Chương 32: White-Hot Monster

Cloud-Mirror Sect?

One of Shi Yan's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch beneath the sodden rim of his rain-soaked bamboo hat, the woven edge dripping steady rivulets that traced silent paths down the curve of his scarred cheek.

Before he could process the intelligence—before the tactical weight of a major sect's involvement could settle into the cold calculations already forming in his mind—a sickening, wet tearing sound echoed through the grove. Flesh parting from bone. Sinew stretching past mortal limits. The sound carried through the suffocating air like ripping canvas soaked in blood, followed immediately by a grunt of inhuman pain that twisted upward into something between a sob and a bestial snarl.

Through the veil of hanging corpses and the steady, obscene rain of blood—droplets pattering against mud, against wooden planks, against the broad leaves of the ancient willows—Shi Yan finally laid eyes on the target.

The Physician wasn't just hiding here; he was utilizing the residual, mythological grudge of the slain Ba She buried deep within the earth to supercharge a horrifying metamorphosis. The man knelt at the center of the blood-array, his silhouette framed by the hellish crimson glow of harvested human vitality pulsing through the carved grooves like molten veins. The light painted his hunched form in shades of arterial red and shadow, casting his weeping face in stark, monstrous relief.

"Her soul is scattering... she needs the essence," Physician Li muttered wildly, his voice cracking with the brittle edge of shattered sanity. His words tumbled out in a frantic litany, syllables blurring together as his head jerked from side to side.

"With this Blood-Refining Array, the Demonic Path will grant me the power the Orthodox Heavens denied. I will rebuild my foundation... I will march up Cloud-Mirror Mountain, and I will skin every last Elder alive!"

The last words tore from his throat as a shriek, raw and feral, reverberating through the willow grove until the suspended bodies swayed gently on their Demonic Qi shackles.

I see, so the classic trope. The target had completely shattered inside. A broken healer forced into monstrosity by the cruel hypocrisy of the Righteous Path.

Shi Yan narrowed his eyes, the darkened gaze beneath his scarred eyelids focusing with predatory precision, zeroing in on the source of the tearing sound. The shadows of the weeping willows shifted as pale moonlight filtered through gaps in the dense canopy, revealing the full extent of the Physician's descent into madness.

It was a sickening, mythological horror. The weeping man had stripped the robes from his upper body, the torn fabric lying discarded in the black mud beside him, exposing a spine ruined by dark, jagged surgical cuts that wept thin streams of corrupted blood. The flesh around each incision was mottled purple-black, swollen and necrotic where Demonic Qi had burned through mortal tissue.

Hovering just over his left shoulder blade was a massive, heavily muscled beast arm—thick with iron-like green scales that gleamed wetly in the crimson light and ending in five razor-sharp obsidian talons, each as long as a man's finger and curved like scythes. It had been freshly severed from some demonic beast, the ragged stump still dripping viscous black ichor that hissed faintly when it struck the ground.

Using tendrils of dark, corrosive blood-Qi as surgical thread—writhing, living sutures that burrowed into flesh with the hungry purpose of parasitic worms—Physician Li was physically grafting the monstrous limb directly into his own human nervous system. The tendrils pulsed rhythmically, each contraction forcing the alien tissue deeper into the severed cavity of his shoulder blade.

The wet crunch of nonhuman bone forcefully fusing with mortal bone echoed across the dark water, a sound like green wood snapping under immense pressure, accompanied by the sizzle of incompatible energies burning away rejected flesh.

The Physician bit down so hard on a wooden talisman clenched between his teeth—carved with crimson runes that glowed faintly with stored spiritual energy—that his gums bled, fresh rivulets of red streaming down his chin to drip onto his bare, mutilated chest. His Dantian desperately pumped the harvested human vitality into the beast's dead veins to reanimate the muscle, the stolen life-force visibly coursing beneath the green scales in pulsing waves of sickly light.

It was a crude, brutal application of forbidden Flesh Cultivation, treating biology like interchangeable machinery—meat and bone as nothing more than components to be stripped, grafted, and forcibly reanimated.

