Cultivation Nerd-Chapter 349: An Unmatched Perspective

Jiang Yeming weaved through the obstacles ahead with ease, gliding between trees with the kind of precision only decades of experience could forge.

It was almost disappointing. The cultivators of this era were so… inept. She had grown too used to the standards of the future, where mental defenses were basic knowledge. In this time, however, most neglected them entirely.

She broke through the last line of trees and entered the small camp. Liu Feng was sitting by the fire, poking at the embers with a stick while chatting with Tingfeng.

“I think a sword style where flames surround the blade might not be as effective as people think,” Liu Feng mused. “But it would look cool.”

“Yes, but I still don’t understand why you insist that water would be a boring element,” Tingfeng countered, frowning with the seriousness of a man discussing philosophy rather than swordplay.

“Because water doesn’t look cool,” Liu Feng said flatly, like a child arguing about toys.

“Teacher,” Jiang Yeming called out, stepping into the light of the fire. “Someone’s following us. A Foundation Establishment cultivator tried to attack me.”

“Really? Huh.” Liu Feng tilted his head, the stick still in hand. “So you’re not their target.”

The calm in his tone made her blink.

He had known.

“It seems I’m the one they’re after,” he added, almost amused. “Feels strange, honestly. I’m not used to being sought out.”

Jiang Yeming frowned. “Did you send me out just to test something?”

“Yep,” he replied without hesitation, not even pretending to soften it. “Don’t worry, you were never in any danger. I’d hate for my disciples to die before reaching their full potential.”

She sighed and walked over to sit by the fire.

Maybe he knew more about her than she liked to believe. It wouldn’t surprise her if he suspected she wasn’t an ordinary disciple. After all, any investigation into her past would turn up little more than a farmer’s daughter turned merchant’s child. It was a convenient cover story.

If it were any other teacher, she’d have been worried. But Liu Feng wasn’t like the others. Even in the future, he’d once protected a disciple who stumbled upon an immortal’s inheritance, asking for nothing in return.

So, she smiled and settled on the dry patch beside the fire.

“Are you going to do something, teacher? Or are you just going to wait until they surround us?” she asked, watching him lazily poke the fire again.

“Wait,” Liu Feng said with a sigh. “I really hope their incompetence is just an act. Otherwise, this is going to be boring. A fight where no one learns anything is just a waste of life.”

Jiang Yeming smiled faintly. For the first time, she felt like someone else finally understood the quiet frustration she’d always carried toward the mediocrity of cultivators in this era.

Indeed, future cultivators could be somewhat annoying. Even if you could beat them, they were cautious enough to carry one or two artifacts that let them escape. Most had cockroach-like survivability, and the disciples from Wisdom Hall were specifically known for this, as they had a mandatory curriculum on escape methods for various situations.

But after fighting these cultivators for a while, it grew boring. Kill someone and they were probably dead with little trickery, few calculations, nothing clever.

Just as she thought that, the wind shifted. Five men appeared, dropping from the trees. They were unremarkable, with average faces and mismatched robes, although a couple stood out as above average in looks.

The one who’d attacked her was among them, a napkin pressed to his bleeding nose; the mental strike had clearly hurt him.

Liu Feng sighed, rose, dusted his pants, and glanced toward the branches where the men had stood.

“Hello, strangers, why don't you join our fire?” he called. “We were planning to cook some venison, and a meal tastes better when shared with friends.”

One of the men with a dead fish-eyed and bored look jumped down and landed softly on the grass.

“Sorry, friend, but we're here for more than just a meal,” the fish-eyed man said.

“Really? Well, that is a shame,” Liu Feng replied, sounding genuinely disappointed. “Usually I let my enemies make the first move, see what their element is, and admire the work they've put in. But you attacked one of my students, planning to use her as a hostage, and that's something I can't let go.”

“How about we apologize and leave this behind us?” the fish-eyed man suggested, still smiling and unconcerned. “We came to talk, not to start a fight.”

“If you hadn't planted an explosive trap, something that would have crippled her if she hadn't noticed it, I would have been willing to sit at the negotiation table. But…”

Liu Feng sighed, and the light in his eyes dimmed.

It wasn't anger; rather, the humane glint people usually had had simply vanished. Jiang Yeming wondered if he'd used some substitution technique. If so, this dead-eyed look was a weakness anyone could notice.

“C'mon, friend, you're outnumbered,” the fish-eyed man prodded. “There's no reason to fight, just hear us out. We came to talk you into turning your back on the Blazing Sun Sect. Some of the other elders admire your scholarly pursuits; it would be a shame if you died here.”

