Nightfall settled over Morning Sun Village like a suffocating weight.
No moonlight reached this slum on the edge of the Artifact Graveyard. Only a permanent canvas of dark gray and muddy crimson, lit by the occasional flare of unstable arrays detonating somewhere in the distance.
Inside his shack, Lin Tian sat cross-legged on the straw mattress, the flicker of his damaged spiritual lamp throwing long shadows across the rusted walls.
The acrid stench of the region had stopped registering hours ago. His attention was locked entirely on his right forearm.
He flexed his fingers, feeling the tension ring loop around his middle finger. A single twitch was all it took.
SNIKT.
The repurposed half of the Thunder-Fire blade shot forward, locking into place past his knuckles. No steady cultivator’s glow — just the same unstable crimson arc he’d carved into it hours earlier, heat rippling the air of the small room.
He retracted it with a flick of his wrist.
Back on Earth, winding down after a long day meant a hot shower and a takeout container. Here, it meant sitting alone with a rigged weapon, hoping it held together long enough to see him through the night.
His eyelids had just started to drop when a sound snapped him fully awake.
Scratch. Scratch. Squeak.
Faint. Coming from the outer room. Like jagged nails dragging across corrugated iron.
His breath caught. His heart slammed against his ribs.
The previous owner’s survival instincts screamed a warning before his own mind even finished processing the sound. He rolled off the mattress without thinking, pressing his back flat against the wall, merging with the shadow.
The thin metal door between the outer room and the workshop gave way with a groaning creak.
A stench rolled in ahead of it — rotting meat, layered under the swamp’s toxic sludge.
What stepped into the lamp’s flickering light didn’t belong in any world he’d known back on Earth.
A Corpse Rat, mutated by leaking spiritual energy until it stood the size of a large dog. Patches of matted fur were missing, exposing purple-veined flesh beneath. Splinters of rusted metal and broken glass jutted from its back like grotesque armor.
Its unhinged jaw dripped acidic green saliva that hissed and smoked where it hit the floorboards.
Beady red eyes swept the room, hunting.
Lin Tian’s mind locked up in raw terror. He’d never thrown a punch in his old life, let alone faced a mutated beast in the dark. His legs shook hard enough to buckle.
Screaming would only pull in more predators. He knew that much, even paralyzed.
"System." His voice came out barely a whisper. "Activate [Insight Eye]."
[Ding! Scanning Target...]
The violet-and-gold interface snapped into view, data overlaying the monster’s outline.
[Target: Mutated Corpse Rat]
[Cultivation Level: Equivalent to Qi Gathering Level 1]
[Threat Level: Lethal to Host in direct, prolonged combat.]
[Flaw Analysis: Heavy calcification across skull and back renders low-grade weapons nearly ineffective there. The soft underbelly and the tissue beneath the lower jaw remain exposed and highly vulnerable. Reaction speed is diminished on its left side due to a rotting hind leg.]
A structural flaw. His engineer’s mind grabbed onto it like a lifeline. Heavy frontal armor, one exploitable gap.
Hit the gap, and the whole system failed.
The rat stopped sniffing. Its head snapped toward the corner where he stood.
Red eyes locked onto his.
It shrieked and lunged.
Lin Tian threw himself sideways, no plan behind it, pure reflex.
The rat slammed into the wall where he’d been standing, incisors tearing a chunk out of the rusted metal. It rebounded fast, acid spraying across his windbreaker, burning through fabric and into skin beneath.
He cried out, scrambling back across the cluttered floor.
The rat pounced again. He grabbed a discarded iron gear and hurled it at the creature’s face — it bounced off the calcified skull uselessly, but the impact made the beast stumble.
His back hit a mountain of scrapped crystal processors. Dead end.
Can’t outrun this. If it doesn’t die tonight, I do.
The rat recovered, jaw snapping as it coiled for a final lunge — straight at his throat.
For one suspended second, its body hung in the air, underbelly and jaw fully exposed, exactly where the [Insight Eye] had marked it.
Every ounce of fear in him collapsed into a single point of focus.
He planted his feet against the scrap pile and didn’t dodge. He drove his right arm straight up into the beast’s descending path.
He flexed his middle finger.
SNIKT!
The spring engaged violently. The jagged blade shot from his sleeve as he poured the last scrap of his Qi into the rigged spirit stone.
Crimson lightning and fire erupted from the blade the instant it met the soft tissue beneath the rat’s jaw.
SQUELCH.
The blade punched through with sickening ease, driving straight into the creature’s brain. The unbypassed heat cooked the tissue on contact.
The rat’s scream cut off mid-shriek. Its full weight collapsed forward, slamming the carcass into Lin Tian and driving him to the floor.
Silence rushed back in, broken only by the dying crackle of the blade and his own ragged breathing.
He shoved the smoking corpse off his chest with a grunt and scrambled back until his shoulders hit the wall.
The smell was unbearable — burnt fur, boiled blood, roasted flesh in a room too small to hold it.
He looked down at his hand. The wrist-blade sat coated in dark blood and hissing green saliva, retracting slowly into its housing. His fingers wouldn’t stop shaking long enough to form a fist.
Then the nausea hit.
The adrenaline that had carried him through the fight drained out all at once, leaving only the raw fact of what he’d just done.
He’d never taken a life before. Not a person’s, not even an animal’s.
The memory of hot blood across his face, the crunch of bone under his blade — it broke through everything holding him together.
He dropped to his hands and knees and vomited onto the floorboards. He dry-heaved until nothing was left, eyes stinging.
He wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling, blood-stained hand and stared at the charred corpse, then out through the broken door toward the toxic sky.
No police here. No laws. Only the strong feeding on the weak — the same logic that let Inner Sect disciples crush outer scavengers for sport, the same logic that let Demon Beasts swallow entire cities whole.
If he stayed the soft, logical engineer from Earth, this world would finish him before the week was out.
Slowly, the shaking in his hands stopped. He forced himself to keep staring at the corpse until the nausea burned away, replaced by something colder.
His eyes narrowed, sharp and unmoving. If he wanted to survive — if he wanted to climb high enough to turn the System loose on the untouchable women ruling this world — the softness had to go.
He pushed himself up, ignoring the sting of acid burns along his arm.
He crouched beside the corpse and began carving out the small, low-grade beast core lodged in its chest.
A meager prize. But it was his first.
The Earthling who’d panicked at the first shriek was gone.
What crouched over the corpse now had already stopped flinching.