Cultivation Nerd-Chapter 356: Ever Growing Suspicion

Jiang Yeming stepped out of the house she shared with Tingfeng, stretching her arms overhead as a long yawn escaped her.

The sunlight was warm on her face, already nearing midday. The air carried that lazy, late-autumn stillness that made everything feel just a little softer.

She started down the path toward the library…

And then her instincts prickled.

Someone was behind her.

She turned, and her heart lurched into her throat.

Song Song stood there as casually as if she’d been waiting all morning, posture relaxed, gaze fixed on her nails as she examined them with disinterest. There was no aura flaring, no killing intent, nothing dramatic… just Song Song being Song Song.

And yet, the air around her felt sharp enough to cut.

“You will come with me,” Song Song said, her voice flat, almost bored.

“What for?” Jiang Yeming asked before she could stop herself.

Pain exploded across Jiang Yeming’s cheek. The world lurched. A thunderous crack erupted behind her.

She staggered, breath hitching, and turned just enough to see the aftermath: a long, clean gash carved into the ground behind her, as if some invisible blade had torn through the earth.

Her fingers trembled as she touched her cheek. Warm liquid smeared across her palm.

Blood.

“Inferior toys should know their place,” Song Song said, her tone sharper than any weapon she’d ever used. “The next time you speak without permission, I will cut off your arm.”

Jiang Yeming’s throat tightened. She nodded quickly, too quickly, while cold sweat gathered at her temples.

She didn’t dare say another word.

Song Song was clearly not in a good mood and that made her especially dangerous, even to Jiang Yeming, who still had a few hidden cards she could play in an emergency.

“Good. Now follow me,” Song Song said, and without waiting for a response, she flew into the air in a smooth arc.

Jiang Yeming hurried after her, flooding her limbs with Qi, her light footsteps barely brushing the ground as she chased Song Song’s fading trail. The wind stung her cheek where the blow had landed, but she kept silent and stayed focused.

As she flew, Song Song slowed just enough to glance over her shoulder.

“You really are Liu Feng’s disciple,” she said, tone calm again. “The way you move… the rhythm of your steps. Even your Qi control is borderline perfect, just like his.”

Jiang Yeming’s jaw tightened. She wanted to say 'he probably copied me' but she swallowed the thought before it reached her tongue. Speaking now would be foolish and dangerous. Song Song wasn’t stable on the best of days, and Jiang Yeming was far, far from strong enough to handle her wrath a second time.

They arrived at the library, the very place Jiang Yeming had been heading to. Walking in with Song Song beside her, Jiang Yeming looked around for any sign of her teacher, but he was nowhere to be seen.

She had hoped he would be around to calm the shark beside her, already smelling blood. Instead, it seemed her luck had chosen this moment to abandon her.

There, half-hidden behind the last row of towering bookshelves, a patch of shadow rippled. Jiang Yeming’s eyes widened as the dark surface peeled back like a curtain, revealing a narrow doorway that hadn’t been there a second ago.

Song Song stepped through without hesitation.

Jiang Yeming swallowed hard… and followed her into the secret entrance.

She had questions, many of them, but one glance at Song Song from the corner of her eye was enough to clamp her mouth shut. This was not the time to test the patience of a woman who had already drawn blood for asking a simple question.

They descended the narrow stairway in silence, the air cooling as stone swallowed the light behind them. When they reached the underground lab, Jiang Yeming barely had time for her eyes to register the massive beast paw suspended in a glass tank, its size dwarfing that of a human–

Before Song Song grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her straight into the Silver Road Mirror.

The world twisted, collapsed into white, then stretched back into form.

The moment they arrived, Jiang Yeming’s instincts flared. She spread her senses wide and immediately locked onto Liu Feng’s presence.

But he wasn’t alone.

Someone else was there, someone whose Qi was plummeting, collapsing at an alarming, chaotic rate.

A failed breakthrough.

Her heart thundered.

Who could it be?

