Who Let Him Cultivate？

Chapter 69: The Wrong Way to Clear the Stage

The Jin army had been routed one too many times. Even a scion like Meng Jingzhou found himself sinking into the mire of despair, the bitter taste of inevitable defeat heavy on his tongue.

“Is victory even attainable?” Meng Jingzhou asked himself in the damp gloom of the cavern, the words feeling like ash in his mouth.

“Hmm? A spider?” His gaze snagged on a tiny arachnid diligently weaving its web in the corner.

The spider failed, its silk snapping, yet it immediately began again. It failed a second time, a third, and still, it persisted. The sight struck Meng Jingzhou like a bolt of heavenly tribulation.

“This mere insect fights on despite repeated, crushing defeats. Am I, a cultivator of grand ambitions, to be outdone by a spider?”

A surge of raw, unrefined determination thrummed through his meridians. Meng Jingzhou rallied his spirits, his eyes burning with renewed martial intent. He would face the Liang state once more!

“The Liang army boasts superior numbers and strength, but the disparity is not an insurmountable chasm. How can I surrender after a mere handful of setbacks? If I fall here, what becomes of the Jin state standing behind me?”

“I am certain that with the correct tactical deployment, victory is within my grasp!” Meng Jingzhou clenched his fist, the bones popping in the quiet cave. A grand strategy was already taking root in his mind.

Through his previous failures, he had meticulously analyzed the Liang general’s operational doctrines. Gorged on a streak of victories, the enemy commander’s ego would be dangerously inflated. Meng Jingzhou could weaponize this arrogance. He would feign a catastrophic collapse, fleeing in disarray to lure the Liang vanguard into a narrow canyon, only to spring a flawless, suffocating encirclement.

This time, he would execute a masterstroke of tactical deception and honor the expectations of the Jin elders!

“I offer my gratitude for your profound teachings.” Meng Jingzhou cupped his hands and bowed deeply to the spider. Without this creature’s silent sermon on perseverance, his Dao heart would have surely fractured, extinguishing any hope of triumph.

The cavern was thick with buzzing mosquitoes and crawling pests. To express his reverence, Meng Jingzhou snatched a plump insect from the air and gently deposited it upon the spider’s web.

The spider, utterly incapable of comprehending this gesture of cross-species diplomacy, perceived the giant hand as a lethal threat. It lunged, sinking its fangs deep into Meng Jingzhou’s flesh.

“A venomous strain…”

Meng Jingzhou’s vision swam as a potent neurotoxin flooded his system. His knees buckled, and he collapsed into the dirt.

He had no concept of how much time slipped away—perhaps a few fleeting minutes, perhaps a quarter of an hour. When his eyes finally snapped open, he didn’t feel the lingering weakness of poison. Instead, surges of explosive, untamed vitality thrummed through his veins.

“What… what has happened to my vessel?”

Meng Jingzhou could feel a fundamental shift in his biology. His vision pierced the cavern’s gloom with terrifying clarity; his hearing picked up the faintest scuttle of insects in the stone. His physical form felt unprecedentedly light, coiled with the explosive tension of a drawn bowstring. It was as if he had shed his mortal coil and been reborn.

Driven by an instinct he didn’t know he possessed, his right arm snapped forward. His middle and ring fingers curled inward against his palm. A pressurized hiss echoed through the cavern as a stream of blindingly white, hyper-tensile silk erupted from his wrist.

“!!!”

“What in the heavens is this sorcery?”

The white silk splattered against the cavern wall, adhering with a sickening thwack. Meng Jingzhou seized the strand and hauled backward with all his might, finding the material exceptionally durable—a monomolecular wire of lethal starch and protein.

“Is this… spider silk?”

Heart pounding, Meng Jingzhou pressed both palms flat against the vertical stone face. To his absolute bewilderment, his flesh adhered to the rock with the grip of a primordial beast. Scaling sheer cliffs and walking inverted across ceilings would require no expenditure of spiritual qi whatsoever.

