Cultivation Nerd (xianxia)
Chapter 269 – The New Immortal

When I thought of the Blazing Sun Immortal, the image I had in my head, for some reason, was a buff guy with flames for hair. Probably because of everything I’d read about the Sect’s history. How it came to be. The unspoken barbaric rules.

It just gave off that vibe.

But instead, there was just some dark-haired teenager with light green eyes. He looked handsome, sure, but not so much that he’d stand out. He’d blend perfectly into a village like this.

Also... a teenager? Damn. Just thinking about how any random guy walking around could be an Immortal…

How many cultivators had unknowingly messed with someone like him and gotten the really bad end of the stick?

Zun Gon, still frozen beside me, hadn’t even moved his eyes. It was hard to tell whether he was paralyzed by fear or if the Blazing Sun Immortal was using some kind of technique. I didn’t feel anything active, but who was I to judge what an Immortal was or wasn’t doing?

It would be weird for someone like Zun Gon, who’d lived so long, to act this smitten. So… probably some technique.

The Immortal stared at me, and it felt like my heart stopped for a second.

In reality, he hadn’t released any pressure. Not even a sliver of killing intent. He was just looking at me.

The pressure came entirely from myself.

I took a breath. Tried to calm my nerves. I pointed at Zun Gon and began the speech I’d been rehearsing in my head:

“Honorable Immortal–”

“Cut that crap. Just call me Sir Immortal,” he said.

I just stared at him, pretty sure he was joking, but not stupid enough to bet my life on that.

“I’m okay with Lord Immortal too,” he added.

“Lord Immortal–”

“Wow, you actually started calling me that. You know I was joking, right?”

Holy shit. Was this guy ever going to let me finish a sentence?

“Now you’re annoyed,” he continued. “I already don’t like you because you remind me of one of my sons. Please don’t tell me you’re an Array Conjurer too?”

I coughed awkwardly and gestured toward Zun Gon. “Should we release him? After all, he is the de facto leader of the Blazing Sun Sect.”

“I’m not going to treat someone who mingled with heaven’s chosen like a human anyway,” he shrugged. “At best, they’re fate’s puppets.”

He tilted his head slightly, studying me. “What about you, otherworlder? Do you treat puppets as human beings?”

I thought about just agreeing with him. But lying to someone who’d looked at me once and immediately seen through one of my biggest secrets, that I was an otherworlder, didn’t sound smart.

“It isn’t my place to say,” I said slowly. “But… anyone can be manipulated by fate.”

The Immortal stared at me with an unreadable expression.

I knew his position. His power. But somehow, having someone who looked like a teenager just staring at me… wasn’t as intimidating as I expected.

He released no pressure. No threats. Nothing.

And honestly, I was used to people in power being way more dramatic.

Still, I had been nervous at first.

He stared at me a moment longer. No smile. No shift in aura. Just silence. Then... 

The Immortal burst out laughing.

"I guess you're right," he said between chuckles. "Anyway, do you want to come fishing? Living with the youth is so much fun. I never feel a day over fifteen!"

I looked at him and shook my head.

So far, telling the truth had worked, and perhaps it would work this time too.

But that seemed to be the wrong decision, as the Immortal sighed.

"Tell me your real thought. What do you think of my decision to spend my time in eternal youthful spirit?" he asked.

"I think it's a bit creepy," I admitted. "Hanging around teenagers all day and all that…"

The guy could probably already tell what I thought. He seemed far too familiar with otherworlders to be surprised.

"You goddamn otherworlders are all the same," the Immortal sighed, rubbing his forehead.

I bowed my head. "Sorry. That was just my opinion."

People in this world usually said 'Heavens this' or 'Heavens that'. But this guy said 'goddamn'. Most people here didn't worship any deity on a large scale. This meant that he was either an otherworlder himself or, more likely, because of how he acted, that he had known otherworlders long enough to pick up their habits.

"Almost two thousand years ago, I had this lover. She was an otherworlder too, but she had zero talent for cultivation," he said. "Most of them are like that."

He smiled, looking up at the sky, reminiscing.

"She complained so damn much if I even looked at another woman. For seventy damn years that woman blew my ear off, trying to make it seem like having a harem was weird," he sighed, shaking his head. "She made me almost celibate for those seventy years!"

Okay. I was a bit confused.

An Immortal who could do anything, forced to stay with one woman through her life?

I got the feeling he must've liked her enough to stay. And depending on the age she was when they met, he probably stayed with her until she was an old woman and died, since she had no cultivation talent.

Maybe… he didn't hate otherworlders as much as he first let on.

"I can tell by your relaxed posture and your Qi functions that you're no longer as worried," the Blazing Sun Immortal said, "and probably thought something along the lines of, 'he doesn't hate otherworlders as much as he initially gave the impression of,' right?"

I nodded. No reason to lie.

"Well, you're right…" he said. "But I definitely don't like you."

He stared at me.

"Even right now, you look at me more as a curiosity than as a human being with thoughts and feelings. You want to understand, study, and dice me to pieces. Just like a pervert who looks at a well-endowed woman, you see me as a mere object of your fascination."

Well, that was a metaphor.

