The imposing, iron-studded city gates of Black Mist City finally came fully into view, casting long, stark shadows across the packed earth.
For the first time since his frantic departure from the bloody clearing in Moonleaf Valley, Shen Jietian felt the heavy, suffocating knot of dread in his chest loosen slightly.
He was finally, truly safe.
The familiar, weather-beaten grey stone walls stood proudly beneath the deep crimson and gold hues of the setting sun, a massive bulwark separating the brutal lawlessness of the wilderness from localized civilization.
All around him, ordinary cultivators and traveling merchants queued up, entering and exiting through the reinforced checkpoints as life continued its mundane, uninterrupted rhythm.
Looking at the indifferent faces of the crowd, a wave of deep cynicism washed over Shen Jietian’s mind.
Nobody in this bustling throng had any inkling of how incredibly close he had come to being torn to shreds by an apex predator.
Nobody knew, and truth be told, nobody cared.
In the grand tapestry of the cultivation world, the life or death of a solitary, low-tier loose cultivator was less significant than a grain of dust.
When he reached the front of the line, the armoured guards stationed at the entrance barely spared a glance toward the crude, splintered wooden identity token hanging from his waist cloth.
One of them simply waved a calloused hand with immense laziness, muttering a singular, administrative word: “Go.”
Shen Jietian offered a low, inconspicuous nod and stepped through the threshold, officially entering the city limits.
The moment he crossed the gate, a profound, soul-deep exhaustion slammed into his system.
His legs felt as heavy as lead bars, and his physical vessel felt entirely hollowed out, his meridians aching from the erratic spiritual energy depletion.
He didn’t pause to browse the glittering wares of the market district, he didn’t stop at any roadside inns to purchase life-restoring food, and he didn’t even glance at the lively, shouting crowds filling the central avenues.
He simply kept his head lowered, moving mechanically toward his destination.
He was going home.
Home.
To Shen Jietian’s analytical mind, that particular word sounded far grander than the depressing reality it represented.
His personal residence sat pinned against the very base of the outer western city wall, situated deep within a congested district overflowing with independent rogue cultivators, mortal labourers, and desperate people who were simply too financially destitute to afford lodgings anywhere else.
Some of the city maps formally labelled it the South District, but the vast majority of the populace simply referred to it by its true name: the Slums.
Here, the houses were constructed from decaying, compressed wood and cheap mud bricks, the unpaved roads were perpetually choked with foul-smelling mire, and the ambient spiritual energy in the air was so incredibly thin that it was practically non-existent.
Yet, for all its glaring structural miseries, it was the only sanctuary Shen Jietian possessed in this vast world.
Reaching a familiar, weather-beaten structure, he pushed open the creaking wooden door.
The tiny, enclosed courtyard was completely empty, consisting of nothing more than two cramped rooms, a crude stone bathroom, and a partially collapsed bamboo fence.
It was a bleak, minimalist existence.
After shuffling into his private sleeping quarters, Shen Jietian completely collapsed face-first onto his thin bedding.
The rough, unpolished wooden frame creaked loudly beneath his dead weight as he lay perfectly still, his blank, bloodshot eyes staring vacantly at the exposed rafters of the ceiling.
By all logical metrics, his thoughts should have been racing with frantic intensity.
He should have been systematically analysing his immediate future, calculating the territorial expansion of the white wolf king, dissecting the lethal implications of Old Zhao’s sudden betrayal, and mourning or evaluating the gruesome demise of Chen Hu.
Yet, strangely enough, he found himself utterly incapable of processing any complex data.
His brain felt entirely fried, completely short-circuited by the sheer volume of adrenaline that had sustained his flight.
Whenever he tried to focus his mind, the blinding image of the snow-white wolf would spontaneously manifest within his inner vision.
Those piercing, ice-blue eyes, that suffocating, majestic aura, and the terrifying level of human-like intelligence hidden behind its calm gaze-it haunted him.
Why exactly had that apex monster chosen to spare my life?
The vexing question surfaced in his mind again, and again, and again like an unyielding tide, beating against his consciousness.
But no matter how hard his analytical mind searched for a logical variable, there was no definitive answer to be found.
