Chương 6: Chapter 5

Ling Tian turned away from Auntie Mei's shaded stall with the small parcel of dried meat tucked securely against his chest. His mind had already moved on. The transaction was finished. Revenue had been collected. Food reserves remained critically low but were no longer at immediate collapse levels.

The next phase of the day was straightforward: find the grain merchant, purchase the cheapest edible carbohydrate available, acquire whatever roots or vegetables could be obtained without bankrupting himself, then leave Hua City before the afternoon heat turned the climb back up Crimson Peak into an extended attempt at heatstroke. Simple, efficient, reasonably survivable. He did not manage to take even one step. The market went silent.

Not gradually, and not in the ordinary way a crowd quieted when someone important passed through. The noise simply died. One moment, Hua City was an unregulated wall of sound, merchants shouting prices, customers screaming counteroffers, fish slapping wetly against chopping boards, wooden carts rattling over broken stone, chickens protesting captivity, children crying, cooks striking iron ladles against blackened pans. The next moment, it was gone.

The silence was so abrupt that Ling Tian felt it as pressure in his ears. A cleaver stopped halfway through chopping a fish. A merchant froze with his mouth still open. Even the mule that had spent the last several minutes complaining loudly about its existence lowered its head and went quiet. Ling Tian's instincts reacted before his conscious mind caught up. Something was wrong. Very wrong. The humid valley air seemed to thicken around him as though someone had lowered an invisible ceiling over the street.

Breathing suddenly required effort. A strange metallic smell sliced through the market's usual collection of sweat, fish, grease, mud, and spices. Ozone. Hot metal. Scorched copper. His modern brain supplied the comparison immediately: electrical discharge. His survival instincts supplied another conclusion just as quickly. Get out of the open. Ling Tian did not tilt his head toward the heavens.

He did not stand in the middle of the road waiting to discover what magnificent supernatural phenomenon had frightened an entire city block into silence. That was how background characters died. He moved. A massive barrel sat beside a nearby alley, its wood blackened by age and swollen from years of exposure to moisture. The sharp stink leaking from beneath its lid suggested fermented cabbage. Ling Tian considered the smell for approximately half a second and decided it was acceptable.

He pivoted, slipped around a stunned vegetable seller, and wedged himself into the narrow gap between the barrel and the alley wall. His small body fit easily. For once, malnutrition presented a tactical advantage. He pulled his knees close, lowered his head, and flattened himself against the damp stone. Then the sunlight disappeared as a vast shadow swept across the street. Ling Tian looked up only enough to see what was happening without exposing himself. Something was descending from the sky.

At first, his brain rejected the shape because the object belonged firmly in the category of things that should not be airborne. It was a carriage. An actual carriage. Dark lacquered wood reflected the sunlight beneath layers of polished finish, while elaborate gold trim followed the frame in patterns that served no visible structural purpose. Crimson curtains snapped violently in the wind around its enclosed passenger compartment. There were no wings, no balloons, and not even wheels.

The entire vehicle was simply hovering several dozen meters above the city while descending toward the market at a speed Ling Tian considered criminal. His eyes narrowed. Of course. A flying luxury carriage. Because apparently wealth inequality in this world had progressed beyond private jets and straight into gravity exemptions. The creature pulling it was even worse. Calling it a horse would have constituted deliberate misinformation.

It was enormous, its body roughly comparable to a commercial delivery truck from his previous life, except delivery trucks generally did not possess thick layers of muscle beneath overlapping reptilian scales. Its hide shimmered with colors that changed subtly as the sunlight moved across it, blue, green, violet, oily black. The effect reminded Ling Tian of gasoline floating across wet pavement.

Its shoulders were thick enough to crush a market stall simply by brushing against one, two heavy horns curved backward from its skull, and its eyes burned with a dim orange light. Instead of wings, the creature simply walked on air. One massive cloven hoof came down against empty space. BOOM. A circular ripple spread outward beneath it. Another step. BOOM. The atmosphere visibly warped beneath the impact.

