章 13: Ch 13 - The “Arrogant” Cultivator

Her eyes opened drowsily, her blurry vision clearing to catch sight of an unfamiliar ceiling. The chirping of birds sounded from the open window nearby as the light of the morning sun shone through.

Habitually, she checked the state of her body. Partially healed wounds, her clothes torn and singed by the battle but still faithfully preserving her modesty, her hair slightly dishevelled but mostly fine.

Most importantly, she was not restrained in way or form.

'Not kidnapped at least.' She thought to herself idly as she sat up on the bed, the blanket covering her sliding down.

She looked down at herself. While her clothes were indeed in a rough shape, her skin was surprisingly free of any dirt or dust.

'Did someone wipe me clean?' While she was indeed capable of using her qi to clean herself in an instant, it seemed it was not required for now.

She touched the blanket and the bed below her. Just from that, she could tell they were not made with the fur of any spirit beast she knew of. They lacked the subtle aura those kinds of products would have.

'Mundane materials?' She pawed at the bedding with wonder. It had been quite a while since she'd even touched a mundane piece of fabric, surrounded by specialty products as she was all the time.

She shifted back to lean her back on the headboard, the bed creaking loudly with her movement. She took a moment to look around the room she was in. It looked like it belonged to a person in poverty.

She shook her head. That was probably just her bias as a person born to fortune. A second look around left her with the opinion that the room was… homey, for lack of a better word. It was plain but cosy.

She closed her eyes and let her spirit sense spread out around her. An invisible bubble of supernatural perception spread out with her as the centre and grew to envelop the whole house.

She detected one person downstairs, a teenage boy. There was no one else.

Her spirit sense expanded, the bubble growing bigger and bigger.

'A village.' She concluded, after her senses had scanned a part of the village she found herself in. 'A mundane village.' She corrected mentally.

She frowned suddenly, noticing an irregularity in her qi circulation. She retracted her spirit sense but the irregularity didn't go away. There was an odd leech within her qi system.

She observed the leech from her mind's eye, wondering what it was. It took but a moment for her to identify its composition and its aura.

She grimaced. It was a remnant of the poison she was inflicted with from the battle.

Her blue eyes went to the golden bracelet on her left wrist. Her spirit sense explored the storage artifact and she searched for an antidote pill to neutralize the poison.

She pursed her lips. There weren't any. Not anymore at least. She'd used them all in the battle. Not even any healing pills were left.

For a moment, she contemplated burning out the poison by channelling her flames through her qi pathways.

She shook her head. She was not at a high enough level of cultivation that such a feat would be safe to perform. At her current level, she was infinitely more likely to potentially cripple herself than cleanly remove the problem.

She would just be doing the same thing her opponent from last night attempted, granting herself a painful death.

Her face turned dark as she was reminded of the battle on the mountain peak. It had been going well in the beginning, both of their powers colliding with each other, shockwaves snapping outwards with every clash, her bright flames competing for ground against the strange earthen flames of her opponent.

It was glorious. Until the point her foe revealed a hidden trump card in the form of a mutation to its typical powers. A poison attribute.

The first poison attack did most of the work for her eventual defeat. Utterly blindsiding her with its mere existence, the poison not just surprising her with its intensity but also with how potent its effects were. She had to use most of her antidote and healing pills just to not drop dead within the first minute.

Things only went downhill from there. With her opponent stepping up the intensity of all its attacks and mixing his poison attribute with all of them, she very quickly ran out of antidote pills to use.

She was just barely able to defend herself from his final attack, choosing to violently break the collision to get away relatively intact.

She gritted her teeth as the memories passed through her mind. She still remembered how she'd swaggered onto the peak, arrogantly claiming that she would defeat him and take his corpse back as proof of her deed. As if her victory was already assured despite not knowing anything about her opponent.

Oh how arrogant she'd been. She felt disgust at her own behaviour. Her past victories over other weaker opponents had clearly gone to her head, her performance in the battle was sloppy and excessively showy, lacking the refinement she knew she was capable of.

She had thought she was better than that. Clearly, she wasn't. And reality slapped her ego into the ground.

"Tsk." She couldn't help but click her tongue scornfully.

There was a moment of silence as she lost herself in her memories. Her eyes open and glaring but her mind occupied with something else entirely.

"I should have known."

She blinked her eyes. Her mind snapped out of her self-reprimanding state and focused on the present just as the words reached her ears.

Right in front of her eyes was the same handsome man – no, boy, she corrected herself – the same handsome boy who… saved her? Escorted her? She wasn't quite weak enough that she would have died last night in that forest. But whichever it was, he was the same person who carried her out of the forest she fell in after the battle.

And right now, he was… staring at her with disappointment?

She blinked again. Why was he-

"I should have known cultivators wouldn't like mundane people associating with them." He broke eye contact and walked up to the table next to the bed.

