Cultivator’s Path to Infamy [Progression | Cultivation | Villain Lead]

The whole time the Ginseng siblings ran around talking, An had stayed quietly in the tunnel, listening. 'So I was right to sense something strange in that tree-woman's chest. Especially when part of her Qi tried, subtly, to hide away inside it.' Once their conversation trailed off, he kept walking toward the hole he'd first come in through.

'Hm, she was able to tell my Qi was different somehow... That even unsettled her.' Stopping right beneath the hole, he looked down the tunnel, toward a fork nearby. 'My Qi Silence technique's worked almost flawlessly up until now. Though I understand that a cultivator with a high enough cultivation level could probably crack my disguise without much trouble, just from the difference in energy structure and hierarchy... Trying to hide every trace completely is basically impossible. And even if I somehow pulled it off, it'd gut the strength of my Qi entirely, along with its density and casting speed. I'd have to constantly juggle way too many adjustments to my energy while it moves through my body... it's just not worth it. Besides, who says that would even fool a high-realm cultivator anyway...'

'I did try something similar once, and it actually worked, but the output energy was laughably weak.'

Deciding to head toward the fork in the tunnel, An started reading the Qi around him, trying to figure out which way to go. 'What she said, about the difference between me and other cultivators... thinking about it, it's not really that alarming. Plenty of cultivators have something unusual about them, even mutations that fundamentally alter their Qi signals, their signature... So really, even when I use neutral Qi, and it shows no trace of Death or Wood energy tied to my Dao and the Cycle Symbol... just the slightest deviations, nothing that actually stands out much.'

Choosing the left tunnel, the one heading back to the center of the Central Ring, he kept walking. 'Even if someone notices something's off with my Qi, actually figuring out what it is... is impossible for them. At least, I hope so.'

'Still, thinking back to that fight with the tree, something's still bugging me.' He activated his Qi and gathered a clump of DeathQi in his palm.

Aiming the clump at the wall, and watching it start to rot away, An shook his head. 'So this really is an aspect, just one with a much more complex structure than my Sharpness aspect... Maybe because one belongs to the Mortal Dao, and the other to a Great Dao.'

Reading the flows coming off the dripping rot, An frowned. 'From the scraps of information I can barely pull out, this aspect seems to have been sitting dormant inside the cloud of Death Dao in my body this whole time. But once my new Qi took shape, the kind now circulating through me, this aspect finally surfaced, fully merging with the new energy I draw from the Cycle Symbol.'

Forming another clump, this time purely from WaterQi, An flung it at a different section of the tunnel wall. The moment the energy touched stone, the rotting process began instantly. The rock turned into a black mass right before his eyes, melting away. 'So it doesn't matter which element I convert my energy into anymore, I can freely apply the Rot aspect, just like the Sharpness aspect. Both are fully integrated parts of my Qi now, parts of me.'

Destroying the traces of his experiments, he kept walking through the tunnel, and before long reached another fork, this one splitting into five separate tunnels.

'Hm? Which way should I go this time?' Standing at the fork, he looked over all five passages and immediately ruled out three that led away from the center of the Sacred Land. Picking randomly between the two remaining, he continued on through total darkness.

'What's this?' Suddenly stopping, constantly scanning everything around him, he discovered a massive chamber buried deep beneath the tunnel. 'How enormous is this whole space... These tunnels sit almost a kilometer below the surface. And this new chamber's nearly as deep again below that... and judging by its shape, this definitely isn't a natural pocket, something built it.'

Wrapping himself in Qi, he started passing through the earth, carving a new tunnel straight toward the chamber.

'Hm? Another formation?' Stopping a few meters short of the chamber, he found a still-functioning formation wall in front of him, giving off extremely faint Qi flows. 'It's really weak, probably running on its last reserves.'

Touching it lightly, he began slowly working his way through the formation's wall. 'Only its detection function's still active, judging by the signals spreading across its surface the moment I touched it. Doesn't seem too dangerous... But it’s better not to disrupt its structure, just to be safe.'

"Ouch? Ouch!!" As he slowly pushed through the wall, the formation unexpectedly resisted, and he felt Fireenergy suddenly gathering from every direction, trying to set him alight.

But since the formation didn't have enough resources left to sustain a proper attack, the strength behind it was pathetically weak, leaving nothing worse than second-degree burns on his skin, which healed over within seconds.

Passing through the formation and finding himself right above the chamber, 'Hm... The ceiling, like the walls surrounding this structure, is built from some extremely tough metal. Better to just use brute force here, it'll be a lot faster than fine-tuning the right vibration frequencies.' Activating and concentrating Qi into his right fist, he drew back.

CRACK!

With a deafening crack, the metal slab split right down the center and immediately shattered into dozens of pieces.

'Oh!' Falling through, he caught himself and hung suspended just beneath the ceiling, frozen by what he saw.

BOOM!

A few moments later, the remaining pieces of ceiling finally hit the floor, snapping An out of his daze.

