Chương 113: Field of Lives

Leo walked along the perimeter of the fog wall, one hand pressed against the gray mist. He moved slowly, scanning the ground until he found the X mark Arthur had carved into the stone last year. Their primary excavation site lay just ahead. He pulled up the old images from his VR pod's camera function and held them against the view in front of him. The massive excavation site they had carved out over months of work remained intact. Good. But beyond it, the field looked wrong. New holes pockmarked the earth wall.

Dozens of them, scattered across the wall of spiritual soil and roots in no particular pattern. Some were deep pits. Others were shallow scrapes. None followed the careful progression that Mike had insisted on. Shovels lay half-buried in loose dirt. Wheelbarrows sat overturned. Picks and blasting caps sat where their owners had left them Leo walked closer. Someone had stripped the equipment of identification. Spiritual signatures scraped off the shovel handles. Manufacturing marks filed down to bare metal.

Whoever sent these tools had prepared them for a one-way trip. Shen Tianyi had assured him they had spelled out the dangers of the profundity to the rulers of Stonehaven. They had even paid the Ammo Sect to spread word of the hazard on the streets of the city, explaining that entering the field was certain death. The sects had sent their disciples anyway. Leo could picture exactly how that conversation must have gone.

Some elder in a meditation chamber, stroking his beard, calculating the value of Tier Four spiritual soil against the lives of some outer disciples. Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. The elders who gave those orders were probably sitting in their cultivation chambers right now, clutching potfuls of dirt, dreaming of forming their divine infant and advancing to Nascent Soul. He pushed the thought aside and focused on the excavations. The new holes were strange.

The edges that should have been circular blast zones showed signs of regrowth. Soil and roots crept back into the empty spaces. Some of the smaller holes had nearly filled themselves in. Leo walked to the edge of the wheat field. Shen Tianyi had speculated months ago that the entire profundity might be a grand formation built on the Three Talents System. Leo's studies at the International Formations Institute hadn't covered grand formation work yet, but after everything he'd learned, the structure was obvious.

The amber sky above. The soil and roots below. The wheat before him. HEAVEN, EARTH, MAN. The amber sky, the perpetual dusk that hung over this frozen moment in time, represented HEAVEN. Leo examined it with his ortho-k enhanced vision, pushing his special sight upward toward the eternal sunset. He saw nothing. But that was expected. Tianyi had guessed right: the ways of Heaven cannot be fathomed by mortal eyes. Leo turned his attention to the wall of soil. EARTH.

The Tier Four spiritual soil looked identical to the samples stored at Skyhome. Same dense concentration of spiritual energy. Same rich brown-gray coloration. He checked the ground beneath the excavated layer of spiritual soil next. It was just ordinary dirt, unremarkable in every way. He leaned closer and examined the roots. The white root networks were covered in formations, but they appeared normal enough.

Based on the systems and array runes of the formations, he could roughly deduce these were some sort of farming formations. He followed the roots upward to where they connected to the stalks of wheat. The final of the Three Talents. MAN. Leo examined the stalks carefully, moving his enhanced sight from the base to the thick stem to the swollen grain head at the top. Each component revealed new layers of complexity. The formations on the stalk were inscrutable.

Leo could see bits and pieces of standard array runes buried within the structure, but the intermediate and forbidden runes had warped the layout so thoroughly that he had no clue what he was looking at. Leo didn't bother attempting the Inverse Derivation technique. Back at the International Formations Institute, the team had tried a few forbidden formation problems as an exercise and discovered that even Tier Two forbidden formation derivation was nearly impossible at their skill level.

These formations were probably Tier Four. Leo tried to take pictures of the patterns, hoping to preserve them for later study. Unfortunately, the camera function of his VR pod did not capture any of the extra details his ortho-k lens revealed. The images came out flat and ordinary, showing nothing but golden wheat stalks against an amber sky. He made a mental note. Sometime in the future, they would need to commission some kind of magnification treasure.

