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

Chapter 273: Chapter 273 - The Anomaly Court and the Immortal Path

Su Bai had already skimmed through the jade slips back in Fallen-Star Sanctuary and noticed how carefully organized they were.

Now that he finally had the chance to study them properly, that impression only became stronger.

The Immortals had prepared these inheritances with remarkable care for their future reincarnations.

Although each jade slip belonged to a different person, their overall arrangement was almost identical. Only the personal portions and individual techniques differed greatly.

After going through them several times, Su Bai could roughly divide everything into four parts.

Their personal legacies came first, followed by records concerning their organization and the anomalies it investigated. After that were records of their final mission in Fallen-Star Sanctuary. The cultivation and sealing inheritances had been placed last.

Su Bai found the arrangement strangely considerate.

It was obvious these jade slips had never been intended for random successors.

They had been prepared for the Immortals themselves.

Or rather, for whoever they became after reincarnation.

The personal legacies made that especially clear.

Names, positions, old relationships, trusted companions, and places that had once been important to them were all preserved inside.

There were even small memories that would have seemed pointless to anyone else.

A courtyard beside a river. A particular mountain seen from the window of a residence. The appearance of an old friend. The location of a restaurant one of them apparently visited far too often.

Su Bai paused when he reached that part.

For some reason, that detail made the Immortals feel considerably less distant.

They had not merely left behind grand techniques and solemn final words.

They had preserved ordinary things as well, probably hoping that one familiar name, place, or memory would someday stir something inside their reincarnated selves.

If Su Bai encountered them again, these records might prove far more useful than any description of their appearance.

Their faces could change. Their bodies certainly would. But memories were another matter.

Su Bai continued reading.

One thing immediately connected every jade slip.

All of them had belonged to the same organization.

The Myriad-Heaven Anomaly Court.

Su Bai had expected some powerful Immortal sect or ancient clan.

Instead, what he found was something much stranger.

The Court existed specifically to investigate things that did not behave according to the normal order of the world, including distorted laws, corrupted regions, foreign existences, abnormal reincarnation, and unknown entities that appeared where they should not exist.

Some missions involved sealing those anomalies, while others required destroying them, studying them, or simply determining whether they posed enough danger to justify intervention.

Su Bai slowly lowered one of the jade slips.

The fact that an organization like this needed to exist in the Immortal Realm was not especially comforting.

He had imagined that reaching Immortality would mean leaving behind at least some of the ridiculous problems of the lower world.

Apparently, the problems simply became larger.

Still, the discovery was not entirely bad.

If he ever reached the Immortal Realm, there was now at least one organization whose purpose he could understand.

More importantly, he had names, places, and people the Immortals had trusted.

That did not mean Su Bai intended to walk into the Myriad-Heaven Anomaly Court someday and announce that he had personally watched several of its members reincarnate.

But having somewhere to begin was much better than arriving in an unfamiliar realm with nothing.

Information was sometimes worth more than a technique.

The next portion of the inheritance proved that point rather quickly.

The Court records contained fragments from past missions, methods of identifying different kinds of anomalies, and observations gathered from places Su Bai could barely picture.

Some incidents had involved a single region. Others had spread across enormous territories. A few records were written on a scale that made Su Bai stop and reread them simply to make sure he had understood correctly.

The Immortal Realm was far larger and stranger than anything he had imagined.

Even the Immortals had frequently arrived somewhere only to discover that nobody understood what was happening.

Su Bai found that oddly reassuring.

At least confusion did not disappear after becoming Immortal. It simply received more complicated names.

His attention eventually settled on the records most relevant to Fallen-Star Sanctuary.

The flesh masses.

The Court had several terms for them.

Foreign Corruption appeared most often in formal reports.

Aberrant Flesh was common in field records.

A few researchers had used the term Voidborne Infection, although even the records themselves made it clear that the name reflected a theory rather than a confirmed origin.

That theory appeared repeatedly.

The flesh masses behaved less like ordinary creatures and more like something infecting a larger system.

Several Court members had compared them to disease.

Others had gone further and called them viruses of the universe.

The Court had never confirmed either interpretation.

Su Bai stared at that section for some time.

’A disease of the universe.’

It sounded ridiculous.

Unfortunately, after everything he had seen inside Fallen-Star Sanctuary, he could not dismiss it completely.