The answer came almost instantly. It was obvious.

Someone Liu Feng kept hidden from the rest of the sect. Someone whose progress had always been unnervingly fast. Someone he guarded, sheltered, and protected.

Wu Yan.

Jiang Yeming’s frown deepened as cold dread pooled in her gut.

Wu Yan had failed to break through?

The feeling crawled up her spine, heavy and wrong, settling like a weight on her shoulders. Something about this wasn’t just unfortunate; it was dangerous.

“What are you waiting for? Keep moving,” Song Song snapped, already lifting into the air.

Jiang Yeming swallowed and followed, the two of them streaking across the warped expanse of the Silver Road Mirror toward the source of the collapsing Qi.

They arrived within seconds.

The sight before them stole the breath from Jiang Yeming’s lungs.

A massive crater scarred the clearing, its edges jagged and glowing red-hot, as if a meteor had struck the earth moments ago. Shattered stone steamed, molten fissures spiderwebbed through the ground, and pockets of scorched soil still flickered with dying flame. The air was thick and oppressive, like breathing sulfur and ash.

At the very center of the devastation knelt Liu Feng.

He was holding something–

No.

Someone.

Cradled in his arms, carried with a care that looked painfully deliberate, was a charred figure barely recognizable as human. Skin blackened, robes fused into ash against ruined flesh.

And yet Jiang Yeming knew.

Wu Yan.

Liu Feng finally sensed their arrival, late. Too late.

The man who normally reacted to danger before it even existed had been so consumed by the moment that he registered their presence only after they landed. That alone told Jiang Yeming how deeply shaken he must be.

But when his eyes lifted and met hers–

A cold shiver ran down her spine.

Gone was the warmth. Gone was the gentle concern, the patient teacher she knew.

What stared back at her was something sharp and stripped bare into a calculating, distant, and utterly devoid of kindness, like a scalpel wearing the shape of a man.

As if he wasn’t looking at her as a person at all.

But as a tool.

Without a word, Liu Feng rose.

His movements were eerily controlled, too smooth, too precise, as though every motion was being consciously restrained. He floated upward, clearing the broken rim of the crater, then descended onto the untouched grass beyond.

Wu Yan remained unmoving in his arms.

And then he lowered Wu Yan, as if that fragile, burned shape could even still be called her, onto the earth with infinite care.

As though she might crumble to dust if he breathed too hard. As though she were the most precious thing in the world, and he feared she might fall apart in his hands.

His Qi burst from his palm in a controlled surge that was terrifyingly precise. Countless threads, thinner than a strand of hair and faintly green in color, wove themselves into existence and shot into Wu Yan’s ruined body. They threaded through her flesh, her meridians, her bones, each one moving with frantic yet calculated purpose, as if every strand had a mind of its own and worked desperately to keep her physical form from collapsing altogether.

Then more threads erupted, this time from his forearms, ripping straight through his sleeves. They darted into his spatial ring, snatching rolls of bandages before unraveling them midair and wrapping Wu Yan in layer after layer. The movement was so fast Jiang Yeming barely saw the bandages touch his hands; the strings handled everything.

Jiang Yeming’s eyes narrowed. She had expected monstrous Qi control from Liu Feng after everything she’d learned. She had steeled herself for absurdity.

But this…

This was beyond the realm of prodigious.

Thousands of thin, nearly invisible threads, each doing a different task, each moving independently yet perfectly synchronized. It wasn’t just impressive, it was inhuman.

A thought clicked into place.

He must have a Sky Grade Technique. And not just any Sky Grade Technique, but one he had mastered to a level most cultivators would never touch even at their peak.

But then again… he was Liu Feng. Mastering techniques was his forte.

“What should we do to save her?” Liu Feng asked, his voice quiet and steady, his eyes never leaving Wu Yan’s burned, barely-held-together form.

Jiang Yeming’s gaze flicked to the girl on the ground. Wrapped in layers of bandages, Qi threads threading through her like living stitches, Wu Yan didn’t even breathe. Her lungs weren’t drawing air. Her body wasn’t responding.

