I extracted two young men and two young women from my inner world and lined them up on the cold floor of the underground cavern. These four weren’t the most powerful youths in the village. They were the ones with the greatest hatred toward the black-robed soldiers.

Once everyone was in place, I slammed my hands together, creating a booming clap that caused all four youths to bolt upright, instantly awake.

“Who? What?” As one of the boys looked around frantically, his eyes settled on one of the girls. “Ling? What—”

The girl, Ling, was equally frantic, but her attention was on the girl to her left. “Ngoi?”

Focused on each other, the four youths didn’t even register that I was standing above them. So, I pulled a spear from my inner world and slammed its haft down on the ground, creating another booming echo that drew everyone’s attention.

“Welcome to the Underworld Academy. You may call me… Teacher.” As I looked each youth in the eye, I pressed down on them with the power of my soul, keeping them from speaking. “The four of you bear a grudge against the rulers of your village. I am here to offer you the chance to fight back.”

Reaching into my storage space, I pulled out four racks of weapons, each one holding a different type of polearm—spear, ji, guandao, and crescent moon spade.

“If you accept this offer, I will train you in how to use these weapons. I will help you expel Lord Mandakh from your village, and I will put you in a position where you will never again need to worry about being conquered by some random warlord. If you decide to reject this offer, however, I will erase your memories of this meeting, ensuring you cannot betray your comrades. Make your choice.”

Stepping back, I gave the children space to talk amongst themselves and come to a decision on their own.

Having been both kidnapped and woken up in the middle of the night, however, the four youths weren’t exactly thinking clearly. So, after my short speech, they just sat and stared at each other for several long minutes.

One of the boys turned his attention to the weapon racks, and I saw a spark of desire light up in his eyes.

Suddenly, he jumped to his feet, ran forward, and grabbed a guandao. Then, he turned and made as if to lunge at me.

Terrified, Ling gasped as her right hand shot to her mouth. “Dak… no.”

The moment the boy, Dak, stabbed at me, I stepped to the side and bashed his left hand with the haft of my spear. Then, with a flick, I knocked the guandao from his grip, sending it sliding across the cavern floor. Finally, I swept the spear around, hitting Dak in the back of the knees and knocking him to the floor.

I placed the point of my spear against his neck and gave him a cruel smile. “Does this mean that you have chosen to reject my offer?”

Ling climbed to her feet and slowly walked toward me. “Please, sir—”

“Teacher,” I corrected.

“Y… yes. Teacher… Please, don’t hurt him.”

I grunted. Then, using environmental earth qi as a support, I flipped my spear around and used its butt end to send Dak sliding back across the floor to lie with the others. “Last chance. Do you want to learn how to fight or not?”

Ling glanced wearily at the other four youths. Each of them seemed apprehensive, but Ling turned back and nodded at me confidently. “Yes.”

Dak was barely conscious by this point, and the other two showed varying levels of terror, but Ling’s agreement gave them the direction they needed. All three nodded weakly, signaling their acceptance of my offer.

“Very good. Then the first thing we need to do is to find each of you a suitable weapon.”

It didn’t take long for me to regret not having Meng LuYao with me. Without knowing which weapons my four new students might have a talent for, I could only allow them to try out a variety of options to see which one felt right. LuYao’s talent—which allowed her to directly sense such things—could have been a game-changer.

Another problem was that the only weapon I had ever trained with was the moon spade. I barely knew anything about the saber, and I didn’t have a clue about how to use something like a chain. So, I was forced to limit my recruits’ options to polearms. The guandao and the crescent moon spade were still two very different weapons, but I could still teach the basics of thrusts and parries.

Even with limited options, though, figuring out which of the four polearms best suited each youth took time, and I could only rely on the rate at which they improved to judge their relevant talent levels. I tried purchasing an ability that could mimic the effects of Meng LuYao’s blessing, but such a thing was far too expensive. Without severely limiting both its effective Rank and which talents it would work on, this kind of ability was priced in shards, not credits.

This made me wonder how normal people on this continent chose a weapon. I would need to look into this before bringing my clan here.

I considered simply purchasing information on the relevant talents of my five recruits. However, this felt like admitting defeat. The point of my Return was to learn and grow. This wouldn’t happen if I just purchased everything from the System.

So, instead, I trained my recruits in the basics of all four polearms and carefully tracked their rate of improvement. This might not have been efficient, but little about this Return was.

Each night, I spent two hours training my recruits. Then, drawing on what I had learned from Qongqor, I brewed an herbal tea that sent all of them into a deep, peaceful sleep. This allowed them to wake up in the morning, rested and refreshed, ready for yet another long day in the fields.

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While my charges toiled away for Lod Mandakh, I remained underground and practiced with my moon spade.

What was the point of this Return to Simplicity? What was I supposed to learn during this brief time as a mortal that I hadn’t already learned over the past several millennia?

I could see how a Return might be useful for most cultivators. After spending several years mastering the art of fighting with complicated techniques, Returns gave cultivators a chance to reset and examine their basic martial skills without the complexities of qi manipulation getting in the way.

Was this valuable for me

, though? After everything I had gone through, how much could I benefit from another year or two as a mortal? I wasn’t sure, but Emperor Chan felt that it was important, so I wanted to try and follow through with it.

However, after only a couple of days of practicing basic staff techniques, my mind started to wander.

