Damon's Ascension-Chapter 116: War In Xiangyang 17

Damon had never used the Silver Eclipse’s healing ability before, simply because he had steamrolled the previous Instances and hardly needed healing, either for himself or his sparse ’allies’.

This time, though, a situation had presented itself that required his input in this regard, so it was time to see whether it lived up to expectations.

As Damon pressed his glowing silver palm onto Qian Weimin’s forehead, the entire chamber dimmed due to the effect of the moonlight.

Silver threads of lunar energy slipped from Damon’s hand, with a soft yet surgical precision, tracing lines across the man’s skull and down into the invisible fracture of his spirit.

At first, nothing happened, then - slowly - the shallow breathing of the tortured man began to deepen.

Qian Weimin’s fingers, once curled tightly inward, twitched ever so slightly. Xu Baochun leaned forward, narrowing his eyes with shock.

"It’s working."

Damon’s brow furrowed in deep concentration, controlling the flow with focus since the Silver Eclipse’s healing ability wasn’t physical, it was an elemental ability based on divine magic, not grounded in any form of physics or logic.

But that only healed the wounds, so to revive Qian Weimin’s mind itself, Damon’s Internal Force, which was thankfully rooted in void and penetration, could find the trace of the hidden mind and slowly draw his consciousness back through.

A sudden gasp rippled through the room as the judge’s eyes, cloudy and unfocused just moments ago, cleared in an instant. He blinked slowly, then again, like a man emerging from a coma, caught on the fading edge of a dream.

"...Where... am I?" His voice was cracked and hoarse.

"Somewhere relatively safe, and yes, you’re still alive." Damon answered, removing his hand.

Qian Weimin turned his head with great difficulty, his sunken eyes landing on the young man before him, then the others. Something flickered in his expression, starting from relief... then suspicion... and then pain.

But mostly there was... recognition?

"You... You’re not from here," Qian Weimin rasped.

"No, I’m not," Damon replied calmly. "But I’m the one who put in the effort to pull you back, so don’t waste it. Just rest."

Qian Weimin nodded and lay back with a sigh, one layered with many meanings, though above all, it spoke of deep relief.

The silence stretched for a few moments as the fellow gathered his energy, and it was only broken by the gentle wind chimes outside the chamber as the breeze picked up.

Then, with trembling fingers, Qian Weimin reached beneath his thin mattress, into a hidden seam. From within, he drew out something wrapped in multiple layers of silk and rice paper.

He held it out and Damon accepted it cautiously, unwrapping it layer by layer... until he revealed a small, glowing fruit the color of melted gold, perfectly round, with faint script shimmering across its skin like circling prayers.

Everyone in the room stilled, their pupils constricting to needle points.

"...That’s..." Xu Baochun whispered, his throat dry.

"A Bodhi Fruit, the last gift from my master at the Prefecture Summit ten years ago. It is said to unlock the final step for any who stand at the door of Martial God." Qian Weimin confirmed, voice steadier now.

Feng Meizhen took a sharp breath. "That’s a myth. Those only grow on—"

"On the Northern Lotus Peak, yes. This one was gifted to me for a service rendered long ago... but I could never use it." Qian Weimin finished for him.

Damon looked up. "So this was the reason why you were tortured?"

Qian Weimin closed his eyes briefly. "The noble families of Xiangyang discovered it and not by accident, but because they were the ones who sponsored Brother Mian. They allowed him to usurp the Zen Sect’s name, fund the rebellion, and spread sedition, all while keeping public eyes off their real goal."

Chen Yuan clenched his fists. "The Bodhi Fruit..."

Qian Weimin coughed. "They believed I had it hidden in the county temple, or perhaps sealed with the Governor’s documents. When they couldn’t find it, they took me instead. And when I refused to give it up..."

"They broke you," Xue Rou finished quietly.

Qian Weimin looked at Damon again, eyes no longer fogged, but filled with gratitude. "But you didn’t ask for anything. You just helped me... So now, I give it to you."

He reached forward with both hands and offered the Bodhi Fruit fully. "This is not a gift... It’s recognition."

Damon accepted the fruit without fanfare, turning it slowly in his palm.

