Chapter 63 (Patreon)

The White Tyrant crossed his arms. “It sounds like some made-up bullshit.”

Chen Haoran looked at Lan Fen. “Is he…?” He waved at the White Tyrant.

“Yes,” said Lan Fen without a shred of hesitation.

“Right well whatever it is it’s the power I somehow found myself with. So long as I select a suitable being to connect to then whatever I give them as a gift I will receive back a hundred times better.”

There was a pregnant pause in the air. Chen Haoran couldn’t help but feel a little nervous. Lan Fen would have already guessed the broad strokes of it and by this point he trusted her enough to tell her but he was still laying bare his greatest trump card. It was hard not to feel a little nervous.

The White Tyrant folded his arms and drummed his fingers along his bicep. “That’s it?”

“What?”

“Is that all it does?” he demanded.

“Oh… well it also stores the rewards so that I can summon them whenever I want.”

“And this power was the reason you were acting like a moron,” the White Tyrant mused. He gave Chen Haoran a once-over. “Well… 25% of the reason I suppose.”

Chen Haoran look at Lan Fen. “Does he..?”

“Yes,” Lan Fen said, with an air of long-suffering. She sat down in a meditative pose.“It explains how you kept acquiring so many resources. I had assumed you found an old cultivator’s inheritance or a storage treasure that required some sort of exchange before you could take out the items within. Am I correct in saying I was your original connected?”

“Yes, ever since our wedding.”

Lan Fen hummed. “So our marriage created the bond and the divorce dissolved it.” She looked at Phelps. “So you married the sloth?”

Chen Haoran coughed

The White Tyrant gave Lan Fen a serious look. “No discrimination.”

Chen Haoran and Lan Fen stared at the White Tyrant in disbelief.

“The universe is big enough for everyone,” he said. He paused and cocked as if ruminating over what he just said. “Except for you people. Stay here and turn into dust for all I care.”

“Right… well,” Chen Haoran said. “I didn’t marry the sloth. He’s my pet, he’s got a collar and everything.”

“I see,” Lan Fen slowly responded. Her eyes practically drilling holes in the White Tyrant.

“Do you have a problem?” The White Tyrant asked, completely ignoring Lan Fen.

“Well no it’s just… I thought there would be more… I dunno shock?” He’d been expecting surprise, outrage, disbelief, not… this non-reaction. Lan Fen he could understand, she’d already guessed the basics of it long ago and was really only confirming her suspicions. Phelps was a sloth. It would be weirder if he did have a reaction. The White Tyrant… well he seemed genuinely curious and pushy about it. “It’s a pretty powerful ability after all isn’t it?”

“Do you realize how pathetic you sound?” The White Tyrant asked. “Look here moron I’m 30 thousand years old. When I had a body I was among the second highest realm of cultivation. I destroyed solar systems for a living. I’ve seen too many talents and special abilities in my lifetime. I’ll give your power points for uniqueness but compared to destroying planets or breaking the limits of cultivation you’re just…” He waved his hand. “An up-jumped merchant by comparison? A resource collector? You have a power that’s good at turning trash into decent trash and that really only shows its worth when you get your hands on the resources everyone else is already competing for. I’ll admit that being able to quantify the value of materials is a bit interesting though.”

Chen Haoran felt his head like his head was spinning. Was his power actually weak? It was impossible. There were plenty of people who’d kill to have it. What was wrong with having a lot of resources? And what about blowing up a planet? He could make a treasure that could only destroy one planet and destroy a hundred! As a matter of fact, who wanted to even destroy planets anyway, that was so wasteful. He felt unsteady on his feet. Lan Fen came to help him sit down.

“Can stronger cultivators cause mental damage just by talking?” He asked when he was sitting and feeling steady again. “Or is that just the near-death experience talking?”

“Do not mind him, you have a very envious power,” Lan Fen assured him. “The White Tyrant has always spoken like this ever since I awoke him the night the assassins attacked.”

Chen Haoran frowned. That was far too specific a reference to be made off-hand. It did fit though, that was the first day Lan Fen displayed her Inventory space. Now that he thought about it The White Tyrant was probably the one doing Lan Fen’s insane feats of sensing. What was she getting at though?

He turned to Lan Fen in shock. The White Tyrant was only talking about resources he didn’t know his power could improve techniques as well. He wasn’t awake when he gave Lan Fen the manuals the first time after all. Lan Fen winked at him and smiled mischievously. It was a look he’d never seen on her before. Just what had the White Tyrant put her through?

Should he say something?

He looked at the bragging White Tyrant.

He silently decided to keep it a secret. Till one day when he had something he could really slap the old bastard in the face with.

—————

Over the next few days he stayed in Lan Fen’s Silver Ring space, as he had taken to calling it after learning where it came from. Because of his injuries, it was too much of a risk for him to enter the cavern until he recovered completely. Unsurprisingly being traped in a pure white space with only a sloth and a crank old ghost man for company wasn’t really the most stimulating activities. Phelps was of course a joy, if a bit sad he had no water to swim around in but the White Tyrant certainly lived up to his name. After 30 millennia of living, he had certainly refined his sharp tongue into a lethal technique of its own.

Even after the rather terrible first impression Chen Haoran thought he could glean some more information about the cultivation world from the superior cultivator. The hints the White Tyrant had dropped about the wider universe were especially tantalizing. Unfortunately, he had underestimated the stubbornness of a 30 thousand-year-old man. Trying to get the White Tyrant to talk about anything useful was like trying to squeeze blood from a rock if that rock could also open its mouth and start yelling profanities about your mother.

Some jokes were truly multiversal.

It wasn’t like he was trying to have the man teach him or anything either, although admittedly he tried. Lan Fen had confided that even after shocking the White Tyrant with her talent on multiple occasions it still wasn’t enough for him to tell her the higher secrets she craved. She was left with raising her cultivation level and competing various trials hidden within the mists of the Silver Ring space that the White Tyrant had created before dying.

When Lan Fen wasn’t around she was wandering the cavern, destroying the Lan family camps and killing as many cultivators as she could before Patriarch Lan appeared in order to prepare her killing stage. For safety’s he didn’t want to be anywhere near Patriarch Lan when he entered the cavern. On the other hand he was truly curious to see what Lan Fen had prepared that gave her so much confidence in facing her grandfather. Now that he knew she was training under a super-ancient cultivator and equipped with various Heaven-rank techniques he had realized his estimation of her strength was way off.

Of course it was a shame that he couldn’t gift the methods to Phelps and it wasn’t just because Phelps wouldn’t see it as as gift.

In an effort to not alert the White Tyrant and so he could show him up with an improved version of his technique he had attempted to ask through elaborate hand gestures and sheer force of will if Lan Fen could share the technique. By some miracle Lan Fen had perfectly understood what he was asking for and merely shook her head.

“Do you think that man would let his techniques be so easily transmitted?” she said.

That night the White Tyrant flashed him a particularly disdainful sneer so Chen Haoran introduced him to his preferred sign language back on Earth. Thankfully by that point he had recovered enough to finally leave the Silver Ring space because he was sure the White Tyrant would do his best to burst his eardrums with his roaring. Now to avoid one dangerous old man he had to do his best to survive a different one.

Patriarch Lan had returned.