Immortal Paladin 161 Nongmin’s Story

161 Nongmin’s Story

161 Nongmin’s Story

I stood up, unsure of myself. The room was still. Too still. The weight of Nongmin’s words had settled like dust on my skin… fine, invisible, but impossible to ignore. I paced a slow circle across the chamber floor, trying to shake the feeling, but my mind kept running back to everything he had said. The end of the world. My death. His loyalty. My love.

"Why are you telling all this?" I finally asked.

It wasn't anger. I wasn’t accusing him. I was just confused. At the sa ti, curious and cautious. This had to be a trick.

I understood him. I did. Nongmin didn’t need my permission to sche, plot, manipulate, or maneuver. That was the thing with him... when he talked to you, when he really talked to you, it usually ant sothing bigger was already in motion. This conversation wasn’t charity or anything like that. It was part of one of his gas.

So I stopped pacing, turned to him, and said flatly, “Cut off the theatrics. Give the deets. What do you want to do?”

He didn't flinch. Didn't smile. He just waited. Calm. Serene. A mountain with eyes.

“I’m waiting,” he said, “for you to ask permission to use Divine Possession on .”

I stared at him.

He said it like he was asking to pour him a drink. Like it was casual. But I knew better. I knew what that ant.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you just that… since I returned from the Promised Dunes.”

Divine Possession wasn’t just a technique. It was intimacy. Real intimacy. The kind where your soul brushes against soone else’s core and doesn’t bounce off. It slides in. Lingers. Learns. I had used it before… to heal, to teach, to understand… but never on soone like him.

But I wanted to.

I wanted to understand Nongmin, not just guess. I wanted to know why he made the choices he did, why he ruled the way he ruled, why his heart seed heavy even when he smiled like a fox.

No… More than that.

I wanted an excuse to like him.

And the scary truth?

I already did.

He had grown on . Like mold, sure, but the kind you don’t mind seeing every now and then because it reminds you that sothing is alive beneath the surface.

“Let show you,” he said. “The future I know.”

I walked back to the chair and slowly sat down. Our eyes t. I could see no fear in his. Only calm. Maybe even hope.

I took a breath.

“Nongmin,” I said formally, “Emperor of the Grand Ascension Empire. I will now use Divine Possession on you. Do you have any objections?”

“No,” he said.

That was all. Just no.

I held his gaze.

“Divine Possession.”

Then…

…I blinked.

And I was inside him.

My own body sat across from , unmoving, quiet, a statue of David_69 frozen in ti. I closed my eyes. I let his inner voice take over. It ca like a whisper, like wind stirring old pages. When I opened my eyes again, I was sowhere else.

I stood in a mory.

There was light. Natural light. And heat from a nearby hearth.

A woman’s voice rang out, sweet and teasing, distorted like a half-forgotten song. “My sweet $#@^&1,” she said, though the na was garbled and blurred. “You sure are giving Mom a tough ti.”

Xin Yune.

She was younger here. Softer. Smiling as she leaned over a bundled toddler. Her hands were gentle, her expression radiant with the kind of peace that could only co from love untainted by ambition.

The baby squird in her lap… chubby arms, wild tufts of black hair. A laugh escaped his tiny lips, wordless and musical.

I stared.

That was Nongmin.

And yet, not quite.

He hadn’t always been “Nongmin.” That na had co later… he’d told once, in passing, that he’d changed it for strategic reasons. To fit the throne. To wear the crown.

Here… he was still soone else. Soone real.

I turned. There was a hut. Old, but warm. Beyond the window, a small plot of farmland stretched toward the horizon, golden under the evening sun.

Then the door creaked open.

A man stepped in, tanned from the sun, ordinary in every way. The kind of man no history book would rember. But his eyes… his eyes softened the mont they saw the two people he loved most.

“We’re eating good tonight,” he said cheerfully. “Old Ma from the village had so fish he caught by the river. Shared so with us. Their daughter just ca of age!”

He was talking fast, chuckling to himself, excited over sothing small and good.

I stood frozen. Watching.

This was his father. A mortal. A farr. A man who smiled at the end of the day and took joy in fish, family, and the evening breeze. This was how it began. Not with crowns. Not with armies. Not with sches or prophecies.

But with love.

With a mother who sang nonsense to her child and a father who brought ho fish. And already, I could feel it. The weight of what was lost. The reason behind what was built. I wasn’t just seeing who Nongmin was.

I was seeing who he used to be.

And sowhere deep inside … sothing stirred. Sothing that both hurt and healed.

Because I knew… this wasn’t going to be an easy journey.

Not for .

And certainly not for him.

But I was already here.

And I had to see it through.

The family of three began to eat beneath the amber light of a setting sun. It was a simple dinner: stead rice, fire-roasted fish, and so greens in broth. The modest al should have been forgettable, yet I felt my chest tighten as I watched them laugh and chat around the table like sothing out of a distant dream I didn’t know I missed until now. Xin Yune was vibrant, humming a lullaby as she spooned broth into her son’s mouth. The toddler, little Nongmin, giggled and kicked his feet under the table. But it wasn’t the warmth of the scene that shook . No, it was the man sitting across from her. That man, the father… he looked just like .

