Chương 3: The Toxic Gold Mine

It was a hollow, terrifying sensation—like standing naked in a blizzard while his own life bled out through invisible wounds, the warmth draining from his core with every shallow, stuttering breath.

The cold wasn't metaphorical. It seeped through the torn silk plastered to his ribs like a second skin, each shallow inhale pulling the soaked fabric tighter against the raw, exposed flesh beneath. The wet cloth clung to the ragged edges of his chest wound, the fibers embedding themselves into the half-formed scabs. The chill burrowed into the spaces between exposed muscle and shredded skin, radiating outward from his core in slow, sapping waves that felt like ice water spreading through his veins.

His fingertips had gone numb first—pale and waxy, the color draining until they looked more corpse than living flesh—then his hands. Now the cold was climbing his forearms, a creeping numbness that swallowed sensation inch by inch, leaving only a dull, distant ache in its wake.

He didn't need a system prompt to tell him he was dying. His vessel was a cracked jar, and the water was pouring out.

He lay there on the mountain of corpses, legs splayed at angles his brain refused to acknowledge—knees twisted awkwardly, one ankle folded beneath the other in a way that should have hurt but didn't, because there was nothing. No sensation below the waist. Nothing. The thick, acrid stench of sulfur and rat blood had soaked into what remained of his clothes until the smell was inside his nose, coating the back of his throat with a greasy film that made every swallow an exercise in suppressing the urge to gag.

The fabric clung to him—sticky and warm where the Corpse-Scavenger's arterial spray had painted his chest in dark, glistening streaks, cold and stiff everywhere else where the blood had begun to dry and crack. The rot beneath him gave a wet squelch as his weight settled deeper into the compressed layers of ancient flesh and brittle bone, the yielding mass of decay conforming to the shape of his back like some obscene mattress.

Something cracked under his shoulder blade—a dry, brittle snap that sent a faint vibration through his spine.

If another hound-sized rat comes, I will die. My spine is compromised. That means no mobility. No evasion. No second chances.

Yet the eyes staring up into the eternal darkness were neither dead nor defeated. They glinted with something harder, colder—a predatory focus that cut through the pain like a blade through silk.

His pupils constricted. Focused. The muscles around his eyes tightened as he summoned the transparent screen with nothing more than a thought.

The holographic UI flickered into existence inches from his face, bathing his bloodless skin in cold blue light that cast harsh shadows across the hollows of his cheeks and the sharp ridge of his brow. The glow caught the sweat trickling down his temple in thin, glistening trails, highlighting the faint tremor in his jaw as he ground his teeth against the fire shooting up from his lower back—a deep, grinding agony that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.

His breath misted faintly in the air, each exhale a small cloud of vapor that dissipated almost immediately in the oppressive stillness.

[Host Entity:] Foreign Soul Merged [Heavenly Alignment:] NULL (Daoless) [Vessel Status:] STABLE but LEAKING (Energy dissipation active) [Dao Embers:] 0 [ATTRIBUTES] Physique: 6 [ANALYSIS: Triage initiated. Hemorrhage contained. Spinal trauma persists.] Might: 5 [WARNING: Left arm snapped.] Agility: 5 [WARNING: Lower motor functions paralyzed.] Spirit: 5 Anomaly: 5 [Daoless trait awakened.] [TECHNIQUES] None.

[SYSTEM DIRECTIVE] Vessel physiology cannot retain energy.

Ambient Qi absorption disabled. To survive the drain, harvest [Dao Embers] from the fallen.

Just like before, he needed a way to survive. Just like every mission where the odds were stacked against him, where the equipment was insufficient and the intel incomplete—he would adapt, improvise, and overcome.

Heh! Do you think I will die after that struggle?! After clawing my way out of the first impossible situation, only to lie down and accept the second?

His eyes locked onto the directive, the blue text reflecting in his dilated pupils. Harvest from the fallen. His brow furrowed, the skin between his eyebrows creasing into deep vertical lines, the muscle at his temple jumping once, twice—a faint, involuntary spasm he couldn't suppress, a telltale sign of the gears turning behind his eyes. He looked down—slowly, deliberately, his neck muscles straining with the effort—at the expanse of rotting bodies beneath him.

