Chương 39: Too Late to Turn Back (1/3)

No, he shook his head, the motion small and deliberate, rainwater sliding in cold rivulets down the rigid line of his jaw. You never take a completely untested, freshly manufactured weapon into a live-fire combat zone. Ever.

The axiom settled into his bones with the weight of a thousand repetitions drilled into him in another life—one where hesitation meant a coffin, where arrogance was measured in body bags.

And besides that, his ingrained paranoia was screaming at him.

For some reason, possessing a massive war chest of unspent Dao Embers felt like a far better mental and physical safety net than draining his reserves to zero before a boss fight. The number 3, 275 pulsed faintly in his peripheral vision, a comforting buffer against catastrophe. If a high-tier cultivator blew his leg off, he needed those Embers to forcefully reconstruct the bone mid-battle—not fumble through shock and blood loss with an empty magazine.

Thus, he looked at his newly acquired Blood-Ignition Flash Step, still at Level 1, the blue text hovering like a promise and a threat.

Before committing, his eyes scanned the dark, fog-choked arterial road stretching out into the abyss of the swamp. The path carved a narrow scar through the skeletal cypress forest, its edges blurred by rain and mist. Fungal growths clung to the exposed roots flanking the roadway, their pale caps glowing faintly with bioluminescence that did nothing to pierce the oppressive gloom. How much time do I actually have?

He crouched, the leather of his coat creaking softly as it bent with him, and slipped a bare hand out from beneath the heavy folds. The freezing air bit immediately at his exposed skin, raising goosebumps along his forearm. He pressed his palm flat against the solid bedrock of the path, ignoring the bite of cold stone against his mud-caked flesh.

He closed his eyes, the scarred lids shutting out the distraction of the skeletal canopy above, tuning out the harsh pounding of the freezing rain that drummed against his hood and shoulders like a thousand impatient fingers.

Well… normal mortals felt nothing, but with a flat 55 in Agility and Physique, his nervous system picked up the microscopic seismic vibrations traveling through the earth. The sensation filtered through his enhanced nerves like sonar—faint, rhythmic, distinct.

Thud... thud... thud...

It wasn't the erratic splashing of men running, boots slapping mud in panicked flight. It was the measured, heavy, synchronized stepping of hooves—slow, confident, unhurried.

But the interval between the strikes was too long, the impact too heavy for normal mounts.

Demonic beasts. Horses or bandits, he deduced, though of course that wasn't certain. They are moving at a casual marching pace. I think. His jaw tightened, teeth pressing together as he sifted through probabilities. Most of the Orthodox cultivators are arrogant; they won't demean themselves by galloping frantically through the mud like common mercenaries.

Distance: roughly four miles. Given the terrain resistance, I have an interception window of twelve to fifteen minutes.

He opened his eyes, dark pupils reflecting nothing but calculation.

Well, let's hope most of that deduction is true...

Now back to the topic. The problem with upgrading this new technique to Level 2 instantly was...

If I upgrade it blindly, the baseline velocity might triple. If I trigger a Level 2 supersonic dash without knowing how to physically brake, my own forward momentum will snap my femurs in half the second I hit a cypress tree.

Just like firing a heavy-caliber rifle for the first time, he needed to feel the exact recoil of Level 1 first. He also needed to calibrate his center of gravity to match the sudden G-force—understand the weapon before trusting his life to it.

Stepping out from behind the massive cypress roots, Shi Yan isolated a relatively straight stretch of solid bedrock bordering the deep marsh water. The stone here was ancient, worn smooth by centuries of tidal seepage, dark with moisture and slick with algae at the edges. He bent his knees slightly, letting his weight settle, boots finding purchase on the uneven surface. His fingers flexed once at his sides, tendons rolling beneath the black subcutaneous veins that patterned the backs of his hands.

But he paused... what's the trigger mechanism? Do I form a hand seal? No, it's tied to my vascular system now. Right, let's just concentrate on the technique's framework and...

Ignite.

The next moment, Shi Yan's eyes widened in sheer shock, the weathered lines around his brows lifting as primal adrenaline spiked through his nervous system. The air violently displaced with a thunderous crack that split the marsh silence like a cannon shot. The black mud immediately surrounding his heavy boots exploded outward into a perfect crater, wet earth spraying in a radius, splattering against nearby roots with audible slaps.

He didn't just run; the hyper-pressurized blood in his calves detonated internally, the sensation like grenades going off beneath his skin, launching him forward like a railgun slug.

He crossed fifty feet in a fraction of a heartbeat.