Liu Feng’s expression never changed. He stared at them with that same hollow, dead-eyed look, like a puppet with no soul.

Jiang Yeming agreed with the sentiment from the other sects, they were offering him a way out.

Even if Liu Feng didn’t yet have the fame he would one day hold, it was obvious he was already considered valuable. Losing someone like him to a meaningless sect war would be a tragedy for humanity itself.

“Did you go deaf?” the fish-eyed man snapped, glancing irritably at his companions. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have all come ou–”

He never finished the sentence.

Between one heartbeat and the next, Liu Feng vanished. A whisper of displaced air was the only trace before a wet thunk echoed through the clearing as the man’s head severed cleanly from his shoulders and tumbling into the dirt. A brief arc of blood painted the air, then silence reclaimed everything.

Even Jiang Yeming, who hadn’t blinked and had all her senses honed on the group, barely caught the blur of motion. It wasn’t teleportation, nor spatial manipulation... just pure, terrifying speed.

Liu Feng stepped out of the fading distortion, jade blade gleaming faintly in the firelight.

For all his reliance on techniques and arrays, it seemed he hadn’t neglected his body at all. That clean, instantaneous burst of movement was proof enough. For a Foundation Establishment cultivator in this era, it was absurdly fast.

“Yu Yan!” one of the men shouted from the trees, voice cracking with panic. The others’ eyes widened, three leapt down at once, attacking out of reflex. Even the one who’d been nursing his bloody nose tore away the cloth and joined in, fury blotting out reason.

Only one man stayed still, it a young cultivator with long dark hair swaying gently in the breeze. He looked to be in his early thirties, expression eerily calm amid the chaos. From his perch, he raised both hands with his palms open, each one bearing an unblinking eye.

The pupils dilated in eerie unison, shimmering with malice as Qi flared around him. It felt like two unseen predators staring straight through Liu Feng, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

Should I help? Jiang Yeming wondered.

Liu Feng was never known for overwhelming combat ability, and most of these attackers had higher cultivation than him. He wasn’t yet the man who filled half a library with his creations.

She calculated quickly. Two Foundation Establishment enemies that much she could handle. If their elements were defensive, she might not kill them fast, but she could hold them off and lighten his burden.

Yet when she looked to Liu Feng for a signal, she froze. His expression was blank and still completely devoid of emotion. Empty eyes, no spark, no hesitation.

And as he moved forward again, something about his gait struck her, the precise placement of each step, the seamless flow between each movement. It was… perfect.

No wasted energy. No breaks in rhythm.

No one could move like that in the heat of battle, not unless they had centuries of experience carved into their bones.

Three attackers lunged as one.

The first flicked his wrist, sending invisible Qi threads slicing through the air that were impossibly thin, impossibly fast. They converged into a glowing net, collapsing inward from all directions toward Liu Feng.

Before it could close, his body twisted at an inhuman angle, spine bending and shoulders dropping low as he slipped beneath the converging strands. The movement was fluid yet unnatural, like water pouring through a crack no wider than a palm. The net snapped shut behind him, empty.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

From below, roots erupted, thick and coiled with killing intent. They lashed to bind Liu Feng, but he leaned even lower, his form blurring as his sword flashed in a sweeping arc. The roots split mid-lunge, severed so cleanly their halves lingered upright before falling apart in silence.

Without breaking stride, he hurled his jade sword toward the third assailant. The man’s eyes widened as he had just begun forming a brown, earthen shell meant to trap Liu Feng.

How did he read that before it even happened? Jiang Yeming thought, her stomach tightening. Even with centuries of experience, predicting an element before it manifested was almost impossible.

The third man tilted his head aside just in time, but mid-flight, the jade sword shimmered, its form bending at the last instant. The blade split into four spinning wings of translucent green light, transforming into a massive shuriken that curved sharply through the air.

The man barely realized what happened before it grazed his neck. A faint hiss, and a line of red bloomed. Blood sprayed in a perfect arc as he staggered, disbelief frozen on his face.

He had hit an artery.

Every motion Liu Feng made was seamless with each strike, each step, and every breath connected in an effortless rhythm. Even Jiang Yeming doubted she could move that fluidly in her underdeveloped body.

Liu Feng was the quiet scholar, the bookish recluse, the man who rarely raised his blade, that was the image carved into Wisdom Hall’s history. But watching him now, the disconnect was staggering.