The ribcage he was wedged against creaked under his shifting weight, the ancient bone groaning like old wood under pressure. A faint puff of bone dust rose into the air, swirling in the blue glow of the screen, and he tasted it immediately: sharp, metallic, sweet in the wrong way—a sickly sweetness that coated his tongue and made his stomach clench. Copper mixed with something older, something that had been decaying for centuries. Ancient decay, ground into powder fine enough to float.

These were cultivators. Warriors who had walked paths of power, who had gathered Qi from heaven and earth, who had forged their bodies into weapons and their souls into something more than mortal. And now they were nothing but fuel.

In every novel he had ever read, a cultivator's power was stored in their abdominal core—the Dantian. The spiritual furnace where Qi was refined, compressed, crystallized into something approaching permanence. If the System translates their cultivation into Embers… then the Dantian is the battery. The reservoir. The last ember of what they once were.

He shifted his gaze to a leathery corpse wedged beneath his right shoulder, so close he could see every detail in the harsh blue light. The mummy's skin had dried into a taut, cracked surface the color of old parchment, stretched so thin over the bones he could see where the skull pressed against the forehead, creating a landscape of ridges and hollows. Deep fissures ran across the face like a dried riverbed, the skin splitting along the stress lines where moisture had abandoned it long ago.

Its jaw hung slack, exposing a row of yellowed teeth worn smooth at the edges from years of grinding, perhaps from cultivation techniques that required clenching the jaw to circulate Qi. The ribcage had collapsed inward, the sternum sunken into the chest cavity, but the abdomen—though sunken and concave—was still intact, the skin drawn tight over what remained within.

A glint sharpened in his eyes, cold calculation settling over his features like a mask.

He grasped the broken steel blade with his one functional hand, his fingers wrapping around the leather-wrapped hilt still sticky with rat blood. Instead of hacking wildly like some desperate scavenger, he used the jagged tip like a crude bayonet, angling it downward into the mummy's withered abdomen with the practiced precision of someone who had field-dressed more than one corpse in his previous life.

The blade punched through the leathery skin with a brittle crunch—like snapping dried parchment stretched over a drum. The resistance was minimal, the desiccated tissue offering no more defense than paper. He twisted the hilt with a sharp, economical rotation of his wrist. The ancient ribs resisted for a moment, the calcified bone holding firm, then gave way with a hollow crack that sent another faint cloud of dust into the air, the particles catching the blue light like ash from a funeral pyre.

He dug his fingers into the dry cavity, his hand disappearing up to the wrist.

The interior was cold. Papery. Surprisingly firm—more like dried clay than flesh, the organs reduced to hardened lumps that crumbled at the edges when his fingers scraped past them. His fingertips scraped along something smooth, something hard, buried deep in the desiccated core just below where the stomach would have been.

He hooked his index finger around it and pulled, bracing his thumb against the inside of the ribcage for leverage.

A shriveled, crystallized lump of tissue came free with a faint sucking sound, trailing wisps of powdered organ matter. It was the size of a walnut, dull gray, and riddled with hairline fractures like cracked pottery that had been fired incorrectly. The surface was rough, almost granular, and cold to the touch—far colder than the surrounding tissue. He closed his fist around it and squeezed, applying steady pressure.

It crumbled into dust with a faint, brittle hiss, the fragments sifting between his fingers like sand.

Immediately, the familiar blue screen flashed before his widening eyes, the notification appearing with a soft chime that seemed absurdly cheerful given the circumstances: [Residual Dao Ember extracted. +1 Ember.] A cold, humorless smile tugged at the corner of his cracked lips, pulling at the dried blood caked at the edges. The blood flaked off as his mouth moved, tiny dark fragments drifting down to join the dust below like macabre snow.

It's working. The System recognizes this. These corpses—these forgotten cultivators rotting in the dark—they're resources. They're ammunition.

With that discovery, he embraced the grind.

