31 Chapter 30: Misery of a Long Life.

Now, "Jasmine, come back; we need to talk, young lady."

"What is it?" She asked after reappearing with a tired expression on her face—not physically tired; she just seemed tired of talking—and once again taking her place on her chair.

It was actually important now, so I hoped that she would take this seriously: "Have I done anything else that might risk my life?"

"Many." She replied immediately.

I didn't expect that—literally no hesitation, "Huh."

"Yes, for example, that time you drank your weird drug and went insane and ran into the forest; it's honestly a miracle you survived that." She continued matter-of-factly.

Fair enough. I smiled wryly and admitted that it had been my fault; there was nothing she could have done to help in that situation. "That was inevitable; anything else?"

"Well, accepting that invitation to the banquet was a stretch; they might have seen the things you can do and wanted to extract all the information you know, especially after you gave that to the girl," She replied, "but I admit, this is a little more unlikely."

Oh my Devil, now she was talking in riddles as well? Weren't the old ladies enough? Now even the young ladies had to act weird: "I gave what to who?"

"Don't you remember? You gave Lan Xueruo her exact vein pattern from your Energy Resonance Imaging Machine." She explained.

I massaged the bridge of my eyebrows and replied, "ERI, don't lengthen my abbreviations, and what does that matter?"

"What does that matter? he asks. She scoffed to herself, clearly unbelieving that I didn't understand even after her perfectly detailed explanation that lacked any detail at all. "Tell me, oh disciple of mine, what's the most important thing for a cultivator?"

"How could I know? You never told me, and I'm not a cultivator."

"You should know," she replied, clearly telling me that I should just know stuff without rhyme or reason, just because, duh, "the most important thing for a cultivator is understanding, and what you gave the girl was an almost perfect source to understand her own veins and, consequentially, her own cultivation."

"Jasmine, I can do that for everybody; it's not a hard thing to do, and I know much more now than I did then." I replied, growing steadily more annoyed, not at her but at myself.

I knew so little about the culture and means of the people of this world that I couldn't even understand what I was doing that was different from the norm.

I didn't even try to understand them, and she was steadily making it clear that the things that I regarded as just the very basics of this field of study were actually somewhat of a big deal for the people of this world.

Knowing how our own bodies worked was exactly a doctor's first part of education; knowing why they did what they did was the second, and knowing why they didn't do what they should be doing was the third.

"Because, my dear disciple, while that may seem little in your eyes, it can work as a guide to perfect her cultivation method if she has a little bit of brains, and trust me, from what I've seen, she has more than enough brains to do so." She continued.

"Okay, so she'll cultivate better, so what?" I asked, still not understanding the crux of the entire conversation.

"With that knowledge, she shouldn't have any problems at all reaching the Tyrant Profound Realm in a short time; she will face virtually no deviation or wrong turn in her cultivation because she knows exactly how her cultivation works, where to send Profound Energy through, and where not to do so." She concluded with a slightly irritated expression.

Well, excuse me, young lady; I didn't even know what that was.

"Is that better or worse than the Sovereign thingy you wanted me to reach?" I asked.

"The Sovereign Profound Realm is the realm after the Tyrant Profound Realm, but—" I interrupted her.

"Then who cares? The Veins are different for each person; even if what you said is true, I'll just have a nice and powerful ally with connections to this Imperial Family, and I'll just keep doing my thing; nothing to worry about." I concluded that there was nothing wrong with helping a friend reach further along her path.

I'll just think about it as having given her a very nice encyclopedia as a present that will teach her how to do her work; there's nothing wrong with it, and in the end, she will still have to do the work on her own.

It was a win-win.

"Disciple, you don't seem to understand just how powerful someone at the Tyrant Profound Realm is in this world." She replied, getting more and more annoyed at my ignorance.

"Well, if you actually taught me this cultivation stuff instead of lazily playing mysterious, then I might know!" I rebuked her, even more annoyed than she was.

Seriously, why did she expect me to understand her common sense?

I had told her that I came from another world, and she was the same.

Maybe she couldn't understand a world where people didn't strive for physical power, where that was everything that she had ever known, just in the same way that I couldn't understand a world where physical power seemed to be all that mattered.

I calmed down and tried to see things from her perspective. To her, I was a guy that didn't have the very slightest understanding of how the world worked, someone who ignored the things that everyone else had taken for granted and had understood for millennia.

I was basically a magical flat-earther.

