Chương 31: The Mad Physician’s Truth (3/3)

His eyes caught the suffix attached to his techniques, the faint ghostly numerals glowing like dying embers in the corner of his vision. If skills possessed levels, they naturally followed an upgrade curve—a progression ladder carved into the very architecture of the System itself.

Could he allocate Dao Embers directly into a technique to force mastery, completely bypassing the years of closed-door meditation native cultivators required?

The thought sparked cold and sharp in his mind, a tactical possibility that carried the weight of genuine strategic advantage. It was a genius idea... but an unverified one. Testing the Dao Ember-cost ratio of a skill tree mere minutes before breaching a hostile zone was sloppy and undisciplined—the kind of mistake that got soldiers killed in the field. Better to test it later, under controlled conditions, when failure wouldn't mean death.

First, he needed to secure his physical baseline. The foundation upon which everything else would rest.

Thus, System, help me calculate the upgrade to 45 stats in Agility, Physique, and Might.

As he issued the command, his darkened eyes hovered over the Anomaly stat, its miserable value of 5 sitting like a neglected corner of his status sheet. The cold bark of the cypress pressed against his shoulders through the damp straw cloak as he considered it with the same methodical scrutiny he'd once applied to ammunition inventories and patrol routes.

It had saved his life against the chaotic red anomaly in the Abyss—that writhing, reality-breaking nightmare that had unraveled three cultivators before his eyes—and now it was about to allow him to bypass the green mist array like a ghost walking through walls.

But what if the Physician possessed deeper blood-curses or parasitic demonic arts? What if the bastard had woven soul-shackles or vein-threading techniques into his victims, traps that would lash out at anyone who disturbed the ritual?

Hmmm... He wondered for a while, the faint sound of his gloved finger tapping rhythmically against the dagger's pommel cutting through the suffocating marsh silence. The leather creaked softly with each deliberate tap—one, two, three—as he weighed risk against cost, survival against expenditure.

Finally, he decided.

Include Anomaly. Push it to 10.

Test the resistance threshold. Because the lower levels were dirt-cheap—practically negligible in the grand calculus of the System's economy—he knew the math wouldn't cripple his bank. Not yet. Not when he still had over four thousand Embers cushioning his reserves.

The ghostly interface rippled across his vision like calligraphy written in smoke, each character materializing with cold, mechanical precision.

System Calculation Request: Confirmed.

Current Reserves: 4, 450 Dao Embers Physique: 39 → 40 (1 pt × 50) = 50 Embers Physique: 40 → 45 (5 pts × 150) = 750 Embers Total Physique Cost: 800 Embers Might: 39 → 40 (1 pt × 50) = 50 Embers Might: 40 → 45 (5 pts × 150) = 750 Embers Total Might Cost: 800 Embers Agility: 39 → 40 (1 pt × 50) = 50 Embers Agility: 40 → 45 (5 pts × 150) = 750 Embers Total Agility Cost: 800 Embers Anomaly: 5 → 10 (5 pts × 5) = 25 Embers Total Deduction: 2, 425 Dao Embers. Remaining Reserve: 2, 025 Confirm Mass Allocation?

Shi Yan's scarred features remained utterly still beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat, his breath misting faintly in the cold, clammy air. The numbers floated before him like a contract written in blood and starlight—irrevocable once accepted.

Yes.

He chose the middle ground, a flat 45 in all three stats—enough to breach the Tier-2 threshold without overextending his reserves—and then his gloved finger moved through the phantom interface with the finality of a blade drawn from its sheath.

Allocation Confirmed. 2, 425 Dao Embers consumed.

Major Threshold Breached. Initiating forced cellular reconstruction.

The reaction was instantaneous, and it was absolute agony.

His entire body locked rigid against the hollow cypress, the damp bark digging into his spine through the soaked straw cloak as every muscle in his frame seized like a vice. He bit down hard on the collar of his rain-soaked cloak, his jaw locking so violently his teeth audibly creaked—enamel grinding against enamel with a sound like splintering stone. A wave of blinding, white-hot pain detonated somewhere deep in his chest and rippled outward in concentric shockwaves, racing through his ribs, his limbs, his skull.

His mortal heart pounded like a heavy war drum against an unyielding furnace, each beat slamming against his sternum with bruising, hammering force that threatened to crack bone from the inside. The blood in his veins ignited—literally ignited—shifting from common liquid into something dense, scorching, and alchemically transformed. Spirit-blood.

The term rose unbidden from the original host's fragmented memories, and now Shi Yan understood it viscerally, intimately, as his circulatory system turned into a network of molten rivers beneath his skin.

Without a Dantian to contain the heat, to channel and refine the spiritual pressure through a cultivated core, his entire physical vessel was forced to endure the refinement raw and unfiltered. Black, foul-smelling impurities purged directly from his marrow—decades of mortal toxins, cellular waste, the accumulated filth of flesh never tempered by Qi—and erupted through his pores in oily, tarlike beads.

They instantly incinerated into acrid steam on his skin, hissing and curling upward like offerings burned at a funeral pyre, as his bone structure densified beneath the surface. His skeleton creaked audibly, joints popping and resetting as calcium compressed into something closer to tempered iron than human anatomy.