For the next several hours, he dragged his dead lower half across the bone pile using pure, agonizing upper-body strength, every muscle in his right arm screaming in protest.

His right arm screamed with every pull—muscles tearing, microscopic fibers ripping apart under the strain, tendons stretched to their limit until they felt like they might snap like overstressed cables. The torn silk bunched and twisted around his torso as he hauled himself forward, inch by painstaking inch, over ridges of collapsed spines and valleys of interlocked femurs that formed a grotesque landscape of human remains.

The bones shifted beneath him with every movement, creating small avalanches of skeletal fragments that clattered down the sides of the mound.

His palm slipped more than once on patches of slick, ancient grease that had pooled in the low spots—liquefied fat and marrow that had seeped from the bodies over decades, congealing into a dark, rancid gel. Each time, the sudden loss of traction sent him face-first into the cold stone beneath the rot, his cheek slamming against the unyielding surface hard enough to leave him tasting copper and seeing stars. The impact rattled his teeth, sent fresh pain lancing through his broken ribs.

He didn't stop. Couldn't stop. Stopping meant dying.

He targeted the oldest, safest corpses—those so desiccated they no longer reeked of active decay, their flesh reduced to brittle leather and hardened cartilage that wouldn't contaminate him with whatever spiritual diseases had killed them. He avoided the fresher bodies, the ones still bloated with gases, the ones whose skin had taken on the waxy, translucent quality of soap. Those were dangerous. Those could carry lingering curses, spiritual toxins, things that would kill him faster than the energy drain.

He methodically broke open their abdomens, sinking the jagged blade into each withered torso with a practiced thrust, prying apart ribs with a wet crack that echoed softly in the oppressive silence, and crushing their dried cores between his trembling fingers with a satisfying crunch.