It wasn’t a vague resemblance. It wasn’t one of those lookalikes you tell yourself is just your imagination. No… this man had the sa nose, the sa stubborn stubble that refused to shave clean, the sa eyes that gave too much away even when silent. It was . Not David_69, not the Ga Character I had beco… but David. The one from Earth. Maybe older by a few years, weathered by sun and ti, but unmistakably… .

I froze, suddenly aware of how small I felt inside this mory. I wasn’t alone for long. Adult Nongmin appeared beside , his presence as calm and unreadable as ever. His gaze was fixed on the dinner scene with a soft lancholy that didn’t reach his voice.

“Fate is strange in so many ways,” he said quietly. “That a princess of a dying empire would fall in love with a mortal.”

I turned to him slowly, words forming and dying in my throat. I wanted to ask him… no, demand… how much he knew about Earth. About David. About . But when I opened my mouth, I couldn’t speak. I tried again. Still nothing. It was like my throat had been sealed by invisible threads. Panic buzzed in the back of my mind. I had spoken about Earth before, hadn’t I? To my companions, my disciples? No, now that I really thought about it… I hadn’t. I had dropped hints, danced around the subject, used vague words in passing like “another world” or “my holand.” But I had never said the word Earth. Not once. At least not in the context that would express the idea of what Earth was, in essence.

“Is there a problem?” Nongmin asked, glancing at .

“I’m fine,” I said automatically. My voice felt distant, hollow. Like soone else had spoken for . After a mont, I cleared my throat and asked, “How did you know how to pronounce my na properly? You did call … David, syllable by syllable.”

“Because I can,” He didn’t even hesitate. “It’s one of the few real things I know about you.”

I blinked. “What?”

Nongmin turned to face fully. “You gave advice once, do you rember? You told that if I wanted to grow attached to my people, I should spend ti with them in the alternate futures I see. That I should live with them, even if only in simulated monts. That’s how you connect with others, right? Through shared mories, even if borrowed.” He gave a faint smile. “So I did that. I spent years with you. Not here, not now… but in those futures. In those lives. I learned your na the way you wanted it to be spoken. Because you were one of the people I wanted to understand. Because I wanted to see what my mother saw in you.”

His voice was quiet but steady, filled with a calm sincerity that made my heart ache. “She laughed the most after eting you, David. Not in the halls of power, not for political gain. She laughed because you said things no one else dared say. You made her feel like a person, not just a mother or an Empress.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the man in front of , feeling suddenly exposed, like he had peeled back sothing I hadn’t even known was hidden.

And then, the mories continued to unfold.

Days turned to weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. The world around flowed like a long, endless stream. Ti passed here differently. While outside perhaps only seconds had ticked by, I was watching a lifeti play out.

Little Nongmin grew quickly. He was sharp, absurdly so for a child. I watched him help on the farm, feeding animals, pulling weeds, and climbing trees. He learned quickly and loved deeply. Xin Yune would read to him, or rather, speak words and their anings. At just four years old, he had morized entire passages and could argue about their aning with a passing scholar from the city, much to his father’s pride and Xin Yune’s barely concealed amusent.

There was joy in this boy. Emotion. Fire. The future Emperor I knew was buried in there sowhere, but here… he was just a child trying to make sense of the world.

This version of Nongmin was not the somber, composed tactician I knew. He cried when his pet chicken died. He threw tantrums when Xin Yune refused to give him extra honey. He laughed uncontrollably when his father tripped in the mud. And when he thought no one was watching, he sang… badly… just like a normal boy.

I felt my heart ache again. Because even though I had known him for what felt like a long ti, this was the first ti I truly t Nongmin.

The mory did not end.

I stood there, frozen between past and present, watching the world blur around a child who carried far too much weight for his small body. Nongmin’s laughter, so full and clear just days ago in this mory, had faded into confused murmurs. His smile, once a daily gift to his parents, turned brittle. It began slowly… his eyes unfocused when others spoke, or him pausing in the middle of a sentence, lost in sothing none of us could see.

His Heavenly Eye had awakened when he was just four.

It was nothing dramatic at first. No lightning, no glowing sigils, no divine voices heralding his fate. Instead, the boy began to see truths that contradicted each other. “The sun rises in the east,” he said once. “But it also doesn’t. Sotis it sets where it rises. Sotis it never sets.” He stared at his hands, wide-eyed. “Sotis… I die here. Sotis I grow up. Sotis I never speak again.”

It was the sort of nonsense that might be brushed off in any child. But not in Nongmin. Not when he started collapsing.

