Chương 69: The Black Mouth (2/3)

Time to test if I can break this open.

Shi Yan rolled his shoulders back and cracked his neck—first left, then right—feeling the stiff vertebrae pop beneath skin still clammy from hours of sensory recalibration. The tendons along his trapezius released with audible snaps, and he exhaled slowly through his nose, tasting the stale mold and old blood that still clung to the room's fetid air.

He leaned down, knees bending with controlled precision, and reached back into the heavy beast-hide satchel that still lay open on the warped floorboards beside his boots. The leather was cold and slick beneath his fingertips, rain-damp from earlier handling.

His hand plunged past the clinking weight of silver taels, bypassing the frost-silk bundle that radiated that dull, nauseating spiritual pressure—the severed demonic arm within still faintly cold even through its insulating wrapping. His fingers brushed against smooth, high-quality fabric folded in neat layers beneath the clutter of pill bottles and cracked manual spines.

He pulled them out one by one, the silk whispering against itself as he laid them in a neat tactical row on the wooden table. Dust motes swirled in the dim lantern light as his shadow stretched long and distorted across the surface.

Spatial pouches.

There were twelve of them in total, arranged now like surgical instruments before an operation.

Seven were the silver-cloud-embroidered pouches he had looted directly from the slaughtered Cloud-Mirror Sect disciples—each one stitched with delicate threadwork that caught the light in faint, shimmering patterns. The embroidery depicted stylized clouds drifting across miniature mirror surfaces, the kind of ornamental craftsmanship that screamed wealth and sect prestige.

The other two were Vermilion Pavilion-issued pouches—exquisitely crafted dark red silk bags that felt heavier than their size suggested, dyed the deep crimson of fresh arterial blood. These Su Yin had originally used to deliver his massive bounty payouts, before Ruo'er had transferred the physical contents into his beast-hide satchel with her own pale, nimble hands.

In addition to that, he had two more spatial pouches—cheaper, coarser gray fabric—that he hadn't touched since killing that three-man scavenger group in the Abyss. Their stitching was crude, functional, the kind of gear used by desperate men scraping survival from the margins. And one more: a faded blue pouch taken from Physician Li, stained along one edge with what might have been medicinal residue or old blood.

Usually, cultivators opened these by cycling Qi through the fabric. The pocket dimension inside was tethered to a specific array matrix woven into the physical threads—spiritual circuitry that responded to the flow of mystical energy like a fingerprint scanner responding to bioelectric current.

But of course, Shi Yan had no Qi. He possessed no Dantian to generate the mystical energy required to interface with the array.

So...

How do I force this open?

He picked up one of the surplus Cloud-Mirror pouches, fingers closing around the silk. The fabric was cool and impossibly smooth, like touching liquid mercury frozen mid-flow. He weighed it in his palm, feeling its unnatural lightness—empty space folded into something that defied physics.

Cultivators bind artifacts using blood-essence and Qi. It's essentially a biometric lock. A retina scanner for the soul.

But...

That female personal maid—what was her name again?

Shi Yan's brow furrowed as he searched his memory, but the recall wouldn't come. Too many faces, too many bodies, too much blood in too short a time.

Well, she did wipe the old signatures from these Cloud-Mirror pouches.

He turned the pouch over in his hand, studying the embroidery with the clinical detachment of a soldier examining defused ordnance.

So basically now they are blank slates, kind of like factory reset. A cultivator claims a blank pouch by dropping blood on it, then opens the pocket dimension by pushing Qi into the fabric.

He didn't have Qi, but he had something much heavier: a [Physique: 55] body reinforced by the raw ash of dead cultivators, and an anomaly trait that made him invisible to the Heavens.

He drew the silver jian he had looted from that disciple—the blade singing softly as it cleared the scabbard, catching lantern-light along its mirror-polished edge. Then he turned the blade inward and sliced a shallow, measured cut across his own palm.

The steel bit clean. Blood welled immediately, dark and thick, pooling in the creases of his lifeline. He felt the sting distantly, pain muted by years of conditioning and a body that no longer processed damage the way mortal flesh should.

He closed his bleeding fist around the Cloud-Mirror pouch, feeling his pulse throb against the silk as crimson soaked into the fine weave.

I can use blood to claim it. But since I don't have Qi to open the spatial door... let's see just how fragile spatial geometry is when I pull it apart myself.

Experiment One: Brute Force.