She almost flinched as he set the tray down forcefully. Without looking at her, he turned around and went back towards the door, frustration emanating from his every action.

She opened her mouth but before she could even say anything, he spoke once more, his back facing her and still not looking at her. "Hopefully, you'll leave us alone and not kill us all as stress relief or to soothe your pride or something." He spat out harshly.

He grabbed the doorknob and pulled the door closed on his way out, a faint "Sorry for bothering you" sounding out just as the door closed.

Silence filled the room.

Her mouth stayed open, her face incredulous.

… Ah, she had been lost in thought and self-disgust when he entered and clicked her tongue right as he was speaking.

She slowly closed her mouth and brought up her hands and buried her face in them.

Not only did she lose a battle due to her carelessness, she even offended the person who helped her due to the same carelessness.

She resisted the urge to groan. Rarely had she ever felt as embarrassed as she was now.

---

Shen Jian would admit that he was heavily disappointed. The feeling of having his hopes dashed right in front of him was not one he hoped to feel frequently but here he was.

"Maybe I should get used to this feeling." He mumbled as he marched towards the sparse forest, sword on his hip.

With cultivators, first he saw that elder from Mei's sect. The man's disdain for everyone around him was subtle but evident. Then, he had that episode with Mei. Her own disdain, real or faked, was also obvious. And now, the third cultivator he'd met also happened to disdain him and wasn't even hiding it.

"Why are all cultivators so… disappointing?" He muttered, feeling vexed.

He had gone to great lengths to make the woman comfortable in her moment of weakness too.

He had placed her on his parents' bed which he himself hadn't used ever since their passing, other than making sure to clean their room every day.

He'd seen she was covered in dust, sweat and blood after last night and taken it upon himself to wipe what was visible over her clothes, taking care not to disturb her while also trying not to so much as touch her skin with his own.

He had even gone and cooked breakfast for her, even though he had a vague thought that cultivators might not even actually need to eat. He'd still done so in the hope of at least making a good impression.

All of it turned out to be useless.

He stomped aggressively on a hollow log in his path, snapping it into pieces. He didn't even look at it as he continued inward, looking for something to let loose his frustrations on.

To his rapidly rising annoyance, no beast seemed to cross his path. He roamed around the forest for hours, even meeting some other villagers going out to forage some plants or herbs but he still hadn't seen a single beast.

Even as the sun travelled across the sky, the world passing from morning to noon to early dusk, he still wandered in the forest. His stomach growled in hunger but he felt a stubborn reluctance to go home so soon.

Part of him even expected the woman to rebuke him for daring to approach his own house, perhaps having claimed it as her own.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of scratching bark. He stopped immediately and focused his senses. His mind automatically switching to combat mode, he stalked through the underbrush and approached the sound.

His head popped out of a bush and he found himself face to face with a brown bear rubbing its back on a tree.

Both of them stopped and stared at each other.

Then the bear dropped to all fours and roared at him.

Shen Jian stepped out of the bush and unsheathed his sword.

A bear was comparatively rarer to find in the sparse forest, somehow maintaining their spot as top predator in the area despite being smaller than the usual oversized beasts populating the place. It probably had something to do with them being unusually strong for their size.

But it wasn't his first time facing one.

Shen Jian cracked his neck, a popping noise sounding out.

He was hoping for a good target to let loose on. He got one. And fortunately enough, he wasn't wearing his weights on this trip either so he was capable of bringing to bare his full capacity to exercise his frustrations.

How convenient.

---

The woman sat on the bed with her legs folded, her hands loosely resting on her thighs, palms facing upwards. Her damaged dress had been replaced by a similar one, this one in perfect condition. Her face was set in a calm meditative trance.

Soon however, she let out a frustrated breath and opened her eyes. Her lips thinned as she clenched her fists.

The source of her frustration was the remnant poison in her body. Despite her best efforts, she was unable to purge it from her system. She had no pills that would do the job for her and she didn't know any qi technique to accomplish the feat either.

Well no, that was wrong. She did have a jade token that contained the instructions to learn a technique to fight against toxins. The problem was that it could only be learned when she was not poisoned. Doing so while being poisoned had a high chance of spreading the poison around her body due to the inevitable trial and error involved in learning such a thing.

She observed the poison with her mind's eye. It was spreading slowly. Very slowly but it was definitely spreading.

It didn't help her case that the poison was the type that consumed her qi, a part of her natural qi generation cut off because of it. The longer it was left to fester, the more it would grow. There was essentially no chance of it getting flushed out naturally.

She would start showing visible symptoms if it grew rampant enough. And if its consumption grew to exceed her natural qi generation, then it would more or less spell her doom.

However, she wasn't a mundane civilian. It would take months at the least for it to get to that stage.

