Chương 30: The Mad Physician’s Truth (2/3)

Shi Yan frowned, his weathered features drawing taut as a glint of dark enlightenment kindled in his eyes—the cold, methodical focus of a man dissecting a trap piece by piece.

The red mist in the Abyss was just a chaotic break in reality—a wound in the fabric of existence itself, bleeding madness into the world. This green mist was something altogether different: a structured, localized array trap. An active harvesting perimeter. It detected Qi, leeched it dry, and rerouted the stolen essence elsewhere, purposeful and predatory.

So this array comes with a filter?

To further test the array's targeting parameters, Shi Yan leaned down, his knees sinking slightly into the cold, waterlogged silt. His gloved fingers closed around an ordinary pebble—smooth, slick with marsh water, and completely devoid of any Qi. The stone sat heavy and inert in his palm, just dead mineral matter shaped by centuries of erosion. He flicked it into the mist with a sharp snap of his wrist.

The pebble sailed through the churning green fog in a shallow arc, disturbing the vaporous curtain only briefly before gravity reclaimed it. It landed on the wooden boardwalk beyond with a soft clack—a sound almost absurdly mundane against the suffocating silence of the marsh. The spectral vines did not manifest. The phantom blood-lotuses did not bloom, their parasitic petals remaining dormant in whatever spectral void they inhabited.

Without Qi to latch onto as fuel, the intricate Daoist array treated the rock as if it didn't exist—less than nothing, a hollow absence unworthy of notice.

Shi Yan looked down at his own hand, fingers still curled slightly from the throw. He possessed no Dantian—no spiritual furnace to refine the world's ambient Qi into personal power. He had no spiritual root—no seed from which the great tree of cultivation could ever grow. To the Heavens, and to the aggressive-looking array logic of this Daoist formation, his physical vessel was no different from that dead, lifeless pebble. Just meat and bone, blood and sinew, utterly divorced from the Dao.

So I should be perfectly fine just walking through it?

But despite that logical conclusion, he hesitated. His jaw tightened fractionally, a muscle jumping beneath scarred skin. For some reason—instinct honed by too many near-death experiences, perhaps—he could not blindly trust assumptions without verifying the data. Theory was clean. Reality was messy, and messy got you killed.

In the Charnel Abyss, his Daoless vessel had shielded him from reality-warping anomalies—phenomena that bent space and twisted minds, that peeled sanity away like wet parchment. Yet this green mist was not a natural anomaly; it was a highly structured, man-made killing formation, designed with intent and deliberate malice.

Yes, it had been luck, but could luck happen twice? The cold, clinical part of his mind—the part that had kept him breathing through ambushes and firefights—immediately rejected the notion. Thus, with a deepening frown carving lines across his face, he paused. His breath misted faintly in the clammy air as he turned the problem over. But what method could he use?

It was then... Wait.

He looked down at his own chest. The air around him was faintly rippling with artificial warmth—an illusory heat signature that had nothing to do with body temperature and everything to do with deception.

I am currently projecting the Phantom-Ash Veil. Through the System, I inverted the jade slip's logic to broadcast a fake, Early Tier-1 Cinder-Blood aura to mask my physical density.

His pulse quickened minutely as the implications crystallized.

If I walk into an array designed to hunt and drain Qi while broadcasting a fake Qi signature, the formation will lock onto the camouflage?

It would have been a catastrophic mistake. A lethal oversight. The kind of tactical blind spot that turned careful operators into corpses hanging from spectral vines, blood-red lotuses sprouting from their marrow while their Qi—or in this case, the illusion of their Qi—was siphoned into the mud below.

With a single, focused thought, he deactivated the technique.

The subtle, illusory warmth radiating from his body instantly evaporated like morning dew under a harsh sun. The ripple in the air smoothed, became still. To the spiritual senses of any cultivator, he vanished completely, returning to his true state—a profound, absolute void in the Dao. A null space where something should exist but didn't, an absence so complete it bordered on metaphysical erasure.

Still, before committing his entire body to a magical meat grinder, he needed one final verification. His tactical mind refused to accept a single data point. Two was better. Three was professional.

Part of my body... then... what about blood?

