When Tundra was much, much younger, he used to think that the higher realms were filled with people who got there by the resources of their family, their sect, or luck.

  That was the old ‘him’, too. At this point in his first life, he still believed that the Great Sects got to where they are by the sheer weight of inertia.

  That their Sect’s tremendous resources overcame so many of their personal limitations and gave their disciples a huge head up.

  That was when he realized that no one who reached the 9th realm was ordinary.

  The barriers that separated those in the 8th, and those who had the power to create their own realms of reality, was not something that could be overcome by resources.

  When he made that leap into the 9th, he remembered his own soul feeling as if it was remade anew. The sensation that attacked his spirit as he made that breakthrough was unusual. He had to resist the world’s attempts to crush his soul, and yet, at the same time, embrace the world’s attempts to offer him its tools.

  Tools to write, to create, for the worlds are filled with invisible strings that could be bent and altered.

  These were the lines of reality.

  It is what the greater cultivators bent in order to create treasure realms.

  They were weavers, and they weaved space into reality.

  Pockets of space. Pockets where everything imaginable was possible, or at least, seemed that way. Pockets where cultivators could hide their life’s creation, pockets where cultivators stored their prized possessions, pockets where the world uare remade in their own image.

  In the later years of Tundra’s first life, his opponents were increasingly those who were just as talented, if not more talented than himself.

  He recalled meeting a young master, Karsh Whitedragon, one of Patriarch Whitedragon’s great grandsons, in the middle 8th realm, who truly made him feel that there were mountains beyond mountains..

  It was a humbling experience to be held to a draw in a spar with a man that was a full realm beneath him, and made him realize how vast and diverse the types of talents of the world are. If Tundra was a 10 in talent, Karsh Whitedragon would be a 12.

  In the words of Grand Abbot Ungkai of Golden Bell Temple.

  “Lord Fox, your talents are so immense that you view your defeat as nothing more than a temporary setback. That you lost because the opponents, the others had a head start. But some day, you will meet someone younger with more talent than you, and you will find yourself questioning the heavens for such cruelty.”

  He was right, and that draw left Tundra stewing in his home alone for months as he contemplated the difference between them.

  That was when he understood the reaction of his family or his lesser disciples. He never understood why they didn’t just work harder, and keep trying.

  There really was no point. The gap in talent is cruel. How the heavens favored some so that they have to do so much more that the others just to be at the same point.

  So cruel that all Tundra felt in the days after that battle was that it seemed rather pointless.

  That was when he faced one of the great truths of the cultivation world.

  Cultivation is a ladder, and most of those on the ladder only want to climb further up.

  But, it was not the right mindset.

  He got himself out of that rut by realizing he didn’t need to be the best in every field, or the best of his generation. He just had to focus to be the best at his own field. Extreme talent is a superpower, but dedication coupled with a decent amount of talent in a particular field could still set him ahead of even those with extreme talent.

  His children, his disciples. They were all different in terms of their talents. It may be that they have yet to find it, but it was just statistical reality that not everyone has it in them to be a cultivator, what more an excellent one.

  The fact that they are cultivators already placed them above the morals, but like a ladder, they did not look down at the millions beneath them. It gives them no solace, no comfort to know that they are mediocre cultivators in a world where geniuses live like what feels like forever.

  He shook his head. A man who lived to his age thinks a lot about things.

  His attention, was then on the guest in his house.

  ***

  It didn’t take much for Tia Truehaven to get a hang of Tundra’s routine..

  It was that day, when she found out that Tundra Fox regularly helped his wives with cultivation, and out of curiosity, she snuck nearby to figure out what they did.

  Her heart pounded heavily when she wanted to spy on them, after all, she knew that he could sense her very well, that even her extremely fine spiritual fragment could be detected, and he could even attack it without destroying it.

  All of this pointed to someone way more experienced that someone who just recently stepped into the 7th realm should be.

  She could feel him inside. No, as if taunting her, a small speck of Tundra’s energy landed on her chest, as if telling him he knew she was there.

  “Do you really want me to see something?” She cursed to herself. “Fine.”