Eventually, the sheer weight of physical and mental exhaustion claimed him entirely, and the moment his heavy eyelids fluttered shut, he plunged into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When Shen Jietian finally drifted back into consciousness, absolute darkness had already fallen over the Slums, the room illuminated only by the faint, silvery moonlight filtering through the cracks of his wooden window shutters.
A sharp, painful contraction in his abdomen immediately followed; his stomach was growling fiercely, the sheer primal demands of biological hunger finally forcing his aching body out of bed.
He staggered weakly into the adjoining kitchen area, where several coarse canvas sacks of yellow spirit rice sat stacked in a corner.
It was an incredibly cheap, low-grade commodity, stripped of almost all spiritual nutrients during the crude milling process; truth be told, even high-tier domesticated spiritual animals would probably reject such foul, husk-filled grain.
Yet, among the impoverished underbelly of the independent cultivation community, it was an absolute staple.
The reasoning behind its popularity was painfully simple: it filled the hollow void of the stomach and sustained basic human metabolic functions for a negligible cost.
Nothing more.
Shen Jietian methodically washed a single handful of the yellow grains, dumped them into a clay pot, and brought the water to a slow boil over a small charcoal stove.
Before long, a simple, unflavoured meal was ready.
He sat alone at a rickety wooden table, consuming the mush in absolute silence.
There was no culinary flavour to speak of, and absolutely no sensory enjoyment to be derived from the act; it was a purely mechanical process dedicated entirely to basic physical survival.
After swallowing the last spoonful, his gaze naturally drifted toward the blood-stained spatial storage bag he had forcefully stripped from Chen Hu’s headless corpse.
For a brief moment, a flicker of hesitation flitted through his chest—tampering with the belongings of the deceased always carried a subtle, superstitious weight—but his pragmatic side quickly won out.
He unsealed the pouch and inverted it over the table.
Clatter.
Several cracked, dim pieces of low-grade spirit stones rolled into his palm.
They were heavily contaminated with earthly impurities, worth very little on the open market.
But just as he was about to toss the bag aside in disappointment, his eyes suddenly widened to the size of saucers, and his breath hitched.
With a dull thud, an entire, intact Iron Fang Wolf corpse materialized on the floor before him.
The carcass was remarkably complete; its razor-sharp claws were fully intact, its calcified fangs were untouched, and its dense grey pelt was mostly undamaged by the chaos of the battle.
Shen Jietian stared at the dead beast for several seconds before a harsh, self-deprecating curse escaped his lips.
“Greedy, short-sighted bastard.”
The realization of what had occurred during those final, chaotic moments in the clearing struck him with absolute clarity.
Even while the terrifying late-stage wolf king was actively materializing from the mists and everyone was screaming to retreat, Chen Hu had actually delayed his own flight by a few vital seconds just to shove a subordinate wolf carcass into his spatial storage bag.
The sheer absurdity of the thought was mind-boggling.
Yet, as Shen Jietian pondered the psychology of their class, he realized it was profoundly fitting.
A desperate rogue cultivator would genuinely rather flirt with the jaws of absolute destruction than abandon a windfall of resources.
Suddenly, the room became incredibly quiet, and a cold drop of sweat rolled down Shen Jietian’s temple.
He looked down at his own hands.
Was I truly any different from Chen Hu?
If he had possessed a high-capacity spatial ring and a spare second during the rout, would he have willingly abandoned such valuable, life-changing resources out of pure caution?
The analytical answer crystallized in his mind immediately, devoid of any comforting illusions: No.
He wouldn’t have.
He would have taken the exact same gamble.
A bitter, self-mocking smile carved itself onto his face.
In the grand scheme of things, beneath their varying veneers of caution or bravado, they were all exactly the same type of desperate beasts, clawing at each other for scraps in the dirt.
After systematically counting and evaluating the stolen goods alongside his own haul, Shen Jietian calculated his net gains.
Two pristine Moonleaf Grass stalks, one complete, high-quality Iron Fang Wolf carcass, and a handful of loose spirit stones.
It was an astonishing sum for a single day’s labour.
It was finally enough.
It was more than enough to purchase the exact object he had repeatedly risked his mortal life for: the breakthrough pill.
The following morning, Shen Jietian adjusted a clean set of robes and headed straight toward the central market district.
