27 Chapter 26: Something something Buddha Arts.

"Where am I?" muttered the boy as soon as he woke up.

I saw a chance and replied with a chuckle, "Hey, you're finally awake."

The boy raised his guard as soon as he heard my voice. He looked at me, weariness evident in his eyes. I could see him flinch as he probably tried to circulate his energy through his legs. His face turned completely pale as he began to realize what had happened.

He reached for the pendant on his neck and squeezed it tight.

"Calm down, kid; we are at my clinic; you received a bad injury during the banquet; you're out of danger right now." I tried explaining the situation, but it seemed useless; he had already started to go into hyperventilation.

I knocked him out and sighed.

"Oh well…" I chuckled. That had been the third time I had knocked him out, and the shock of losing the ability to cultivate seemed to impact his mind on a deeper level than I imagined.

I briefly analyzed the scan that the bed under him gave me; his metabolic rate was normal, if slightly accelerated to facilitate healing, so I made sure to provide plenty of nutrients through the IVs, but what really disturbed me was a different reading, his internal Energy reading.

His flesh was filled with energy, but it seemed stale; it wasn't under his control; it wasn't flowing.

Maybe the energy that kept leaving his veins remained in his flesh, but it didn't seem to be having any real effect other than making any proper scan with my ERI machine harder than it had to be.

I mumbled for a little but saw no real solution at the moment, so I went to work on a tool that might help.

It wasn't complicated; I just had to adapt the basic function of the ERI and implant it into a pair of glasses. I had to utilize a different mechanism by utilizing the radiation emitted by the energy in other people's bodies to understand where it's mainly concentrated in other people. Those places of maximum concentration should be where his veins were.

I put my new glasses on and eagerly looked at my patient.

He looked like a humanoid ball of energy.

Huh, this didn't help at all.

"Jasminee, are you there?" I said it out loud, hoping for my mini-master to emerge from her slumber in my hand.

And soon enough, a groan could be heard from behind me: "What is it, you dumb disciple?"

I turned around and looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "Do you keep appearing behind me because you want to look mysterious and cool?"

She froze.

"Well, if all you wish from me is to mock me, then I'll be leaving you to your own devices." She hummed and turned away, ready to walk out of my laboratory.

"Sorry, sorry, I don't mind if you act mysterious; I actually like it! You're really cool, Jasmine." I replied hastily, stopping her in her tracks and causing her to turn around with a smug smile on her face. This was truly too easy.

"Your gracious and beautiful master forgives you for your offense. Tell me, what do you wish to ask from this princess?" She said this, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

I ignored it, having already seen what I needed to see with these glasses, once again seeing just a semi-humanoid ball of energy where I should have seen energy channels, but maybe this time it was just because she was just a projection, and making energy channels in a mere projection wouldn't be useful.

It was pretty useful to summon her now that I thought about it.

"I was thinking," I said, taking the glasses off and deciding to work on them a bit more, just because I couldn't be bothered to stand up and find another person to test them on, "maybe I should learn some of those attack techniques; I don't think that being faster than my enemy will help me survive this awful world. Do you have any idea where to start?"

She inhaled sharply and covered her mouth with a hand. In an obviously exaggerated voice, she replied, "What?! My lazy and dumb disciple finally decided to learn how to be a proper cultivator. The heavens must be about to collapse!"

"Hey, I'm not lazy!" I replied, objecting to the only thing that I truly didn't agree with, "It's just that... I've seen a lot earlier; at that banquet, I liked none of it."

She lowered her hand, her smug expression turning into a genuine smile of appreciation. "It seems like it has been a productive day for you, especially since your genuine enlightenment caused you to raise to the eight level of the Nascent Profound. Tell me, what is it that caused your breakthrough?"

I didn't really want to talk about it, but if there was anyone who could understand my situation, then it was probably Jasmine.

To anyone else, I would have to explain how I was brought here from another world, how I didn't even believe in the existence of gods in the first place, and how I was probably being toyed with by an unfathomably powerful existence.

My life was a mess.

"I was called a fellow Daoist." I replied with a smile, but not one of happiness.

She looked at me weirdly and said, "And?"

"That's it; that sentence brought an avalanche of questions to my mind, and they all brought me to a single, pretty simple explanation, something that I had purposefully ignored all along." I explained, my smile disappearing from my lips in pure apathy.

Dark thoughts swarmed my mind, but I forced myself to stop. I had to be better.

"That is?"

"That is, that Gods apparently exist, with the capital G." I replied with a chuckle.

"Well, obviously." Jasmine said this while raising an eyebrow, not understanding how such a simple thing could possibly lead to a breakthrough.

But I wasn't done. "It might be obvious to you, but I was entirely convinced of the contrary. Even after my body was swapped from my own to one in an entirely different Universe governed by entirely different laws, how can I describe whoever did that as anything other than a God?"

"What do you mean by different universes?" She asked, but I mostly ignored it, my hands working with fury on my prototype glasses.

"The gravitational constant is different, by a lot; I don't know about the rest, but this is a different universe from my own, but that is beside the point," I explained, my hands working faster and faster, and so did my brain as I finally stopped limiting the amount of energy circulating through it, breaking what calculating limits should be possible for a human. "This God decided that it was a good idea to destroy my life to bring me here; they have a plan for me, that fucking asshole."

