The morning sun finally cut through the smog over the Artifact Graveyard, throwing long shadows across the boundary walls of the sect.
Lin Tian stepped out of the treeline, boots heavy with mud and dried monster blood. His windbreaker hung in tatters, stained with Corpse Rat saliva and Shadow Wolf blood layered together into one filthy record of the night. He looked exactly like a scavenger who’d barely survived something terrible.
Underneath that, everything had changed.
His back stayed straight. His breathing stayed even, controlled in a way it hadn’t been three days ago. His eyes carried the cold confidence of a predator walking home from a clean, successful hunt.
Ten Silver-Leaf Herbs sat in his pack. So did the Level 3 beast core, still warm against the fabric.
"I survived." He adjusted the pack straps, feeling the weight settle. "Now I have the capital to actually climb this ladder."
He crossed back into the Outer Sect’s paved streets, and the world shifted around him instantly. Spiritual energy thickened the air. Disciples in neat uniform robes moved between the Task Hall, the Alchemy Pavilion, and the sparring grounds, none of them sparing him more than a glance.
Most of them pinched their noses when they saw him. Stepped aside like he was something they’d rather not have to touch, let alone speak to.
He ignored all of it. His mind was already three steps ahead — get to the Resource Hall, submit the mission, claim fifty Contribution Points, secure the Qi-Condensation Pill waiting on the other side of that paperwork.
The jade-tiled roof came into view at the end of the courtyard, sunlight catching its edges.
Then a voice cut through everything, sharp enough to stop him mid-stride.
"Stop right there, you piece of trash!"
He froze. [Insight Eye] flared to life without him even consciously asking it to.
Four figures blocked the path ahead. Three lackeys, still pale and unsteady from the Corpse-Paralysis Powder still working through their systems. Leading them, Young Master Wang.
Wang’s white silk robes were scorched now, dirt ground into every fold that used to be pristine. His topknot had come apart somewhere in the forest, strands hanging loose around a face twisted with rage. Humiliation had pushed him somewhere past reasonable thought.
His bloodshot eyes locked onto the windbreaker like he’d recognize it anywhere now.
"It was you." Wang’s face contorted into something genuinely ugly. "That jacket. That pathetic Level 1 aura. You’re the rat who stole my kill and made a fool of me in front of my own men!"
Disciples nearby stopped walking, one after another. A crowd started forming fast, drawn by the sight of a young master publicly confronting a scavenger in broad daylight — exactly the kind of spectacle this sect fed on.
Lin Tian stayed still. Cold. Unreadable, the same mask he’d learned to wear in the tree hours earlier.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about." His voice came out flat, no fear bleeding through it at all. "I’m just returning from a sect task, same as anyone else out here."
"Shut your mouth, trash!" Wang stepped forward, his aura exploding outward like a physical wave. Nearby disciples staggered under the pressure, several gasping audibly at the weight of it.
"You think you can play me?! I saw the wound marks on that carcass! I know you took that core! Hand over your pouch right now. Kneel. Maybe — maybe — I let you keep one arm out of this!"
The lackeys drew their weapons, forming a loose semi-circle around him. Blocking his path to the Resource Hall entirely, cutting off every obvious route forward.
"Young Master Wang." Lin Tian let his voice carry, pitched loud enough for the growing crowd to hear every word clearly. "We’re standing in the middle of the Outer Sect. Broad daylight. Right outside the Resource Hall itself. Sect law forbids robbery and murder inside safe zones. Are you planning to break that law just to take what’s mine?"
Wang’s face flushed dark red, the color climbing fast up his neck. The words had landed exactly where they were aimed — his pride, and the sect’s own rules, both at once, and both mattered to a man like this.
Attack now, in front of this many witnesses, and he’d be branding himself a common thief for the rest of his career in this sect.
"You think rules protect trash like you?" Wang laughed, ugly and forced, his hand tightening hard around the sword hilt.