Something that could capture what his enhanced vision saw and preserve it for analysis back on Earth. Leo began examining the stalk more thoroughly, searching for some kind of special energy signature. The wheat was tall, rising to his full height, and the grain head sat level with his face. He searched the head first, since that seemed like the most important part of the plant. But nothing stood out. The formations there were just as inscrutable as the rest of the stalk. He paused, letting his eyes rest.

Then he turned his gaze downward, toward the stalk's center. The heart of the wheat, if such a thing existed. He knew what he was looking for. A synthetic karma thread, like the one Shen Tianyi had shown him on his family identity token. His eyes ached from the strain of prolonged use. He had to take breaks, closing his eyes and letting the strain disappear before trying again. Eventually, he found it. A thin, silklike thread, extending from deep within the stalk's core.

The synthetic karma line caught the amber light and seemed to glow faintly. He tried to follow the thread with his eyes, tracing its path away from the stalk. But as soon as the line left the wheat, it became impossible to track. The ambient spiritual energy swallowed it whole. He decided he would come back after he advanced to Foundation Establishment. With a stronger divine sense and more practice with Tianyi's identification token, he might be able to follow the threads to their destination.

Once he found one synthetic karma thread, finding more became easy. He moved from stalk to stalk, checking each one. Every thread pointed in the same direction: deep inward, toward the center of the field where Monarch Scatterstraw walked its eternal circuit. The wheat was connected to the Monarch. Every single stalk, bound by karma to the scarecrow that harvested them. Leo approached one of the excavation holes the Stonehaven cultivators had dug.

The misshapen pit showed clear signs of regrowth, new wheat sprouting from the disturbed soil. He bent down and examined the stalks growing inside the pit. The karma lines were different. Instead of a single thread pointing toward the center of the field, these stalks showed bundles of threads. Multiple lines extending in all directions, tangled and chaotic. Some pointed inward. Some pointed outward. Some seemed to reach toward the scattered equipment lying in the dirt. Leo straightened up slowly.

He looked at the shovels. The wheelbarrows. The picks and blasting caps. He looked at the new wheat growing in the holes. The karma lines were dense. These stalks weren't just new growth, they were the cultivators who had come to harvest, transformed into the very thing they'd tried to take. The wheat retained every connection those lives had carried. Families. Friends. Sect brothers and sisters. Debts and grudges and broken promises. Leo turned to face the field.

The golden wheat stretched to the horizon in every direction, millions of stalks bobbing gently under the amber sky. He wondered how many of them had also been promised they would come back.

Leo stood in the wheat field with his arms crossed. The teleportation had deposited him somewhere in the middle of the domain, surrounded by golden stalks that swayed under the amber sky. The cutting sound was distant. He had time. He looked down at the object in his hand. His divine sense had found it moments after he arrived, half-buried in the soil near his feet. An identity token. Carved wood inlaid with copper, bearing the sigil of the Deep Root Sect. One of the many sects that called Stonehaven home.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. The token was freshly made. The edges were still sharp, the wood still pale where it hadn't been stained by handling. Whoever this belonged to had been an outer disciple for weeks at most. Leo turned it over in his fingers. It was one thing to understand that the cultivation world was cruel. He had seen cruelty. He had seen war. He had watched Crimson Lotus City burn and walked through the poverty of the Western Seat.

That was natural evil. Suffering that occurred due to factors outside anyone's control. It was another thing entirely to hold evidence of moral evil in your hands. Someone had recruited this disciple. Someone had promised him spiritual wheat and safety. Someone had handed him a shovel and pointed him toward the fog wall, knowing exactly what waited on the other side. Leo was sick to his stomach. The wheat swayed around him. He barely noticed.

But the more he thought about it, the more he examined the logic and why it made him feel wrong. The more he realized that he had glossed over something important. Why did he think it was okay that the cultivation world was cruel? Why did he think the war of the western provinces was the natural order of things? Why did he consider the war a natural evil rather than a moral evil? Somewhere along the way, his own logic had been twisted. Before his transmigration, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.

His teachers had used it as an example of moral evil. The idea that one man could start a war and cause so much suffering. But if you told the Leo of 2029 that Russia had declared war on Ukraine over a spirit vein, he would have shrugged. Natural consequences. The way of cultivation. Strong nations took from weak nations, and spiritual resources flowed to those who could hold them. When had he started thinking this way? When had he started thinking more like a cultivator, and less like a human?

