Leaving home behind

The Netherworld Kingdom was supposed to be dimly lit, but it was straight darkness that he found himself in. By reflex, he tried to shift Qi into his eyes to improve his vision and was surprised that it worked. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Not only did ghosts not cultivate in the same way that living people did, nor did they actually have bodies, but he was under the impression that people's shades would not be permitted to touch the Qi of the netherworld, which felt surprisingly normal. Otherwise, the courts of the dead would have sinners running all about trying to avoid being sentenced.

He almost shouted in shock when his improving vision caught a glimpse of an ashen young woman looming over him, inspecting him as if looking for a flaw. It was hard to tell in the dark, but she looked about his age, perhaps a year or two older.

Her skin was as pale as jade, paler even, and he caught the sight of a pair of exaggeratedly pointed ears poking out of her unusual golden hair. "G-ghost!" he screamed, at once realising how stupid that was. Wasn't he a ghost now, too? It was just that it was common knowledge that both spirits and demon beasts that could take a human shape often had subtle mistakes or tells as if they couldn't quite master the human form in its entirety.

The obvious was finding a tail on a transformed fox demon, but pointed ears and unusual beauty were featured in a series of stories he had read about a particular ravenous female spirit who drained men's yang energy. He flushed a little, remembering the popular stories in question.

An annoyed look came across the girl's face. At the same time, he heard a familiar voice in his head, "Li'er, are you okay?" Grandma? He was starting to come to the conclusion that he maybe didn't die after all and felt his ears heat up in embarrassment. But where was he, and why did this girl sit here, alone in the dark?

He felt around his body to make sure everything was still attached, and it seemed to be—except that he felt weak as a baby. In fact, he felt kind of terrible, but on the plus side, he didn't have a hole in his chest.

Those memories caused him to make a fist in anger on the bed he found himself in. He was angry at himself for not listening to Grandma Mei's warnings about those two when they had met. She hadn't liked the look of them, but he pushed ahead anyway.

Still, Xiao Li prided himself on being the type of man not to keep a grudge. His mother told him that it would stymie his cultivation and made him promise not to keep a grudge close to his heart.

He felt that was wise, and being a filial son, he, instead, wrote all of his grudges in a small notebook that he carried about his person at all times. Except they had even stolen his grudge notebook! The fact that he could rewrite it from memory was irrelevant.

He groaned and asked mentally while being very wary of the spirit girl in front of him, "Grandma Mei, what happened? Who is this spirit-girl? Is she a ghost cultivator?"

"You died, you stupid brat! That's what happened!" Grandma Mei scolded him, and he winced, "And she's not a spirit, but she probably is a ghost cultivator—still, she saved your life. But be wary of her. I think she is a foreigner, not of this world."

He raised his eyebrows in shock. It was common knowledge that the Myriad Heavens consisted of innumerable minor realms and ten thousand major ones, like the Winding Rivers Realm that they were living in right now. 

Well, that was what Grandma said, anyway. He hadn't actually known that before she told him, but she claimed that it was common knowledge, so it probably was. But to see someone from a different world was as rare as a hen's teeth. 

Travelling to different realms wasn't something even powerhouses like Grandma Mei could have done safely. She had repeatedly told him that, in the grand scheme of things, she was a nobody, but he always found it difficult to believe that. The Great Ancestor of the Xiao family, who stayed continuously in seclusion, was in the Nascent Soul realm as well, so it always seemed like she was just being humble.

At the same time, the girl, who he reminded himself definitely wasn't a ravenous yin-spirit, said something in a melodious windchime-like language he couldn't understand. He didn't understand a word, but he was a bit disappointed that she stopped. Everything she said sounded pretty nice somehow, and some of the phonemes she was using he wasn't sure he ever heard. 

Just the idea of speaking a different language was a bit unusual. It wasn't that there were no other languages. Demon beasts had their own language once they got intelligent enough, and there were probably uncountable small tribes of mortals that spoke unintelligible dialects. But speaking a different language for a cultivator, which she clearly was if she had brought him back from the dead, was something he'd never heard of before.

