Chapter 58 - 50: Panicked Speculations, The Mystery of Life and Death

Chapter 58: Chapter 50: Panicked Speculations, The Mystery of Life and Death

The stairs leading from the first floor of the Sword Pavilion to the second floor formed a spiral. After walking up the relatively short staircase, Lu Chen stopped before a large door. He looked at the wooden doors in front of him and the complex, special patterns carved into the wood. His gaze ultimately landed on a small indentation on the wall next to the door. The indentation was small and rectangular.

After a moment of thought, Lu Chen took out his Cyan Cloud Sect Disciple Token. This was one of the few items he could bring into the Dungeon.

He placed the Disciple Token into the indentation, where it fit perfectly and began to glow. Immediately after, the patterns on the second-floor doors of the Sword Pavilion also lit up. Before long, the tightly shut second-floor doors opened.

Lu Chen stepped through the entryway, soon arriving on the mysterious second floor of the Sword Pavilion. The room was extremely spacious and perfectly circular. Along the walls on both sides were Sword Boxes, each inscribed with the name of a Sword Concealment Peak disciple. However, most of these Sword Boxes were empty, and the west wall bore an astonishingly massive sword scar.

Slicing from bottom to top, the scar had sheared off a fifth of the entire second-floor room. Without a doubt, this was the very same gigantic sword scar Lu Chen had seen from the outside, the one that cleaved through the entire Sword Pavilion.

At the time, Lu Chen had deduced that this could only be the work of a Cultivator at the Golden Core Stage or higher. But that didn’t necessarily mean a Golden Core Cultivator had actually done it. After all, a Divinity Transformation Great Cultivator was also an existence above the Golden Core Stage. Because Lu Chen had never personally witnessed an existence above the Golden Core Stage take action, he had made a relatively conservative judgment.

If he had known how the Sword Concealment Peak’s Sword Pavilion was constructed, he would have realized just how far his deduction was from reality. A Golden Core Stage Cultivator destroying the Sword Pavilion? It would take a Divinity Transformation Cultivator at the very least!

Although the second-floor room had suffered considerable damage, it was largely well-preserved. Thus, most of the objects in the room remained intact. After confirming that the Sword Boxes along the walls didn’t contain anything of value, Lu Chen walked straight to the center of the second floor.

Shortly after, he noticed an unfamiliar man kneeling in the open space at the center. Perhaps sensing the arrival of an intruder, the stranger slowly raised his head and looked in Lu Chen’s direction. This movement seemed to trigger a mechanism on the second floor, causing the braziers hanging on the surrounding walls to ignite instantly, bathing the previously dim space in bright light.

"Who... are you?"

Facing the stranger’s question, Lu Chen did not answer immediately. Instead, he walked up to the man and carefully observed him.

Unlike the Outsider Sword Demons on the first floor—monstrosities that were neither human nor demon—the man before him looked far more normal in appearance. If it weren’t for the thick aura of decay emanating from him, Lu Chen might have even mistaken him for a regular person who simply hadn’t seen the sun for a long time.

Unfortunately, this was merely an illusion.

[Outsider Sword Demon/Foundation Establishment Magic Corpse·Fang Heng]

[Features: A special Magic Corpse whose body has been partially occupied by an Outer Evil Sword, retaining a portion of its memories from when it was alive.]

From a distance, Lu Chen hadn’t been able to clearly see Fang Heng’s true condition, mistakenly assuming the man was half-kneeling on the ground. But upon stepping closer, he realized Fang Heng wasn’t kneeling at all. Everything below his waist had been devoured by the Evil Sword. His lower half had mutated into a snakelike Outer Demon Body, currently coiled on the floor.

However, unlike the Outsider Sword Demons on the first floor that attacked on sight, even though Fang Heng had become a Magic Corpse, his mind did not seem entirely corrupted by the Power of Outer Path, retaining a certain degree of sanity. Realizing this, Lu Chen was in no rush to attack. Without any hesitation, he sat down on a meditation cushion right in front of Fang Heng.

If the half-demon, half-corpse Fang Heng were swapped for a normal person, the two would have looked just like they were sitting down to discuss the Dao.

"Inner Sect Disciple of Cyan Cloud Sect’s Danyang Peak, Lu Chen, greets Fellow Daoist."

"Danyang Peak?!" Fang Heng raised his head excitedly, as if he had just heard incredibly inspiring news. "Dare I ask, Fellow Daoist, is Peak Master Ji of Danyang Peak still alive?"

"Peak Master Ji?"

"The Earth Heart Master, Ji Chang. Peak Master Ji."

