Chương 16: One Point Too Far (1/2)

[System Calculation:] [Physique: 35 → 37 (Cost: 50 Embers per point = 100)] [Confirm Allocation?] Execute.

[ATTRIBUTES UPDATED: Physique 37] [System Directive: Structural damage detected. Directed anatomical refinement initiated.] The healing wasn't gentle. It was never gentle.

It felt like molten iron being poured straight into the hollow of his bones—not trickling, but flooding with deliberate, surgical violence. The jagged, splintered halves of his ulna and radius moved—not by his will, but by something colder, more mechanical. Something that treated his body like clay to be reshaped rather than flesh to be mended.

Hyper-dense muscle fibers ballooned outward along his forearm, each strand thickening with the sound of wet rope pulled taut. The fibers contracted with the mechanical brutality of a winch cranking under impossible tension, dragging shattered bone fragments back into alignment with ruthless precision.

The broken ends scraped together—a grinding sensation that sent white-hot sparks shooting up his nerve endings. Then they locked. Calcification spread like frost crystallizing across winter glass, sealing hairline fractures in a fraction of a heartbeat. Mineral deposits flooded the gaps, fusing marrow and cortex into something denser, stronger, other.

Then came the pop.

Sharp. Resonant. Wet.

His vision flashed pure white. Every nerve in his arm screamed in unison as the bones clicked into perfect alignment with a sound like a gunshot muffled by meat. The taste of sulfur thickened on his tongue, now laced with the coppery tang of his own blood surging violently back into reconstructed tissue—capillaries reopening, veins re-routing, circulation restored with brutal efficiency.

Heat radiated outward from the injury site in nauseating waves, and faint wisps of steam curled off his grime-slick skin into the cavern's freezing air. The temperature differential was sharp enough to sting his nostrils when he inhaled.

By the time he pushed himself upright, the arm was whole—thicker than before, denser, the black-iron vambrace now biting into newly reinforced flesh like it had been forged directly around living muscle. The metal groaned faintly, rivets straining against the sudden increase in diameter.

He flexed his fingers experimentally. No tremor. No weakness. The joints moved smoothly, fluidly, as if the break had never existed.

A few yards away, the Abyssal Overseer was still struggling to stabilize. Its left knee had caved inward during the pivot, bone fragments jutting through charcoal-flushed skin like splintered wood breaking through scorched bark. Dark blood seeped from the ruptures, hissing faintly where it met the frozen bone-ash below.

The flaming Guan Dao scraped across bedrock as the creature used it like a crutch, the notched crescent blade shrieking across stone in a grinding metallic wail that echoed off the vaulted ceiling. Loose shards of calcified bone skittered away from the blade's path.

It roared—blind, guttural, confused—a sound more animal than sentient. Thick veins pulsed grotesquely beneath fused black-iron plates, bulging to the point of rupture as volatile Demonic Qi continued flooding its collapsing circulatory system. Its movements were jerky, uncoordinated, half its motor control already severed by neurotoxin.

Time for round two.

Shi Yan didn't wait for it to recover.

He activated his [35 Agility] and launched.

His frictionless boot soles detonated the compressed bone-ash beneath him, sending a gray cloud billowing outward in a perfect expanding ring. He cleared the distance in a low, phantom blur—body angled forward like a thrown knife, shoulders tucked, every motion economized for speed.

He vaulted upward mid-stride, left hand—the one that had just been shattered—seizing the heavy bronze crest of the Overseer's executioner mask to anchor his momentum mid-air. His fingers clamped down hard, knuckles whitening.

Stand still.

The corroded bronze seared his bare palm—blistering heat radiating from the Overseer's overloading core straight through the metal and into his skin. He could feel the flesh of his palm beginning to cook, blisters forming instantly across his lifeline. Yet his newly reinforced fingers clamped down like a mechanical vise, tendons locking with cold precision. Pain was irrelevant. Grip was all that mattered.

He refused to let go.

Suspended mid-air against the beast's massive chest, boots dangling a foot off the ground, he angled the chipped jian upward with his right hand. The emerald bioluminescence of Grave-Rot pulsed along the jagged edge like foxfire, casting a sickly green glow that left ghostly trails in the sulfur-thick air. The light reflected off the inside curve of the Overseer's bronze mask, illuminating the shadows beneath.

Stand still, stand still, stand still…

With a wordless exhale—sharp, controlled, expelled through clenched teeth—he drove the blade straight up beneath the monster's chin.

