Chương 26: The Blood-Jade Offer (1/3)

He hadn't even looked up when the bone snapped.

The wet crack of splintering cartilage and the muffled wail that followed might as well have been wind rustling through dead leaves for all the reaction it drew from the figure hunched behind the counter. The elder's brush continued its methodical dance across parchment, each stroke precise and unhurried, the spiritually-infused bristles leaving characters that gleamed faintly gold before fading to mundane black ink.

Finally, after completing an entire line of appraisal notation with the meticulous care of a master calligrapher, the old man lifted his brush. The movement was deliberate, almost ceremonial. He raised his eyes—sharp as freshly honed daggers, ancient as weathered mountain stone, and utterly devoid of warmth. No trace of human compassion lived in those depths, only the cold assessment of a merchant who had witnessed ten thousand transactions and found most of them wanting.

"Young man," the elder said, his voice quiet as falling snow, yet it effortlessly sliced through the chaotic din of the pavilion—through the whimpering groans, the scattered whispers of horror, the nervous shuffle of feet on bloodstained floorboards. The sound carried with it an almost imperceptible weight, the faint pressure of decades spent circulating spiritual energy through well-worn meridian channels.

"If you wish to exchange martial pointers, take it to the dueling grounds outside."

The appraiser's thin, elegant fingers shifted, angling his brush with the casual authority of one accustomed to absolute obedience within these walls. He gestured toward a nearby display pedestal—black lacquered wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl formations depicting coiling dragons. Atop it rested a fragile, glowing porcelain artifact no larger than a child's fist. Pale blue light pulsed from within its translucent shell in rhythmic waves, like a heartbeat frozen in ceramic form.

Wisps of ancestral spiritual resonance emanated from its surface, the unmistakable signature of an object containing a fragment of a cultivator's departed soul.

"When you threw that brute's weight," the elder continued, each word measured and deliberate, "his heel missed knocking over the first generation of our Patriarch Soul-Vase by exactly three inches." His gaze didn't waver from Shi Yan's face, and the temperature around the counter seemed to drop by several degrees.

"If it had shattered, harvesting your organs wouldn't have covered a tenth of the compensation. Your meridians, your dantian, your bone marrow—all rendered into spirit-stones and refinement materials—would still leave you nine-tenths short of the debt."

Shi Yan met the elder's gaze without flinching. The amber lamplight caught the pale gleam of his eyes beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat, two flat mirrors that reflected nothing back. Under that worn woven brim, his expression remained entirely deadpan—no trace of fear, no flicker of remorse, not even the subtle tension most cultivators displayed when facing someone clearly their superior in both age and cultivation depth.

"My mistake, Senior. A minor miscalculation in trajectory," Shi Yan replied, cupping his hands together in the proper gesture of junior-to-senior respect. His gloved fingers pressed together with practiced precision, the formal salute executed with mechanical correctness despite the blood still cooling on the floorboards three paces behind him. The straw fibers of his cloak rustled faintly with the movement, and a single severed strand finally completed its slow descent to land soundlessly on the ironwood counter.

"Please forgive this junior's disruption."

The elder's nostrils flared slightly—perhaps the only sign of emotion he'd displayed since looking up. He huffed a faint sigh of boredom, a measured exhalation that carried with it the scent of medicinal tea and old parchment. His gaze swept over Shi Yan once more, the crystal Qi-loupe over his right eye spinning lazily as it analyzed and dismissed the pathetically weak Cinder-Blood aura radiating from the younger man's dantian.

Clearly unimpressed, the appraiser set his brush down with exaggerated care, aligning it perfectly parallel to the edge of his scroll.

"Forgiveness is irrelevant," he stated, his tone suggesting he was already tired of this conversation.

"Do you have business with the Pavilion, or did you come to my counter just to show off your joint-locks to the riffraff?"

In response, Shi Yan simply slid his hand beneath his heavy straw cloak.

The movement was smooth, economical—no wasted motion, no dramatic flourish. His gloved fingers disappeared into the layered folds of coarse straw and fabric beneath. The crowd behind him tensed; a few sharp intakes of breath hissed through clenched teeth as onlookers anticipated another violent outburst, perhaps the drawing of a hidden weapon or the activation of a concealed talisman.

