Immortal Paladin

170 Nightmare Feedback Loop

Ever been turned to stone? Maybe petrified? My game character, the ever-reliable meatshield “David_69,” had a long, unfortunate history with status effects like that. Back in LLO, tanks were basically moving brick walls with faces, and if there was a debuff to catch, we caught it. Petrification was especially nasty during the PvP meta, where mages ran wild with stunlock combos that could render you into glorified scenery before you even got your second breath. So yeah, I thought I knew what it was like to be turned to stone. Suffocating. Pressure on the lungs. A creeping numbness that left you locked in your own skull, counting down the seconds until a healer remembered you existed.

But this wasn’t that. Not even close.

This time, it wasn’t just my body that turned to stone… it was me. Mind, soul, and everything! It wasn’t numbness. It wasn’t silence. It was exposure. The kind of raw vulnerability you only feel when someone strips you naked and hurls you into your own memories, not the good ones either, but the ones you pretend never happened.

I saw myself crying when the toy I loved went missing in kindergarten. I felt the sting of my first paper cut like a knife, not because it hurt, but because I made a big deal out of it and got laughed at. I watched my father get run over by a truck, again. I stood at my own graduation with no one there to hang the medal around my neck. I heard the cheer when I lost the championship. I read the rejection when I failed the scholarship. I felt the gut-punch when some guy with a half-baked poem stole the girl I liked in college. I remembered the dull shame of making nothing but coffee during my first job. I even relived the shootout I stumbled into by accident and, of course, the explosion that blew up my PC and slingshot me into this damn cultivation world.

And as if that wasn’t enough, it didn’t stop there. The memories kept going.

Watching my disciples die. Losing Ren Xun and Gu Jie. Facing the Hell’s Gate alone. Standing next to Xin Yune as she chose to pass away on her own terms. And now? This! A trap disguised as repentance. A sermon that stripped the will from hundreds of cultivators and reduced them to stone while chanting that same phrase on loop… we must repent… until even I couldn’t tell where my mind ended and their voices began.

At some point, I stopped running from the memories. There was nowhere to run. I realized I’d been caught in a spiritual loop, like a dream prison layered over another dream, with each regret forming a key that locked me tighter. I used to believe Soulful Guiding Fire was just a utility spell… something to light the way in a dream to find my way. However, it seemed there was more to it.

With every loop, every repeated trauma, I let my Soulful Guiding Fire burn a little brighter. I fed it pain. I fed it failure. I gave it every emotion that I’d buried since waking up in this new world, and I told it: “Guide me. Show me the way out.”

And finally, it did.

I noticed the pattern.

The more awkward and miserable the memory, the more cracks would appear in this fake world. It wasn't just some random selection of traumas; this place fed off shame, guilt, and humiliation. The memories that made my soul shrivel were the ones tearing holes through the dreamscape. I started walking with purpose… toward pain, and toward the places I had spent most of my life avoiding.

I passed by the library staircase. I stopped.

For a second, I just stood there, unsure if I wanted to turn. But I sighed and walked forward. Working as a teacher in a public school was supposed to be a noble thing. Back on Earth, if you were a teacher, especially one working with kids, people looked at you with respect. I thought I was living the dream, doing something meaningful. I even had a girlfriend, which was a miracle in and of itself, considering my schedule and personality. She was the librarian. Pretty. A little older than me. Wore those reading glasses that made her look smarter than everyone else in the building.

And then I walked in on her screwing the principal.

Not even in a discreet corner or an empty classroom, but right there in the middle of the backroom archive, next to the budget reports. The principal looked like he was having the time of his life. The librarian, on the other hand, went pale when she saw me. Her mouth opened in a silent gasp… horrified, not guilty. That part stuck with me. She wasn't ashamed of what she was doing. She was just afraid I had found out.

"This is just a memory," I told myself. "It should be fine."

I activated Flash Step and, before I could second-guess myself, followed it up with Divine Smite. They didn’t explode into blood and viscera… they just evaporated, reduced to dust like sand slipping between my fingers. I stood there for a moment, breathing heavily, waiting for catharsis. But there was none. Just emptiness.

"Oops," I muttered. "My hand slipped, I guess..."

Revenge, it turned out, didn’t feel all that great when the targets were echoes. All I’d really done was relive the humiliation. I kept walking, angling toward another corner where a glowing crack had split the ground wide open. The path became more fragmented the deeper I went, like the world itself was fraying from the pressure of my own messed-up psyche.

Then I reached a crack so wide and so jagged, it nearly swallowed me whole. And within that breach, something peered out.

