The Undying Immortal System Chapter 103: Life 62, Age 16, Martial Disciple 1

Upon death, mories of my past lives were stored in my soul. As ti passed, they would slowly be pushed further down, causing to not think too deeply about them unless I actively sought to recall sothing.

Sitting in my tiny shack in the Su Clan, I focused on the mories from the life that just ended and did everything I could to keep them from fading. I needed to understand what happened to . I needed to understand what went wrong.

My soul was in tatters. Fighting against my body for so long. Cutting itself away and breaking my mind into two. My soul had experienced more trauma than I had ever thought possible. I had pushed myself to the absolute limit to defeat my cultivation-mad body, and I had only barely been able to force myself in a position where it was possible to bring that life to an end.

mories of my past life passed over through my mind. I started to rember everything that happened with M–

My soul began to collapse even further. I quickly created a barrier in my mind, willing a wall to block from thinking about the last years of my life. I wasn’t ready to face that. Not yet.

I took a deep breath.

If I only counted gains and losses, my last life was a huge success. I had gained hundreds of millions of credits, skills beyond what I could have hoped for, and ideas that could change the entire continent.

On a personal level, though, the life had been a complete ss.

What went wrong? When did everything start spiraling out of control?

I thought back to when I had created my dantian. I wasn’t being careful. I’d made mistakes, and it was leaking qi from the very beginning, but I had never considered it important enough to go back and fix. Possibly, my errors at that stage had caused my ntal state to beco more unbalanced than it should’ve been. Possibly, ascending to Lord had so kind of amplifying effect on the ntal state of cultivators that I was unaware of. I just wasn’t sure.

When I had purchased the cultivation technique from the system, I had requested it to do three things. The first was to enhance my personability. In retrospect, this had clear limitations. My social skills have always been limited. The cultivation technique only did its best to force to act in what I thought was an appropriate manner, but my own limitations stopped it from being as effective as it otherwise might have been.

When addressing my ministers, I did my best to be what I thought was required, to be ‘lordly.’ When I talked with Her, I did my best to appear to be a friend. When I talked with the various clans, I tried to be a good negotiator. These attempts were all flawed by my own inability to handle the different situations.

This was most evident in how I had dealt with the queen. I had been told not to reject her, but how was I supposed to do that? She was the type of person who wouldn’t take no for an answer. How do I approach a situation where I can neither agree nor refuse? I don’t know how to handle that. My inability to do so is what caused that interaction to end so poorly.

From what I could tell, though, that part of my cultivation technique had little impact on how things ended. It did its part, and it was part of the reason I acted the way I did, but it was the other two aspects of my technique that had determined the final outco.

I designed my cultivation technique to be exactly what I thought I wanted: dedication and focus. Focus on what I wanted to do. Dedicate myself to a task. I had never survived more than 80 years after a restart, but cultivators are supposed to be able to live for hundreds. For a Lord, it was possible to live to be 400 years old. If I were to live that long, dedication and focus had seed to be important traits that would keep on track and doing what I needed to do.

Well, it worked. I set myself the goal of getting the fire seed as early as possible. Early in that life, I had felt lost and undirected, so I had decided to simply follow Her wherever She felt She needed to go. After I set out on my own, though, it was the cultivation technique that kept working and moving forward.

I had to acknowledge that I probably wouldn’t have achieved even half of what I did in that life if it weren’t for the cultivation technique continually forcing to improve my alchemy and formation abilities and to research how to connect the two together. I was grateful that it had helped in that regard. Even after everything, I couldn’t help but feel that having those impulses pushing forward was extrely beneficial.

However, the problem was that I had completely lost control of them. The more I dedicated myself to the task of getting the fire seed, the more the dedication from the cultivation technique seed to reinforce itself. The longer it went on, the harder it was to focus on anything that didn’t directly relate to acquiring the fire seed as soon as possible. At the end, I wanted to die. I needed to die. But I couldn’t kill myself. Anyti I tried to think about doing so, I was snapped back to thoughts of how to push further forward in acquiring the seed. Tricking my mind that a path toward certain death was the best way to acquire the seed had been my only recourse.

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I didn’t know what the right balance was, and I didn’t know how to achieve that balance. I wanted to have the ability to put myself into a state of hyperfocus, where I could ignore everything around , but having it completely out of my control was unacceptable.

I could not let my cultivation technique control anymore. I need to find a way to control it.

With the general whys and wherefores firmly planted in my mind, I tried to slightly lower the wall protecting myself from what happened at the end.

My soul shuddered.

I had read Her letters to SuYin. That ant they were now part of my ntal library, and they would stay there for as long as I lived. I would never be able to forget what She wrote in them. I could put it out of my mind, but it would still be there, waiting for .