The sunlit streets were already intensely crowded, the air thick with the raucous shouts of roadside vendors and the fierce, aggressive bargaining of low-level cultivators.
The city moved forward as if the horrors of the previous day had never occurred.
The complete wolf corpse liquidated remarkably fast; after all, high-conduction Iron Fang Wolf materials were always in constant demand among the local talisman and weapon-refining workshops.
The two stalks of Moonleaf Grass disappeared just as rapidly into the inventory of an alchemical dispensary.
By the time midday arrived, a small, heavily weighted leather pouch filled with solid low-grade spirit stones rested securely inside his storage bag.
For the first time in his seven years of arduous practice, he actually possessed a respectable, substantial amount of personal wealth.
Yet, looking at the pouch, he felt absolutely nothing.
There was no sudden surge of excitement, no profound happiness, and no sense of triumph.
His soul felt entirely blanketed by a lingering, grey fog of physical and psychological exhaustion.
The shrewd shopkeeper who had purchased the wolf carcass gave him a lingering, highly suspicious look before handing over the stones, his eyes sweeping over Shen Jietian’s obvious Third Layer cultivation base as if wondering how an impoverished gatherer had managed to secure such premium material without dying.
Shen Jietian completely ignored the silent interrogation, turning on his heel and walking away.
In Black Mist City, asking questions was dangerous, but providing answers was often infinitely more lethal.
By the time evening approached, he finally entered a low-end medicinal pavilion and exchanged the entirety of his hard-won fortune for the single item he coveted.
A Low-Grade Qi-Breaking Pill.
The small, spherical black pill rested quietly inside a protective, miniature jade bottle.
Staring at the dark, slightly irregular surface of the medicine through the translucent glass, Shen Jietian couldn’t help but let out a low, bitter laugh.
Truthfully speaking, within the orthodox systems of the grand cultivation world, there was no such thing as an “official” Qi-Breaking Pill.
The prominent, wealthy righteous sects never manufactured them in their grand cauldrons, and the powerful, ancient cultivation clans completely forbade their scions from ever touching them.
These volatile pills were exclusively the crude creations of desperate, rogue alchemists attempting to provide a violent, chemical shortcut for low-level cultivators who were utterly trapped by their own structural limitations.
They were notoriously dangerous.
They severely damaged the fine tissue of the human body, left permanent scabs across the spiritual pathways, and under the worst conditions, the volatile, unrefined medical energy could violently rupture the user’s organs, killing them instantly.
But despite their horrific array of structural drawbacks, they possessed one undeniable, saving grace: they worked.
At least occasionally, they provided the raw, concussive force needed to blast open a blocked meridian bottleneck.
For a resource-starved loose cultivator like him, that slim, dangerous probability was more than enough to justify the gamble.
Night descended fully over the South District, plunging his small bedroom into deep shadows.
Shen Jietian sat cross-legged atop his creaking wooden bed; his posture aligned with the classic meditative stance.
The dark Qi-Breaking Pill rested quietly in the centre of his open palm, its faint, acrid medicinal scent wafting through the room.
For seven agonizing years, every single drop of sweat, every scar on his skin, and every structural humiliation he had endured had been a stepping stone toward this singular, definitive moment.
Seven years of being mockingly labelled as a permanent Third Layer failure. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Slowly, his jaw tightening, he placed the pill in his mouth and swallowed it whole.
Almost instantly, an intense, burning sensation erupted in his stomach, spreading outward through his torso like a wave of liquid fire.
Shen Jietian’s eyes snapped shut, and he immediately began circulating his core cultivation technique: the Five Streams Returning Art.
It was an incredibly common, basic five element mantra—nothing special, entirely devoid of unique transformations, and easily purchasable for a few spiritual stones in any bookstore.
His late father had personally handed the manual to him many years ago.
Shen Jietian could still vividly remember the proud, hopeful expression on his father’s weathered face at that moment, his voice echoing from the past:
“A single stream may dry, but five streams returning together become an endless river.
Cultivate diligently, son.
This Five Streams Returning Art will be the foundation of your immortal path.”
Only after his father had tragically perished in the wilderness and Shen Jietian had grown older did he finally understand the cold, unvarnished truth behind that memory.