The steel slid effortlessly through the soft tissue of the throat, parting flesh like silk. Cartilage folded inward with barely any resistance. The tip punched through the palate with a wet, grisly crunch—bone fragmenting, membrane tearing—then sank deeper still. Past the roof of the mouth. Past the sinus cavity. Burying itself hilt-deep inside the Overseer's brain cavity with a final, sickening squelch.

Dark blood erupted from the wound, now streaked with sickly luminescent green veins where the Grave-Rot toxin had infiltrated every capillary. It spurted hot and viscous across Shi Yan's knuckles, splashing onto the frayed collar of his straw cloak in thick, steaming rivulets that reeked of sulfur and rot. The liquid was disturbingly warm, almost body-temperature, and far too thick—clinging to his skin like oil.

The nine-foot frame went rigid.

Massive muscles locked mid-spasm as the neurotoxin flooded directly into the central nervous system, violently severing every neural pathway at once. The creature's limbs seized, fingers curling into claws, back arching violently before freezing in place. The pitch-black demonic fire wreathing the dropped Guan Dao snuffed out instantly—extinguished like a candle in a vacuum—leaving only the acrid stench of burnt sulfur and charred meat clinging to the frigid air.

The burning lights behind the cracked bronze mask flickered once—twice—then died, leaving only empty black sockets.

Shi Yan ripped the blade free with a sharp twist of his waist, muscle memory guiding the motion. The steel scraped against bone on the way out, sending a shudder through the corpse's jaw. He dropped back to the cavern floor in a controlled crouch, knees bent to absorb impact. His boots met the ash silently, frictionless soles barely disturbing the surface.

The colossal Abyssal Overseer stood frozen for a single heartbeat, suspended entirely by ruined joints and the last stubborn firing of dying synapses.

Then its right knee buckled.

The joint folded inward with a wet crack, and the massive body collapsed backward like a felled tree. It crashed into the bone-ash with a final, earthquake-inducing thud that sent shockwaves rippling outward through the compressed powder. A massive plume of gray dust billowed upward in all directions, filling the air with choking particulate. Loose stalactites overhead shivered, raining fine stone dust down onto the scene below.

Even the sundered Daoist statue seemed to shudder, fresh hairline cracks spiderwebbing across its stone face. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Silence returned to the charnel abyss.

Only Shi Yan's steady, rhythmic breathing remained—cold, mechanical, unbothered. His chest rose and fell with the discipline of a metronome.

Sleep well.

[Target Slain. Tier-1 Boss Entity (Abyssal Overseer).] [+5, 000 Dao Embers.] In his vision, the golden numbers skyrocketed.

Five thousand points of pure, condensed evolutionary fuel flooded his system like a warm, restorative tide washing over a frozen shore. The lingering ghost-ache in his left arm dissolved instantly, replaced by a deep, thrumming vitality that pulsed outward from his core.

"Hehehe."

His arms spread wide, palms open toward the vaulted ceiling. His lips curved upward—not quite a smile, something sharper, more feral—as his shoulders dropped and the tension bled out of his frame. He exhaled—a long, steady breath that misted faintly in the freezing air, dissipating slowly into the darkness above.

Then he wiped a smear of black blood from his cheek with the back of his thumb, streaking it across his jaw. The joy faded as quickly as it had come. His eyes—previously bright, almost manic with combat adrenaline—shifted downward to study the mountain of mutated flesh at his feet with the cold assessment of a butcher evaluating a carcass.

The survival phase was over.

Now came the extraction phase.

A lesser survivor might have bolted for the Ascension Array, terrified of the dark, desperate to claw their way out of the abyss before something worse arrived.

Shi Yan simply knelt beside the dead Boss, movements calm and deliberate, each motion economical. He sheathed the chipped jian with a practiced flick of his wrist and reached into his heavy leather belt, drawing a rusted but thick skinning knife he'd stripped from the scavenger leader back in the pagoda. The blade was pitted with corrosion but still held an edge—good enough for fieldwork.

Five thousand Embers is a treasury, but…

He plunged the heavy blade into the Overseer's abdomen, leveraging his [37 Physique] to hack brutally through the gaps in the fused black-iron lamellar. Corroded metal plates shrieked as they parted, rivets popping free and bouncing across the stone with tinny plinks. Dark blood oozed sluggishly from the wound, pooling in the ash beneath the corpse in thick, congealing puddles that gave off faint wisps of steam.

But Embers aren't hard currency.