He didn't pull out the entire Mutated Core. That would have been suicide. Displaying the complete core of an Abyssal Overseer—an object radiating Tier-3 demonic energy and suffused with the concentrated malice of a creature that had devoured hundreds of lesser demons—in a public hall full of desperate cultivators would be akin to tossing raw meat into a den of starving wolves.

Even righteous sect disciples would justify murder for such a prize, wrapping their greed in the silk cloth of "righteous demon suppression" and "protecting the mortal realm."

Instead, he pulled out a tiny, freshly chipped sliver of the Abyssal Overseer's core, no larger than a thumbnail.

The fragment was jagged where it had been pried free, its edges sharp enough to draw blood from unprotected fingers. Its surface was a swirling, hypnotic amalgamation of black and deep crimson, like coagulated blood mixed with powdered obsidian. Faint veins of darker-than-black energy pulsed beneath its glossy exterior, and even in the amber lamplight, it seemed to drink in the surrounding illumination rather than reflect it.

He placed the jagged black-crimson fragment onto the polished ironwood of the counter with a soft tink of crystallized matter meeting treated wood.

"May I trouble Senior to—" Shi Yan's words halted mid-sentence.

The old man looked down, and in that instant, his entire demeanor transformed.

The moment the fragment made contact with the counter's surface, it overwhelmed the ambient wards woven into the ironwood's grain. The protective formations—designed to contain even violent fluctuations from unstable Tier-2 artifacts—guttered like candle flames in a hurricane. The tiny sliver radiated an oppressive, suffocating heat that pressed against exposed skin like standing too close to a furnace mouth.

Mixed with that heat came a terrifying, heavy pressure—the spiritual weight of an Abyssal Overseer's accumulated killing intent, the compressed malice of a predator that had hunted, killed, and consumed its way through the demonic hierarchy.

Several cultivators in the crowd behind Shi Yan stumbled backward, their faces draining of color as the pressure wave washed over them. One younger disciple's knees buckled entirely, and he caught himself against a table, ceramic cups rattling dangerously.

A wisp of black demonic fire curled off the fragment's jagged edge, thin as an incense thread but radiating enough heat to distort the air around it. The flame danced for a heartbeat before it licked across the counter's surface, and where it touched, the supposedly indestructible ironwood—treated with decades of Daoist preservation techniques and inscribed with flame-resistance formations—instantly blackened.

A finger-width scorch mark seared into the grain with a faint hiss, thin tendrils of acrid smoke rising from the charred wood. The smell hit a moment later: burnt wood underlying something far worse, something that brought to mind funeral pyres and battlefield cremations.

The profound boredom on the elder's face vanished like morning frost under sunlight.

His expression shifted through a rapid succession of micro-expressions—surprise, then sharp assessment, then something that might have been hunger tightly leashed behind professional composure. The golden runes inscribed on his crystal Qi-loupe began spinning violently, blurring into continuous rings of light as the artifact desperately cycled through calculation arrays.

The device was attempting to quantify the density, purity, and origin of the fragment's spiritual resonance, but the numbers it returned clearly defied its measurement threshold. Tiny cracks of light fractured across the loupe's lens surface as the formation strained against its designed limits.

The old man's eyes snapped up from the fragment, locking onto Shi Yan with the intensity of a hawk spotting field mice.

This time, there was no annoyance coloring his gaze. No dismissive superiority or cultivated indifference. There was only the razor-sharp, predatory focus of a master merchant who had learned to recognize the scent of opportunity—and the scent currently filling his nostrils was that of a mass grave converted into spirit-stones, of demon cores harvested from a battlefield, of wealth measured not in taels of silver but in the foundational resources that sects would go to war over.

Shi Yan held the elder's gaze without blinking, his pale eyes flat and unreflective as polished marble.

"I need a private room," he added politely, his tone unchanged despite the palpable shift in atmosphere.

"Now."

…

The old man's bored demeanor vanished instantly, replaced by the coiled efficiency of a merchant calculating profit margins even as spiritual alarms screamed in his mind.

He did not waste breath on pleasantries or negotiation. He simply reached over with those thin, elegant fingers and tapped a smooth, hemispherical jade paperweight resting at the corner of his desk. The jade was cool green shot through with veins of white, and when his fingertip made contact, a single clear note rang out—a sound more felt than heard, vibrating through the floorboards and resonating in the bones of everyone present.

Within two seconds, the shadows behind the counter shifted with liquid smoothness.

