I Became a Peak Master With No Disciples?!
Chapter 34: I am Su Ming.

Chapter 34: I am Su Ming.

A blinding white light flashed.

Su Ming shut his eyes. When he opened them, the volcanic cavern was gone. He stood in an endless white. He was still in his demonic form. Pale red skin, black lines wrapping his chest, two horns steady at his temples.

He raised one hand and looked at it.

A pressure arrived before the voice did. It drifted toward his soul sea like a slithering snake—subtle, patient, designed for erosion rather than assault. He activated the Tranquil Lotus Mantra, his Yin-Yang Core circulating once, quietly.

He did not fight the presence. He simply guarded against it.

***

"Behold the unthinkable future."

The white world shifted.

Lin Yao stood in a stone arena with her sword drawn.

Her chin was lifted. Her eyes moved across the crowd with a certain uneasiness.

The seat of the White Lotus Peak Master was empty.

Su Ming watched from nowhere. He had not come back.

Someone in the crowd laughed at something almost inaudible. He caught only ’abandoned’ and ’joke’, and the whisper folded back into noise.

Lin Yao did not look at the empty seat again. She had already accepted it. Her master had abandoned her.

She fought well. She won her early rounds without celebration, moving from circle to circle with the quiet efficiency of someone completing a pointless task. By the semifinals, the seat was still empty.

When the Sword Peak elder approached her after the final bell, she did not look surprised.

She turned her back on the White Lotus Peak Master seat one last time and walked away.

Su Ming’s mouth opened, but nothing came out of it. And by the time he thought of stopping her, she was already gone.

The future does not hear what you meant to say.

The scene moved.

Lin Fan stood in the White Lotus Peak’s stone courtyard, his hand extended toward Lin Yao. He smiled with the natural ease of someone who has never once doubted the world would reach back. There was no cruelty in it. That was the unbearable part.

Lin Yao took his hand. She did not look back.

The Sect Master’s voice, distant and final.

"Remove the plaque."

A servant took the White Lotus Peak board down, tucked it under one arm, and walked away. On the wall where it had hung, the stone was slightly cleaner, shielded from weather for years by something that no longer existed.

Su Ming looked at that clean rectangle.

He stood there in silence.

***

Wang Tian, now an old man, was on a road going nowhere in particular. Dust and gray sky, and the weight of a man who has kept walking long past the point where it made sense.

A long time back, he had gone to the Sect and found no one. He was looking for a master who was already gone. When Lin Fan found him, it was not with anger. Under the banner of correcting misunderstandings, Lin Fan’s blade came down.

Wang Tian fell in the dirt. His eyes were open. He was not looking at the sky. He was looking at something that was not there.

"Why didn’t you come back, Master?"

The question did not come from his lips. It came from those lifeless eyes.

It came from everywhere all at once and asked Su Ming.

Su Ming stood still.

He could have ended these illusions at any moment. The strength was there. His Yin-Yang Golden Core, the Cloud Dragon Sword Technique, the Primordial Yang Demon Body, the white flames of the Lantern. It was more than enough to shatter this space.

He did not.

Because the illusion had not lied, it had shown him the most terrifying thing possible. A future that was entirely plausible. A future that already existed in the gap between his thoughts and actions.

He stood there, unable to destroy what he could not call false.

***

"Behold the unraveled past."

The images dissolved. The waterfalls first. Then the spring, the early mornings on the mountain, Lin Yao’s impatience at sword practice. Then the long, quiet, lonely cultivation, breath by breath. And last, the very moment he had arrived in this world, crossing over from the Earth into the White Lotus Peak.

That too faded away silently, like the way sleep comes. Quietly.

His name faded. His cultivation dimmed. The Golden Core dissolved, his physical strength faded gradually till he had no sense of having a body at all.

Only darkness remained, and the dim awareness that he had forgotten something important.

***

"Behold the forgotten self."

Fluorescent lights. A desk. Two monitors filled with work.

Su Ming looked at his pale, ordinary hands. No qi. No sword. No horns. Outside a small window, rain fell on a concrete city. His manager’s voice came from somewhere behind the headphones.

"We need this report by midnight."

He had died at this desk. Exactly here, in exactly this posture, and no one had noticed for two days.

"Was it all a dream?"

He was tired. Not the exhaustion of battling an enemy, but the tiredness of a person who has carried a heavy burden for a very long time and has finally reached a place where putting it down seems like the only reasonable option.

In the dim light, two figures appeared.

