The harsh white light banished every shadow in the canopy. Lin Tian stood exposed.
Below him, Wang’s handsome face twisted into pure fury. He’d bowed to a scavenger. Called him Senior. The humiliation burned hotter than any spiritual flame, and it showed in every line of his expression.
"Tear him apart!" Wang’s voice tore through the ravine, echoing off the rock walls. "Don’t kill him fast! I want his skin off while he’s still breathing!"
The three lackeys scrambled up the roots like rabid monkeys, blades glinting in the talisman’s harsh glare.
Lin Tian didn’t panic. His mind treated the crisis like a system failure, not a death sentence — cold, structured, already running solutions.
Direct confrontation is suicide. I need a distraction.
"System." The thought moved fast, no wasted syllables. "Calculate wind trajectory. Optimal dispersion angle for particulate matter."
[Ding! Scanning atmospheric conditions...]
[Wind blowing Northwest. Optimal dispersion angle highlighted.]
A blue vector cone projected downward, pointing straight at the climbing lackeys and the hovering talisman above them.
His left hand whipped forward. He didn’t just throw the pouch — he slashed it open mid-motion with his thumb, scattering pale green toxic dust straight into the Northwest wind.
His right hand flicked at the same instant.
SNIKT!
The wrist-blade shot out, crackling crimson lightning. Not aimed at the men. He swung wide, burying the overheated blade into a massive rotting branch hanging directly above the climbers.
"What’s he doing?!" the rat-faced lackey yelled, squinting through the falling powder.
The answer came fast. Unregulated heat incinerated the rotten wood in an instant. A deafening CRACK, and several hundred pounds of branch tore free, dropping straight down onto them.
"Watch out!" Wang screamed from the ground below.
The branch crushed the climbing lackeys’ footing entirely. Worse than the impact was the powder cloud settling into their lungs the same moment. Neurotoxin hit hard and fast, no time to react.
Choked gasps. Misfiring nerves. All three lost their grip and crashed into the muck below, tangled together, paralyzed limbs twitching uselessly.
"You lowly rat!" Wang lost every last trace of composure.
He didn’t check on his men. He didn’t even glance down at them. His Level 5 aura exploded outward in a visible ring of azure light. Qi surged into the Wind-Piercer, the blade humming at a pitch that made Lin Tian’s teeth ache from twenty feet up.
He swung upward. A crescent wave of condensed Qi tore straight into the canopy.
[ Warning:Lethal force detected! Evasion mandatory!]
Lin Tian’s pupils shrank to pinpricks. The wave moved faster than anything Earth’s physics had ever prepared him to expect.
He threw himself backward, diving into thorny vines on the neighboring tree, a heartbeat before the wave sliced clean through the space he’d occupied a moment earlier.
BOOM!
The blast severed the ancient tree’s upper canopy in one motion. Shockwaves threw him deeper into the branches. Splinters rained down like shrapnel, cutting shallow lines across his cheeks and forearms.
This is a Level 5 cultivator with a mid-grade artifact. His heart hammered as he caught himself on a lower branch, breath ragged, hands scraped raw against the bark.
He never touched the tree. Twenty yards away, and he severed a trunk three feet thick without ever closing the distance. One clip from that wave, and Lin Tian would’ve been cut clean in half before he registered the pain.
"Where are you hiding?!" Wang’s screams echoed below, sword hacking wildly at the surrounding brush, each swing sending another shower of leaves down into the mud.
"I’m Young Master Wang! My mother runs the Resource Hall! You think you escape me in my own sect?! I’ll find you and pull your tendons out one by one, slowly!"
Lin Tian pressed his back against cold, damp bark. He killed [Insight Eye] to save what stamina he had left, matching his breathing to the forest’s own rustling until the two became indistinguishable.
No taunts. No sound at all. Just a ghost, waiting the way he’d learned to wait his whole first day in this body.
Even furious, Wang wasn’t foolish enough to charge blind into dark canopy where a trap-setter was hiding — not with three lackeys paralyzed and foaming at the mouth on the ground behind him as a fresh reminder of what waited up there.
Using the miasma and the cover of Wang’s tantrum, Lin Tian leaped branch to branch, putting distance between himself and the ravine with every silent jump. Fluid. Deliberate. A predator leaving an arrogant boy screaming empty threats into the fog.
Hours passed.