A face. No… a skull.

“Jue Bu…” I muttered.

The perverted floating skull I’d made into a part-time security guard and full-time nuisance was staring at me with glowing sockets filled with equal parts rage and absurdity.

“FUCK your mother! Fuck your father! Fuck your ancestors and your descendants!”

“Good morning to you too,” I said flatly.

Jue Bu rattled in the air like a bobblehead with rabies. “You dare delve in the recesses of your vulnerabilities, you miserable slob! I hope your dick turns to salt and your liver gets chewed by mosquitoes!”

“Calm down, okay?” I raised both hands. “Also, can you, I dunno, let me pass?”

“FUCK NO!” screamed the skull.

I sighed. Of course. He wasn’t going to make this easy. And I couldn’t exactly vaporize him… because for all his insanity, Jue Bu was part of the reason Eldritch-chan hadn’t chewed me for some time now, like a cosmic candy bar yet. As annoying as he was, he was a buffer between me and something far worse. More specifically, an expendable buffer I am willing to part with…

I rubbed my temples. “Speaking of things that are supposed to help… where’s Dave?”

“Asleep,” Jue Bu said, suddenly deadpan.

“Huh?”

The abrupt shift in tone caught me off guard. If Dave, my Holy Spirit buddy, was asleep, that probably meant something in this dream-prison had short-circuited my spiritual protections. Whatever curse this was, it was heavy enough to knock him out, despite being immune to such things.

“Can I pass?” I tried again. “Look, I’ll make it up to you.”

“I don’t trust you,” Jue Bu said with venom.

I folded my arms. “Uuh… what do you want? A sexy lady or something?”

“Why? Gonna find a beautiful fair maiden and trap her inside you the same way I accidentally did with you?” The skull actually scoffed. “As if you could bring me one!? No offense, but you don't look that much...”

“You are an idiot, you know that.”

“I AM NOT AN IDIOT! I WAS TRICKED! THERE’S A DIFFERENCE!”

“Sure, sure. Open sesame.”

Jue Bu paused. “What?”

“Open sesame,” I repeated. He didn’t get the reference, which meant that despite acting like the gatekeeper to my soul, he didn’t have access to my actual memories. That was a relief… and a loophole. “Worth the try, I guess…”

“What even is Open Sesame? A name?”

“I’m probably going to regret this,” I muttered.

I closed my eyes, mentally digging through the cobwebbed attic of my adolescence. Magazines. Videos. Risqué images hidden in browser folders labeled ‘homework’. I remembered managing to snag a dirty mag during my first year of high school, feeling like I’d uncovered forbidden treasure. I recalled those blurry videos from the early internet days and even a few real-life encounters… consensual, awkward, and utterly unforgettable.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

As I started feeding Jue Bu curated snippets… nothing too precious, just enough to get him drooling… he gasped like a drowning man finally reaching air.

“Oooh! OHHHH! YOU BASTARD! YOU MAGNIFICENT, DEVIOUS…”

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said. “You’re getting this in installments, got it? This is the teaser trailer. If you want the extended edition, let me through.”

"I don't even understand half of the things you say."

The skull hesitated. Then, with exaggerated reluctance, its jaw slowly opened.

“Fine. You win, you crazy fucker.”

I stepped forward past him, shaking my head. “Takes one to know one.”

The world cracked like thin glass underfoot, and I felt the weight peel off me… stone layers shattering and sliding away as if they’d never been real. My skin tingled. My breath came easy for the first time in what felt like hours. When I blinked again, I wasn't in that mind-maze of humiliating memories. I stood before a colossal gate, and a sense of déjà vu hit me.

Two guards flanked it: one on the left and one on the right. Rigid posture, blank expressions, and cultivation at the Eighth Realm. Between them stood Tao Long, as straight-backed and steady as ever, though I caught a flicker of exasperation in his eyes as he turned to me.

“As per the orders of the Supreme Leader of Ward,” Tao Long said, voice calm but edged, “I now serve as your second. I believe you have no problem with me tagging along, Lord Wei.”

His tone was polite. Almost too polite. I turned my head toward him, trying to place the strange tug of familiarity curling in my chest.

Déjà vu.

Something about this moment echoed faintly of one of those fake dreams, or maybe a half-remembered vision from a loop I hadn't lived yet. Either way, it left a strange taste in my mouth.

Before I could speak, one of the guards stepped forward, his boots clanking sharply on the stone. His scowl was already halfway formed.

