"I swear... I will kill all of you," seven-year-old Wan Lihan croaked, his voice cracking through the cold bars of his cage.
The middle-aged man from Table 76 sneered. Without a word, he struck the boy across the head with a heavy wooden staff. The impact sent a wave of white-hot pain through Li Han's skull, and he instantly fainted.
When he woke up, a freezing bucket of well water was violently slammed into his face. He choked, gasping for air as the middle-aged man roared at him: "Get up, you useless brat! Go clean that room, water the courtyard plants, and tend to the fields!"
From that day on, Li Han's life became a living hell of endless labor and brutal beatings. He had to endure every strike, every kick, and every insult. He wanted to split the man's throat open, but he couldn't—the tyrant had placed a Tier 2 Servant Seal on an iron collar around his neck. Every time Li Han even thought about resisting, the magic collar would tighten, cutting off his breath and forcing him to his knees. He didn't know how to break it, so his blank mind locked into a single mode: absolute endurance.
Day by day, month by month, years bled together.
By the time he turned fifteen, Li Han had changed completely. He was lean, quiet, and his eyes were as unyielding as flint. Over those eight years, he had done something his master never expected. Every time he cleaned the study, he carefully watched the middle-aged man read his scrolls. He memorized the shape of the ink, the rhythm of the words, and the movement of the man's lips. By mimicking him in the dead of night, the slave boy had secretly taught himself how to read and write perfectly.
He constantly heard the man bragging to the neighbors about a secret manual that could allow a mortal to cultivate. One evening, after the middle-aged tyrant fell into a deep, drunken sleep, Li Han watched him hide the thick, leather-bound book inside a locked wooden drawer.
Moving like a ghost, Li Han picked the lock, pulled the book out, and hid in the shadows. He opened the pages, his heart racing. He wasn't just looking for power—he was looking for the flaw in the Servant Seal. As his eyes scanned the text, a spark of understanding lit up his blank mind.
How am I going to do this? he thought, tracing the meridian pathways in the diagram. Oh... so it looks like this.
Sitting cross-legged on the cold floor, he closed his eyes. Driven by eight years of buried rage, his body acted like a vacuum. He didn't just gather Qi—he forcefully ripped the spiritual energy out of the surrounding air, forcing it through his blocked veins.
Boom. A quiet pop echoed inside his chest. He had instantly broken through to the 1st Layer of the Qi Cleansing Realm.
Exhaling a breath of foul air, he pointed his finger at a ceramic cup on the table, trying to make it lift with his new power. The cup trembled, but it didn't rise. He didn't have enough energy.
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Not enough! Li Han growled in his thoughts, his eyes turning bloodshot. More! I need MORE!
He forced his meridians to open wider, ignoring the burning pain as torrents of Qi smashed through his bottlenecks. Within minutes, his raw willpower forced a second breakthrough. 2nd Layer of Qi Cleansing! It was a terrifyingly fast cultivation speed. He pointed at the cup again. This time, the ceramic cup smoothly lifted off the wood, floating silently in mid-air.
Suddenly, the middle-aged man groaned from the bed, tossing around. "What’s that commotion...?" he muttered sleepily.
Li Han’s reflexes were instantaneous. He slammed the book back into the drawer, locked it, and threw himself onto his straw mat, faking a deep sleep. The man blinked his heavy, bloodshot eyes, looked around the dark room, and seeing nothing, grumbled and went right back to sleep.
Li Han didn't waste a single second. Sitting up, he focused the entire strength of his 2nd Layer Qi directly into the iron collar on his neck, attacking the magical circuit of the Tier 2 spell. For two straight hours, sweat poured down his face as he ground his energy against the magic.
Snap. The internal mechanism of the seal shattered.
Right at that moment, the middle-aged tyrant jolted awake. "What was that sound?" he barked, sitting up and swinging his legs over the bed.
He didn't get to take a step. Standing in the darkness right in front of him was fifteen-year-old Wan Lihan, holding a long, rusted kitchen knife.
"Hello there, Master," Li Han said, his voice flat, cold, and entirely devoid of human emotion. "Why won't you sleep?"
The man gasped, his face turning pale as he fell backward off the bed, scrambling to run toward the door. But Li Han was already there. With his enhanced 2nd Layer speed, he pinned the tyrant down, dragged the heavy Tier 1 iron chain off the floor, and violently wrapped it around the man's neck, snapping the collar shut.
"You always do this to me," Li Han whispered, staring down at him. "Now, feel the pain you gave me."
The man convulsed on the floor. The chain was a Tier 1 treasure, and the collar carried a Tier 2 spell. The rule of the artifact was simple: whenever the servant declined a direct order from the master, the collar would contract with enough force to crush stone.
"Kill yourself," Li Han commanded coldly.
The man's eyes bulged in horror. He tried to resist the command, but the Tier 2 spell instantly activated. The iron collar began to tighten. It squeezed his throat, crushing his windpipe as the metal groaned.
"Everyone... everyone has a price!" the middle-aged man choked out, blood spilling from his lips as he desperately begged for his life. "Please... let me live! I will serve you well! I will give you everything!"
Li Han looked down at him, his gaze completely blank. "Why would I believe you? Die."
The collar snapped shut completely. Crunch. The man’s head was cleanly severed from his shoulders, rolling across the stone floor.
Li Han stood over the corpse, entirely unbothered by the blood splashing his boots. "You're lucky," he muttered quietly. "Death is your escape."
He walked back to the drawer, took the cultivation book, and packed a small bag of food. Reading further into the manual, he learned that to advance past the early stages, a cultivator needed to find a massive, pure spiritual source like a sect's primal valley or a hidden spirit vein.
"So this is cultivation," Li Han muttered, looking down at his glowing hands. He looked at an iron frying pan on the kitchen table, wondering if he could use it like the immortal he saw on the mountain. He stepped onto the pan and tried to infuse it with Qi to make it fly, but the pan just clattered uselessly against the floor.
Realizing he still had a long way to go, Li Han didn't waste time being frustrated. He slung his bag over his shoulder, opened the door, and ran out into the vast, infinite world.