  Her spiritual senses fanned out, and along the way she felt more of Tundra’s marking bits of energy, as if taunting her. As if guiding her to see.

  What is it?

  Elly, Marin, and Celestia, the three wives of Tundra Fox were mediocre. From what she saw, they were moths drawn to the burning pyre, and they will get burned eventually. Nothing special in the greater scheme of things.

  But then she paused, and her eyes widened as she picked up the condensed motes of tightly bound, extremely dense bits of energy. It was as good as cultivating in upper-middle tier cultivation chambers.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “That’s the Divine Spiritual Energy Compression!” She gasped, perhaps a little too loudly.

  Of course, the regressor knew the method by other names, but this type of heavily packed energy was a type of energy form known only to extremely high level cultivators. It required years, hundreds if not thousands of years of practice to be able to tie floating bits of energy midair into smaller packs.

  Her mind scrambled to figure out what she had just seen. No, at this moment, Tia Truehaven pieced together all the little oddities and came to a realization why her uncle sent her here.

  Her uncle was part of the divination faction of the Ancient Titans Great Sect, a subgroup of the Ancient Titans that believed in the power of divination and wanted to use ancient divination powers to prevent disasters and identify powerful individuals. They often foretold a coming, lurking disaster.

  Those outside the faction generally viewed the divination faction as too superstitious. But those who had seen the disasters avoided are true believers.

  The Divination faction of the Ancient Titan’s once made a powerful divination of the fate of their world, and what they learned a few thousand years ago set off a long, secretive plan.

  Something only known to the ancestors and the Sect Masters.

  But she knew little snippets, that if they spotted people of unusual ability, they need to know.

  “Saw what you wanted to see, Lady Truehaven?” Tundra Fox was next to her.

  She raised her head slowly, as her eyes met his.

  ***

  “Who are you?” Tia Truehaven looked deathly pale, but in her mind, she formed a few plans. The question was partly to pitch the story back to her family. The two met in a room not far away from Tundra’s main home.

  “You know who I am.”

  “That’s not the question I am asking.” She prepared for a fight.

  “Like I said, we can negotiate it in a way that we both get what we want.” Tundra Fox sat. “Did I scare you?”

  “I believe you already know that.” Tia answered. She was always a pale woman, but somehow her skin looked cold. Tundra could feel that she was forming some kind of spiritual energy formation within her spirit, perhaps, afraid.

  Tundra nodded, and shrugged. “I can tell you, but like I said, I want the full text of the 72 Iterations. Everything.”

  She hesitated. She looked around, as if planning an escape route. “You know I can’t give it to you.”

  “Technically correct, because it is not yours to give. Your sect gave it to me. You are just withholding it from me.” Tundra stepped closer.

  Tia panicked, and activated some kind of movement ability. She ran. But Tundra was a full realm above her, and he did not lose to her in skills or talent. Keeping up wasn’t difficult at all.

  Tundra chased after the female alchemist through the forests, she leapt from the canopies of trees to another, and after humoring her attempts to flee for a while, he decided to strike. His fists charged with powerful metallic energies, and then, he varied that energy into bolts of lightning.

  The golden bolt arced through the forest and struck her.

  She immediately crashed into the ground below, and she turned in horror. The residual energies still buzzed around her, as if trapping her. “This is the paralyzing lightning strike of the Skypiercer Sect!”

  “You are well learned, Lady Truehaven.” Tundra landed casually in front of her.

  “You can’t- you can’t kill me.” She tried to wrestle against the lightning that jumped throughout her body. She began to regain control, but it was too slow. The man was already right next to her and at this distance, even her special protective talisman wouldn’t hold up.

  No. There was a deep realization within her that Tundra was hiding far more powerful cards.

  “I didn’t plan to, Lady Truehaven. But it would be impolite if I let you run away so unfashionably after you’ve made the journey the entire way here. There are proper ways and means to things.” Tundra smiled, now next to her once more.

  “The Ancient Titans will declare you as an enemy for attacking one of the Great Sects!” She barked.