He eventually moved on.

There was no point trying to solve something that Immortals had failed to understand even after investigating it directly.

The third portion of the inheritance was much more familiar.

Their final mission.

This section contained the records they had made concerning Fallen-Star Sanctuary, including why they had come, what they discovered, what they attempted to seal, and the failures that eventually forced them into increasingly desperate measures.

Su Bai had already heard much of the broad story from the Immortals themselves.

The written records were different.

They contained details the Immortals had never bothered explaining aloud.

Su Bai read through them slowly.

Eventually, he found several entries concerning the people trapped inside the Sanctuary with them.

His expression grew quieter.

The Immortals were fully aware of the resentment directed at them by the cultivators trapped inside Fallen-Star Sanctuary.

Their containment measures had cost countless lives, and some survivors had cursed them openly while others could barely conceal their hatred.

The records made no attempt to deny any of it.

The reasoning was painfully simple.

If sacrificing thousands prevented something from spreading far enough to destroy millions, they would make that choice.

If they themselves had to be included among those sacrifices, they would make the same choice again.

That had been the standard expected of members of the Myriad-Heaven Anomaly Court.

Su Bai leaned back slightly.

He understood the reasoning behind their decisions well enough.

Even so, he had never been a fan of that philosophy.

Perhaps that was part of why dealing with the Immortals had always felt so uncomfortable.

They were not cruel for pleasure. They were simply willing to make calculations that ordinary people would never accept when they happened to be among the numbers being sacrificed.

Su Bai continued deeper into the record.

His expression abruptly changed.

There were also entries about him.

He read the first description twice, then a third time.

His eyebrow twitched.

’Unusual local entity... What kind of description is that supposed to be?’

Su Bai stared at those words.

That description sounded like something the Court would write before deciding whether to put him inside a sealing formation.

He continued reading and found another assessment describing him as an unusually effective weapon against the Aberrant Flesh.

That was somehow worse.

Su Bai closed his eyes for a moment.

So this was how Immortals wrote about someone who had helped save them.

He decided their reincarnations did not need to know that he had read this particular section.

His annoyance disappeared soon afterward.

Near the end of the final mission records, he found something far more important.

The Immortal Path.

Su Bai’s attention sharpened.

The records did not contain the explanation he had hoped for.

In fact, they confirmed something even the Immortals had been unable to understand.

They did not know who sealed it.

At the time the connection disappeared, they had already been confined within their own seals.

They had only realized later that the link they once possessed to the Immortal Realm was gone.

Whether the Myriad-Heaven Anomaly Court had sealed the path, another Immortal force had done it, or something entirely different had happened remained unknown to them.

Su Bai continued searching.

There was no method for reopening it either.

That was disappointing, although not particularly surprising.

If the Immortals themselves had been trapped when the path was sealed, expecting them to leave detailed instructions for reversing it would have been unreasonable.

What they had left behind was something else.

A description of how the Immortal Path had originally functioned.

Su Bai read it once.

His expression slowly changed.

The Immortal Path had never belonged solely to the Human Realm.

What cultivators here called the Immortal Path was only one part of a much greater ascension structure.

According to the Court’s records, that structure extended through all Six Realms.

Each realm possessed a connection to the same greater network.

Su Bai stared silently at the jade slip.

The Six Realms again.

For the past several days, everything somehow seemed determined to return to those words.

He had only just learned what the other realms were like.

Now he was being told that the path to Immortality was connected to all of them as well.

Su Bai rubbed his forehead.

Even assuming the old network could somehow be restored, there was an obvious problem.

He was in the Human Realm.

The other five were not.

Traveling between continents was already troublesome enough.

Traveling between realms was not something he intended to casually add to his plans.

The Great Fissure had once connected them, but Su Bai had heard enough about that event to know that reopening anything resembling it was a terrible idea.

He had absolutely no desire to become the person responsible for creating the second Great Fissure.

For now, the Immortal Path would remain someone else’s impossible problem.

Su Bai was perfectly comfortable with that decision.

He set aside the third portion of the inheritance and finally turned toward the last.

His mood immediately improved.

The earlier sections had given him information, mysteries, warnings, and several entirely new things to worry about.

This one was considerably more straightforward.

The cultivation and sealing arts.