Yu Xiang stood motionless for a while in what once many years ago had used to be his parents’ bedroom.

There was not even a speck of dust to be found anywhere, not on the floor, not on the bed and not even on the shelves. And this wasn't something that was limited just to the bedroom, but a fact that rang true for the entirety of the house.

The young reincarnator didn’t know if the sect had maybe sent someone to clean the place up before they’d arrived, or if there was some funky array put in place that could keep your house clean, like the cultivator version of a roomba, but the pristine conditions of the insides of the building plus the knowledge of who it’d once belonged to had produced an unsettling atmosphere.

Like the man and woman in the photo had simply gone out for a stroll in the sun and would be coming back at any time.

However, Yu Xiang knew that was not going to happen.

He didn’t notice the time flying by as he lost himself in his thoughts, to the point that a curious Lin Fen came up to see what was taking so long, having just finished putting away his alchemy supplies, his feline ears raising to attention as he heard his long time friend’s shallow breathing.

He slowly walked to Yu’s side, a concerned expression on his pale face. He almost spoke up before he finally noticed what was held between his friend’s hands.

A spark of understanding entered his steel grey eyes and a wave of sympathy emanated from his aura as it brushed against the green eyed cultivator’s.

He didn’t say anything, simply placing a long fuzzy tail against his friend’s back. It was extremely rare for him to find Yu Xiang so vulnerable, he was always so in control of himself that sometimes the young alchemist almost forgot his companion could fall in a ditch just like any other person.

Yu Xiang turned his head away from the framed picture for the first time in what felt like hours but was closer to not even twenty minutes, meeting the feline cultivator’s eyes.

Lin Fen had something that couldn’t really be called a smile on his face, his lips were curved but there was no cheer in his eyes, only a deep understanding and a sense of shared hardship and longing.

Yu Xiang’s expression was even more complicated, his face was twisted into a half frown half expression of confusion and his aura was completely blank of emotions, his eyes were narrowed due to some emotion too complicated to name. There was one feeling that Yu could easily pick apart from the others that were running through his being tho.

Awkwardness.

When he looked into Lin Fen’s deeply emotional gaze, full of empathy and compassion, he couldn’t help but feel embarrassed. Because while the feline cultivator might have believed they were having a moment of camaraderie and understanding Yu Xiang knew better.

Ultimately, when he looked at the picture of the man and woman that could not have been anyone else but his parents in his current life, he didn’t feel sad.

There was a hint of melancholy, a pinch of forlorn longing, and even a dusting of what someone might call pity if they were feeling particularly generous, but nothing strong enough to be categorized as sadness.

A chaotic mix of unpleasant emotional echoes, from a time when his consciousness had been lowered by the inadequate brain of an infant and he’d been acting and behaving on pure instinct like a common toddler.

Now that he’d rationalized away his emotions Yu Xiang did what he always did when he needed to deal with these kinds of bothersome feelings.

He wrapped them in the palm of an imagined metaphorical hand and shoved them down where they wouldn’t bother him anymore.

Not exactly the healthiest coping mechanism, but hey, there are no cultivators walking the grand path of psychology in this world!

Or at least he didn’t think there were.

Yu gave himself another minute to compose himself before he lowered the framed picture down back on the nightstand where it belonged. Lin Fen also retracted his tail now that he’d seen the young reincarnator coming back to his senses.

“How are you feeling?” The feline alchemist asked softly as the green eyed cultivator stretched his back.

“Better,” Yu answered succinctly but not harshly. “Thank you.”

Lin Fen just smiled slightly and nodded before he turned around and walked out of the room. A second later Yu Xiang followed after him, going down the stairs to the main room of the house.

After that little dose of emotional turmoil, he needed something to occupy himself with, and there was still a lot of stuff left to sort through, both from what they’d taken with them up from the outer compound and from what had been left in their new home by the previous occupants after they died.

More than enough work to take his mind away from the bad thoughts and let his body work on autopilot.

>>>

It took Yu Xiang and Lin Fen most of the rest of the day to settle in their home, after which they had a second celebratory dinner, courtesy of Yu Xiang going all out in the kitchen, played a bit of chess using the far too ostentatious chess set Lin Fen was still mildly apprehensive of touching, then went to bed.

Now, after a good night of sleep, Yu felt like a new man, ready to take on the world and make good on what he’d promised himself just after his fight with Su Rong.

It was time to learn some actual defensive techniques.

He took the map of the inner compound he’d been given the previous day and went on his way, leaving Lin Fen to tinker with his tools in what had once been an unused room but had now been transformed into his new personal laboratory.

Yu Xiang just hoped he wouldn’t set anything on fire.

Thanks to the map the young cultivator easily made his way around the various paved streets of the sect, still mildly weirded out that despite what common sense would dictate normally, there was in fact way more space up here than in the outer compound. Jokes on him for clinging to such a useless notion while surrounded by cultivators.

In no time Yu reached his destination, the inner sect's Hall of Knowledge, a giant library full of any kind of information, from political documents dating back hundreds of years to piles of techniques of all kinds.

To Yu Xiang's eyes, the enormous building looked a lot like a particularly wealthy museum, with large stone columns decorated with gold carvings of various historical and fantastical scenes connecting to the mostly wooden, but still just as imposing, rest of the building, a bright red double door with no handles and covered in rows of gleaming dark jade studs.