The world became a smeared tunnel of gray fog and skeletal trees, rain frozen mid-fall in his accelerated perception. Wind shrieked past his ears, tearing at his hood, flattening the wet leather against his torso with brutal force. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Ghh—!" he grunted violently, the sound ripped from his throat as the world snapped back into focus with jarring, nauseating speed. He slammed his heels down, his heavy boots ripping deep trenches into the stone as he fought to kill his own terrifying momentum. Sparks flew where steel-reinforced soles scraped bedrock. His entire skeletal frame shuddered under the strain, the fused vertebrae and overlocking rib cage absorbing impact that would have liquefied an ordinary spine.

His calves screamed in protest, a sharp, tearing sensation ripping through his lower ligaments and muscle tissue like hot wire cutting through meat. He felt the micro-tears open—dozens of them, threading through his gastrocnemius and soleus muscles in burning lines.

He immediately checked his UI, forcing his breathing to steady.

[Cooldown Initiated: 29... 28...] Too much vertical lift, he panted, wincing as the micro-tears flared like hot needles under his skin, each pulse of his elevated heartbeat sending fresh spikes of pain radiating up through his knees.

He looked at the surrounding environment—the gouges his boots had carved, the spray pattern of displaced mud, the faint scorch marks on the stone where superheated blood vapor had kissed the surface—then glanced down at his smoking legs, steam curling up from the damp fabric clinging to his shins.

Quickly he ran the combat calculations, his mind assembling data with mechanical precision.

The explosion started at the heels. I allowed my posture to remain too upright. I caught too much wind resistance across my chest. He recalled the brutal drag, the way his torso had acted like a sail. I need to drop my center of gravity by a hard fifteen degrees and angle the kinetic release through the soles of my feet, not the heels, to keep the trajectory flat.

He waited out the exact thirty seconds, jaw clenched against the residual burn, enduring the deep, throbbing ache that radiated from his Achilles tendons up through his hamstrings. His breath misted white in the freezing air, each exhalation controlled, measured. However, as the timer ticked down—27... 26... 25—he noticed something incredible.

He looked at his own legs, expecting to feel the dangerous swelling of internal bleeding, the hot, tight pressure of hematomas forming beneath the skin. Instead, his dense, 55 Physique acted like an automatic hyper-pressurized vice, a living compression system.

The torn muscle fibers visibly vibrated beneath his skin, minute tremors rippling along the defined musculature of his calves, aggressively catching on to one another and stitching shut in seconds. The sensation was alien—not quite healing, more like biological welding, each fiber locking into place with microscopic precision.

He blinked, narrowing his eyes in pure focus again, scarred brow furrowing. Damn. A 55 Physique isn't just armor; it's a structural dampener.

Usually, this wound would have permanently crippled his Achilles tendon. My body is just sweeping it up as minor fatigue.

The countdown reached zero.

Again.

BOOM.

This time, the dash was significantly cleaner, flatter. He moved like a localized sonic boom, the displacement cone tight and controlled, tearing through the rain without disturbing the canopy above. The skeletal branches didn't even tremble. But his braking mechanism was still sloppy—he'd misjudged the friction coefficient of wet stone.

He overshot his mental target and nearly collided center-mass with a massive cypress trunk, forced to catch himself against the rough bark with his upgraded forearms. The impact sent a shockwave through the ancient wood, splintering the dead outer layers. Fragments of rot-softened bark exploded outward, and a shower of disturbed beetles scattered into the rain. His palms left deep impressions in the fungal growths coating the surface, black spores puffing into the cold air.

Again. Account for the dagger draw.

He tested it a third time, stepping back to his starting point, boots squelching in the mud he'd displaced. This time he prioritized his arm posture, loosening his shoulders, repositioning his elbow angle before triggering the technique.

If he drew the weapon mid-dash, the raw air resistance against the flat of the steel blade acted like an aerodynamic flap, instantly throwing his trajectory off by inches—a flutter effect that rotated his torso counterclockwise, destabilizing his forward vector.

Inches matter when you are aiming for the brain stem.

He adapted, learning to keep the blade tucked tight, perfectly parallel against his forearm, the cold steel kissing the inside of his wrist, until the exact millisecond of impact. The toxin coating gleamed faintly green even in the dim light, viscous and clinging.

He tested it a fourth time.

The detonation carved another trench through the bedrock. This time he drew mid-flight, the dagger clearing its sheath in a single fluid motion, and struck a rotting stump with pinpoint accuracy. The blade sank to the hilt, the Grave-Rot toxin hissing faintly as it made contact with organic matter.

Then a fifth.

