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Molting the Mortal Coil - Chapter 354

Published at 29th of March 2024 06:24:55 AM


Chapter 354: Five Mountain

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Chapter 354: Five Mountain

Month 10Ñ00v€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

I had a little more trouble in Five Mountain Province. This place is a war zone, or at least thats what it feels like. Okay, Im exaggerating. The cities and villages seem peaceful enough, but Ive been sticking to the wilderness as usual. The thing is, in Five Mountain Province, the wilderness is just crawling with cultivators. Or at least thats what it feels like because of all the noise they make. Theres actually not that many of them, but it seems like theyre fighting non-stop around here.

I came here with an agenda. Five Mountain Province is run by an alliance of five great Sects. Each of them on their own is probably strong enough to run a whole province, but they instead chose to stay here and compete with each other. Each of the Five Sects are named for the mountain they reside on. The province is actually named for the Five Mountain Sword Sect Alliance and not the mountains they inhabit. They also really like to fight. The disciples of the five mountains are constantly in competition with each other. They show a unified front against others, but their greatest competition is with each other.

Im actually here to head to the Mount Song Sword Sect. Song Lu Tian somewhat owes me a favor, or at the very least I established a relationship with him in the past. Ruanfu still hasnt come out to talk to me, but Im still intending to send her and her family somewhere safe. With how highly ranked Song Lu Tian was in the past, now that around twenty years had passed he was likely to be even more powerful. Surely he could help me arrange a place for a bunch of Demonic Bird Beasts. What Sect wouldnt want to be friends with a family of giant birds?

Month 11

I left the Mount Song Sword Sect a bit anxious.

Month 15

I havent bothered to record anything lately. I never thought it was possible to be this exhausted. My Qi is endless, and with the constant hunting and fast regeneration my physical body is far from its limits. The fatigue is purely mental.

When I was young, I always heard the greatest barrier to a great cultivator was their own mental state. I had thought they were just talking about attitude. Dont let the minor failures break your confidence. Dont let the small setbacks become roadblocks on your journey. Just because you arent the strongest now, doesnt mean you cant be later. When I first learned that cultivators could take hundreds if not thousands of years to reach the peak of strength, I knew that training was a marathon, not a sprint.

I saw the other youngsters getting upset when their classmates surpassed them. Theyd get fixated on being second best, putting all their effort into beating number one. Inevitably, one or the other would get injured or theyd devolve into deep hatred and conflicts. It just seemed like the drama of teenagers with too many hormones and too much on the line. I was far too average to even hope to compete, but I like to think that even if I could, I wouldnt. It just seemed like the cultivator version of petty high school cliques and bullying.

I was wrong. Well, not completely, Im sure that other stuff matters too, but mental state must also refer to what Im facing now. How can you keep doing the same thing over and over again, day after day, without going crazy? All I do is hunt, eat, and hide. It seems like an endless cycle. I tried to bring Ruanfu out to mix things up, but she seems a bit too intense. Shes no longer that odd and funny girl from the past, the one that demanded I catch her pretty birds to be her future husbands. It seems her talk of protecting me wasnt idle, and shes way too committed to it. It unnerved me a bit, so I told her to keep training and put her back into the Inner World. Well, that is only after I promised to capture strong beasts for her to train by battling. She wouldnt go unless I did.

Its been nearly three months since then, and I feel like Im on a treadmill. I stalk and track, hunt and kill. I rip into the bodies of animals and swallow them down. I found myself slipping into the mindset of a beast. So much blood and slaughter. Living on the edge. Hunt and be hunted. It felt too much like that time when I truly became a beast. I had lost my mind by merging with too many creatures too quickly. It scared me.

I had to start using the Human Seal at night to keep myself sane. I brought out a Hoplite to talk to, but that was even worse than Ruanfu. Instead, I found a better option. I didnt just bring out one Hoplite, I brought out a whole group of them. With a group, they could talk amongst each other and their inane chatter became less annoying. Then with a flash of inspiration I brought out one of Kings children. They werent conversationalists, but I found that teaching them was a good way to distract myself.




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