Chương 129: Paradise in Rot (2/3)

A dozen paces behind him, Ye Bing stood rooted where she was, silent as carved ice, while freezing rain pressed strands of dark hair against her scarred cheeks. The cold droplets traced the old wounds—pale, puckered lines that webbed across her left temple and jaw—before dripping from her chin to darken the collar of her travel-worn robes. Her knuckles, still wrapped tight around the leather grip of her broadsword, had gone bone-white from the cold and tension both.

The blade's edge trembled—barely, imperceptibly—not from fear, but from the involuntary shiver that even a Foundation cultivator could not entirely suppress in air this frigid and this thick with the reek of slaughter.

She had long known that Shi Yan's methods in battle were strange beyond reason, yet she had thought he was merely probing the beast first, wearing down its strength before revealing some profound killing move.

She had expected a Heaven-Rending Palm, or a Cloud-Piercing Finger, or something like that. She had expected the fierce and resplendent might of a Body Cultivator, Blood-Force surging like a furnace, shaking the earth with a single blow—the kind of technique that would fill the valley with golden-red light, split the fog with sheer spiritual pressure, and leave crater-marks seared into stone.

Yet there had been none of that.

No radiant qi-surge. No heaven-shaking roar of triumph. No display of mastery over the natural laws.

Only cold arithmetic. Only blood and mud and the clean, merciless geometry of a killing blow delivered without hesitation, without flourish, without waste.

What is that? Kind of like a hunter? Although she was bewildered, every cultivator had their secrets. Perhaps Daoist Shi practiced some strange dao or whatever.

Her gaze lingered on the bisected corpse steaming in the cold air, on the black blood pooling around Shi Yan's boots, on the furrow his saber had carved through moss and stone before the final cut. The scene before her felt wrong in a way she could not name—like watching a butcher dismember livestock with the efficiency of a craftsman, rather than witnessing the clash of titans that cultivation manuals glorified.

While Ye Bing still struggled to make sense of the crude and dreadful manner of that victory, Shi Yan stood over the steaming, bisected corpse, his gaze fixed upon the glowing blue words branded across his vision. The fog around him had begun to creep back in, tendrils of gray mist curling around his armored legs, licking at the gore-slick steel of his sabatons.

His breath—white vapor escaping the hollow sockets of the Yaksha mask—rose in rhythmic clouds, steady and unhurried despite the violence that had just ended.

[Current Dao Embers: 41, 725 Dao Embers] Beneath the cold iron of the Yaksha mask, the corners of Shi Yan's lips curved ever so slightly. The expression was hidden, invisible to all but himself, yet the faint warmth of satisfaction touched his chest—brief, clinical, already fading into the next calculation.

Finally. I have some breathing room again.

He did not linger in triumph. His thoughts turned at once, cold and precise, examining the battle and his own condition as though taking stock after a life-and-death trial. The adrenaline—what little his body still produced after months of suppressing biological panic responses—had already begun to ebb, leaving only the familiar clarity of the post-engagement review. First, let me re-watch the scene.

Total engagement time: 11. 4 seconds, he calculated, sensing the residual heat of the [Black-Iron Body Art] swiftly ebbing from his veins. The black, carbon-fiber veins that had bulged across his neck and jaw during the technique's activation were already receding beneath his skin, disappearing like shadows swallowed by deeper darkness. The unnatural heat radiating from his armor—the steam that had boiled rain off his pauldrons and vambraces—faded into the valley's clammy cold.

His heartbeat, forced into violent irregularity by the Art's physiological override, had returned to its steady, mechanical rhythm. Passable. But my grasp of these weapons is still far from enough.

This had been his first true use of such ancient weapons as a recurve bow and spear in actual combat. On Earth, he had mastered firearms and close-quarters ballistics—M4 carbines, suppressed sidearms, the weight and recoil of a Barrett. 50 cal sniper rifle. Muscle memory honed over a decade of urban warfare, hostage extractions, and counter-insurgency operations in dust-choked cities half a world away.

In this world, he could only adapt as he fought, translating principles of force application, trajectory prediction, and kinetic energy transfer into the cruder language of wood, steel, and spiritual corruption.

The bow's four-hundred-pound draw weight can be borne with my [55 Might], but ordinary wooden arrows tipped with iron are too brittle before concentrated Qi. His mind replayed the moment the first volley had struck—the way the iron-tipped shafts had cracked mid-flight as Yin-frost invaded the wood grain, splintering before they could punch through the beast's armored hide. A waste of positioning. A waste of the opening.

If I am to draw out this weapon's true use, I need better arrows—carbon-steel shafts, or at least dense Tier-2 beast-bone arrows. Otherwise, once Yin-frost invades them, they crack before they can pierce through. He filed the thought away with the cold efficiency of a logistics officer tallying supply deficiencies after a botched op.

His gaze shifted to the shattered halves of the heavy steel infantry spear buried in the mud, the broken shaft still jutting from the stone socket where he'd braced it. Mud and freezing water filled the furrows where the ape's redirected impact had torn through the earth.