His mind couldn’t keep up with what his Eye showed him. I watched, helpless, as he lay curled on a straw mat, shivering from a fever no herb could touch. He muttered to himself constantly, describing futures that hadn’t happened and deaths that hadn’t co, as if he were living through all of them at once. Blood leaked from his nose, and then from his ears. His breath ca in shallow gasps as if so invisible force was wringing the life from his lungs.

Beside , adult Nongmin stood with his arms crossed, gaze distant. “At the ti, I didn’t understand what was happening,” he murmured. “Just that there was this wall I kept pushing against. And if I didn’t break through it, I would die.”

I watched little Nongmin twitch and convulse, his spirit draining with every breath. His qi had thinned to the point of vanishing. His skin paled, brittle like old parchnt. And then… he died.

I recoiled. But the mory continued.

It restarted.

I saw it again. The sa fever. The sa visions. The sa death. But this ti, sothing changed. He didn’t die from the fever… he died from a different mistake. A flicker of hesitation. A montary lapse in focus. His mind couldn’t contain the weight of so many futures at once, and it snapped. And again… he died.

Over and over. Weeks. Months. Years.

Each ti, he was reborn into the sa four-year-old self, as if so great clock were resetting every ti he failed to shatter that wall. The trial was not of the flesh, but of the soul. He was trying to master the Martial Tempering Realm inside the simulation of his own awakening.

“I broke through eventually,” Nongmin beside said. “After countless lives, I finally passed the First Star. Then the Second. Then more. But every ti I reached a new star, the visions increased. I had to endure death again and again before I reached the Ninth Star. That was when… I stopped dying.”

I looked at him, stunned. “You… trained Martial Tempering that way? In simulated lifetis?”

He nodded. “Yes. I had no choice. My body was too weak. My soul was too frail. My Eye showed too much. If I didn’t temper myself through pain, through failure, through death, I wouldn’t survive to my sixth birthday.”

Brilliant as Nongmin was, even he couldn’t master sothing like that in a single mont. But in those fragnted slivers of ti, in those looping trials within the Eye, he spent what felt like decades. It was grueling. rciless. And he bore it all.

Yet outside the mory, the world didn’t know that. To his mother, to Xin Yune, it was nothing short of a miracle.

From her point of view, her five-year-old son collapsed from a fever, suffered a coma, and woke up half a day later speaking with the clarity and control of a cultivator decades his senior. She held him close, trembling, unsure whether to cry or celebrate.

“I rember her that day,” Nongmin said softly. “She was afraid. Even more than I was. I could see it. She saw my talent and she saw the price.”

That night, Xin Yune confessed everything to her husband. I watched as she sat by the fire, gaze heavy with regret. Her hair was unbound, her eyes red. She admitted she had once been a princess… not of the Empire that bore Nongmin’s na today, but a different one, an inferior one, forgotten. She had fled its destruction, hiding her identity to live a quiet life, never planning to marry or raise a family. But then, sohow, she had t him. The man who looked like .

She told him everything. About her bloodline. Her fears. Her suspicion that their son was sothing unnatural. She trembled as she said it, terrified that their simple life was at an end.

But he didn’t flinch. He simply reached for her hand and held it.

I wanted to say sothing. I wanted to cry. Or scream. Or laugh bitterly at the cruel symtry of it all. But I only watched.

Even with all the cultivation Nongmin earned through pain, it didn’t end there. His body failed him year by year. The Heavenly Eye took too much. Each ti it opened, his qi depleted faster than he could replenish it. His physical growth slowed. His internal organs weakened. He wasn’t cursed… he was burning through life like a candle soaked in oil.

And Xin Yune… she knew.

She was a healer. I watched as she examined him late at night when she thought no one was watching. She fed him herbs. Applied salves. Drew diagrams and charts, trying to asure the depletion of his essence. No matter how far he advanced spiritually, his body simply couldn’t keep up.

Nongmin, standing beside , murmured, “I don’t know what realm she had reached back then. She never told . But I know she was far stronger than she let on. She just… wanted to be a mother.”

The day ca when Xin Yune packed her bags and kissed her son’s forehead goodbye. She promised to return with a way to cure him. Her eyes were swollen with tears, but she smiled anyway, radiant and determined.

And Nongmin stayed behind.

He said nothing. He didn’t cry. He simply sat by the window, his fra smaller than ever, eyes hollow. He spent his days ditating, pushing at that next wall. Dying. Trying again. Failing. Surviving.

His father never left his side.

He fed him. Carried him when he couldn’t walk. Sang to him during fever dreams. Rubbed his back when the seizures ca. Even when Nongmin lashed out, sobbing and confused from another death inside the Eye, his father never faltered.

“He saved ,” Nongmin said. “More than once. Not through power or dicine. Just by being there.”

The wind blew through the mory, stirring the leaves in the courtyard. I stood in silence, my heart a knot.

And for the first ti, I realized: the man who looked like didn’t just resemble David from Earth. He was the man I might have beco, had I stayed behind, lived simply, raised a family, and loved soone like Xin Yune.

And yet… that life was not mine. It never had been.

And this was not my story.