The CopyCat Immortal

Chapter 8 Secret Training

The night didn't offer Ren any solace. It only provided a velvet shroud for his madness. 

The Azure Cloud Sect’s North Wing was a graveyard of ambition. Here sat the Mirror Gallery, a restricted corridor of stone pillars and polished jade intended only for disciples of the Inner Circle whose mental fortitude was supposed to be as rigid as a mountain. It was silent, save for the hum of ancient defensive arrays that whispered like old ghosts in a tomb.

Ren moved with a silence that shouldn't have belonged to a human. His footsteps didn't click; they slithered, a byproduct of the Wind Blade Qi he had repurposed into a rhythmic, friction-less glide. He wasn't supposed to be here. Laborers were confined to the soot-stained kitchens and the damp servant shacks at the mountain’s base. But "supposed to" was a concept Ren had discarded the moment Senior Li’s fire failed to turn him into ash.

He stopped in front of a pillar carved from blackened obsidian. At its center hung a piece of Spirit-Silk draped over a jade mirror. This was the Ethereal Sigh array—a training tool for cultivators to practice their resistance against psychic trauma. 

"Okay, Ren. This is a bad idea," he whispered to the shadows, his voice a dry rasp. "A really, spectacularly stupid idea."

His internal world was already a war zone. The Inferno Burst snarled in his chest like a caged tiger. The Azure Static from the Stormcrest Wolf flickered across his nervous system like a localized storm. The Earth Shield weighted his bones, making every muscle groan. Adding a mental technique was like pouring liquid nitrogen into a boiling kettle. It would either crystallize his focus or shatter his brain into fine dust.

Ren gripped his wood-cutter’s axe—not for protection, but as a grounding weight. He stepped onto the jade dais. 

Click.

The array recognized a presence. The Spirit-Silk shroud didn't just move; it disintegrated into a violet mist that smelled of rotting lotus and ozone. The mirror began to vibrate, emitting a low-frequency hum that vibrated the very calcium in his teeth. 

Suddenly, the gallery vanished.

The stone pillars melted into the sky of a childhood memory. Ren wasn't in the Azure Cloud Sect anymore. He was ten years old again, huddled in the corner of a burning village house, his mother’s cold hand gripping his as the smoke turned her face into a silhouette of grief.

"Why couldn't you save us, Ren?" a voice hissed from the fire—his mother’s voice, twisted by a thousand-watt spiritual pressure. 

"Not real," Ren groaned, his knees hitting the dirt of a dream. "It’s a... projection. An oscillation of the Spirit Roots. Tier 3—Mind-Rend Veil."

His mother’s phantom lunged. Her fingers were jagged icicles that pierced through his chest without breaking the skin. The pain wasn't physical; it was a deep, visceral agony that felt like someone was dragging a serrated blade across the memories of his own name. 

His eyes rolled back. White foam began to prickle at the corners of his mouth. 

Grafting... process... begin, his survival instinct screamed.

In the dark cavern of his subconscious, the Copycat Immortal’s hidden mechanism activated. Usually, Ren waited for physical damage to trigger the absorption. But the Mind-Rend Veil was insidious. It fed on the Inferno Burst’s aggression and the Earth Shield’s stubbornness.

Ren’s brain felt like it was being shoved through a keyhole. 

Analysing wave-form. Frequency: 404 hertz. Source: Obsidian Core. Spiritual signature: Ghost-Element.

He didn't fight the illusion. He invited it. He lived the fire ten thousand times in the span of a single second. He watched his mother die, then his brothers, then himself—a recursive loop of misery that would have broken a thousand normal men.

But Ren was a pragmatist. Even in the depth of soul-shredding grief, he was looking for the gears. How does the violet light bend? How does the Qi anchor to the frontal lobe?

Suddenly, the blue static in his veins surged unbidden. It hit the psychic energy like a lightning rod, grounding the mental storm into his physical frame. The transition was brutal. Ren felt a vessel behind his left eye pop, a warm trickle of blood sliding down his cheek.

"I... I have you," Ren croaked. 

He didn't push the illusion away. He swallowed it. 

The violet mist was sucked into his open meridians, following the cooling trail left by the Wind Blade essence. The Grafting wasn't smooth this time; it was an amputation followed by a clumsy stitching. 

Sync complete: Whispering Soul Illusion – Tier 2 – Mastered.

The world snapped back into reality. Ren fell onto the jade floor, gasping for air that felt like it was made of solid lead. He vomited—a thick, dark sludge that sizzled with residual violet sparks. 

He looked at the obsidian pillar. The mirror was cracked. The array had exhausted its cycle, its jade heart dulled. 

"Dammit," Ren wheezed, clenching his fists. His knuckles were bone-white. 

He tried to stand, but his legs were jelly. His internal world was no longer a war; it was a massacre. The Whispering Soul Illusion sat at the center of his mind, a cold, predatory presence that demanded to be fed. For the first time, he felt the heavy price of his theft. Every "death" he lived, every technique he stole, was taking up a real estate in his soul that wasn't designed to be a library.