"...And the families?" He asked.

"They will not stop," Qian Weimin said grimly.

He shifted his position on the bed slightly. "They’ve tasted what it means to move without oversight. With the martial courts absent, they want to rule openly. The rebellion was only a game of shadows to them, a storm to drown government hands while they rise to power in the dark."

Damon nodded slowly, slipping the fruit into a sealed pouch. "So they used this Brother Mian fellow to set fire to the house while they picked the vault."

"Exactly," Qian Weimin smiled coldly.

Damon turned away and looked at the door. His voice was calm, but beneath it ran the edge of cold ruthlessness as he realized that the entire instance he had entered this time was one where a normal person would be toyed to death.

He got this far thanks to a mixture of Probability Manipulation, high stats and his acumen as a politician. Looking at his four objectives, they were intensely intertwined and connected, feeding off each other. Solving one would unravel new layers to the others and precious conclusions and conspiracies would shift to reveal new ones.

If it was not for the fact that Damon currently wanted to master martial arts rather than fight to harvest Worldly Essence, he would have long sent this county up in flames. Currently, his prudence was proving to pay off because this Instance was absolutely meant to be solved by wits, not force.

This was something he also knew to be true about the main Essence Instances and even the Chaos Realm. Those places focused on rules and problem-solving using Skills, Stats and Abilities and rarely was there a chance to use force to solve problems easily.

It seemed Tier 2 and above Essence Instances began to slowly shift from mindlessly training combat effectiveness to starting to use your brain.

However, with this Bodhi Fruit in hand, Damon had largely achieved his own personal objective, so it was time to set the final scene in motion.

To that end, he glanced back toward the bed. "Then it’s time to uproot the cancer affecting Xiangyang."

"Rest, Judge. You’ll preside over your own reckoning soon enough." Damon said softly, exiting the room with his people, aiming to return and utilize the given gift at the earliest possible convenience.

Qian Weimin closed his eyes, a faint smile returning to his face for the first time in months as he fell asleep peacefully.

...............

Upon returning to the Crane Ridge Villa, Damon gave some basic orders to his group and let Xu Baochun flounder off to wherever he wanted while he entered his cultivation chamber, taking out the Bodhi Fruit to look at it.

As he was within an Instance, he couldn’t see the game-fied details of the fruit or know if it lived up to its reputation, but Damon could almost feel his Internal Force shifting in response to the fruit, like a sleeping baby reaching out for its feeding bottle by instinct.

Damon held the fruit and pondered his next step. When he previously snapped the threads of perception and logic, he had told Xu Baochun that he was ’somewhat’ at the Martial Grandmaster realm, which was the penultimate martial arts realm.

The reason for this was quite complicated.

As stated before, Damon was bound by the rules of the universe and those rules were clear. However, the natives of this Instance weren’t, so when they cultivated Internal Force, they needed to comprehend and then accumulate, raising their stats slowly by turning Qi essence into Internal Force.

When Damon crossed the Martial Apprentice stage, he had stats surpassing that level, so he was able to extract the maximum amount of Internal Force. The same occurred with the Martial Warrior stage.

However, the obvious problem soon emerged, he ran out of stats to draw from. Surely no one actually believed someone titled Martial God would be someone with a measly 5 or 6 stat points, right?

So when Damon crossed the 3rd realm of Martial Master, he already noticed that his stats were strained, meaning that in terms of raw stats, he was about equivalent to halfway through the accumulation of a Martial Master.

When he entered Martial Grandmaster, he completely ’ran out’ of stats, so he couldn’t extract more Internal Force, but his quality became superior, matching the realm of Martial Grandmaster.

Hmm, so to give an analogy, one could assume that every Martial Grandmaster had two aspects - the stats and the Internal Force - which could be equated to the engine and fuel tank of a car.

Let’s say every Martial Grandmaster is equivalent to a Bugatti Veyron in terms of engine and had a full tank of fuel at the peak of the realm. Then Damon was like a BMW M3 GTR - equivalent to a Martial Master - in terms of engine with a half tank of fuel that is the same quality as what was in the Bugatti.