I grew horrified at the analogy, but at least I was willing to learn rather than being stuck in my ways, so that was a plus.

"I'm sorry for snapping at you," I replied a few seconds after snapping out at her, my brain processing things at a speed that I never thought possible before coming to this world. "Jasmine, I don't know anything about this cultivation thing; just the fact that it's divided by levels makes no sense to me, honestly, so you'll have to explain those things to me rather than taking them for granted."

It was a problem of lack of communication on both sides; I saw her as just a little girl that I had nothing to learn from, because what could I learn from a thirteen-year-old, right?

Wrong, she had been in this world twelve years more than I had—well, not exactly this one, but close enough for her experiences to be worth much more than mine even in this one.

I could admit that I had been a complete idiot to discard the advice from an obviously powerful cultivator in a world made by cultivators for cultivators, but she kept thinking as a cultivator talking to another cultivator, and I was not one.

"I see, you have a point," she looked away and crossed her legs on my chair, "someone in the Tyrant Profound Realm is known as an Overlord; they are able to topple empires like the one we are in with a flip of their hands; they are the undisputed rulers that nobody below their cultivation can dare to defy, at least in places like this Empire we are in right now, and an Overlord can live up to around eight hundred years."

"Oh." Can he survive a nuclear bomb, though?

Why was that the first thing that I thought about?

Anyway, "What about the Sovereign thingy?"

"Someone in the Sovereign Profound Realm," she said, seemingly pissed off at the way I called these realms of theirs, but at this point I just did it because it was fun and because it was too long, a mix of the two reasons, "is called a Monarch; they are the upper limit of power in this world; this is the limit of what can be called a mortal; they live from one thousand to two thousand years."

I couldn't even wrap my head around those numbers; such a long life seemed miserable. I could barely understand a hundred years for a normal human; forget about millennia.

The entire civilization of Earth was only around ten thousand years old, more or less; that was hundreds, almost a thousand generations of humans, but these people could live a fifth of that?

That sounded insane: "Two thousand years?"

"Yes, beyond the Sovereign Profound Realm there are the Immortal realms; they live upwards of ten thousand years, but those are impossible to achieve in this world." She continued, talking about this stuff as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I had to sit down.

I thought about it; she had told me that the higher the cultivation, the longer you live, but this... it was just a lot.

"How do they not grow bored?" I asked, trying to even fathom such a long life.

"Bored? Why would they get bored?" She replied.

"Human life is not meant to live that long; how do they not grow insane from just having that level of experience?" How can they keep sane when they see the people around them age and die while they remain young for millennia?" I asked; this whole thing seemed more like agony than life.

And I was meant to reach that level? How could I possibly manage for that long?

"Just interact with people at your own level; those at inferior levels don't matter." She replied matter-of-factly.

I looked at her.

Is that why they grew so violent?

They saw people of lower cultivation as inferior. Because they lived less?

Is that how they grew so detached from normal people? Was that why they didn't care about the fates of the non-cultivators?

Was cultivation itself the root cause of this world's horribleness?

I didn't know, but this was a lot—really, really a lot.

"Are you okay?" She asked, and seeing me getting paler and paler as I thought about the implications of her words, I went right beyond the phase of denial and straight to acceptance. By now, I trusted Jasmine way too much to just think she was kidding right now.

"I think so." I asked back; I wasn't sure. In the end, this didn't affect how I was going to live my life from now on, but it changed how I thought about the people of this world from a fundamental point of view.

Maybe they weren't savages?

Were they just people terrified of death, raised since young to not get close to people that lived shorter than them, therefore people that they saw as less talented cultivators than they were, because they saw it as a source of misery?

This was truly a miserable existence.

"Jasmine, what cultivation realm are you in?" I asked, looking her straight in the eyes. This wasn't about power; I just had to understand.

Just how different was she from what I saw as normal people? How different was I going to be the further I grew in these realms?

Did she look at me the same way I looked at mosquitoes? Could she go on a nap only to one day wake up just to find me as an old man while she looked no different?

She looked at me, at the seriousness in my eyes, and replied, "Higher than a Monarch, you don't need to know precisely."

Indeed, I didn't.

That told me more than enough; that explained so much.

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hey people, i really liked writing this chapter, but i'm not sure if you've liked it as much as i did, since this is more introspection and for the character growth rather than anything else, please give me any feedback since i'm trying to get better.

Love you all.