His lungs burned. His vision swam. The faint ghost-light of the bioluminescent moss twisted into smears of sickly green across his retinas.

And then, as suddenly as it began, the pain crested—and broke.

Vascular fortification complete. Muscular density evolved.

System Registry Update: Native Cultivation Taxonomy synchronized.

The ghostly script reformed across his vision, each character sharper now, more vivid, as though the System itself had been recalibrated to match his new state.

Host Entity: Foreign Soul Merged Heavenly Alignment: NULL (Daoless) Vessel Status: STABLE. Flesh-Furnace active. Mortal impurities purged.

Current Dao Embers: 2, 025 ATTRIBUTES Physique: 45 (Tier-2 Early, Kindling) Might: 45 (Tier-2 Early, Kindling) Agility: 45 (Tier-2 Early, Kindling) Spirit: 5 (Mortal Baseline) Anomaly: 10 (Daoless Trait Amplified) SYSTEM DIRECTIVES & TRAITS Base physical triad successfully advanced to Tier-2 metrics. Host generates localized thermal radiation consistent with Furnace-Core entities. Anomaly threshold increased: Host's physiological rejection of foreign Daoist laws has strengthened.

Lethality parameters sufficient for target neutralization.

He clamped a hand over his forehead, fingers digging into his temples as he let out a hot, ragged breath that steamed visibly in the marsh air. His chest heaved, ribs expanding and contracting beneath the straw cloak as his newly forged cardiovascular system adjusted to the surge of spirit-blood coursing through his veins.

While his physical body burned with the newly acquired heat of the Tier-2 realm—radiating outward like a furnace barely contained beneath human skin—the upgrade to the Anomaly stat struck him differently.

It caught him completely off guard.

It wasn't physical pain—not the bone-deep agony of cellular reconstruction or the searing heat of spiritual ascension. It was something far stranger, far more unsettling. A cold, absolute stillness settling deep behind his eyes, like a lake freezing over in the span of a single breath. A profound decoupling from the world's natural laws, as though the invisible threads that bound reality together had suddenly become visible to him—and revealed themselves as nothing more than fragile, arbitrary constructs.

For a split second, the very fabric of the Daoist magic saturating the air around him—the green mist array, the demonic miasma, the ambient Qi woven into the marsh itself—looked like tangible threads of spun glass. Brittle. Breakable. As if he could simply shatter them by walking through them with enough intent, the way a man might brush aside cobwebs in an abandoned house.

The sensation passed as quickly as it came, but it left him stunned by the conceptual weight of it, by the sheer metaphysical wrongness his existence now represented in this world. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

A satisfied smile touched his lips, cold and sharp as a blade's edge.

Heh. It was the ultimate defensive buff.

Then his gaze flicked back to the System interface, specifically to the new taxonomy glowing softly in the dim light: Tier-2 Early, Kindling.

The original host's residual memories provided the answer, fragmentary knowledge rising to the surface like debris from a shipwreck.

In the native world, early Tier-2 was the stage where a cultivator sparked the accumulated ash within their Dantian into an unstable internal flame—a Kindling, the first true ignition of spiritual power that separated a mortal from a true practitioner of the Dao. It was the threshold where disciples became inner sect members, where wandering rogues became threats worth hunting.

But Shi Yan had no Dantian. No spiritual core. No heavenly aperture through which to channel and refine Qi.

His System had bypassed the magic organ entirely, turning his very flesh, muscles, and vascular network into the engine of cultivation itself. Because of his Daoless vessel—his fundamental rejection of this world's cosmic order—he didn't just project spiritual heat the way a cultivator's Dantian radiated Qi. His body was the furnace. The meat, the bone, the blood—all of it now burned with the low, smoldering intensity of Tier-2 power.

He exhaled slowly, his breath visibly distorting the damp swamp air in a faint heat shimmer, singeing the moisture into thin wisps of steam that curled upward and vanished into the clammy darkness.

Now, with a complete understanding of the battlefield's parameters—every variable measured, every risk calculated, every advantage secured—he stepped out from behind the cypress tree. The damp, rotting bark peeled away from his shoulders as he moved forward, boots sinking slightly into the cold, waterlogged silt with each deliberate step.

Without further hesitation, he walked straight into the lethal, swirling wall of Demonic Qi.

His eyes closed as the green Daoist mist parted lazily around his shoulders, thick tendrils of corrupted energy washing over his rain-soaked straw cloak like ocean fog rolling over stone. It clung to the fabric for a heartbeat, two, probing—searching for spiritual essence to latch onto, to drain, to harvest—and found nothing. No Qi. No aura. No spark of cultivation. Just void. Just absence.

The array ignored him completely.

Not a single burn mark marred the straw. Not a single ward triggered. Not a single spectral vine manifested to drag him down into the mud.

He was a ghost walking through the boundaries of the living world, unseen and untouched.

Only once he passed through the threshold did he blink, his scarred eyelids lifting as he stepped out of the churning fog and onto the damp wooden planks of the inner village. His boots made no sound on the weathered boards, the silence absolute save for the faint creak of wood settling under his weight.

