Ah. Hello there, traveler from another universe. My name is Tama, and as you might have been able to tell from my name, I am a cat. Or maybe not. I don’t know about what might get lost in translation. Now, as for what you don’t know... I’m almost 70 thousand years old, and am immortal. Surprised? Allow me to tell you a bit about my backstory, and about the universe we’re in now.

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“Add in root of mandrake... raise heat... let cook for three days... it’s high noon now, so I’ll come back at dawn of the third day to take the next step. Until then, I’ll sleep and cultivate. I hadn’t had a chance to do so recently, because I've been trying to make this damned pill. Tama, keep the rats out of this room, okay?”

“Nyaa! (Of course, don’t I always?)”

 

Master left, and I took a nap on the shelf above the pot, where it was warmed to perfection by the steam. When I woke up, I stretched, and knocked a small, round, glittering object into the pot, among other things, which caused a burst of heat to flare from the pot as I ran, knocking more items into the pot.

 

“Nya? (What was that? Did I do a bad thing? Master won’t get mad at me, right?)” 

 

A day or so later, the pot began to smell like there was something tasty inside of it, and the flames beneath it had died out (I had no way of knowing that I’d also destroyed the heating formation when I sharpened my claws on a wooden post) so I stuck my head into the pot. At the bottom was a small amount of a gold-colored paste, which smelled like perfectly cooked fish, so I licked it experimentally.

It tasted like week-old shit, however, so I pulled my head out and tried to get the taste off of my tongue. The top layer, once removed, uncovered a black paste that released a stench to match the taste of the top layer. As I was moving erratically trying to get it off of my tongue, Master entered the cave.

 

“What is this! What happened?! A failure... Again... At least this time, it’s only a loss of half a week and some easily found ingredients, as opposed to three weeks and some things like Dragon’s Blood or 100-year Poison Dragon Grass.” 

 

He looked at me, finally noticing my strange behavior. 

 

“Tama, what are you doing?”

“Nyach! Nya... (What the - this tastes so bad! I feel like my body’s going to explode!)”

“Hmm… I guess you dislike the smell, huh. It’s bad enough to make me gag, so you must have it really bad” 

 

He scraped the residue off of the bottom of the pot and into the shell of a nut, which he set aside to deal with later or something. Regardless, my body was extremely hot, and my head felt like it was going to burst open. I’ve never felt that from anything I’d eaten before... but, then again, I’d never had any of my Master’s concoctions until now.

 

“Time to start over. First, add in the fireflower pet... als... what happened to the baby dragon’s iris I had? It should be right here... did it... fall into the pot? What would that do to the mixture? I wonder...”

 

Master went back to the husk with the residue and used his Truth Flame or whatever it was on the stinking thing, his eyes widening as he saw... whatever he saw. 

 

“Residue of... immortal salve?! That means... there should be some immortal salve here! The dream of all cultivators, nay, of all mankind, eternal life! Even if it’s an incomplete product that only makes me live thrice as long, it’s still incredible! Where is it?!”

“Nya... (I think... I might have eaten it... Sorry)”

“Tama? Could it be... that you... the reason you’re acting like that... is because you ate it?”

 

I nodded, with an apologetic look on my face. Master froze, his expression unreadable.

 

“Nya… (I am sorry…)”

 

Master slammed the table, breaking it without a care. 

 

“How could this happen? How could I let this happen!”

 

Master was mad, I had no idea what to do. All I could do was apologize, not that he’d be able to understand my words. 

 

“Nya… Nya! (I am sorry… It will get better!)”

 

He paused and looked at me glaring daggers.

 

“Youu… You eat it, and now you’re acting all high and mighty, huh?!”

 

In a fit of rage, he drew his dagger, and I backed away.

 

“Nya! (Calm down!) Nya⁠- gh…” 

 

My eyes trembled as I saw a piece of metal piercing my small belly, no trace left of his gentle hand that I had once known. Opening my flesh without a hint of care, he didn’t stop searching in it even as I gargled on my blood and bile. 

 

“Tch. It’s not in his stomach… What ingredients were added, and when did it happen? It could’ve been me! I had a chance at immortality, and it slipped away!”

 

The pain was insufferable. I did not know what was going on around me. He picked me up and threw me outside the house, almost as if I was just disposable, bleeding away on the fallen leaves of the woods. Last thing I saw was the feet of a man, his back facing my rapidly dimming eyes…

---

I awoke sometime later, though if it was a few hours or months, I didn’t know, my belly felt like the cut and pain were just a dream, and my head and body felt more or less back to normal. Was it just a dream? No, I’m in the woods, and there’s a pool of dried blood beneath me, with more sticking to my fur. Will Master attack me again if I go back to him? I don’t know, but I’ll try it. It must’ve been a bad situation, bad luck… I’m also hungry... and his grilled fish... were so tasty. Master was a kind man! Surely he won't still be angry. Surely he'll be happy to still have a ratcatcher.

