The eastern plains looked surprisingly peaceful in the fading twilight. Hard to believe that for the past hour, Yuan Zhen and I had been trying to destroy each other with mathematical formulas and botanical domains. Now it was just grassland again, with a few scattered flowers from my technique still blooming here and there.

I looked down at Lu Wenjun's unconscious form, then back toward the city walls where I could see torches being lit. Time to head back and see what remained of our little revolution.

"Can't leave you out here," I murmured, lifting Lu Wenjun's limp form. He was heavier than Du Yanze's body was used to carrying, but manageable.

The walk back to Hope City gave me time to think about what came next. I had maybe a day left before my spiritual manifestation would be pulled back to the tournament arena. That wasn't much time to help consolidate what Feng Zhaoyang and the others had built, but I'd have to make it count.

"Master," Azure said quietly as we approached the city gates, "I'm detecting some concerning energy signatures from the direction we came. Nothing immediate, but there are definitely cultivators out there. Probably scouts."

I nodded internally. We'd known this was coming. The Tribunal forces that Yuan Zhen had captured were just the advance guard. Word of a Disbeliever uprising in Hope City would spread, and eventually, someone would come to finish what we'd started.

The guards at the gate recognized me immediately; their eyes widened when they saw the unconscious young man in my arms.

"Young Master," one of them said, bowing deeply. "Is that...?"

"Lu Wenjun," I confirmed. "He needs medical attention. Where's the nearest physician?"

"The administrative complex has healing chambers," the guard replied.

Inside the administrative complex, I found organized chaos. Feng Zhaoyang had set up what looked like a command center in the main hall, with converted guards and civilians coming and going with reports. The atmosphere was purposeful rather than panicked, which was encouraging.

"Divine One," Feng Zhaoyang greeted me, rising from a table covered with city maps. "I'm relieved to see you've returned safely." His eyes fell on Lu Wenjun's unconscious form. "Is he...?"

"Alive and unharmed," I assured him. "Just unconscious from the spiritual strain. Is there somewhere I can lay him down?"

Feng Zhaoyang directed me to a side chamber furnished with a comfortable couch. I set Lu Wenjun down carefully and stepped back, settling into a nearby chair that the Stone Emperor immediately repositioned for optimal comfort. I'd given up trying to convince him he didn't need to serve as furniture.

"How bad is it?" I asked Feng Zhaoyang, who had followed us into the chamber.

"Better than I feared, worse than I hoped," Feng Zhaoyang replied with a wry smile. "The good news is that nearly eighty-five percent of the city has converted. The bad news is that the three major clan compounds still refuse to engage with us.”

"Expected," I said. "The anti-Disbeliever formations will likely hold up until the Tribunal reinforcements arrive. Any news concerning them?"

"Scouts have been spotted on the hills overlooking the city. No major forces yet, but..." He shrugged. "It's only a matter of time."

I nodded, that confirmed what Azure had sensed.

A groan from the couch interrupted our conversation. Lu Wenjun's eyes fluttered open, and he sat up slowly, one hand pressed to his forehead.

"What..." he began, then stopped as his gaze fell on me. This was my first real look at Lu Wenjun without Yuan Zhen's consciousness overlaying his features.

He was handsome in that effortless way that marked the truly gifted: sharp cheekbones, expressive eyes, the kind of bearing that suggested he'd never doubted himself for a moment in his life. Until now.

"Eight victories," Lu Wenjun muttered, staring at his hands like they belonged to someone else. "Eight times I defeated him. Perfect record. Chosen of destiny." His voice cracked slightly. "But he lost. In my own body, wearing my own face, which means I…I lost to Du Yanze."

I walked over and knelt beside the couch. "Lu Wenjun?"

His eyes snapped to mine, and I could see the confusion there. "Du Yanze..." He trailed off, then his eyes widened. "No, it’s you. The divine being..."

"I am," I confirmed. "And you were the vessel for my opponent. An honorable one, I'm told."

Lu Wenjun laughed bitterly. "Honorable? I lost. The great Lu Wenjun, heir to the Celestial Mandate, lost to the family joke." He looked at his hands again. "Everything I believed about myself, about my destiny..."

