Immortal Paladin 222 The Day ‘David’ Died

222 The Day ‘David’ Died

I drank my nth bowl of soup. Honestly, I lost count sowhere around eleven… or maybe fifteen? The number didn’t matter anymore. Each bowl was stronger than the last. This one hit like a slap of reality wrapped in cinnamon and lotus. Harsher, yes, but sohow it tasted better. I tilted the bowl and took another sip, letting the warmth slide down what might've been a throat. Technically, I didn’t have one. Spirit body, after all. But sensations here didn’t follow logic.

As the soup settled… or floated, or diffused, or whatever it did inside my ghostly essence… I took a ntal inventory. My na? Still intact. My mission? Sowhat fuzzy. The presence of the Heart Demon? Still detectable, buried under soup layers like a shard of obsidian beneath thick fog. So I hadn’t drunk enough yet. Not if I still rembered that.

“Soup?” ca ng Po’s voice.

“Yes, please,” I answered with what must have been my hundredth smile. I accepted another wooden bowl, warm in my hands, and sipped more cautiously this ti. I tried to track which mories were thinning and which remained solid. Taste was one of the first to slip. I forgot what strawberries tasted like. Or roasted duck. That was fine. Rediscovery could be its own kind of joy.

I closed my eyes and searched for the mark the Supre Heart left inside . What was it again? A seed? A tether? A worm? No… the Heart Demon. That was it.

The realization spiked dizziness through . I bent over and puked blood. Thick, steaming, crimson. Onto the ground that wasn’t really ground. I stared at it in mild awe.

“Sorry about that,” I said with strained politeness. “That’s… ungentlemanly of . May I have more soup, please?”

ng Po blinked. “Oh my, is my soup really that good? You’re bleeding just from how good it is?”

I gave her a thumbs-up. “Absolutely. That’s how good it is.”

A few more bowls down the line, and I… forgot. What was I even doing again? The reason I’d been drinking this stuff? Definitely sothing serious. Sothing about... resisting? Repelling? Sothing planted inside ... Eh. Who cared? The soup tasted amazing.

“Want more soup?” ng Po asked again, her usual cheer replaced by a sudden clarity.

Her eyes sharpened… not unkind, but no longer playful. I chuckled and waved a hand.

“Well, I don’t rember anymore, so no complaints on my end!”

She studied closely. “You had a Heart Demon planted in you. By a Supre Being, no less.”

I nodded slowly, then winced. “Right... so that’s why I’m drinking tea, or was it soup?”

“It’s soup,” she corrected without much conviction. “So, how did you do it?”

I tilted my head. “Do what?”

“Retain your sense of self,” she said. “Or even reach this place. This realm is cut off… layers upon layers of reality woven into barriers. Yet here you are, slurping soup and cracking jokes.”

“Oh, that.” I puffed my chest, about to launch into a grand tale… and then forgot the beginning. My hands fell limp.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “Looks like the mory of how I did it didn’t survive the last bowl.”

ng Po groaned and dragged a hand down her face. “This is annoying.”

I grinned. “Now you know what Hei Mao feels like. That’s revenge for my disciple.”

She eyed , amused and exasperated. “You’d be exactly my type if you weren’t so cheeky.”

“I know. I’m irresistible despite my flaws,” I replied with a shrug. “Part of the charm.”

She leaned back slightly and swirled the soup in the ladle. “So how many tis do you think we’ve had this conversation?”

“No clue. But it’s definitely a lot.”

Her gaze darkened with mory, ancient and weighty. “The Destiny Seeking Eyes.”

That na lit a spark in what was left of my thoughts. I turned toward her. “You’ve heard of it?”

“Of course,” she said. “It caused a storm across the realms the mont the Immortal Art was conceived. The Supre Idiots begged for my soup to erase it… not just from mory, but from possibility. They wanted the creator to forget it so completely it could never be relearned across any future life.”

She stirred the pot again, voice dropping to a murmur. “And yet you used it. Even borrowed, it’s phenonal. It shouldn’t have allowed you to reach . And yet, here you are.”

I chuckled, a little bitter, a little proud. “It was a gamble. I didn’t expect Hei Mao’s benefactor to be so... cooperative.”

“Let’s try again,” ng Po said, her tone uncharacteristically serious. She wasn’t smiling now, not behind her wrinkles, not through her misty eyes. “You see, I badly want to learn how you reached this world, and more importantly, how you’re resisting the soup.”

