Fellow Daoist, Wait! Are You Cultivating Immortality?

My first year of cultivation. I swung a woodcutter’s axe three thousand times every day, sweeping the fallen leaves and bloodstains from the Body Tempering Institute. The instructor said this was called tempering my body. My second year of cultivation. I was thrown into the Bloodrust Secret Realm as “expendable material.” The first thing my axe cut into wasn’t wood. It was a “thing” that could scream and beg for mercy. The axe’s blade felt cold, and somewhere in my mind, I heard the inexplicable sound of something chewing with malice. The secret realm steward called it “training.” My third year of cultivation. I became a strange legend within the sect. They stopped sending me to the martial arts arena. Instead, they sent me to the mass graves behind the mountain, to mines drained of spiritual energy, and to every place where people had died for no apparent reason. When they called for me, their eyes darted away and their voices grew complicated. “Bu Yu, go and… ‘clean up’ that place.” I carried my axe over. The axe was silent, but I “heard” them: the sticky, writhing “sounds” of things that should not exist. Later, I swept every dark corner of the sect. My axe grew brighter and brighter, and beneath the rust, patterns like bone and blood emerged. The “sounds” I “heard” grew more numerous and more distinct, weaving into a vast, maddening whisper that told the truth of this Immortal Realm’s rot. Until one day, the sect’s transmission elder, who had sent me into the secret realm, let out a shriek from his meditation chamber that was nothing like a human voice. [No romance + Lovecraftian cultivation + exorcism by physical force]