Damn... isn't this like a boss fight?

Shi Yan's scarred face hardened, the faint lines around his mouth deepening as his jaw tightened. His gaze swept over the demonic cultivator's twisted form with the cold, analytical detachment of a soldier assessing enemy capability—threat vectors, mobility limitations, exploitable weaknesses.

No wonder the intelligence said he could wipe out a guarded caravan, probably one guarded by Tier 2s.

Right at this time, a transparent screen flashed before his eyes, the familiar interface overlaying his vision with crisp, emotionless clarity: [Entity Recognized: Demonic Physician Li] [Cultivation Resonance: Tier-2 Late Stage (Furnace-Core: White-Hot)] [Vascular Mutation: Tier 1 Late Stage, Demonic Beast Detected] [Threat to Current Vessel: Extreme (Lethal Response Advised)] [Estimated Yield: 10, 000+ Dao Embers] When he looked at the transparent screen, his brow furrowed slightly as the data settled into place.

The Chamber's intel proved fundamentally flawed. Su Yin had stated the target's fleshly might rivaled that of an early Furnace-Core cultivator.

But viewing the massive, successfully grafted demonic arm bulging with demonic vitality—watching the green scales flex and contract with unnatural vitality, the obsidian talons clicking softly as they tested their newly integrated motor control—the visual data aligned perfectly with the System's diagnostic.

He was essentially Tier 2 now, not a mere Tier 1. And judging by the sheer density of the heat radiating from his mutated pores, distorting the cold air in visible ripples that shimmered like summer haze rising from scorched earth... he was firmly entrenched in the Tier-2 Late Stage.

And... a stage native cultivators called White-Hot.

White-Hot, huh? Interesting name.

In addition, while assessing this, his gaze slowly drifted past the mutilated man to observe the immediate environment, gathering the final parameters of the kill-zone. His darkened eyes swept methodically across the ritual site, cataloging sight-lines, obstructions, potential hazards with the ingrained efficiency of pre-mission reconnaissance.

The epicenter of the massive blood-array was built upon the ruins of a desecrated Daoist shrine. Statues of forgotten marsh deities lay toppled and smashed in the black mud, their stone faces smeared with the stolen Chamber herbs that had been ground into toxic paste—thick, acrid sludge that bubbled faintly where it pooled in the carved eye-sockets and broken mouths of the divine effigies. The air reeked of burned incense and corrupted vegetation, the cloying stench clinging to the back of Shi Yan's throat.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Yet, lying dead center in the heart of the grove, entirely untouched by the muck and the gore, was a perfectly pristine crystal coffin forged from profound Frost-Jade. The translucent stone gleamed with an inner luminescence, pale blue-white light radiating outward in soft, cold pulses. The heavy, pale mist radiating from the jade kept the surrounding air artificially freezing—a pocket of winter carved into the humid marsh night, so cold that frost crystals formed delicate lacework across the coffin's surface.

That must be the wife, isn't it?

His gaze narrowed to a slit, the scarred flesh around his eyes tightening as he tried to get a clearer picture through the shifting curtain of blood and shadow.

Inside the coffin lay a beautiful, pale woman, her features serene and perfectly preserved, dressed in immaculate white silk that seemed to glow faintly in the jade's ethereal light. Her hands were folded gracefully over her chest, fingers interlaced as though she merely slept.

The complex, chaotic grooves of the Blood-Refining Array did not touch her; they flowed around the coffin in precise, reverent arcs, funneling the boiling, harvested life-force of the hanging villagers directly to where Physician Li sat hunched at the head of her resting place.

The Physician hunched over, his normal human hands violently trembling—fingers spasming, knuckles white—as he reached out to gently stroke the lid of the crystal coffin. His touch was heartbreakingly tender, fingertips tracing the smooth jade surface with the delicate care of a man cradling something infinitely precious and infinitely fragile.

"Just a few more hours, my Lan'er," Li sobbed, his voice cracking with a terrifying mixture of tenderness and unhinged malice. Tears streamed freely down his blood-smeared cheeks, carving clean tracks through the grime.