I could see the moment it happened. The crack in his fundamental worldview, the same fracture that had broken Feng Zhaoyang's certainty. Lu Wenjun's spiritual pressure shifted, the golden radiance of Xuan Yi darkening as it purified into something more rational.

"Welcome to clarity," I said gently. "I know it hurts right now, but you'll find that seeing the world as it really is has its advantages."

Over the next few hours, Lu Wenjun went through the same process that the City Lord had experienced. The initial despair gave way to a kind of grim relief as he realized how much energy he'd been wasting on maintaining his ego. By evening, he was asking tactical questions about defending the city.

"The Lu Clan compound has the strongest barriers," he reported, studying a map of the city. "They'll hold out the longest. But the Chen and Wang families will probably surrender once they realize you're still here."

"Actually," I said, "I won't be here much longer. Maybe another day."

The room went quiet. Little Bloom, who had been sitting beside me while I reviewed reports, looked up with wide eyes.

"Divine Mister is leaving?" she asked in her tiny voice.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I have to," I explained, patting her leafy crown. "But Du Yanze will still be here. And all of you. The work we started doesn't end just because I'm gone."

That conversation led to one of the most important decisions I made during my time in the Realm of the Chosen. I spent most of that night in deep discussion with Du Yanze about what would happen after I left.

"The time loop is active," I explained internally, feeling that strange temporal resonance that had started when his breakthrough completed. "Everything that happens after your advancement will reset. That includes this conversation, my departure, the Tribunal attack that's coming."

"So, I'll be the only one who remembers," Du Yanze said quietly. "Over and over."

"Yes. And I won't be able to give you anything physical to help, because it'll all disappear with the reset. But information stays with you. Knowledge. Techniques. Understanding."

Which is why I spent the rest of the night imparting everything I'd learned from Feng Zhaoyang's library to Du Yanze in manageable chunks. Combat techniques, city management strategies, the history of Disbeliever movements, even the basic principles of formation work that might help him organize defenses.

"Master," Azure observed around dawn, "you're essentially creating a one-man university curriculum for revolution."

"Better to over-prepare than under-prepare," I replied, continuing to explain the finer differences between the blue sun energy and Xuan Yi to Du Yanze. "He's going to be doing this alone for potentially centuries. Every piece of knowledge might be the difference between success and failure."

But the technical information was only part of what Du Yanze would need. I also had to prepare him for the psychological reality of being a time looper.

"The isolation is the worst part," I explained, drawing on what I'd gathered from Kal's experience in the Two Suns world. "Everyone else will forget. Every relationship you build, every moment of connection, gets erased. You'll start to feel like you're the only real person in a world of puppets."

"How do I fight that?" Du Yanze asked.

"Remember that they're not puppets. They're people with their own thoughts and feelings and dreams. The fact that they forget doesn't make them less real. It just means you have to be their memory."

I spent considerable time helping him understand the mechanics too. How soul attacks could potentially bypass the time loop's protection. The importance of maintaining his sanity by taking breaks, by allowing himself to fail sometimes rather than pushing endlessly toward perfection.

"The loop isn't a prison," I told him. "It's a tool. Use it to learn, to experiment, to try approaches that would be too risky in normal time. But don't let it become an obsession."

The hardest part was preparing farewell messages for everyone, knowing that only Du Yanze would remember them, and it would be up to him whether to deliver them or not at the start of every loop. While I had no doubt he would probably do so for the first dozen or so iterations, I wouldn’t blame him if he gave up on that later on to focus on more important things. But that was out of my control, I could only do what was in my power to do so.

"For Little Bloom," I said, "tell her that that I said learning to think was the bravest thing she ever did, and that thinking minds can change the world if they work together."

"For the ancient oak, remind him that wisdom isn't about age; it's about being willing to change when you learn new things."

"For the Stone Emperor..." I paused, trying to figure out how to phrase this. "Tell him that true importance comes from lifting others up, not from being above them."

"And for Feng Zhaoyang, tell him that the greatest leaders are those who can admit when they were wrong and choose to be better."