“You arrive late, show no respect, and think to saunter in with no explanation?” he snapped. His brow furrowed like a thick slash of ink across parchment. “You mistake this place for a market stall, outsider. Go back to wherever you crawled from. The world has no need for arrogant nobodies.”

I didn’t hesitate. My hand moved faster than thought, an open palm strike across his cheek.

CRACK.

The sound echoed louder than I expected. His body flew sideways, his qi scraping and sparks flashing as he crashed into the stone floor with a graceless tumble. When he sat up, his jaw hung at a crooked angle, a thin line of blood trailing from the corner of his mouth. The other guard didn’t move, but his mouth parted too… though that was from sheer shock, not injury.

I stepped forward and knelt beside the one I’d slapped. I could feel the ambient mana reacting… nothing hostile, just a ripple of attention. I pressed my hand to the man’s cheek and murmured, “Cure.”

A pale green glow flowed from my palm, sealing tissue, reknitting bone, and silencing the pain in a moment. The man blinked up at me, confusion flickering through his eyes as the swelling began to fade.

“Does it still hurt?” I asked gently.

He shook his head meekly. No bravado left.

I nodded. “Guess this isn't a dream, then.”

Tao Long was giving me a look. Not angry, not annoyed… just… concerned, like he was trying to solve a puzzle where all the pieces were from different boxes.

“You okay?” he asked.

I stood and dusted my hands. “Yeah. I thought it was still… You know. One of those dream layers. Like a punishment maze. I used Divine Sense, and everything felt too clean.”

“Divine Sense?” Tao Long asked, frowning slightly.

“It’s empathic,” I explained. “Might be an influence from the accumulated experience of using the Divine Possession skill. Ah, forget it…”

I stepped forward, raised my foot, and kicked the gate open.

BOOM!

The twin doors, each easily five times my height, slammed open with a thunderous crack that shook the foundation stones. The sound rang out like a war drum, echoed by a startled gasp from the guards behind me. Tao Long didn’t say anything. He knew better than to interrupt me when I was in one of these moods.

I walked forward, past the threshold of the gates to the Summit, and into the inner chamber of the building.

“Shan Dian.”

She stood in the same place where I saw her, among the four great throne-like seats.

Five steps away. Four.

“I heard you were clever,” she continued, her lips curving slightly. “But all I see is a fool with good posture.”

Three.

Two.

“One.”

Shan Dia looked up at me with moist eyes.

“Divine Possession.”

I never liked using Divine Possession on an enemy. Not because it was ineffective… far from it, really… but because it was too intimate. You got too close. Too close to their fears, their hopes, their loves, and their regrets. It was the sort of closeness you reserved for lovers or blood-sworn brothers, not the woman who just went crazy and began praying like a lunatic.

“Once you bore witness to someone’s heart, killing them wasn’t just dirty, it became cruel.”

That was why this was a milestone to me.

Then came the rapid descent of consciousness.

Her world bled into mine like ink dropped into water… dark, spreading, but not without color. The first thing I felt was hunger. A deep, marrow-scraping hunger that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with freedom. She was a child then, or what passed for one in that nameless compound tucked between valleys no map dared mark. A slave… not just in body, but in soul, fed into formation arrays as raw cultivation material. She had no name, only a number and a task: walk when ordered, kneel when beaten, scream only when it pleased her masters.

Somehow, she lived.

The next memory came like thunder. Her bare feet slicing open on jagged stones as she fled through mountain fog, carrying nothing but bruises and a stolen pendant that didn’t even belong to her. She ran until her legs gave out. Then she crawled. At some point, death must’ve forgotten her name, because she reached the outer provinces alive. The freedom she found there, however, was worse than captivity.

Her stomach ruled her choices, and it led her into dark corners. Prostitution wasn’t a word she learned, it was simply what her body could sell. No one bought her name, only her silence. But she remembered one face… a woman named Rui… with kind hands and cruel eyes, who taught her how to pretend not to care. They traveled for a while, drifted from brothel to barge, until one day Shan Dian stabbed a man trying to hurt Rui. After that, pretending wasn’t enough. Pretending had turned into running, and running into robbing, and robbing into something resembling banditry.

She built her own crew in the chaos of it all. Half-starved men and broken women, souls who could kill with a smile and eat with blood still on their hands. They were scum, but they were hers. They raided convoys, took slaves when needed, and sold them when desperate. It was a mirror she had once stared into from the other side. It should’ve broken her. It didn’t.

But love did.