One stood by the window. Pale, office-clothed, unremarkable twenty-eight years old man who became invisible as a survival strategy, so completely that even his death went unnoticed.

He had died long before his heart stopped beating.

The other stood by the door in cultivation robes, carrying the residue of a life spent trying to prove something to a world that had decided the moment he was born. An orphan handyman disciple, selected on a whim, to become Daoist Xuan’s successor. His talent was less than ordinary.

They both looked at the red-skinned demonic Su Ming standing in front of them.

No one spoke. The lights hummed.

Three versions of the same person. Two dead. One standing in the dragon’s trial, in a borrowed body, in his demonic form, carrying borrowed debts, without an answer for a single question.

He did not feel heroic. He felt only the quiet, exhausted weight of recognition.

Both of them were dead. And whatever had continued past their endings was still here.

Not because he was stronger, not because he had deserved it, not because he had willed it.

He did not know why he had continued even after their end.

He sat down on the floor and said nothing.

***

"Behold the final question."

"Who are you?"

Su Ming stood still.

"Su Ming," he said.

"A name given to a body."

"The Acting Peak Master of White Lotus Peak."

"A title given without weight."

He was quiet a moment. "A man who died and woke up in a new world."

Silence.

"Who are you?"

The pressure tightened, slow and absolute, against his thoughts, against the last remaining edges of his identity.

He had no more titles to offer. No more roles. The trial had stripped away every identity he had ever carried, and left nothing beneath.

His two selves looked directly into his monstrous eyes. Su Ming’s grasp on his own identity began to slip.

The white space was completely silent.

He could hear himself breathe.

In. Out. Slow and shallow.

The sound of it felt strange. It was too loud, too close, as if it were the only thing left in this silent white world.

’Does it even matter?’

He was tired. Not the kind that sleep fixes. Something older than that. His thoughts were growing slow, his eyelids heavy in a way that had nothing to do with his physical body.

’Should I just give up?’

The thought arrived without urgency. That was what made it dangerous. It did not feel like surrender. It felt like relief.

Like if he simply closed his eyes, just for a moment, the pressure would stop, the questions would stop, and whatever remained of him could finally rest.

It would be so easy.

He looked at them both for a long time.

The office worker by the window. The handyman disciple by the door.

Both dead. Both passed away in the same quiet way.

He had always thought of himself as a traveler wearing the identity of a person from this new world, pretending to belong.

Standing here, looking at the two versions of himself at once, he dug deeper into his memories.

The one by the window had no one. No roots, no bonds. He had died exactly as invisible as he had lived.

The one by the door had tried to belong somewhere, to matter to someone, and had died before he got to know if it worked.

And he, the one still standing, had Lin Yao calling him Master as if it meant something important to her.

He had a peak that he had spent months quietly caring for because something in him could not leave it alone. He had walked the stone paths of White Lotus Peak before dawn because it felt like his mountain.

Yes, it was his mountain.

Lin Yao was his disciple.

Not borrowed. Not a role to maintain. His.

’When did that happen?’

He did not have a clear answer. Only the quiet awareness that it already had.

He looked at his other two selves.

And suddenly, there was no distance between them. No boundary where one life ended and another began. No extra weight to accept, because it had never been separate to begin with.

They were him. All three, their path converging at the same moment from three different directions.

He did not say anything dramatic. He was too tired for that.

"I am Su Ming," he said again, simply without any explanation attached.

Not a title. Not a declaration. Just his name, finally meaning what it should have meant all along.

An acceptance.

The white world shattered into countless pieces like a broken mirror, revealing the innermost layer of the secret realm.

***

The breakthrough came like a rush of air after drowning. The pressure lifted. He drew in a deep, trembling breath, his lungs burning as his heart steadied.

In his soul sea, the Twilight Nether Lantern blazed with magnificent brilliance, its light illuminating every corner of his consciousness. A thick golden-white stream flowed down from the lantern. Not a droplet but a rich pool of Samsara Resin, pouring directly into his soul sea.

The deep, burning cracks that had scarred him since his transmigration closed in an instant as his soul sea expanded rapidly.

A cool, powerful energy washed through his mind and left nothing broken.

At the same time, a tiny gray thread of mysterious Qi took root in the centre of his dantian, at the very centre of his Yin-Yang Golden Core.

It carried no heat or cold, only closure, containing a sliver of the Chaos of Ending.

Su Ming raised his head. His eyes were clear, reflecting a sharp silver light.