Du Yanze absorbed it all with the quiet determination that had made me choose him as a vessel in the first place. This wasn't the delusional confidence of his Xuan Yi-corrupted self, but genuine resolve built on clear thinking.

The next day brought exactly what we'd expected: more converted citizens, but also the ominous news that Tribunal reinforcements were gathering outside the city. The three major clan compounds remained sealed, their anti-Disbeliever formations making them effectively immune to philosophical conversion.

I'd considered trying to break through their defenses, but honestly, I didn't see the point. Everything I did here would be reset anyway. Better to focus on what Du Yanze could learn from the experience.

That's not to say the day was wasted. Far from it.

One of the most remarkable things about the converted city was how much the atmosphere had changed. Before, every interaction had been a competition: who could demonstrate superior destiny, who deserved more cosmic favor, who was more chosen than whom. Now people actually talked to each other.

I spent the morning in the market district, just observing.

A baker was explaining his techniques to a young apprentice without demanding acknowledgment of his superior fate. A group of children were playing a game just to have some fun instead of each one trying to prove they were the prophesied champion. Two merchants were actually negotiating fairly instead of each claiming that heaven demanded they receive the better deal.

"It's like watching people wake up from a shared fever dream," I told Azure as we watched an elderly woman teaching a group of youngsters how to tend a garden.

"The social dynamics are fascinating," Azure agreed. "Remove the competitive element from basic human interaction, and suddenly you get actual community building."

The most touching example was a young mother I encountered near the city's central well. Her baby had been crying, and before the conversion, the established response would have been for everyone around her to offer unsolicited advice about their divinely-inspired child-rearing methods. Instead, the nearby women simply offered practical help: holding the baby while she drew water, sharing food, asking what she needed.

"It's not that they stopped caring," I realized. "They just stopped making everything about themselves."

But it was my promise to Little Bloom that provided the day's real highlight.

"Divine Mister promised to teach me reading!" she announced excitedly when I found her in the courtyard, practically vibrating with anticipation.

I'd never taught anyone to read before, let alone a sentient sapling who was maybe three days old intellectually. But Little Bloom was an eager student, and her fresh consciousness meant she didn't have any preconceptions about what learning should be like.

We started with the basics: recognizing shapes, understanding that symbols could represent sounds and ideas. I used Xuan Yi to create glowing characters in the air, which delighted her to no end.

"This one means 'tree,'" I explained, forming the character with careful strokes.

"That's me!" Little Bloom exclaimed, her tiny branches rustling with excitement. "I'm a tree! Write more tree words!"

Soon we had an entire vocabulary floating in golden light above us: growth, roots, leaves, flowers, forest. Little Bloom was a quick learner, probably because her mind wasn't cluttered with years of accumulated assumptions about how difficult reading was supposed to be.

The ancient oak watched our lesson with obvious amusement. "In my eight thousand years," he rumbled, "I never thought to learn human writing. Perhaps this old tree could benefit from such lessons as well."

"Everyone can learn," I told him. "That's the beautiful thing about knowledge; it doesn't care how old you are or where you came from."

By afternoon, Little Bloom could recognize about twenty characters and was starting to sound out simple combinations. Her joy at this accomplishment was infectious. When she managed to read "little flower grows tall" without help, she did a tiny dance that involved all her branches swaying in perfect synchronization.

"I can read, Papa!" she called to the ancient oak. "I can read like the big people!"

"Indeed you can, little one," the oak replied with obvious pride. "You have learned in one day what took this old tree millennia to understand: that wisdom comes not from age, but from curiosity."

As the sun began to set, I felt the familiar tug that meant my time in this realm was coming to an end. Feng Zhaoyang found me in the library, where I'd been having one final strategy session with Du Yanze.

"Divine One," he said, bowing respectfully. "The people have gathered in the central plaza. They wish to hear from you before you depart."

"Word travels fast," I observed.

"News of your leaving has spread throughout the city. They're grateful for what you've done, but they're also frightened. Many of them have never had to think for themselves before."

I nodded. This was exactly what Du Yanze would need to address in every loop: not just the external threats, but the internal fear of freedom that came with casting off delusion.