The Dark Mist Forest had gone silent.
After the Shadow Wolf’s death, every insect and lesser beast had gone quiet in their burrows. Pure terror had swept through the undergrowth. Even the constant chittering static from earlier had vanished completely, leaving only the drip of moisture off dead leaves.
Lin Tian controlled his breathing. He wiped his knife clean and slid it back into his belt.
The wolf’s massive corpse lay in front of him. Its brain had liquefied in a single strike from his wrist-blade. Steam still rose faintly off the wound where the blade had cauterized flesh on contact, curling up into the gray-green fog above.
"One beast core. Ten Silver-Leaf Herbs." He adjusted his pack straps.
The System’s overlay still flickered faintly in his vision, confirming the objectives cleared. Green checkmarks sat quietly at the edge of his sight, waiting for him to move on to the next.
Back on Earth, he’d spent his whole life behind a monitor. Insults were the worst violence he’d ever faced. This visceral world of blood and death should have broken him harder than any war movie or hyper-realistic simulation ever could have prepared him for.
But the fear was gone now. What stood in its place was cold and calculating. Two kills in two days had reshaped him more than twenty-seven quiet years on Earth ever managed.
His ears perked up.
Crunc. Snap.
Not a beast’s paws. Boots. Heavy, well-crafted leather boots crushing dry foliage underfoot.
Voices followed, faint but unmistakably human.
In a lawless place like this forest, cultivators were more dangerous than any beast. Murder and robbery here were routine, unpoliced, and unremarkable. If anyone saw him holding a Level 3 core and a pack full of rare herbs, they’d kill him without a second thought and pick his corpse clean before it even cooled. The Task Hall wouldn’t investigate. Nobody investigated anything out here — that was the whole point of a lawless zone.
He moved fast. Kicked leaves over his tracks, scattering the disturbed earth back into something that looked undisturbed. He left the wolf exactly where it lay. Moving it would only draw more attention than the corpse already had.
He scrambled up an ancient, blackened tree with quick, monkey-like agility. His windbreaker blended into the rotting bark almost perfectly, the same dirt-yellow that had made him invisible in the Graveyard for years before any of this started.
Seconds later, four figures entered the ravine.
His eyes narrowed. Three were lackeys, clearly — postures hunched, eyes darting nervously to the man at their center. The fourth walked like he owned the ground beneath him.
Young Master Wang.
Handsome. Arrogant in every line of his posture. Completely out of place in a garbage-filled forest like this — the kind of man who’d never once had to think about where his next meal was coming from.
Where Lin Tian’s clothes were torn and mud-streaked, Wang wore pristine white silk robes. Faint azure arrays woven through the fabric pushed the toxic miasma a full foot away from his skin at all times. A glowing Mid-Grade spirit sword hung loose in his hand, its hilt studded with gemstones that probably cost more than every scavenger in Morning Sun Village earned in a year combined.
"Ugh. This place stinks." Wang pinched his nose, voice dripping with contempt. "If I didn’t need a strong beast to test my new technique, I’d never set foot in this dump. How do those Outer Sect scavengers even survive here?"
"You’re absolutely right, Young Master!" one lackey chimed in, flattering shamelessly. "You’ll be promoted to the Inner Sect soon anyway. What right do Outer Sect trash have to even breathe your air?"
Hidden in the branches, Lin Tian stayed dead still. He held his breath.
System. Activate [Insight Eye]. Scan the leader.
[Ding! (Insight Eye) activated. Target Locked...]
A violet-gold data box unfolded in his vision.
[Target: Young Master Wang (Outer Sect Elite)]
[Cultivation: Qi Gathering Level 5]
[Talent Rating: 3 Stars]
[Flaw Analysis: Target’s Dantian is bloated and unstable due to an over-reliance on high-grade cultivation pills rather than actual hard work.]
[Equipped: Mid-Grade ’Wind-Piercer’ Sword, Tier-2 Defensive Jade Pendant.]
Level 5. His mind ran the numbers instantly, cold and fast.
He was still Level 1. Even luring Wang into his filament traps meant nothing — that jade pendant would block the toxin cold before it ever reached his skin. Direct combat wasn’t even a question worth asking. One flick of Wang’s finger could end him without effort, and there’d be no wire thin enough or trap deep enough to change that math.
No anger here. No wounded ego. Just survival logic, and the logic said hide, wait, watch.
Below, a lackey spotted the wolf’s corpse half-buried in the mud.
"Young Master! Over here! A Level 3 Shadow Wolf!"
Wang crossed to it fast, flipping the carcass over with the flat of his glowing blade. His arrogance cracked, just slightly, into something closer to shock.
"Front legs sheared clean through by something thin. Razor thin." He crouched low, studying the wound with genuine interest for the first time since entering the forest. "One strike to the neck. Enough heat to boil the brain instantly. And the core’s gone. Who did this?"
"C-could it be a high-level Demon Beast?" a lackey stammered, backing up a step.
"Idiot." Wang slapped him hard across the face, the crack of it echoing off the gorge walls. "Can an animal extract a core this clean? This took real skill. Whoever killed a Level 3 with this kind of precision has to be Level 7 or higher. There’s an Inner Sect senior somewhere close, and we just walked into their territory."
A flicker of dark amusement crossed Lin Tian’s face, up in the branches, gone as quickly as it appeared.
A high-level senior? No. Just an engineer with basic physics and a little poison. The gap between what Wang assumed and what actually happened here was almost funny, in the way a stack trace pointing at the wrong function always used to be.
"Young Master, should we head back?" the second lackey’s voice trembled, eyes scanning the treeline nervously. "If someone that strong is nearby, this could get dangerous fast."
Wang ground his teeth, clearly annoyed at the suggestion. "Cowards. My stepmother gave me these protections personally. She’s the Head Manager of the Resource Hall — Madam Shen. No one in the Outer Sect would dare touch me, senior or not."
Madam Shen. Head Manager of the Resource Hall.
Lin Tian filed the name away, locking it into memory the way he’d once memorized a critical server password he couldn’t afford to forget.
The System had already flagged this world’s real power as sitting almost entirely with mature women, and here was confirmation dropped right into his lap without him even asking for it. A Matriarch who ran the Resource Hall was exactly the kind of target his System had been built to find. If Wang’s arrogance was any indication of the family running through those veins, Madam Shen was worth remembering long before he ever crossed paths with her directly.
"We’re moving forward." Wang’s voice hardened, brooking no further argument. "Stay alert. If we do find that senior, I’ll personally step up to befriend them, for the good of the sect."
He turned to head deeper into the ravine, the lackeys falling reluctantly into step behind him.
One of them didn’t follow.
Instead, he walked straight toward Lin Tian’s tree, boots dragging slightly through the wet leaf litter with every step.
"Wait." The lackey’s voice went strange, tight. He was staring at a faint smear of blood on the bark, barely visible in the gloom. "There’s climbing marks here. The blood’s still fresh."
Lin Tian’s breath caught hard in his throat.
His muscles locked into a coiled spring, ready to snap in either direction. His hand slid silently toward his belt, fingers closing around his last poison bomb.
His heart slammed against his ribs like a war drum, loud enough he half expected the lackey to hear it over the dead silence hanging across the entire ravine.
If that lackey looked up right now, there was no version of this where he walked away clean.