

The sign-in rewards he had received while traveling through the public airways over the past week had all been the same.

Heavy-Air Sludge.

He had already used every portion during the journey back.

Without it, reaching Radiant Sky Sect in seven days would have taken much longer.

His attention shifted toward the far more troublesome part of his inventory.

Everything he had brought back from Fallen-Star Sanctuary.

Even after spending months inside it, Su Bai had never properly sorted everything he collected.

He began separating what he actually needed from what merely had value.

The first category was easy.

The seven Boundary Pillars stayed with him. Even if he did not currently know how to recreate the original formation, their value went far beyond raw material.

The Immortal sealing weapons remained as well. So did the ancient command seal, the Petrified Calamity-Magnet, the Vanguard’s Entropy-Detonator, and the damaged records or fragments that might still contain information unavailable anywhere else.

Anything connected to the Immortals, the sealed sources, or the ancient command structure was too important to hand away before he understood it.

The corrosion-resistant cloth and thread also stayed.

Su Bai had spent enough time having his robes destroyed to develop a sincere appreciation for fabric that refused to disintegrate.

He was not giving that away.

The remaining ancient weapons required more consideration.

The Artifact Spirits already had their own destination in mind once circumstances stabilized. The damaged but spiritually inactive weapons, however, were different.

Some were still forged from materials that barely existed in the current era.

Others had become too damaged to use directly, but their metal alone could probably make Huo Yan stare at them for several days without blinking.

Su Bai separated those into another pile.

Radiant Sky Sect could make far better use of them than he could.

The same was true of most of the star-metal.

He had accumulated an absurd quantity from Fallen-Star Sanctuary, including fragments from the deeper layers whose composition was far superior to ordinary refined metals.

Keeping enough for future experiments made sense.

Keeping all of it did not.

Su Bai imagined hauling the entire stock into Heavenly Forge Peak and telling Huo Yan it was a gift.

The old man might either laugh, cry, or immediately lock the mountain and refuse to let anyone leave until every fragment had been catalogued.

All three seemed possible.

Su Bai reserved a substantial portion for himself and set the rest aside for the sect.

Ancient formation parts followed.

Many were incomplete, damaged, or impossible to activate without the original formation structure. Individually, they were nearly useless to him.

To Radiant Sky Sect, however, they represented materials, research, and possibly entire techniques waiting to be reverse-engineered.

The same logic applied to several pieces of mineralized beast material, medicinal clay, unusual seeds, ancient residues, and miscellaneous components he had collected simply because leaving potentially useful things behind had seemed wasteful.

Su Bai inspected the growing donation pile.

Calling it a donation was beginning to feel slightly dishonest.

It looked more like he was preparing to bury one of the sect’s storehouses.

Still, that was preferable to letting everything gather dust inside his storage.

Radiant Sky Sect had lost too much during the Great Fissure. If even a fraction of what he brought back could improve its formations, equipment, medicine, or defenses, there was little reason to hoard it.

Anything the sect genuinely could not use could be sold.

Ancient materials were ancient materials.

Someone would pay. Preferably someone who was not a demonic cultivator and did not intend to rob the caravan five minutes later.

Su Bai continued sorting.

The sealed Immortal storage rings were immediately excluded from the donation pile.

He had not even examined their contents yet.

Giving them away unopened would be an act of generosity so extreme that even Su Bai would question his own mental state.

By the time he finished separating the materials, several storage rings had been reassigned almost entirely.

One contained what he intended to give Radiant Sky Sect.

Another held materials he wanted Huo Yan and the other Peak Masters to inspect first.

The most important objects remained inside Su Bai’s System Inventory.

Only after settling the physical materials did Su Bai turn his attention toward the cultivation methods already installed in his mind.

That was going to take much longer.

There were simply too many of them.

Writing everything down alone would take time, especially if he wanted the sect to actually make use of them instead of tossing a mountain of ancient methods into the Grand Archive and letting the disciples figure things out themselves.

The body and soul cultivation methods were easier to handle. Those could be practiced alongside Qi cultivation as long as the methods were suitable and did not conflict with what a disciple already practiced.

The Qi cultivation methods were more troublesome.

Changing one’s primary cultivation method midway was not something that could be done casually. In many cases, truly switching to a different method meant crippling one’s existing cultivation and rebuilding the foundation from the beginning, while others were simply better off never changing at all.

Technically, restarting cultivation was still an option.

Su Bai’s expression became slightly strange.

Considering the quality of some of the methods in his mind, he had a feeling there would actually be disciples willing to do it.

That alone was enough reason not to release everything without sorting it first.

He would deal with that later.

For now, Su Bai finally turned toward the things he had deliberately left untouched.

Several jade slips rested inside his System Inventory.

The Immortal inheritances.

Su Bai stared at them for a moment.

Everything else he had sorted so far suddenly seemed much less interesting.

He reached for the first jade slip and slowly sent his spiritual sense into it.

It was finally time to see what they had left behind.