Chương 70: The Black Mouth (3/3)

Invisible, razor-sharp blades of spatial shrapnel shot outward in a chaotic burst—a violent exhalation of dimensional energy tearing through the stale air of the room. The lantern flame guttered and twisted sideways as if struck by an unseen hand. Shi Yan threw his hands up, instinct honed from a dozen firefights overriding calculation, his [Physique: 55] armored flesh taking the brunt of the impact.

"Tsk!"

The invisible blades tore through the sleeves of his cheap civilian robes, leaving shallow, precisely drawn bleeding cuts across his forearms—clean lines that wept crimson immediately, as though carved by a surgeon's scalpel rather than reality's fabric itself. The spatial edge was impossibly sharp, sharper than any steel he'd ever felt, but it was unable to shear deep enough through his obsidian-dense muscle tissue to actually cripple him or reach the bone.

Still, it stung like a spray of hot glass, each cut burning with an unnatural cold that prickled along his enhanced nerves.

The fourth pouch shredded itself into useless, mundane ribbons, fluttering down to the warped floorboards like the wings of dying moths. The once-pristine silver embroidery unraveled mid-fall, threads catching the dim lantern light before settling in limp, lifeless coils across the scarred wood.

Shi Yan sat back heavily onto the edge of the hard wooden bed, the frame creaking under his weight with a dry, protesting groan. He stared in silence at his bleeding forearms—blood beginning to track in thin rivulets toward his wrists—and the ruined remnants of his spatial experiments scattered across his table: ash piles, ribbons of destroyed silk, the faint scorch marks radiating outward from where the second pouch had ignited.

Out of the twelve pouches he had started with, four operations had completely failed.

The two cheap scavenger bags were destroyed—one imploded, one incinerated. Physician Li's spatial pouch was warped into a solid lump of dead weight somewhere beneath the floorboards, and lastly, one of the pristine Cloud-Mirror bags was shredded into ribbons at his feet. Four total losses. Four expensive, irretrievable failures.

It was exactly like trying to defuse a complex, multi-tiered IED without the wiring schematic—working blind, probing for pressure plates in the dark, hoping muscle memory and logic could compensate for missing intel.

The Daoist technology governing this world was fundamentally, violently exclusionary to a Daoless biology. He simply didn't have the mystical 'thumbs' required to press the scanner. Every attempt to bypass, to exploit, to reverse-engineer had been met with the same result: catastrophic rejection.

"Haaah…." He blew out a long, frustrated breath, shoulders sagging as the tension bled out of his frame. Using his thumb, he wiped a smear of blood off his cheek, the dried crust flaking away and mixing with the fresh crimson from his forearms. His fingertips still stung faintly from the earlier cold-burn, a phantom ache layered beneath the new cuts.

Outside the thin wooden walls of the inn, the late afternoon sky was bruised with the color of spoiled plum—a sickly, mottled violet that bled into gray at the horizon. The relentless, freezing rain of the Outer Wards hammered against the roof tiles in a chaotic, unending rhythm, each impact a wet slap that reverberated through the beams overhead. Water trickled somewhere in the walls, a faint gurgling that spoke of rot and poor construction.

The temperature in the room had plummeted, carrying the faint, sulfurous stench of the distant alchemy furnaces working overtime in the city—a nauseating mix of burnt metal, rotten eggs, and something acidic that clung to the back of his throat.

It had been nearly thirty hours since he dragged himself out of the Black-Ash Marsh.

Between securing the safehouse, organizing the colossal pile of bloody loot, and spending the first half of the day forcibly rewriting his cranial nerves to acquire the [Acoustic-Blood Tracker], exhaustion was finally beginning to pool behind his eyes—a dull, leaden weight pressing against the back of his skull. His body was still clammy beneath the sweat-dampened robe, the fabric clinging uncomfortably to his shoulders and lower back.

Shi Yan let his head fall back against the rough wooden wall, an expression of profound, weary detachment settling over his face. He watched a bead of rainwater leak through a crack in the ceiling and track down the yellowed plaster, leaving a dark, glistening trail before it dripped onto the floorboards with a soft plink.