Yu Xiang put away his map before entering the building, briefly noting the unusual weight of the doors. Nothing difficult for someone like him who had begun refining his body, but something that would prove much harder for someone still in the Natal Realm and downright impossible to move for a mortal.

He got in without any issues, taking a couple of steps forward as he admired the expansive insides of the dramatically named library.

Rows upon rows of shelves filled to the brim with scrolls of all kinds lined every inch of the floor, the same for all the other floors above the entrance, which looked more like wide indoor balconies that stretched on until Yu Xiang could not see them anymore.

Alright, that confirmed it. Something was going on with the space here. The building had looked big from the outside but nowhere near this massive. Yu could not even see the other end of the building while pushing spiritual energy into his eyes, not to mention just how high up the ceiling was.

Was this the work of an array? Maybe the same thing that made the inner compound so much bigger than the outer one?

Another thought planted its roots in the young reincarnator's brain, followed by a full body shudder.

What would happen if the array failed? Would everything inside the stretched fabric of reality get lost between dimensions? Would everything just snap back towards its normal position, crushing everything in its way? Or maybe something that he had no way to predict would befall the poor souls caught in such an incident?

Yu Xiang paled rapidly before he shook his head, banishing the panic driven thoughts from his mind. This was all conjecture, and there was simply no way that nobody else had considered such an outcome, which meant people smarter and more experienced than him had already found some way to make anything bad he could come up with moot. Or at least he hoped so.

On that cheery thought, Yu finally took his eyes away from the sprawling library, noticing that the only space devoid of shelves in his sight was a wide desk a few large strides away from the doors he just passed through.

The young cultivator approached the desk, which was currently being manned by a short, sharp looking man wearing a modified version of a core disciple's robes, the top part descending way past his waist and looking more like a tunic.

The red clad disciple was looking through a long scroll that fell past the edge of the wooden desk, with another group of scrolls laying beside him stacked in a pyramid.

"Name?" The librarian asked before Yu could say anything.

The young reincarnator blinked a few times before he registered the question. "I'm Xiang Yu."

The man on the other side of the desk hummed slightly as he looked down the scroll in his hands. "A new inner disciple? What have you come here for?" He asked a few seconds later as his eyes settled on what Yu Xiang presumed was his name on the scroll.

"I'm searching for scrolls on defensive techniques, senior brother." Answered Yu.

The core disciple finally took his eyes off of the scroll, his sight dipping under the counter as he searched for something. Once he raised his hand back up the man handed Yu a rectangular wooden badge covered in indecipherable scripts.

He met Yu's eyes for the first time since their conversation had begun, looking bored at what must've been a routine occurrence for him. "Take this and climb the stairs on the right of the entrance."

Yu Xiang took the offered scripted piece of wood, bowing slightly at the core disciple in thanks, who simply waved him away, returning to his reading.

The green eyed cultivator walked towards the stairs that he'd been pointed at, feeling something happen to the spiritual energy around him the moment both of his feet were on the steps.

He ignored whatever it was, chalking it up to an intended effect as he kept ascending the flight of stairs.

He quickly reached the end of the stairs, where he was immediately greeted by the sight of several balconies protruding under the one he was currently occupying, something that should not have been the case considering he hadn't climbed nearly long enough to reach such a high position.

Yu Xiang gave the wooden token laying in his open palm the stink eye before he shook his head. Damned space fuckery.

Finally, he began perusing the various scrolls on the shelves, looking for a technique that would fit him.

Yu Xiang had to leave the more utility focused defensive skills alone as much as it pained him, he had utility for days already, and having a focused defense art could save his life down the line.

Goodbye puncturing shell of thorns, adieu lightning armor that shocks people on contact, adios skintight barrier that helps your sensing abilities, see you never carapace of chi that explodes when hit by an enemy cultivator...

Not that there weren't any useless looking techniques amidst the ones he had looked through, because oh boy were there some weird one in there!

Who would ever need an armor that makes one faster underwater? Or a technique that just picks up any dirt, rocks, and anything else not tied to the ground to form a shell around the user? Or some weird water-based defensive skill that made one able to sense the changing of the weather?

Not to mention that one technique that transformed your spiritual energy into a vicious snail like mucus that smelled foul and left you covered in a sticky gross substance, ugh.

Whoever had written down that one must've been even less enthusiastic about it than Yu Xiang himself, as the texture, odor, and feel of the dreadful technique were all laid out in painful detail. No doubt born from a first hand experience of the horrible skill.

Yu Xiang spent hours discarding technique after technique in his search, almost crying in despair when he stumbled upon a skill called [Golden Skin], which was the defensive counterpart to his other two golden techniques, but he had to ultimately put it away.

He had made a promise to himself and he was going to keep it. No more utility! It was time for focused skills!

Finally, after a long and grueling search, Yu Xiang found something promising. A technique with a simple name and a direct effect, [Snake Skin].

An armor made of spiritual energy that took on the properties of a snake's slithering form. Not only directly protecting the user from harm but also using the smooth surface of the snake like scales to bleed out the force of both physical hits and other techniques, which even made deflecting attacks easier.

A promising find that would work excellently with his own fighting style, and which piqued his interest greatly thanks to his and Lin Fen's fight against the giant snake back in the tunnels less than a week ago.

If he could produce an effect similar to the one it had with its refined scales then he would be set as far as protection went.

That reminded him, he still had a bundle of that spiritual beast's scales, didn't he? He should probably actually use them for something one of these days...