Chapter 291: Stairway to the Heavenly Peak

Rakshasa was sitting astride Victor, her legs on either side of his body while one hand rested on his chest. After all the enthusiasm she had shown since his arrival, she finally seemed to notice that something was different about him. Victor returned her kisses, wrapped his arms around her waist, and was clearly happy to see her, but part of his attention remained caught up in a thought that refused to disappear.

She pulled her face a few centimeters away and studied his eyes.

"Why don’t you look as relaxed as you should?" Rakshasa asked, slowly running her fingers across his chest, narrowing her eyes as though trying to figure out for herself what had happened.

Victor exhaled through his nose and placed one hand on her waist.

"We need to talk about something serious," he replied, setting aside the jokes he would normally use to escape a question like that.

Rakshasa didn’t get off him. She simply adjusted her position and placed both hands on Victor’s chest, giving him her full attention.

"I’m listening," she said, her expression growing more serious as well, without showing excessive concern before knowing what had actually happened.

Victor took a few seconds to organize his thoughts. He had already told Serafall, Chysis, Carmilla, Scarlet, and Rowena, but every time, it still felt strange to put into words something he had kept secret for practically his entire new life.

"I came from the future," Victor said directly, deciding there was no reason to build suspense around it.

Rakshasa blinked.

Victor expected surprise, disbelief, or at least some question about whether he was serious.

Instead, she tilted her head.

"Like my mother?" Rakshasa asked so naturally that Victor completely lost his train of thought.

This time, Victor was the one who blinked.

He stared at her.

"Come again?" Victor asked, genuinely confused, even lifting his head slightly off the pillow.

Rakshasa seemed unable to understand why he was so surprised.

"Regression," she explained, making a small circular motion with one finger. "Sending your mind or your very existence back into the past to prevent something from happening. My mother has done that before."

Victor continued staring at Rakshasa.

Of all the possible responses, that definitely hadn’t been among those he had imagined.

"Your mother traveled back in time?" he asked, sitting up a little more comfortably and forcing Rakshasa to readjust her position on his lap.

"Yes," Rakshasa replied as though they were discussing a particularly difficult sword technique. "But tell me your story first. Judging by your expression, I imagine your case is different."

Victor ran a hand through his hair.

That made the conversation simultaneously much easier and much stranger.

"Alright," he replied after a few seconds. "In my first life, I was sick."

Rakshasa remained silent as Victor began telling his story.

He explained the illness that had afflicted him since birth, a condition that prevented his body from properly absorbing blood despite his vampiric nature. He told her how Serafall had kept him alive using her own blood and essence, sacrificing herself little by little simply so he could continue breathing. He spoke of the years spent confined to a bed, the stories he had heard about a world he knew of but had never been able to truly explore, and how his body had finally lost the struggle when he was still in his twenties.

Rakshasa stopped joking entirely.

"So you really died," she murmured when Victor finished that part, keeping her eyes fixed on him.

Victor nodded.

"In my mother’s arms," he replied, his hand still resting absentmindedly on her waist. "After that, I met a woman."

Rakshasa raised an eyebrow slightly.

"Of course you managed to meet a woman even after dying," she remarked, a small smile threatening to appear before quickly disappearing when she realized Victor was still serious.

"I don’t even really know who she was," Victor continued, ignoring the teasing. "She spoke to me, something happened that I still don’t completely understand, and then time went backward."

He explained waking up in a different period, the differences he had noticed, his bloodline finally functioning, and the feeling that the woman hadn’t simply sent his memories into the past. Something much greater had happened. His very existence seemed to have been rewritten along with that regression, and the blood that had once condemned him had become one of his greatest advantages.

Rakshasa listened to everything without interrupting.

When Victor finished, she remained quiet for a few seconds before shrugging.

"That’s more or less what happened to my mother," Rakshasa replied, adjusting herself on top of him again.

Victor looked at her as though he were still expecting her to be joking.

She wasn’t.

"The difference is that Mother didn’t meet anyone," Rakshasa continued, resting her chin on one hand. "She used a technique to go back on her own."

"She knew how to do that?" Victor asked, his curiosity immediately increasing.

Rakshasa nodded.

"Somehow," she replied, without going into details that apparently even she didn’t know. "But something went wrong. The technique was supposed to send her back to a specific moment, but it ended up pushing her much too far into the past."

Victor frowned.

"How far is ’much too far’?" he asked, trying to imagine the magnitude of a mistake necessary to change someone’s entire history.

"She went back as a baby," Rakshasa replied calmly.

Victor fell silent.

"As a baby," he repeated, raising an eyebrow.

"As a baby," Rakshasa confirmed, making a small gesture with her hand. "A new body, starting all over again. She retained something from her previous life, enough knowledge to roughly understand where she was and what she needed to do, but it wasn’t as though she could simply stand up and start cultivating."

Victor immediately remembered the story he had heard about Seo Baek Hyang.

The child abandoned in the snow.

The ten days spent surviving in conditions that should have killed any ordinary baby or child.

The stranger who found her.

The Demonic Cult.

"The story about the snow..." Victor murmured as the pieces began falling into place.

Rakshasa nodded.

"She went in that direction because she knew there were demonic cultivators in that region," Rakshasa explained, looking at him. "She survived by eating snow until she managed to get close enough to a place where someone could find her."

Victor spent a few seconds processing that.

"So your mother deliberately tried to reach the Cult while she was still a child because she remembered where it was supposed to exist," he remarked, understanding for the first time that the seemingly absurd story had another layer almost nobody knew about.

"Basically," Rakshasa replied, absentmindedly playing with a strand of his hair. "I don’t know what happened in her future. She never told me what mistake she wanted to correct, and I stopped asking a long time ago."

