The Undying Immortal System

During my seclusion, while my focus was on my studies, I kept abreast of news from around the sect to ensure everything continued to develop properly.

Once Yan reached Martial Lord, I gave him his orb from his second life. I wasn’t entirely sure when his soul would be developed enough to make this safe, but I felt that a Lord-level soul should be able to handle a few dozen years’ worth of memories.

Somewhat surprisingly, after absorbing everything, Yan didn’t seem to show much of a reaction at all. His notebook had already provided him with most of the information the orb contained, so the memories themselves simply made him more comfortable with certain aspects of that life. Afterward, he just promised to let me know if there were any signs of problems and went on about his work.

As for JiaQi, she was pretty much the same. She didn’t have a notebook telling her about what had happened during our second life in the sect, but she didn’t care. For her, that life had been more of a relaxing romp with her deer than anything else, so learning the details of it didn’t make much of a difference to her. However, I did notice her spend a bit more time practicing beast taming.

Others, though, weren’t quite as sanguine about the process.

Upon entering the sect, Yan took all the illusionists in my clan under his wing, including Meng LuYao. The elder who had been appointed to lead our people on the Dark Peak became his deputy. While this group did join us in TongBei, they claimed one of the outlying villages as their own and stayed somewhat separate from the rest of us most of the time.

At first, I was a bit worried about this, but a quick conversation had been enough to clear up what Yan was doing. He was giving LuYao a chance to grow up away from LiTing, and it seemed to be working.

LuYao’s talent and affinity levels were enough to make her a prodigy, and her striking looks, different from anyone else on the continent, made her extremely popular on the Light Peak. There, it was common for people to use illusions to alter their appearances, so she didn’t even stand out as anything more than a beautiful girl. However, the fact that her appearance was natural and not the result of an illusion made her a bit special.

Since she was starting as a Martial Disciple with no knowledge of cultivation, LuYao was years behind everyone else, but they lacked her talent, affinity, and determination. This allowed her to quickly make a name for herself within my clan and earn everyone’s respect. This, in turn, caused many of the men to confess their feelings for her, but at my request, Yan stepped in to prevent anything from developing.

Giving LuYao this layer of protection had a strange effect, though. It seemed to turn her into some kind of unattainable fairy figure in the minds of several men. This no doubt warped her mental and spiritual development in its own way, but it was the most ‘normal’ development that I could offer her.

As for LiTing, without LuYao to latch onto, she was initially a bit adrift. She had the memories of her first life in the sect, but she didn’t have any strong need to do anything about them. She wanted to help with my clan, but her more introverted personality held her back from taking on tasks related to interacting with large numbers of strangers.

After about a year of this, she latched on to Cao MeiLan.

During my first life in the Twin Mountains Sect, Cao had been someone who I could only look up to. Her skills in both alchemy and cultivation far outstripped my own, and she had helped me develop from a boy who could only craft Basic Qi Gathering Pills into a Master Alchemist.

However, even in the Twin Mountains Sect, her skills had been near the bottom.

At the start of the loop, she was a 28-year-old Martial Master, but stagnation had already set in because of how late she had advanced, and that would never go away. Her fire affinity was only low eight-star, her talent for alchemy was lackluster, and her blessing simply enhanced her control over mortal fires.

Cao was exactly the kind of person the Twin Mountains Sect had been designed for. She was someone with a bit of talent in alchemy who would likely never achieve anything more than a basic level of competence. My hope was that she would be able to develop into a powerful Revered Elder of Fire, but that would take centuries of practice.

When she first joined us, RuLan took Cao under her wing and retaught her the basics of cultivation, but after Rulan started spending most of her time with Emperor Li, Cao was left adrift.

That was when LiTing latched onto her and the girls bonded over their status as ‘outsiders.’

When LuYao and LiTing both reached Martial Lord, I gave them their memory orbs. LiTing had been expecting this, but LuYao hadn’t. Yan had done his best to avoid tipping her off to the fact that she had been a part of our second life in the sect.

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Upon absorbing these memories, the relationship between the two girls became extremely awkward. During this life, they were strangers who hadn’t interacted with each other more than a handful of times. So, finding out that they had thought of each other as sisters was difficult to process.

Worse, for LiTing, Meng LuYao no longer looked like her true self, so it was hard to connect those memories with someone who had both a different personality and a different body. For LuYao, this time, she didn’t have LiTing’s memories, so many of the impulses that those memories had given her felt entirely foreign.

The result of all this was that the girls ended up mostly avoiding each other and carrying on with the new lives that they had already established.

As for Shi YuLong…

Originally, Yulong had planned to hang around TongBei and act as a general trainer while keeping an eye on his sister. He wanted her to stay safe, but he lacked any real motivation. After absorbing his memories, YuLong retreated into seclusion for several weeks. When he emerged, his sole focus was on training his sister to make her as powerful as possible. Ṟ𝘈₦∅𐌱Ɛ𝐬

When she turned 16, he took her to join the Guild of Talisman Artists.