"Pardon me, I can't understand you. But you sound very pretty, so feel free to continue speaking," he said cheekily but paused in dismay when he could detect total comprehension on her face. She looked interested at first but then narrowed her eyes, snorted, said a few more words and walked away, throwing her hair over her shoulder as she turned and left in the same way that his female cousins did when he pissed them off.

"Little Li, perhaps I should have mentioned that she can understand you. She just can't speak our language—yet," Grandma Mei told him, with an incredibly amused tone to her mental voice. 

He winced, but at least he got to watch her leave. Before she left, she slapped the wall, which caused a bright light to pop into existence, allowing him to see a lot better. There was something that caught his eye as she left, and it wasn't just her butt. He asked Grandma Mei, "Her shadow looks a little bit odd."

"I'm glad that your brain has finally started working. That's one of the reasons I've asked you to be wary of her. She keeps a low-level malevolent spirit of shadow and hunger living in her shadow like a pet," Grandma Mei said, sending the feeling of shaking her head in exasperation, "It wants nothing more than to kill her, but despite all that, it is as chained as well as I have ever seen." Her voice turned amused again, "By the way, she asked you if you were feeling well. She took your response as a yes."

He let out a hiss, "So she is a ghost cultivator! A demonic cultivator, Grandma Mei! Are we going to be okay?"

"I haven't mentioned this before, but Little Li, whether it is the Righteous or the Demonic path... really, the most important thing is surviving," Grandma Mei said with emotion, "I don't sense a lot of sin on her, either. It's not necessary for someone who cultivates ghosts to be evil; it just turns out that way fairly often. But it would almost be a shame for this girl to be anything else. She's lived in this place for months, according to what she's told me. She almost certainly has some ghostly-yin type special constitution."

He felt his world and its assumptions rock, and he raised an eyebrow at the last guess. Demonic cultivation wasn't that bad? Lived here for months? Already, he felt kind of vaguely ill, which had nothing to do with his overall weakness. 

He was circulating his Pure Yang aspected Qi, which helped to drive the feeling away. But the data he was given about this place was clear. A regular human, if they walked in, would be dead in an hour. Even Martial Masters like Old Gu, who had betrayed him, could only stay two or three hours at most.

It was why they tended to only take people who had experience with this place on the missions—so they could race through the place, killing all the zombies and taking what there was to take as quickly as possible.

He didn't know how long he could stay here, but it wasn't months.

"I think she is weaker than you, but she has incredible attainments in the Soul Dao for someone at her level. Bringing you back to life in the way she did would have taken a soul cultivator in the Golden Core realm, I think, to capture a soul before it ends up in the Netherworld Kingdom. Speaking of which, there were conditions for her to help you. I am going to need to ask you to swear an oath to the Heavenly Dao..." Grandma Mei then explained the oath that she had already sworn, and he frowned.

It basically amounted to an oath not to reveal the young woman's secrets or origins and also to help her learn the language and culture. Swearing an oath to the Heavenly Dao was serious. If you broke it... well, you might not die, necessarily, but it did happen sometimes, too. It kind of depended on both how severely you broke the oath and chance.

It would take a seriously strong person to completely protect someone from the backlash of knowingly breaking such an oath, but even if that occurred, it tended to cause your speed of cultivation to falter for a long time. It could even breed a type of inner demon in your mind. Nobody would swear such an oath with the intention of breaking it, he thought. 

Well, he considered that and realised that some people might. Especially if they had no hope of further advancement and were offered a lot of compensation to do so, but it would still be a dangerous proposition.

Still, he owed the girl, literally, his life, so he wasn't upset that she had set conditions with Grandma Mei. The ties of karma were already there, after all, and it was best to balance the scales as soon as possible. In his opinion, this assistance wasn't near paying off his debt to her, either.

