Immortal Paladin 206 Debate for Ownership

206 Debate for Ownership

How to steal soone’s body 101, written and narrated by Jue Bu, your local perverted skull.

“It’s fairly easy, really,” Jue Bu had once said with the nonchalance of soone talking about fixing a loose roof tile. “You only need to keep three simple rules in mind.”

The mory world began to quake. The walls around us groaned and bent, reshaping from a quiet noodle shop into a maelstrom of shifting sceneries from endless deserts, a crumbling temple, a rainy back alley, and to a palace built on a lake of stars. Each was a fragnt of Wen Yuhan’s past lives, jumbled and exposed in the chaos.

“Rule No. 1: Do not blink.”

Of course, Jue Bu didn’t an it literally. In the ntal world, “blinking” ant letting your focus slip, even for a mont. Once that happened, the world belonged to your opponent. You dropped your guard, even if subconsciously, and in a place like this, where the mind was both weapon and battlefield, that was as good as death. It was why most battles here devolved into psychological warfare, layered illusions, and soul-grinding debates that cracked open your worst fears. We didn’t punch here. We broke wills.

Considerably, there had been exceptions… like that ti I was beating the shit out of a self-proclaid Heavenly Demon to claim my disciple’s soul…

Wen Yuhan stood opposite , unmoved by the shifting terrain. Her figure remained as clear and focused as her mind. She was rooted in this place, wrapped in the fabric of her own truths and her own story. I couldn’t land the first blow. Not in this domain. This was her mory. Her rules.

Ultimately, her 'rules' were more personal than absolute, thus feasibly allowing to pick a fight with her, here...

“Rule No. 2,” Jue Bu’s disembodied voice continued in my head, with that unmistakable smirk woven into his tone, “use words. You gotta prod the nerves that haven't healed. Dig up the scars. Make ‘em flinch.”

I could feel Wen Yuhan’s will pressing down on like the weight of a collapsing mountain. I had to crack her and force her attention to splinter. So I said, calmly and without threat, “I saw in your mories that you used to have two precious students. Used to, because they betrayed you. Here's the thing: I know one of those two students. He calls himself Shouquan now.”

There was a flicker. More like a single tremble in her eye. For soone like Wen Yuhan, who wore a mask like a second skin, even a twitch was a gaping wound.

Sowhere, even without Jue Bu physically present, I could hear his smug cackling: “Rule No. 3, and this one’s the biggie. To attack in soone else’s mory, you gotta assert your own.” And that's just what I did. By ntioning 'Shouquan', I asserted my mory of him.

In the blink of an eye, the noodle shop shattered like porcelain dropped on marble. The fragnts curled outward into light. When the mory world reford, we were no longer in her mory. This one belonged to .

The room was quiet, understated, lined with old scrolls and a single flickering lamp… the quarters I used to sleep in at the Summit Hall. But I wasn’t here. Sitting at my desk was an old man with weathered hands and a calm presence. It was Shouquan, the Supre Leader of Ward. He stirred tea without urgency, taking slow sips as if the fate of souls wasn’t being contested just outside his peripheral vision.

Wen Yuhan’s brows twitched again, more violently this ti. She clicked her tongue, not in anger, but in annoyance. That, more than anything, told I had scored a hit.

“You learned so rather annoying tricks,” she said coolly, but I could feel it. Her rhythm had been disturbed. Her control wasn’t absolute anymore. And I was just getting started.

I continued, keeping my voice even. “Shouquan did a lot in his life. He built a place called the Heavenly Temple to unite the Hollowed World. A noble dream, sure… but as always, people had hearts. And hearts ant desires. Desires ant priorities. And no matter how much soone claid to uphold a cause, belief, or religion, when push ca to shove, they’d always put themselves first.”

Wen Yuhan said nothing, but her silence wasn’t the dismissive kind. It was the kind that listened, maybe even rembered.

