Chương 2: A Fugitive’s Path

The hunting path snaked for seventeen miles beneath the permafrost, a claustrophobic vein of ice and darkness that finally spat him out into the ruins of a derelict charcoal kiln. Reyn hauled himself from the kiln's maw just as the horizon bled into the sickly, pale hue of crab-shell green. He collapsed into the withered grass, his body convulsing as he retched. Nothing came up but bitter bile and thin streaks of crimson. He hadn't eaten in three days.

His stomach felt like it had been packed with glowing embers, a searing void that demanded a tribute he couldn't provide. The main roads were a death trap. He knew the Lei Clan's hounds could track a scent for a hundred miles, and the Hall of Punishment Deacons carried Scent-Seeking Talismans—cursed gifts from the immortals that could sniff out a drop of clan blood within a three-hundred-mile radius.

Reyn scrubbed his skin raw with freezing meltwater, then smeared a thick layer of rancid pond mud over his hair and face. He transformed himself into a feral shadow, a creature of the muck that no high-born cultivator would deign to notice. Then, he ran south. He became a creature of the night. By day, he was a ghost, wedged into burial mounds, rotted wells, or the shadows behind crumbling idols in forgotten Earth Temples.

He pressed his body against the damp stone like a gecko, purpled toes gripping cracks in the masonry, holding his breath until the world went silent. By night, he sprinted along the ridgelines. Thorns shredded his trousers; jagged stones ground his straw sandals to dust. The blisters on his soles burst and reformed, layer upon layer, until his feet were encased in a thick, leathery armor of scar tissue. On the seventh night, he stopped to drink at a mountain stream.

The reflection staring back at him was a nightmare. Sunken eyes, protruding cheekbones, and lips as cracked as a riverbed in the height of a drought. A thorn-plowed furrow on his left cheek had turned to rot, yellow-green pus mingling with dark scabs to mask half his face.

"I cannot die," he croaked. The voice was a dry rasp, barely human.

"If I fall here, who will be left to slaughter Lei Wanjun?" He pulled the tattered half-scroll of the Qi Induction Manual from his tunic. The parchment was soft from his body heat, its edges frayed and soaked with sweat. Under the cold moonlight, he traced the tadpole-like ancient scripts. Draw Qi into the body, circulate through the heavens, sink it to the Dantian... He sat cross-legged on a frozen slab of rock, forcing his breath into the rhythm of the manual. An hour passed. Nothing. Two hours.

His Dantian felt like it was stuffed with wet wool—heavy, cold, and utterly lifeless. By the time the sky turned fish-belly white, frost had coated his eyelashes and his lips were a bruised purple. He roared in frustration, slamming a fist into the rock. Skin split, blood seeping into the stone's fissures.

"Useless!" he spat. He cursed his mediocre aptitude, his broken body, and the incomplete manual. Then, he closed his eyes and started again. Breakthrough came on the tenth day within a ruined mountain temple. As he neared a state of total delirium, a faint tremor stirred deep within his Dantian—the subtle twitch of a hibernating serpent's tail. It was gone in a heartbeat, but Reyn lunged for it with the desperation of a drowning man.

He ignored the exhaustion screaming in his marrow and drove the incantation forward. This time, he felt it: a thread of warmth descending from the Baihui point, passing through the Shanzhong, and settling into his core. It was fragile, like a candle in a gale, but it was real. The Qi Induction Manual was a fragment, containing only the first three layers, but Reyn didn't care. He was a starving wolf. He refined that sliver of spiritual energy, compressing it, forcing it through his meridians.

Every inch of progress felt like needles of steel grinding through his veins. He spasmed in agony, cold sweat drenching his thin clothes, but he did not stop until the energy was his. On the fifteenth day, he crested the southern foothills of the Thunder Abyss Mountains. He descended into a landscape of rolling hills where the villagers spoke in alien dialects and the coins were not the copper pieces of Thunder Abyss City.

At a local pawnshop, he traded a single Low-grade Spirit Stone for a string of copper coins, two sets of coarse robes, a rusted short blade, and a half-sack of bran cakes as hard as granite. The pawnshop manager was a one-eyed vulture with skin like cured leather. He weighed the spirit stone in his palm for a long moment, a predatory glint flickering within his clouded pupil.

"Boy," he rasped, his voice like grinding stones.

"Where does a gutter-rat like you find a treasure of this grade?"

"I... I found it," Reyn stammered, keeping his head low. He projected the pathetic aura of a cornered rabbit, his voice trembling with practiced cowardice.

"In the mountain gullies... just lying there." The old man chuckled—a dry, rattling sound—but didn't press further. Reyn didn't wait for a second invitation. He vanished into the city's arteries, but three streets later, the familiar prickle of malice crawled up his spine. Two shadows had detached themselves from the grime of the street: a wiry man with the face of a rat and a brute whose features were divided by a jagged scar. He didn't hesitate.

Reyn veered into a narrow alley, scaled a crumbling wall, and sprinted across the uneven roof tiles for half a mile. The world was a blur of gray stone and soot. Finally, he plummeted toward the stench of an open cesspool, diving into the subterranean drainage canals. He waded through knee-deep filth, the air thick with the rot of discarded offal and human waste. He pushed forward until his lungs screamed for oxygen, finally hauling his shivering frame out of a long-abandoned well.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. The pursuit was broken, but the realization was cold and heavy. To a mortal, a spirit stone was a curiosity; to a cultivator or a desperate man, it was a piece of the heavens worth more than a thousand lives. It was a death warrant.