By the fifth detonation, the violent action had been fully mapped into his spatial awareness and muscle memory, burned into his neural pathways like scar tissue. He knew the exact boundaries of the thirty-second cooldown—the physiological rhythm of his vascular system resetting. He knew how to predict the landing, down to the inch. He knew the precise physical angle to strike the moment the G-force dissipated, the optimal rotation of his hips to transfer kinetic energy through the blade.

His legs ached with a dull, overarching soreness, the kind that settled deep into the bone marrow, but his thick Physique caged the damage perfectly, preventing the catastrophic ruptures the System had warned him about. The overlapping muscle plates across his torso absorbed the shock transmission, distributing forces that should have shattered his lumbar vertebrae.

"Hah... h-hah...." He panted softly, thick steam rolling from his lips in heavy clouds, mingling with the rain. Sweat traced lines through the mud streaking his jaw. He looked at the absolute mess he had made of the bedrock. Deep gouges scarred the stone like claw marks, and splattered mud painted the nearby tree trunks in abstract patterns, black against gray.

Time to clean up, I think. Can't leave obvious footprints.

Working quickly, Shi Yan snapped a thick, rotting branch off a nearby tree, the wood crumbling slightly in his grip, releasing the pungent smell of decay. He hastily swept the black mud over the deep gouges, obscuring the telltale boot-shaped impressions and the too-regular spacing that screamed human activity.

He dragged the jagged wood across the stone to break up the pattern, making it look as though a massive demonic beast had simply charged through the marsh—territorial aggression, perhaps, or a mating display. Something primal and mindless.

Satisfied, he tossed the branch into the marsh water, where it landed with a soft splash and began drifting slowly away, carried by invisible currents.

He stepped backward into the deepest pocket of shadows cast by the overlapping cypress roots, his black leather coat blending seamlessly with the darkness. With a mere thought, he manually dialed the newly upgraded Phantom-Ash Veil all the way down to absolute zero.

The heat stopped radiating. The steam vanished from his breath. His heartbeat slowed to a crawl, the thunder in his chest diminishing to a faint, distant drum. The faint warmth that had clung to his skin—residual thermal signature from the repeated dashes—bled away into nothingness. He became a void, a black hole in the sensory landscape, invisible even to Qi-sense.

The rain continued to fall, but it seemed to forget he existed, droplets pattering against the roots around him without acknowledgment.

Finally, after testing all of the skills, while lying completely motionless in the dark, pressed against cold stone and colder bark, he heard the faint sound of people murmuring—soft, cultured voices drifting through the fog like ghosts. Then came the shriek of horses, high-pitched and wrong, not quite animal, and the rhythmic echo of footsteps from the foggy road ahead, measured and arrogant.

...

The dense fog slowly parted, repelled by the soft, glowing illumination of authentic Orthodox Daoist arrays. The light was pale and cold, a silvery-white luminescence that clung to the cultivators like halos, pushing back the marsh darkness in neat, geometric boundaries. Talismans sewn into their clothing pulsed faintly with each step, maintaining the wards.

Shi Yan watched from the darkness as a group of cultivators casually entered the fatal funnel, their posture relaxed, shoulders loose, heads tilting toward one another in conversation. They moved like they were on a leisure hunt—like this festering swamp was a garden stroll, like death wasn't crouched ten feet away with a toxin-coated blade.

There were six young elites composing the vanguard, sitting astride towering, scaled spirit-horses. The mounts stood easily seven feet at the shoulder, their hides gleaming wetly despite the rain never touching them—scales the color of jade and silver overlapping in intricate patterns. Their eyes glowed with dull amber intelligence, and their breath came out in small puffs of luminous vapor.

Their hooves struck the bedrock with that same heavy, synchronized rhythm Shi Yan had felt through the earth, each impact ringing with unnatural clarity.

The riders' pristine white silk robes, adorned with the silver lotus insignia of their sect—delicate embroidery that caught the wardlight and shimmered—remained entirely dry; passive warding talismans woven into their belts repelled the driving black rain before it could even touch them. The water struck invisible barriers inches from their bodies and slid away in perfect arcs, leaving the silk immaculate.

Their faces were young, unblemished, with the kind of refined beauty cultivated through spiritual purification—high cheekbones, clear skin, dark eyes framed by long lashes. But there was a coldness there, a casual disdain in the set of their mouths, the tilt of their chins. They spoke to one another in the flowing, archaic cadence of the Orthodox sects, their words flavored with classical poetry and veiled superiority.

Right as he observed, a transparent screen from the System flashed before his eyes regarding their data, blue text overlaying his vision without obscuring the targets themselves...