The Five Streams Returning Art hadn’t been chosen because of its hidden potential or its fluid compatibility with his physical constitution; it had been chosen simply because it was the absolute only manual his impoverished father could afford to buy without starving.
His father had cultivated this exact same mediocre technique until his death, and his grandfather had likely done the same before him.
That was the inescapable, generational reality of the loose cultivation underbelly: no profound ancestral inheritances, no high-grade secret manuals, and no miraculous opportunities.
There was only the brutal, repetitive struggle for basic survival.
As the volatile medical energy of the pill dissolved further, the spiritual energy within his meridians began to rapidly accelerate, churning through his pathways with unnatural velocity.
The stubborn, iron-like structural bottleneck separating the Third Layer from the Fourth Layer of Qi Refinement began to vibrate, showing visible signs of loosening under the chemical assault.
Success seemed tantalizingly within his grasp.
Yet, at that exact, critical juncture of his breakthrough—just as his spiritual energy reached its peak acceleration—the terrifying image of the white wolf king spontaneously shattered his concentration, exploding into his mind with the force of a mental demon.
Those freezing blue eyes seemed to stare directly into his soul, and that suffocating, late-stage spiritual pressure materialized so vividly within his perception that his physical breathing instantly turned ragged and uneven.
A profound, systemic wave of existential dread completely derailed his focus.
His father had died horribly while pursuing this elusive dream of immortality.
Countless thousands of far more talented loose cultivators had filled the bellies of wild beasts before him, and countless thousands more would undoubtedly rot in the dirt after him.
What structural variable made him think that he was any different?
The answer was absolute: Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
His innate talent was completely garbage, and his spiritual roots were utterly abysmal.
When he was a naive fifteen-year-old boy, the grand outer sect examination had already definitively weighed his potential and stamped a permanent verdict upon his destiny.
A Lower-Grade Five Spirit Roots constitution.
It was the absolute lowest, most heavily contaminated qualification possible in the known cultivation world—a chaotic mess of elements so profoundly poor that even the lowliest outer sect servants looked down upon it with open disgust.
And yet, despite possessing the talent of a common mortal peasant, he had still foolishly dared to harbour the grandiose dream of ascending to immortality.
The ambition suddenly felt completely ridiculous—a pathetic, dark joke played on him by the heavens.
He had nearly been torn limb from limb in Moonleaf Valley, he had been violently betrayed by his leader, and he had looked into the eyes of death itself, all for the sake of securing this volatile black pill.
And even if he successfully survived the chemical damage and broke through tonight…
what then?
What would change?
Fourth Layer of Qi Refinement?
An ant.
He would still be nothing more than a slightly larger ant in the grand hierarchy of the world.
The white wolf king could still effortlessly erase his existence from the earth with a single, casual swipe of its paw.
He hadn’t been strong enough to save his father from his fate, he wasn’t strong enough to truly protect his own skin without relying on blind luck, and he possessed absolutely zero control over his own sovereign destiny.
The deep-seated, systemic terror that he had meticulously suppressed throughout his life finally erupted like a dormant volcano, completely overwhelming his rational mind.
His internal spiritual energy instantly became chaotic and unstable, losing its structured trajectory.
Without the firm guidance of his consciousness, the unrefined, burning effects of the Qi-Breaking Pill surged wildly out of control, rampaging backward through his delicate pathways.
“No…
stop…” Shen Jietian’s eyes snapped open, widening in sheer horror as he realized he was entering a state of cultivation deviation.
He desperately attempted to clamp down on his rogue thoughts, trying to force his rampaging energy back into the familiar channels of the Five Streams Returning Art.
But it was already far too late; the volatile medical fire had completely slipped his reins.
The chaotic spiritual energy inside his meridians spiralled entirely out of control, tearing through his internal pathways like jagged glass.
A sharp, agonizing pain exploded throughout his entire torso, his peripheral vision blurring into absolute darkness.
A thick line of dark, corrupted blood leaked heavily from the corner of his mouth.
Then—
Boom!
A violent, invisible spiritual shockwave erupted directly within his central dantian, completely shattering his remaining consciousness.
His vision went entirely pitch-black, and Shen Jietian’s limp, unresponsive body collapsed heavily off the bed, crashing onto the cold wooden floor as he fell into deep unconsciousness.
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