---xxxxxx---

I was glad he was revived successfully. Merildwen had only used that spell once before, and only with her mom helping her out and using someone who had attacked them as practice subjects. The spell cost too much in material components to be practised often, but Merildwen considered it important. If the worst happened and both her parents died, but she survived, she wanted to be confident enough to have some chance of reviving one of them.

Fortunately, everything worked perfectly. He remained unconscious after his vital signs restarted for a few minutes, and I deposited the ring with his grandma in it around his neck. She said she needed to touch him to protect him from the yin qi in the area while he slept.

When he had woken up, I had decided to speak Elvish with the boy, as to me, it was the language that sounded the most like Chinese, even if it didn't sound at all like it. Perhaps if Chinese and Finnish had a baby, that would be what it sounded like.

His cheeky comments and being obvious about checking me out made me want to roll my eyes. It was unwanted, but I had been a boy his age before, so I realised that thinking with his little head was almost unstoppable for this stage of his life.

An hour or so later, he arrived from the bedroom that I had revivified him in. He coughed to get my attention and said, "Miss? Grandma Mei wants to speak with you. By the way, if you don't mind me asking, what is your name?"

I stood up from being seated on the floor and dusted my robes off before I considered how to answer that question. Finally, I decided to just continue stealing the identity of the woman whose body I was in, "Merildwen."

He scrunched up his face and said, "Mei Wen?"

I considered correcting him, as he lost a few phonemes there in the middle, but finally decided it sounded alright, so I nodded, acceding to the change in the moniker.

"She's got the same family name as you, Grandma!" he said, enthused, before taking the necklace that wasn't anything more than a loop of leather off his neck and handing it to me.

I had a good feeling about these two, but I didn't trust them completely, so I cast Protection from Good and Evil again. This caused the boy to squint at me and ask, "What was that? The Qi around you moved oddly, and now there is a bit of sheen to it... wait, I can't understand you." He chuckled and shook his head, "Never mind."

I closed my hand around the ring in the necklace and asked, "What do you need?"

"Well, I agreed to help you with language, culture and cultivation. I can mentally send you information, and I propose to send you information on language right now. It won't make you fluent, but you'll have all of the vocabulary and it will vastly shorten the time it takes for you to learn the language," the old woman said and continued, "I'll do the same for a better cultivation method, as well."

I frowned, "What's wrong with this Five Phase Method that I have been using?"

"It's crap. It's one of the most common methods around, and you don't have high compatibility with a five-element method anyway. You'll spend five times the amount of time for half the results. You have a ridiculously high compatibility for yin energy. It's the reason you can live in this place. You'll want a method that takes advantage of that. I have two options, but..." she seemed hesitant at the end.

Well, she sounded really sure and was the expert. I didn't know how fast or slow this was supposed to take. I was curious at her hesitance and asked, "But what?"

"The best one requires that you have maintained your primal yin energy all the way to the Foundation Establishment realm. But it is quite good and the manual I have goes all the way to the Celestial Immortal realm, which is incredibly rare. The other one is about as good, but the manual stops at the Nascent Soul stage," she tried to explain, but she seemed to be using words that Comprehend Language couldn't quite translate.

I asked, flummoxed, "What is primal yin energy? What is the Baby Soul realm?"

"Nascent. Nascent. And primal yin energy is what every female is born with... I'm asking if you're still a virgin," she said, finally becoming blunt about what she wanted to know.

I frowned. I've never had sex with Merildwen's body, obviously, but by any measure, I probably wouldn't qualify. I wasn't a virgin in my past life, nor was Merildwen, so I couldn't say either my soul or body was virginal. 

Honestly, having the memories of her having a few sexual encounters, with men, were some of the things I had been trying to compartmentalise or forget, especially considering how much she had enjoyed herself. 

Talk about body dysmorphia. I didn't really feel at home living in her body yet, but I suspected that even when I had, my sexual preferences wouldn't have changed, so the memories were a bit unwelcome. 