Fuck me.

I had tried to calculate how this meeting would go. I had run every scenario I could think of.

But I hadn't accounted for this.

How the hell was I even supposed to respond to that?

"I think we should get to talking about other matters at hand, since we didn't come here just to bother you, Lord Immortal," I said, bowing my head in respect.

Actually, I was really curious about the guy's personal life… but if I admitted that, the pervert metaphor would really hit the nail on the head.

"Your secret is safe with me, since I froze Zun Gon before revealing you were an otherworlder," he said.

"Thank you," I nodded.

"You don't really need to thank me. Ninety-nine percent of immortals can tell where you're from with one look," he shrugged.

Then, with a snap of his fingers, clearly just for theatrical flair, he unfroze Zun Gon, who had seemed like he was frozen in time.

Zun Gon immediately dropped to one knee as soon as he was released.

"This unworthy disciple greets the Honorable Blazing Sun Immortal!" Zun Gon bellowed, addressing himself like a low-level student.

The Immortal just stared at him for a moment… and then a look of pure disgust crept across his face.

"After so many years as a Sect Leader, I've developed an irrational fear of people acting like this in front of me," he said, deadpan.

Zun Gon stood up immediately, but kept his eyes on the ground. Probably scared shitless by the fact that he'd casually grabbed the Immortal's shoulder earlier.

"Okay, let's just finish this as fast as possible. I've got more important things to do," said the Immortal. "And I can roughly guess why you guys are here."

More important things to do than save the Sect he'd built and been tied to for three thousand years?

This guy was… something else.

But I guess a normal person wouldn't have become an Immortal in the first place.

"Anyway, first question: Why would a heavenly calamity attack the Sect while I was here?" he asked. "Also, why would the calamity be a giant flaming ball... when I'm the Blazing Sun Immortal and probably the creature with the highest fire resistance to ever live?"

How the hell was I supposed to answer that?

I didn't have access to much information about Heaven's will.

But from the way he was talking, it almost sounded like Heaven wasn't some intelligent, calculating entity. More like the world's instinctual immune system, reacting to threats, irregularities, and anomalies. Not thinking. Not planning.

That would make sense. Otherwise, we'd hear stories of Heaven threatening loved ones, making calculated hostage moves, or cutting off a Sect's inheritance line out of spite.

But if that was true, then…

The heavenly calamity at the Blazing Sun Sect wasn't targeting him.

Oh. Fuck.

The Blazing Sun Immortal turned toward me.

Zun Gon froze in place again.

"Oh wow, you're boring," the Immortal said. "Don't tell me your world was one of those without a supernatural system?"

I just stared at him.

He already knew the answer.

The Blazing Sun Immortal sighed.

"The Heavens aren't stupid," he said. "And that wasn't my calamity…"

He smiled, slowly, like a secret blooming. "Another person broke through and became an Immortal Cultivator.... And the heavens reacted."

Another Immortal…? I hadn’t considered that possibility. At least not as a real option. 

As he spoke, a gentle wave of heat pulsed through the air. Subtle at first, like the breath of summer.

Then, in an instant, the cold vanished.

Frost melted off the ground. The bite in the air disappeared. And the world felt like it had been dipped in fire.

His robes caught flame first, flickering softly as if kissed by morning light. He smiled, like the innocent child staring at their mother for the first time. 

Then his fingers ignited, tongues of golden fire licking up his skin. His eyes burned next, no longer orbs of flesh but radiant spheres of pure heat. 

The rest of his body followed in seconds, consumed in silence.

“That day,” came his voice, distorted, echoing, as though spoken through distance and flame, “the only known new Immortal in the last millennium was born.”

The teenager was gone.

What stood before me was something else entirely.

A being made of pure flame, its body flickering with radiant intensity, barely holding a shape beyond humanoid. The head, if it could even be called that, was a searing sphere of light, blinding to look at directly. Like staring into the sun itself, it pulsed with solar flares and cascading heatwaves, casting shadows that danced wildly across the earth.

This wasn’t just power.

It was divinity, barely restrained.

What the hell was this thing? Not just a cultivator. Something more. Something the world wasn’t meant to look at directly.

This was the Blazing Sun Immortal.

“Do you think fire can hurt me now?” he asked, his voice like a flicker inside my skull. Distorted, radiant, wrong in a way my senses couldn’t fully process.

He hadn’t released any pressure. Not a shred of Qi.

And yet, just hearing him made my chest tighten, like my lungs didn’t belong to me anymore. My thoughts stumbled. My instincts screamed.

It was like standing at the edge of a star. Staring into something so far beyond me that my mind refused to understand it.

“The last time I saw an otherworlder was about a hundred years ago,” he continued, calmly, as if discussing the weather. “A young girl from an isolated village near the Sect. She didn’t have the talent to cultivate. But she was quite sharp. Just like you.”

I wanted to respond. I really did.

But the words never made it past my throat. They swirled in my mind, forming and unforming, tangled by the weight of the being in front of me.

Then he tilted his head slightly. The light of his face pulsed.

“Now,” he said, the heat in his voice like a whisper made of sunlight. “Tell me, who do you think is the new Immortal who broke through?”

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