Dawn’s pale, bruised light finally broke through the forest’s darkness, thin and gray at first, then steadily stronger. The miasma thinned as he crossed back over the boundary into the Outer Sect’s territory, the air growing cleaner with every step.
He collapsed against a smooth jade boulder, chest heaving as the last of the adrenaline finally drained out of him, leaving something closer to exhaustion in its place.
His windbreaker hung in tatters — toxic mud, corrosive saliva, dried wolf blood layered across it in equal, filthy measure. Every muscle ached down to the bone, the kind of ache that came from hours of running on pure nerve.
He looked at his shaking, grime-covered hands.
A cold smile spread across his face anyway.
He’d survived. Again.
He opened the pack and checked the haul. Ten Silver-Leaf Herbs, perfectly preserved, glowing with faint Yin energy exactly as promised. Beside them, the real prize — a pure Level 3 Shadow Wolf core, humming with dense Fire-attribute Qi.
The mission needed three low-level cores. One Level 3 core outclassed ten of those combined, easily. He hadn’t just completed this mission — he’d blown straight past it.
"System." His voice came out hoarse, scraped raw from hours of silence. "Display status."
[Host: Lin Tian]
[Cultivation: Qi Gathering (Level 1)]
[Active Target: None]
[System Status: Optimal]
His smile faded into something sharper as he read it, the number sitting there flat and unforgiving.
Level 1. The reality settled cold in his chest, undeniable no matter how the night had gone.
He’d hunted a Level 3 beast with physics and poison. He’d outsmarted and escaped a Level 5 cultivator with nothing but stealth and a lucky assumption about his own identity. Neither one counted as real power. Both were tricks that only worked because nobody had caught him yet, and luck wasn’t a resource he could keep spending.
Wang’s sword wave replayed behind his eyes on a loop he couldn’t quite shut off. The gap in raw force was absolute, not close, not negotiable. Tricks bought him time. Eventually he’d meet an opponent no wire or poison could touch, and the math on that day would be very different.
Wang’s arrogance isn’t a personality flaw. His mind compiled the night’s data with the same cold clarity he’d once brought to a failed system audit at three in the morning. It’s a direct product of his backing.
Wang’s own words echoed back to him, clear as if he were still standing in the gorge shouting them
"Madam Shen." He tasted the name on the morning air, turning it over.
He pulled up the System’s core directive, letting it fill his vision.
[The System’s primary objective is to elevate the Host’s power through ’Synergy’—profound dual cultivation with the powerful matriarchs of this world. By conquering these dominant women... the Host will absorb massive cultivation feedback, bypassing traditional methods of Qi accumulation.]
Earth had taught him a simple rule long before any of this started. Don’t attack a fortified firewall head-on. Find the administrator instead. Hack their credentials, and the firewall stops mattering entirely.
Wang was the firewall.
Madam Shen was the administrator.
Head Manager of the Resource Hall — wealth, pills, artifacts, the entire economic lifeblood of the Outer Sect ran through her hands alone. A high-ranking Matriarch, and the exact source of Wang’s untouchable shield.
Stay Level 1, and Wang eventually finds me. Crushes me, probably slowly, exactly like he promised. His eyes locked on the distant, towering peaks of the sect, barely visible through the last of the morning haze. But the System changes that math entirely, if I’m patient enough to run it right.
[Magnetic Allure] to open the door. [Insight Eye] to find her fatal flaw once he was through it.
A predator’s glint lit up behind his eyes, replacing whatever exhaustion had been sitting there a moment ago.
Survival wasn’t enough anymore. He wanted to conquer. Strip Wang of his backing, his wealth, every ounce of arrogance he hadn’t earned through anything but birth — and the fastest way there ran straight through turning his enemy’s protector into something devoted entirely to him instead.
He pushed off the boulder. Slung the pack over his shoulder. Adjusted the sleeve over his hidden blade, checking it was seated right by feel alone.
Battered, bleeding, exhausted to the bone — but his posture had changed completely somewhere over the last few hours. No more hunched scavenger shuffle. He walked now with the measured stride of something that had already locked onto its next target and simply hadn’t announced it yet.
The hunt in the forest was over.
The real game was just starting.
"Let’s go to the Resource Hall." He stepped onto the paved jade path back into the sect, the light finally clean and full above him. "Time to meet the Stepmother."