Chương 75: The First Bite (2/3) [Bonus 1/6]

"Also, I don't—" Shi Yan began, the words forming at the back of his throat, but they died there, unspoken. His dark eyes swept across the hunched figure before him, then shifted to the girl half-hidden behind her father's shoulder. The rain drummed steadily against the sagging canvas overhead, each droplet adding its weight to the pooled water that threatened to spill over at any moment.

They are natives, right? Perhaps...

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. The faint line of an old scar at the corner of his mouth pulled slightly as he considered the pair. Old Ma's weathered hands still trembled faintly at his sides, knuckles white where they gripped the fabric of his sodden trousers.

"Information," he said at last, his voice dropping to a low rumble that barely rose above the patter of rain on canvas and stone. The word carried no farther than the crooked bamboo frame of the stall itself.

"I seek a blacksmith. Not the Flesh-Forge Pavilion, and not one of those who rely on silk-work or artifact craft."

Old Ma blinked, his rheumy eyes widening slightly. Rain dripped from the edge of the awning behind him, each droplet striking the mud with a soft plip-plip-plip. Confusion creased the deep lines of his weathered face, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening like cracks in old leather.

"Not a forge of artifacts?" His voice wavered, thin and uncertain. He lifted one gnarled hand halfway, as though to gesture, then thought better of it and lowered it again.

"But an honored expert would surely require a weapon or armor suited for Qi..."

"I need heavy armor of plain workmanship," Shi Yan cut in, his tone flat and matter-of-fact, carrying the same clipped efficiency he'd once used when requisitioning gear from a quartermaster.

"Steel. Layered plates. Hardened beast hide. Thick inner padding. Something made to withstand direct impact." He paused, letting the weight of each word settle.

"Where in the Outer Wards is such work done?"

Old Ma blinked again, slower this time. His head tilted to one side like a puzzled sparrow, and his free hand rose to scratch at the back of his scalp, fingers working through thinning hair plastered flat by the damp air. A deep frown carved itself across his brow, pulling his weathered features into a mask of concentration. His lips moved soundlessly, as though sorting through decades of memory stored in the crooked alleys and smoke-choked quarters of this district.

Then—there. A glint flashed in his watery gaze, bright and sudden as a struck flint.

"Ah!" The sound escaped him like a breath he'd been holding. His posture straightened slightly, though his head remained respectfully bowed.

"Then my lord seeks the Iron-Ash Furnaces, near the southern aqueduct. Mercenary companies and body-refinement cultivators often purchase gear there."

He gestured with one age-spotted hand, the motion careful and deliberate, pointing southward past the sagging frame of his stall. His voice gained a thread of confidence, the kind that came from knowledge hard-won through years of survival in these mud-soaked streets.

"My lord need only follow this road south until he sees a forge bearing the sign of a shattered anvil. The smith there is rough-tongued, and he is just a mortal like us—but when it comes to common steel, no one in the Outer Wards surpasses him."

Exactly what I need.

Shi Yan's expression didn't shift, but something inside his chest loosened—a knot of tension he hadn't realized was there. He gave a single nod, the brim of his bamboo hat dipping once in acknowledgment. Rain slid from its edge in a thin stream, splashing against the collar of his oiled cloak.

Without another word, he turned on his heel. His boots squelched through the black mire as he stepped back into the muddy flow of the street, leaving deep impressions that filled slowly with murky water. The cold air wrapped around him again, and the mist curled in to reclaim the space he'd occupied.

Soon, his broad-shouldered figure was completely swallowed by the morning haze and the chaotic tide of moving bodies—ragged merchants hauling bundled goods, laborers bent under the weight of soaked hemp sacks, beggars pressed against crumbling walls. All of it blurred together into a gray, shapeless mass, leaving behind only the deeply shaken father and daughter standing beneath the dripping awning of their crooked stall.

Old Ma stood motionless for a long moment, staring at the place where the cultivator had vanished. His chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths. Beside him, Xiao Lin pressed her mud-streaked hands together as though in prayer, her thin shoulders still trembling beneath her threadbare jacket.

…

But barely three streets down from Old Ma's stall, Shi Yan's heavy footsteps slowed, the rhythm breaking. Then they halted completely.

He stood in the middle of the road, rainwater pooling around the soles of his boots, mist clinging to the folds of his cloak. His head turned slightly, as though he'd heard something—or smelled it.

Wh... what is that smell?

A sudden gust of wind rolled out from an adjacent alleyway, warm and rich and utterly out of place in the cold, damp morning. It struck him like a physical thing, bypassing every layer of tactical conditioning, every wall he'd built around himself since waking in this cursed world. It went straight to the deepest, most terrestrial part of his brain—the part that remembered being human.