This single identity token bothered him more than what he had seen at the Western Seat. More than the children fighting over frozen turnips while Cloudpiercer's jade palace caught green light above the clouds. More than the war itself, with its sieges and its burning cities and its endless groups of refugees. More than seeing Okonjo's casket brought back home. Maybe it was the betrayal. The deception. It was one thing to sign up for a war that had been going on since the 80s.

The cultivators who fought in the Catacombs knew what they were getting themselves into. It was another thing to be deceived into an inescapable death. To be handed a shovel by someone you trusted and promised you'd come back. Leo stared at the token. He had remembered the crowds of cultivators that he had passed as he flew by. Had this disciple been recruited from that crowd? Some desperate cultivator looking for a path forward, willing to join any sect that would have them? Leo's grip tightened on the token.

Was the problem cultivation itself? America had approximately two hundred sixty million Qi Refiners. Eighty million Foundation Establishment cultivators. One and a half million Gold Core Superiors. Four thousand Nascent Soul Lords. Ten Deity Transformation Monarchs. Each realm acted as a great filter. Only a fraction of cultivators could advance. The rest plateaued, aged, regressed, and died. When Leo first arrived in this cultivation America, the prospect of it all had excited him. Powers. Longevity.

The thrill of breaking through to realms his old self had only read about in novels. He knew what it felt like to want more. To crave the next realm. Could he blame the elders of the Deep Root Sect for using others as a means to further their cultivation? Cultivation was unequal. For every cultivator who broke through, hundreds plateaued and fell behind. The elders of the Deep Root Sect hadn't invented that cruelty. They had just stopped pretending it bothered them. Leo shook his head. No.

Shen Tianyi had told him long ago. He had a compass of good and evil. It was his heart. And his heart told him this was wrong. The cutting sound grew closer. The wheat around him began to tremble. The Monarch was coming. Leo crouched down and pressed the identity token into the soil. A quick burial. It was all he could offer. He wasn't going to solve the fundamental inequality of cultivation today. He didn't know if it was solvable.

His cheat had given him many things, but the power to rewrite the nature of spirit veins themselves was not among them. He had more pressing matters. Leo rose and turned his attention to the wheat surrounding him. He moved from stalk to stalk, examining each with his ortho-k vision until he found the synthetic karma threads he was looking for. Nearly invisible lines extending from the cores of the stalks, all pointing in the same direction. Toward the approaching Monarch. The cutting sound was closer now.

Leo felt each stroke through the ground. He jumped, trying to get a better vantage point above the grain heads. For a brief moment he caught sight of the distant figure moving through the field. His ortho-k vision strained to make out details. Something obscured the Monarch's form. A faint black cloud clung to its body, shifting and roiling like smoke trapped in glass. Leo pushed harder, trying to see through the haze, but his eyes began to ache. He was still too inexperienced with this special sight.

He landed and let his vision rest. Instead, he shifted into omnidirectional awareness. The divine domain arrived like a slow tide, a wall of power that pressed against everything it touched. The wheat within its radius bent and stilled. The air inside grew thick and heavy. Leo started to activate his ortho-k enhanced vision. Something stopped him. Not a thought. It was the same reflexive clench as looking over the edge of a tall building.

A deep, animal part of him pulling back before his conscious mind could form an objection. However Leo didn't have time to think about it. He just pushed through and used his ortho-k enhanced vision. He saw something new. Something that he had never seen in all his other deaths in front of the scarecrow. A mass of black air surrounded the Monarch. It churned in slow spirals, dense as oil, clinging to the straw-woven body like a second skin.

The darkness moved against the amber light, absorbing it, swallowing it whole. Where the golden wheat reflected the eternal sunset, the black air drank it down and gave nothing back. Leo's stomach turned. His enhanced sight had revealed many things over the past months. Formation structures. Karma threads. Hidden complexities in ordinary objects. But this was different. This was not a structure to be analyzed. This was not a pattern to be understood. This was wrong.