Yet her heart was somehow still beating. Slow. Weak. But unmistakably alive.

What a monster, Jiang Yeming thought not in disdain, but in awe. Anyone else would have died six times over. Wu Yan clung to life with a stubbornness that bordered on the impossible.

For a moment, just one, Jiang Yeming hesitated. A dark, selfish whisper slithered into her thoughts.

If she held back some of her knowledge, if she let the girl die here, the Face-Stealing Immortal would never be born.

It would make everything easier, wouldn’t it?

No threat to the future, and one less crazy immortal to deal with.

But then she looked at Liu Feng.

He was kneeling in the grass, bandages staining red beneath his fingers, Qi threads glowing like dying fireflies. His expression was blank, but beneath that stillness was something raw, something violent and breaking.

Since returning to the past, Jiang Yeming had seen destinies twist, fates unravel, and choices reshape the future. Nothing was written in stone anymore.

She didn’t want him to become someone like the Bookworm Immortal or worse. This mind could have been used for good, turning toward unimaginable cruelty.

If Wu Yan died here, in his arms… this might be the first break. The first crack in the version of Liu Feng she still hoped could remain human. And from that fracture, something truly dangerous might emerge.

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So she shoved the whisper down, crushed it, and met his eyes.

“We’ll save her,” Jiang Yeming said quietly.

Because if they didn’t, then the future as she knew it would be over and done with, leaving her with only one advantage: the techniques she possessed and even those would be caught up to, sooner or later.

Jiang Yeming stepped forward slowly, careful not to trigger even the slightest reaction. When she reached Wu Yan’s side, barely a foot away, she lowered herself into a squat.

Up close, what lay before her hardly resembled a person at all. Charred skin fused with bandages, Qi threads holding the body together like makeshift ligaments. It was more corpse than cultivator. And yet, she knew better than anyone that this girl wasn’t done.

She had never once read a record of the Face-Stealing Immortal failing a breakthrough. Not a single mention of a close call or deviation. And she doubted Wu Yan would die here. No, someone like her didn’t flicker out so easily.

Back in Jiang Yeming's original timeline, she’d had access to restricted archives and compilations on every known Immortal. Some were curated by Wisdom Hall, others fractured accounts pieced together from rumor and fact. As a Nascent Soul Cultivator, she’d been allowed glimpses into secrets the lower ranks would never touch.

And in those documents… Wu Yan had always stood out.

Some scholars theorized she possessed an Extreme Physique, a type so rare and so poorly understood that information on it was scattered, inconsistent, and often contradictory. But in the future, far more research on Extreme Physiques was conducted by none other than Liu Feng himself.

He had studied Extreme Physiques extensively.

Her eyes narrowed. A realization clicked into place like a snapped thread.

If he had researched Extreme Physique holders so deeply… who else could he have possibly been studying other than Wu Yan?

Jiang Yeming’s pulse quickened.

Wu Yan and Liu Feng’s connection was deeper than it had appeared in the future.

And suddenly, she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a terrible one.

She pushed the thought aside for now, adding it to the ever-growing mound of suspicious things about her teacher, things she couldn’t afford to investigate yet.

Instead, she focused on what she did know.

For most cultivators, having their foundation shattered or their Qi roots crushed was a near-death sentence for their future. Even at Body Tempering, a ruined cultivation base was something one rarely recovered from without divine luck, a miracle herb, or an impossible opportunity.

But Extreme Physiques were the exception.

Depending on the type, some could regenerate their roots entirely and begin cultivation anew. Others could rebuild their meridians or force their bodies to recover from failures that would cripple normal cultivators. A few even required destruction and rebirth as part of their growth.

She explained all of that to Liu Feng.

He simply nodded, absorbing every word without a shred of suspicion. He didn’t even ask where she’d learned it.

