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This needed to be addressed, but I put that to the side for the moment. We weren’t ready to start worrying about walking the path. First, we needed to ascend to Martial Lord. We could deal with soul cultivation after that was done.

To give ourselves a bit of privacy, LiTing and I left the road and headed deep into the forest that blanketed this section of the mountain. With such dense foliage, it would be incredibly easy for us to hide out on the path for as long as we needed. After finding a secluded spot hidden deep in the forest’s undergrowth, we sat down to cultivate and prepare for our breakthroughs.

I had noticed a shift in LiTing’s demeanor ever since we left the Path of Body, and now that we were safe, I had time to ask her about it.

“How are you holding up?”

She ground her teeth slightly at the question. She wasn’t quite angry, but she was certainly irritated.

“Well enough.” She clenched a fist and looked me dead in the eye. “Fang, why am I old?”

I looked at her blankly.

Her nostrils flared.

“You told me you would provide me with a disguise. You said it would be a beautiful young woman. Why. am. I. old?”

I stared for a second before finally answering.

“That… It was difficult… I tried to think of someone to disguise you as, but I couldn’t come up with any good options. So, when I finally thought of a name, I forgot she was a mortal and would have aged. In the end, I think it might’ve been the right choice. This disguise will hide you even better.”

LiTing clenched her fist even tighter and then swung it futilely in the air.

I had a pretty good understanding of the root of her anger. She didn’t want to look old, especially not in front of me. I knew she was frustrated, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

Our relationship had become too complicated over the past couple of years. I had noticed that LiTing had started showing signs of interest in me, but I didn’t feel I was in a position to respond to them. Not only was she a thousand years younger than me, but I also understood the dangers of developing any type of feelings for people that would be reset at the end of a loop.

Our biggest problem was that we didn’t have a defined relationship. To LiTing, we were a young man and woman who had known each other for 20-odd years and had spent the last two in close contact. What was our relationship? I wasn’t sure and neither was she. This anger about the disguise I had chosen for her was just an offshoot of that confusion.

With my lack of responsiveness, she didn’t say anything else. She just whipped a cultivation mat out of her storage bag and plopped down on it.

I closed my eyes and wished I knew what to say.

All in all, this whole thing was a bit of a mess. While I was willing to purchase a disguise for LiTing, I wasn’t willing to tell her any details about what I did or how I did it. The System was my only remaining trump card that was truly secret. It would be obvious to my friends that I had some kind of strange power, but I had to keep the particulars of how it worked as hidden as possible.

The only reason I was willing to use the System on LiTing like this was because she understood the importance of guarding secrets deep within her bones. She wouldn’t ask any uncomfortable questions or probe for more information than I was willing to share.

Watching LiTing silently cultivate with her eyes closed, I took a deep breath. We had to set this drama to the side. There were more important things to focus on.

I took out my own cultivation mat and got to work on my breakthrough.

Having copied several Rank 4 cultivation techniques from the sect’s libraries, I no longer had to rely on the one I had gotten from my time as the Water Groom. I flipped through each of the techniques looking for something good, but none of these techniques had been graded by the sect, and none of them stuck out as particularly powerful, so I had to assume they were also all Yellow-Rank techniques. They were also all elementally neutral, so I only had to worry about choosing one with acceptable mental effects.

After reviewing my options, I chose a technique focused on productivity. With everything I had learned, I would be able to close my acupoints so that the technique wouldn’t have an overly powerful effect on me in my day-to-day life, but when I was working, I could activate it to keep myself on track.

LiTing went with a technique focused on learning. This choice was a result of her feelings of inadequacy. She felt a desperate need to learn fast enough to keep up with me. I knew this wasn’t healthy, but all I knew to do to help was to try and teach her what I could.

LiTing took several weeks to successfully advance. After she did, I spent time explaining will-locks and getting her comfortable using them. I had never learned to fight as a Lord, so I could only guess at how to use them in combat, but I could at least introduce her to the basics.

Once I felt we were ready, we exited seclusion and headed down the path to Profound City.

While I didn’t have any difficulty at all with the meager soul pressure the path was subjecting us to, LiTing was a different story. In the first section, while she was uncomfortable, she was able to withstand the pressure without complaint. However, the deeper we went, the more problems she had.

After reaching the fourth section, we had to stop. With the current strength of LiTing’s soul, if we risked entering the fifth section, there was a chance she would be seriously injured.