That Cicada Pill that Chan had given me… It had ripped out a small piece of my soul and shoved it into my moon spade. What exactly had that done? While practicing basic techniques, I hadn’t been able to notice anything, but what if…

I pulled on the moon spade qi that surrounded me and shoved it into my weapon. Then, acting on instinct, I thrusted its shovel tip forward, attacking the empty air.

Halfway through my strike, the qi in my weapon shifted. And, almost as if it had a mind of its own, it formed itself into a rough pattern that resembled a basic Moon Strike.

Upon the completion of my strike, the qi in my weapon dissipated harmlessly into mid-air, such that anyone on the receiving end of the blow wouldn’t have even noticed it. However, if I provided my weapon with just the slightest bit of assistance, I was confident that I could launch a full-power Moon Strike with almost no effort.

This gave me a new mission. To explore the limits of my new soul-empowered weapon and see what hidden benefits it might have in store.

After a month of training, all five of my recruits had made decent progress in learning the basics of armed combat. In one-on-one fights, none of them would have any trouble taking out one of Mandakh’s black-robed soldiers. Sadly, though, this level of prowess was entirely meaningless.

The black-robes were the weakest of Mandakh’s troops, and he had hundreds of them. Even if my recruits were slightly more skilled, they couldn’t fight against Mandakh’s numbers, and once the red-robes entered the fray, my recruits would find themselves outmatched.

For my recruits to have even the slightest chance of reclaiming their village, they needed more strength, and they needed more support.

The second of these issues was easy enough to deal with. From the very start, my goal wasn’t to create powerful champions. It was to create leaders who could rally the villagers to their own defense, and it was time to start making this plan a reality. So, I gave the recruits a mission:

“Over the next few days, spend some more time interacting with the other villagers. The four of you are generals, and you must each find five trustworthy lieutenants. These don’t need to be the best fighters—we can teach them how to fight. They need to be loyal, and they need to be able to keep their mouths shut. We cannot allow Mandakh or his people to learn what we are doing.”

This task turned out to be a bit more challenging than I initially expected. One of the girls simply brought in the five people in the village that she was closest to, and Dak simply recruited the biggest men he could find. The other boy, Zan, even recruited one of Mandakh’s spies.

The only person who truly took my assignment to heart was Ling. She carefully sorted through the villagers, looking for those who were both trustworthy and generally capable.

I was disappointed with these results, but I didn’t do anything to change them. This wasn’t my village, and there was only so much handholding that I was willing to do to save it. And, in any event, all of these people would eventually need to be brought into our conspiracy anyway. These poor choices might affect the village’s long-term stability, but they wouldn’t matter much in the fight against Mandakh.

Except for the spy, of course. With him, I had to use a soul technique to suppress his memories and send him on his way.

With everyone’s lieutenants chosen, we moved on to the more difficult task, improving everyone’s strength.

No matter how much the villagers trained, they would never be a match for a Returnee. Even with their cultivation bases gone, Returnees still had far too many advantages, such as pills, formations, and refined artifacts.

Even without Mandakh, though, the villagers I was working with would likely never be able to measure up to the red-robed overseers. The villagers were only getting two hours of training each night, while the overseers were training constantly.

So, if we wanted any chance at victory, we needed to cheat. Due to the Saint’s rules, none of us were allowed to cultivate, but there were ways to increase a person’s strength other than cultivation.

My first thought was to give everyone Strengthening Pills. However, since these pills were created through beast alchemy, I didn’t really want anyone to know they existed. When I thought about the herbal teas that I was using to put everyone to sleep at night, though, I had an idea.

Herbs had power on their own. Alchemy made herbs both less toxic and more potent, but technically, herbs didn’tneed to be turned into pills to be effective. After all, demon beasts were able to gain power by consuming herbs directly, so why couldn’t humans?

I took out the ingredients for an earth-based Strengthening Pill and steeped them in hot water, creating a tea. Then, I examined my concoction in energy vision.

This ‘tea’ was a blend of powerful, chaotic energies, and I doubt whether any mortal who drank it would be able to survive. This first experiment was a near-total failure, but it gave me ideas.

Strengthening Pill required three ingredients: beast blood, an herb of the appropriate element, and a binder. Maybe teas just needed a different binder?

I began testing countless different combinations of ingredients, hoping to find one that worked. The core of these experiments was the blood of Rank 1 oxen from my Plane of Earth. Everything else was up for grabs.

After three weeks of this, I pieced together something that looked like it might be effective.

“System, move my next five temporary reset points forward to this moment.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 1 credit. 1,386 credits remaining.

With a hesitant exhale, I picked up a cup of beast-blood tea and drank it down.

It tasted terrible, and it had a horrendous effect on my internal organs. Only seconds after taking my first sip, I pulled out a poison pill to end my suffering.

After returning, I stared at the cup of vile brew that sat in front of me. I wanted to pour it out, but something stopped me.

Drinking that stuff was deadly, but… did I need to drink it? I needed to absorb the medicinal energy from its herbs, but…

During our trip to the Palace, Qongqor had mentioned that some didn’t like herbal teas. They preferred medicinal baths. He hadn’t given me any details about these baths, but they shouldn’t be too hard to figure out, right?

Using earth qi from the surrounding environment, I create a bathtub in the corner of the cavern. Then, after filling this tub with hot water, I added the ingredients of my ‘Strengthening Tea.’ Finally, taking a deep breath, I removed my robes and allowed myself to sink into the hot waters of the tub.

Almost as soon as I did, a piercing pain shot through my body, causing me to consume another poison pill and start over. However, before this happened, I felt the wu of the beast blood flow into my skin.

This would work. I was certain of it. I just needed to try again.