Chapter 105: Drugged Up

Chapter 105: Drugged Up

There was a knock on my door and I frowned. I was losing track of time investigating my cultivation in depth. The deeper I looked, the more time I was losing. I had been thinking constantly over the reason, but there was no good explanation with what I knew about cultivation.

“Enter,” I said with a frown. An older man entered my cabin.

“Master,” the old man bowed his head. “I wanted to pay my last respects before I depart.” The voice sounded familiar.

“Come, let us have tea,” I said while trying to figure out who I was talking to. The old man sat down as I prepared some tea.

“You have been quiet for a long time. Even Elder Tan was getting a bit worried,” the man said. I weighed my thoughts and decided to get a second opinion. I doubt it would help, but losing time like I had, was not a good thing in my mind. It made the trip pass by more quickly, but I was unsure as to my lifespan. It could also be some effect as I got closer to the center of the Great World.

“I have experienced something unexpected,” I said as I poured out both cups of tea. It then hit me who this old man was. “Fu Shirong.” The man who had decided to come with me and who was handling travel arrangements for a while.

“Yes? What is the problem Master?” he asked. I shook my head slowly.

“I have been losing track of time,” I replied while I sipped my tea.

“While cultivating?” he asked and I nodded. “How badly?”

“Between you entering this cabin, and my last visitor, how long would you say it has been?” I asked.

“Not since the end of the Leaf Woof battle. That was over three decades ago,” he said.

“About thirty days from my perspective,” I replied and there was silence at that.

“Did you lose yourself in cultivation or something else?” Fu Shirong hesitantly asked while sipping his tea. For being so old, it had not lost its flavor. There was also a very small coating of dust that covered everything in the cabin.

“Something else. The deeper I tried to peer, the greater the impact on my perception. This shouldn’t be happening, which is concerning,” I explained.

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Fu Shirong said. “Do you want me to get Elder Tan?” he asked and I shook my head.

“No. The fact that I reacted to a knock on the door shows that I am not disabled. My personal age does not seem to be impacted either,” I replied. There was silence, while I was still trying to work out what had happened. For me only a short time had passed, but everyone else had experienced decades.

“I suspect it has to do with a limitation on the cultivation of the Great World,” I said out loud and sipped my tea, trying to put my thoughts in order. “More concerning is no one bothered me in the last couple of decades. Storms, leviathans?” I asked.

“We have handled all of it Master. The fleet has grown. The great pilgrimage to the center of the Great World. Many more cultivators have joined up. They often wonder if you are real, but enough people have seen you,” he answered.

“As long as we have kept moving towards the center of the Great World, then I have no complaint. But you did not come here to listen to my problems, you are leaving?” I asked.

“I am old. My cultivation has stagnated. Rather than continue onwards, I would rather settle down somewhere, on a mountain, looking out over a peaceful valley,” Fu Shirong said. He had clearly changed in the last couple of decades. But that was the nature of mortals, to change as their bodies decayed. Their hopes and dreams unfulfilled.

“You have my blessing and permission to depart. Take some money and supplies so you don’t encounter problems,” I said. Fu Shirong bowed his head deeply.

“Thank you Master,” he said. “I am sorry, I cannot help you any more after all that you have done for me.”

“Think nothing of it,” I said and he quickly left my cabin. I rang a bell and a servant quickly entered.

“This place needs dusting and the tea set needs to be put away,” I ordered as I got up. The servant quickly left to get supplies while I left the cabin. I looked at the withered face of Vice Leader Tan who was just finishing a conversation with Fu Shirong. He looked at me in surprise and then smiled.

“Greetings Senior,” he bowed his head.

“Junior,” I replied with a small nod. Fu Shirong had already left. Saying a second goodbye was pointless. “I have heard you have expanded the number of cultivators that are traveling with us?”

“It is the Great Pilgramige to the center of the Great World. Many senior cultivators or those hoping to see sights no one has seen before have joined us. Already our fleet it quite large, but we have encountered no serious problems,” he explained.

“It is fine. I am just curious,” I replied as we walked out onto the deck of the ship. There were other ships traveling with us along with other cultivators on board. I saw many of them quickly look at me in surprise.

“There is still quite a ways to go. Decades more,” Vice Leader Tan said. “I have appointed my replacement for when I pass. Junior Wei has been listening to me for quite a while.” A middle aged woman stepped forward from the other cultivators standing on the deck of my ship. She bowed deeply.

“Junior Wei greets Senior Yuan Zhou,” she said. I gave her a slight head nod and then looked back at Vice Leader Tan.