Ji... Ji Chang?! Hearing that name, Lu Chen’s pupils instantly shrank.

"Fellow Daoist, are you referring to Danyang Peak’s sixty-fourth generation Inner Sect Disciple, Ji Chang?"

"Inner Sect Disciple?" Fang Heng paused, a hint of confusion seemingly flashing within his hollow, eyeless sockets. He frowned and thought for a moment before answering, "Was Peak Master Ji previously just an Inner Sect Disciple of Danyang Peak? I’m truly not sure about that, but he is indeed a sixty-fourth generation disciple of Danyang Peak."

Upon hearing this, Lu Chen’s expression turned unprecedentedly grave. There was no mistake. The Peak Master Ji he spoke of was actually Brother Ji, Ji Chang—the very same Inner Sect Disciple who studied alongside Lu Chen under the Spirit Fire Taoist. It was unimaginable that Brother Ji, who always seemed so jovial and greeted everyone with a beaming smile, would eventually become the Peak Master of Danyang Peak.

One had to know that within the Cyan Cloud Sect, the title of Taoist represented the Golden Core Stage, while Master represented the Nascent Soul Stage. Ji Chang was a sixty-fourth generation disciple, and Lu Chen himself was from the sixty-fifth generation. Meanwhile, the Disciple Tokens Lu Chen had picked up in the Sword Pavilion mostly belonged to disciples from the seventieth to seventy-third generations.

In other words, the era of this Dungeon, the Ancient Cultivator’s Sword Tomb, was separated from his era in the game by at most eight hundred years. And within those eight hundred years, not only had Ji Chang broken through to the Golden Core Stage despite his mere Seventh Grade Human Dao Foundation Establishment Talent, but he had surged forward with unstoppable momentum, reaching a Nascent Soul Stage Cultivation and becoming the Peak Master of Danyang Peak.

He thought, "To think Brother Ji’s potential was actually this vast!"

Immersed in these thoughts, Lu Chen suddenly snapped back to reality.

"Dare I ask, Fellow Daoist, did you ever hear my name when you were alive?"

"Your name? Lu Chen?"

"Yes."

Fang Heng furrowed his brow, thinking for a long time before shaking his head. "I’m sorry, Fellow Daoist Lu, but I am quite certain I have never heard your name. Or perhaps I did know it once, but forgot that part of my memory upon being resurrected as a corpse. My apologies."

He thought, "He never heard my name?"

Lu Chen’s face paled slightly at Fang Heng’s response. If Fang Heng had heard of him before but simply forgot the memories associated with him due to his transformation into a corpse, that would be excellent news and wouldn’t cause Lu Chen to lose his composure. What Lu Chen was truly worried about was that Fang Heng had never heard his name in the first place.

Because if that were the case, the implications were absolutely terrifying. It meant one of two things: either Lu Chen died before Fang Heng’s generation of disciples joined the sect, resulting in Fang Heng never hearing of him, or the historical Cyan Cloud Sect simply never had a person named Lu Chen to begin with. It would mean that in reality, he was truly just playing a special game set against the backdrop of the Cyan Cloud Sect.

If it were the latter, Lu Chen would merely feel that there were still far too many undiscovered secrets within the game "True Cultivation." But if it were the former, the situation was undoubtedly severe. Because it would mean that someday in the future, he would either die in the game or suffer an accidental death in reality.

And if he factored in the ten-to-one time ratio between the game and reality, he might face a terrifying, life-threatening crisis within his next eighty years in reality, which equaled eight hundred years in the game.

At this thought, Lu Chen’s brain began to process information at lightning speed. He wondered, "Did the ’me’ in the game never actually exist in the history of the Cyan Cloud Sect? Am I just playing a mini-game that feeds back Cultivation? Or did I actually exist in the Cyan Cloud Sect, only to die and perish before Fang Heng and his batch of disciples joined? Which of these two... is the real answer?"

Without any other clues, Lu Chen had no way of determining which scenario was true. The feeling of knowing he might die one day, yet having no idea how to prepare for it, threw the usually composed Lu Chen into turmoil.

With this in mind, Lu Chen desperately hoped to pry more clues from Fang Heng’s mouth. So he asked, "Fellow Daoist, was your Sword Concealment Peak ever required to study the Purple Mist Health Cultivation Technique?"

"Purple Mist Health Cultivation Technique? I... I think someone mentioned it before... but who was it again..."

Looking at the deeply frowning Fang Heng, Lu Chen’s expression became exceedingly urgent. He was desperate to use this matter to ascertain that crucial answer in his heart.