Four guards stepped out from the veiled corridors that branched away from the Appraisal Counter's protected space, their movements synchronized with military precision. They were clad in heavy dark-iron lamellar armor, each plate overlapping the next in perfect geometric arrangement. The metal had been treated with some coating that drank in light rather than reflecting it, rendering them as moving silhouettes even in the amber lampglow.

Their faces were hidden behind expressionless bronze masks—smooth, featureless ovals with only narrow eye-slits and small breathing holes, transforming each guard into an identical, inhuman enforcer. The masks caught the spirit-lamp light and threw back cold, metallic glints.

A forceful seizure?

Shi Yan's eyes narrowed by a fraction, the first real change in his expression since entering the pavilion. His weight shifted almost imperceptibly, settling into the balls of his feet, his center of gravity dropping by inches. The posture was subtle but combat-ready—coiled springs waiting for the signal to release.

The Silk & Ash Chamber had built its reputation on discretion, on being a neutral ground where even blood-feuding sects could conduct business without fear of ambush. But with people watching behind them, their reputation was at stake—murdering a client in full view of witnesses would shatter decades of carefully cultivated trust. Yet this was no longer the normal xianxia world he'd read about in web novels, where rules and face held absolute power.

The demonic incursion had changed everything, twisted the fundamental nature of this realm. Desperation made monsters of men, and a Tier-3 demonic core fragment was the kind of treasure that made even honorable merchants reconsider their principles.

It was possible they'd simply drag him into a private room and cut his throat, harvest the rest of the core from his corpse, and claim he'd never arrived. Witnesses could be silenced. Memories could be altered with the right talismans.

But...

Right as that thought crystallized, a transparent screen flashed into existence before his eyes—visible only to him, overlaying his vision like a heads-up display. Blue light traced itself into structured information with mechanical efficiency: [Multiple Entities Recognized: Outer Sect Guards (x4)] [Cultivation Resonance: Tier-2 (Furnace-Core Realm – Early to Mid Stage)] [Threat to Current Vessel: LETHAL. Physical mitigation impossible at current stats. Direct confrontation highly discouraged.] [Estimated Yield: 1, 500 Dao Embers per target.] Wow... that much?

This time, Shi Yan's gaze genuinely narrowed, the pale gleam of his eyes sharpening as they tracked across each guard in turn, reassessing them not as threats but as resources. Although the threat classification was lethal—meaning his current physical attributes couldn't bridge the gap in raw power—the harvest potential was staggering. 1, 500 Dao Embers per target meant six thousand total if he could somehow isolate and eliminate them. That was forty times what those pathetic Cinder-Blood lackeys had been worth.

Enough to purchase significant attribute increases, perhaps even push toward Tier-2 himself if the system's conversion rates held steady.

The cold calculus of cost-benefit analysis ran through his mind in the space between heartbeats.

It was then that the elder spoke, his voice cutting through Shi Yan's internal deliberation with practiced authority.

"Escort our esteemed guest to the Fifth Heaven," he commanded, the shift in terminology deliberate and pointed. No longer "young man" or "junior"—now he was an "esteemed guest," elevated by the value of what he carried. The elder's thin fingers moved with reverent care as he slid the scorched sliver of the core into a lead-lined lockbox that had appeared from beneath the counter.

The box's interior was inscribed with suppression arrays that glowed a dull red as they strained to contain the fragment's radiating energy. The lid closed with a heavy thunk, and immediately the oppressive heat in the air lessened, the pressure on everyone's chests easing like a weight lifted.

The lead guard turned toward Shi Yan, his movements smooth despite the considerable weight of his armor. Each plate shifted with the faint whisper of metal on leather backing, and the suffocating, lethal heat radiating from his frame—the telltale signature of a Furnace-Core cultivator whose dantian burned like a miniature sun—created a shimmer in the air around him. Yet that overwhelming power was tightly leashed, controlled with the discipline of a trained enforcer.

The guard's posture shifted into a pristine, formal Daoist bow—right fist cupped in left palm, upper body inclining precisely thirty degrees forward, the exact angle prescribed for greeting an honored merchant or minor noble. The juxtaposition was stark: overwhelming destructive potential wrapped in rigid courtesy.

"Please follow us, Esteemed Guest. We will ensure your path is unimpeded," the guard said, his voice muffled behind the bronze mask, emerging as a hollow echo that stripped away individual identity. Yet the respect embedded in his tone was unmistakable, each word carefully enunciated despite the metallic distortion.