My first time through the sect, the PangBo Alliance had wanted me to use Soul Numbing Pills to make the Path of Soul easier. After a bit of research, I learned that this was about the worst possible option. These pills allowed a person to ignore the pressure of the path, but they did so by permanently crippling the soul.

I needed to help LiTing strengthen her soul, not cripple it.

Hunkering down to practice soul cultivation while on the path wasn’t without risk, but from my perspective, it was one of the safest places to do so. Like in Yellow City, if someone decided to attack us, the highest cultivation level we would be up against was Peak Lord. We didn’t need to worry about Profound City’s Kings.

Peak Lords would still be challenging to deal with, but once the effect of the path’s soul pressure was factored in, I felt I would have a distinct advantage against anyone we might come up against. I just had to hope that such an opponent didn’t bring any friends with them.

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Still, no matter what, we needed to be careful. There was only one way I knew of to ensure no Lord could get the drop on us.

In the fourth section of the path, we headed deep into the forest until we found a large clearing near the area’s invisible barrier. Using a variety of earth qi techniques, I compacted the soil at the far edge of the clearing until it turned into a hard, ochre-colored stone. I then quickly carved the stone into a herringbone pattern and roughed up its surface to prevent us from slipping.

This kind of qi-fabricated stone wasn’t too durable, but it would serve well enough for a simple floor.

I then proceeded to pull earth from the ground to form two spacious stone cabins. After decorating them with a few items of furniture from my storage bag, the cabins felt habitable, though not exactly homey. The biggest mark against them was their lack of doors. My earth control wasn’t quite up to that task yet, so I could only hang curtains to cover their entrances.

LiTing watched me work with a raised eyebrow but didn’t say anything to stop me. Once her cabin was complete, she went inside to work on cultivating her soul.

Outside, I continued working on our little homestead. I built a high palisade around the buildings with an opening facing toward the path. This wasn’t a defensive wall. Instead, it was there to mark the edge of my defensive formations. If anyone tried to cross that boundary, they would be in for a world of hurt.

While I might not be as good at Rank 4 formations as I was at Rank 4 alchemy, I still had a decent amount of experience with them by this point, and I used everything I knew to make our shelter as impenetrable as possible. With the formations combined with the path’s soul pressure, we were safe from anyone who might try and approach us.

Our small haven was as secure as I could make it, so it was time to focus on improving LiTing’s soul.

I set up a small, covered pavilion in the courtyard between our houses. After carefully arranging a table and chairs, I made some tea. Once everything was ready, I called for LiTing to join me.

When she saw everything I had done to the place, she couldn’t help but laugh.

“Why did you go to so much effort? How long are you expecting us to stay here?”

“I don’t know, but the environment where you cultivate will affect you as you try to grow and improve your soul. If you do so in a wilderness with no shelter, that becomes part of your identity, right? If we’re going to be working on soul cultivation, we need a proper place to do so.”

She frowned and then nodded. “That makes sense.”

I considered giving LiTing a copy of my soul cultivation technique, but that seemed too dangerous. It was far more powerful than any of the techniques available in the Academy, and if others found out about it, it could put both of us in danger.

In any case, LiTing’s cultivation technique wasn’t a problem. Her technique could expand her soul rapidly, but absorbing enough information to fill that new space was time-consuming. If she just sat and cultivated, her technique could quickly grow and strengthen her soul, but doing so would be a mistake. Instead, she needed to fill that space with new understandings as she grew it.

To help her overcome this difficulty, I became her teacher. I hadn’t been studying soul cultivation any longer than she had, but I had a lot more time to devote to studying the different philosophies and had read far more books on the topic than her. I also had an extensive library of texts that I could instantly access to address any questions either of us might have.

As we sat in the pavilion and drank tea, we talked about the different philosophies and asked each other questions about them. After that, we retired to our cabins and thought about our discussions in private as we cycled our soul cultivation techniques. During this time, I also accessed my vast library to gain a deeper understanding of the topics we had covered.

For the next several days, this pattern repeated itself, and I could feel my soul rapidly strengthening even further. Talking with LiTing and sharing my insights with her was improving my soul at an astonishing rate.

After our discussion one day, I left LiTing alone in her cabin and walked out into the forest to think about my place in this world.

LiTing wanted to walk what this world considered to be the path of a Daoist, a person who separated herself from the mundane world around her. This didn’t entirely line up with the Daoist text I had purchased from the System, but it was the path she had chosen.