'Guess it wasn't a waste coming all the way down here after all!'

The whole chamber was packed with alchemy tables, each covered in dust-laden cauldrons. Along the walls stood massive shelves, holding thousands of scrolls, still fully intact. Right at the center of the room sat a small sunken basin, holding something like a shallow pool, no more than a meter deep.

Descending carefully to the floor, An walked up to the pool first. 'Hm? I can't tell what this liquid is. But its effect calms and relaxes the mind... don't tell me this place was used as some kind of sweatshop?' Looking back at the hundreds of alchemy tables, he understood exactly what the pool was for, keeping contented workers refining pills without a single break, the vapor from this liquid pseudo-relieving the mental strain of it all.

'Even if this liquid is effective at fooling the body and mind... how long could an alchemist actually keep this up before their body just gave out?' He started walking between the tables, examining the cauldrons.

'The technology behind these cauldrons is clearly on par with the incubator laboratory... Even the style's completely different from the cauldrons I've seen back at the sect.' Every cauldron shared the exact same unadorned style, with no patterns of any kind. Even the material they were made from was identical.

Turning a few of them over in his hands, he came to realize they were practically clones of each other. Even a machine couldn't produce items this precisely identical, down to the smallest details, right down to the number of scratches along the exterior seams.

Setting a cauldron back down, he walked toward the shelves.

Reaching the first one, packed tight with scrolls, he glanced down the row at the rest of the shelves lined up along the wall. 'Well, let's get started.'

.

.

"This is just ridiculous at this point..." Tossing aside the last scroll, An rubbed at his temples. 'Every single scroll's identical! Ninety percent of the text is the same glorification of that damn Devil Bo, and the other ten percent's just one pill recipe, something that speeds up cultivation for spirit beasts...'

Looking at the pile of scrolls behind him, it took An a few moments to calm himself down. 'Same as always... the more you hope for something, the harder the disappointment hits.'

Snapping his fingers, a tiny particle of FireQi dropped onto the scrolls, instantly setting them ablaze, the flames devouring them whole.

Turning toward the doorway leading to the staircase down, he walked over and opened the door.

Going down and coming face-to-face with another door, he carefully wrapped it in Qi before opening it. After what had happened with the teleportation, An now avoided touching doors with his bare hands, afraid of a repeat.

Once he'd confirmed the door had actually shifted, he opened it, stepped inside, and frowned slightly.

At the center of the room stood a massive square cauldron, a tangle of wires running from its head into a slab set on a stone table beside it.

'This cauldron looks nothing like the one in the incubator... or the one a floor up.' Walking closer, An first examined the stone table, and specifically a small slab made from something that looked a lot like plastic.

Studying the slab, he noticed it was built from many layers, and along one edge sat something that resembled touch-sensitive buttons.

'Oh! Could this be some kind of keyboard?' Finding the largest button of the bunch, he tapped it, but since everything was sealed beneath the top layer, his touch sent cracks and a flash of light spreading across the whole surface.

Crack!

A loud electric discharge shot through the wires from the table to the cauldron, but nothing else happened.

After tapping a few more times and seeing nothing else occur, he felt a flicker of disappointment. 'The power source is probably a formation, and judging by how pressing it drained some stored charge from inside the table itself, rather than pulling from anywhere external... same principle as everywhere else, everything's wired into one formation, sharing the same pool of resources... Or maybe this so-called Great Bo isn't actually all that great... or maybe none of this was ever built to run automated. Maybe it was built to run under total, constant control.'

Deciding to give it one last shot, An tapped along different sides of the stone table and pressed at the button outlines still visible beneath the cracked slab, but this time he couldn't manage anything at all, not even another spark of electricity. 'Hm, maybe all of this could be repaired somehow, but I don't have the skills for that.'

Pushing off the ground, he climbed onto the cauldron. Studying the metal fitting at one end, where the wires disappeared inside, he decided to leave it alone and instead pried open a massive metal lid, sending a screech echoing through the room.

Leaning the upper half of his body inside the cauldron, he started studying the interior, hoping to find something interesting. "Oh!"

On one of the inner walls, runes had been inscribed in gold ink, so small, so precisely arranged, so perfectly uniform that his first thought was mass production. 'Even the runes weren't made by hand?'

Pulling his head out of the cauldron, he sat down and propped his chin on one hand. 'This is only getting more confusing... Technology this advanced, where the runes, the alchemy, and probably every formation I've come across, weren't made by cultivators at all, but manufactured, like on some assembly line churning out millions of identical parts...'

Looking back at the stone table nearby, 'Hm, this is probably some civilization from a different continent... assuming other continents even exist.'

'Damn... I need to find someone and ask them how this whole world's actually put together... Maybe this is a civilization from another planet? A more advanced one... But then why hasn't there been any conquest? If this Devil Bo and his people had technology like this thousands of years ago, why didn't they just take over everything?'

'Hmm, if a conquest like that had actually happened, the outside world wouldn't still be stuck living like it's the Middle Ages...'