Victor arched an eyebrow.

"She didn’t even tell you?" he asked, imagining that information of such magnitude was hardly something Seo Baek Hyang would casually share.

"No," Rakshasa replied, slowly shaking her head. "Mother speaks when she wants to speak. Trying to force information out of her just makes her stare at you until you feel like an idiot."

Victor chuckled.

"Sounds pleasant," he remarked, already beginning to imagine where part of Rakshasa’s personality had come from.

"She is," Rakshasa replied with complete sincerity before adding, "When she isn’t killing someone."

Victor laughed again.

Rakshasa then became a little more thoughtful.

"Whatever problem she was trying to correct, she did what she needed to do," she said, the playfulness fading from her voice. "Today, she is what she is. She created techniques that changed the Cult, trained my father, saved me when I needed her, and surpassed limits that almost nobody even comes close to reaching."

Victor stared at Rakshasa.

For the first time since he had begun revealing his regression, he wasn’t speaking to someone who simply needed to accept that time travel was possible. Rakshasa had spent her entire life alongside someone who had apparently done something similar.

That changed quite a lot.

"Can I meet her?" Victor asked after a few seconds.

Rakshasa arched an eyebrow.

"My mother?" she asked, seeming surprised by how quickly he had become interested.

Victor nodded.

"I’d like to talk to her," he replied, already beginning to think about all the questions he could ask. "Knowing someone else has been through this... makes me curious."

Rakshasa shrugged.

"You can try," she replied, vaguely pointing upward. "She’s at the top of the mountain."

Victor waited for her to say something else.

Rakshasa said nothing.

"Then I’ll climb up," he replied simply.

Rakshasa began smiling.

Victor noticed.

"What?" he asked, recognizing that expression as a clear sign she was leaving out something important.

"You can climb up," Rakshasa repeated, her smile widening. "I only said you could try."

Victor narrowed his eyes.

"Rakshasa," he said, already growing suspicious.

"Victor," she replied in the same tone, clearly enjoying herself.

"What’s wrong with the mountain?" he asked, tightening his hold on her waist slightly.

Rakshasa let out a short laugh.

"It’s not the mountain," she replied, pointing upward again. "It’s the staircase."

Victor waited.

"Even I can’t climb all the way to the top," Rakshasa added, appearing extremely pleased with his reaction.

Victor blinked.

"You can’t climb a staircase?" he asked, finding that completely incompatible with practically everything he knew about her.

Rakshasa lightly slapped his chest.

"It’s not a normal staircase, idiot," she replied, finally beginning to explain. "It was built within an ancient formation. Every step is saturated with gravitational demonic energy."

Victor became more interested.

"Gravitational?" he asked, sitting completely upright on the bed while keeping Rakshasa on his lap.

"Yes," Rakshasa replied with a nod. "With every step you take, the pressure increases. Each step adds more force to your body until you can’t lift your leg again."

Victor thought about his own body refinement technique.

"How much does it increase?" he asked.

Rakshasa answered as though it were perfectly normal.

"A hundred times at each stage."

Victor stared at her.

"How many steps?" he asked after a pause.

Rakshasa looked toward the ceiling as though trying to remember the exact number.

"About fifteen hundred," she replied, looking back at Victor.

Victor did the calculations mentally.

His expression changed.

"Gravity increased by... fifteen thousand times?" he asked, seemingly trying to confirm that he hadn’t misunderstood part of her explanation.

Rakshasa shrugged.

"It’s the best training location in the Demonic Cult," she replied calmly. "Were you expecting less?"

Victor remained silent.

For a few seconds, all the enthusiasm he had felt about reaching the summit disappeared as he compared that figure with his own limits.

His body could currently withstand approximately two hundred and eighty times normal gravity during training before entering a genuinely dangerous zone.

Two hundred and eighty.

Victor looked at Rakshasa.

Then toward the ceiling, as though he could see the entire mountain through it.

"I can handle two hundred and eighty times," he murmured, the difference beginning to feel almost insulting.

Rakshasa flashed an enormous smile.

"I know," she replied, clearly having been waiting for exactly that moment.

Victor looked back at her.

"And you were planning to let me discover that on my own?" he asked, narrowing his eyes.

"Absolutely," Rakshasa replied without the slightest shame. "I wanted to see how many steps you’d manage before you started crawling."

Victor stared at the woman sitting on top of him.

Then a slow smile began spreading across his face.

"Now I’m definitely climbing it," he replied, determination immediately appearing in his expression.

Rakshasa sighed.

"I knew you were going to say that," she murmured, shaking her head, although she seemed quite satisfied.

"If you tell me there’s a staircase that even you can’t finish climbing, do you honestly think I’m just going to ignore it?" Victor asked, wrapping his arms around her waist.

"No," Rakshasa replied, bringing her face closer to his. "That’s why I told you."

Victor realized what she meant.

"You want to watch me suffer," he concluded, raising an eyebrow.

Rakshasa smiled.

"That too," she replied before giving him a quick kiss on the lips. "But mostly, I want to see how far you can go."

Victor caught the back of her neck before she could pull away and returned the kiss.

When he finally released her, there was still a thoughtful expression on his face.

Seo Baek Hyang.

Another regressor.

A cultivator who had surpassed Human Transcendence.

And between him and the answers she might be able to offer stood fifteen hundred steps specifically designed to crush anyone stubborn enough to attempt the climb.

Victor chuckled.

"Does this family not know how to do anything normally?" he asked, looking at Rakshasa.

She appeared genuinely confused.

"You’re asking that after joining it?" Rakshasa replied, pointing at him.

Victor couldn’t argue with that.