Jiang Yeming had prepared a backstory in case he did, some tale about belonging to a declining ancient clan with deep knowledge, but he didn’t bother. Not even a raised brow.

“Thanks,” Liu Feng murmured, and the relief in his voice was raw enough to scrape against her ribs. “I had theorized something similar… but I needed confirmation.”

His shoulders loosened by a fraction. Just a fraction.

Every cultivation realm had its price for failure; some mild, some devastating, and some fatal.

But Extreme Physique holders were not bound by the same rules as everyone else.

Usually, if a Body Tempering cultivator failed to break through to Qi Gathering, it was little more than a setback. A waste of time, effort, and a few resources. Nothing permanent. They could simply try again after rebuilding momentum.

If a Qi Gathering cultivator failed to reach Foundation Establishment, the consequences grew harsher. The Qi they had gathered and tried to form into a pillar scattered, dissolving back into nothing. They would plummet to one-star Qi Gathering, forced to rebuild their strength from the bottom. A few specialized pills could mitigate this, limiting the regression by one or two stars, but it was still a painful step backward.

Failing the jump to Core Formation, however… that came with real scars. Broken meridians, damaged organs, mangled foundations, and injuries that lingered for life unless treated by rare treasures or divine luck. Most survived, yes, but they would never be the same.

Failing to reach Nascent Soul was worse. It was a death sentence. A cultivator who reached too far at that stage simply died. No exceptions. No safety nets. Their bodies collapsed under the weight of a failed metamorphosis.

But the final step, ascending to become an Immortal, was beyond all of that. If someone failed there, the punishment was absolute.

They weren’t merely killed. Their souls were erased. Their bodies turned to nothing. And unlike all other deaths, there was no reincarnation, no chance for a remnant soul to cling to a treasure or be resurrected. They were simply… gone.

There had been tests, once. Reckless, desperate, horrifying tests. In the Age of Immortals, one Immortal had tried to preserve a failed ascendant’s soul using an Immortal-rank preservation technique. Immortal arts were like worlds of their own with absolute, inviolable, and capable of rewriting reality.

And yet, when pitted against the punishment of failed ascension, even that Immortal’s technique hadn’t worked.

The discovery had shaken the Age of Immortals to its core. Because it meant only one thing: failing to ascend wasn’t merely a backlash; it was more like an Immortal Technique itself, one that annihilated the user’s body and soul for failing.

Some theorized that when someone ascended to immortality, they weren’t just advancing; they were breaking the shell of the world itself. Immortal Techniques could twist reality, rewrite logic, and impose new laws upon existence… and nothing short of another Immortal Technique could stand in their way.

To become an Immortal was to shed the identity of a human or beast. It was to become something more.

Jiang Yeming exhaled slowly. She understood this situation better than most. But understanding didn’t make watching the aftermath any easier.

The failure was clearly taking its toll on Liu Feng.

She glanced at Wu Yan, charred and barely clinging to life and yes, she worried for her. The girl had not yet become the terrifying figure she would one day be. She was still young, still growing, still kind, in many ways, from what Jiang Yeming had seen.

But her eyes kept drifting back to Liu Feng.

His movements were quiet, measured, and brittle around the edges.

He was out of it, emotionally frayed in a way she had never seen.

The way he acted hadn't changed, and at first glance everything seemed normal. Still, on a deeper look, it was clear he was out of it completely, and he wasn't as cautious as usual, nor was he thinking clearly.

That feeling of competence that radiated off him was nowhere to be seen.

Liu Feng gathered Wu Yan into his arms with a gentleness that felt painfully out of place amid the devastation.

“We are leaving this place,” he said.

He pressed the silver sword into Song Song’s hands. She sliced open an exit with a single practiced motion, and all three of them stepped out into the underground laboratory.

Then, with a single burst of Qi, Liu Feng swept an entire workbench clear. Glass shattered. Vials burst into glittering splinters. Notes—months, perhaps years of research, knowing him—fluttered to the ground.

