Immortal Paladin
222 The Day ‘David’ Died

222 The Day ‘David’ Died

I drank my nth bowl of soup. Honestly, I lost count somewhere around eleven… or maybe fifteen? The number didn’t matter anymore. Each bowl was stronger than the last. This one hit me like a slap of reality wrapped in cinnamon and lotus. Harsher, yes, but somehow 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 mental inventory. My name? Still intact. My mission? Somewhat 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 remembered that.

“Soup?” came Meng 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 time. I tried to track which memories 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 Supreme Heart left inside me. What was it again? A seed? A tether? A worm? No… the Heart Demon. That was it.

The realization spiked dizziness through me. 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 me. May I have more soup, please?”

Meng 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 something serious. Something about... resisting? Repelling? Something planted inside me... Eh. Who cared? The soup tasted amazing.

“Want more soup?” Meng 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 remember anymore, so no complaints on my end!”

She studied me closely. “You had a Heart Demon planted in you. By a Supreme 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 memory of how I did it didn’t survive the last bowl.”

Meng 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 me, 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 times do you think we’ve had this conversation?”

“No clue. But it’s definitely a lot.”

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

That name 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 moment the Immortal Art was conceived. The Supreme Idiots begged for my soup to erase it… not just from memory, 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 phenomenal. It shouldn’t have allowed you to reach me. 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,” Meng 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 me 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 performed 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 me like smoke and immediately triggered a jolt… something like a lantern relighting in a forgotten hallway.

“Oh,” I said slowly, blinking as recognition stirred. “I remember 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 me in suspense.”

I leaned back, feeling the tangled threads of memory start to unwind into something 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 me 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 me, anyway.

“There was this guy,” I continued. “He stole my body. Name’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 some 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?”

Meng 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 meet 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, fragmentary 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 method to resist it. Not by brute force or by immunity. More like... dosage control. I infused the memories I cherished most with the weight of destiny that as a result, this memories would always be the last to go when I drank the soup.”

I touched my temple. “Of course, that came at a price. I sacrificed a lot of memories along the way. Most of the Summit Hall, most of Nongmin’s looping lives. But their weight cushioned me. They acted as a buffer between me 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 memory… a clean wipe of one lifetime at a time. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been stored.”

I hesitated.

One lifetime?

Something about her tone made my gut turn.

I replayed what I said in my mind. Dosage, buffers, precious memories… 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 time, meaning one person’s memories… One person.

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

She raised a brow. “You think?”

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

Then it hit me.

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

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 Meng 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 me,” She stared at me for a long time. “You are dangerously clever in the most idiotic ways.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I think.”

“So what’s next?” Meng 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.”

Meng Po blinked.

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

I coughed and tried again. “Please come with me. 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 fragmentary… so brief they’d slip away before I even realized what I saw. Half-formed impressions. Shapes in smoke. If Hei Mao hadn’t existed, if he hadn’t led me to her presence, I doubt I would have ever managed this meeting. 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-melting lunatic I’d expected from a being who spanned realms and brewed memory-erasing tea for a living.

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

She was truly an eccentric.

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

“Let me 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 becomes 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,” Meng 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 mean, 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 metaphor 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 same, but…

I didn’t answer right away.

There was something beneath her words. I’d known from the beginning that Meng Po wasn’t truly forgetful. She chose what to remember. Every time she drank, every time she claimed to forget, it was her way of nudging the conversation forward without revealing too much. She was dancing along a line between memory and mystery, and her soup was more than just memory-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 immediately.

Her eyes were darker now, deep wells of something older than time. Maybe sorrow. Maybe expectation.

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

“But you will die,” Meng 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 metaphor 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 someone 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 me 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 came to you.” I dropped to my knees and pressed my forehead to the cold stone. “Please teach me your ways, Master. And give this little ant the wings to fly.”

I remained like that for a long moment, 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 amusement or annoyance. My ears caught only the bubbling of soup and the creak of her joints as she stood above me.

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

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

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

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

She grimaced as if she’d just swallowed something bitter. “No,” she said again, turning her back on me 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 Meng Po was going to reject me, so be it. There were other things to focus on… questions to ask, pieces to understand.

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

“Yes,” Meng Po replied, matter-of-fact. Her voice carried no trace of emotion, but it didn't need to. My Divine Sense confirmed what she said… the current of time 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 me 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.

Meng Po stirred the soup with a slow, circular rhythm. “The Hollowed World was forged by the collective power of the Supreme 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 name would shatter you. The Supreme Idiots made a pact to erase this existence in all realities…”

My Divine Sense hummed 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 something 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 something more you wish to forget. What is it?”

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

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

“So?” urged Meng Po as she stared at me 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.