The anti-cavalry brace redirected its weight well enough, but a forty-five-degree angle was still too shallow against a target of that size dropping from above. He could still feel the shock of the impact reverberating up his arms, the way the spear's wooden shaft had groaned and splintered under three tons of corrupted muscle and bone crashing down at terminal velocity. The angle had saved his life—barely—but it had been a near thing.

Next time, the shaft's butt must be driven into a deeper stone fissure—or else replaced outright with a solid iron pillar. Had the spear not broken, the force of the impact might have skewered the beast through and through, sparing me the effort of drawing the saber. Another note added to the mental after-action report. Another inefficiency identified. Another variable to control.

Having finished this brief reckoning of fault and gain, his attention returned to the system currency. The glowing numerals hovered in his vision, impassive and immutable as tombstones. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

He now possessed more than forty-one thousand Dao Embers. It was quite a huge sum, but...

To cross the final threshold into Tier-3—pushing his base attributes from fifty-five to the absolute minimum of seventy-one—would cost over three hundred thousand Embers. The gap yawned before him like a chasm. Even with this kill, even with the Embers earned from every rogue cultivator, bandit, and corrupted beast he'd put down since arriving in this world, he was still barely a seventh of the way there.

This payout is a fraction of the requirement, he concluded instantly. Not only that, it cannot be squandered on small gains. Better to preserve it all. If my arm is severed, or my lungs are pierced in the Shattered Realm, I must keep at least two thousand Embers in reserve for instant [Emergency Vessel Triage].

The system's healing protocols were brutally expensive—hemorrhage suppression cost 800 Embers per activation, severed limb reattachment started at 1, 500, and catastrophic organ failure could drain upwards of 3, 000 in a single second if the damage was severe enough. He'd come close to that threshold once already, three weeks ago, when a Furnace-Core bandit's saber had opened his side from ribs to hip.

The memory of watching his Ember count plummet while his intestines knit themselves back together—conscious, clear-headed, and fully aware of every grotesque biological detail—was not one he cared to repeat.

The soft, wet sound of boots sinking into mud disturbed his thoughts. The squelch was distinct even through the valley's oppressive silence—leather soles pressing through cold slurry, displacing water and half-frozen silt.

Ye Bing walked over, her broadsword still held warily at her side. Her gaze shifted from the Iron-Spined Ape's dissolving, acid-seared throat—where blackened tissue still hissed and bubbled from the Grave-Rot toxin eating through cartilage and esophageal lining—to the towering armored figure before her. The stench of the corpse was worsening by the second: sulfur and copper and the sickly-sweet reek of rotting meat, all mingling with the acrid chemical burn of alchemical poison.

She forced herself not to gag, breathing shallowly through her mouth, though the taste of it still coated her tongue.

"I have once traveled with Body Cultivators of the Iron-Blood Prefecture," Ye Bing said. Her voice was steady, yet a strange reverence lingered beneath it—quiet, almost reluctant, as though the words themselves were an admission she had not intended to make.

"They can shatter boulders with their fists and split the earth with their blood and qi. But never have I seen one fight in such a manner..." She paused, as if searching for words that did not exist in the martial world, her brow furrowing beneath the rain-slicked strands of dark hair plastered to her forehead. Her scarred cheek twitched—an involuntary tic, quickly suppressed.

"That was no martial art. It was butchery. A clean execution."

Shi Yan's pupils shrank and narrowed, but it was normal—or as he had been expecting, given the plans to travel together and the alliance they had formed. She was observant. Sharp. He'd known that from the beginning. The fact that she was drawing conclusions now, after watching him kill, was inevitable. He filed her reaction away: wariness, yes, but not hostility. Useful.

Thus, the voice emerged from behind the Yaksha mask, hoarse and metallic, distorted by the hollow iron chamber that enclosed his mouth and nose.

"When a foe is dead, it makes no difference whether the method was elegant."

He nudged the beast's severed arm with his foot—the plated, clawed limb twitched once, a final nerve-spasm reflex, then went still—confirming no final twitch of life remained. The black blood pooling beneath it had already begun to congeal, thickening into tar-like sludge as the corruption within it reacted to the valley's cold air.

"Were we exposed?" he asked, his tone flat and businesslike, already moving past the kill and into the next tactical concern.

"Its dying roar was loud enough. Will they come to investigate?"

Ye Bing shook her head, her sharp eyes sweeping the dim canopy above. The pine branches were barely visible through the gray fog, their frost-coated needles glinting dully in the diffuse, overcast light. Somewhere in the distance—perhaps a li away, perhaps closer—a crow cawed once, harsh and grating, before falling silent. The valley offered no other sounds. No footsteps. No voices. No rustle of robes or clatter of weapons approaching through the underbrush.

"Most likely not. A former orthodox sect like Cloud-Mirror cannot easily subdue a pure Yin-beast without a grand beast-taming array or powerful talisman. Their legacy lies mainly in the sword dao." She exhaled slowly, her breath misting in the frigid air. Her fingers, still wrapped around her broadsword's hilt, flexed once—working warmth back into the joints—before tightening again.