She pulled a pill from one of her ragged sleeves and handed it to without explanation. I didn’t question it and just tossed it down my throat and swallowed. A faint sweetness coated my tongue, like candied lotus root mixed with iron.

Without missing a beat, she perford a series of deliberate gestures in the air. Wisps of energy curled around her fingers before coalescing into a pale orb. With a flick, she launched it at my forehead. It passed through like smoke and imdiately triggered a jolt… sothing like a lantern relighting in a forgotten hallway.

“Oh,” I said slowly, blinking as recognition stirred. “I rember the taste of shrimp now. That’s good. Also… a few of Nongmin’s blueprints. Huh. What else?” I paused, then snapped my fingers. “Ah, so that’s how I did it.”

Her eyes sharpened. “What is it? Don’t keep in suspense.”

I leaned back, feeling the tangled threads of mory start to unwind into sothing coherent. “Apparently, it wasn’t a gamble at all. And I have to thank the ignorant Jue Bu.”

Of course, back then, I couldn’t have possibly foreseen the entire chain of events. When Jue Bu betrayed and stole my body, I didn’t even know he had the capacity to wield an Immortal Art to that degree. But it worked out just fine in the end. For , anyway.

“There was this guy,” I continued. “He stole my body. Na’s Jue Bu. He possesses an Immortal Art that lets him reverse heaven and earth. Pretty flashy and absurd. But here’s the thing… he used that technique along with so insights he picked up from the Grand Exorcist’s death and, ironically, my own Exorcise spell. The combo ended up repelling my soul so violently from my body, I was yeeted not just out of myself but clean off the False Earth, the Hollowed World, and into the Greater Universe.”

I chuckled dryly. “When I finally figured out how he did it through visions, I thought… why not take advantage of it?”

ng Po’s eyebrows lifted slightly.

“So here’s the trick,” I said, raising one finger. “Right before I lost access to my vessel’s Destiny Seeking Eyes, I imbued all of my quintessence into one final act. I embedded a destiny into myself… the destiny to et Hei Mao’s benefactor. Which turned out to be you.”

Her lips thinned, but she said nothing, so I pressed on. “I had glimpses of you in an alternate reality… brief visions, fragntary at best… but enough to learn about your soup. I figured I could kill two birds with one bowl, as it were. Not only seek your help, but also make use of your forgetful specialty.”

I gave her a sheepish grin. “So I devised a thod to resist it. Not by brute force or by immunity. More like... dosage control. I infused the mories I cherished most with the weight of destiny that as a result, this mories would always be the last to go when I drank the soup.”

I touched my temple. “Of course, that ca at a price. I sacrificed a lot of mories along the way. Most of the Summit Hall, most of Nongmin’s looping lives. But their weight cushioned . They acted as a buffer between and oblivion.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Is that so? You’re saying you tricked the soup? But that’s impossible. It erases everything from a person’s mory… a clean wipe of one lifeti at a ti. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been stored.”

I hesitated.

One lifeti?

Sothing about her tone made my gut turn.

I replayed what I said in my mind. Dosage, buffers, precious mories… it all made sense. Right?

But then a cold realization crept in. My skin prickled as the logic shifted underneath. No. That wasn’t how the soup worked, apparently. Not partially. Not selectively. It erased one life ti, aning one person’s mories… One person.

I stared at ng Po, suddenly pale. “Wait… I might’ve misunderstood…”

She raised a brow. “You think?”

I looked inward, desperately. The mories from Summit Hall… from Nongmin… they were still floating around. Detached, but present. Too present. Not mine, not exactly.

Then it hit .

The soup erased the mories of a person. But I wasn’t carrying just one lifeti’s worth. I held mories of multiple people from fractured tilines, alternative versions, and borrowed lives. Each one counted as a separate lifeti.

In other words, I hadn’t resisted the soup.

I’d sacrificed myself, layer by layer, and survived only because I wasn’t just myself anymore.

It was a loophole.

A terrifying, accidental loophole, filled with multiple implications.

“It seems I am not just one person, anymore…” I looked up at ng Po, my voice dry. “I really have to thank Nongmin and the others. It seems… each of their lives counted as its own. I wasn’t drinking soup as Da Wei. I was drinking it as a dozen different selves.”

“You really amuse ,” She stared at for a long ti. “You are dangerously clever in the most idiotic ways.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I think.”

“So what’s next?” ng Po asked, her voice drifting like fog on still water. “What’s your next move following this grand plan of yours?”

