Cultivation System: Elder Edition

Chapter 355

Ghosts of the Mine (I)

I've rarely seen Light smile, let alone laugh.

For a seven-year-old girl, she was this strange dichotomy: stern, boulder-ish stoicism, sarcastic beyond her years, drably apathetic... yet, anyone who spends more than a day with her will quickly realize that she really is just a seven-year-old girl. There are things that no amount of early, gnarly experiences can hide, and she seldom even has the tools to attempt it.

But now, as she was floating leisurely about ten feet off the ground... she was laughing.

Laughing as though wholly unconcerned about everything.

Laughing like a child ought to.

... For a while now, I realized, I've kind of given up even trying to give these kids a 'normal' childhood. Perhaps the world bent me just far enough to make it so I don't believe it possible, but regardless of the reason... I'd given up. But hearing her laughter and seeing others' expressions alight, too, is... well, disheartening.

There was a way, a way to at least try.

"Come on, Light! Teach us too!" Dai Xiu pressed. "Master, please tell her to teach us!"

"Don't involve me," I said, still seated alongside Lao Shun and Long Tao. "I already said, if Light chooses to teach you, she can. If not... there's nothing I can do about it."

"Humph!" she pouted but quickly turned toward light and begged again. The little girl seemed to be enjoying it a great deal, cackling away while making strange poses midair.

"Besides, don't you all have your own things to learn?"

That did little to diffuse the situation, as Light continued to taunt, Dai Xiu continued to pout, Xing Feng looked like he really wanted to fly, too, and the rest of the kids did their best to hide it.

"Right, ye' old alchemist," I turned toward Lao Shun.

"Oh no."

"What?"

"Any time you refer to me as an alchemist," he said. "You proceed to shock the soul out of me. Will you do it again?"

"... I don't know. Let's see?" I mulled for a moment which recipe to procure, but I had a feeling that it didn't really matter. As such, I just chose the pill I would need the most of: the Void-Nullifying Pill. "This," the parchment appeared on the top of my hand as I extended it toward him. "Can you concoct it?"

"..." his expression distorted slightly as he took the parchment and flipped it over, reading it. I could pretty much guess by the play his face put on--the slightly uncomfortable expression quickly melded into one of shock, then one of horror, then a strange mix between the two, then he paused for a moment to shoot me a bedeviled stink-eye before looking back down, his face twisting further and further away from a normal human expression. "Fuck." he spat out loud as he seemed to finish it. I think that was the first time I'd heard him curse out loud. "Do I even dare ask where you got this?"

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"My third cousin, twice removed, had an aunt who--"

"--yeah, yeah, yeah," he quickly interrupted, taking a deep breath. "I will just say: this pill doesn't exist."

"Hm?"

"Not anymore, at least," he added. "It is listed in the compendium of Historical Records, but has been considered a lost type for... well, for forever, practically."

"Interesting."

"It has the capacity to dissolve spatial twists and essentially freeze the Laws of Space within a radius."

"Marvelous."

"Consuming one means that you can flicker through spacetime at will, depending on the pill's potency."

"Extraordinary."

"You could, theoretically, walk into a Chaos Storm's edges, grab a crystal or two, and leave... and survive."

"Phenomenal."

"Oi, you bastard! Take this shit seriously!" while he cursed me out a bit, Long Tao stifled his laughter, though his shoulders' movements betrayed his state.

"I am!"

"Like hell you are! If I went to the Tower with this recipe, do you know what they'd do to me?"

"Make you the leader?"

"Dip me into boiling oil, upside-down, until I squealed where I got it!" he said. "This is categorized under 'Extinct Recipes'," he added, his tone rather serious. "It doesn't just mean that nobody's heard of it or seen the pill in a long time. It means that a group of Alchemists had likely spent thousands of years scouring every inch of every realm, searching for either a set of pills or the recipe. And only after diving into every possible place, and still not finding anything, did they declare it extinct. And yet, here it is."

"... and yet, here it is."

"Haah," he sighed, scratching his head. "Whatever. I'd already made an oath to not disclose anything."

"That's the attitude."

"Oh, drop dead, you bastard."

"Ha ha ha, come on, don't be like that," I said. "Weren't you the one who said that your life was beyond boring? Well?"

"Indeed. But if I had known it would turn into this, I would have never followed you."

"Ah, let the bygones be bygones," I shrugged. "You never answered my question. If you can't, I have to find somebody who can."

"... hah. You really are heartless," he said. "Truth is, not even Tower Master would be able to concoct this--not with ordinary means, anyway." Hm? Didn't the system say that it prepared those pills specifically in consideration of my circumstances?

"I'll be able to do it with the cauldron you've given me," he said. "But I will need help."

"What kind of help?"

"I never took in a Disciple," he added. "Not direct one, anyway. However, there was one kid in the Tower that would pester me often, and to get her off my back, I'd share a nugget of wisdom or two with her. I'll need her help."

"Why do I have a feeling it won't be that simple?"

"Last I heard," he said. "She tried to scam someone in the Jade Blossom City and got thrown in jail."

"... haah. Let's hope she's still there, then."

"Forget the concoction," he said. "Some of the ingredients required won't be easy to source." Figures. "The city, though, has a branch of the Tower; if I put in a request, I'll at least be able to learn where we can get them."

As the dawn wound on and the kids finished their morning spars, we got up, packed up, and left.

For the next twenty days straight, all we did was travel--at an immense pace, even. The days became rather similar to one another: wake up before dawn, practice, spend the entire day walking with maybe one break on the way, and camp when the night fell. The kids spent the nights cultivating while I spent them sorting the items, occasionally trying to comprehend a thing or two, and playing chess against Xing Feng.

... that kid is scary, to be honest. If we were plunked back on Earth, I've no doubt he'd eventually become a contender for a world champion. He learns scary fast, and by the twentieth day, he'd actually managed to beat me once or twice.

After learning how to play chess for just a month. Sheesh.

On the twentieth day we came upon a river mouth, gushing and wide, as it spilled into Moon Lake. And at its back, we came upon the first people we've seen since leaving Moonlake City.