  “Everyone knows your present here is as a spy of the Great Sects. You come into my home, spy on me, and here you are saying your sect will defend you for it? I think you wrongly estimated your value. As long as you live, the Ancient Titans know that your treatment is entirely due to your lack of skill. At most, to save the Ancient Titan’s face, I will have to pay a small reparation in the form of pills, and we will call it a day. I can afford that.” Tundra said with an uncanny familiarity with the ways of the Great Sects.

  Great Sects do crush their opponents, but only if the offense truly offended them. Often, what happens will be a rather extortionary payment of reparations.

  She frowned, she could move slightly, but the effects of the paralyzing lightning was a little stronger than she expected.

  “Your Uncle, Nord Truehaven is no fool. He knows you will get caught, and he merely judged that I was wise enough not to kill you. He is quite right, in that aspect. He is also quite right that you will return with some findings. But there are a thousand other things a cultivator can do to another to hurt them.”

  She gulped as she imagined the possibilities. “Don’t you dare.”

  Tundra squatted next to her. “Must we fight, Lady Truehaven? The last time I fought a woman I killed her and left a hole in her chest. I rather not do so, especially if we can both get what we want by trading.”

  “Trade? I cannot help but feel that any trade I make with you will be a loss for me.”

  “A perceived loss, or an actual loss?” Tundra countered. “You imagine your trade as a loss because you gave away something. Did you?”

  She blinked. “My uncle clearly expects me-”

  Tundra cut her sentence off before she finished. “Did he say so? Or are you presuming that he tasked you to withhold something that is mine? The fact that I am giving you extra is already above what I have already given the Titans.”

  She blinked again, as if realizing the mistake in her assumptions. She took out a set of documents, and passed it to him. She had regained most of her movement ability, but the fact that he could use the paralyzing lightning again meant her chance of escape was slim. “Fine.”

  “Great.” Tundra kept the books, and offered her a hand. “Let’s talk, as adults should. The world is filled with enough men and women who are centuries and millennia old fighting as if they are children in a pit of sand. Let us do less of that. Many more fruitful things can happen when we talk over tea.”

  Tia nodded reluctantly.

  Tundra smiled.

  ***

  Tia walked away from the meeting feeling as if she had been scammed, but he dropped enough hints that it was worth looking at, but it was clear that there was an inheritance of some kind. Some kind of relic from the Old Ones that gave him an intense spiritual dream, and foretold that of a great evil returning to the world, during some planetary alignment a few thousand years in the future.

  A great relic that gave him such immense insight into cultivation was not impossible, even if exceptionally rare. Over the eons there were countless geniuses who stumbled upon great secrets that made them into the era’s unbeatable champions.

  Still, an evil from the era of the great primordial ten? It sounded very much like those kinds of cheap frauds many mid-tier merchants tried to sell as real. There were so many of that sort of fake prophecies of doom that it was hard to distinguish truth from fiction.

  A lot of Tundra’s story also didn’t quite make sense to her. As far as she knew, the Old ones did not have divination sects. Then again, she wouldn’t write it off entirely, with so much time passed, it might have been that they were just eradicated.

  Then, there was the planetary alignments, which could be calculated with a fair bit of certainty. That was something she could verify. If the star charts indicate there would be an alignment of some sort, then, at least there is some credibility to it.

  He was definitely lying. And yet, she tried to fathom what else could teach someone who wasn’t even a millennia old the Divine Spiritual Energy Compression?

  That was the kind of thing that took at least a few hundred years to learn. Even a genius would take a few decades to a hundred years. The simplest answer was that Tundra was a genius. The elder of the Ancient Titans met people who were geniuses of their time as well, and none of them knew Divine Spiritual Energy Compression at the 7th realm. All of them, now Ancestors of the Ancient Titans, only mastered it later in the 9th realm after decades of study.

  So, first, she needed to visit the nearest stellar observatory. Was there really a planetary alignment ten thousand years into the future?

  She needed to collect evidence. Once there was sufficient records and evidence, then that would be something she could discuss with her uncle.