"The Relic-Grade Blood-Pill will be perfectly refined... Elder Zhou thought he broke me by pouring that boiling water down your throat instead of the antidote... but he only opened my eyes."

The newly grafted demonic beast arm on his back twitched involuntarily, the thick muscles bunching beneath the iron-like green scales as the demon blood successfully merged with his own. The obsidian talons flexed, each movement accompanied by the soft scrape of claws against stone.

"He wanted my ancestral alchemy scrolls. I will give them to him. I will shove them down his throat along with the ashes of his disciples. I am almost powerful enough."

Hmm... this will be a hard battle.

Beside that, Shi Yan's vision caught a severe anomaly in the array's geometry—a detail that prickled at the back of his mind with the instinctive unease of something fundamentally wrong.

The Physician was seated heavily, dead center upon a raised circular dais of stone, the surface worn smooth by centuries of use and now slick with fresh blood. To a layman, it was just a seat next to his wife's coffin. But, incorporating the xianxia fundamentals he now understood—the principles of spiritual energy flow, of anchor points and resonance nodes—Shi Yan recognized it as the Array Eye, the physical anchor of the massive Daoist array circle.

Let's deduce how this demonic array is keeping the operation stable.

His eyes traced the glowing blood lines with methodical precision, following each crimson groove as it carved through the churned black mud, observing the way the stolen vitality pulsed and flowed like liquid fire through the intricate network.

So, the array is violently mashing stolen spiritual herbs and mortal blood together to synthesize a high-tier pill?

While pondering, Shi Yan also tracked the flow with the trained focus of a combat engineer dismantling an explosive device. The dark crimson grooves carved into the mud acted as conductive wires—channels etched finger-width deep, their surfaces smooth and polished by the constant rush of spiritual energy.

They siphoned the raw, biological vitality—the Yin property—falling from the dozens of hanging villagers suspended overhead. Those grooves forced the fluid to rush inward, channeling the viscous streams with unnatural directionality, aggressively crashing into the crushed remains of the Chamber's stolen spirit herbs heaped at the array's intersection points. The herbs radiated aggressive Yang properties, their spiritual essence shimmering in the air like heat distortion.

It was basic thermodynamics applied to ancient mysticism. Yin and Yang of this raw, unprocessed magnitude fundamentally rejected one another. They were meant to repel, to violently tear away like water poured onto boiling oil—explosive, catastrophic, uncontrollable.

Yet, they weren't exploding. They were funneling flawlessly up the stone steps of the central dais, converging in streams of swirling crimson and gold light that spiraled upward with impossible stability.

Then he focused on the exact point of intersection, his gaze locking onto the critical detail.

Every single blood-groove converged directly beneath the cross-legged, weeping figure of Physician Li.

That meant the Physician wasn't just sitting there to be close to his dead wife's Frost-Jade coffin. In simple terms, he was the processor—no, more than that, he was the literal Array Eye. The human anchor physically suppressing the violent clash of incompatible energies through sheer force of will and cultivated power.

By channeling his newly mutated, dense Demonic Qi downward through his muscular system—pouring the corrupted spiritual energy into the stone beneath him in thick, suffocating waves—Physician Li was forcibly suppressing the violent clash of herbs and blood, physically compressing the volatile energies until they had no choice but to synthesize into the Relic-Grade Blood-Pill.

What tier is Relic-Grade? But…

Well, those looked like incompatible energies. Highly volatile. The faint tremor in the air around the dais, the way the crimson light flickered and pulsed with barely restrained violence, spoke to forces barely held in check. The only thing keeping the violent, swirling blood-Qi from tearing the grove apart right now was the sheer physical mass and suppressive Demonic Qi of the Physician sitting directly on top of the Array Eye.

It also meant he was essentially using his own body as the pressure lid on a boiling cauldron.

Shi Yan's right hand drifted silently down to his waist, the movement smooth and utterly soundless, his gloved fingers brushing through the cold, damp air. His thumb instinctively brushed the heavy leather-wrapped hilt sheathed there, the familiar weight and texture grounding him in the reality of what was about to come.