With (almost) nothing but the taste of his cooking on my mind, I trotted back towards the cave in which he normally slept, cooked, ate, and otherwise spent most of his time, when he wasn’t in the other caves making his concoctions.

 

“Nyaa! (Master! I’m back, I’m sorry, but I’m hungry as well! Can I have some fish?)”

“Was that a cat? Tama? He should be dead, unless he is truly immortal...”

 

He walked out of his cave, looked at me, and his expression showed that he seemed to recognize me, probably by the star-shaped white patch on my forehead.

 

“It’s really you! You are immortal! Oh, how I wish I could have eaten what you ate. Where have you been these past two weeks?”

“Nya... (You’re not going to hurt me again, right? Are you...)”

 

I backed away as he extended his hand. I couldn’t help it, I still remembered the pain of that hand spreading my wound open and digging around inside.

 

“Oh, no… What did I do, you’re all covered in blood… I’m so sorry, let me wash you and get you some food” 

 

He spoke with a gentle voice as he knelt down to my level. That was my Master!

 

“Nya… Nyaa! Nyaa?” (I’m sorry for doubting you... Food! wait, two weeks?)”

---

Days turned into months, until several years passed, and by then, he’d fed me several of his concoctions, including several that killed me again. Even so, thanks to the Pill of Animal Wisdom he’d given me, I now was able to read just about anything, and with another pill, I became able to communicate through telepathy, though only some simple things, at least for the moment. Currently, he was working on trying to find a working pill to get me to be able to make much of any progress at all on my so-called twelve weeks foundation building.

We’d come up with the idea to see if I could become a cultivator a year or so earlier, but at the current pace, it’d take me about a decade to complete just the foundation building. I just didn’t have enough spiritual strength, often called spirit, to condense into drops. It didn’t help that the motions that humans initially used to guide their spirit, before they gained direct control over it, couldn’t be applied to my feline body, though I’ve gotten good at walking on just two legs... mostly because I was bored and thought that might help me perform them. I was wrong about that, but it’s still another skill I’ve learned, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time, right? Right?

 

Speaking of skills I learned, in addition to cultivation, Master taught me about alchemy, at least the theory portion as paws couldn’t really put the theory into practice. As part of that, the appearance, properties, and processing techniques of hundreds of thousands of useful materials got drilled into me, as did interactions and importantly the fundamental rules behind the interactions between materials.

That allowed me to become incredibly proficient in the theory of pill concoction and formula creation, best trained via one of Master’s favorite exercises to do with me, where Master would name a few materials and I would figure out what kind of pill one would make with them, and explain the general procedures step by step. Alternatively, he’d name a large number of materials, and ask for a formula using just those materials that could make something with specific effects. He did have me read several massive tomes filled with alchemy formulae to expand my knowledge base as well, most of them being ones he wrote himself, often with both the standard and improved versions of common formulae side by side for comparison.

He taught me other things too, including the normally hard to actively train control of spiritual strength, which I fortunately seemed to have a knack for. However, as I’d later discover, most of the things he taught were technical skills, with little to nothing taught about how to interact with people.

 

Around a thousand years passed like that, and Master’s cultivation had hit a wall at level 80. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t break through to become a tier 9 Introductory Immortal, and so he died of old age, stuck at the wall for over 200 years. I, as a level 9 cat without any teacher or spirit companion, wandered the world, before settling down as an ordinary ratcatcher in the imperial castle, hiding my capabilities.

I would run away every decade or so, wander the city for a few months or a couple of years, and then return, being treated as a new cat. I was very glad that, despite still being a kitten at a millennium old, I could pass for a full-size adult cat. Master said my mother was abnormally large for a cat, so I guess that’s something I inherited. And I had grown slightly in that time, but it didn’t seem like I was anywhere near done growing.

About two hundred and seventy years passed in such a manner, and I was content enough, I guess. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t slack off, I was still cultivating and trying to learn everything I could about my void spirit realm whenever I had time, but... I lived life how I pleased as well. Why did I pick that length of time? Well... that’s when I broke through to level 10, the pinnacle of where I could reach with my void spirit realm, at least in theory. Well, that happened about a decade earlier, but whatever.

 

Oh wait, perhaps I should talk about the way cultivation works here, as you seem to use an entirely different system, or none at all. I’ll explain that next, I suppose. Then we get to the events that made me pick that particular point in time.