My path of cultivation began with something small when I compare it to where I ended up. All I wanted to do was cure my mother’s sickness. A simple motivation but it was nonetheless a powerful one. However, as I grew up and saw more and more signs of the tyranny that the noble families of this world perpetuated, I decided that simply curing my mother wasn’t good enough. So, I decided that I would work to improve the lives of as many people as I possibly could. It took me years before I even started to feel like I had achieved anything despite people telling about that good that I was doing over and over again but eventually I started to feel that I had in fact managed to improve the lives of those around me.

Excerpt from Telram’s memoirs.

As she sparred with Henry, Iris noticed that Telram had shown up while they had been fighting. The young man was something of an enigma to her even now after all these months. He was unfailingly kind but also firm when he needed to be as well as a skilled fighter with impressive knowledge of cultivation and martial techniques.’

He was also quite an intimidating person to look at with his wild black and red hair and mis-matched eyes and that was without even mentioning his height and powerful build which rivalled even Dale’s physique. However, for the first time since she had met him, he seemed to be struggling with something.

Someone else might not have even noticed that he was even struggling thanks to the serene expression on his face, but she knew better. The thing that he was struggling with was a strange spiky lump of reddish metal that was almost as big as he was. Iris knew that he had gone out into the beast lands to retrieve some mithril to make a weapon, but she hadn’t expected the weapon that he wanted would look anything like the thing that he was carrying now.

Suddenly Iris was sent reeling as Henry punched her right in the face causing her to gasp in pained surprise as she raised a hand to her eye which was already beginning to swell.

“Oops, sorry Iris,” a shamefaced Henry apologised.

“No, no that was my fault,” Iris sighed. Thankfully she would heal much faster now thanks to the Body Strengthening Technique Telram had taught them which meant that her black eye would be gone by the time she woke up the next day. “I should’ve been paying better attention.”

“Still…”

“No Iris is correct; she should’ve been paying attention,” Diane interrupted making Henry flinch. The stern woman was the one who was watching over the students as they sparred. Iris and the other students actually looked up to her quite a lot but that didn’t mean that they weren’t a little bit afraid of the powerful female cultivator as well.

“Now,” Diane continued as she turned towards Telram who was currently smirking at her. “I see that you have a new toy, do you care to test it out?”

“I’ve already done that,” Telram replied with a chuckle. “And I don’t think I’m quite ready to use it in combat.”

“Well do you want to spar anyway?” Diane asked. “Maybe show these kids how real cultivators fight.”

Telram chuckled again at her words. Diane had warmed up to him quite a lot over the past few months and now respected him almost as much as she did Gerry or Fergus, but she was still a bit irritated by his seeming lack of drive to actually increase his cultivation level.

“Sure, why not,” he agreed as he walked over towards them. His Kanabo was currently resting across his shoulders so every step he took caused his feet to sink slightly into the soft earth as he walked. Seeing this Diane raised her eyebrows as she realised just how heavy the massive club was.

Leaning the massive weapon up against a nearby tree caused the whole plant to creak like there was a strong wind blowing. Which was surprising for the students because there wasn’t so much as a breath of wind blowing today.

Rolling his shoulders Telram walked up to Diane with the same smile on his face that he usually had making the older woman scowl at him irritably. She had a much higher cultivation level than he did and knew that she could beat him in a single strike if she so wished. In fact, if she really tried, she could probably kill him in a single strike even with the toughness that his Body Strengthening Technique gave him while he would barely be able to injure her, unless he used the dangerous technique that he had used when they had fled Palamar.

That was the difference between someone who was still at the Human Realm like Telram and an Ascendant Realm cultivator. In reality most people didn’t even really consider you to be a cultivator until you reached the Ascendant Realm. Normally Diane wouldn’t consider someone who was still in the Human Realm to be a cultivator either, but she felt differently about Telram for a reason that even she couldn’t explain. For some reason the thought that he wasn’t a true cultivator had never so much as a second ever since she had met him, and that irritated her even more than the calm smile on his face did.