She gasped at the vulgarity of my words, which made me stop what I had been doing and look in her direction. "I'm sorry, I really should get a grip, but anyway..."

These people really couldn't handle any harsh words, huh?

I put on the new and improved energy-readying glasses, or Scouters, as I decided to aptly name them, and saw a less entangled mess of light when I looked at the passed-out cultivator.

As a step forward, I could actually see that there were some areas that were richer in energy—a small step, but enough to not rule out this project as a failure.

"They work well." I put them back on the table and stretched my back, then looked back as Jasmine, who had been looking at me with a slightly worried expression, said, "I'm sorry for my outburst; I shouldn't have taken it out in front of you. Want to get something to drink?"

"So what?" She said it was completely unrelated to the conversation I was unilaterally having.

"So what, what?"

"So what if this "God" has a plan for you? What are you going to do about it?" She finally explained herself, her eyes seemingly boring a hole through my skull.

She exuded an intensity that I had never seen before.

I had seen it before, on the same day that she forced me to kneel to her under the pressure of her infinitely superior cultivation; it was truly otherworldly.

But this time, I didn't fall to the ground; I could stay tall and face her with my decision on how I would live my life from this point forward: "I've decided; until now, I've been drifting around, not really knowing what I had been doing, just following the tide; this is not what she would have wanted for me to do."

She was the love of my life, and even at such a distance, I still loved her more than anything else. I doubted I could ever possibly move on from that relationship, but it didn't matter right now.

She wouldn't have wanted to see me depressed like that, constantly working and never having a single moment to truly relax until I passed out because of exhaustion, so that I wouldn't have any dreams or nightmares at night.

She loved the real me, the guy that I would finally return to being, or at least the one I'd try to become once again.

"I'm not going to let that God or this world change who I am; I will do everything I can to bring even a spark more of happiness to those people who don't have anything." I stated that the seriousness in my tone represented what I was feeling from the depths of my heart.

"What if that's exactly what the being who brought you here wanted from you?" She asked with a slightly amused expression on her face as she heard me explain my new dream.

"Then they chose the right person."

She started chuckling.

The chuckle then escalated to a full-blown laugh: "I was right; you truly are a fool. Had I been bound to any normal person, then it would have made this whole situation way easier if you'd just been a power-hungry man like so many others. Yet here you stand, with a desire to change the world on his own but without the necessary power to do so, truly a fool."

"Maybe, but I'm not alone, am I?" I replied with a cheeky grin on my face.

She seemed confused at first, but she smiled the next second and said, "Indeed, we are in this together; I already gave you the blood of the Evil god; I might as well give you the techniques you need to become unparalleled in this world."

"That's my master!" I pumped the air in joy.

If I was going to put myself on the line to lead those who truly held power in this world, the cultivators, then I was going to need the power to survive these bloodthirsty maniacs.

And then, I would lead by example; maybe I'd create my own sect based around healing people so that I could empower people who shared my dream; I was sure there were many; we were all humans after all.

They couldn't all be evil; I just needed to find the good ones.

I chuckled; founding the Red Cross in another world sounded like a great idea.

"I have many techniques that I could teach you, but one in particular could be the very best given your situation; it's the Divine Profound Art called the Great Way of the Buddha."

I whistled, or tried, and failed; apparently this body couldn't whistle for some reason. That was one long and pretentious name.

I kind of liked it, I thought.

Her smile turned wry; she looked down for a second, and I thought that I could see sadness in her eyes after she said that name. I had never seen her that sad. I didn't even think that she could feel sadness after she said that she would have to spend thirty years inside my hand with a smile on her face. "Are you alright?"

"Yes," she took a second to recompose herself, "The Great Way of the Buddha is a technique that only my brother and I know about; while your Evil God Arts are a Divine Profound Art that exclusively affect your profound veins, the Great Way of the Buddha changes your blood, bones, muscles, skin, and hair; it will absolutely be the best possible technique for you, especially with your knowledge."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked; it was the first time I heard Jasmine talk about her family, but I could always ask about that later. Now was time for business, and I needed to understand what this weird Buddha art would do.

I also ignored the fact that they apparently had Buddha here too; that would just unsettle me more than knowing that even more religions from my old world existed here as well.

All was well as long as it wasn't the big three monotheistic ones.

"The Great Way of the Buddha is also known as the Forbidden Heavenly Tome; by cultivating it, your body will be completely reborn in a stronger and tougher form; you won't even have to use Profound Energy to stop attacks; your flesh will be more than enough." She explained.

That sounded… completely wild; how did that work?

My brain started working in overdrive, generating theory after theory on how such a thing could be achieved through the energy that flowed through my veins, but I knew far too little to gain any real insight.

But the words she said next were what really sold me on the Buddha art: "This Divine art will also allow you to heal yourself and others with unmatched speed, but you need an incredibly deep understanding of the human body to achieve this effect, but something tells me you won't have any problems with that." She chuckled.

"Oh my," I asked. The grin on my face couldn't be hidden; this was great news; I could finally learn some magical healing powers. "I like where this is going."