I had chosen to embrace a blend of philosophies, but my focus was on Universalism and Mohism. Of all the options presented to me, the principles of ‘universal love’ and indiscriminate help were what I felt the deepest connection to.

So far, while I had read books on these topics, I had never put any of these lofty ideals into practice. I had only focused on my own advancement and, to a lesser extent, the advancement of my small network of friends.

As I walked through the forest alone, I felt lost. What did I want? What was I trying to achieve?

If all I was going to do was focus on boosting my own power, I should shed all pretenses and fully embrace my place as a Nine Rivers Daoist. That felt wrong to me… It wasn’t what I wanted, but what should I do?

In my wanderings, I found that I had stumbled upon a clearing where three young men had secluded themselves to work on cultivating their souls. They, like LiTing, had been pushed to their limits by the soul pressure in this section of the path, and they needed to improve before they would be able to go any farther.

When I saw them, my first instinct was to duck away before they noticed me. Even if these three weren’t a threat, they might alert someone who was.

I calmed myself with a reminder that I was in disguise and no one would recognize me. Even if I weren’t and these three wanted to do me harm for some reason, they would pose zero risk to me in their current state.

I examined them in energy vision and couldn’t help but shake my head. They needed to improve their souls, but they were going about it the wrong way. They were simply cycling a basic soul cultivation technique. I couldn’t see inside their souls to know what was going on with them, but I knew that if they continued like this, they would only end up crippled.

I wanted to walk away and refrain from making any new contacts, but something pushed me forward. These young men needed my help, if I was supposed to love everyone equally, I couldn’t just abandon them to their fates.

Mustering my courage, I took a deep breath and stepped into the clearing. When I did, three pairs of eyes shot toward me, and all three men moved to grab a weapon.

I raised both hands in a sign of peace to calm them down. With them eyeing me suspiciously, I took a seat in the grass across from them.

One of the men was silently chosen as the group’s spokesman.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

I considered my answer.

“A teacher. I only want to teach you, and by teaching you, learn from you.”

The men growled and began to move for their weapons once more, so I reached into my storage bag, brought out a kettle, and filled it with water. I then placed it on a formation stone to heat it up.

Once it was near boiling, I took out a tray containing a teapot and four small cups. I placed a few tea leaves into the pot and then poured in the hot water to let it steep.

As I worked, the three men only watched me warily. While they wanted to defend themselves, they could see from my fluid movements that I did not feel the same pressure from the path that they were under. They knew attacking me would be far too dangerous.

Once I judged that the tea was ready, I poured it into the four cups before me and took one as my own. I didn’t offer the other cups to the men, I let my actions do that for me.

I sipped my tea, but the others didn’t move to pick up the other cups.

I drew in a deep breath, smiled, and looked at my companions.

“What path of cultivation do you follow?”

The three men were confused by my actions, but their spokesman was willing to speak.

“I’m a fire cultivator.”

I shook my head slightly. “What path of soul cultivation do you follow?”

The man on the right narrowed his eyes.

“We can’t share our cultivation technique.”

Again, I shook my head. “Not your technique. What is your path?”

They seemed confused by this question.

This made me sigh. On this continent, those who had not taken the elite courses at the Yellow Orchid Academy didn’t learn anything about soul cultivation. The Path of Soul was a dead end for all the unfortunates who had no understanding of how they were supposed to go about strengthening their souls properly.

Quickly sorting through the scrolls in my storage bag, I took out foundational texts for each of the four paths of soul cultivation. I had transcribed these to help LiTing in her studies, but she was already beyond the level of these basic texts.

These were, of course, texts from this world. I hadn’t even shared the books the System had given me with my friends. I wasn’t about to share them with complete strangers.

I placed the four scrolls on the ground in front of the three men.

“Your souls are strong, but they are undisciplined. Continuing down your current path will only lead to ruin. Instead, as you improve your soul, consider the information in these texts. It can help guide you.”

Given the situation, I knew these men couldn’t trust me. Leaving the scrolls and tea set behind, I stood and disappeared into the forest.

This interaction hadn’t accomplished anything except potentially betraying our presence in the forest, but something about it felt right. It felt like I had finally done something to make the world a slightly better place.

I immediately felt an urge to push back against this feeling. I knew that it was coming from my soul cultivation. However, after ensuring the shell of my cultivation technique remained solid, I chose to let the feeling of contentment from helping those three wash over me.

I was supposed to be a Mohist, and I needed to start acting like it. That could change in the future, but I couldn’t live in the future. I needed to live in the moment.