“Even the most fanatical followers would make decisions for their own benefit, whether they admitted it or not. It’s human. It’s true for Shouquan, for you… and for . The Heavenly Temple beca no different. It prioritized survival over justice, politics over people. And when Shouquan realized that, he left. Maybe not all at once. Maybe he fought to preserve what it was ant to be. But in the end, he gave up and walked away.”

I let the next words hang in the air like a judgnt passed. “Then he made Ward.”

The mory world around us shifted like a canvas dragged under a new brush. The warm light of my quarters faded into blood-streaked ruin. Rubble lined the edges of the shattered do, and the four thrones that once represented the harmony of the Martial Alliance, the Union, the Empire, and the Heavenly Temple stood cracked. Smoke coiled from collapsed pillars, and the scent of ozone, tal, and death filled my nostrils.

Wen Yuhan took in the destruction, the corpses, and the sared glyphs. “Where is this place?”

I answered plainly, as I stepped forward and wrapped my fingers around a spectral mirage of Silver Steel, my longsword. “This is where I broke the peace between the Four Powers. Where I slaughtered more cultivators than I could count in a single day, and a small legion of low-level angels.”

The sky above darkened, thick with the fluttering silhouettes of malford angels. Their wings twisted, their halos cracked, and their eyes glowed. I swung my blade in a wide arc. The edge tore through air, space, and mory alike… and in that mont, I could almost feel my real strength again, thundering in my limbs like a forgotten lody.

Wen Yuhan danced away from the strike, light on her feet and unbothered, until the spears of low-ranking angels rained down and impaled her through the back. They pinned her like a butterfly to parchnt, and the ground cracked beneath her as she struggled against the weight.

“This sure brings back a lot of nostalgia,” she said, a grimace forming into sothing resembling a smile. “Do you know how many of these angels I killed in my final monts before I got sent to this False Earth?”

Before I could answer, the angels turned to ash. Their bodies disintegrated as though her mory rejected them outright. A red hue bled into the world. The sky split open with several rifts, and from each one, more angels descended. Not the ones I had conjured. These were her mories now.

Wen Yuhan rose, the spears clattering to the floor like discarded needles. “Using ‘characters’ from your mories is one thing, Da Wei,” she said, her voice sharp now, laced with condescension. “But using every elent of the story… the tone, the pacing, the transitions, and the direction of fate itself? That’s my domain.”

She stepped forward as more angels poured from the rifts, forming an army behind her. “You’re outclassed. Your tricks are clever. Your resistance is admirable. But ultimately—”

The angels raised their weapons as one.

“—you have no chance of beating in this ga.”

“Yeah, I confess,” I said, eting Wen Yuhan’s narrowing eyes without flinching. “This would’ve been a tough fight if I went in with the original plan. Hell, I might’ve lost. But then sothing changed. I found out we shared a certain bond with a certain soone. That link gave the leverage I needed. In this world, mory is power… and connection? That’s the coal that maintains the ember and the power.”

The mory realm shuddered, responding to my will.

“I am curious though,” I added, cocking my head. “What was Shouquan like in his youth?”

Wen Yuhan’s expression hardened like stone. “I refuse to play your gas,” she said flatly, then gestured. “Destroy him.”

The angels descended in a flurry of malford wings and burning halos. Their weapons glinted with a light not born of Heaven. They struck, then burst into a cascade of gore the mont their blades touched my skin.

I remarked plainly. "Canonically, Angels of this level just explode by the graze of my armor... so yeah, this won't work...""

A second later, I stood clad in armor. It was my armor. The Wandering Adjudicator. The segnted tal shimred with indelible mory, the sa way I rembered it from my final campaign in the Hollowed World. To the Hollowed World, this wasn’t just a fantasy… it was fact. And in this world, what I rembered as fact beca reality.

Low-level angels couldn’t touch . I had beaten dozens with a single activation of Reflect. This was engraved into my story, my legend, and my very soul.

“It’s my turn,” I said, drawing on another truth. “Hit her, Shouquan.”