The beast descended through the sky as though an invisible staircase had been constructed exclusively for its convenience. Ling Tian stared from behind the barrel. He had seen enough impossible things since waking in this world that the sight did not inspire wonder. Mostly, it inspired irritation. This was not majestic transportation. This was a billionaire landing a helicopter in the middle of a pedestrian crossing because walking thirty meters from a proper landing area would apparently violate his dignity.

There were people directly beneath the carriage. Actual people. Children. Merchants. Customers. No warning bell had been sounded, no area had been cleared, and there were no guards establishing a landing perimeter. No air-traffic regulations. No public safety protocols whatsoever. Whoever owned that carriage had simply selected a street and expected reality to accommodate them. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. Ling Tian disliked them immediately.

The massive scaled beast reached the ground, and the impact was catastrophic. Its front hooves struck the muddy stone road with enough force to send a shockwave through the entire market. Wind exploded outward. Ling Tian ducked behind the barrel as debris tore through the street. Wood cracked. People screamed. Several stalls simply folded. A spice merchant's table overturned, launching enormous clouds of crimson and yellow powder into the air.

Baskets rolled through the road, dried chilies scattered across the stones, and fish buckets toppled simultaneously, spraying foul gray water across half the street. Somewhere, a chicken achieved temporary flight. The barrel shielding Ling Tian shifted several centimeters under the pressure. He immediately shoved one foot against the wall to prevent it from crushing him. When the wind finally settled, the market looked as if a small storm had passed through it. No one complained.

That was the part Ling Tian found most disturbing. A merchant whose stall had just lost half its roof did not curse. The fishmonger whose merchandise was now scattered across the road did not demand compensation. A woman holding a child did not scream at the driver. Instead, every person in the street dropped to their knees almost simultaneously. The movement rippled outward from the carriage. Bodies folded into the mud. Heads lowered. Foreheads touched dirty stone.

Some people had been knocked down already and simply remained where they had fallen, while others crawled into position. One spice seller was openly bleeding from his temple. He still bowed. Nobody looked up. Nobody even dared wipe the filth from their faces. Ling Tian watched from the shadows, his expression hardening. Fear could organize a crowd more efficiently than any government. He did not kneel. Not because of pride. Ling Tian had no objection to kneeling if kneeling increased his probability of survival.

But stepping out from behind cover purely to demonstrate submission would require voluntarily entering the sightline of whatever monsters had just arrived. That seemed counterproductive. So he remained hidden and pulled his spiritual perception completely inward. No passive scanning. No environmental awareness. Nothing. In his mind, the mental interface he had constructed earlier appeared again. Qi detection.

He highlighted everything, closed the program, killed the process, then, for good measure, imagined ripping the power cable out of the wall. He slowed his breathing, relaxed his muscles, and lowered his heartbeat as much as his frightened body would permit. His entire objective was to become spiritually uninteresting. A damp sack. Discarded garbage. A dead rat. Anything beneath notice. Because Ling Tian understood exactly what he was looking at. Power. Not social power.

Not wealth backed by contracts, police, courts, or institutions. Personal power. The kind that required none of those things. The people inside that carriage were not simply upper-class citizens. They were the human equivalent of natural disasters who happened to own property. In his former world, an executive could ruin your career. Here, an offended cultivator could ruin your entire bloodline. There would be no HR complaint. No lawsuit. No investigative journalist. No angry posts online.

If some frightened merchant accidentally looked at the wrong elder for half a second too long, a guard could cut his head off in the street, and the only practical consequence would be somebody having to clean the blood off the paving stones. The hierarchy was brutally clear. Ling Tian had no intention of participating. Absolute avoidance. Maximum compliance through invisibility. The safest interaction with senior management was no interaction at all.