“Do as you see fit, as long as our progress is not stopped. If there is ever a serious problem, you can disturb me,” I said this both to Tan and Wei. No wonder why senior cultivators kept their distance. The moment you get to know someone, they were leaving or dying.

“Of course. Is there anything you need before you go back into seclusion?” Vice Leader Tan asked me. I considered the question.

“Do you know of any stories where cultivators have lost time while cultivating or their perception of time altered?” I asked. Vice Leader Tan frowned as he considered my question.

“No. Nothing comes to mind. Not even legendary tales,” he replied. I let out a soft hum at that answer. It was not the one I wanted, but one I expected. There was something weird going on and it was annoying I could tell what the root cause was.

“Senior, I may have information,” Junior Wei said and bowed deeply. Already she was proving herself useful.

The poison was acting as a filter for my perceptions. It was tied to the key locations in my brain. The more I focused, the more the poison became agitated, which caused the pain. Normally I would focus and feel with my energy what something was, like an extra limb or sense. This information was translated by my brain.

The poison was beyond clever, since it would match the strength of a person’s cultivation. The stronger the cultivator, the more energy the poison was able to absorb. It would then release that energy slowly back into the brain, causing one’s perception of time to be messed with, while still getting feedback.

Focusing intently used the parts of my brain where the poison was concentrated, allowing it to become more active. When I focused on my brain itself, I was getting feedback that didn’t match what I was seeing and the poison grew more agitated, since my focus increased the amount of energy a small fraction, upsetting the balance the poison had created.

While it might be called a sap or a drug, it was ultimately a poison for me. The effects truly were crippling. If I pushed to observe it more, or attempt to remove it, it would output more and more energy in a way my brain was not meant to handle. I would suffer a brain bleed at best, and my head would explode in the worst-case scenario.

Consuming food and drink might help, but this was a plant-based drug. And from its sap as well. Refined through millennia of selective breeding. There was no chance I would be able to remove it on my own. I needed someone else to go in and remove the sap from me.

Or I could attempt to remove it myself before we reached our destination. I would have a couple of minutes at most to remove the poison, which in turn would be centuries from an outside perspective. The problem was it was spread out and interlocked with various portions of my brain like a cancer. Directly intercepting the signals between neurons.

Since the poison was empowered by the cultivation of the cultivator who used the stuff, there was a good chance I would be cutting out a portion of my own brain while trying to remove it. And it had to come out if I wanted to improve my cultivation. Other people might think losing large chunks of time would speed things up, but they were idiots.

I needed to make every moment count to improve my cultivation and to figure out how to improve it. Wasting time lost to this poison was a death sentence.

After I finished eating, I inspected my body in ten minute intervals. The poison remained. I attempted to slowly just impact one small portion of the poison in my brain. But I was shaken awake just as I got a look at the poison.

Sitting in my cabin, another cultivator was sitting off to the side with a glass of sand. They would check in on me every ten minutes, unless I ordered otherwise. Even though I wasn’t focused on my cultivation, I didn’t want to lose more time.

I would have my minions inquire about cures, or similar poisons in the cities we passed by, but I wasn’t optimistic. At this point, things were so bad that I was even considering turning around. I would lose around forty years going all the way back and returning, but the trip to the center of the Great World was far longer than that.

The people following me would be quite upset losing so much time which was another consideration. The ship was being seen to by cultivators who had elected to go on a pilgrimage to the center of the Great World. If they left me, then it would be much more difficult to travel.

Sure, some would stick around, but I could also see resentment building. I wanted to scream in rage, since I had never even considered such a poison. One that doesn’t harm and might even be considered beneficial. The real problem was my danger sense.

It was something that was innate to each cultivator, that grew stronger with their cultivation. The most I knew about it was that danger sense was derived from the fluctuations caused by a cultivator’s death or injury rippling through time itself. The shock of being hurt or killed, was greater the more powerful the cultivator, which increased the danger sense.

Senior Yang Heng said it was an innate part of being a cultivator, and there were many explanations. The real danger was something that could kill without trigger this danger sense. He mentioned this in relation to cultivators or weapons using temporal techniques, which was considered beyond advanced and incredibly risk to pursue as the focus of one’s cultivation.

That was why Chaos monsters were so dangerous as well. They could bypass cause and effect, which would bypass a cultivator’s danger sense to varying degrees. As for danger sense being something echoing through time itself, he had said better minds than me had considered such a question but if they had discovered anything he did not know.

