The air around the desk carried a chill sharper than anything Lin Tian had felt since waking up in this world. He held his ground inside it, eyes steady on hers, none of the usual tremor other disciples brought to this desk.
Madam Shen’s fingers, pale as carved ice, worked the knot on his parcel loose. Her expression stayed flat until the scent hit her — cooling Yin energy from the herbs, layered under the dense, fiery pulse of the beast core.
A Level 1 scavenger producing a Level 3 core. That alone should have raised questions. She buried the surprise fast, her face resetting into its usual mask before it could show.
"A Level 3 core." Her voice cracked like ice settling. "Acceptable."
Her eyes lingered on it a moment longer than protocol required. "May I ask how a Qi Gathering Level 1 disciple managed to bring down something at this level? The Dark Mist Forest doesn’t forgive miscalculation."
"Traps, Head Manager. Not strength." He kept it brief. "I don’t have the cultivation to fight a Level 3 beast, so I didn’t fight it."
She picked up one of the herbs with jade tongs, turning it toward the light, filing his answer away without comment.
"These Silver-Leaf Herbs, however." She studied the base of the leaf. "Discoloration here. Crude harvesting methods let the Yin-attribute properties leak. Under Resource Hall standards, defective goods don’t qualify for full contribution."
Lin Tian’s expression didn’t shift, but something clicked into place behind it.
She’s rejecting this to protect her own authority, not because the herbs are actually bad. He’d seen this exact move before — a manager stalling a request just to remind everyone in the room who signed off on approvals.
"System." He kept the thought razor-thin. "Focus [Magnetic Allure]."
[Ding! Passive Ability: (Magnetic Allure) focused on target: Madam Shen.]
Heat rolled outward from his core, filling the space between them.
Her breath caught. Years of buried agony — the slow freeze eating through her meridians, her husband’s absence doing nothing to slow it — met something warm for the first time in longer than she could easily place.
The scent bypassed every defense she’d built up over a decade of running this desk.
Her composure cracked, just slightly. A faint flush rose across her cheeks. Her eyes, usually locked and unreadable, went soft with confusion for half a second.
He caught the opening and leaned in, voice dropping low, steady.
"Head Manager Shen. If I may."
She didn’t stop him.
"The discoloration isn’t leaked energy. It’s a concentration technique — bruise the stem’s outer layer during harvest, and the plant locks its purest Yin properties into the upper leaves instead of letting them disperse. Test the tips. You’ll find the spiritual density runs fifteen percent higher than a standard harvest."
He delivered it clean, the same way he used to walk an executive through a technical report nobody in the room could argue with.
She blinked, momentarily caught between his logic and something harder to name — his proximity, and the warmth bleeding off him with every word.
Without meaning to, her body leaned a fraction closer. Her eyes closed for half a second, breathing him in, feeling the ice in her chest ease just slightly.
"I... see." Her voice lost its usual edge, softening into something almost breathless. She caught herself leaning and straightened fast, though her eyes stayed a beat too long before pulling away from him entirely.
She looked back down at the herbs. The flaw she’d been so certain of a moment ago had quietly stopped mattering.
"Your assessment is unusually precise for an Outer Disciple." She cleared her throat, covering the crack in her voice. "Where did you learn artifact and herb theory to this level? Most Outer Disciples can barely tell a spirit stone from river gravel."
"Self-taught, Head Manager." He kept the answer simple, offering nothing more than the sentence required. "The Graveyard teaches fast, or it doesn’t let you live long enough to learn slow."
Something flickered across her expression — not quite surprise, closer to reassessment. She studied him a second longer than the exchange strictly called for.
"That’s not a common answer from an Outer Disciple." A faint edge of genuine curiosity crept into her tone, quickly smoothed back down. "Most of the disciples who come through this desk can’t tell me why a technique works, only that it does. Or doesn’t."
"Most of them haven’t had to survive on the theory alone." He let the statement sit without elaboration, watching her weigh it.
"The concentration checks out." Her voice settled back into its usual register, though not quite as sharp as before. "Task approved."
Her hand trembled, just slightly, as she pressed the jade stamp into the glowing ledger.
"Task: Resource Retrieval from the Dark Mist Forest. Complete. Reward: 50 Contribution Points, 2 Low-Grade Spirit Stones, 1 Qi-Condensation Pill." She slid a velvet pouch and a glowing token across the desk toward him.
"One more thing." Her eyes lifted back to his, some of her usual authority reasserting itself even as her voice stayed lower than before. "A disciple who returns from a high-risk mission with results this far above expectation doesn’t usually stay at the bottom for long. Watch yourself out there. The Dark Mist Forest isn’t the only place in this sect that eats the careless."
"Noted, Head Manager. I intend to keep being careful." He held her gaze a beat longer than strictly necessary, letting the warmth between them do the rest of the talking.
"Thank you, Head Manager." He offered a slight, respectful bow, careful to keep every trace of triumph out of his voice. "Your fairness matches everything the sect says about this Hall."
He turned and walked off the platform, resources in hand.
The warmth left with him. The moment he crossed back out of her radius, the cold rushed straight back into her chest, harder than before.
She gripped the edge of her desk, knuckles white, breath shallow.
Who was that. The thought came unbidden, chasing his retreating back across the hall. Not a question she had an answer for — just a pull she hadn’t asked for and couldn’t immediately explain away.
Outside, the courtyard noise swallowed him the moment he stepped past the crimson doors. Sunlight hit different out here — cleaner, without the weight of that frozen desk pressing down on every breath.
He turned the Qi-Condensation Pill over in his palm once, checking the seal on the pouch without breaking stride.
Fifty points. Two spirit stones. A pill that would push his body somewhere past Level 1 for the first time since this nightmare started. Not enough to matter against someone like Wang, not yet — but enough to matter against everything that had almost killed him in the last two days.
Not bad for a morning that started with me hiding in a tree from a screaming lunatic.
A group of disciples near the courtyard fountain glanced his way and immediately looked elsewhere, the same reflexive disgust as always. He didn’t bother noticing them this time.
His mind had already moved three steps ahead, running through what came next. The [Magnetic Allure] hadn’t just worked — it had worked exactly the way the System’s data promised, cracking through a decade of icy composure in under two minutes of conversation.
If that’s what Stage 1 does against a woman running a resource empire, Stage 2 is going to be a problem for a lot of people in this sect.
He tucked the pill and pouch into his inner pocket, next to the beast-core memory that still sat warm in his thoughts even after handing the real thing over.
Behind him, past those crimson doors, Madam Shen was still standing at her desk. Still cold. Still shaking it off the only way she knew how — burying it under paperwork and the next disciple in line.
But something had shifted in that exchange, and both of them knew it, even if neither said it out loud.
He didn’t look back to check. He didn’t need to.
The firewall had cracked. Everything after this was just a matter of patience.