She thought about her situation for a long time and she found she had very few paths to choose to resolve this crisis.

Her ears suddenly twitched, her keen senses catching a strange sound coming from outside.

Feeling curious, she got up from the bed and went out of the room, looking for a window in the direction she heard the sound from. The window in the hallway sufficed.

Peering outside, she saw two other houses in front but behind them was a forest different from the one she fell in last night. Looking for the source of the noise, her blue eyes roamed until they found it coming from between the two houses.

She blinked a few times. She even rubbed her eyes with her hands to further confirm the sight in front of her. Still feeling sceptical, she thinly spread her spirit sense towards the anomaly in front of her. The result was the same.

Her mouth opened slightly in astonishment.

In front of her was the boy she'd offended earlier in the day. And he was… dragging a bear by its paw towards the house. The people around him were giving him a wide berth, some muttering something about the 'harvesters' taking a break for the day while others were simply shaking their head, evidently in awe.

She just stared at the spectacle. Why did everyone seem used to this?

Ordinarily, she wouldn't have given a second glance to such a scene. After all, it was normal for cultivators to defeat spirit beasts and harvest them. She'd seen it countless times and she'd done it herself countless times, many of her prey even bigger than the bear in her sight.

But the boy dragging that big bear with a single hand was NOT a cultivator. And the dead animal he was dragging was a beast on the cusp of becoming a spirit beast. The blood on his clothes and sword along with the multiple slash wounds on the beast made it very clear what happened.

… How did a mundane civilian kill a beast like that?!

How was a seemingly mundane civilian casually dragging such a heavy beast as if it weighed nothing?! He was even so young! Younger than her!

She ducked back inside, awkwardly hiding from view as he dragged the bear to the yard and tossed it to the side. She fidgeted for a moment then hurried back to the room she woke up in.

She sat on the bed, running a hand through her hair, her eyes catching sight of a tray with a couple empty plates stacked on top.

She had in fact eaten the food that the boy had given her in the morning. She had already offended him, she didn't want to offend him even more by refusing to eat the food he so graciously gave her.

It was delicious too, mundane homemade food that while not very useful in keeping up her cultivation, it made her wonder when was the last time she'd eaten something purely because she liked its taste.

With her status being what it was, she had somehow gotten used to eating food – usually made from spirit beast meat and spirit herbs – purely for their benefits to her cultivation and not because she simply liked it.

In hindsight, it seemed so strange how she'd transitioned from eating food for sustenance to simply… not needing to.

For now, she sat on the bed, facing the door, trying to come up with the proper words of apology to say to her benefactor. Mundane though he may be – though she was beginning to doubt that after what she'd just seen – it wasn't right of her to be disdainful of him and his efforts to help her.

She wasn't the kind of person to be so disdainful of mundane civilians anyway. After all, everyone was mundane until they started cultivating.

So she sat there, anxiously waiting for him to enter. It would be simple, she would apologize for looking at him unfavourably, explain that she was actually lost in thought with the disgust he witnessed actually directed towards herself, then thank him for the food he gave her.

That was the plan she came up with in the morning.

It went awry when he didn't appear in the house for lunch. It went further awry when he continued to remain away from the house for many hours, leaving her alone. Thankfully, he hadn't simply moved away and decided to stay somewhere else and came home late.

She heard the sound of a door closing below. She patiently waited in her room, anticipating his arrival. She could hear him moving around. A few minutes later, she grew curious and extended her spirit sense to see what he was doing.

She retracted it in a fluster when she saw him undressing himself. She sucked her lips in, trying not to blush. Evidently, he was getting ready to have a bath.

So she calmly waited for him to finish his bath.

She calmly waited as he moved around the house doing various other tasks and chores.

She calmly waited as he made himself dinner and ate it.

She continued waiting calmly…

…

She stared at the moon hanging in the sky from her window, the sky having turned dark during her wait.

Her spirit sense perceived the boy sleeping in a different room, all his tasks apparently done.

The woman however stood at the window in her room, staring dully at the night sky.

… Why had she subconsciously assumed that he would come to her? Because he hadn't. He simply finished all his tasks and went to sleep, not even so much as approaching the door to her room.

She turned and went to the bed, falling on it and burying her face in a pillow.

She suppressed the urge to let out an embarrassed groan.

Usually, she was the one offended and others trying to gain her forgiveness. Now being placed on the other side, having offended someone and wanting his forgiveness, it felt terribly awkward.

The fact that he was (probably) mundane didn't help matters either. Even if she considered herself humble, she couldn't just bow her head to someone so beneath her even if she wanted to. She had to maintain her image while also being genuinely apologetic for her behaviour.

… How was she supposed to do that? She had no idea.

The urge to groan came up again. She didn't suppress it.

Why was this so hard?