[Residual Dao Ember extracted. +1 Ember.] [Residual Dao Ember extracted. +1 Ember.] [Residual Dao… The notifications became a rhythm, a metronome marking his progress through this grim harvest. He ripped through the dead with no respect for the sacred fallen, no reverence for whatever lives they had lived or powers they had possessed. To him, this mass grave wasn't a tragedy—it was an abandoned gold mine, and he was the only prospector with a claim. These bodies were tools, resources to be exploited with ruthless efficiency. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. But it was a terrible mine, its veins nearly depleted. Decay had destroyed most of the energy, the passage of time grinding down what had once been mighty reserves into scattered grains of spiritual power. Sometimes, he painstakingly cracked open sixty ribcages—his good arm burning with lactic acid buildup, the muscle trembling so hard he could barely maintain his grip, his breath coming in ragged gasps that fogged the air in front of his face—only to find a single preserved core intact enough to yield an Ember. The rest were dust, or worse: hollow cavities where the Dantian had rotted away entirely, leaving nothing but a faint rust-colored stain on the dried organs and the ghost of power that had once dwelled there. Empty husks that mocked his efforts, corpses that offered nothing but wasted labor and mounting exhaustion. He simply exhaled a heavy, measured sigh through his nose, the sound carrying a weight of acceptance rather than frustration. His expression remained neutral, pragmatic. Calorie is a calorie. Fuel is fuel. I should be grateful the System still recognizes this ancient trash as [Dao Embers] at all, that it hasn't degraded below the threshold of usefulness. Beggars can't be choosers, and right now I'm worse than a beggar—I'm a dying man scavenging scraps. Panting, his right arm burning with lactic acid that made the muscle feel like it was filled with molten lead, the trembling so severe he could barely grip the blade without it slipping from his sweat-slicked palm, he hit his target: fifteen Embers. The number glowed softly in his peripheral vision, a small fortune earned through hours of grueling labor. He didn't hesitate. Hesitation was for people who had the luxury of second-guessing their choices. He opened the UI with a thought and dumped every single point directly into his lifeline, into the only Attribute that stood between him and bleeding out in this pit of corpses. [Consume 15 Dao Embers to increase Physique Attribute by +3?] Yes. [ATTRIBUTES] Physique: 6 → 9 [ANALYSIS: Triage advanced. Bone density increased. Central nervous system reconnecting.] A blinding, agonizing pop echoed through his body—not a sound, but a sensation, a wrongness that reverberated through every nerve. He violently arched backward, his spine bowing like a drawn bow, eyes wide in shock as the System forcibly realigned his shattered spine without anesthetic, without mercy. It wasn't a warm, magical glow of cultivation stories, no gentle suffusion of healing energy. It felt like white-hot wire being threaded directly through his vertebrae, each disc snapping into place with a wet, grinding click that he felt more than heard—a visceral sensation of bone grinding against bone, cartilage popping back into alignment, nerve bundles reconnecting with surgical precision. Hundreds of dead nerves suddenly fired at once, awakening from their forced silence, sending a sickening wave of pins-and-needles cascading down his thighs in a torrent of sensation that was almost worse than no feeling at all. The sensation was overwhelming—sharp, electric, impossibly wrong, like his legs had been asleep for years and were now waking up all at once in a compressed burst of agony. Every nerve ending screamed its protest, flooding his brain with signals it hadn't expected to receive. He gritted his teeth, refusing to scream, refusing to give this place the satisfaction of hearing his pain. His jaw locked so tight the tendons in his neck stood out like steel cables under tension, the muscles bunching and straining until they formed visible ridges along the sides of his throat. A thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth where he'd bitten through his lower lip, the copper taste mixing with the bone dust still coating his tongue. The blood ran down his chin in a slow, warm trail. As the pain faded to a dull, throbbing ache—still present, still grinding away at the base of his skull, but manageable, survivable—he noticed something else. The hollow, agonizing ache of starvation in his stomach was completely gone, replaced by a dense, warm fullness that radiated from his core outward. It wasn't the comfortable satiation of a good meal, but something more fundamental—the sensation of a body that had been on the edge of systemic collapse now pulled back from the brink, energy reserves replenished at a cellular level. I see… so [Dao Embers] aren't just magical numbers on a screen. They're pure, condensed life force. Raw calories in their most distilled form—matter and energy compressed into spiritual fuel that bypasses digestion entirely. Then, as long as he harvested the dead, he would never starve. The implications settled over him with cold clarity. As the pain ebbed to a dull throb that pulsed in time with his heartbeat, his lips twitched, the corner of his mouth quirking upward in something that might have been satisfaction. He commanded his foot to move, sending the mental signal down newly reconnected pathways. His toe wiggled. The movement was small, clumsy, the motor control rough and uncoordinated like a stroke patient relearning basic functions—but it was there. Sensation flooded back in, the feeling of cold air against his skin, the pressure of his boot against his foot. He exhaled sharply through his nose, the sound carrying a note of grim triumph. Using a half-buried stone pagoda for leverage—its surface cold and gritty beneath his palm, covered in a thin layer of bone dust and something slick that might have been ancient moss or just centuries of accumulated filth that smeared under his touch—he painfully pulled himself upright. The pagoda's carved surface pressed into his palm, the intricate reliefs of