"My family built this sect’s foundation! I don’t need to kill you to ruin you. I’ll cripple your cultivation base. Take back what’s rightfully mine. Throw you back in the Graveyard where filth like you belongs."
He drew the sword in one smooth motion. Azure light hummed off the blade as he lunged, fast enough that half the crowd only registered the movement as a blur.
Lin Tian was already two steps ahead of him, had been since the moment Wang’s voice first cut through the courtyard.
Execute evasion protocol.
His hand went into his torn pocket. Not the wrist-blade this time — a small sphere wrapped in scavenged foil. An improvised smoke bomb, built from unstable spirit powder and crushed flash-crystals scavenged out of the Graveyard years before this body had ever needed one.
He didn’t throw it at Wang. He slammed it straight into the ground beneath his own feet, hard enough to crack the seal instantly.
BANG!
The explosion tore through the courtyard. A magnesium-white flash blinded everyone standing nearby. Black and purple smoke rolled outward in a thick wall, swallowing the entire path whole in less than a second.
"Gah! My eyes!" A lackey dropped his sword entirely, both hands flying up to cover his face.
Wang slashed through the smoke with a wave of Qi, trying to force the air clear. "Don’t let him escape! Surround the perimeter, now!"
Three seconds later, the smoke thinned enough to see through. The spot where Lin Tian had stood a moment ago was completely empty.
He’d already vanished into the panicked crowd, weaving through bodies with the kind of quiet, deliberate agility this world’s cultivators never bothered learning — too used to relying on Qi to ever need it.
Wang’s composure finally snapped completely, humiliated twice now in front of a crowd this size, in his own sect, on his own doorstep.
"LIN TIAN!" His voice cracked hard against the pavilion walls, carrying far past the courtyard itself. He spun toward the Resource Hall’s entrance, catching the last glimpse of a figure disappearing behind the massive jade doors.
He didn’t dare send a sword wave at official Hall property. That crossed into an entirely different category of crime, one even his family’s name couldn’t fully shield him from.
Instead he pointed his blade at the doors, screaming loud enough for the entire courtyard to hear.
"You think you can hide in there?! Submit your task and just collect your reward like nothing happened?!" His laugh turned hysterical, cracking at the edges. "You ignorant piece of trash! Do you have any idea whose domain that is?! My family’s! The Head Manager is my own stepmother, Madam Shen!"
The crowd murmured, recognition rippling through them fast. Everyone in the Outer Sect knew Madam Shen controlled resource distribution outright — pills, spirit stones, artifacts, all of it ran through her office eventually. Cross her stepson, and you cut off your own lifeline in this sect for good.
"I’ll make sure you fail!" Wang’s voice dripped with venom, each word deliberate. "I’ll get your task rejected! I’ll strip every point you earned and watch you starve back in the dirt where you came from!"
Inside the Hall’s cool, incense-scented corridors, Lin Tian heard every threat carry clean through the walls, muffled but unmistakable.
He didn’t tremble. He stopped walking, brushed ash carefully off his ruined sleeve, and let a slow, deliberate smile settle across his face.
*Madam Shen. Head Manager. The stepmother shielding this fool from every consequence he’s ever earned.*
He pulled up the System’s directive in his mind, letting the familiar text settle into view.
[Sovereign Matriarch Conquest System]
Earth’s logic had taught him a rule that applied here just as well as it ever had back home. Don’t attack a corrupt system from the outside, banging against a locked door. Compromise the administrator instead, and the whole structure falls open on its own.
Wang believed his stepmother was an impenetrable fortress protecting him from anything the world could throw his way.
He thinks she’s going to destroy me. Lin Tian’s eyes gleamed, cold and sharp in the dim light of the corridor. He just handed me her exact coordinates instead, and he doesn’t even know it yet.
He adjusted his pack and turned deeper into the pavilion, past the entrance hall, toward whatever waited further in.
He wasn’t just a scavenger scraping by anymore, and hadn’t been since somewhere in that gorge last night.
He was the Vulture, and he was about to meet the Queen of the Outer Sect.