Chapter 35 – Days Mundane (II)

Chapter 35

Days Mundane (II)

I must admit, I never expected days within the world of cultivation to be so… mundane. Once I handed the method to Dai Xiu and mostly finished the barebones construction of their home, things just… settled down. Inordinately so.

Long Tao never asked me for the cloaking art again; he did stop cultivating and started hanging around the girl a lot, guiding her quite… earnestly. I don’t know what that old monster has planned, but maybe he warmed up to the place? Yeah, right. Ah, who’s to know…

Once a month, a cart of resources would be brought up, but, save for that, we had no more visitors.

I’d descend the mountain every couple of weeks and head straight into the library, borrowing more and more books. That’s right–I became a bit of a bookworm!

Naturally, I wasn’t renting cultivation arts or methods and such, no; I mostly stuck either to histories, folklore, or just ‘tales,’ as they called the novel-like tomes here.

There were… a lot of them. Histories, alone, filled up a massive bookshelf with eight rows, each holding at least fifty books. To be fair, I’m using the word ‘history’ quite loosely here; most contained myths of the age that were just that: mythical.

Things like, “There be this God who made this mountain and lived for 8 billion years,” or “The Tribe fought the Serpent God for 10,000 years and perished…” Though I would be inclined to believe some of these, as this is a fantasy world, after all, I rejected them all on the basis that hyperbole was the mother of them all.

No, seriously.

Nothing ever happened within either a short distance or a short time; nothing was ever ‘normal-sized’, either. Kingdoms spanned literal hundreds of thousands of miles, mountains peaked at a million miles, and people themselves were as ‘tall as the sky,’ which ranged anywhere between a billion miles or some loose, indeterminate number.

However, it was… fun, I have to admit.

Much like my little hideout at the back of the mountain, these books became my anchors; they reinforced, in however small a way, that despite the fact people here could shoot magic from their fingers and do things otherwise impossible, they weren’t actually all that different from me me.

They, too, were bewitched by concepts beyond their ken, even if those concepts were slightly more exaggerated. They, too, formed beliefs around the things they could not otherwise explain; while we conjured up gods for environmental hazards, they made up mythical cultivators who ‘fought’ and ‘produced’ these catastrophes.

It was… compelling, reading accounts of mythological figures that resonated with something deep inside of me.

But it was also rather frustrating.

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After all, I was mostly interested in real accounts of this world, in a desperate bid to spin a proper framework of it in my mind. However, after reading through nearly 150 books, I can maybe ascertain like 10 true details of the world itself, beyond the grasp of this tiny hamlet.

Perhaps the most revealing was that this corner of the world wasn’t even charted on official maps that were present in the books–it was so off the beaten path that nobody even bothered checking if there was anything here.

In fairness, the map itself had a lot of… gaps, let’s call them. It’s likely that this isn’t the only ‘missed’ portion, but just one of the many. Unlike on Earth, where we felt compelled to document every single tribe we could, here there seemed to be a broader sense of pure apathy towards anything ‘below-level’.