spiritual beasts and flowing clouds worn nearly smooth by time. His legs trembled violently beneath him, the muscles twitching and spasming as they struggled to remember how to bear weight, the quad muscles firing in uncoordinated bursts that made his knees buckle and lock randomly. But they held. After a moment of wavering, of his body swaying dangerously as it relearned the concept of balance, they held. He had earned his mobility. Finally. Through pain and effort and the systematic desecration of the dead, he had bought back the ability to stand. He took one heavy step forward, his boot coming down on the pile of bones with a crunch, intent on finding a secure place to camp, somewhere he could defend with limited mobility while he continued to harvest and grow stronger. But before his foot even landed fully, before his weight had fully transferred, his lungs seized. A sudden, terrifying wave of exhaustion washed over him like a physical blow. It wasn't gradual—it hit like a punch to the chest, like running full-speed into a wall he hadn't seen. His heart hammered as if he had just sprinted a mile at full combat load, the rapid thud-thud-thud echoing in his ears so loud it drowned out everything else, each beat a painful slam against his ribcage. His vision swam, the edges going dark and sparkling with points of light. The cold air suddenly felt thinner, harder to pull into his chest, each breath a struggle that left him gasping. The blue screen flashed before his eyes, confirming what his body was already screaming: [Extensive movement detected. Sieve drain increased by 40%.] His brow furrowed deeply, the skin between his eyebrows creasing into harsh vertical lines. The muscle at his temple twitched again, sharper this time, more pronounced. The corner of his mouth pulled down in displeasure, his lips pressing into a thin, bloodless line. Of course. Thermodynamics. Conservation of energy. Moving the vessel burns the fuel. The Daoless physiology can't retain energy passively, which means every action, every movement, every heartbeat is drawing from a finite reserve that's constantly leaking away. I'm not just burning calories—I'm hemorrhaging them. He couldn't hike to safety, couldn't march to a better location or search for an exit from this abyss. Walking more than a few hundred yards would drain him dry like a battery run to zero, and trigger a lethal heart-demon backlash when the vessel finally gave out. He was trapped in a radius measured in feet, not miles. He couldn't rely on 1-point scraps anymore, couldn't sustain himself on the degraded remnants of ancient corpses that had been rotting for centuries. The math didn't work. The return on investment was too low, the energy cost of harvesting them nearly equal to what they provided. He needed a dense, high-yield target, something with a cultivation base intact enough to provide a substantial reserve. And he needed it now, before the drain whittled him down to nothing. Leaning heavily against the pagoda, his palm pressed flat against the cold stone to steady himself, his fingers splayed wide for maximum contact as his legs continued to tremble beneath him, his eyes scanned the dark expanse of the abyss from his new, elevated vantage point. His pupils constricted, adjusting to the oppressive gloom, dilating and contracting as they struggled to pull detail from the near-absolute darkness. The sulfur-copper-sweet stench was thicker here, the elevated position putting him directly in the path of rising vapors. It mixed with the faint metallic tang of old steel—oxidized iron that had been corroding for years—and the acrid bite of something chemical, something that didn't belong in a natural environment—sharp enough to make his eyes water, tears forming at the corners and streaking through the dust on his face. Through the suffocating fog that hung in the air like a physical presence, about fifty yards away, he spotted a faint, sickly-green bioluminescence pulsating in the dark with the slow, steady rhythm of a dying heartbeat. It was a cluster of corpses—five, maybe six bodies piled together—but their armor wasn't ancient bamboo lamellar or leather hardened with spiritual techniques. It was the heavy, steel lamellar of the Iron-Blood Prefecture, the distinctive overlapping plates that marked them as military cultivators, professionals trained in organized warfare rather than solitary ascension. The plates were stacked in overlapping rows, still intact despite the carnage that had killed them, their edges catching the faint green glow like the scales of some monstrous serpent. The craftsmanship was visible even from here—each plate precisely shaped, the holes for the binding cords evenly spaced, the steel still holding its dark blue temper despite whatever had brought these warriors low. They were freshly slaughtered—their bodies coated in a highly toxic, glowing fungus that pulsed with unnatural light, its luminescence throbbing in slow waves that suggested something alive, something actively feeding. The risk of touching them was monumental, potentially fatal. The lethal miasma radiating from the fungus could melt his skin on contact, dissolve flesh down to bone in seconds. Even from here, fifty yards distant, he could see the way the fungus had eaten through the steel lamellar in places, the organic growth somehow corroding metal that should have been spiritually reinforced. Jagged, corroded holes gaped in the armor where the metal had simply dissolved, the edges eaten away as if by acid. Those edges were ringed with a dark, oily residue that glistened faintly in the green light, reflecting it back with an iridescent sheen like oil on water. If it could do that to forged steel—to military-grade armor that should have been treated with Qi-infusion techniques to resist spiritual corrosion—it would strip flesh from bone in seconds. His current Physique wouldn't protect him. The fungus would eat through skin, muscle, and organs before he could even reach their Dantians. But a fresh military Dantian wouldn't yield one Ember, not like these ancient husks. It would yield hundreds. Perhaps even a thousand or more, depending on what cultivation stage they had reached before death. A gold mine compressed into a space the size of a fist.