“I recall being bitten by that arachnid… Wait, where is my master?”

When Meng Jingzhou finally located the spider, tragedy had struck. It lay dismembered, the victim of a ruthless praying mantis.

With a heavy heart, Meng Jingzhou brought his boot down, obliterating the mantis in a spray of ichor to avenge his fallen mentor.

He inherited the spider’s unfulfilled will. He rallied his broken army and prepared to face the Liang forces once more.

However, on the eve of the decisive clash, draped in the midnight black of an assassin’s garb, Meng Jingzhou bypassed the theater of war entirely. Relying on his terrifying new biological enhancements, he scaled the sheer walls of the enemy encampment and executed a surgical decapitation strike, slaughtering the Liang general in his own tent.

In his final moments, the Liang general’s face was frozen in utter disbelief. They were both esteemed commanders of grand armies! Were they not supposed to clash on the blood-soaked plains, matching wits and formations in a glorious, climactic battle? What kind of lunatic skipped the entire war to personally murder the opposing general in his sleep?

The Liang general was flanked by elite cultivator guards, but their movements were sluggish compared to Meng Jingzhou’s terrifying, arachnid-like agility. The assassination was flawless.

The Liang general had been a once-in-a-generation military savant. With his sudden demise, the Liang army was instantly paralyzed, a dragon stripped of its head. Without a commander to maintain the grand formations, Meng Jingzhou led the Jin forces to utterly crush the disorganized enemy.

Meng Jingzhou cleared the stage.

***

Within the shadowed halls of the Immortal Cult headquarters, the Cult Master and Deputy Cult Master stared at the scrying projection of Meng Jingzhou’s victory. A heavy, suffocating silence stretched between them.

A second, completely derailed method of clearing the stage had actually manifested.

The Cult Master rubbed his temples, the sheer absurdity of the situation threatening to induce a qi deviation. “What in the heavens was that arachnid? Since when does a venomous bite bestow the biological traits of the attacker upon the victim?”

“If I were to bite a spider, would the creature undergo a tribulation and transform into a human?”

The Deputy Cult Master was equally bewildered. He stroked his chin in deep contemplation before a spark of realization lit his eyes. With a flick of his wrist, he withdrew a crumbling, ancient tome from his Storage Ring. Thumbing through the fragile parchment, he slammed a finger onto a specific passage.

“Behold. The ancient texts record an anomaly native to the Central Continent. It possessed the mundane strength of a common spider and was entirely docile. However, any cultivator whose flesh was pierced by its fangs would undergo a radical, localized physical mutation.”

“This specific breed of arachnid was driven to extinction tens of thousands of years ago.”

The Deputy Cult Master adjusted his robes, his tone shifting into that of a seasoned academic delivering a flawless thesis. “The historical conflict between the Jin and Liang states occurred one hundred thousand years ago. Since our grand array perfectly reconstructed the temporal and spatial reality of that era, it is theoretically sound that this extinct, anomalous spider would spawn within that cavern.”

The Cult Master nodded slowly, the logic impeccable. “It appears this Meng Jingzhou possesses not only an indomitable will and tactical flexibility, but also terrifying luck.”

The concept of luck was an elusive, ethereal force. Only the legendary Qi Observation Art could truly quantify the weight of a cultivator’s Providence.

Yet, the evidence was undeniable. Out of the countless initiates enduring this grueling simulation, only Meng Jingzhou had the fortune to be bitten by a prehistoric, mutating arachnid. It was a clear testament to his extraordinary Providence.

A cultivator blessed with such supreme Providence was destined to walk a path paved with heavenly treasures, their future achievements boundless.

“Let us observe the others. I refuse to believe a third, equally absurd method of clearing this stage exists.”

***

Elsewhere in the simulation, Lu Yang sat cross-legged, his eyes locked onto a spider that was repeatedly failing to construct its web. His mind descended into a vortex of cynical philosophy.