And then he lowered Wu Yan onto the empty table with exquisite care, as if she were something fragile enough to dissolve at the slightest touch.

The future Liu Feng showing this kind of weakness, this raw and unguarded emotion in front of anyone, would have been unthinkable. The Liu Feng she knew had been a creature of impeccable composure, a man who wore detachment like armor.

But Jiang Yeming didn’t hold it against this Liu Feng. He wasn’t that man yet. Not even close.

She liked him more like this, more human.

Still… something wasn’t lining up.

A quiet suspicion crept into her mind, one she had brushed aside before but could no longer ignore. Liu Feng and Wu Yan had obviously known each other in the past; they had both been members of the Black Chapter.

She was starting to believe Liu Feng had been Wu Yan’s teacher even in her original timeline, and that would change everything.

If Wu Yan had been personally guided by him from early on, then countless events throughout the growth of her rise, her transformation into the Face-Stealing Immortal, had foundations Jiang Yeming had never known about. Never been told.

Which meant…

How much of the history she’d studied was real?

How much of what Wisdom Hall recorded was accurate? How many “facts” were actually omissions? How many pieces had been deliberately altered or removed?

Because certain inventions, discoveries, and techniques attributed to Liu Feng in her era… many of them required an Extreme Physique as a reference. Required Wu Yan. Required this exact girl.

Her suspicion solidified.

Unless someone hid it. Hid her. Hid their connection.

Her gaze drifted to Liu Feng as he frantically stabilized Wu Yan’s form with impossibly delicate Qi strings.

Yes. Someone had absolutely hidden this.

And the more she watched him now... the cracks in his composure, the fear in his eyes, the way he ignored the destroyed research scattered at his feet, the more Jiang Yeming began to suspect the unthinkable.

That someone… might have been Liu Feng himself.

Only he had the power to twist history that thoroughly. Liu Feng wasn’t just a scholar in her future. He was the scholar. The archivist. The record keeper. The man whose notes and research formed the backbone of half the modern cultivation world’s knowledge.

If he changed a paragraph, omitted a detail, or “corrected” a chronicle… no one would question it. Why would they? He had always been generous with his research, always open with his discoveries, always willing to share freely.

Why would someone who handed out methods for creating Sky Grade Techniques bother altering mere history books? Nobody would suspect him. Even if he had been obvious, nobody would care.

Jiang Yeming looked at him now; the future founder of Wisdom Hall, its first leader, its architect.

And she understood something chilling.

What about his research into the mysterious immortals? Was it truly academic curiosity… or a smokescreen?

Was he covering the evidence of Wu Yan’s existence? Hiding her abilities? Protecting her from someone or something so powerful he had to rewrite history itself?

Or… was he trying to fool an enemy who could peer through time? Manipulate fate? Trace cause and effect across centuries?

She didn’t know.

For the first time since returning to the past, Jiang Yeming felt a sharp, cold gap in her understanding, like a missing piece in the puzzle that made the entire picture feel wrong.

Who or what could force Liu Feng to hide his own disciple? If they were so close, why did Wu Yan end up the way she did? Who was so dangerous that even Liu Feng feared being seen?

She swallowed hard. She was missing something. Something enormous.

And whatever it was… it was still out there.

“You can leave,” Liu Feng said at last, finally tearing his gaze away from Wu Yan long enough to acknowledge her. His voice was steady, too steady, but it carried the weight of someone trying very hard not to break. “Sorry for dragging you here out of nowhere.”

Only then did his eyes catch the shallow cut along her cheek. His expression darkened, his gaze sliding sharply toward Song Song.

Was this going to cause a rift or a fracture in the delicate balance between them?

Jiang Yeming felt a jolt of alarm. The last thing she wanted was to accidentally warp the future over a superficial injury barely worth mentioning.

She coughed loudly, stepping between their gazes before things could escalate.

“I’m going outside for a bit,” she said lightly, forcing a smile despite the sting, despite the fresh trickle of blood. She acted as though it were nothing, as though she couldn’t even feel it.