This surprised me since, in the past, YuLong hadn’t been too keen on mastering the art. However, his explanation was simple. “The power of a talisman doesn’t rely on the cultivator who uses them.”

Without a natural affinity for lightning, his sister, Shi YuHua, was at a slight disadvantage in the guild, but with a constant supply of essence from around the continent, she was able to develop her lightning affinity a bit more easily than Liang had.

I was worried about the intensity with which he was pushing her, though.

YuLong was, essentially, a 150-year-old monster at this point, and at times, he seemed to forget that his sister was only a 16-year-old girl on her first life. So, to try to help YuHua cope with the situation, I had a talk with Yan and sent a few letters back and forth with Emperor Jin via LiTing.

The next year, Cai XiaoYu and Jin ZiHan arrived in TongBei, and neither of them had been given the memories of their previous lives.

Emperor Jin used her position and power as a grandmother to order ZiHan to learn cultivation through Black River’s guild system instead of through the Yellow Orchid Academy. As for XiaoYu, Yan simply recruited her while she was still a poor orphan who didn’t know what the future might hold.

Following Yan’s and Jin’s advice, both girls enrolled in the Guild of Talisman Artists where they were placed into training sessions alongside YuHua. The one-year age gap made this a bit tricky, but everyone followed my orders and got it done.

In truth, I wasn’t entirely comfortable arranging friendships like this, but I felt that it was necessary. YuHua needed a chance to become friends with people in the loop, and these two girls were the only options that were readily available.

Finally, as for Bao and SuYin, ever since their arrival in South Gate, they had been more or less inseparable.

In their last life, SuYin’s memory blessing had allowed her to learn everything far too fast for Bao to keep up with, and the fact that Bao’s body had already entered stagnation only caused this gap to widen more quickly. The result of this disparity was that SuYin became a core disciple of Verdant Forest Sect and Bao was only able to serve as her attendant.

In this life, things were flipped. With the reversion of his cultivation and soul strength, Bao’s blessing wasn’t able to help him much, but he retained all the memories of an expert Grandmaster Herbalist. With a stagnated cultivation base, he was slower to advance than others, but with the knowledge and experience he possessed, his ascent was steady and relentless.

SuYin, on the other hand, had only patchy recollections remaining of her past life. She knew big-picture ideas about who and why, but nearly all the details had been stored in her blessed memory, and none of them had been transferred into her memory orb. So, for both cultivation and herbalism, she was constantly seeking out Bao to get his input on things.

After only a few weeks of this behavior, it seemed to reach the point where SuYin was afraid to stray too far away from his side lest she forget important knowledge that she was supposed to have.

For his part, Bao didn’t take any pride in the situation, and he didn’t use it to take advantage of the girl. Whenever SuYin asked a question, he would patiently answer, knowing that with her blessing, the same question wouldn’t need to be asked a second time.

Because of SuYin’s memory issues and Bao’s stagnation, the two of them reached Grandmaster a bit later than the other Revered Elders, but they eventually made it there and were both able to enter the sect as ungraded inner disciples. This rating, while low, was simply the result of them not caring about their standing within the sect and wanting to rush to join us. If they had stayed and cultivated in South Gate for a few more years, I was confident that they could have both achieved core disciple status.

Once inside, they spent nearly all their time secluded in Mortal City or TongBei.

The only time Bao had visited the Wood Peak was when he first entered the sect and was taken there by his guide. After that, he refused to return. That single visit had scared him more than I had thought possible.

This told me he needed to redouble his efforts with soul cultivation. If Bao was going to become an Emperor in this life, he needed to visit the Wood Peak Trial to raise his affinity, and if the voices from his blessing were stopping him from doing that, he needed to be able to block them.

He and SuYin had requested to be allowed to cultivate in my storage space, but a quick test showed that, like with regular qi cultivation, they weren’t able to control energy well enough in there to cultivate their souls properly.

So, instead, they each borrowed several stacks of books from my Soul Cultivation Library and spent their days locked away with them.

At first, they were alone in this endeavor, but as more of my clan learned the importance this sect put on soul cultivation, my two disciples slowly grew a small following. In time, this turned into a school where people could go, read, and discuss the different philosophies.

This deep focus on soul cultivation caused their attention on qi cultivation and herbalism to wane, but that was fine. Bao was already in stagnation, so he only needed to worry about reaching Lord before 90 to prevent calcification, and SuYin was already a Peak Grandmaster who could advance to Lord whenever she wished.

If the clan needed help or advice, my Revered Elders were around to offer it, but they didn’t involve themselves in its day-to-day operations. Instead, they each charted their own course through this life based on their own personal desires.@@novelbin@@

For some, like Meng LuYao and Shi YuHua, I steered things slightly from behind the scenes, but I didn’t try to dictate how anyone lived their lives. I was simply grateful for whatever assistance they were willing to provide me and my clan.