It kind of reminded me of a few books by William Gibson, set in a cyberpunk future where you could experience the life and sex life of people vicariously through sensorium-broadcasting cybernetics. At least, I tried compartmentalising that way, although it was a bit difficult.

Finally, I said, "No, I'm not a virgin." That was the safest answer, and I didn't want to explode because I would like to say otherwise.

"Then it will be the Heavenly Dance of Moonlight Scripture, it's quite good but I only found half the book by fluke. If and when you get to Nascent Soul realm, you'll have to either find the rest, switch to another cultivation method, or deduce your own path to Immortality from there. You'll definitely have to dissipate your current entire cultivation base to start this method, though," she said, not seeming to judge my answer to her at all. From what I could tell from the one history I read, it was very much a culture where a young woman was expected to stay a maiden until marriage, but that had just been a mundane history. 

It was possible that if you were a female cultivator, you were outside of most of the expectations of regular society. It was kind of like that in Merildwen's world, which was a great reason for young women to study magic.

But lose all my progress? I hissed, "Why? It took a long time to get this much!" I hated wasting time.

"Absolutely. It'd be like building a house on quicksand. If you didn't, you'd suffer Qi deviation and die before the year is out. Don't worry, you'll definitely save time overall. You're just barely started," she coaxed.

I sighed, "But if I manage to get to this Baby Soul stage, will I need to start over from scratch again? That seems bad."

"Nascent. And no. You'll be limited to methods which are similar to this, though. So only yin cultivation methods... well, perhaps single-element ones, if they are highly yin-aspected, like water to ice. And maybe a Yin-Yang method, or Taiji," she paused to consider and said something that made little sense, "After all, from zero comes one, from the infinite Wuji comes the supreme Taiji, and then from one comes two from the supreme Taiji comes the Duality of Yin and Yang, and then from two comes four and so on."

"Absolutely none of that made any sense," I admitted. I had only been really reading the practical directions in the Five Phase Manual. How it directed me to move energy around, basically, and I had been ignoring the philosophy. 

If I proceeded down this "cultivation" path long enough, would I be required to actually comprehend what all of this philosophy and metaphysics meant? It would be hard. I was an engineer, and Merildwen was a wizard. Neither of them was really down to accept unverifiable axioms.

Still, I had gotten some information from her earlier about what some cultivators at the Baby Soul stage could do, and it was on the level of turning a mountain to gravel with a punch. That was stronger than some actual divinities in Merildwen's last world. And she said that she was a nobody. On the lower levels where I was at, I figured that Wizardry was a lot more flexible, though.

The possibility of combining the both was intriguing and even if it wasn't, this was even a crueller world than Borea. From what I've learned, if I didn't get stronger, my life would consist entirely of some strong person holding me upside down by the ankles and shaking my gold coins out of my pockets repeatedly, forever. 

I also didn't want someone to take a fancy to my exotic looks and coerce me into a marriage, and that was before anyone found out how long elvenoids could live. I could see myself becoming an experimental subject or, possibly a broodmare, or both if I wasn't careful. That would be a sad end.

My ears were a bit hard to hide, though, unless I used magic, and when I did I could only do it for an hour at a time with Disguise Self. Although, who knew? I had gotten Major Image to run for several weeks straight by incorporating one of Big Chungus' ice stones, so I knew illusions longer than standard was possible.

While my ears weren't as long as anime elves or a Blood Elf from World of Warcraft, they were quite a bit longer than the traditional Tolkien-style elf, and they poked out of my hair even when I kept my hair styled to hide them.

They could also move a little bit, kind of like a cat to track sound. Although Merildwen thought that fact was deeply embarrassing for some reason and hated it when someone noticed she moved them. Personally, I thought it was cool.

She sighed, "You'll have options. So, are you willing?"

My conclusion was that I didn't really have a choice.