Well, it's working, for now....

As the last wisps of green mist cleared from his vision, he beheld the true, sickening scale of the horror within.

It was a vision pulled directly from the darkest depths of ancient, forbidden mythology—the kind of nightmare that old monks whispered about in hushed tones, the kind of scene that marked a cultivator as irredeemably fallen, beyond redemption, beyond mercy.

The village square had been hollowed out, the black mud heavily churned and trampled into a foul slurry that stank of rot and copper and something else—something alchemically wrong, a scent that clawed at the back of the throat and made the eyes water.

Towering out of this muck was a rotting grove of giant ancient willow trees, their gnarled trunks wider than a man's outstretched arms, their weeping branches cascading downward in curtains of skeletal green that cast long, agonizing shadows under the pale, sickly moonlight filtering through the canopy.

Drip. Drip. Slap.

The sound echoed across the square with metronomic regularity, wet and obscene.

Dozens of mortal villagers—men, women, frail elders whose faces were gaunt with starvation and suffering—hung upside down by their ankles from the thick, twisting willow branches. They were bound not by ropes or chains of iron, but by hardened, jagged chains of dark, manifested Demonic Qi that had solidified into cruel, barbed shackles. The black energy dug cruelly into their flesh, biting deep enough to bruise bone, the skin around the bindings swollen and discolored with necrotic purple-black bruises.

They were unconscious—heads lolling, mouths slack, eyes rolled back—but fiercely alive. Their chests rose and fell in shallow, labored breaths. Their hearts still beat.

And their blood still flowed.

The veins in their wrists and the shallow arteries near their throats had been opened with superficial, surgical cuts—precise incisions that wept slow, steady streams of crimson without severing anything vital. Just enough to bleed them. Just enough to keep them alive while they drained.

Beneath them, their blood dripped like macabre rain, falling in thick, glistening rivulets from fingertips and earlobes and the corners of slack mouths. It pattered onto the churned black mud of the village's central plaza, where a massive, glowing crimson Daoist array had been carved directly into the earth—intricate geometric lines and spiraling runes etched with manic precision, each groove a finger's width deep and filled to the brim with viscous, bubbling blood.

The blood flowed through the intricate channels like water through an irrigation system, pooling in nodes where piles of crushed, high-grade spirit herbs had been heaped—once-precious ingredients now reduced to pulp and mixed with human suffering. The herbs glowed faintly, their spiritual essence forcibly extracted and merged with the lifeblood of the villagers in an alchemical abomination that made Shi Yan's jaw tighten.

"P-Please..." an old man rasped into the empty dark, his voice little more than a wet, rattling whisper. Tears of blood leaked from his tear ducts, carving crimson tracks down his wrinkled, upside-down face.

"It hurts... Physician Li... it hurts..."

Shi Yan's dead, hollow gaze swept across the massacre with the cold, clinical detachment of a man who had seen mass graves and burnt villages, who had walked through the aftermath of chemical attacks and drone strikes and ethnic cleansings. This was no worse. Just different in its cultural trappings.

The air reeked of copper—thick, cloying, metallic—and voided bowels, the sharp ammonia stench of bodies that had lost control of their functions hours ago. Beneath it all lurked the sickly sweet scent of corrupted spirit herbs, their natural fragrance twisted into something cloying and rotten, like flowers left too long in stagnant water.

It was a slaughterhouse orchestrated with agonizing, medical slowness—a clinic turned charnel house, where the healer had become the butcher.

And from the dead center of the blood-array, from somewhere within the hanging forest of bodies and weeping willows, a tragic, broken voice echoed back through the hanging corpses.

"I'm sorry... Uncle Chen, I am so sorry," the voice wept, trembling with genuine grief and barely restrained hysteria. It was a pathetic, wretched sound—the kind of voice that belonged to a man who had crossed a line he could never uncross, who had damned himself and knew it, and wept not for his victims but for the innocence he had lost.

"Just endure it a little longer... please. I saved your son from the bone-pox last autumn, did I not? I gave you medicine when the harvest failed... I only ask for this strict repayment now..."

The words dripped with manic justification, each syllable soaked in delusion and desperation.

Disgusting.

Shi Yan melted into the deep shadows beneath a ruined stilt-house, his body moving with predatory silence as he skirted the edge of the square. His boots made no sound on the damp wood and mud. His breath made no noise. He was a shadow among shadows, a ghost hunting another ghost.

"The Righteous sects... the esteemed Cloud-Mirror Sect..." the voice continued, transitioning rapidly from weeping remorse into manic, seething hatred that shook the branches of the willows and sent the hanging bodies swaying like grotesque pendulums.

"They poisoned my Lan'er. They demanded my ancestral alchemy scrolls in exchange for the antidote. And when I gave it to them... they gave her water! They gave her boiled water!"

The last words were a shriek—raw, agonized, the sound of a man whose soul had shattered into jagged, bleeding pieces.

It was then that Shi Yan froze, his body going utterly still in the shadows as his mind processed the implications.