"No more stones," he hissed, wringing the black sludge from his tunic. He wrapped his last spirit stone and the 'Zhen' Jade Pendant in layers of rags, tucking them into a hidden seam in his belt. His meager supply of bran cakes had been lost in the frantic escape. His stomach was a hollow pit of fire. He turned toward the city's outskirts—to the mass graves. For three days, Reyn lived among the dead. He scavenged moldy offerings and fished copper coins from the pockets of those who no longer needed them.

Seven coins. In a derelict temple, he traded three of them to a toothless beggar for a tattered, yellowed map.

"The Xuanxiao Sect?" the beggar wheezed, his finger poking a hole through the parchment.

"Three thousand miles south. You'll have to cross the Blackwater River, survive the Bone-Burying Desert, and scale seven peaks of hell. You looking for immortality, kid? Or just a faster way to die?" Reyn didn't answer. He pocketed the map and the remaining four coins, stepping into the gathering dusk. On the twentieth night, under the shadow of a jagged cliff, Reyn was roasting a rat over a tiny flame. The flickering light cast monstrous shadows against the rock. Suddenly, he froze.

The faint crunch of gravel echoed from the cliffside above. It wasn't an animal; animals didn't try to hide their weight. He smothered the fire instantly, shoving the half-cooked meat into his shirt. He pressed himself into the obsidian darkness of the rock face. Above, voices drifted down, hushed and lethal.

"... the scent ends here. The hounds lost the trail."

"Fan out! He's close. The Patriarch's order is absolute: a hundred gold pieces and a High-tier manual for his head!" Reyn's pupils contracted into needles. The Lei Clan's deacons and their hounds were like leeches, tracking him across provinces. He turned and ran south, the baying of dogs rising behind him like a funeral dirge. He sprinted through frozen streams and thorn-choked ravines, his lungs heaving like a broken bellows. The metallic tang of blood filled his throat.

By the thirtieth day, he reached the Blackwater River. It was a hundred yards of treacherous, sapphire-tinted ice. The current beneath was a silent monster. Reyn collapsed onto the surface, gasping for air like a fish hauled from the depths. His straw sandals were shredded, his feet a bruised, frozen purple. The shouts of his pursuers grew louder. He forced himself up, limping toward the far bank. The ice groaned beneath him—a sharp, sudden crack that signaled the end. The surface shattered. The abyss claimed him.

The freezing water was a thousand needles stabbing into his brain. He thrashed, but his limbs were leaden. As consciousness began to slip, a warmth radiated from his chest. The Qi Induction Manual—the damp parchment against his skin—began to pulse. A faint, ethereal barrier of spiritual energy flickered into existence, shielding his vitals from the killing cold. He broke the surface in a downstream eddy, coughing up water laced with blood and ice shards. He was half-dead, but the manual had kept the reaper at bay.

For now. Reyn dragged his shattered frame onto the jagged, ice-slicked shore, collapsing among the freezing stones. Above him, the heavens wept fine, crystalline snow that melted against his skin in cold streaks. Staring up at the suffocating gray expanse, he let out a laugh—a sound as jagged and rasping as the clatter of a broken iron gong echoing within a tomb.

"Lei Wanjun... the dogs you sent... could not claim my life." With a violent shudder, he forced himself upright, his fingers trembling as he reached into his robes to retrieve the 'Zhen' Jade Pendant. Under the pale moonlight, the jade pulsed with a soft, ethereal luster, still seemingly imbued with the phantom warmth of his father's final embrace. He gripped the artifact with such ferocity that his knuckles turned a ghostly white, the sharp edges biting deep into his calloused palm.

"Father, Mother. Your son still draws breath." His voice was a low, guttural vow.

"The Xuanxiao Sect... the Ascension Trial... it begins now." He turned his gaze toward the south, his eyes piercing through the swirling blizzard to fixate on the legendary immortal peaks three thousand miles away. Entry into the Xuanxiao Sect was no longer a dream—it was his singular lifeline. Only by becoming a cultivator could he hope to transcend his mortal frailty and flay the skin from his enemies.

He looked down at his hands, skeletal and drained of color in the lunar glow, looking more like the claws of a vengeful spirit than a man.

"Lei Clan... Lei Wanren, Lei Wanhe... mark my words. Your debt will be paid in marrow." A wolf's howl tore through the distance, a mournful, elongated cry that sounded like an ancient prophecy of doom. Reyn tucked the pendant securely against his skin and compelled his frozen legs to move. One agonizing step at a time, he vanished into the encroaching darkness.

His silhouette, sharp and thin as a blade, left a jagged trail of crimson across the pristine snow—a bloody path leading straight into the heart of the abyss. Miles away, nestled in a sheltered mountain hollow, three deacons of the Lei Clan huddled around a crackling bonfire. The one-eyed brute tore a hunk of charred hound meat from the bone and tossed it to his companion, his singular eye fixed on the southern horizon.

"The brat has crossed the Blackwater River."

"Shall we pursue?" the other asked, hand resting on his blade.

"Pursue?" The one-eyed man sneered, revealing a maw of rotted, yellowed teeth.

"Beyond that river lies the Bone-Burying Desert. Even the most seasoned hunters refuse to traverse that hellscape alone. We shall hold the perimeter. He will either wither into a husk under the sun or crawl back to us begging for the mercy of a blade."

"And if he defies the odds? If he makes it through?" The brute fell silent for a long moment, staring into the dancing flames.

"If he survives that wasteland, then the Heavens themselves have decreed he shall live. And I am not a man who picks fights with Fate." Suddenly, a violent shiver racked Reyn's body. He froze, casting a sharp glance back toward the north. Though the blizzard obscured all sight, he felt it—a predatory, glacial gaze piercing through three thousand miles of mountain and mist, locking onto his spine.

It wasn't the gaze of a man; it was the collective, bloodthirsty malice of his own kin, watching him like a pack of starving wolves.