Chương 80: A Body That Shouldn’t Exist (1/3) [Bonus 6/6]

Many of the surrounding mercenaries let out silent breaths, the sound escaping them like wind through cracked shutters. Their weathered faces turned toward Shi Yan, eyes gleaming with unconcealed astonishment beneath the flickering orange light of the forge. Admiration softened the hard lines around their mouths, momentarily displacing the ever-present wariness that marked men who lived by the blade.

Had it been some arrogant young master—one of those silk-robed fools who mistook their sect's reputation for personal strength—he would already have struck out in fury, heedless of consequence or collateral damage. Yet despite the young looks, this young man withdrew as calmly as still water, neither losing face nor seeking needless strife. His movements carried the economy of someone who had calculated the cost and found the price wanting.

"That... scared me..." one of them couldn't help but murmur, his voice barely audible above the rhythmic hammer-strikes echoing through the space. The man's knuckles, still pale from gripping his saber hilt too tightly, slowly regained their color.

Who knew if two cultivators, either Qi or body refining, fought, the smithy would probably close down—either from structural damage or the Iron-Blood Prefecture's subsequent investigation. And they, who made their living hunting in the treacherous wilderness beyond the city walls, would be left with rusty or broken weapons, unable to afford replacements or the weeks of waiting for new orders to be filled.

On the other hand, the Body Cultivator gave him a slow nod of acknowledgment, the gesture carrying the weight of respect between those who understood restraint. The dark tattoos across his bare chest—mountain tigers mid-hunt—seemed to shift in the firelight as his shoulders relaxed fractionally. Then he returned his attention to the counter, dismissing the moment as concluded.

As he waited behind him, Shi Yan narrowed his eyes beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat's brim.

The ambient noise of the forge—the roaring fires belching heat through open furnace doors, the clanging hammers ringing against hot metal in overlapping rhythms, the hoarse shouts of apprentices coordinating their work—was deafening. The air itself seemed to vibrate with industrial violence, thick with smoke and the acrid bite of scorched iron.

Hmm? What is this... sound?

Yet beneath it all, underneath the chaotic din of the crowd and the mechanical roar of the bellows pumping like the lungs of some great beast, Shi Yan caught a faint, anomalous rhythm. It threaded through the cacophony like a single wrong note in an otherwise familiar song.

It was a bizarre, heavy vibration resonating through the stone floor beneath his boots, completely out of sync with the frantic energy of the surroundings. The sensation traveled up through the soles of his feet, too regular to be coincidence, too powerful to be ambient forge noise.

Was that... a heartbeat?

He frowned beneath his bamboo hat, the faint scar at the corner of his mouth pulling slightly with the expression.

He focused his natural hearing, trying to isolate the sound, filtering through layers of noise—the hiss of water meeting hot metal, the scrape of coal being shoveled, the grunting breaths of laborers. But it was too buried beneath the mechanical noise of the bellows, too diffuse among the hammer-strikes and the crackling roar of the central smelting trough.

Then what if I use this?

If his base [Physique: 55] couldn't isolate the anomaly through conventional senses, then he would use the tools the System had given him—whether he'd wanted them or not. He reached up with calculated subtlety, pressing a specific point at the base of his skull with two fingers. The exact nerve cluster the System had violently mutated the night before responded immediately, sending a cold tingle down his spine. The memory of that excruciating modification was still fresh enough to make his jaw tighten.

Shi Yan quietly triggered his [Acoustic-Blood Tracker].

He didn't dial it to maximum sensitivity, which would have overloaded his brain with the frantic heartbeats of a hundred terrified mortals—their pulses hammering like panicked rabbits, their fear a biological storm that would drown out everything useful. He kept the aperture narrow, tuning the biological sonar directly onto the massive man standing less than two feet in front of him, refining the focus until the rest of the world's cardiovascular symphony faded to background static.

A subtle pulse swept outward from his modified senses, invisible and silent, tracing the vascular network of the Body Cultivator like fingers following the roots of an ancient tree.

Thump... thump... thump...

The heartbeat was slow—perhaps forty beats per minute, the rhythm of something conserving power rather than expending it.

But each beat drove blood through the man's body with frightening force, like a heavy war drum struck in an empty valley, the sound resonating not just through flesh but through bone and sinew, through the very foundation of the man's forged physiology. The pressure wave from each contraction was powerful enough to create micro-vibrations in the stone floor. It was nothing like the frantic flutter of frightened mortals, whose hearts raced at seventy, eighty, ninety beats when cultivators drew near.

It was the pulse of a forged body, dense and violent, optimized for explosive power rather than endurance.

Hooh? Is this why they are called Body Cultivators?

Shi Yan narrowed his eyes further, his analytical mind cataloging the data with the cold precision of someone trained to assess enemy capabilities.

From the scattered memories left by the original owner of this body—fragments that surfaced like debris from a shipwreck, disjointed and incomplete—Qi Cultivators were those who gathered the spiritual breaths of Heaven and Earth, called Qi into their meridians through breathing techniques and meditation, stored it in the dantian like oil in a lamp, and refined it through cyclical circulation until it grew potent enough to be weaponized.