The black air pulsed with a rhythm that had nothing to do with the Monarch's footsteps. It breathed on its own. It lived on its own. And as Leo watched, frozen in place, he began to understand what it was made of. Every stalk of wheat in this field had once been a person. Every fiber woven into the Monarch's patchwork body carried the memory of a life cut short. And all of that suffering, all of that terror, all of those final moments of helpless agony, had condensed into something tangible. Slaughter Qi.

Leo's breath caught in his throat. He tried to look away. He tried to blink, tried to close his eyes, tried to look anywhere else. His body would not obey. The divine domain crashed into him. The pressure slammed through his omnidirectional awareness like a hammer through glass. His divine sense collapsed inward, forced back into the narrow confines of his skull. He could no longer feel the wheat around him. He was just a pair of eyes staring at the approaching horror. His knees buckled.

The divine domain pressed down, crushing him flat, demanding his submission. Leo reached for his Heart of Flesh. He tried to connect to the wheat surrounding him, tried to feel that shared hunger for life that had sustained him through so many deaths in this field. The connection would not form. Every realization from the past hour sat like a stone in his stomach, blocking his heart from flowing outward. How could he connect to the wheat now that he knew what it really was?

How could he feel their desire for life when he understood that desire had been stolen from them? Something in his hindbrain screamed at him. Run. Die. Look away. Anything but stay here, anything but remain in the presence of the divine. The Slaughter Qi noticed him. Leo watched it happen. The churning mass of black air around the Monarch slowed its rotation. A tendril of darkness separated from the whole, extending outward like a snake testing the air. It was looking at him. The tendril drifted closer.

The black air coiled and uncoiled, patient, curious. It had all the time in the world. It had been accumulating in this field for centuries, fed by every harvest, growing stronger with every soul woven into the Monarch's body. And now it sensed something new. Leo tried again to connect to the wheat. He reached for the nearest stalk with his collapsing divine sense, searching for that thread of shared existence, that common hunger that bound all living things together. The stalk felt hollow. Empty.

A shell of formations wearing the shape of a plant, connected by synthetic karma threads. The tendril stretched closer. Leo's mind fractured under the pressure. He wanted to shift into Third Person Perspective, to use his body as a puppet and pull his awareness somewhere safe. He could float above himself, detached, regain control, and self-detonate. But something stopped him. He knew. Somehow he knew that he could not let his divine sense touch that Slaughter Qi.

If he allowed his awareness to brush against that corruption, it would corrupt not only his divine sense, but his awareness. His self. Somehow he knew. For the first time on the Azure Profound Continent, death carried real consequences. Given enough accumulation, it begins to overwrite you. No respawn could save him from this. His soul itself would be overwritten. The tendril was halfway to him. Leo's journey could not end here. He had so much more to do. So much more to struggle for. The tendril lunged.

Time stretched. In that final moment, balanced on the edge of annihilation, Leo's mind achieved a clarity that came only when facing true death. Every question he had wrestled with since entering this field suddenly had an answer. Every contradiction resolved into a single understanding. He found his Dao. The Dao of all living things. Leo's heart ignited. The vague feeling that had flickered weakly in his chest blazed into an inferno.

It tore through the barriers he had built, burned away the doubts he had accumulated, and poured outward. The wheat responded. Leo felt them. All of them. Millions of stalks stretching to the horizon, each one carrying within it that same desperate hunger for existence. He had been wrong. Before, when he had looked at the formations, the synthetic karma threads, the hollow architecture, and he concluded they were empty. Victims that died long ago. But the formations were not the wheat.

The wheat was alive, fiercely and undeniably alive, pushing upward through three meters of roots, reaching for an amber sky they would never touch. And the wheat felt him. The field shuddered. A pulse of something vast moved through the wheat, rippling outward from where Leo stood. The stalks that had been bowing began to straighten. The grain heads that had hung limp rose toward the eternal sunset. The golden dust that had settled to the ground stirred and lifted.

For one blazing instant, Leo stood at the center of an army. He closed his eyes and self-detonated.

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