I nodded, "Fine." You'd think I'd be more accustomed to knowledge being dumped into my head, but really, it never gets any easier. I winced and, sat down on a chair and threw the ring back to the young man who was standing there during our entire mental conversation. I checked my mental dictionary for the word for "thank you" and said it after a couple of attempts, "Xiè, xie..."

He grinned and gave me two thumbs up.

---xxxxxx---

A couple of days later, the young man, who was named Xiao Li, was feeling well enough to get out of bed and offered to teach me martial arts, specifically swordsmanship. I had told him he was free to take any of the swords the skeletons had to replace the one that those two guys stole from him, and he suggested he assist me in learning, partially in compensation for the "good sword" I had given him.

He had selected one of the swords I got teleported with, a thin, elvish longsword. It hadn't been made of mithril or anything, just normal high-grade elvish steel. He seemed slightly amused at the larger guard that this sword had compared to the swords I had taken and repaired in the city.

"Why do I need to learn swordsmanship or even any martial arts?" I asked curiously. Both he and his grandma were talking as though it was a given that I should. Although I didn't think this was a game, and I was sure that Multiclass mechanics didn't exist, at the same time, I didn't really want to shift my focus away from spells too much, "Certainly, there are cultivators who focus mainly on spells, right?"

While I wasn't anywhere near fluent in the language, part of Merildwen's wizardry training was speaking clearly any possible phoneme and remembering arbitrary ones. Saying the wrong verbal component when you cast a spell usually just caused the spell to fail, but people were known to explode occasionally if they were casting especially energetic spells. So the words came a bit easily, while the grammar was another story as I often reversed subject and verb order, butchered inflexion or forgot to say certain particles. 

But I was at the stage where I could be understood, so that was Great Success.

I also had already dissipated all of the Qi in my body, which, while simple, was very uncomfortable. The action felt deeply unnatural, as my body and spiritual circulation system wanted desperately to hold onto it. If I had to describe it, it was like both relaxing and tensing your muscles at the same time and then farting. Honestly, that wasn't a very good way to describe it, now that I thought about it.

Still, the old lady was right. The progress I was making with the new cultivation method, the Heavenly Dance of Moonlight Scripture, was at least two orders of magnitude faster than before, even if I had to mentally re-read the first part of the book over and over and over. It was a lot more difficult to understand, and having it shoved into my brain didn't help that at all.

Xiao Li frowned, "Yes, there are. But... even they still at least practice martial arts, especially in the early stage. As for why..." He frowned and then brightened and nodded. 

Then he seemingly vanished from across the room and appeared in front of me, pointing his sword directly at my head, before saying, "That's why, basically. You need to defend yourself from purely physical attacks while you attack with spells. There are defensive spells, but according to Grandma Mei, they aren't really that good until at least you establish your Violet Palace and enter the Foundation Establishment. Practising a Martial Art will improve your reaction speed and allow you to see and avoid attacks better at your same level." He lowered the sword and asked, hypothetically, "Also, if you can dodge or parry an attack, why bother wasting your precious Qi to defend against it? A lot of fights between cultivators devolve into who runs out of energy first, after all."

Ah. So, defensive techniques didn't scale very well at the entry-level of cultivation. Not only that, they used a lot of energy. But, I didn't particularly like being reminded that even weakened from being raised from the dead, this kid was significantly stronger to me, to the point where I barely saw him move. 

Mrs Mei had found a way to speak audibly while Xiao Li carried her and agreed, "It's really a good idea, even if you have no fate as a sword cultivator like Li'er."

I nodded, having been convinced, and when he asked me to pick up a sword for practice, I selected one of the thin, slightly curved ones that somewhat reminded me of a slightly shorter Japanese katana. Xiao Li looked at me, his face unamused, "Wen, that's a sabre." The actual word he used was the same base word used for kitchen cutlery, actually, but I had since heard him use it in context and realised what he was saying.

"Well, I mean, it's still a sword, isn't it?" I asked, confused. I might as well have told him I kicked his puppy! He wasn't even angry; he was just confused and disappointed.

