The End

Gou Dabao was a special fallen immortal. Because his shallow thoughts and deep instincts had long been at odds with one another, he displayed symptoms resembling latent schizophrenia, though they were also somewhat like borderline personality disorder. His mind had long remained unstable, rising and falling wildly, fickle and unpredictable, often splitting into extremes.

For years, he had relied on various methods of cultivating the heart to suppress that shattered state of mind. Fortunately, he had never suffered any particular shock before, and the immortal's remnant soul had never awakened. Instead, he had fiercely resisted both his identity as a fallen immortal and his insights into the ancient methods, allowing him to endure.

The immortal acting as host had seen every storm and wave there was. In any case, he had enough backups of himself; even if one or two hosts refused to let him revive, it did not matter.

But Gou Dabao's attempt to use the Modern Dharma Cultivator method of dividing his spirit and transforming thoughts amounted to using an Outer Dao cultivation method, one fundamentally opposed to the immortal's own cultivation, to contaminate the immortal's original purity. This provoked an instinctive rejection from the immortal's remnant soul. As a result, Gou Dabao's cultivation of divided spirit and transformed thoughts was forcibly interrupted before it could go deep. The thoughts of both the immortal and Gou Dabao's surface consciousness entered his mana together.

The mana that had refined the immortal's thoughts immediately changed in nature, opening another cycle within Gou Dabao's body. The remnant soul was an incomplete fragment with no capacity for thought, but this cycle could make the simplest judgments. The powerful will contained within several of the immortal's thoughts kept growing within those cycles, squeezing out Gou Dabao's original consciousness in only a few breaths.