It was the smell of woodsmoke and charred animal fat, of cracked peppercorns sizzling in hot oil, of boiling ginger root and caramelized meat drippings hissing against open flame.

Shi Yan's jaw clenched. His scarred hand tightened into a fist at his side, knuckles going white.

He turned his head toward the source. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Between two soot-darkened rows of half-collapsed dwellings—walls cracked and leaning, their plaster peeling away in great weeping patches—stood a broad street-side meat stall.

A patched oilcloth canopy had been stretched above it, low and uneven, its sagging folds gathering the chill drizzle of early morning. The fabric was stained in overlapping rings of grease and smoke, mottled brown and gray, and rainwater beaded along the creases before dripping in irregular streams onto the packed earth below.

Beneath the awning, three iron braziers burned with fierce red flame. The coals glowed like molten rubies, throwing waves of shimmering heat into the cold air. Whole sides of beast-meat—thick slabs of marbled flesh still clinging to massive ribs—turned slowly over the fire on crude iron spits. Fat rendered from the meat in slow, glistening rivulets, dripping down into the coals with sharp, violent hisses.

Each drop sent up a fresh plume of rich, savory smoke that coiled upward and outward, thickening the air with the scent of char and spice.

A food stall...

Shi Yan's throat worked. He swallowed, though his mouth had gone dry.

The place was crowded from end to end, packed tightly with mortals. Laborers with dirt-caked hands and bent backs. Dock workers reeking of fish brine and sweat. Ragged merchants clutching their last few copper coins. Not one cultivator could be seen among the long, grease-dark benches. Every seat was taken. Men hunched over chipped clay bowls, tearing into strips of roasted meat with their teeth, grease shining on their chins and fingers.

A longing gaze flashed in his eyes, sharp and involuntary, before he could suppress it.

How long has it been?

The thought rose unbidden, wrapped in a bitter edge he couldn't quite bury.

Based on his understanding of the original host's memories—those fragmented, half-faded impressions that sometimes surfaced like ghosts—in this world, or in most xianxia worlds, once a person stepped into the Tier-1 Ash-Marrow Realm and learned to circulate Qi, the food of the mundane world became a thing of filth.

Common grain and butchered flesh were laden with turbid impurities, the sort that muddled the meridians and hindered one's path toward immortality. To consume such things was to poison one's cultivation, to drag one's spirit back down into the mire of mortality.

Upon entering Tier-2 and higher, many simply practiced Bigu—the sacred art of severing themselves from the need for mortal sustenance, living instead upon the spiritual breath of heaven and earth, or on carefully refined essence pills distilled from rare herbs and spirit beast cores.

As for him?

Of course, he was daoless, so he needed to eat, but...

Shi Yan stood in the drifting mist and watched the fire in silence. His breath misted faintly in the cold air. The flames danced, casting flickering shadows across the soot-stained walls.

Strictly speaking, he had no true need to eat.

During these first brutal days in this damned world, his body had long since ceased to behave like that of an ordinary man. Whenever his sieve-like physique bled away stamina, whenever wounds tore him down to the edge of collapse, consuming [Dao Embers] was enough to keep him moving. The System's cold, efficient logic sustained his flesh with the same indifference it showed to everything else.

As long as he had resources, starvation was little more than a theory.

But the mind did not obey reason so easily.

His stomach felt hollow. Not the sharp, clawing pain of true hunger—he'd felt that before, in the field, on long missions when resupply didn't come—but something softer and worse. An ache born from old human habit. The ghost of appetite. The memory of sitting down to a meal and feeling, for just a moment, like a man instead of a weapon.

He had buried too much of himself beneath cold military instinct just to crawl alive through the Charnel Abyss and carve a road out of the Black-Ash Marsh. He'd killed. He'd bled. He'd stood knee-deep in corpse-mud and kept moving because stopping meant dying.

Yet now, standing before this shabby stall with the smell of roasting meat curling through the rain-soaked air, he was reminded with cruel clarity of what he had lost.

Let's just eat first.

He gulped, his throat bobbing once. Then he stepped forward, boots crunching against loose gravel, and passed beneath the drooping awning.

…

Inside, the air was thick—oppressively so. Heat, smoke, and the smell of grease pressed in from all sides like a living thing. Voices overlapped in noisy disorder, a cacophony of rough laughter, muttered complaints, the clatter of wooden bowls against scarred tables, the scrape of benches dragged across packed earth.

At a nearby table sat several mortal mercenaries, their bodies marked by the hard edges of a violent trade.