Fine. R&D phase concluded. Theoretical limits established.

He sighed, the sound barely audible over the rain, accepting the loss with the same flat pragmatism he'd applied to failed ops in his previous life. Adjust. Adapt. Move forward.

It wasn't a matter of pride.

He just hadn't wanted to rely too heavily on the System for basic utility functions if he could bio-hack them himself. Every expenditure of Dao Embers felt like burning through limited ammunition in hostile territory—necessary sometimes, but never without cost. Relying purely on the System for everything was an easy way to bleed his wallet dry and build a crippling dependency on an interface he still barely understood.

He had hoped his raw stats and terrestrial logic could bridge the gap, that sheer physicality and pattern recognition could brute-force a solution. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Who knew the result would actually be like this…

Four destroyed artifacts. Several bleeding cuts. Zero structural successes.

That was simply the cost of doing tactical business in an unknown theater of war. You probe. You test. You lose assets. You learn.

He looked at the surviving eight pouches sitting quietly on the desk—six silver-embroidered Cloud-Mirror spatial pouches, their pristine silk still gleaming faintly in the lantern light, and two small silken pouches embroidered with the Chamber's ashen crest: the Vermilion Pavilion bags, their dark red fabric heavier than it should be, almost pulsing with latent enchantment.

Then his gaze shifted to the empty air in front of him. A single, focused thought summoned it.

The hovering, transparent blue screen flared to life at the edge of his vision, its pale glow reflected faintly in the sheen of sweat on his brow.

It was his only hope, the absolute skeleton key to his impossible existence in this world. With a weary face—jawline still crusted with dried blood, singed hair tips framing his expression—he stared at the digital glow.

System.

He shifted his weight, sitting upright on the edge of the bed. The frame creaked again. He reached out and picked up one of the pristine Cloud-Mirror pouches, clutching the immaculate silver-threaded silk in his bloodied fist. The fabric was cool to the touch, impossibly smooth, almost liquid in texture. Blood from his fresh cuts smeared faintly across the embroidery.

He didn't misunderstand the mechanics.

He knew perfectly well that the Deaconess's attendant had already wiped the karmic and blood signatures from these specific pouches. In modern terms, she had factory-reset the devices. There were no passwords on them. No prior user authentication lingering in the arrays. They were blank slates.

But placing a blank, factory-reset phone in the hands of a man who produces no electricity still leaves him with a hunk of useless glass.

The pouch was clear, but its fundamental 'operating system' still rigidly demanded Qi to boot up and open the dimensional space. Qi was the power source, the electric current, the biometric key all rolled into one. Without it, the array remained dormant, inert, as dead as a corpse.

He couldn't provide the electricity. So he needed the System to completely tear out the battery pack and wire it to run on a combustion engine.

Use my Anomaly trait.

Isolate whatever Daoist spatial lock is built into the baseline fabric of this pouch, and burn it out. I don't care about the original array. I don't care about preserving its elegance or respecting its craftsmanship.

Strip the Qi requirement entirely. Bind the pocket dimension exclusively to my unique physical pulse, my body heat, and my blood.

Make it mine.

The blue text scrolled rapidly across his retina, each line appearing with a faint flicker.

[System Calculation Request: Confirmed.] [Scanning Artifact: Dimensional Silk Pouch (Medium Ash-Grade)] [Warning: Forcibly severing an inherent Daoist Spatial Array without collapsing the dimensional pocket requires severe karmic decoupling and structural quarantine.] [Cost: -5, 000 Dao Embers.] [Confirm?] Medium Ash-grade, huh? Even a spatial pouch counted as an artifact… right, I forgot about these artifact grades.

He began massaging his temple with two fingers, applying slow, circular pressure as if he could physically squeeze the tension out of his skull. Perhaps after this, he would try to acquire more information about them—what the grades meant, what thresholds separated trash from treasure, how the cultivation world's economy actually functioned.