By using Qi as fuel, and through the connection of dantian and meridians—pathways the body cultivated over years of disciplined practice—they could channel Sword Qi or various techniques, including their faint Qi barrier that shimmered like heat haze when struck, turning aside mundane blades and dulling spiritual attacks.

But it looked like Body Refinement Cultivators were different.

Without Qi to shield them, many of their fleshly bodies were no sturdier than any common man's in their initial stages. A knife to the throat would kill them just as dead as any mortal hunter. Instead, they did not borrow the strength of Heaven, did not petition the world's spiritual energy for power. They smelted themselves. That sound... so grand, huh. Like the forge around them, they became both the ore and the smith.

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They hammered blood into force, beating it through their veins until it grew thick and potent as liquid steel. They refined marrow into fuel, a furnace burning within their bones. They twisted sinew into chains of power, braiding muscle fibers until they could tear apart what Qi cultivators needed techniques to destroy, until the body itself became furnace, cauldron, and weapon—a complete system that required no external energy source, only constant, brutal refinement.

So, it's called Blood Force?

The man before him carried that kind of weight, that self-contained power.

His Blood Force rolled faintly from him, not visible to the naked eye like Qi, but oppressive as a buried volcano—a heat that wasn't temperature but pressure, the sense of enormous kinetic potential held barely in check. The air around him felt thicker, heavier, as though his presence increased the local gravity.

Shi Yan, however, had no such thing.

No Blood Force refined through years of body tempering. No true spiritual root to draw Heaven's Qi into his meridians. No dantian as foundation, no golden core to aspire toward, no nascent soul waiting to be born from cultivation's patient labor.

He was a Daoless aberration, a contradiction that should not exist in this world's metaphysical framework.

The host body's world might interpret his [Sieve Effect]—that violent leakage of power, that steaming vent of heat in battle when his body temperature spiked beyond human norms—as the sign of a Qi Deviation in a cultivator who failed to endure tribulation, their foundation cracked and their energy hemorrhaging uncontrollably. Or else as a cultivator burning life force for temporary strength, sacrificing decades of lifespan for a few moments of transcendent power, the desperate gambit of the doomed.

But Shi Yan knew the truth, cold and mechanical as the System itself.

He was not refining blood in any mystical sense, not tempering his body through meditation and herbal baths and gradual enlightenment.

He was being rebuilt, one cell at a time, according to specifications he'd never agreed to.

When his [Physique] reached 55, it did not signify some enlightened threshold of fleshly tempering, some barrier broken through insight and perseverance.

It meant the System had coldly and precisely altered his body at the cellular level—rewritten genetic code, compacted his bones until they had the density of composite materials, strengthened tissue with fibrous structures that didn't exist in nature, reinforced neural conduction pathways so signals traveled faster and carried more data, and optimized him into something closer to a weapon than a man. Each point was a surgery without anesthesia, performed by invisible hands.

A machine wearing skin, running calculations even when he tried to sleep.

We are different, but outwardly look the same, Shi Yan concluded, watching the Body Cultivator's broad back with the detachment of someone examining a different species—but just then—

"You there!" the Body Cultivator barked, his voice cutting through the forge noise with startling clarity. He pointed at one of the senior apprentices stationed at the front counter, a wiry man with soot permanently stained into the creases of his knuckles.

"Three days ago, I ordered a left-arm gauntlet. Has the binding been completed?"

"Yes! Yes, Master Zhao!" the apprentice replied hurriedly over the thunder of the forge, his words tumbling over each other in his eagerness not to offend. He crouched beneath a wooden bench scarred with burn marks and old blade-gouges, his shoulders disappearing from view. Grunting with effort, he hauled out a massive iron gauntlet bristling with savage spikes, each one filed to a wicked point. The thing must have weighed thirty pounds at least, its articulated fingers thick as a child's wrist.

"Forged from mountain-iron exactly as instructed, Master Zhao," the apprentice continued, sweat beading on his temples despite the cool drizzle that had fallen earlier.

"No spiritual runes inscribed, no formation arrays etched into the plates, no need to channel Qi at all—only constant maintenance with oil and a whetstone for the spikes. Only pure weight and killing force, as you specified."

"Good." Master Zhao's scarred hand reached out, swallowing the apprentice's grip as he took the gauntlet.

He tossed a thick leather pouch onto the counter with his other hand, the impact sending up a small puff of coal dust from the scarred wood.

Silver clinked heavily within, the sound distinct even amid the ambient noise—enough to feed a mortal family for half a year, casually spent on a single piece of equipment.

Taking up the gauntlet with one hand, Master Zhao tested its heft as casually as though lifting a bowl, rotating his wrist to feel the weight distribution. The massive piece of metalwork barely seemed to burden him. His forearm muscles, thick as ship's cables beneath the dark tiger tattoos, flexed once and went still.

"Tonight I go into the eastern bogs," he said, his voice carrying the flat certainty of someone who had already accepted whatever outcome awaited.