One of them—a weathered man with a single eye, the other socket a puckered scar half-hidden beneath a strip of stained cloth tied around his head—tore off a piece of flatbread with his teeth. He chewed slowly, methodically, then swallowed and muttered around the mouthful, "Brother, remember this well: if the Flesh-Forge Pavilion comes seeking guards again, refuse them, even if you have to starve."

He jabbed a finger at the man across from him for emphasis, his voice low and bitter.

"Yesterday I escorted one of their alchemists through the southern bog. That bastard made us haul a two-hundred-pound iron cauldron through acid mire up to the waist." His scarred face twisted with disgust, lips curling back from yellowed teeth.

"In the end, he tossed us a handful of copper and wouldn't even spare a pinch of healing pill after a Marsh-Leech tore through Lao Er's leg. We had to cauterize it ourselves with a hot blade."

His companion—a younger man missing two fingers from his left hand, the stumps healed over into rough, puckered flesh—let out a cold laugh. It was a harsh, joyless sound, more exhale than mirth. He lifted a clay cup to his lips and drank deeply before setting it down with a dull thunk.

"At least he paid," he said, his voice flat and tired.

"These days, even copper is hard to earn. Better that than creeping around the northern ridge." His expression darkened, the lines around his mouth deepening.

"The Cloud-Mirror Sect has gone mad."

The one-eyed mercenary paused, bread in hand, his single eye narrowing.

"They're still sealing the place?"

"Sealing?" The younger man leaned in, lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper barely audible over the crackling braziers. His gaze darted left and right, checking for eavesdroppers.

"It's worse than that. I heard it from an information peddler in the eastern quarter—paid him three coppers for it, too."

He paused, as though weighing whether to continue. Then he did, his voice dropping even lower.

"Last night a band of rogue cultivators tried to slip through a gap in the valley to gather wild ginseng. The Cloud-Mirror disciples did not even ask a question." His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the stubble on his cheek.

"They unleashed their sword art on the spot and ground every one of them into blood mist. Not a scrap left. Not even bones."

His voice took on a grim finality.

"Something terrible has happened out there. The Sect Master means to bury it by burying everyone who saw too much."

Beneath the bamboo hat, Shi Yan's expression did not change. But his eyes narrowed—just slightly, the dark irises hardening like chips of flint.

Cloud-Mirror Sect again? How many times had he heard that name today?

Then he took another step deeper into the stall, his boots heavy against the packed earth.

At once, the atmosphere changed.

The oppressive force of his fake Marrow-Rot Stage aura rolled over the room like a heavy, invisible wave. It was not truly his own power—he had none—but under the cover of [Phantom-Ash Veil], it was more than enough. The cold, corpse-like spiritual pressure radiated outward from his body in slow, suffocating ripples, and the air itself seemed to grow heavier, thicker, harder to breathe.

The chatter in the stall vanished.

Not gradually. Not awkwardly.

It was as though an unseen hand had closed around every throat at once.

Wooden spoons stopped halfway to waiting mouths, broth dripping back into bowls in silent streams. Bowls were set down with soft, hurried taps—ceramic against wood, careful and deliberate, as though even the sound of impact might draw unwanted attention.

At the nearby table, the mercenaries froze where they sat. The one-eyed man's hand hovered above his bread, fingers stiff. The younger one's cup tilted in his grip, forgotten.

Then, with painstaking care—the kind of care reserved for defusing a trap—they shifted their hands away from the sabers resting against the bench beside them. Slowly, deliberately, they placed their palms flat upon the table, fingers spread wide, showing clearly that they had no intention of offending a cultivator.

Behind the braziers, the stall owner—a squat, barrel-chested man with a grease-stained apron tied around his thick waist—was stirring a huge iron pot of bone broth. Steam rose from the surface in thick, roiling clouds, carrying the scent of marrow and herbs.

He felt the spiritual pressure descend like a stone dropped into still water, and he trembled at once. The ladle slipped from his hand, fingers going nerveless, and it fell into the pot with a dull splash. Hot broth splattered across his forearm, but he didn't even flinch.

Slowly, as though moving through deep water, he turned.

The moment his gaze landed on Shi Yan's tall, broad-shouldered figure in the waxed-canvas cloak—rain still dripping from the brim of his bamboo hat, mist clinging to the folds of oiled fabric—the blood drained from his face. His weathered skin went from ruddy bronze to a pale, waxy gray in the span of a single breath.

"G-greetings, Great Venerable!" the stall owner choked out, his voice high and strained, barely more than a wheeze. His knees buckled slightly, legs trembling beneath him, looking as though he were a second away from plunging face-first into the mud just as Old Ma had.

"M-may... did this lowly one's smoke foul your divine robes as you walked past?" The words tumbled out in a desperate rush, tripping over each other.

"I... I am a worthless insect! Please, please spare my miserable stall!"