How could someone who “lived behind a desk” move like this? How could that lethality simply disappear later in history?

Unless someone had made it disappear.

There was only one person with the authority and power to alter records, to erase inconvenient truths from archives and memory alike–

Liu Feng himself.

Jiang Yeming’s gaze narrowed, uncertainty flickering beneath her calm.

No… perhaps she was overthinking it. But the thought refused to leave.

Liu Feng’s gaze swept over the survivors. Two enemies lay motionless on the forest floor, the first speaker and the shell-element cultivator. Both were older, more experienced, yet they had fallen within moments.

Despite the blood soaking the grass, Liu Feng’s expression remained blank, his eyes hollow and detached from the violence he had wrought.

Only three remained: the thread-wielder, the man who’d first attacked Jiang Yeming, and the strange cultivator still perched on a branch with eyes embedded in each of his palms. He hadn’t moved, Qi coiling around him like a drawn bowstring. Jiang Yeming guessed that his element must be tied to sight, perception, vision, or perhaps even illusion.

Those who wielded such abstract elements were rarely strong in a straightforward fight. Still, when they did appear on a battlefield, their techniques were unpredictable, sometimes unstoppable.

Then Liu Feng moved.

His form blurred, air cracking in his wake. The remaining attackers reacted instantly, Qi flaring as they braced for the strike. But instead of meeting them head-on, Liu Feng slipped between their defenses like a shadow, reappearing before the man on the branch.

He’d correctly judged the greatest threat. Letting that cultivator finish charging whatever he was building would have been dangerous.

The palm-eyed man raised both hands, pupils dilating in eerie unison, locking onto Liu Feng the instant he closed the distance.

But Qi, no matter how subtle, was faster than flesh.

The thread-wielder’s energy surged, rippling at impossible speed. Strands coalesced mid-air, solidifying into shining cords that snapped toward Liu Feng.

Only… they weren’t aimed at him.

Instead, the threads lashed around the limbs of the palm-eyed cultivator on his forearms, legs, the back of his neck, and pulled.

The man’s body jerked violently, then blurred backward at a speed that momentarily surpassed Liu Feng’s, yanked out of harm’s way like a puppet on strings.

Jiang Yeming blinked, startled. A body-control technique? Those were rare and dangerous in this era. The thread user wasn’t weak at all; his teamwork was sharp, his execution near-perfect.

Even though Liu Feng was making them look a bit like amateurs, they were still dangerous.

From the corner of her eye, she caught Tingfeng’s expression and the faint tremor in his sword hand and his furrowed brow. The poor kid probably couldn’t even follow what was happening.

But then, a small grin crept onto his face.

Oh. He wasn’t trembling from fear.

He was trembling from excitement.

The man who had attacked Jiang Yeming charged at Liu Feng, desperate to stop him from reaching his comrade, the one clearly least suited for direct combat.

The root-wielder’s eyes morphed grotesquely, red flowers blooming from his sockets as Qi coiled for release.

But Liu Feng didn’t even glance at him. And somehow, despite the gathered Qi, the attack never came. The man’s body stiffened, frozen mid-motion, while Liu Feng’s hollow, inhuman gaze shifted toward the thread user.

Sensing danger, the string cultivator frowned. New filaments of Qi bloomed around him, weaving into a shimmering suit of armor that wrapped tight across his frame. Then, rather than attack, he forced the stringed armour to move his own body faster, retreating toward the root cultivator’s position and placing the palm-eyed man safely behind them both.

Liu Feng didn’t pursue. He stood just three steps away, utterly still, staring at them with that dead-eyed look.

The thread user refused the bait. He dissolved his armor and began gathering Qi into his palm, charging a dangerous technique.

“I’m going to use you-know-what,” he said. His voice was measured, but tension radiated off him. Whatever he was about to do, his teammates clearly understood.

The root cultivator nodded stiffly, jaw trembling like he wanted to speak but couldn’t.

“Careful!” the palm-eyed man shouted from behind.

The thread user froze instantly, trusting his comrade’s warning. His Qi flow halted mid-gather, and he looked straight at Liu Feng.

Liu Feng hadn’t moved. His expression remained the same: blank, lifeless, and puppet-like.

Then, without warning, the root cultivator lunged. His arm shot forward, hand piercing straight through his teammate’s ribs, elbow-deep.

“What?” Jiang Yeming gasped.

Betrayal? Now? In the middle of this?

“Why–?” the thread user choked, voice breaking as blood spilled from his lips. It sprayed across his killer’s chest before his body went limp, sliding off the branch and thudding against the ground below, staining the grass red.