Mrs Mei interrupted with an interesting question, "Mei Wen, what do you think underpins the way the world works?"

I sighed. The older woman was a lot more down with the Socratic method when trying to teach me something; it reminded me of the way Merildwen's parents did. "According to the Heavenly Dance of Moonlight Scripture chapters I have read, the Heavenly Dao."

"Yes, but what is a Dao?" she pressed.

That was a better question, "I don't really know? A path. I know that there are many of them, though. Like the Dao of Water, the Dao of Fire, and so on."

"There are innumerable Daos, some of which are larger or more complete than others. But they all end at the same place. For example, it is rare for someone to immediately try to gain insight into the Dao of Water. Perhaps they approach it from the Dao of Raindrops first. This is a bit of an advanced topic since you don't really need to bother about this until you've created your Jindan or your Golden Core, but I think it is important that you need to know that the underpinnings of the entire world, how it functions, are concepts."

Okay, I hadn't really thought of it that way, but that made some sense. The concept of Water was somewhat different from the physics of water and liquids that I was thinking of from Earth or even the element of Water from Merildwen's world. Still, I didn't quite understand what she was saying.

She continued, "One Dao, obviously, is the Sword Dao. It is based, conceptually, on the fundamentals of what makes up a sword. Nobody is really sure if this concept existed as the world was created because nobody had invented a sword yet or if it is more malleable and was created the first time some distant ancestor created one. I tend to favour the latter possibility, but from your perspective, it doesn't matter. You're not trying to be a sword cultivator, but trying to practice swordsmanship with a sabre will produce less results because you're going against the collective, conceptual idea of what a sword is."

Xiao Li took that as a hint to hold out his own sword, "A sword. At its most basic, it has two sharp edges, a straight flat, a point, a hilt, and a guard. What's in your hand is a sabre, single-edged and curved. I'm also not very good at sabre techniques, so you'll have to pick up a sword."

I rolled back on the balls of my feet as if I'd been struck and tried to absorb what the old woman had said. She seemed to think that what I called and thought of something would drastically alter the way I was able to learn it. If I picked up a sword and called it a spear but practised it diligently, I would get little or no good results from my practice.

  I wanted to say this was deeply unscientific, but I wasn't exactly in a scientific world anymore. If anything, this world seemed even more magical than Merildwen's. Finally, I nodded and, sat the sabre down and picked up a simple sword that I had salvaged from one of the villagers. It was blunt, but Xiao Li said that wouldn't matter for now.

He nodded, sighing with relief, and said, "Before I show you some basic sword forms, I think it's important... especially with your misunderstanding before, for you to understand both what a sword is physically and its purpose." He blinked and then got a smile on his face as if he thought of something clever, "The purpose of a sword is deeply linked to the concept of a sword."

This little brat seemed to enjoy playing the teacher, but I would go along with it for now. I glanced down at the sword in my hand, hoping this wasn't a trick question. It was a weapon, so... I replied questioningly, "A sword's purpose is to kill people?" I mean, it was a weapon

Xiao Li jumped up and down in excitement, waving his own sword, and grinned, "Yes! Yes! Excellent, Mei Wen! That's exactly right! Don't ever try to make it more complicated than that. My father told me this. You wouldn't believe how many people will say some nonsense about how a sword is supposed to protect people or something along those lines."

He shook his head, "A sword is a tool made for killing. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it." He then held out his own sword, "Always keep that in mind, as well as each part of the sword. How do you kill with the point?" He did a thrust into the air. 

"How do you kill with the sharp edges?" which he followed with by a couple of cuts into the air, "How do you kill with the flat? How do you kill with the guard? How do you kill with the hilt?"

Wow, this boy was edgy as fuck! I had the complicated desire to both laugh and cry, as few people would get my puns or popular culture references anymore.