In ancient myths and orthodox Daoist texts—scrolls he'd skimmed in preparation, treatises written by long-dead masters—blood was considered the physical anchor for the Hun and Po: the ethereal and corporeal components of a mortal soul. The fluid that carried life force through flesh, that bridged the material and the spiritual.

If this array possessed secondary targeting logic designed to harvest human vitality directly, pure blood would trigger it just as violently as Qi.

Shi Yan drew his steel dagger, the blade whispering free from its sheath with a quiet rasp of metal on leather. He pressed his thumb against the edge—not the point, but the sharpened side—and drew the steel across his flesh in a controlled, shallow cut. The sting was immediate, sharp and clean. He squeezed, forcing a heavy drop of dark crimson blood to well up from the parted skin, the liquid almost black in the dim, ghost-light of the marsh.

It pooled on his thumb for a heartbeat before he smeared it onto a broad, dead marsh leaf—brown and brittle, edges curled with decay.

With a flick of his wrist, economical and precise, he tossed the blood-painted leaf directly into the churning green miasma.

I hope this is working...

He watched intently, his breathing shallow and controlled, his other hand resting on the hilt of his blade—ready to move, ready to retreat if the array suddenly came alive with hunger. The leaf sailed through the corrosive fog like a fragile paper bird, spinning lazily on unseen currents, and landed with a soft, wet slap on the wooden planks of the ruined village. The blood smear glistened faintly, dark against pale wood.

There was no reaction.

No spectral vines lashed out from the condensing mist. No parasitic blood-lotuses bloomed, their crimson petals unfurling to drink vitality. The array completely ignored the raw human blood, treating it with the same indifference it had shown the pebble.

It strictly demanded spiritual essence—Qi—as its harvest mechanism. Without a Dantian to naturally refine the ambient Qi of the world, to distill it into personal spiritual power, Shi Yan's blood was just mundane biological fluid. Plasma and platelets, iron and protein, nothing more.

Perfec— But as he stared at the unbothered leaf, the blood beginning to darken as it dried in the humid air, his tactical mind snagged on an inconsistency. The satisfaction died before it fully formed, replaced by a cold prickle of unease.

The targeting logic exclusively hunts cultivators and demonic beasts. He paused for a moment, his eyes narrowing behind the shadow of his bamboo hat. But if that is the case, what about the mortals within? If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He knew the village was populated entirely by mere mortals—fishermen, weavers, families scratching out survival in this forsaken corner of the world. Meaning, they had no spiritual roots. They possessed no Qi, no connection to the Dao whatsoever. By the exact same logic he'd just tested, they should have been able to walk directly through the green mist unharmed, to flee into the marsh and scatter like startled birds.

Then what is the point of sealing the entire village? Why didn't the villagers just run away into the marsh instead of becoming ritual materials?

The inconsistency gnawed at him, a splinter lodged in the smooth machinery of his analysis. He turned it over, examined it from different angles, let the pieces rearrange themselves.

But what if... the Physician hadn't used the green mist to trap the villagers? Instead, the mist was an anti-cultivator barrier, erected specifically to annihilate heavily armed, high-tier cultivators—sect enforcers, righteous Daoists, anyone with enough spiritual weight to pose a real threat.

As for the mortals? The Physician was originally an esteemed physician—a man who understood the fragility of the human body with intimate, clinical precision. He hadn't needed magic to catch them.

He had likely contaminated the village's shallow wells with a potent, tasteless paralytic—something that would seep into the groundwater, odorless and undetectable until it was far too late. Once the mortal villagers collapsed, their limbs useless and heavy, completely helpless as their lungs continued to draw breath but their muscles refused all commands, he had hauled them out of their beds, bound them with coarse rope, and then activated the massive array to repel outside interference.

So that's it, perhaps?

Furthermore, even if a mortal had somehow managed to flee through the barrier without triggering the phantom vines—stumbling through on sheer desperate momentum—their unrefined, fragile lungs would immediately begin inhaling stagnant, highly concentrated demonic miasma. The corrupted Qi that saturated this entire cursed marsh, thick as smoke and twice as toxic.

A mortal breathing ambient demonic Qi would suffer catastrophic cellular necrosis in less than ten breaths. Their flesh would begin to rot from the inside, blood vessels rupturing, organs liquefying, the body consuming itself in a cascade of spiritual poisoning.

