615: Chapter 615 Imperial Tutor (5)

Qin Yun stood beneath the Eternal Divine Tree.

The Nine Books and Nine Treasures floated within him, his cultivation at the peak of the Pseudo-Immortal realm perfectly integrated and self-consistent, having even touched the threshold of the Supreme Realm.

Yet, the Origin Will of the Nine Continents had given him the final answer.

Only after experiencing the Mortal World can one become a Mortal World Immortal.

He did not understand.

What was the Mortal World?

He had experienced countless great battles, witnessed life and death, slain anomalies, suppressed the Dark Turmoil, and even saved the Nine Continents.

Yet, none of these seemed to be the Mortal World.

Qin Yun realized that he had always been standing too high.

He looked at the survival of the Nine Continents, the anomalies of the Immortal Path, and the final end of the Dao.

Those things were too vast, too distant.

But the Mortal World, perhaps, was hidden in the lowest of places.

Qin Yun decided to stop retreating, stop deducing, and stop forcing a breakthrough.

He retracted all his power.

He sealed the Nine Books and Nine Treasures.

Leaving only a wisp of consciousness, he walked into the world.

At first, he transformed into an unnamed beggar.

He walked through an ordinary small city.

He had been hungry.

He had been cold.

He had been shunned by others.

He had also been secretly slipped a steaming hot meat bun by an old woman selling buns.

He could clearly have conjured thousands of spiritual foods with a single thought, yet he held back.

For the first time, he earnestly experienced the plight of Mortals, and that tiny, insignificant warmth.

Later, he worked as a porter, moving goods for others, his shoulders rubbed raw with blood blisters, earning a few copper coins barely enough to buy a pancake.

He worked as a carpenter, crafting a wedding bed for an ordinary family, watching that young couple bow to each other with faces full of joy.

He worked as a farmer, planting in spring and harvesting in autumn, relying on the heavens for food, waiting for rain, and guarding against pests in the fields.

He worked as a teacher, teaching a group of children with pigtails to read, babbling as they recited poems he had almost forgotten himself.

He worked as a physician, able to cure colds, but unable to save an elderly person whose lifespan had ended, lying in bed waiting for death.

He worked as an observer, sitting in a teahouse, listening to the storyteller in the restaurant turn the past of the Nine Continents into stories.

The people below listened intently, but no one knew that the brilliant and talented Cloud Immortal in the story was sitting right in front of them.

However, Qin Yun soon realized that merely observing the Mortal World was not enough.

Using the supreme power of Chaos, he split off thousands of Clones.

He let each Clone Seal its memories, leaving only the most genuine humanity, and cast them into various parts of the Nine Continents.

One Clone was born in a fishing village by the East Sea, fishing his whole life.

He married a woman from next door who loved to laugh, and they had three children.

The eldest son was like him, silent.

The second daughter was like his wife, loving to laugh.

The youngest son was the naughtiest.

He watched them grow up, watched them start families, and finally, in a storm, he disappeared at sea along with his fishing boat.

One Clone became a frontier soldier.

He was urgently conscripted the day before his wedding and rushed to the battlefield.

He promised her he would return when the war was over.

He did not return.

He died on the battlefield, his chest pierced by an enemy spear.

One Clone became a wealthy merchant.

He was shrewd his whole life, calculating his whole life, but in his later years, he gave away all his family assets.

He repaired bridges, paved roads, and built charitable halls.

When he died, there was no one by his side, yet half the city spontaneously came to see him off.

One Clone became a down-and-out scholar.

He took exams his whole life but never achieved official rank; his wife died early, and his children despised him for his incompetence.

Yet, he taught a virtuous minister whose name would be passed down through the ages.

One Clone became a man of few words, a blacksmith.

He only forged one type of sword his whole life, pouring his heart and soul into every blade.

After he died, the sword he forged was worn by a general, who slew the enemy leader with it, becoming a legend.

That sword was enshrined in an ancestral hall, receiving offerings from later generations.

Other Clones married and had children, experiencing the daily grind of life.

When a child developed a fever in the middle of the night, he carried the child and ran dozens of miles to seek medical help.

His wife slowly grew old, wrinkles appeared at the corners of her eyes, and her hair turned white.

Former friends and relatives drifted away one by one, and in the end, only he was left, sitting in the courtyard, watching the falling leaves.

Life after life.

Clone after Clone died of old age, and their memories eventually returned to Qin Yun's main body.

He no longer viewed the world from the perspective of a powerhouse.

Instead, he truly experienced the lives of countless ordinary people.

He finally began to understand that the so-called Mortal World was not just suffering, nor just love.

It was the persistence of Mortals who, knowing they would eventually lose everything, still lived earnestly.

Absorbing the memories of countless Clones, Qin Yun's state of mind underwent a subtle change.

He no longer saw the Nine Continents merely as a cold world that needed to be protected.

What he saw were living, breathing people.

He saw a mother afraid her child would go hungry, stuffing the last half of a pancake into her child's arms.

He saw an old man on his deathbed still worrying about the crops in the fields.

He saw a teenager who left home in a fit of pique, yet secretly bought medicine for his parents halfway.

He saw a woman waiting for her husband to return, waiting from black hair until it turned white.

He saw a Mortal who had never seen an Immortal in his life, yet on a rainy night, held up an oiled paper umbrella for a strange beggar.

Qin Yun seemed to have touched the edge of the Mortal World Immortal state.

But that membrane still existed.

He knew he was still one step away.

Just as Qin Yun continued to walk through the Mortal World, the Luoyun Heavenly Abyss trembled once again.

The suppression left by the azure pagoda was still there, and the Green Lotus Seal was also still there.

The Nine Continents' Origin, patched by the Nine Books and Nine Treasures, was also still playing its role.

But the Dark Turmoil still erupted.

This time, it was not as violent as the change in the Immortal Path, but it was insidious.

The anomalous creatures no longer simply attacked the Seals, but began to spread throughout the Nine Continents by borrowing the desires of Mortals, the obsessions of Cultivators, and the greed of Imperial clans.

They were like a silent plague.

Qin Yun struck to suppress them.

With one palm pressed down, Chaos Qi swept across several continents, easily slaying several corrupted Fallen Heavenly Emperors.

But after the suppression, Qin Yun felt his own Origin had been consumed by a sliver.

He discovered that every time he suppressed the darkness, it was as if he was using his own Origin to patch an invisible hole for the Nine Continents.

The suppression of the azure pagoda was still there, and logically speaking, the root of the Dark Turmoil should be suppressed and not last too long.

But the reality was that the intensity of the turmoil was deeper each time.

The corrupted creatures were also getting stronger.

Fear arose in Qin Yun's heart.

The true source of the darkness, that "Emperor" hiding in the deepest part of the Heavenly Abyss, had not yet fully appeared.

It was simply using this method to continuously consume the Nine Continents, and also consume him.