Shi Yan offered no resistance, no verbal acknowledgment beyond a minute dip of his head. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The four guards arranged themselves around him with practiced efficiency—not as captors, but as an honor guard. Two took positions flanking his sides, exactly three paces distant. One moved ahead to clear the path. The last fell into step behind him, close enough to respond to threats but far enough to avoid seeming like a jailer. The formation was textbook escort protocol for high-value clients: protective, prestigious, and subtly controlling.

Anyone watching would see a valued customer being afforded the full measure of the Pavilion's hospitality. Anyone thinking clearly would realize escape from the center of this formation would be nearly impossible.

They moved as a unit through the stunned crowd, which parted before them like water around a ship's prow. Cultivators pressed themselves back against walls and tables, some still clutching weapons they hadn't dared to draw, others simply staring with expressions caught between fear and desperate greed. The lead guard's hand rested casually on his sword hilt—not threatening, merely present—and that casual readiness was deterrent enough.

They were led toward a spiraling staircase that rose from the hall's far corner, previously concealed behind a decorative silk screen now drawn aside. The steps were carved from the same dark ironwood as the appraiser's counter, each one polished to a mirror sheen that reflected the amber lamplight in streaks of gold. Intricate patterns had been carved into the risers—protective formations interwoven with aesthetic flourishes, dragons and phoenixes locked in eternal combat spiraling upward alongside them.

Hmm, three chokepoints...

Shi Yan's eyes tracked every detail as they climbed, his expression remaining dead and disinterested even as his mind catalogued vulnerabilities with mechanical precision. The staircase curved tightly, limiting sightlines and forcing anyone ascending into a predictable path.

Two visible killing arrays embedded in the mahogany walls...

His gaze caught on the faint shimmer of formation-work hidden within the decorative wall panels—Daoist characters formed from near-invisible golden wire, currently dormant but ready to activate and fill the stairwell with flames, or blades of compressed wind, or perhaps a gravitational collapse that would crush anyone caught within into paste against the steps.

And no windows. A perfect fortress to trap me...

The architecture was deliberate. Every element designed to funnel, control, and if necessary, eliminate anyone deemed a threat. The guards, the arrays, the narrow space—all combined into a killing corridor disguised as opulent hospitality.

His eyes narrowed fractionally, but he continued climbing without hesitation, his mud-caked boots leaving faint prints on the pristine wood.

At the landing, the staircase opened onto a small antechamber. The walls here were darker mahogany instead of ironwood, and the air smelled faintly of sandalwood incense and old money. Directly ahead stood a heavy vault door—solid iron banded with bronze reinforcement strips, its surface inscribed with layer upon layer of defensive formations that glowed a sullen red, like embers viewed through smoke.

As they approached, the vault door unlatched automatically with a series of heavy clunks as internal mechanisms disengaged. No one had touched it. Some remote activation talisman or scrying formation had alerted those within to their approach and granted entry. The door swung inward on well-oiled hinges, revealing a corridor beyond lined with more spirit lamps, these burning with a cooler, whiter light.

The four guards halted symmetrically at the threshold, their armored boots coming together in a synchronized clack against the floorboards. The lead guard stepped aside, angling his body to clear the entrance while simultaneously extending one armored palm toward the open doorway. The gesture was graceful despite the bulk of his gauntlet, an invitation rendered with courtly precision.

"The Deaconess awaits you inside, sir," the guard said, dipping his bronze-masked head once more in that same formal bow.

"We will stand watch here to ensure your negotiations are held in absolute privacy."

The phrasing was perfect—absolute privacy could mean protection from external threats, or it could mean no witnesses to whatever occurred within. The ambiguity was likely intentional.

Shi Yan gave a minimal nod, barely more than a slight downward tilt of his bamboo hat, and stepped through the threshold.

The temperature changed immediately. The oppressive weight of defensive formations pressed against his skin like walking into a wall of humid air, then released as he fully crossed into the room beyond and the arrays recognized him as a permitted entrant rather than an intruder.

Behind him, the vault door remained open, the four guards taking up positions in the antechamber beyond—two flanking the entrance, two stationed further back. True to their word, they would ensure privacy. Whether that privacy served his interests or the Pavilion's remained to be seen.

…

The room was breathtakingly opulent, yet coldly practical beneath its veneer of luxury.