"A Phantom-Rank beast lurks there, marked by three hunters who didn't return. Ordinary blades will break against its hide—steel folds like silk against its scales. If I cannot split its skull with this, I will at least smash its jaw to pieces and bleed it slow."

Shi Yan listened without expression, his face a careful mask beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat, but his mind caught something like a hook snagging fabric.

I've been too ignorant before, but they mentioned Phantom Rank? Is that above Beast King rank?

As far as he remembered from Su Yin's words—delivered in that clinical tone she used when explaining the world's dangers—Beast King was basically a peak Tier 1 demonic beast, an apex predator capable of slaughtering entire hunting parties, requiring coordinated sect responses to bring down safely. It's just that these cultivators used a strange kind of name for them, regional terminology or perhaps sect-specific classifications.

Then what about Phantom Rank?

The name implied something beyond the physical, perhaps creatures that had begun to touch the threshold of true spiritual evolution. But that was another matter, another piece of information to be cataloged and investigated when opportunity permitted.

On the other hand, Master Zhao fastened the heavy gauntlet onto his forearm with practiced efficiency, threading leather straps through iron loops and pulling them tight with his teeth. The spikes gleamed dully in the forge light, still faintly warm from their final tempering. He flexed his fingers once, testing the articulation, then turned to leave with the confident stride of someone walking toward violence with open eyes.

As he passed Shi Yan, he offered him a respectful nod, the gesture brief but genuine—warrior to warrior, cultivator to cultivator.

Shi Yan did not return it. He merely stepped forward, his boots scraping softly against the packed earth and coal dust, his presence filling the space Master Zhao had vacated. Social niceties were currency he couldn't afford to spend carelessly.

Only then did he notice that the apprentices, when faced with anything more difficult than simple repairs or standard orders, kept glancing inward toward the heart of the workshop. Their eyes flickered toward the interior like compass needles finding north, seeking approval or instruction they dared not voice directly.

There, before an enormous anvil warped by decades of heat—its surface no longer flat but rippled like frozen water, discolored by a thousand thousand impacts—stood the forge master himself.

He was a giant of a man, broad and square as a fortress wall, his shoulders wide enough to block the light from the furnace behind him. His scalp was bare and gleaming with sweat that ran in rivulets down the deep crevices of old burn scars, and what little hair remained clung to the sides of his head in thin gray wisps, plastered down by moisture and heat.

Pale burn scars crossed his head, shoulders, and torso in dense layers—a topographic map of decades spent too close to molten metal and explosive furnace accidents. The tissue was raised and twisted, some scars so old they'd faded to silver, others still pink and angry. The skin of his body had taken on a dark, mottled cast from years of smoke and heat exposure, stained almost like leather left too long in tannin solution.

The upper half of his left ear was gone, sheared away cleanly—likely by flying shrapnel from a failed casting. One eye lay hidden beneath a thick leather patch, the strap cutting across his scarred scalp and vanishing into the remaining hair above his temple. The visible eye, however, was sharp and clear, a disconcerting pale gray that seemed to see more than it should.

Unlike what Shi Yan had thought, this man possessed no visible trace of emitted Qi, no spiritual pressure radiating from his frame, nor the usual heat signature that Qi Cultivators generated when they circulated energy through their meridians.

"Interesting..." This made Shi Yan silent, his analytical processes running through possibilities. To treat even a cultivator with such politeness, to command respect from someone like Master Zhao who clearly didn't bow easily—did he have backing? Perhaps a hidden cultivation base he'd deliberately suppressed? Or connections to a major sect that offered protection in exchange for exclusive craftsmanship?

But regardless of political considerations, he was terrifyingly mortal in the raw biological sense.

With one hand, this man swung a hammer heavy enough to make ordinary men stagger under its weight—the head alone probably forty pounds of forge-hardened steel, the haft thick as a woman's wrist. It crashed down upon a glowing bar of steel with such exact and brutal force that showers of sparks burst outward across the packed earth like golden rain, each ember tracing a brief arc before winking out.

CLANG.

The sound rang sharp and true, the note of properly tempered metal meeting metal, a tone that carried all the way to the avenue outside.

CLANG.

Shi Yan stepped out from the line and walked toward the anvil, heedless of the furnace heat that washed over him in waves, the temperature gradient steep enough that he could feel it pressing against his face like a physical thing. Sweat began to bead along his collar beneath the dark cloak.

CLANG.

The blacksmith still did not look up, his attention absolute. Another heavy hammer strike fell, the impact precisely angled, sending a dazzling shower of yellow-hot sparks cascading over his thick leather apron. The garment was burned through in dozens of places, patched with newer leather in ragged squares, the accumulated history of close calls and careless moments.

"If a respectable Venerable seeks some elegant flying sword, or wants to inscribe spiritual runes into his weapons or equipment," the massive, scarred man said, his voice as rough as grinding gravel and rusted iron dragged over stone, each word scraped from a throat that had breathed too much smoke, "then he has come to the wrong place. This old man does not forge ornaments. Just pure, crude mortal works."

His visible eye never left the glowing metal, tracking minute changes in color that indicated precise temperature.

"I am not here for ornaments," Shi Yan said.