Everything that Telram did flew in the face of what she had learned over the years. It was almost like he enjoyed tearing hundreds of years of tradition apart and distilling it down into what he needed before expanding on it in ways that no one else had even considered. Everyone knew how dangerous Body Strengthening Techniques were to learn but not only had he gone out of his way to learn one. He had made his own body strengthening technique that didn’t seem to have any negative side effects at all which allowed him to teach all of his students a version of the technique making them far stronger than they should be at their cultivation level. According to Gerry, Telram should have learned ten separate martial arts; 4 movement techniques and several other martial techniques over the years that Gerry had been teaching him and she had yet to see him use more than three martial arts that she had heard of before. When she had asked Gerry about this the old man had replied that Telram had used most of the martial arts and techniques that he had learned to create new ones instead of just using the ones that he had learned.

This had frustrated her so much that she had eventually confronted Telram and asked him why he went to the trouble of developing new techniques from the ones that he had learned instead of just using them as is. To her surprise Telram had a pretty good response to her question when she had asked him. He explained in very simple terms that the traditional techniques that he had learned were just that; traditional. To Telram tradition was simply the starting point and instead of simply rely on the techniques that others had created a cultivator was supposed to use them as a base to grow from.

However, his views on techniques weren’t the only unusual thing about the way that Telram approached cultivation. As far as Diane could tell he was far more talented than she was, but he refused to advance his cultivation anywhere near the speed that someone as talented as he should be would normally. Instead, he chose to polish each and every one of his skills up to their absolute limit before proceeding to the next level of cultivation and even then he spent far more time than she would’ve thought was necessary when he did form the next layer of his Soul Core. When she had asked him about this Telram had talked about cultivation like building a tower to the heavens. In this metaphor Telram had explained that he considered the Human Realm as well as his physical body and soul energy to be the ‘foundation’ that this tower was built on and the stronger you built your foundation the higher you would be able to build your tower. Honestly once he had explained this Diane couldn’t even bring herself to disagree with him, especially since her own cultivation had slowed dramatically in the past few years. The worst part was Telram never really seemed to come across as arrogant to her confident that he was correct but never arrogant.

Slipping his arms from the sleeves of the plain grey robes that he usually wore Telram let the top half of his robes drop down to hang from the sash that he wore around his waist revealing his impressive physique. He did this so that his clothes weren’t damaged to badly in the fight since he had already destroyed one set of robes recently but also to make sure that he could move more freely.

Diane’s eyebrows rose even further as he did this, maybe she had been wrong about his arrogance after all.

Telram watched Diane carefully as she took her normal fighting stance but made no move to take a fighting stance of his own. Instead he stayed in the same relaxed stance that he usually did, this was his first fight with another cultivator since he had increased his cultivation to the 8th Layer of the Core Formation Stage. Since he had only increased his cultivation level a couple of days ago Diane actually didn’t know how much powerful he was now which gave him a very small advantage. She was still much more powerful than he was. Over the past few months Gerry, Fergus, and Diane had agreed that using their full power when they sparred with Telram was still a bit too dangerous. Some of the many rules that they had come up with was that they weren’t allowed to use their Elemental Mana at all, and they also weren’t allowed to use their higher ranked techniques. This actually went a long way to levelling the playing field thanks to Telram’s powerful body strengthening technique as well as his unusually high levels of Mana and Soul Energy for his cultivation level.

To the surprise of the watching students Diane was the first to make a move launching herself at Telram and lashing out with incredible force. However, what happened next surprised them even more. Instead of dodging or even attempting to block the vicious punch that Diane had thrown at him Telram almost moved faster than any of them could see and what they could see left them standing with their mouths wide open.

As Diane’s fist approached him Telram swayed to one side and grabbed Diane’s wrist as it passed by his head before performing a half turn and flipping Diane over his shoulder and into the ground with a loud thump.

Even Diane was left surprised by this as she hadn’t expected Telram to be able to react quite as quickly as he had been able to and was left gasping on the ground while Telram slowly turned towards her with the same calm smile on his face that he’d worn since he had showed up a few minutes ago.