Shi Yan set down the claimed Cloud-Mirror pouch and picked up the first of the scavenger pouches—the cheap gray one with frayed edges and clumsy stitching. Unlike the Cloud-Mirror pouches, the scavenger and Physician Li spatial pouches weren't wiped by Ruo'er. They still held a dead security lock—biometric signatures belonging to corpses rotting somewhere in the Abyss or buried in unmarked graves. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

He gripped the opening with both hands, smearing his hot blood over the drawstring rim. The liquid seeped into the coarse fabric, staining it darker. Since he couldn't push ambient Qi into the threads to expand the dimensional space, he would try to manually separate the seam using absolute physical trauma.

He activated a fraction of his [Black-Iron Body Art].

The change was immediate. His muscles tightened like coiled steel cables, fibers contracting with unnatural density beneath his skin. Veins surfaced along his forearms, thick and corded, pulsing with blood that ran hotter and faster than any cultivator's Qi circulation. His fingers clamped down on the edges of the pouch—ten points of crushing pressure—and he simply pulled.

Tendons stood out like bridge cables. His jaw clenched. His breath hissed between his teeth.

He expected the fabric to tear. It didn't.

Instead, the air around his hands abruptly dropped in temperature—a localized plunge so sudden that frost crystallized on his knuckles. His breath misted white. The lantern flame flickered as heat was violently sucked away.

Then came a sickening pop, like a glass lightbulb imploding underwater—a sound that registered not in his ears but behind his eyes, reverberating through his skull.

It looked like the Daoist array stitched into the fabric forcefully rejected his raw kinetic force. Unable to sustain the topological stress without a Qi stabilizer, the spatial singularity inside collapsed inward on itself.

A localized vacuum violently sucked inward.

Shi Yan jerked his hands back with superhuman speed—reflexes honed by combat and reinforced by unnatural physiology—but the implosion still sheared a micro-thin layer of skin off his fingertips. He felt the cold burn, saw blood bead instantly where epidermis had been peeled away like paint scraped off steel.

The pouch didn't rip—it folded in on itself, collapsing through dimensions that shouldn't exist, shrinking smaller and smaller until it became a microscopic point of light suspended in midair. Then it vanished with a sharp crack like a gunshot in a enclosed space.

Where it had been, a perfect circular bite was missing from the wooden table beneath it—edges smooth as glass, wood grain visible in cross-section, the cut so clean it looked like it had been erased from reality rather than removed.

Shi Yan stared at the smooth missing half-circle of wood, flexing his stinging fingers.

Well... that's fucked up. So brute force basically triggers anti-tamper implosion.

He picked up the last cheap gray pouch belonging to the scavengers, turning it over with more caution now. The fabric felt heavier somehow, as if it knew what had just happened to its twin.

Experiment Two: Corrosive Override.

If pure force was useless, what about chemical or elemental subversion?

He reached into his robe—the fabric rough and sweat-dampened against his skin—and pulled out the small jade vial of Grave-Rot toxin. The vial was cold and smooth, carved from pale green stone veined with darker mineral inclusions. Inside, the toxin glowed faintly, casting sickly phosphorescent light across his palm.

If I can't pick the lock, I'll melt the tumblers.

He carefully dipped a wooden splinter—scavenged from the warped floorboards earlier—into the glowing green toxin. The liquid clung to the wood like honey, viscous and luminous, eating microscopic holes into the splinter even as he withdrew it. He could smell it now—acrid, chemical, wrong—a scent that made his enhanced olfactory nerves recoil instinctively.

He traced the toxin-coated splinter along the runic stitching of the pouch, following the lines of threadwork with surgical precision, mixing the corrosive substance with his own blood still wet on the fabric.

The reaction was instantaneous and violent.

The Qi embedded in the silk recognized the toxin not as a key, but as a fatal virus—a corruption introduced into sacred circuitry. The threads ignited in a flash of blinding white-gold fire that seared afterimages into Shi Yan's retinas.

He barely had time to cross his forearms over his face, muscles bunching reflexively.

FWOOSH.

A column of flame erupted upward like a miniature funeral pyre, scorching the ceiling beams black and filling the room with choking smoke. The heat slammed into him—a wall of superheated air that singed the tips of his hair and left the scent of burnt keratin mixing with ozone and incinerated silk.

The gray pouch was utterly consumed, reduced to a pile of foul-smelling ash on the table that glowed faintly orange at the edges before cooling to black.

He coughed, waving off the smoke with one hand, his newly sensitive nose assaulted by the overlapping reek of ozone, burnt silk, chemical residue, and his own singed hair. The room's already foul atmosphere was now layered with acrid combustion byproducts.

Failed too. So basically, chemical override results in absolute combustion. Asset destroyed.

He picked up the third and final scavenger pouch—no, wait. This one was different.

This one belonged to Physician Li.