Jumping down, he looked around and spotted a small desk against the far wall, right next to the door leading to the staircase, and walked straight over. 'Maybe there's a huge number of different civilizations out there, from different planets, with some kind of established rules governing how they interact. That's usually how it works, isn't it... Maybe there are alliances out there protecting less advanced civilizations, like whatever one I happen to be living in.'

Reaching the desk and looking it over, An opened a drawer and found a small notebook inside. He picked it up.

Opening it, he found dates and entries, along with signatures. '9404.xGV.TPm? What kind of date format is this? Maybe the first four digits are the year? Year 9404... If I go by the calendar used at the sect, this year should be 4612, counting from the birth of the Fallen Star...'

Setting the notebook back down, he walked toward the door leading to the staircase below. 'No telling what kind of time-keeping system this Bo and his people used. Might have nothing to do with the current one at all.'

Descending further, An came up against two doors, completely identical, only mirrored from each other.

'This isn't an illusion or a projection. It's an actual mirrored pair of doors.' Scanning them a few times to make sure everything checked out, he still couldn't work out the point, since both doors led into the exact same room.

Picking one at random, he used his Qi to open it and stepped inside.

'Let me guess. This one's empty too...' Looking at the massive, empty room, metal cabinets lined against the walls, An walked toward the center, where a small armchair sat beside a tea table.

Reaching it, he sank into the chair. "Ooh!" Fully relaxing, he let the chair swallow him a little.

Smiling, An pulled a tray toward himself off the table, a small teapot and two cups sitting on it. Everything was ceramic, hand-painted with intricate patterns: a golden dragon chasing another, all set against waves of blue.

He tucked the teapot and cups into his ring, reluctantly pulled himself out of the soft chair, and stashed it in his ring too.

Checking every cabinet around him, he found nothing but old jumpsuits, already starting to rot, and nothing else.

'Usually in places like this, you're supposed to find treasure after treasure... So why is all I ever find just rotten, used underwear?' Already in a foul mood, he headed straight for the staircase leading down to the next floor.

Descending, An stopped a few meters short of the door.

This time, the door was much smaller, built for a single person, unlike the doors upstairs, which could fit an entire standard vehicle through.

'Another formation... but this one isn't tied into the main network. If it were connected, it would've shut down along with everything else a long time ago.' Activating his Qi and wrapping his hand in it, he swung with everything he had, striking the barrier in front of him.

Unable to withstand the raw physical force, the formation shattered right at the point of impact and, within seconds, cracked apart entirely, shutting down from the overload.

Carefully opening the door, he found himself in a small room, only ten by ten meters, with an artificial window looking out over a lake, where enormous birds swam, couples riding on their backs, the women in thin dresses, the men in white pants, bare-chested.

Studying the view through the window, An could even hear the voices and laughter of these couples. Some played ball games in groups near the beach, some swung on swings, others had gathered a small crowd of people and birds around themselves, telling some story, hands gesturing constantly.

'Is this a hologram? Hm? No... it's an illusion.' Realizing what he was looking at, every bit of interest in watching it drained away instantly.

Turning his full attention to the room itself, he realized he was standing in what had probably been the private office of whoever oversaw this laboratory while it was still active. Even though the decor was covered in dust and grime, it was noticeably different from everything he'd seen so far, there was even a faint sense of homely comfort here.

Walking around the desk, he sat down in a leather chair and, opening a few of the drawers, pulled out two journals.

The first journal held dates and signatures tied to material shipments. Only the year format matched the entries he'd seen earlier. Everything else, while clearly some kind of shipment log, used code names for the materials, making it impossible to figure out what any of it actually was.

Picking up the second one, he immediately noticed a distinctive, hand-decorated cover. 'This is clearly someone's personal journal.'

Opening the first page, he found he'd been right.

'9201.xGV.DSht: finally got the paperwork sorted, officially a supervisor at Skylight Laboratory now!'

'9204.xGV.ShKv: just got word, a full inspection of the lab's operations is happening in two years, and Master Bo's own Third Finger is coming with the group! Saying I'm thrilled would be a massive understatement!'

'9206.xGV.VKp: last night, after the banquet! The Third Finger. Hm, I can call him Vigo now. He picked me, out of everyone there! Ah! What an incredible night!'

'...'

'9345.xGV.AOp: I'm so tired of being stuck on this Planet V-90A... Even the air of this Lower World irritates me! I want to go home!'

'9387.xGV.TPm: these filthy primates of the lower world don't deserve to keep living. We should've just scorched the whole planet and kept just enough of these lesser primates around as slave labor to keep the labs running. But no, that damn Council and their rules about lower worlds! Ugh! Everything about this is infuriating!'

'9405.xGV.ITo: got the order to gather up every document tied to our research and development. The Council decided to seal off direct access to this planet. Finally! I'm flying home! Goodbye, filthy Lower World! Goodbye, wretched primates!'