As a former soldier, he understood logistics. Supply lines. Barter economies. The difference between theoretical value and negotiable assets.

As a careful observer of this world's fragmented memories—inherited from the body's previous owner—he understood the rules of cultivation society even better.

The System allowed him to survive and evolve. But it wouldn't pay for a room at an inn. It wouldn't buy intelligence from shadow brokers lurking in teahouse backrooms. It wouldn't purchase a quality sword that didn't chip against bone or shatter against spiritual armor.

To survive the complex, ruthless society of Skycloud City waiting above—a place where power, reputation, and coin ruled in equal measure—he needed physical capital. Tangible wealth.

Reaching elbow-deep into the steaming, sulfurous chest cavity, Shi Yan's fingers hunted blindly through slick tissue and shattered bone, pushing past charred lung tissue and collapsed vessels. The heat was intense, almost scalding, but his reinforced nerves tolerated it. Finally, his fingertips closed around something heavy, something violently pulsing with residual heat like a dying ember.

He ripped it free with a wet squelch, tendons snapping, fluids spilling.

The Overseer's Mutated Core.

Roughly the size of a grapefruit, it resembled a polished sphere of dark obsidian—smooth, almost glassy—intricately veined with faint, dying crimson light that pulsed like a failing heartbeat beneath the surface. It was dense—far heavier than it looked, easily three or four pounds—and radiated a fierce, primal heat that quickly warmed his damp, blood-slick palms. The surface was slippery, coated in residual fluids, but he gripped it firmly.

A Tier-1 Peak Cultivator Core.

Shi Yan turned the gem over in his hands, examining it with a professional eye. No visible fractures. The pulsing light was faint but steady—good structural integrity despite the violent death. High-grade alchemy reagent material. Maybe even suitable for weapon forging if a skilled craftsman knew how to channel residual Demonic Qi.

He grabbed a clean scrap of dry silk from his belt pouch and securely wrapped the priceless alchemy reagent, layering the fabric multiple times and tucking the edges tightly. The wrapping muffled its crimson glow until only faint traces of light bled through the fabric, barely visible even in the dim cavern.

To an apothecary or a black-market broker in the city, this is a masterpiece. This is my bargaining chip.

He stood, knees popping faintly, and tucked the wrapped core deep into the inner pockets of his heavy straw cloak, strapping it securely against his lower back with a leather thong tied in a quick-release knot. Since he was Daoless—lacking Qi entirely—he couldn't use spatial pouches or storage rings that required spiritual energy to open. He had to rely on manual concealment, physical security.

He didn't look back at the corpse.

There were undoubtedly other valuable parts scattered across the massive frame—the giant claws tipped with blackened talons, the mineral-rich bone marrow in the femurs, the abyssal armor plates forged by demonic mutation and worth their weight in spirit stones to the right armorer. A greedy scavenger would have spent hours sawing them off, carving every scrap of profit from the carcass until nothing but bones remained.

But Shi Yan understood something more important.

Suspicion is worse than poverty.

Just think about it logically: a low-level, mortal corpse-handler—someone who should be hauling bodies and scrubbing bloodstains—could never kill an Abyssal Overseer. Not in a thousand lifetimes. Not without artifacts, talismans, or cultivation base.

If he approached the heavily guarded surface checkpoint dragging an eight-foot demonic halberd over his shoulder or hauling a conspicuous sack filled with high-tier boss fangs and claws, the Iron-Blood Sect guards would instantly realize he was an imposter. They would intercept the loot, arrest him on the spot for suspected theft or forbidden cultivation, and likely dissect him—literally—to figure out his secrets. Maybe even sell his organs to an alchemy hall.

The core was small, easily hidden against his spine beneath layers of cloth, and immensely valuable on the black market. It was all he needed to build his initial capital without painting a target on his back.

He turned his emotionless stare toward the colossal, floating black bedrock platform of the Ascension Array hovering a few dozen yards away, suspended in midair by ancient formation runes.

The golden Lift Runes etched into its surface pulsed faintly with rhythmic light, casting dim, shifting illumination across the bone-ash terrain like a slow heartbeat. The light reflected off the compressed powder, creating faint halos in the sulfur-thick air.

He paused, eyes tracing the massive vertical shaft that stretched upward into total darkness above the platform—an abyss in reverse, a throat leading back to the surface world thousands of feet overhead.

If I take it, won't the surface guards notice that the apex predator of this sector is dead? Won't they investigate?