The faded blue silk was softer, better made than the scavenger trash, stitched with care by someone who understood the craft. At this time, he hesitated, fingers hovering over the fabric. This was higher quality. Potentially more valuable contents. But he wanted to test his own biology—to see if the fundamental wrongness of his existence could be weaponized.

Caressing his chin—feeling the dried blood still crusting along his jawline—Shi Yan looked at the pouch with narrowed eyes.

Since I am classified as NULL by the Heavens...

He closed his eyes, focusing inward on the strange void where his Dantian should be, the absence that defined him in this world of cultivation.

I am a void. Let's see if the array recognizes negative space.

He intentionally dialed his biological presence down using the lowest threshold of his [Phantom-Ash Veil], feeling the technique activate like shutting down non-essential systems.

His heartbeat slowed to one thud every ten seconds—each pulse deliberate, distant, the rhythm of something hibernating rather than living. His body temperature dropped to a corpse-like chill, skin growing cold and waxy to the touch. His breathing became so shallow it barely stirred the air. He became a living ghost, a man-shaped absence in the world's perception.

He pressed his bloody palm against the fabric, blood still warm despite his dropping core temperature, trying to force the array to passively absorb his vitae without providing a single spark of energy in return.

The pouch soaked up the blood eagerly, fabric darkening as crimson spread through the weave, turning a rusty brown like old iron stains. The threads began to glow faintly—first blue, then shifting through confused spectrum of colors—attempting to read the biometric signature pressed against them.

It searched for a Dantian. It found nothing—a hollow space where spiritual roots should anchor.

It searched for a soul bound to Samsara, tethered to the cycle of reincarnation that governed all beings beneath Heaven. It found a foreign void, something that didn't belong to this world's metaphysical architecture.

It searched for elemental alignment—fire, water, earth, metal, wood, the foundations upon which cultivation was built. It registered absolute zero, a null value that shouldn't exist.

The ancient Daoist array simply couldn't comprehend the paradox holding it.

It began to vibrate intensely in his palm, the silk trembling like a living thing in the grip of seizure. A high-pitched, whining frequency built rapidly—ascending through octaves until it approached the upper threshold of human hearing, a sound that scraped against his enhanced auditory nerves like nails on slate.

"Tsk. Oh, you've got to be kidding me—" Shi Yan threw it.

The pouch hit the far wall with a soft thud.

Then it inverted.

It didn't explode in fire or implode into a vacuum like the previous experiments. Instead, the conflicting paradox broke the dimensional space entirely—reality folding wrong, physics giving up—turning the bag into a crumpled, impossibly heavy lump of solid, lead-like thread that crashed through the already-warped floorboards with a splintering crack and dented the foundation stone below with a muffled thud that shook dust from the ceiling.

Shi Yan stared at the fresh hole in his floor, then at his remaining pouches.

He had officially run out of test objects. The three cheap pouches were gone—imploded, incinerated, and collapsed into a physics-defying paperweight. If he wanted to keep testing, he had to risk the high-quality loot: the Cloud-Mirror pouches or the Vermilion Pavilion silk.

Tsk, so be it.

Experiment Four: Torsional Blood Manipulation.

He refused to be stumped by a mere storage pouch. Shi Yan picked up the first of the silver-cloud pouches—one he'd already claimed with his blood, the silk now faintly stained rusty brown where his palm had gripped it.

Ruo'er had purged it. It was a blank slate waiting for a host, all previous biometric signatures wiped clean like a hard drive zeroed out.

This time, he would attempt a highly intricate, surgical dissection of the spiritual array—or Daoist array, or whatever these cultivation bastards called their metaphysical circuitry.

Pulling a steel sewing needle from his scavenged field-medical gear—a thin sliver of metal still sharp enough to pierce flesh—he prepared to literally "hotwire" the magical fabric.

He used his own thick, clotting blood like copper wire, squeezing fresh drops from his cut palm and carefully dragging the red liquid between the silver embroidered nodes on the pouch. Each cloud-and-mirror motif was actually a circuit point, he realized—spiritual transistors that channeled Qi flow according to geometric principles he only half-understood.

His intent was to physically bridge the silk nodes, creating conductive pathways of blood to short-circuit the "opening" mechanism while entirely bypassing the array's demand for Qi input.

He spent twenty minutes hunched over the table, sweat beading on his forehead despite the room's chill, every muscle in his back and shoulders tensed with concentration. The lantern flame cast his shadow huge and distorted against the wall as he painted a tiny circuit board of blood over the silk—crimson lines connecting silver dots in patterns that felt right on some instinctive level, following logic that was half engineering and half intuition.

His hand was steady. Each droplet placed with micrometer precision. Each line drawn without tremor.

Then... he tapped the final node with the needle tip, completing the circuit.