With a loud growl Diane leapt to her feet and started attacking Telram with what looked like short sharp jabs to Telram’s enhanced vision. Although the punches looked like little more than jabs Telram knew that even one of them was almost twice as powerful as a punch from a heavy weight boxer. Which made them about fifty percent more powerful than one of his own jabs and Diane could punch faster and for longer than he could, partly because Diane, like Gerry, Fergus and his father, had also learned the same body strengthening technique that he had taught his students. Thinking quickly, he bent his body and stepped past the enraged woman as she advanced towards him lashing out with an elbow as he straightened back up that sent her stumbling forwards.

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” he told Diane calmly as she spun towards him angrily. “You’re still treating me like I’m at the 7th Layer.”

Diane growled angrily at his words before taking a deep breath and taking a different stance from the one she had taken before. Telram nodded as he recognised the stance as one of Diane’s higher ranked martial arts. In fact, it was the weaker version of the same martial art that she had used during their escape from Palamar. Even as he watched her arms started to glow slightly as she channelled some of her Mana into them to strengthen her blows even further.

“Now that’s more like it!” Telram laughed as he took a fighting stance for the first time.

The next person to make a move in this fight was Telram. Now that Diane wasn’t underestimating his speed, he felt the need to make another statement about how much his strength had increased since he had increased his cultivation level.

Using his new movement technique that created shockwaves that launched him forwards even faster than he could run normally Telram struck one of Diane’s fists with near blinding speed sending a blast of mana into her body. The shockwave caused her to lose control of the mana she had gathered into her arms which them promptly exploded outwards knocking them both backwards and causing Diane to curse loudly and then glance guiltily at the students who were watching them from the side-lines. This was what made Telram such a difficult opponent to fight. A cultivator that didn’t have a body strengthening technique couldn’t injure him badly enough for that damage to so much as slow him down without using their Mana to enhance their attacks. But the moment that they did that he would use his Resonance Palm to cause them to lose control of the Mana which ended up damaging them. In their previous bouts Telram hadn’t actually been fast enough to land a clean hit on her so Diane hadn’t had to worry too much about that. However, his recent power up combined with the use of his new movement technique had allowed him to move faster than she had expected even after she had adjusted her expectations.

This was because as far as she had known his new movement technique was still incomplete. As such she hadn’t expected him to use it in this fight, so he had managed to catch her off-guard once more. This was getting to be too much of a common occurrence for Diane’s liking. Telram was supposed to be so weak that he shouldn’t be able to so much as touch her, but she was starting to wonder if he might actually be able to hurt her even if she used her full power. She would still be able to defeat him of course but that didn’t change the fact that he would be able to injure someone who was supposed to be much more powerful than he was.

Telram and Diane continued to exchange blows at high speeds and very soon it became clear that despite how things had gone at the start of the sparring match Telram was completely outclassed by Diane which wasn’t actually surprising to anyone. Least of all Telram who had stopped smiling and now had an expression of extreme concentration on his face as he started to change things up and use attacks other than the palm strikes and punches that he had been using so far in this fight.

Most notable of these new attacks was the same kicking technique that he had used in the fight with the Metal Scaled Baboon which caught Diane off guard the first few times that he used it when the shockwave created by the kick sent her flying back several feet. But even this new technique wasn’t enough to keep Diane from knocking Telram to the ground with a powerful hook that would’ve taken a non-cultivator’s head clean off. However, Telram was tough enough that he didn’t even lose consciousness and was simply stunned by the powerful blow, but Diane decided that one of them (most likely Telram) would end up getting injured if this fight went on any longer.

“Okay I think that’s enough,” she panted as he held out a hand towards Telram who was still on the ground.

“Y-yeah,” Telram agreed as she helped him to his feet. “Thanks for the bout.”

Telram was looking pretty beaten up at this point and was perfectly happy to finish the sparring match here. He felt that he had done quite well against a more powerful and experienced opponent. Now that he was stronger, he could actually keep up with Diane when she wasn’t using her movement technique and his Resonance Palm techniques could actually affect her now which was a good sign.