Her gaze was as unreadable as the mist around us. Still, I felt a little heat rise to my cheeks. Embarrassed or not, I had to answer. I took a deep breath, steeled my tone with all the calm and coolness I could summon, and said, “You.”

ng Po blinked.

Her face didn’t change much, but the silence that followed was loud enough to slap . She looked at like I’d just confessed love to a cauldron.

I coughed and tried again. “Please co with . To the Hollowed World. Then the False Earth. We can go kick ass together!”

“No,” she said without missing a beat.

And that was that. I’d expected it. Hoped otherwise. Still stung like a cold breeze through tattered robes.

At least I tried.

Back when I first caught glimpses of her through the Destiny Seeking Eyes, they were always fragntary… so brief they’d slip away before I even realized what I saw. Half-ford impressions. Shapes in smoke. If Hei Mao hadn’t existed, if he hadn’t led to her presence, I doubt I would have ever managed this eting. Let alone survived it.

Strangely enough, she wasn’t the terrifying, ancient, cosmic horror I had imagined. In fact, she was… surprisingly chill. A bit eccentric, sure, but not the kind of mind-lting lunatic I’d expected from a being who spanned realms and brewed mory-erasing tea for a living.

Then she raised her ladle, drank straight from it, and offered the bowl with a glint in her eye. “Want soup?”

She was truly an eccentric.

Still, sothing about her made feel uneasy in that cautious, you’re-too-nice-what’s-the-catch sort of way. She didn’t need to help . She didn’t need to explain anything. Yet here she was, watching with the kind of patience that made it feel like she’d seen this story play out more than once.

“Let ask a question,” she said, turning serious.

“Please,” I replied, gesturing for her to continue.

“There is a poison jar.”

Ah. One of those questions.

Anyone who’d dealt with alchemists or poison path cultivators would know that concept. A jar filled with venomous insects, left to kill each other until only one survives. The survivor becos the vessel for all the poison and hatred within the jar, stronger, more toxic, and more potent than any other.

“A single insect escapes the jar,” ng Po continued. “Why does the insect return to it?”

I tilted my head, thinking. “Maybe it’s hungry? Or… maybe it just prefers the jar? I an, why would I know what an insect thinks?”

She didn’t blink. “But this insect happened to be you!”

So much for pretending I didn’t understand.

The taphor was clear. The Hollowed World was the jar. A place where hatred festered, where cycles repeated, and where souls grew twisted. I’d escaped and Hei Mao had done the sa, but…

I didn’t answer right away.

There was sothing beneath her words. I’d known from the beginning that ng Po wasn’t truly forgetful. She chose what to rember. Every ti she drank, every ti she claid to forget, it was her way of nudging the conversation forward without revealing too much. She was dancing along a line between mory and mystery, and her soup was more than just mory-erasing it presented itself to be.

“I guess,” I finally said, staring down at the bowl in my hands, “I do know what an insect thinks.”

I looked up.

“If I were that insect, the only reason I’d return to the poison jar… is because I have people there. Friends. Family. People worth protecting.”

She didn’t respond imdiately.

Her eyes were darker now, deep wells of sothing older than ti. Maybe sorrow. Maybe expectation.

“I can’t save everyone,” I admitted, “but that doesn’t an I won’t try. Even if the jar poisons .”

“But you will die,” ng Po said flatly, her voice lacking cruelty, yet utterly devoid of hope. “And even if you manage to live, the rest of them will be dead.”

I smiled despite the weight of her words. “If I am an insect,” I said, “then it would be an ant.”

She scoffed gently, almost like a breeze disturbing still water. “There is a reason why powerful existences use ant as a taphor to describe frailty and insignificance. It’s because they are the weakest imaginable lifeform in the universe… The ants are fodder. That’s all they’ve ever been.”

I tilted my head, eyes fixed on the soup swirling in its eternal boil. “In your long life, with all your vast experience and fancy titles… have you ever seen soone put ants in a poison jar?”

Her expression shifted slightly. “Surprisingly, no. Their bites sting, but it barely qualifies as a poison. So there’s no use for them.”

I nodded, the smile never leaving my face. “Exactly. If you throw one ant, two ants, maybe even three… they die, no doubt. Step on them. Flick them. End of story. But what if you drop in a handful?”

She paused, frowning. “What’s going to happen?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

She stared at blankly, clearly unimpressed. “Way to get my hopes up…”

I laughed and leaned in slightly. “But it roused your curiosity, didn’t it? You’d love to see it play out.”