For now…

Looking at the cost, another vein popped in his neck and temple, a visible throb just beneath the skin. Five thousand. That was the exact payout of a Tier-1 Boss like the Abyssal Overseer—a creature that had nearly killed him, that had required every ounce of cunning and brutality he possessed to bring down. It was a vicious overhead cost just for a backpack, for something as mundane as portable storage.

Damn, that's expensive.

But…

He exhaled slowly through his nose, jaw tightening.

Carrying his wealth in a physical, flammable, easily stolen beast-hide bag into a Shattered Realm was a guaranteed death sentence. One ambush. One stray flame technique. One clever thief. Everything gone.

Shi Yan didn't blink.

Confirm.

This time, he was glaring at the pouch, pupils dilated and focused, trying to capture how the System actually used his valuable 5k [Dao Embers]. He wanted to see the mechanism, to understand the process, to learn if there was any pattern he could replicate or exploit in the future.

The next moment, under his watchful eyes, a sudden freezing cold radiated violently from the silk pouch in his hand. It wasn't gradual—it was instant, like plunging his fist into ice water. Frost crystallized along his knuckles in thin, white lacework. The orthodox silver threading on the fabric—the very lines of magic that had previously shredded his skin—instantly blackened, turning an ashen, dead gray as though drained of life, of purpose, of divinity.

The transformation spread outward from where his blood-slicked palm gripped the pouch, threading through the embroidery like corruption spreading through veins. The silver dulled. The glow died. The faint spiritual hum that had resonated from the pouch—barely perceptible even to his enhanced hearing—cut off abruptly, leaving only silence.

It was as if the System had reached its digital hands into the real world and violently strangled the artifact's original alignment, throttling it until it ceased to resist. The pouch readily absorbed the fresh blood on Shi Yan's palm, drinking in his Daoless, void-like signature like a dry sponge starved for moisture. The fabric warmed slightly where his blood soaked in, a faint pulse traveling through the threads.

[Artifact Hijacked. Spatial Matrix physically decoupled from Heaven's Law.] [Inventory Array bio-locked to Host Vessel.] [Current Dao Embers: 29, 275 Dao Embers] Shi Yan wiped his palm against his trousers, smearing a dark streak of blood across the coarse fabric. The micro-cuts on his arm were already itching as they scabbed over, his high Physique accelerating his platelet response—skin knitting together faster than any mortal's, the shallow wounds sealing themselves with thin crusts of dried crimson.

He looked at the blackened pouch, turning it over slowly in his hands. The once-pristine silk now resembled something burned, something tainted. The silver embroidery had become a dull, lifeless gray-black, like ash left too long in a dead fire. It no longer looked like a treasure. It looked like something scavenged from a corpse.

He let his thumb rest naturally against the drawstring opening, simply allowing his baseline 37-degree Celsius body heat, his unique sweat signature, and his resting pulse rate to press against the fabric. No conscious thought. No effort. Just contact.

Pop.

The sound was soft, almost anticlimactic—like the release of a vacuum seal on a jar.

Shi Yan paused. His eyes narrowed in analytical curiosity, the exhaustion momentarily forgotten as his mind shifted into assessment mode.

There was no majestic flash of Daoist light. There was no thunderous resonance of spiritual energy, nor the scent of burning incense that usually accompanied high-tier cultivator magic. No shimmering aura. No celestial chime. No ripple of Heaven's acknowledgment.

The System had simply bypassed tens of thousands of years of mystic refinement in an instant. It didn't fight the lock; it simply deleted the lock's existence, erased it from reality as cleanly as wiping data from a hard drive. The mouth of the pouch parted effortlessly, the drawstring loosening without resistance, exactly like unzipping a normal nylon bag.

That it?

He blinked, almost disappointed by the mundane simplicity.

But looking inside, peering past the blackened rim of the opening, he didn't see the bottom of the silk fabric. He didn't see stitching or lining or the flat interior of a normal pouch.

He saw a localized, pitch-black vacuum of folded space—an impossible depth, a lightless void that seemed to extend far beyond the physical dimensions of the object in his hand.