Chapter 113 - 112: Mortal (2)
The transition from the River of Years Pagoda to the fabricated reality of the dream domain was instantaneous, as Lin Yuan’s consciousness slammed into his new vessel.
He gasped, drawing in a harsh, ragged breath that burned his throat and rattled painfully in his chest. His eyes snapped open, and his vision was immediately swallowed by the dim, flickering light of a single, nearly exhausted oil lamp.
He was kneeling on the floor, the cold absolute. It seeped through the thin fabric of his tunic, biting into his joints with an aching persistence he had not experienced since his earliest days in the outer-city slums.
Lin Yuan’s instincts, built over years of cultivation, surged to the surface. His first instinct was to release his aura and drive away the biting cold, as naturally as breathing.
But he knew that there was no Qi. In this dream domain, he was nothing more than a mortal. His cultivation, his spiritual energy, and all the abilities he had relied upon were completely inaccessible.
For the first time in a while, Lin Yuan had to endure the cold without using his cultivation to resist it.
He then examined his meridians. The wide, roaring rivers of energy he was accustomed to were completely dry, thin, and fragile. His dantian was nothing more than a dark, empty void. His muscles still possessed the solid strength of a well-trained martial artist, but the divine invincibility he had grown accustomed to was completely gone.
He was just a man. A fragile mortal trapped in a fragile, decaying world.
Then...
"Rong’er..." a small, trembling voice whimpered from the shadows.
Lin Yuan blinked, his mundane, human eyes adjusting to the dim light. He realized he was kneeling beside a humble, low wooden bed. The blankets were threadbare and heavily patched.
Lying beneath those blankets was a woman. Su Rong.
The domain instantly fed the memories into Lin Yuan’s mind, seamlessly integrating them into his identity. She was his wife in this lifetime. She was not a peerless celestial beauty like Bai Qingyue, possessing a flawless talent for cultivation. Su Rong was a simple, ordinary woman. Her face was pale, gaunt, and hollowed out by months of a relentless, wasting fever. Her breath came in shallow, wet rasps that sounded like tearing paper.
Kneeling on the other side of the bed, clutching her limp, freezing hand, was a small boy no older than seven. Lin Fan. His son. The boy’s face was streaked with dirt and tears, his small shoulders shaking violently with suppressed sobs.
"Father..." Lin Fan looked up at Lin Yuan, his large, red eyes filled with an agonizing, desperate hope. "The medicine... the apothecary said the new medicine would make her sweat the fever out. Why is she so cold? Why won’t she wake up?"
Lin Yuan looked at the small clay bowl resting on a nearby stool, filled with a foul-smelling, black sludge. It was a mundane herbal concoction. To a cultivator, it was less than garbage. A single, low-grade Qi Condensation pill—a trash item Lin Yuan wouldn’t even bother picking up off the street in the real world—could have cured this mortal illness in seconds.
But he didn’t have one. He couldn’t open his spatial ring. He couldn’t summon a single spark of Qi.
Lin Yuan just stared at the bed, his mind suddenly overwhelmed by a terrifying realization. Not long ago, he would have been able to save this woman with nothing more than a thought. A strand of Qi, a single pill, even the most basic healing technique would have been enough to pull her back from the edge of death. Yet now, standing in this mortal body, he could not even do that.
His gaze slowly shifted toward the woman’s pale face, and for a moment, that face was no longer hers.
It became Bai Qingyue’s.
A chill ran through his heart.
What if Qingyue were lying there instead?
What if his cultivation were truly sealed away, his, and all his divine abilities stripped from him?
Would he simply stand there and watch her suffer?
Would he be powerless to save the woman he had sworn to protect?
As expected, life and death were often determined by one’s ability to command the power of Heaven and Earth. To be a mortal was to accept that there were things in this world that seemed as easy as breathing to even the simplest cultivator, yet to a mortal, accomplishing those same things could feel like trying to cross an ocean in a single step, Lin Yuan thought.
Su Rong’s eyelids fluttered. She slowly, agonizingly turned her head toward him. Her eyes were dull, the light of life rapidly retreating into the abyss. She reached out with a trembling, skeletal hand, her cold fingers brushing against Lin Yuan’s cheek.
"Yuan..." she whispered, her voice so fragile it barely disturbed the stale air of the room.
