Daily life of a cultivation judge Chapter 1383 - Capítulo 1383: One can only hope(2)

Capítulo 1383: One can only hope(2)

Shaless as he was, and especially as one who never passed up free things, Yang Qing did not drink more than two cups of the wine, even after the administrator generously offered more. After finishing his cup and filled with gratitude, he excused himself and left for his abode, having a few more exchanges with Fei Chen, whom he t as he was leaving the town.

On his journey back, Yang Qing’s stomach twisted into knots of anxiety. Thankfully, this had nothing to do with Senior Instructor Lu Yuan or Old Fiend Lei, but more to do with the possibility that he might finally be close to uncovering Bai Chen’s whereabouts.

It was what happened after he found Bai Chen that truly left him anxious, because his pessimistic mind could not help but picture all manner of horrid states. It was fifty-fifty on whether Bai Chen was alive. The signs pointed to the kidnapper not wanting to kill him and likely lacking any nefarious motives for taking him, even though they had, in fact, kidnapped the man.

But that still did little to lessen Yang Qing’s worries or his assumptions about Bai Chen’s condition when —or if—he found him. Would he be a corpse, a half-corpse, or sothing worse? Or perhaps he might not even find a body, just like it had been with Ma Yuan’s wife.

“I can only take it one step at a ti,” Yang Qing consoled himself, shaking his head to dispel the negative thoughts.

All he should be focusing on now was what lay directly in front of him, which at this mont was the hope that Administrator Liu Wen would find sothing, preferably sothing that aligned with his own theories.

If the traces found aligned with his guesses, then that mysterious fog would shrink considerably, revealing more of what lay within it. His workload would decrease along with it, as he would have sothing solid to follow and work with, especially when it ca to using karma.

Karma, fate, and destiny were Daos with esoteric natures that made them powerful but also difficult to cultivate or use. To cultivate them, one needed a natural predisposition. Hard work and talent were not enough; you either had the aptitude, or you did not. And even when cultivating them, they did not follow the sa patterns or routes as the regular cultivation system.

Yang Qing had read accounts of a fate cultivator who never advanced past the qi cultivation stage for close to a hundred years. Just when he was a few years shy of exhausting his lifespan, he reached enlightennt in the Fate Dao, was transford and reford, and broke through to the soul formation realm in a single leap.

Yang Qing was not sure if that account was true, but he had seen enough about these esoteric Daos to know that common sense and the normal guidelines of cultivation did not apply to them.

But even so, as unstructured as they seed, they still abided by their own rules and restrictions. They were not above the law of balance.

For example, when it ca to karma, one could use it to track soone’s present or past, and, if skilled enough, possibly even their future, though the latter usually ca at a steep cost. Yang Qing had heard that one would usually suffer a heavenly tribulation when trying to use karma to extrapolate a person’s future. In other cases, you did not just face a deadly tribulation but could also face retaliatory backlash, especially if the target was more powerful than you, or, inversely, if you were stronger but they possessed greater talent or had a close association with a powerful figure.

Using himself as an example, if soone tried to spy on his future using karma, they would end up tangling with Ren Shu, with whom he had a close relationship. All soul formation experts, even without cultivating karma, could interact with it upon reaching that realm. They might not be able to manipulate it as freely as those who had cultivated the Dao, but they were able to isolate their karma from being spied upon or used against them. They could also extend the sa protection to those with whom they had close karmic engagents, such as relatives, sworn siblings, masters, dao partners, children, or even their descendants.

They might not have made it official, but Ren Shu and Yang Qing were technically master and disciple. As such, that relationship would shield Yang Qing’s karma from manipulation. Not to ntion, the Order also possessed an artifact that isolated the karma of its mbers.

But even if Yang Qing did not have all that and relied solely on his own talent, the risk of spying on his future using karma still remained. While soone might be able to extract the karma of his past and perhaps his present, any attempt to extract that of his future carried a risk of backlash, for it ant facing off against a future version of Yang Qing.

Yang Qing might be a middling palace realm cultivator now, but who knew what his realm would be in ten or fifty years? Whoever tried to access the karma of his future would be facing off against that future version of himself.

This was precisely why karma users had to be careful. Karma was a great Dao for uncovering secrets, but it also carried a great degree of risk. To reduce that risk, one had to operate within certain paraters. For one, they should never use it to peer into soone’s future lightly; using it to examine their past or present was far safer.

Secondly, the more information one had, the better the results.

As useful as karma was for uncovering secrets, its results were often marred by vagueness and inconclusiveness. The results only improved if you had more to work with. You could not simply start extracting information from the karma of a person you had just encountered and knew next to nothing about. To get reliable results, it needed details, and the more details, the better.

This was why Yang Qing was hard at work uncovering everything he could about the kidnapper: the places he or she had been, and for how long; who they had interacted with; what they looked like; their cultivation realm; and everything that Heart Stone Steele could extract about them, along with whatever else the Silver Guards or Flying Shadow Hawks might have observed.

He would also add whatever information Gu Xing might provide if her contact proved fruitful, along with any findings from the Silver Frost Eagle rcenary Company and Dong Ping’s own investigation.

Every piece of information, whether proven or not—including re suspicions—he would collect. Later, with the Order’s permission, he would hand it all over to Sister Veiled Destiny and have her use it to carve out a clearer trail of everywhere the kidnapper had been. Perhaps, just perhaps, one of those locations would be where Bai Chen was.

Yang Qing sighed, hoping it would work out that way. He was not entirely sure things would pan out as planned, because if the kidnapper was indeed a mber of a mythical race, would peering into their karma even be possible?

He could only hope it was possible, and a part of him felt hopeful precisely because of Veiled Destiny’s abilities. He was not sure where an artifact of that nature ranked in terms of power, but he believed she had to be special even amongst saint-grade artifacts, given the abilities she had displayed. After all, soul formation experts were generally thought to be immune to karma-related abilities, yet by her own admission, she could spy on early-stage soul formation experts.

In his book, that made her a one-of-a-kind karmic monster. Perhaps investigating the karmic trail of a mythical race mber was possible for her, considering the difference in their realms and the substantial amount of information Yang Qing would have collected about them by the ti he sought her help.

He could only hope.