But the “traitor’s” eyes widened too, filled with shock and confusion.

Something was wrong.

Jiang Yeming’s expression hardened. She extended her senses to the limit and then she saw it: a faint line of spiritual energy trailing from the back of the root cultivator’s neck.

A thread. Not of Qi, but mental energy.

Her breath caught.

It was nearly invisible, undetectable for anyone in this era. And it led… to a spider... a small, jade spider, no larger than a fist, crouched on a nearby tree trunk, lightning flickering faintly within its crystalline body.

A construct. A pre-programmed puppet technique. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

Meaning Liu Feng had predicted their actions before they’d made them.

Jiang Yeming felt a chill crawl down her spine.

He was already this far into his research?

In the future, about a century from now, creating pre-programmed techniques that activated under specific conditions would become an entire field of study. Such constructs required coding: a written framework that told a formation or construct when to act and how to behave, with no conscious thought from the cultivator once completed.

Liu Feng would one day call this concept a computer.

But that would be nearly a hundred years after this moment. And another century still before the knowledge became usable to the average cultivator, since not everybody's element was lightning.

Jiang Yeming wasn’t particularly talented with it. Her element of darkness was inherently chaotic, resistant to pre-set logic. Darkness was freedom, instinct, and entropy; coding was rigid, orderly, precise. The two simply didn’t coexist well.

Yet, seeing Liu Feng use a prototype of such a construct two hundred years too early was staggering.

Was this her influence? Had her regression, her mere presence, changed history this drastically?

He had already “copied” cultivation methods from the future, the same foundational efficiency techniques that would one day become standard in the Wisdom Hall. But this… this was something else entirely.

To push an entire field of research forward by centuries, just by watching her… was absurd.

If this version of Liu Feng kept advancing at this rate, he might against all odds become an immortal.

No. That was an exaggeration. He didn’t have the detached, transcendent mindset of an immortal. But still…

That was a problem for another time.

“You…” said the palm-eyed cultivator, lowering his trembling hands as despair clouded his expression. His entire body quivered. “How?”

His voice cracked as his real eyes widened in disbelief. “How can someone like you exist? You saw Hei Zhizhu’s string foundation technique, something that took him years to master, and in mere seconds, you copied it… improved it… and replaced it entirely. You turned it into invisible mental strings. You need only one, and you don’t even have to control the body manually.”

Jiang Yeming understood that despair. She had felt it too. Even with four centuries of knowledge, she sometimes fell behind Tingfeng. And for this man, seeing someone rewrite the limits of another man's foundation technique in real time must have been crushing.

“This isn’t even your foundation technique,” he said, voice dull and broken. “Yet you saw it once, and moments later, used it better than its creator, better than Hei Zhizhu himself ever could.”

His gaze sank to the forest floor, defeated.

“How is this fair?” he whispered. “How have the heavens created someone like you?”

But despite all the questions hanging in the air, Liu Feng stood as cold as carved ice, not a trace of emotion flickering in his eyes. He summoned a thin jade blade more rapier than sword and thrust it downward.

The tip struck the ground with a dull crack, and a small, perfectly round black hole bloomed where it hit, just wide enough to fit a finger through. Without hesitation, Liu Feng plunged the blade into it.

A second black hole materialized behind the palm-eyed man. He didn’t even try to dodge before the jade blade emerged, stabbing through the back of his skull. The tip burst from the front, skewering one of his eyes with the other rolling loose from its socket as his head snapped forward under the momentum.

For a Foundation Establishment cultivator, using spatial transfer in combat should have been impossible. The Qi consumption alone would cripple most practitioners before the first strike even landed.

But Liu Feng had made it look effortless.

In later centuries, the principles of spatial transfer were studied and refined, with equations written, arrays mapped, and energy thresholds defined, until such techniques could be used efficiently in battle and for transport. The discoveries would confirm what Liu Feng had already demonstrated here tonight:

Living beings cost the most Qi to transfer.

Material objects came next, things with fixed form and substance.

Qi constructs, however, were the most efficient to send through space, costing only a fraction of the energy required.

And Liu Feng’s jade sword was precisely that, a condensed Qi construct, lightweight and stable enough to bypass the usual cost.

Watching him, Jiang Yeming realized with a chill that he perfectly embodied the future cultivator, surgical, precise, and detached.

If not for his lack of interest in certain matters, she might have believed he had regressed with her.

Now, only the root cultivator remained alive.