"I am here, Rong’er," Lin Yuan replied. To his own profound shock, his voice cracked. A hot, stinging tear—a genuine expression of human sorrow—spilled over his eyelid and ran down his cheek, wetting her fingertips.
Why was he crying?
It had to be a reflex caused by the memories the dream domain had placed within him. His consciousness had already begun to align with this reality, and with that alignment came emotions that felt frighteningly real.
This was sorrow, but a different kind of sorrow.
It was the sorrow of being punished not because you failed to try, but because you were simply too weak to change the outcome.
"Don’t... don’t try to conquer the world anymore," Su Rong breathed, her chest struggling to rise. "It is too heavy for one man. Just... look after our boy. Make sure Fan’er eats well. Keep him warm in the winter. Don’t force him to fight if he doesn’t want to... just let him grow up happy."
"I will," Lin Yuan choked out, the suffocating weight of the promise pressing down on his chest like a mountain. "I swear it."
Su Rong’s smile lingered for a fraction of a second longer. Then, her hand went entirely limp, sliding off his cheek and falling heavily onto the thin mattress. Her chest stopped moving. The faint, wet rasping of her breath ceased entirely.
The silence that followed was the loudest, most deafening sound Lin Yuan had ever experienced.
In the cultivation world, death was often a violent transition, a dazzling explosion of severed cultivation. It was a failure of the Dao. But here, in this dim room, death was just an absolute end. It was the permanent theft of a soul, leaving behind nothing but an empty shell.
"Mother?" Lin Fan whispered, leaning over the bed. He shook her shoulder gently. "Mother, wake up. The sun is going to rise soon. You promised to mend my tunic today."
She did not move.
The realization hit the seven-year-old boy like a physical blow. Lin Fan let out a wail that tore straight through the core of Lin Yuan’s being. It was a sound of pure devastation. The boy scrambled over the bed, clutching his father’s robes, burying his face in Lin Yuan’s chest.
"Father, wake her up!" Lin Fan screamed, his small fists weakly pounding against Lin Yuan’s chest. "You are the strongest martial artist in the district! You can break stones with your bare hands! Why can’t you wake her up?! Please, make her breathe!"
Lin Yuan wrapped his arms around the small, trembling body of his son. He held the boy tightly against his chest, burying his face in Lin Fan’s hair. The strongest martial artist in the district. The Late Stage Nascent Soul Expert. Neither title meant absolutely anything in this reality.
He experienced the raw grief of losing a loved one without the emotional buffer of an immortal lifespan. There was no higher purpose to this tragedy, no karmic cycle to analyze, and no enemy to annihilate in revenge. There was only the crushing absence of a wife and a mother.
The next twenty-four hours were a blur of exhausting misery.
The funeral was not a grand affair with soaring spirit-beasts and jade coffins. It was a brutal, grueling physical labor. Lin Yuan had to sell the last of their decent furniture just to afford a cheap, splintering pine box. He carried it on his own shoulders up a muddy, rain-slicked hill on the outskirts of the town. With his bare hands and a rusted iron shovel, he dug the grave himself.
By the time the dirt covered the wooden box, Lin Yuan’s hands were covered in bloody blisters. His back ached, as he stood in the freezing rain, holding a silent, hollow-eyed Lin Fan under a frayed umbrella, staring at the unmarked mound of wet earth.
When they finally returned to their dilapidated martial arts school that evening, the building felt suffocatingly empty. The hearth was cold. The cupboards were completely bare.
Lin Yuan put the exhausted, grieving child to bed, wrapping him in every spare piece of clothing they owned to ward off the damp chill. He sat alone in the dark main hall of the dojo, staring at the wooden training dummies, the silence of the illusion pressing down upon him, forcing him to stew in his own profound mortality.
The night slowly gave way to a bleak, gray dawn.
Lin Yuan was just beginning to stir from a fitful, exhausted doze on the wooden floor when the silence of the morning was violently shattered.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
A loud, violent, and aggressive pounding echoed through the dojo, threatening to tear the front doors right off their rusted iron hinges.
"Open up, Lin Yuan!" a harsh, guttural voice roared from the street outside. "The Black Tiger Gang is here! The grace period for your wife’s medicine is over! Bring out the silver, or we’ll take the deed to this pathetic shack and throw you and your brat out!"