The floors were lined with snow-fox pelts—pure white fur so thick and soft it swallowed sound, each pelt worth more than a mortal family might earn in five years. They overlapped one another in a seamless carpet that stretched from wall to wall, and walking across them was like treading on clouds. The pelts still retained a faint chill, a ghostly memory of the frozen peaks where snow-foxes made their dens, and that coolness seeped up through the soles of his boots.

Heavy screens of spun silver silk partitioned off the corners of the room, each screen depicting scenes of primal savagery rendered in exquisite detail—ancient beasts devouring one another in a hierarchy of predation. A horned tiger tearing into the flank of a lesser spirit-deer. A scaled serpent coiled around a massive eagle, crushing the life from its prey. The silver thread caught the light and threw it back in shimmering waves, making the creatures seem to move when viewed from the corner of one's eye.

The primary seating arrangement dominated the room's center: a wide table carved entirely from a single piece of solid, translucent spirit-jade. The stone was a pale, luminous green shot through with veins of deeper emerald, and it emitted a soft, calming light from within—a gentle radiance that soothed frayed nerves and helped stabilize turbulent Qi flows in those seated near it.

The effect was subtle but measurable, designed to put merchants and clients at ease during negotiations, to dull the sharp edges of desperation and greed that might otherwise derail profitable deals.

Standing beside the jade table were two women.

The first was clearly a subordinate—some hybrid of personal attendant and bodyguard molded into one efficient package. She wore fitted dark martial robes of quality fabric, the cut designed for mobility rather than display. Her hair was pulled into a tight, practical braid that hung down her back like a coiled whip, not a single strand out of place.

Her posture was parade-ground straight, weight balanced evenly on both feet, and her right hand rested with deliberate casualness mere inches from the hilt of a slender straight sword sheathed at her waist. The sword's scabbard was plain lacquered wood without ornamentation, but the wrapping on the hilt showed the wear patterns of constant use—this was a weapon drawn often, maintained religiously, and wielded with lethal proficiency.

Her eyes tracked Shi Yan's entry with the cold assessment of a professional evaluating threat levels, her gaze lingering on his hands, his stance, the way his cloak hung—searching for concealed weapons, hidden talismans, any sign of hostile intent.

But it was the woman seated behind the desk who commanded the room's gravity, who drew the eye and held it with the inexorable pull of a whirlpool.

She must be the deaconess.

After briefly scanning the room's corners—marking potential ambush points, noting the lack of secondary exits, cataloguing the positions of what appeared to be dormant formation-anchors embedded in the walls—and assessing the bodyguard woman with the same clinical detachment he'd applied to the guards outside, Shi Yan's attention settled on the figure occupying the room's seat of power.

She was young—no older than twenty-four at most—yet she possessed the chilling, untouchable aura of a viper coiled on a throne. Age meant little in the cultivation world where techniques could preserve youth for centuries, but everything about her bearing suggested this was her true age, that she had climbed to this position through talent and ruthlessness rather than the slow accumulation of years.

She wore an exquisite crimson hanfu embroidered with silver ash leaves that seemed to flutter and drift across the fabric's surface with each subtle shift of her body. The silk was of the highest quality, its weave so fine it caught light like liquid blood, and the ash-leaf pattern—the symbol of the Silk & Ash Chamber—glimmered with metallic thread that had been infused with trace amounts of spiritual silver.

The garment draped elegantly over her shoulders and pooled around her seated form, the layers arranged with meticulous care to project both wealth and authority.

Her skin was the pale, flawless porcelain typical of high-tier body refinement—not a single blemish, not a hint of mortal imperfection marred its surface. It was the kind of complexion that spoke of expensive cultivation resources consumed since childhood, of meridian-cleansing elixirs and skin-nourishing treasures, of a life lived far above the common masses who bore scars and sun-damage and the accumulated wear of manual labor.

Her features were sharp and imperious: high cheekbones that could cut glass, a straight nose with aristocratic angles, lips painted a dark red that matched her robes, and eyes— Her eyes were cold and calculating, framed by long lashes and slightly upturned at the outer corners. Those eyes held the detached cruelty of someone who had ordered deaths as casually as others might order tea, who calculated profit and loss in human lives without a flicker of conscience.

