Renegade Immortal Chapters 22-24: The Tenth Cloud and the Dream Realm's Secret
The wooden door of Wang Lin’s room clicked shut, sealing him in a silence broken only by the distant sounds of the Heng Yue Sect. The encounter with Wang Zhuo had left a bitter aftertaste, a reminder of the chasm that talent carved between cultivators. But Wang Lin’s mind was not on his cousin. It was fixed on the three gourds at his bedside and the unassuming, cloud-marked stone bead resting in his palm. The Qi Gathering Pills from his uncle were set aside, temporarily unimportant. A greater experiment demanded his attention.
He weighed the stone bowl in his hand, his expression taut with uncertainty. The morning dew he had painstakingly collected over months was his lifeline, the source of the spiritual energy that allowed him to feel the faintest pulse of cultivation. To pour it out now was a gamble. But the ninth cloud has been there for so long, he thought, his fingers tracing the cool surface of the bead. The tenth… it must mean something. The potential of the bead transforming, of producing water with even greater spiritual potency, finally tipped the scales. He could always collect more dew. He could not always ignore a mystery that promised power.
With careful, almost reverent movements, he emptied the finest gourd. A greenish, viscous liquid filled the stone bowl halfway, releasing a fragrance so refreshing it made his spirit feel light. A pang of alarm shot through him; such a concentration of spiritual aroma could attract unwanted attention. He hurriedly dropped the stone bead into the liquid. It sank with a soft plink, and almost immediately, he saw the level dip slightly as the bead began its slow absorption.
He watched for a long moment, hoping for a flash of light, a tremor, any sign of change. Nothing happened. A flicker of disappointment crossed his face, but he quashed it. Patience was a currency he had in abundance. He placed the bowl under his bed and sat cross-legged, falling into the familiar rhythm of the one long, three short breaths. The night passed in this quiet vigil.
At dawn, he checked. Half the liquid was gone, absorbed by the insatiable bead, yet the tenth cloud remained elusive. Undeterred, he retrieved a second gourd, topping up the bowl. A small amount remained. Rather than waste it, he drank it down, the cool liquid sliding into his stomach, and resumed his cultivation.
The effect was immediate and violent. A heat more intense than any induced by Sun Dazhu’s herbs erupted within him. It didn’t dissipate but coalesced, growing with each cycle of his breathing technique. His body became a vessel under immense pressure. He stopped cultivating in panic, but it was too late. A horrifying sight met his eyes: the veins on his arms and hands bulged grotesquely, writhing like worms beneath his skin. A balloon of spiritual energy was inflating inside him, and it was on the verge of bursting.
In his terror, a desperate idea flashed. If the one long, three short breath gathered energy, perhaps its inverse—one short, three long—could scatter it. It was a wild guess, born of instinct rather than knowledge. Gritting his teeth against the swelling agony, he reversed his breathing pattern.
He was right. The technique was a foundational scattering method known to cultivators. As he breathed out in this new, strained rhythm, streams of spiritual energy began to vent from his pores. But they did not simply dissipate into the air. The stone bead under his bed, as if sensing the outflow, pulled the escaping energy toward itself, absorbing it hungrily. What the bead rejected was a darker, impurity-laden qi that stained the air briefly before vanishing.
The process was a torment that lasted a full day and night. When the last of the swelling subsided and his veins lay flat once more, Wang Lin was a hollow shell of exhaustion. He collapsed onto his bed, his mind reeling. He had nearly killed himself through reckless ingestion. The dew was potent, far more than he had understood. But within the near-disaster, a miracle had occurred. The violent purging had scoured his system, forcibly expelling the last lingering traces of the Qi Scattering Grass poison Sun Dazhu had fed him. Unknowingly, in his desperation, Wang Lin had cleansed the fundamental obstacle from his path.
He slept a deep, dreamless sleep, utterly spent.
When consciousness returned, the room was dark. He stirred, his body aching but fundamentally whole. Remembering the experiment, he scrambled to retrieve the stone bowl from beneath his bed. In the dim light, his breath caught.
There it was. The tenth cloud, faint but unmistakable, had formed on the bead’s surface.
Thrill surged through him, burning away the last dregs of fatigue. He rushed outside, filled a bowl with fresh spring water, and ran back. He dropped the ten-cloud bead in, stirred vigorously, and took a cautious sip. His face fell. The water was ordinary. No surge of spiritual energy, no refreshing coolness. He tried everything he could think of: biting the bead (it was immovable), pricking his finger to smear it with blood (it drank the drop without reaction), even, in a moment of frustrated hope, slamming the stone bowl down onto it. The bowl shattered in his numb hand. The bead was unmarred.