She snorted and sipped from her ladle. “Now that you say it… I am indeed curious.”

“Good,” I said, settling back. “Then keep an eye on the Hollowed World. You’ll see what happens when ants refuse to die properly.”

Her gaze narrowed, thoughtful but skeptical. “Your conviction is admirable,” she said after a pause, “but it’s not enough.”

“That’s why I ca to you.” I dropped to my knees and pressed my forehead to the cold stone. “Please teach your ways, Master. And give this little ant the wings to fly.”

I remained like that for a long mont, unsure of how she was reacting. Without the Destiny Seeking Eyes, I couldn’t read her, couldn’t peek behind the veil to see if her lips curled in amusent or annoyance. My ears caught only the bubbling of soup and the creak of her joints as she stood above .

Then ca her answer, firm and unyielding. “No.”

A dull ache swelled in my chest. Not disappointnt… I'd expected rejection… but sothing deeper. A sense that, even now, the heavens had tied every loose thread just to snuff out a single stubborn light.

ng Po added, “My hands are tied. There is nothing I can do.”

I raised my head, grinning shalessly. “Maybe you’re looking for a gigolo then? I’ll take even leftovers of benefits.”

She grimaced as if she’d just swallowed sothing bitter. “No,” she said again, turning her back on with exaggerated finality.

“At least, I tried…”

I let out a long breath and returned to my seat, brushing away the lingering desperation from my earlier plea. If ng Po was going to reject , so be it. There were other things to focus on… questions to ask, pieces to understand.

“Ti doesn’t flow in this place, right?” I asked, watching the curling steam rise lazily from her eternal pot.

“Yes,” ng Po replied, matter-of-fact. Her voice carried no trace of emotion, but it didn't need to. My Divine Sense confird what she said… the current of ti was suspended here, like a lake with no wind, no ripple, no end.

I nodded slowly. “If I return to the Hollowed World five hundred years from now, the place wouldn’t have changed from when I last left it, right?”

“Yes,” she repeated again.

That gave breathing room. A thousand years could pass in this realm, and nothing would move on the other side. I could afford to prepare. Train. Learn. But I still didn’t understand the larger forces at play. The more I glimpsed behind the curtain, the more I realized how little I knew.

“How much do you know about the Hollowed World and the False Earth?” I asked.

ng Po stirred the soup with a slow, circular rhythm. “The Hollowed World was forged by the collective power of the Supre Idiots,” she said. “But the False Earth… was not.”

My brows knitted. That was a sharp distinction. “Then who made the False Earth?”

She stopped stirring. “I’m not at liberty to say. And uttering their na would shatter you. The Supre Idiots made a pact to erase this existence in all realities…”

My Divine Sense humd with confirmation. She wasn’t exaggerating.

I leaned back, lips pressed tight. It wasn’t the answer I wanted, but it was more than I expected. “Any advice on cultivation then?”

She tilted her head. “I suppose it’s fine to tell you this much… Since you plan to stay awhile, don’t go beyond the Tenth Realm if you intend to return to the Hollowed World. If you wish to touch the edge of the Ascended Soul, find sothing compatible with you from the Six Paths and then stop just around the Peak of the Tenth Realm. Most importantly, manifest an Immortal Art. Only then will you stand a fair chance when confronting the False Earth’s prisoners.”

“That’s… unexpectedly detailed,” I said, surprised by her clarity. “And you know so much that it honestly is creepy.”

“Is that all you need?” she asked, already reaching for her ladle again.

“Just one last thing.” I hesitated. “Can I have a go at your strongest soup?”

She paused, blinked, and then with surprising ceremony, sprinkled a fine silver powder into the pot. Her fingers danced with strange gestures, shaping invisible runes in the air. Finally, she spat into the pot casually, without flair, and let the mixture settle.

“That’s my strongest soup,” she declared. “I see there’s sothing more you wish to forget. What is it?”

I didn’t answer right away. I stared into the swirling broth. Sowhere in that soup was an end… a full stop to sothing I no longer had the strength to carry. I dipped the ladle in and didn’t bother with a bowl this ti. I brought it to my lips.

But first, I reversed the destiny I had woven into one of my most cherished mories. I stripped it of its divine protection and let it drift to the surface, unguarded. With that particular mory’s destiny reversed, it would be the mory prioritized by the soup.

“So?” urged ng Po as she stared at and then at my soup. “What is it you wish to forget so badly?”

I looked at her and said softly, “Earth.”

Then I drank.

And then I forgot.