And he did. The Supre Leader of Ward appeared out of nowhere as if stepping from a fold in the wind. His palm crackled with lightning and scread with wind. Before Wen Yuhan could react, the strike connected. She went flying, so fast and so far that the mory around us fractured and collapsed into sothing new.

We landed in an old stone temple. Dust floated lazily through moonlight slanting through broken rafters. Two youths knelt on the worn steps. One of them, no older than twenty, sobbed desperately. It was Shouquan, or at least the version of him that still worshipped his master. “Please,” he begged to soone unseen, “Take in. I want to learn. I want to protect.”

Beside him knelt another boy. But this one had no face.

“I see,” I murmured, the pieces slotting together. “Your mories are incomplete.”

Wen Yuhan stiffened. I didn’t need my Divine Sense to feel the tremor that went through her spine.

I smirked. “I imagine you can’t even trust your own mories. With a mind like that, how do you expect to hold your body? This is going to be easier than I thought. Lucky .”

She snapped her head toward , fury gleaming in her eyes. But she didn’t shout. She didn’t lash out. She breathed, slow and cold, forcing herself back into composure.

“Two can play the sa ga,” she said icily. “Do you know? Da Ji is not what she seems?”

Before I could speak, the temple evaporated. The air turned sharp and thin. We were suddenly atop a frostbitten mountain. Snow whipped around us in a blizzard of cutting winds. I grit my teeth.

Ah, shit. She was asserting her mory now and trying to steal back the tempo. I couldn’t let her.

Still, I comnted aloud, “Feels almost like the mountain where the Arch Gate was…”

Shouquan reappeared in a flash of wind once more, launching a brutal punch toward Wen Yuhan’s face. She caught it. Not by blocking, but by anticipating. Her palm slapped his wrist away, and with a flick of will, erased him from the playing field.

“The Arch Gate that I used to own?” she said with a biting smile. “Yes, I know it well.”

Ah… she exiled Shoquan by exerting her mory more strongly this ti. She’s good.

I grinned. “Wow, so you used to own it? A pity. I should’ve asked for permission before I owned it.”

The mist parted.

Another walked out.

It was a darker version of from another tiline. It was the Da Wei that had stared back at in Nongmin’s vision. The Villainous Paladin. The one who walked away from morality and chose destruction if it ant going ho. The one who saw the whole Hollowed World as an obstacle.

He didn’t hesitate. One smooth step, one glint of steel… and Wen Yuhan’s head flew cleanly off her shoulders. The body hit the snow. The blood lted it instantly. And then, of course, she rematerialized beside the corpse. Arms crossed. Face miffed.

I laughed.

“Man,” I said, “that’s gonna hurt your life points a lot.”

Maybe I was having too much fun. But hey… if we were fighting in stories, then it was about ti I enjoyed writing mine.

“The Supre Beings really screwed you bad,” I said, circling her slowly. “Missing mories? Shackled powers? You’re basically suffering from impaired vision… Tell , how do you plan to win a war when you can’t even see all the pieces on the board?”

Wen Yuhan stood still, her face composed, but her silence was brittle. I could feel it cracking under her skin.

“I an, you can’t even perceive multiple tilines,” I added, leaning forward with a smile that didn’t reach my eyes. “But I have a friend… you’ve heard this already, I’m sure. He possesses sothing extraordinary: the Heavenly Eye. With it, he can see across tilines, digest their information, and make sense of it at speeds your current self couldn’t even dream of. Through his visions… he saw at my worst. The villain.”

The mist stirred. A subtle ripple passed through the air, like a warning before a storm.

One after another, figures stepped forward from the haze. All of them were… . Villains from tilines that never got the happy ending. One wore crimson armor soaked in angelic blood. Another carried a black glaive forged from a devil’s bone. A third whispered Divine Words laced with madness. They each bore my face, my na… but none had my rcy. The pressure they exuded made the dream-realm creak under its own weight.