“Alright then kids, do you have any questions before we move onto something else?” Telram asked as he turned towards his students who were watching them with awed looks on their faces.

After answering the questions that the students had for them Telram started teaching the kids about different types of Mana Beasts which was a subject that the students all seemed to enjoy learning about. Mostly because Telram also explained the different parts of the various parts of these beasts that could be used to make things like armour and medicines.

At the end of the day Telram walked the kids back to town before bidding them goodnight. A small smile covered his face as he walked home. While he had been gone the others had finished the preparations for repairing Lily’s Mana Core. In fact, before he had left to obtain the mithril for his Kanabo Gerry had suggested that increasing his cultivation level would increase their chances of succeeding even further.

Walking inside Telram greeted the others before turning towards his mother who was looking worse than ever and giving her a gentle hug. She had lost even more weight in the past couple of months and so much as walking more than a couple of steps left her gasping for air. Even now he could feel her hands trembling against her back.

“Are you ready?” Gerry asked a few seconds later.

“I am,” Telram replied.

“Yes,” his mother agreed as she allowed Telram to help her over to the most comfortable chair that they had in the house. This was going to take a couple of hours so it was important to keep Lily as comfortable as possible so that she could concentrate on forming a new Mana Core with what remained of her Soul Energy. They had performed a few tests to make sure that Telram’s own Soul Energy was compatible with Lily’s own and although it was impossible to know how larger quantities could affect her body, she seemed to be fine with the small amounts that they tested.

Now that Lily was comfortably seated everyone started meditating and soon, they had all gathered their spiritual bodies inside of Lily’s body just outside of her Mana Core. In here it was even clearer how much Lily was suffering, not only was Lily’s spiritual body a mere wisp of light where the others at the very least looked like their silhouettes made out of light but they could see Mana leaking from the cracks in her damaged Core.

“Alright you all know what you’re doing,” Gerry said looking around at everyone present which included the additions of Dale and surprisingly even Warren who had agreed to help out on the condition that Telram have another sparring match with him when he next had time. The spiritual bodies of the cultivators and Mana Beasts nodded their agreement, except for Lily whose spiritual body simply bobbed up and down like a paper lantern floating on a lake.

Telram, Jai and Lily floated closer to Lily’s damaged core while the others started to form a barrier of mana around it to protect her body from the mana that remained in the damaged core when Telram broke it.

What they were doing was essentially strong arming their way through the problem and the slightest mistake could kill Lily outright. This was why they had exhausted all other avenues before being forced to attempt something as dangerous as this. Before Fergus and Diane had decided to join them, this method wouldn’t have been an option either, due to the massive Mana and Soul Energy requirements for even attempting it. As such Telram was even more grateful for them for offering to help than he was for their help training the students.

“Alright mum, brace yourself,” Telram said once he was sure that the others were ready. What he was about to do now was going to hurt a lot but Telram also knew that pain was Lily’s constant companion, and this was the only way for her to live a normal life once more.

Connecting with Jai so that they could share their soul energy was even easier than it had been all of the other times that they had attempted to do so and Telram felt the tiger’s more violent soul energy fill him to the brim.

The faint ball of light that was Lily’s spiritual body bobbed up and down one more. She was to weak to project a voice right now which was why Telram was here to help her, if she couldn’t so much as do that then there was no way that she would have enough soul energy to form a Mana Core.

Telram took a deep breath before lashing out at the damaged Core in front of him shattering it completely. In the real-world Lily started screaming like she was being dragged over hot coals and her spiritual body almost blinked out of existence completely. Seeing this Telram immediately started channelling his soul energy into her even as they were buffeted by the Mana that had once been (partially) contained in the Core which allowed her to stabilise.

Sweat began to run down the back of the group who were creating the barrier protecting Lily’s body from being damaged even further by the Mana escaping her Core as the massive surge of mana crashed into them. This was the most dangerous part of the operation if they failed to contain the veritable tidal wave of Mana then Lily would die.