I needed my body to reject the poison on its own and expel it. To force my cultivation to resist the poison. The problem was that the sap blended in very well into my brain and took in my energy and released it. It was the perfect method of stealth and its impact evaded my danger sense. Since it would only kill me by sucking up my time and I would die a natural death eventually.

If I couldn’t continue my journey of cultivation, it was better to die than to give up. I had made this choice many times in the past and I made it again. It was time to take a risk, but I had finally come up with a possible solution to deal with this problem. I began focusing on my internal energy and increasing the amount in my head as slowly as possible. I was shaken every ten minutes and gave a response while doing this, making sure I did not lose track of time, which I wasn’t.

My plan to deal with the poison was to adjust the poison itself. I would increase the energy in my head over time, more and more. Eventually the level of energy in my head would be incredibly high. I would then normalize the amount of energy in my head, which would reveal the poison, since it would retain that high energy state.

I would be able to observe the poison and remove it without succumbing to its effects. The energy used to observe and remove the poison from my body would be below the threshold for triggering it. That was how I knew it was something used in desperation.

If the poison was really insidious, then I wouldn’t be able to increase the energy of the poison after it had set in place, in my brain without my knowledge. However, the sap was still in flux. The trick was not increasing the energy too quickly. It was incredibly slow, taking weeks of slowly increasing the energy in my head slowly.

I had cultivators check on me every ten minutes, to make sure my perception of time was not being impacted in the slightest. I wouldn’t take the risk of losing years or even decades to this poison. After the first five weeks, I had an understanding of how quickly I could increase the amount of energy in my head.

It would take an entire year of slowly increasing my energy, before the energy in my head reached the level of when I was focusing my observation on my brain. It was incredibly tedious and frustrating. If I ever went back in this direction and had a chance to stop. I would be eradicating the entire Wood Sect.

The frustration I felt about this sap was beyond immense. I had lived a long life, experienced many set backs, but this one was one I felt the most frustrated about. Not because it was the most impactful. Aoyin had a far greater impact, but that was a situation I had no control over.

Getting poisoned was something I should have expected and prevented. I would be paying attention to my breathing and what I was breathing very carefully while in combat going forward. Getting poisoned like this, was something that should have never happened to begin with.

One year of constant focus, with reminders of every ten minutes, I had managed to increase the energy in my head to match the energy I used when I focused on my brain. One of the nice things about the poison was that it somehow completely mitigated the need for sleep. I could go without sleep for long periods of time already, but somehow the poison was impacting my brain in a way I didn’t understand. The fact it was beneficial in any way made it incredibly frustrating. With a couple of tweaks, it would be a powerful medicine.

But I was going to remove the poison if possible. Even with its benefits, the downsides was too great. I let the energy drop to normal in my head, and I felt a slight headache.

I then focused my attention on the poison that was coated to parts of my brain. There were several points it was located on, but I could inspect it closely without being caught in the moment. I could respect the Wood Sect and what they had come up with, but they were still going to die horribly if I could manage it.

Now I just needed to figure out how to remove it. Focusing my energy, I tried to use a slight amount of force, to push the poison off of a neuron. I was shaken awake. I needed to increase the energy in my head even more before attempting to remove it. The energy from trying to remove the poison caused me to lose my sense of time. I had been hopeful that wouldn’t be the case, but I wasn’t going to get off that easy unfortunately. I went back to flooding my brain with energy and slowly increasing the amount for another year.

Once it was high enough, I should be able to remove the poison from my brain without losing track of time. At least that was my hope.

There were billions of neurons in my brain. About five percent were covered in poison, which equated to around five billion neurons. Removing the poison from my first neuron took around a day. If that pace kept up I would spend around 13.6 million years. I needed to fix 10 million neurons a day to get this done at a reasonable pace.

That was something I was used to. Picking up the pace and this was just an added step to my cultivation. I managed to get one done around once every ten minutes, which meant instead of 13.6 million years, I would need around 95,000 years instead.

I considered living with the poison, but the problem was that if the energy spiked in my head then I would lose track of time. Also, I had a constant headache from the portions of my brain with the poison on them, from the lack of energy now present. I needed to inspect the poison more in depth and understand how it worked to counter it wholesale.

The headaches might get worse, but my hope was my physical body would adjust and slowly begin rejecting the poison. After spending several weeks trying to remove the poison more quickly, I flooded my head with energy once more, slowly increasing the amount. The headache had gotten worse after the second time and it would undoubtedly get worse after this third time of increasing the energy and then cutting it off.

Hopefully I would be able to remove the poison more easily then. I would have to see if it changed after another session of increasing the energy and then setting things back to normal.