Rui had stayed. Through all of it, through the grime and blood, she had remained a constant. Their love wasn’t poetic… it was angry and loud and constantly teetering between dagger and embrace. But it was love. For a brief moment, they even tried to escape the game, abandon the trade, and raise a mercenary band that protected caravans instead of raiding them. It worked. For a while. Shan Dian began to laugh again. She took pride in the ragged uniform they wore. Called herself Captain of the Storm Gate. And when the call came from the Union to become one of the Seven Warlords, she answered. Not out of ambition, but to protect what she had built.

That was when she heard of the Cleanse.

A polite word for genocide.

She was outvoted.

She shouted. She warned. She even wept behind closed doors when her voice broke and her cultivation cracked. That internal deviation nearly killed her… her lightning surged wild, her meridians swelled with guilt and fury. But she didn’t die. No, worse… she lived. She lived to see Rui die in bed, old and smiling, whispering her name one last time with lips trembling against hers. There was no blood. No final battle. Just the quiet kind of death that didn’t even give her rage a target.

After that, Shan Dian became the Accursed Lightning. She was a storm in human skin. She chased battle like an addict, wielded all seven hues of her lightning like scripture, and carved her name into the nightmares of cities. She wasn’t trying to win. She was trying to burn out. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

And I felt it all.

Every bit of it.

When the Divine Possession ended, I staggered… not because I was injured, but because I suddenly understood. Not just her pain, but her choices. I couldn’t hate her anymore. I wanted to. I should have. But knowing her story made hating her feel dishonest.

I hated to admit it, but I related to Shan Dian’s memories more than I should have. Her pain felt too familiar. Her choices, the ones that led her from survival to power and back again into ruin, mirrored so many of the compromises I’d made. They weren’t elegant decisions, weren’t the stuff of parables or legends. They were just… necessary. That bitter flavor of necessity sat heavy on my tongue even as her memories bled into me like water soaking into old parchment.

And then I blinked.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I wasn’t in my body anymore. I stared down at unfamiliar hands…feminine, callused, and trembling slightly. Shan Dian’s hands. Somehow, I was still inside her, seeing through her eyes from a distance neither spiritual nor physical. Across from me, my own body stood still, smiling. But that smile… that smile wasn’t mine.

“Dave?” I asked instinctively, hoping for some half-sarcastic reassurance from my eternal passenger.

But the figure didn’t respond like Dave. The aura was wrong!

“Designate: Holy Enemy,” the 'thing' said from inside my body. Its voice was mine, but layered with something hollow, like it had been processed through the echo of a vast, empty cathedral. As it spoke, inverted red crosses began appearing… one above every head in the distance, flickering just at the edge of perception.

“I will kill you again,” the 'entity' said, stepping forward, its smile still stretched over my face. “And again, if I have to. I will get what I want. What He wants.”

I couldn’t move. I could only watch as it raised my hand, the one I once used to teach children how to hold a brush or catch a ball, and brought it down in a clean, surgical strike. Shan Dian’s head fell from her shoulders. Her final sensations flowed into me… pain, yes, but also fear, and strangely, relief. Then silence.

The entity didn’t stop. My body, possessed and violated, turned toward the crowd. It began the slaughter with an eerie grace, one step at a time, without malice. Just… function.

I blinked again.

And I was back in front of the gate.

The same colossal archway, the same grim stone, the same two guards to either side. Tao Long this time stood at my right, hands calmly folded behind his back, looking like nothing had happened.

It was verifiably… a time loop.

The sickening realization settled over me like the dust of crumbling memories. I had seen this moment already. I lived through what came next… and if I didn’t change something soon, I’d watch it happen again.

Forget being reckless. I was outmatched! Some cosmic bastard was wearing my skin like a jacket, and I didn’t even know what it wanted… only that it was willing to butcher people with my body of all things!

I breathed sharply through my nose and cast Lion’s Courage, forcing my limbs to stop shaking and my jaw to clench just tight enough to push the panic back. The divine buff settled in my bones, not like a blessing but like armor I was barely holding together with tape and prayers.

“What’s the problem, Lord Wei?” Tao Long asked, turning his face slightly toward me. He sounded composed, but there was tension under his words, like a taut string waiting for the pluck.

I turned to him, slowly.

“Man,” I exhaled, trying to keep it casual, failing spectacularly. “I think I’m screwed.”

He blinked once. “Is this a tactical evaluation or emotional commentary?”

“Both,” I said, rubbing my temples. “Definitely both.”

And the worst part? I wasn’t even sure if I could win. Because if I had to kill myself to do it… what did that make me?

And more importantly, what would be left of me afterward?