Heart sinking into a cold pit of disappointment, he tossed the bead aside. It rolled into a corner, seemingly just a useless, pretty rock. After a while, resentment warring with stubborn hope, he retrieved it. He sat on his bed, turning it over and over in his hands, staring at the ten cloud patterns as if he could will them to reveal their secret.
As he stared, a strange drowsiness began to pull at his eyelids. He blinked, confused. He had just slept for a long time. Yet the heaviness increased, the bead in his hand growing blurry. His thoughts slurred, and he slumped sideways onto the bed, falling into a deep sleep while still clutching the stone.
He dreamed. But it was unlike any dream he had known. His consciousness found itself in a vast, boundary-less space. There was no ground beneath his feet, yet he stood. There was no sky above, yet he saw. The emptiness was punctuated by countless soft, glowing points of light that hovered in the void, providing a gentle, sourceless illumination. His mind was eerily clear, aware that he was dreaming but powerless to wake. For what felt like hours, he wandered the featureless expanse, growing increasingly weary and frustrated. Just as the tedony became unbearable, the entire space shuddered. A sensation of being ripped apart seized him. With a silent cry, he awoke.
He was on the floor of his room, drenched in cold sweat. The relief of being back was immense. Then he looked at the bead still clutched in his hand, and his blood ran cold.
The ten clouds were gone.
In their place, etched finely into the stone, were a series of tiny, archaic characters.
“This…” Wang Lin breathed, bringing the bead close to his eyes. The script was ancient, uncommon. Drawing on every book he had ever read in his village, he pieced together fragments. They seemed to represent numbers, but their sequence held no apparent meaning. Then, the memory of the strange, endless dream space flooded back.
Was that the key? Was the dream the bead’s true function?
Driven by a feverish need to know, he lay down and tried to force himself back to sleep. It was futile. Then he remembered the drowsiness had come from staring. He fixed his gaze on the bead, unblinking. Soon, the same heavy lassitude pulled him under, and the gray, lit expanse welcomed him once more.
This time, he was prepared. Instead of wandering aimlessly, he decided to test the reality of this place. He began to jump. At first, his leaps were feeble, barely any height at all. But he persisted, jumping again and again. As time passed—time he could feel stretching—his jumps grew higher. He could feel his dream-muscles tiring, a genuine strain. When he was thoroughly exhausted, the tearing sensation returned, and he awoke in his room.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he jumped from his bed.
He soared upward, his head nearly brushing the ceiling. The height was identical to his final jumps in the dream.
Astonishment held him still for a moment, then erupted into wild, silent excitement. He paced the small room, his mind racing faster than his feet. “Exercise? I can exercise anywhere. That can’t be all. The bead absorbed oceans of spiritual energy… it must be more…” He muttered to himself, thoughts tumbling over one another.
Then, a concept, staggering in its implication, crystallized in his mind. Time.
What if time in the dream flowed differently?
The possibility was so immense it stole his breath. He clenched his fists, his body trembling. “If… if it really is related to time… then I, Tie Zhu, will become an immortal no matter how bad my talent is!” The vow was a whisper, but it carried the weight of his entire being.
He had to test it. Calming himself with visible effort, he prepared an oil lamp, filled it, and lit it. He noted its state, then sat holding the bead, counting his heartbeats to mark the passing hours. After five hours, by his estimation, the lamp’s oil was nearly spent. He quickly refilled it, stared at the bead, and descended back into the dream.
This time, he did not move. He sat cross-legged in the gray void and counted. He counted with the focused discipline of a boy who had learned patience through years of hardship. One hour. Five. Ten. Twenty. Thirty-five. Fifty hours.
The ripping sensation. Awakening.
The oil lamp was low, but not empty. The time that had passed in the real world was a fraction of what he had experienced.
“Ten times,” he whispered, the words sacred in the quiet room. “Time passes ten times faster in the dream.” He stood up, holding the bead so tightly his knuckles turned white. For the first time since learning of his abysmal talent, a fierce, unshakable confidence bloomed in his chest. He had a tool. Now, he had to learn how to wield it.
Night had fallen deeply over Heng Yue Mountain. Wang Lin moved with a new sense of purpose. He made several trips to the spring, filling every container he had with fresh water. He then used the stone bead to transform them, one by one, into spiritual energy-rich spring water. By the tenth hour of the night, his preparations were complete. As a final precaution, he tied one end of a rope to the door latch and the other around his own wrist—a crude but effective alarm.
He drank deeply from a gourd, feeling the now-familiar heat bloom inside him. Then, holding the stone bead, he fixed his gaze upon it. The drowsiness came, and he surrendered to it, entering the dream space.
In the endless gray, he sat and began to cultivate, cycling the one long, three short breathing technique. The spiritual energy from the water coursed through his dream-body. As he cultivated, the gentle lights that dotted the void seemed to grow softer, and unseen tendrils of their essence drifted into his form, though he remained unaware of this infiltration.