"This creature was wild. To them, this fog valley is little different from a natural barrier. Even if they heard its cries, they would sooner assume it was tearing apart some wandering rogue cultivators, or fighting another beast for territory. In that sense, the matter favors us. But we cannot linger. The scent of blood will soon draw other things." Her gaze dropped to the bisected corpse, to the black ichor still oozing sluggishly from the severed torso, and her expression tightened. Predators. Scavengers.

Or worse—other Yin-corrupted beasts drawn by the spiritual resonance of a kill this large.

"Then why has the Sect not eradicated it?" Shi Yan asked. Though his tone remained plain, he had already seized upon the inconsistency, the tactical anomaly that didn't fit the operational profile of a functioning military or paramilitary force.

"We are not far from their outer gates. A Furnace-Core equal beast of this size should have long been marked as a hidden danger. Any ordinary force would have swept this valley clean."

Ye Bing's scarred face tightened as she stared at the ape's jagged purple spinal plates, still faintly gleaming with eerie light even in death. The violet runes carved into the bone had dimmed but not extinguished—residual Yin-Qi clinging stubbornly to the corpse like frost on a windowpane. Her fingers brushed the pommel of her broadsword, a nervous gesture—grounding, tactile, the worn leather familiar beneath her palm.

"They should have," she said softly, her voice dropping to little more than a murmur, as though speaking the words aloud might summon unwanted attention from the fog itself.

"Cloud-Mirror has always proclaimed its mountain gate a pure land, unsullied and immaculate. They are obsessed with order and purity. To allow a Yin-corrupted fiend like this to remain so near their borders runs contrary to everything they claim to uphold."

Her gaze drifted toward the deeper fog, toward the direction where—somewhere beyond the gray veil and the pine-shrouded ridges—the Sect's mountain stronghold loomed like a fortress carved from cloud and stone.

"If they heard its roar, they would likely assume it was devouring some rogue cultivator or contesting another beast. That is not strange." Her brows drew tighter, the furrow between them deepening as her thoughts turned inward. The scar tissue along her jaw pulled taut, pale against the flush of cold in her cheeks.

"But for it to have lived here this long... that should not be."

As she spoke, Ye Bing knelt in the mud, the wet slurry soaking into the knees of her robes with a cold, creeping dampness that sent a shiver up her spine. She reached out and examined the layer of unnatural purple frost crusted over the ape's bone plating, her fingertips brushing the jagged edge of a spinal plate where the frost had crystallized into intricate, fractal patterns—beautiful in a terrible, alien way.

The frost bit at her skin, sharp and stinging, and she pulled her hand back quickly, rubbing warmth into her fingertips.

Before the Sect's curse had ravaged her master's mind—before the madness had taken root and hollowed him out from within—he had taught her the deeper principles of beast lore. Iron-Spined Apes were Earth-attributed spirit beasts by nature, dwelling in mountain caves and rocky highlands, their strength drawn from the bones of the earth itself. They did not naturally develop Yin-frost armor. They did not corrupt. They did not mutate.

For a wild beast to undergo such a violent demonic mutation, it would need to dwell for a long time in an environment saturated with terrifying Yin-miasma. Years, perhaps. Decades, if the exposure was gradual. The kind of environment that should not exist anywhere near a Sect of Cloud-Mirror's supposed strength and vigilance.

Unless the Sect has not purged it because they cannot.

The thought struck her like a hammer blow, and a chill ran down her spine—deeper than the valley's cold, sharper than the freezing rain. Her pulse quickened despite herself, a flicker of primal unease she could not entirely suppress.

Yet her expression did not change. Her breathing remained steady. Her hands did not tremble. Outwardly, she was carved ice—a Foundation cultivator kneeling in the mud, calmly examining a corpse.

The seal upon the Shattered Realm in the back mountain is no longer merely weakening... it has already begun to crack. Yin-miasma is seeping through the earth veins and spreading into the outer regions around it. The Sect's foundations are being corroded from below, and all their strength is already being spent to suppress the calamity at its source. No wonder they are so desperate to enter the Secret Realm.

The pieces fell into place with awful clarity—like watching a structure collapse in slow motion, each support beam failing one after another. They need resources. Treasures. Heaven-grade materials to reinforce the seal. And they need them now, before the crack widens into a chasm and the Shattered Realm vomits its horrors into the world.

Swallowing that grim realization—forcing it down into the quiet, disciplined part of her mind where she stored all the truths too dangerous to speak aloud—Ye Bing rose to her feet. Mud clung to her knees and shins, dark and cold and heavy. She met the unreadable iron gaze behind Shi Yan's mask, the hollow eye sockets offering nothing but shadow and the faint glint of reflected fog.

"They will not come," she said at last, voicing only the practical truth, the tactical assessment that would keep them both alive and moving forward.

"Their attention is fixed on the upper passes. They have no leisure to care about a beast roaring in the mire."