I didn’t understand my relationship with Her. Even after reading the letters, even after everything, I still felt scared of Her. I could believe that She ant no harm. I could believe that She, the woman, only wanted a friend and companion, but even after SuYin explained more about how it worked, I was still afraid of Her blessing.

I could appreciate what SuYin said about how it affected Her, about how it drove Her mad. I could accept that it might not be as omniscient as I had convinced myself it was. What I couldn’t do was convince myself that it was benign. No matter what, one truth remained above everything else. I never knew what She was thinking. I only know how She appeared to act.

That thought made laugh. I only knew how She appeared to act, but I didn’t know what She was thinking. Was SuYin any different? Did I have any better idea of what anyone was thinking? All I saw was the mask they wore, and everything else was a guess.

Thinking back through everyone I had known in this world, everyone I knew in my previous world, how well did I know what any of them were really thinking? I didn’t have the tools to understand people. I didn’t have the capacity within to grasp how anybody really felt.

Did people like ? Did people want to help ? Throughout everything, I’ve always assud the worst about people. I always assud they just wanted to take from . so I began to focus on what I could take from them.

Elder Mu in the Twin Mountains Sect. When he had transferred to the Eyes, I cast aside any obligations I felt I had toward the man, but was Elder Mu truly so heartless to ? What if he was only doing what he thought was best for and my understanding of his actions was completely off base?

What about Jiao? She treated like a friend, but after being sent to her faction, I began to treat her as nothing more than a random business partner I barely knew.

I treated everyone as if they were rcenaries only looking out for their own interests. In doing so, I beca what I thought they were.

I needed to be better.

Taking everything into account, I decided to make two purchases.

First, I needed to purchase sothing I’d been putting off for far too long. I had convinced myself that I would be able to control the ntal influences of cultivation techniques if I used them properly. I had convinced myself that if I had the perfect cultivation technique, with the exact ntal effects I wanted, it wouldn’t be so bad. These were lies that I could no longer keep telling myself. I needed a real solution.

Long ago, I had tried to purchase a cultivation technique from the system that didn’t have any ntal influences. I learned that would be impossible, so I gave up on the idea and instead focused on personal improvent to try to overco the situation. I took my susceptibility to cultivation techniques as a personal failing. While that may be true, I couldn’t continue with the status quo. I needed to change sothing.

“System, I want to purchase resistance to the ntal effects of cultivation techniques without lessening their effectiveness. I want to purchase as much resistance as possible for 25 million credits.”

ntal Resistance to Cultivation Techniques. Cost: 25,000,000 credits. Confird. 175,000,000 credits remaining.

I didn’t know how much 25 million would help . It was possible that such a purchase would barely have any effect at all. I didn’t care. I needed to do sothing. I needed to feel like I was doing sothing to protect myself.

The second purchase was sothing else that I needed. It wouldn’t help cultivate. It wouldn’t help beco more powerful. It wouldn’t help reach immortality. It would only help live a more normal life.

“System, I want to purchase an aptitude for learning how to read other people's thoughts and emotions based on their behavior. A comprehension boost for social skills. I want it to help learn to understand how people feel. I want it to help understand the true thoughts of even soone like Her who may have their emotions suppressed or controlled, whether by their blessing or another entity. I want this to at least help with anybody that doesn’t have a blessing specifically guarding them from being read in such a way. I want to purchase as much comprehension as possible with twenty-five million credits.

Increased social comprehension. Cost: 25,000,000 credits. Confird. 150,000,000 credits remaining.

I spent a quarter of my credits on two things that would not help advance, but they were things that needed to be purchased. I could worry about becoming a better cultivator, becoming a better Lord, becoming a better alchemist… I could worry about these things later. I needed things that would help be a better .

I had many more credits to spend, but I wasn’t in a rush. I didn’t want to jump back into the grind of trying to beco the best cultivator in the world. I wanted a simple life. I wanted… I wanted to be able to relax. I had to take so ti for myself.

Even as those thoughts passed through my head, urges within pushed in a different direction. I thought about the fire seed that I had spent so much ti and energy trying to acquire. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been worth everything I’d put myself through. I wanted to know. I wanted to at least see the seed, to hold it, and to know if it was worth it.

I decided that I would live a quiet life, but at the sa ti, I wouldn’t waste my ti.

Deciding on a course of action, I chose my destination. I needed to travel a long way to get where I needed to go, but the thought of going to the Blue Wind Pavilion… The thought of running into a young girl at the entrance… I couldn’t handle that situation. I had to do sothing different.

“System, how much to teleport directly to a discrete spot in the capital of the Brilliant Sun Empire?”

Cost 26,725 credits.

In the past, that amount would have been an impossible dream, but now it was a rounding error.

“Confirm.”

Purchase confird. 149,973,275 credits remaining.