A day passed in the dream. The spiritual energy from the water was exhausted. But here was the critical difference: before, with Sun Dazhu’s drugs, every shred of energy would scatter at the crucial moment, leaving nothing behind. This time, after the dissipation, a tiny, almost imperceptible sliver of energy remained. It was a minuscule gain, but it was a gain. It was proof. A wide, genuine smile broke across Wang Lin’s dream-face. He could only attribute this success to the mysterious environment of the stone bead’s realm.
Unable to leave at will, he continued cultivating without a fresh source of energy. He soon discovered another difference. In the real world, cultivation left him refreshed. Here, after the initial energy was gone, continuing to breathe in this empty space made him feel short of breath, drained. The reason was clear: the dream space held no natural spiritual energy of its own. It was a void. His cultivation here was entirely dependent on the fuel he brought in with him.
When the fifty dream-hours elapsed, he was ejected back to his room. A new question nagged at him: why could he only stay for what felt like fifty dream-hours? Was there a limit? He immediately tried to re-enter the dream, holding the bead and staring. Nothing happened. No drowsiness, no pull. A spike of fear shot through him. Had he broken it? Had he used up some finite resource?
Controlling his panic, he spent the day cultivating in the real world, sipping spiritual water, holding the bead, and trying intermittently to enter the dream. Each attempt failed. The sliver of energy in his body grew slowly, steadily, but his mind was preoccupied with the loss of his greatest advantage.
As night fell again, a wave of drowsiness finally washed over him as he held the bead. He jerked his head away, resisting the pull, his heart pounding with relief. He stood and paced, piecing together the pattern. The first two entries were close together. The third was about five hours after the second. This fourth entry was a full day after the third.
The rule became clear. “There’s a cooldown,” he murmured to himself. “A rest period for the bead… or for me. To be safe, I must wait at least five hours between uses.” The limitation was a setback, but a manageable one. Knowing the rules was half the battle.
Now, he turned to the next puzzle: what could he bring into the dream? He gathered an array of items. The three gourds (one with leftover dew, one empty, one filled with spiritual water), a shard of the broken stone bowl, a dried sweet potato from his supplies, a scrap of cloth, and of course, his bag of holding. He tied the sweet potato, cloth, and stone shard to his body, shouldered the gourds, and clutched the bag. Then he triggered the dream.
Inside the gray expanse, he performed a quick inventory. The sweet potato, cloth, and stone shard were present. The three gourds and the bag of holding were gone.
The conclusion was inescapable. “Items without spiritual energy can enter,” he reasoned aloud, his voice swallowed by the vastness. “The gourds have been soaked in spiritual water for too long; they’ve become infused. The bag of holding is a low-grade treasure, it inherently contains spiritual energy.” They were filtered out.
This presented a severe problem. He could only bring in what he carried on his person, and he couldn’t bring his containers of spiritual water. The few gulps he drank before entering would never last fifty hours.
He spent his dream-time pondering this, the glowing lights around him pulsing softly. The water can’t enter… but the spiritual energy inside my body can. The thought was a spark. The gourds are rejected because they are fused with energy. What if… what if the vessel itself has no energy?
When he awoke, he didn’t wait for the five-hour cooldown. He spent the time scouring the mountain slopes. He found them: wild, untreated gourds, freshly picked, their surfaces dry and inert. He brought them home and carefully filled them with his transformed spiritual spring water.
Five hours later, his heart thudding with anticipation, he slung four of these fresh gourds over his shoulder, held the bead, and entered the dream.
He materialized in the gray space. The first thing he did was reach back. His hand closed around the rough, familiar shape of a gourd. All four were there. He uncorked one and drank. The cool, energy-rich water flooded his mouth. It worked.
A profound, quiet triumph settled over him. He had deciphered another rule. The bead’s barrier judged the vessel, not the contents—at least, not if the contents were contained within an untainted shell.
Without wasting another moment, Wang Lin sat down in the boundless, timeless realm. He drank, set the gourd beside him, and closed his eyes. The one long, three short breaths began again, a steady rhythm in the silence. As he cultivated, drawing on the potent spiritual water, sliver after sliver of energy was captured and retained within his meridians, slowly, inexorably building toward the critical mass needed for the first layer of Qi Condensation. The ambient lights of the dream space continued their silent, gentle journey into his body, an unnoticed bonus to his arduous work.
The path was still steep, his talent still a millstone. But Wang Lin now had time—ten times more of it—and an endless supply of spiritual fuel. The impossible was receding. The first, foundational step of his cultivation, once a distant dream, was now a visible peak on the horizon, and he began the long, determined climb.