Liu Feng’s attention broke. Crisis averted.

Jiang Yeming slipped out of the lab, and only once the secret hidden door clicked shut behind her did she release the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been suffocating under.

What a mess.

Wu Yan’s condition, even in the future, was something only someone like the Bookworm Immortal could have healed quickly and safely after an Extreme Physique failure.

Anyone else would need luck, relics, months of painstaking effort, and even then there was a high chance of failure.

She began descending the long stairway toward the main library, her footsteps quiet against stone worn smooth by centuries of tread. With each step, her thoughts unwound.

Her mind churned, spiraling deeper and deeper.

Despite the almost ridiculous title that sounded like mockery, the Bookworm Immortal was anything but harmless.

In the future, he was feared as one of the most terrifying beings ever to walk the continent, a monster dressed in scholar’s robes. A man rumored to “know everything about everything,” his breadth of knowledge so absurd that many suspected he possessed a divination technique capable of reading the world itself.

But knowledge wasn’t what made him frightening.

His cruelty was.

He quenched his curiosity the way other people quenched thirst carelessly, ruthlessly, and with no regard for the lives crushed along the way. He had kidnapped children for experiments. Dissected beasts and humans alike. Grafted wombs from pregnant women to test demonic gestation cycles and tried to birth demons.

There were many parallels between Liu Feng and the Bookworm Immortal, and she didn’t want him to turn into that.

The man had once, single-handedly, wiped out an entire great sect. Rumors said it hadn’t been vengeance, nor war, but simple curiosity; he wanted to test the limits of a forbidden technique. He left no survivors. Even that sect’s immortal had been killed.

People feared him because if he chose you as a subject, he wouldn’t usually just kill you.

Jiang Yeming froze two steps from the bottom of the staircase.

A horrible, gnawing thought surfaced, one she wished she had never considered.

What if the Bookworm Immortal planned all of this? What if he sent her back? What if she herself was part of his experiment?

She had been handing over future knowledge without hesitation, because most of what she shared were things Liu Feng was destined to create anyway.

But what if that was exactly what the Bookworm Immortal wanted? What if they were all pieces of a much larger plan?

A chill crept down her spine.

Maybe she wasn’t just altering the past.

Maybe she was sitting right in the middle of someone else’s design.

Sending her memories back through time required an Immortal Technique, one way or another. She had always known there was a chance she was part of some greater scheme, even if coincidence wasn’t impossible. But assuming innocence would be naïve.

Still, she doubted whoever sent her was all-powerful. If they were, they would have sent someone else, someone more loyal or simply performed the time travel themselves.

No, thinking about these things with her current power was useless and would just make her paranoid.

She forced herself to breathe and redirected her focus to something she could control.

Her element.

In her first life, she’d been assigned the darkness element. Not chosen, assigned. Her affinity had been forcibly shaped with pills, methods, and carefully timed “insights,” engineered epiphanies fed to her through endless books and lessons. Every breakthrough came with a manual, and every manual carved her path into an artificial shape.

She’d been a factory-made Core Formation cultivator, mass-produced, replaceable, and unremarkable.

Her understanding of darkness was brittle because it had never truly been hers. It had been fed to her like a script, and she had followed it blindly in her younger years.

Worse, darkness was a dangerous element. Not inherently, but conceptually. It brushed too close to instinctive fear, to the unknown, to the shadows of the human psyche. A powerful element, if one had the insight and freedom to explore it. She had never been given either.

That path was a shoddy, mass-produced bridge someone else had built for her, and it had limited her potential in the later stages of her life.

Her foundation cracked at Core Formation. After Nascent Soul, she could never take another step forward. All because her understanding had never been rooted in herself.

But not this time.

This time, she would not let anyone or anything dictate her path. This life was hers.

She inhaled deeply, steeling her will.

Soon, she would break through and become a Foundation Establishment Cultivator.

And this time, she had already chosen her element.