Chapter 260

  Unforgiven (I)

  "Aah, fine, we'll go..."

  Those were the resolutely resounding words of our chief alchemist as he fell under the spell of peer pressure. Or, well, hardly peer as it was kid pressure. Is that a thing? I'm fairly certain it actually is.

  I remember when Myra, my niece, once walked up to me and said, 'Mom says you can eat an entire cake all by yourself! Is it true?!' and I balked. I looked over at my sister, and she was about an inch away from losing it, but the way that little kid looked at me so expectantly... was I going to say no?

  Of course not.

  Thus, I ate an entire cake, all by myself, in front of her, and she looked at me like I've conquered the world or something. Was it worth the fact that I was sick for the next eight days and couldn't even look at any sweets for over a month?

  ... not really, to be honest.

  So, even if you live for hundreds of years, it turns out, the kids can still pressure you into doing some wild things. Good to know.

  We moved slowly and not directly toward the 'voice' since, well, there wasn't really a direct route. Each time it would sound out, it'd be from a different place. Same general direction, which was further north, but from different corners of it.

  As such, what we started doing was, as soon as we'd hear it, we'd go in that direction for about an hour and stop, resting (well, cultivating, really) until it would sound out again, and then rinse and repeat.

  Three days passed by, and we established a bit of a routine and noticed a bit of a pattern.

  What I approximated to be at night, we'd be attacked by the ever-increasing number of beasts, though they were still individually quite weak. The further in we went, the more frequent the attacks became, though the numbers never crossed sixty or so.

  There have also been some breakthroughs in the meantime--Dai Xiu reached the late Foundation Establishment, Xi Zhao was at the peak of the middle stage, Wan Lan was at the peak of the Foundation Establishment (and feeling quite restless, based on her window, as the kids were catching up to her), while Light reached the 11th stage.

  I'd kind of expected this, as there was a lot of 'layering' in the past few months in terms of their speed of cultivating, though I also suspect they'll plateau for a while. One thing I discovered sort of passively was that none of the kids were rushing through the stages; whether it was Long Tao warning them or them knowing so instinctively, they all took their time (at least until this small boon).

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  I suspect that none, except maybe Wan Lan, will reach the Spirit Manifestation Realm before we leave the forest.

  As for Long Tao... I don't know, honestly. I mean, he was at the peak of the Spirit Manifestation Realm, but he's been sitting there for a little while, unmoving. He was probably consolidating his foundation, but it wasn't like I had to worry about him.

  I had to worry about me.

  The good news is, I managed to do one revolutionary cycle--which means I'm now at the Second Cycle of the Revolving Core Realm, still a long way off from its peak.

  The bottleneck wasn't the physical cycling of Qi, but figuring out how to automate the core's rotation. As far as I understand it, it's sort of like a puzzle--right now, the core resides within my dantian, suspended at the center of it, unmoving. When I start cultivating, it begins to spin (and quite fast, if I may say so myself). When I first started doing it, I actually had to do several revolutions of Qi through my meridians to get it to spin, but now, I only need to do one.

  Once it's spinning, it passively begins to increase the speed of cultivating. At the highest speed I managed to reach, it actually almost tripled my base cultivation speed, though that was kind of unsustainable as the sheer quantity of Qi began to wreck my meridians to the point they physically started to hurt.

  Regardless, perhaps for the first time since coming to this world, I felt like an actual cultivator. It wasn't the system or some external means that propelled me forward, but my own effort.

  Not too shabby, I'd say.

  "AAAAAHHHHHTTTWWWW!!!"

  We got up as though the roar was an alarm and slowly started walking.

  One piece of bad news was that we were actually slowly running out of lanterns. Well, when I say we, I really just mean me. I'm fairly certain that I'm one of the few cultivators ever who'd pack a bunch of random 'mortal' crap that just 'takes space' and is as 'useful as a torch in the middle of a summer day'.

  I thought I'd packed a hefty amount, as I didn't think we'd come upon a place where they would be the only source of light. My big thinking was that we'd use the lanterns to navigate places where using Qi would give away our position.

  Still, there were about twenty-five left, and we were going through about one a day, which wasn't too bad. I don't think we'll be stuck here for a month, but hey, what do I know?

  "They're here," kids took turns warning about the upcoming fight, thinking they were being slick.

  But they were being rather obvious--it was a competition.

  This time around, it was Wan Lan who gave out a warning, and I could practically hear the silent clicks of the tongues.

  Nonetheless, they all quickly shifted into position, with me in the center, of course, like a little helpless lamb, and before a few thoughts could cross my mind, we were once again attacked.

  But there was something different--the beasts were larger and far more malformed than ever before. In fact, one that attacked was just a semi-spherical blob of growths with barely an inch of identifiable body. I think I saw a patch of brown fur, but it could have just as well been an open, infected wound.

  With their size, their cultivation also improved, and they were all now at least in the Foundation Establishment.

  Which was... well, worrying.

  My idea of coming here wasn't that we were strong enough to conquer the place (as expeditions much stronger than our little group have failed to do exactly that), but that I hoped that with the system's hint, some positive karma from being surrounded by protagonists, and just a tinge of luck, we'd skip that which killed everyone else and find the garden relatively quickly.

  As it stands, though, that may just be kind of... impossible? Though the roar was getting 'louder', it's sort of like that city-wide alarm that would ring out. Sure, it's loud, and it's grating, but the speakers blaring it are still miles and miles away from you.

  And trekking miles in this forest?

  Yeah.

  We may really stay a month here.