Immortal Freeloader 124 (Patreon)

Memorizing the Everdawn Fist hadn’t taken too long. It was not a complicated martial art, clearly designed for foot soldiers and ordinary recruits. Meanwhile, Everdawn Saber was trickier and demanding, both in terms of essence purity, and the complication of the techniques, designed for the elites.

That part hadn’t been a surprise. I had already seen others practicing the Everdawn Fist, and that had been a clear process. What had been a surprise was to access the next sections of the fist art, which had been referred to as the second-rate martial artist, roughly equivalent to the Foundation Establishment.

It was an interesting read.

Up until now, everything I had learned about martial arts was about generating martial arts essence of a certain nature before using that energy to activate certain parts of the body. Starting with muscle, moving to skin, and then the bones. The ultimate step was the Connate realm, which was activating and linking the eight gates of the body.

Only after having access to the next stage, did I truly understand it was just the preparatory steps for the next move. Once reaching the peak of the Connate realm, the martial artist required a build-up of the essence to a high degree, and purifying their essence to a certain degree before triggering a transformation.

A transformation that actually required some kind of feedback from the spiritual totem of the martial arts. One section that had been missing from my Everdawn Saber.

There was no description of the exact method of attaining that feedback, just some vague terms like accepting the sovereignty of the Empire and loyalty being rewarded. That second, I didn’t spend much time.

I was more interested in the following section, describing the methods of the next stage. It was about binging essence into blood rather than leaving it as an ephemeral object. “Interesting,” I muttered. Turning blood into blood essence was not simply about having a more superior energy delivery method, but also to bind the martial artist with the essence irrevocably.

That process explained why the conspirators had been obsessed with finding people with no martial arts experience. Essence left some kind of mark as they used. It was a subtle thing that was not a problem for me — even without my extreme apothecary skills to cleanse it — since I didn’t practice those styles for years like any other expert, but any other martial artists, it would have been dangerous during the blood essence realm.

Commitment to one martial art seemed like a dangerous thing, making the fist art useless for any practical purposes.

Luckily, I had no intention of playing with it in the first place. I wanted to get the fist art mostly to have a method of comparison, to see if there was a trap buried in the Everdawn Saber.

Well, more accurately, to see what kind of trap was buried. The existence of it was obvious at this point, but I needed to understand its exact nature if I were to with that mysterious being behind the stone door.

As I compared the two, I decided that the greatest difference lay in the parts about the spiritual pillar during the breakthrough. There were several critical steps missing in the Everdawn Saber version. I just didn’t know why that section was missing. The possibilities were endless. Maybe the being wanted me to go back and beg for their help once the breakthrough failed.

Or maybe, it would give them a chance for possession.

A difficult challenge, particularly since I had to have a meeting with them. Soon. Not wanted to, but had to.

I still had no idea about the objective of the conspiracy. I had scoured the library twice, but I wasn’t able to find anything about their strategy, or the nature of the spiritual pillars. The sources in the outer library were limited.

A difficult choice lay before me. Was it easier to infiltrate the inner sanctum first, where multiple cultivators, including at least a few foundation establishment cultivators, resided, or was it safer to visit one of the kingdoms first?

“Inner sanctum it is,” I muttered. Technically, it was easier to return to the capital and confront that being under a formation, but it was a trick that could go awry if I didn’t know the right questions to ask. Comparatively, sneaking into the inner sanctum was the easier option.

Especially since the formation had been designed to allow anyone carrying the correct identity plate to pass unhindered. Faking the reaction had been easy enough.

Once passed, my attention had been grabbed by a small formation right at the center. One that was radiating some kind of fascinating energy. One that I didn’t recognize immediately even with my knowledge, but it wasn’t a surprise. It was an advanced formation, one that was even more complicated than the Golden Core formation I had dealt with before. The condensed lines of Qi had been wrapping around something I couldn’t detect.

Yet, its function, I couldn’t understand. It was independent of the detection formation, which meant it had nothing to do with the protection or detection. It didn’t even feel like it was properly anchored to the location. And, it was currently inactive.

It was fascinating enough that, rather than going directly to the library, I approached it, listening to the mutterings of the guards to understand its purpose. Soon, I learned its function.

Teleportation.

I pulled back the moment I learned that fact. The existence of such a potential was fascinating, but scary at the same time. Even with all my formation knowledge, I couldn’t begin to imagine how such a thing was possible.

Its existence was scary for another reason. Whoever created it was clearly not an ordinary Golden Core cultivator … though, considering the sections that I couldn’t detect, it was a chance that they were not a Golden Core cultivator in the first place.

The conspiracy was even more dangerous than I had first presumed. I didn’t know the true value of such a formation, but I didn’t have the slightest doubt that such a formation was a treasure that was more valuable than the whole mortal domain.

I moved forward. There was no library in the inner sanctum, but by breaking every building that was currently not occupied by a foundation establishment cultivators, which had several valuable benefits.

One of them was the notes about Everdawn Fist. A deep treatise with a lot of interesting points about the nature of the spiritual pillar, whether it was the Empire itself was the pillar, or the Emperor. It had been going a long way about the concept of providence, which was some kind of fate energy of the world itself.

I might have written that as another name for Qi, but at this point, I had encountered too many coincidences not to believe some kind of different somehow sentient force was driving things.

What truly interesting was not the existence of such an energy, but the mention of some experiments that the author had conducted to understand the nature of it, and how it was linked with the Everdawn Fist. He seemed to be convinced that spiritual pillars were inartistically linked to providence.

Most of them had been inconclusive, and the ones that had seemingly succeeded couldn’t be trusted, because his understanding of Everdawn fist — and martial arts in general — had several subtle but dangerous flaws.

Still, one thing was clear. His experiments had mentioned one fact several times, almost as a throwaway line. That providence and the land were linked as well.

A vague statement among pages and pages of writing, one that I might have missed if it wasn’t for one thing. The martial arts somehow used providence, and the being that was trapped behind the stone door had given me Everdawn Saber.

It explained why I wasn’t able to find what exactly the stone gates were responsible for. I had checked for Qi for essence, but I couldn’t check for providence.

That also explained why cultivators actually paid attention to the gates so much, yet they didn’t assign anyone truly strong and let the mortals actually handle it. Fate and providence seemed like topics even cultivators didn’t dare to intervene too deeply.

Unfortunately, most of the other papers had been about details I had already deduced, like how to increase the cultivation of the new recruits. The plans had confirmed what I was already guessing. They had recruited the current batch in the hopes of using us as trainers and leaders for the second batch. There were a lot of papers detailing the numbers, as raising more than a hundred thousand martial artists in the Blood Essence realm was a significant logistical challenge even for cultivators.

Too bad there was no convenient plan lying around to tell what they would do once they raised their army.

The only other thing that had been interesting was the copy of a historical map. It was an incomplete map of the Everdawn Empire, filled with various notes.

First, it was the extent of the borders. Not only the whole mortal domain had been a part of it, but it was a mere corner of the great expanse.

The second, instead of misty mountains, was a huge plain that represented the center of the Everdawn Empire, with its old capital right in the middle of the misty mountains.

I doubted that it was a coincidence.