“A spider’s web is designed to ensnare prey. Yet, why is the mortal idiom ‘waiting by a tree stump for a rabbit’ considered the height of foolishness? Are both not the act of remaining stationary, waiting for a victim to deliver itself to its doom? What is the fundamental difference?”

“Is it because insects are entirely devoid of cognitive function, hurling themselves blindly into the abyss of the web, while rabbits possess the spatial awareness to avoid timber?”

“But if insects lack brains, does that not imply the spider is equally mindless? Therefore, is this spider’s endless cycle of failure and reconstruction a manifestation of supreme martial willpower, or merely the repetitive insanity of a brainless automaton?”

“Even rabbits possess the rudimentary intelligence to avoid crashing into trees. Why, then, do cultivators refuse to turn back until their skulls are shattered against the proverbial southern wall?”

Lu Yang’s thoughts spiraled outward, dissecting the very nature of existence.

Unlike the others, he hadn’t fallen into despair after his military defeats. He was simply using the cavern to shelter from the rain, idly pondering methods to shatter the enemy formations.

Watching the spider had merely triggered a cascade of profound, yet entirely useless, existential questions.

Suddenly, a blur of green motion shattered his reverie. A praying mantis, seizing upon the spider’s momentary lapse in defense, launched a lethal ambush. The spider fought back with vicious desperation, utilizing the sticky terrain of its web, but the mantis was a tempest of nimble, violent strikes. Within a few breathless exchanges, the mantis severed the spider’s life force.

Lu Yang witnessed this brutal display of nature’s martial arts. His eyes narrowed in profound realization. He rose slowly to his feet, his mind replaying the mantis’s flawless execution of violence.

He analyzed the technique: the masterful, versatile deployment of its twin forelimbs, striking with the precision of dual sabers. He analyzed the footwork: the explosive, erratic leaps, dodging forward, backward, left, and right with zero telegraphing.

“To internalize the Dao of the mantis… one must become the mantis…”

Lu Yang murmured, his voice dropping an octave. He felt a strange resonance within his soul. He had dabbled in similar mimicry arts before; his talent in this specific, bizarre field was unparalleled.

Lu Yang began to move. He became a humanoid mantis, his strikes a perfect harmony of yielding softness and devastating hardness. His fists blurred with ferocious speed. Any mortal martial artist would be instantly pulverized beneath this barrage.

The historical Jin general he inhabited possessed a cultivation base at the mid-stage of Qi Refining. Inheriting this vessel, Lu Yang wielded the same power.

As his martial trance reached its zenith, the boundaries of his physical form began to blur. He didn’t just mimic the insect; he initiated a visceral, terrifying metamorphosis. Flesh gave way to an emerald, chitinous exoskeleton. He expanded, transforming into a towering, monstrous praying mantis. His forearms elongated into lethal, serrated scythes.

With a single, blindingly fast strike of his scythe-like appendage, he unleashed a shockwave of kinetic force that caused a localized structural collapse, obliterating the cavern walls entirely.

Lu Yang clicked his mandibles, letting out a sigh of enlightenment. “So this is the legendary ‘Mantis Fist’ whispered of in the mortal martial world. Its destructive output is staggering. It is a pity ordinary humans lack the biological framework to master it.”

Returning to his human form, Lu Yang distilled this primordial, monstrous martial art into a simplified, brutal doctrine. He disseminated it throughout the ranks of the Jin army.

The results were catastrophic for the enemy. The Jin army’s combat prowess skyrocketed, transcending the need for mortal tactics or grand stratagems. They didn’t outmaneuver the Liang forces; they simply marched forward, a tidal wave of martial devastation that flattened everything in its path.

Lu Yang cleared the stage.

***

“What kind of lunatic clears a military simulation like this?!” the Deputy Cult Master roared, his composure finally shattering into a million pieces.

(End of Chapter)