Still, if the world was driven by concepts instead of physics, then he had a good point. The ultimate purpose of a weapon was to kill. I had known that from a lifetime of handling them, so it wasn't a surprise to me. But it could have been something I would have not forgotten exactly but disregarded after I had accepted the concept. It sounded like keeping both the idea of what a particular weapon was as well as the purpose of the weapon well in mind while practising would produce better results here.

"I'll let the two of you practice. Xiao Li is really an incredible talent with the sword for his age," Mrs Mei said before returning to silence.

---xxxxxx---

A few days later, I woke up and felt the tell-tale vibration in the air, and my eyes widened. I sat up and went to Xiao Li's room, knocking on the door, "Get up! We have to leave the village; it's going to reset in about eight hours."

His door opened, and he grinned, "Awesome! Hey, hey, Mei Wen..."

I tilted my head to the side and asked, "Yes?"

"Can I have the lotus that appears? I still kind of need it so I won't explode," he said hesitantly.

I snorted, "You should have asked me earlier. I have five more flowers in pots downstairs. But sure. You have to fight Big Chungus yourself for it, though."

"It wouldn't really matter. I left all of my alchemy equipment back in a rented Immortal cave back in the city," he said, shrugging his shoulders, "So me and Grandma Mei can't refine the pill I need until we leave anyway." Then he paused and said, "Oooh... you have five of them? We'll help you sell them when we go back to the city."

Wait... I frowned, "Leave?" I was about to say, "But this is my home," but even I realised how weird that sounded. This was obviously not my home. Still, I was kind of attached to this place.

He stared at me as if I was a very special person, "Uhhh... you didn't expect that we'd stay here indefinitely, right? I'd die if I tried that. I'm not sure how I can explain how uncomfortable this place is for me. Besides... you can't learn the culture of this continent while hiding away from everything."

I mean... yeah, I suppose. I sighed. I kind of knew this was coming, anyway. The time it took to reset this place was growing a few days longer every reset. This time, it had been base plus five days. If I stayed here forever, would I eventually just "use up" all of the energy here? I didn't know.

"Also, I need to go and kill Old Gu and Chen," he said brightly, causing me to raise an eyebrow.

I asked, slightly amused, "Are you so invested in revenge?"

He paused and said, clenching his fist and making the mean face of a man who had obviously held a grudge, "Ahahaha... of course not! I don't hold grudges!"

"Mmmhmm..." I said.

He shrugged, "Besides, even if I hadn't, it would be necessary. I can't just come back to life... such a thing isn't impossible, but it is quite unusual. If we leave Old Gu and Chen alive to keep gabbing away, then more people might notice my remarkable recovery. Most people would assume that they're just incompetent, but who knows? Best to nip it in the bud."

I paused, "Is it really that miraculous?"

He tilted his head to the side, "Yes and no. My soul hadn't reached the Netherworld Kingdom yet, so it wasn't like reviving me was impossible. But soul cultivators are rare, and by the time they become more common... well... at that point, dying and even leaving your soul behind becomes the exception rather than the rule. So it's less miraculous and more unusual."

Grandma Mei had mentioned that. By the time Nascent Soul and possibly even Golden Soul cultivators fought, they could punch you and eradicate your soul. With a punch! Even One Punch Man couldn't do that, I didn't think.

So it was possible, but it took the equivalent of a lot higher cultivation realm than I had. And by the time it was possible, it wasn't often needed. So, his coming back to life might imply he had the backing of someone far above our level, which would produce interest. Since I intended to travel with him for the time being, that would be bad.

I nodded. That made sense, then, to silence those two guys. Well, I wouldn't be involved. I lived long enough as a man to understand this was something Xiao Li intended to do himself. 

Xiao Li finished with a self-deprecating chuckle, "Uhh... besides, I have to go back to the city and get all of my belongings I left there. I really need to refine this pill soon."

Ah, yes. I supposed it was inevitable then. I sighed and looked at the dilapidated nexus of necromantic energy that had become my home for, perhaps, the last time.