I felt Wen Yuhan’s anxiety spike. The shiver that traveled down her spine wasn't physical… but I knew it was there. I’d seen for myself through Nongmin’s vision just how monstrous I could beco. And now, so had she.

But of course, she wouldn’t go down that easily.

“I see,” she muttered, lifting her chin with regained composure. “Before I died and was exiled from the Hollowed World… I divided my Immortal Art: Destiny Seeking Eyes into two. The Heavenly Eye and the Sixth Sense Misfortune. I did it in the hope that soone would carry on my legacy. But the Supre Beings twisted them both. The Heavenly Eye beca a tool… an observer they embedded into the world as their early warning system. And the Sixth Sense Misfortune…” her voice cracked slightly, “was cursed to bear the bad luck of the universe. All to make the Greater Universe more ‘prosperous’.”

I blinked.

It was a fatal mistake.

The reveal had been too much for … I an, seriously!? No wonder Aixin was able to fuck up so bad…

I opened my eyes to Yellow Dragon City.

Gu Jie clung to my leg. The girl’s weight was real, and her voice was tiny, muffled by sobs. My mind raced to reassert control, but Wen Yuhan had already stepped forward, smiling as if she’d just scored match point.

“I imagine you have a ho,” she said, voice soft as silk but laced with poison. “You’ve been cagey about it, but I imagine… wherever your ho was, you’ve always missed it deeply.”

I knew what she was doing. She was trying to expel , so she'd get her body back by tempting with mories of him.

“Do you miss ho, Da Wei?” she asked, figuratively twisting the knife. "I am sure you do..."

The dreamworld shook as cracks ford in the scenery. My consciousness trembled like it was being peeled off her mind.

But I didn’t run.

I embraced it.

“Yeah,” I admitted, my voice a whisper at first, then a roar. “I miss ho. I miss being a ‘god,’ sitting behind a screen, pretending to be a Paladin of Light, trying to save a world I didn’t belong to.”

Reality snapped.

We were back in my apartnt.

It was dark, lit only by the glow of a computer monitor. Another version of sat in the chair, clicking away, completely engrossed. Onscreen was LLO… or rather, what it had once been. Now, the images shifted into a xianxia-style landscape, complete with floating sects, immortal beasts, and spirit rivers.

Being able to edit details of a mory had been one of the most important things I learned from Jue Bu…

Wen Yuhan stood frozen, stunned by what she saw.

“What… is this place?” she asked, her voice thin. “Where are we?”

“This,” I said without rcy, “is reality.”

Her eyes flicked back to the screen, where a younger her fought the Yama King in cinematic combat.

“That’s you,” I said, pointing to her virtual self. “And that’s ,” I added, nodding toward the man on the chair, the one who had once dread of heroes.

She flinched. “I… I don’t understand.”

But she did. In the ntal world, understanding was contextual. aning didn’t rely on words. Her soul had already grasped the implications.

“We live in a ga, Wen Yuhan,” I said, stepping beside her. “You live in a ga. And most importantly… you’re not real. This? This might as well have been soone’s dream.”

Her knees buckled slightly.

“YOU’RE LYING!” she scread. “NO! THIS ISN’T REAL! THIS CAN’T BE REAL!”

And if I were acting the villain, then I might as well play the part.

The scene changed again.

A classroom now. Chalkboards. Dust. And another standing before a bunch of high school students, enthusiastically explaining the history of basketball. The world outside the windows was grey. Earthly. Godless. Devoid of qi or divine technique. No cultivators. No wars of immortals. Just traffic, school bells, and old n watching cockfights on alley TVs.

“This,” I said as gently as I could muster, “is the real world. One where qi doesn’t exist. Where no gods listen. Where everything has rules. And you are not in it.”

That was the final blow.

Wen Yuhan’s strength cracked. Her composure dissolved. Her arms trembled as she hugged herself, and finally, her pride shattered with her voice.

She cried.

And in that mont, I almost pitied her.

Almost.