The scaled beast snorted, the sound rolling through the street like distant thunder. Steam burst from its nostrils. Not ordinary breath, actual white-hot vapor. The plume struck a puddle beside its hoof, and the muddy water boiled instantly. Ling Tian watched the surface disappear in a violent hiss and mentally added another item to his risk register. Do not stand near dragon-horse respiratory discharge. The beast showed no interest in the mortals kneeling around it. It simply began walking.

Each step cracked the stones beneath its hooves, while the carriage followed behind without wheels, floating several inches above the ruined street. Its passengers remained invisible behind crimson curtains. That somehow made them worse. The procession advanced toward the far end of the market, where an imposing manor stood behind a stone wall and heavy iron gates. Ling Tian had noticed the compound earlier but paid little attention to it. Large property. Good masonry. Private guards. Aristocracy.

None of his business. Now the gates were opening. Slowly. Iron hinges screamed against one another, the sound cutting through the unnatural silence. The flying carriage entered. Ling Tian remained still. He should have continued doing exactly that. Unfortunately, paranoia won. What if guards spread into the surrounding streets? What if someone checked the alley? What if hiding while everyone else knelt was itself suspicious? He needed information. Minimal information.

Ling Tian cautiously reopened the smallest possible sliver of his Qi perception. Not enough to observe the carriage. Not enough to scan the entire manor. Just a narrow sweep around the alley to make sure no heavily armed cultivator was about to drag him out by the ankle. The spiritual sense flickered outward and immediately caught something. Ling Tian froze. It was not the beast.

The beast radiated something enormous and oppressive, like standing close to industrial machinery that could kill you if you leaned the wrong way. This signal was different. Smaller. Closer. Wrong. Ling Tian followed it carefully. The source lay inside the manor courtyard. Through the narrow gap between the barrel and wall, he could see past the still-open gates for several seconds before the carriage fully entered. Someone stood there. A boy. Perhaps twelve.

Two years older than Ling Tian's current body, give or take. He wore clean clothing made from fabric far better than anything Ling Tian owned, but nothing about him suggested privilege. His shoulders slumped forward, his arms hung stiffly at his sides, and his fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. He seemed to be trying to make himself smaller. Then Ling Tian saw his face. The posture said defeat. The eyes did not. Those eyes were furious. Not childish irritation. Not embarrassment.

Something sharper. Contained humiliation. Rage forced under control because displaying it openly would be dangerous. The boy stared at the arriving carriage as though he hated every piece of lacquered wood attached to it. Ling Tian should have stopped scanning there. Instead, curiosity pulled his perception a fraction deeper. The result hit him immediately. Heat. Not physical heat. Spiritual feedback. For one startling second, it felt like opening the door of an industrial furnace.

Ling Tian instinctively tightened his mental filters. The anomaly centered on the boy's chest. Something rested beneath his tunic. A necklace. Only a small portion of its cord was visible physically. Spiritually, it was impossible to miss. It was consuming everything around it. Ambient Fire Qi drifted through the bright courtyard in faint currents. The necklace pulled at them. It did not absorb them gently. It pulled.

The energy bent toward it, narrowing into tiny streams before disappearing beneath the boy's clothes. Ling Tian stared. A vacuum. A localized sink. A black hole with jewelry branding. Then he noticed something worse. The necklace was not satisfied with environmental energy. Thin strands of Qi were being pulled directly from the boy. His internal reserves flowed toward the object continuously, slowly enough that an ordinary observer would never notice, but fast enough to cripple long-term cultivation.

Ling Tian's accountant brain did what it always did. It identified and analyze everything. Input. Output. Loss rate. Cause. Effect. The boy was not failing to generate spiritual energy. His spiritual energy was being stolen. Continuously. By his own necklace. Ling Tian's expression became blank. That was unfortunate. The iron gates began closing. His sightline narrowed.

Before they shut completely, Ling Tian caught one last glimpse of the boy standing alone in the courtyard while the massive carriage approached him. Then, CLANG. The gates slammed shut.