Soon the storm of Mana subsided slightly and Telram and Lily were able to completely synchronise their soul energy. They had tried this before, but it still took them a couple of times to get it right but when they did Lily’s spiritual body immediately stabilised completely and even grew a little brighter.

“Okay that’s step one,” Telram panted. Now that they had synchronised their soul energy which was already quite difficult he was going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting while making sure to keep their soul energy synchronised which was naturally made more even more difficult by the fact that he was currently projecting his spiritual body into someone else. “We can start making your new Core now.”

“Okay,” Lily replied. Now that their soul energy was synchronised and they could freely share their soul energy (which basically meant that she could freely use Telram’s soul energy as there was literally no point in Telram trying to use what remained of hers) she could use a small amount to allow her to project a voice. While this might seem like a waste of soul energy to some people being able to communicate well was going to be very important for what they were going to do next.

Working together they began to condense some of the Mana down with their combined soul energy. This thankfully went much faster than it normally would thanks to the copious quantities of both Mana and soul energy which was good because the others were still struggling to keep the Mana that had been released from Lily’s Core contained. It was a bit easier now, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t struggling.

Once Telram and Lily had condensed the Mana and soul energy down they moved on to actually forming the first layer of the Core. Once again, their combined knowledge and experience came into play and they managed to get it done in record time. It wasn’t as good as the Core that Telram had helped Henry make but they were much more limited in terms of time. The new Core was actually still better than most first layer Mana Cores though. Which was made even more impressive when one considered that up until now even synchronising the soul energy of two people to the point where they could actually use it to do something like this was thought to be impossible. In fact this technique was the final piece of the puzzle that they had needed to complete before even considering doing something like this because without access to more soul energy there was no way that Lily would’ve been able to make a new soul core once her old one had been destroyed.

Now that the Core was complete Telram started channelling as much of the Mana remaining in the surrounding area into the Core as it could handle before absorbing some of it himself and gathering the rest into a ball that he pushed up against the barrier that the others had created. Seeing this the others quickly wrapped what remained of the barrier that they had created around the ball of energy and shunted it out of Lily’s body and up through the roof of their house where it couldn’t do any more damage to her or anyone else.

Now that they were done Telram and the others opened their eyes and breathed a collective sigh of relief, Gerry and Aran even had tears running down their faces as they looked at the exhausted face of Lily who had fallen asleep immediately after they had finished.

“I can’t believe we did it,” Gerry muttered. “It took us so long and in the end most of what we worked on turned out to be useless.”

“Not all of it,” Telram disagreed but despite his words the others could see that he had unshed tears in his eyes revealing how much of a big deal this was for him. “It was just that mum’s Core was too badly damaged for most of them to help. The techniques that we came up with can still help people.”

“We couldn’t have done it without any of you,” the young man continued as he looked at the rest of the people present with genuine gratitude on his face making them smile back at him in return even Warren.

“Even if we were here, we wouldn’t have been able to do it if you hadn’t worked out how to synchronise your soul energy with Lily’s so perfectly,” Fergus disagreed. “It’s hard to believe that you have so much control over you soul energy at your age. I’ve heard of people on the edge of becoming an Immortal Ranked cultivator who would be unable to do something like that.”

“Alright you lot, that’s enough patting each other on the back for tonight,” Diane interrupted when Telram opened his mouth to reply. “We’re all exhausted and some of us have to teach the kids in the morning.”

The others all chuckled at her words but agreed that she was right and so they all made their way to their respective rooms with Dale and Warren returning to their homes. Once he was inside his room Telram all but collapsed onto his bed. Even he was unsure whether this was because of how exhausted he was or because of relief but one thing was sure; he had finally managed to complete the main goal that he’d had throughout this life.

When he realised this, he was struck with a sense of loss. He had wanted to cure his mother for so long that he didn’t really know what to do with himself anymore. However, this sensation soon passed as he remembered that what had happened to his mother was only a symptom of a larger problem. Instead of thinking of curing his mother as his main goal it was in fact just the most important part of his overall goal and now that he had managed to cure her, he could move onto the next thing. He had actually begun the groundwork for his plans already when he had decided to open a school.

It was time for a revolution.