So basically, the very swamp itself was the cage. The mist was the lock. And the geography—this sunken, crater-like bowl of corruption and decay—kept them trapped as surely as iron bars. Shi Yan blinked slowly, the understanding settling into place with grim finality.

He pressed his back against the damp, rotting bark of the hollow cypress tree, feeling the uneven texture through his straw cloak, the cold moisture seeping through fabric to chill his shoulders. His eyes slipped shut for a fraction of a second as his mind processed the final parameters of the battlefield—environmental hazards, enemy capabilities, points of failure, avenues of approach.

I knew the location, the reasoning, and the enemy logic. With this environment, it was basically perfect.

Perfect for an ambush. Perfect for a massacre. Perfect for turning well-meaning cultivators into drained husks feeding a blood-soaked ritual.

Opening his eyes, the ghost-light of bioluminescent moss reflecting faintly in their depths, he moved to the next step: breaching the threshold.

Back in his military days—a lifetime ago, in a world without cultivation or spiritual veils—stepping through a doorway or a chokepoint was known as entering a "fatal funnel." It was the exact moment an operative was most statistically likely to be killed, the precise instant when exposure peaked and options collapsed to binary outcomes: live or die. Angles of fire converged. Reaction time compressed. Every advantage the defender possessed magnified tenfold.

A veteran did not cross a blind threshold without maximizing every available advantage.

Thus... up until this very hour, he had deliberately bottlenecked his own physiological growth, strangling his potential with calculated precision.

He had capped his primary triad—[Physique], [Might], and [Agility]—at precisely thirty-nine points, a hair's breadth below the boundary that would push him into visible, undeniable Tier-2 status.

He had done so strictly for infiltration purposes; pushing past the mathematical ceiling of Tier-1 without a cloaking technique would have caused his physical vessel to radiate an oppressive, dense aura—a pressure that cultivators described as "intent," a weight in the air like distant thunder. The city guards would have flagged him immediately, swords drawn and formations activated before he'd taken three steps past the gate.

But now... there was no reason to remain hidden. No walls to slip past, no checkpoints to deceive. Just him, the marsh, and a target that needed killing.

He opened the system interface with a thought, and the familiar lines of text materialized across his vision like ghostly calligraphy suspended in empty air.

System, help me calculate the cost of upgrading...

At this point, he paused. Should he push to the maximum his bank allowed? Pour everything into raw capability? Perhaps close to 50? Maybe even force a breakthrough into Tier-3, consequences be damned?

Well, I think that's a hard no. He shook off those ideas immediately, a cold current of discipline cutting through the temptation.

He needed reserve [Dao Embers] as a backup—a war chest for emergencies, for the inevitable moment when plans collided with reality and everything went sideways.

A dead operative with max-level offensive capabilities but zero medical supplies was just a casualty waiting to happen. He had to retain a sufficient reserve fund for mid-combat triage—his only method of rapid field healing, the difference between bleeding out in the mud and walking away with scars.

Resource management wasn't glamorous. But it kept you breathing.

The system screen pulsed softly, text arranging itself with mechanical precision: [Host Entity:] Foreign Soul Merged [Heavenly Alignment:] NULL (Daoless) [Vessel Status:] STABLE. Sieve leak permanently resolved via vascular fortification. Combat window fully expanded.

[Current Dao Embers:] 4, 450 [ATTRIBUTES] Physique: 39 (Tier-1 Peak, Obsidian-Frame) Might: 39 (Tier-1 Peak, Obsidian-Frame) Agility: 39 (Tier-1 Peak, Obsidian-Frame) Spirit: 5 (Mortal Baseline) Anomaly: 5 (Daoless Trait Awakened) [TECHNIQUES & ARTS] Black-Iron Body Art (Lvl 1): Temporarily doubles physical force limit. Max Operational Limit: 60 Seconds.

Phantom-Ash Veil (Lvl 1): Logic Inverted. Actively projecting false Tier-1 (Cinder-Blood) Aura.

[SYSTEM DIRECTIVES & TRAITS] Primary physical triad capped artificially at the Tier-1 threshold. Defensive camouflage is active. Host possesses absolute biological superiority over all Tier-1 entities, but remains statistically disadvantaged against Furnace-Core parameters. Tactical upgrade recommended before engaging entrenched targets.

Eh? [Lvl 1]?