Resting between her perfectly manicured fingers—each nail lacquered in that same dark red, filed to elegant points—was a long, slender pipe of spirit-ash bamboo. The pipe was a work of art in itself: carved with minute formations, its bowl crafted from hollow demon-bone and fitted with a jade mouthpiece. A thin trail of violet smoke curled lazily from the bowl, carrying with it the acrid-sweet scent of refined spirit-tobacco mixed with crushed moonflower petals.

The smoke rose in languid spirals before being caught by the room's ventilation formations and whisked away.

"Welcome to the Vermilion Pavilion's inner sanctum," the attendant spoke, her voice professional and neutral, carefully stripped of any emotion that might color the negotiation to come. She gestured with a slight movement of her left hand toward an immaculate woven cushion positioned on the near side of the jade table. The cushion was deep blue silk with gold embroidery, plush and inviting.

"Please, seat yourself. The Deaconess has been anticipating you."

Yet, he did not immediately sit.

His pale eyes fixed on the cushion for a long moment, and his posture—already tense—tightened fractionally. To an observer, he appeared to be examining the offered seat with the same cautious deliberation one might apply to inspecting a blade offered handle-first by an enemy.

A woven floor cushion.

His mind shifted into tactical assessment with mechanical efficiency, overlaying this xianxia environment with the threat-recognition patterns drilled into him through years of military training.

In a modern firefight, kneeling drops my hips below the knee line, adding a fatal half-second to my reaction time and ruining my lateral evasion angles.

The posture forced by a floor cushion—knees folded, weight settled back on the heels or tucked beneath the thighs—was murder on mobility. Standing or crouching, a soldier could explode into movement in any direction. Kneeling, that explosive potential was cut by more than half. The angle of the legs made lateral movement awkward, forward lunges clumsy, and rising to standing required precious tenths of seconds that could mean the difference between living and dying.

In a xianxia setting? It's infinitely worse.

Perhaps because he knew this was a xianxia world that had fallen into a demonic era, because he'd witnessed firsthand how the systems of honor and face that supposedly governed this realm had corroded into a thin veneer over desperate savagery, he couldn't help but become paranoid. Paranoia had kept him alive in his previous life. Paranoia would keep this stolen vessel intact long enough to grow strong.

That cushion could be the focal point of a Daoist suppression array.

The embroidery wasn't merely decorative—those gold threads could be formation-work disguised as ornamentation, designed to activate the moment a cultivator's Qi-signature made contact. The silk could be threaded with parasitic spirit-leeches too small to see, organisms that would burrow into his meridians through the acupoints in his legs and begin draining his cultivation base before he even realized he'd been attacked.

The floor beneath it could be rigged with a gravity-seal triggered by body weight, a formation that would multiply perceived gravity by ten or twenty times the moment he settled into position, pinning him helpless while they harvested his core at leisure.

His dead gaze flicked passively to the attendant, whose hand rested with such studied casualness near her waist. The position was too perfect, too ready. If she channels Qi into a flying-sword technique or an elemental sword art, I need my legs primed like coiled springs, not folded in submission.

A flying-sword—one of the signature techniques of higher-realm cultivators—could cross the distance between them in a fraction of a heartbeat. The blade would separate from its scabbard propelled by pure spiritual energy, guided by the wielder's will rather than hand. Dodging required explosive lateral movement and vertical displacement simultaneously. Kneeling, he'd be cut in half before he could rise.

Thus, he remained firmly planted exactly where he was—his back positioned inches from the heavy vault door, his weight distributed for maximum mobility, his hands hanging loose at his sides beneath the concealing drape of his straw cloak.

On the other hand, behind the desk, the woman he assumed to be the Deaconess took a slow drag from her pipe.

The movement was languid, almost sensual in its deliberateness. Her dark lips closed around the jade mouthpiece, her cheeks hollowing slightly as she drew the smoke deep into her lungs—holding it there for a long moment, letting the refined spiritual tobacco's calming properties seep into her meridians before exhaling in a thin stream that added to the violet haze.

Her striking, cold eyes never left him during the entire process, studying with the focused intensity of a master appraiser examining a potentially flawed gemstone. Those irises tracked across the muddy boots caked with dried filth, rose to take in the cheap straw cloak with its severed fiber still visible at the shoulder, lingered on the worn bamboo hat that shadowed his features, and finally—most tellingly—settled on the pathetically weak spiritual aura surrounding him.

Early Tier-1. Cinder-Blood Realm.