The mocking laughter from the Task Hall had already faded behind him, tuned out the way a good engineer ignored commented-out code — present, but running nothing.
Cultivators in this world worshipped the concept of face. They’d die over a perceived slight, announcing every move before throwing it, clashing in loud, wasteful displays meant to be watched.
Lin Tian found the whole philosophy fundamentally broken.
"Fighting like medieval knights obsessed with honor." He adjusted his collar, weaving through the crowded streets of the Outer Sect. "In a real life-and-death fight, there’s no honor. There’s the survivor, and there’s the corpse.
He was severely under-equipped for what came next, and he knew it. Level 1, against anything that lived past the wall of this sect. A single Level 2 beast in direct combat would end him before he registered the first hit.
He didn’t need to become a cultivation genius overnight.
He needed to become a predator running a completely different set of rules — guerrilla tactics, asymmetric engagement, terrain manipulation. The playbook Earth had spent centuries refining, dropped into a world that had never needed it.
No cultivator here had ever fought a war without Qi as the deciding factor. Every technique manual he’d skimmed through in the shack’s yellowed texts assumed spiritual power as the baseline, treating raw physics as an afterthought at best. That gap was exactly where he intended to live.
He slipped into a dim alleyway toward a familiar, cramped stall buried under rusted junk. The merchant — hunched, one eye replaced by a mechanical prosthetic that whirred faintly — glanced up and grunted.
"What do you have today, Vulture?"
He emptied his sack across the counter without a word. Three fractured crystal processors. A handful of dull, low-grade spirit stones. A scorched conduit core. Copper spirit-filament, stripped clean off a ruined flying shuttle.
The merchant’s mechanical eye clicked and whirred as it scanned the pile. "Junk. Mostly junk. Processors are burnt clean through the arrays. Twenty spirit coins for the lot."
"Fifty." His [Insight Eye] was already active, casting its faint violet-gold tint across the stall. "The core still has an intact. You sell those to the outer-sect apprentices for at least forty alone."
The merchant’s eye zoomed in, reassessing. A scowl. "Forty-five. Take it or leave it."
"Deal."
He’d have taken thirty, honestly. But a man who negotiated like he needed the coins invited questions he had no interest in answering.
Forty-five spirit coins joined what little he’d saved. Enough to fund the expedition — but not toward the flashy pavilions selling flying swords and explosive talismans.
He pushed deeper into the market’s mundane, mortal-facing section instead, toward a burly blacksmith who worked gear for the ordinary people scraping by on the sect’s outskirts.
"High-tensile steel wire." He set a handful of coins on the anvil. "Thinnest, strongest spool you carry. Needs to hold a thousand pounds of weight without snapping. Three heavy-duty steel hunting traps. A serrated skinning knife. Fifty feet of hemp rope."
The blacksmith raised an eyebrow at his frail, obviously Level 1 frame. "Boy, you planning to hunt the outer woods? This mundane gear won’t touch a demon beast’s hide. You need spirit-infused steel for that."
"Just the wire."
He’s thinking in terms of magic. Doesn’t understand the physics. A spirit sword cut through Qi-infused force. But a filament thin as a hair, strung taut across two trees under a thousand pounds of tension — a beast hitting that at sixty miles an hour didn’t need Qi to lose a leg. Momentum did all the work.
Next stop, a shady apothecary in a damp basement. He skipped the healing pills and Qi elixirs entirely and bought three pouches of Corpse-Paralysis Powder instead — a cheap toxin grave robbers used against subterranean insects. Not enough to kill a large beast outright, but enough to numb its nervous system, buy him the fraction of a second a fight like this would need.
Last purchase: a cheap, mass-produced jade slip etched with a topographical map of the Dark Mist Forest.
He retreated to an abandoned courtyard near the sect’s perimeter to lay everything out.
To a traditional cultivator, the pile in front of him — wires, poison, mundane steel — looked like trash off a scrap heap. To him, it was a tactical arsenal, and he spent the next hour coating both the filament and the trap teeth in Corpse-Paralysis Powder, making sure even a shallow scratch would deliver a debilitating dose.
"System." He picked up the jade map.
" breakdown the Dark Mist Forest. Scan and extrapolate."
[Ding! Scanning topographical jade slip...]
Violet light swept from his eyes across the slip. The HUD expanded, and a rotating three-dimensional model of the forest bloomed into view.
[Map Analysis Complete.]
[Integrating historical data, moisture levels, and topological parameters...]
[Warning: The Dark Mist Forest features a dense canopy that reduces solar visibility by 80%. The terrain is characterized by heavy swamp-like conditions in the southern sector, and dense, ancient timber in the northern sector.]
"Overlay Silver-Leaf Herb locations."
[Processing... Silver-Leaf Herbs thrive in damp, low-light environments with high concentrations of rotting organic matter. Highlighting optimal growth zones...]
Clusters of green dots lit up across the model, clustering heavily around a crescent-shaped ravine in the northern sector.
The map shifted. Wide stretches of the ravine pulsed red, swallowing most of the clean path to the herb clusters.
His eyes narrowed, mind sliding into the same cold state he’d once used to debug a system on the edge of total failure. "Straight in has a 99% mortality rate. I need a kill zone on the periphery, not a fight in their own den."
He zoomed in on a narrow bottleneck outside the red zone — a tight corridor pinched between two steep, rocky inclines. A natural chokepoint. Anything chasing him out of that ravine would have no choice but to run this exact corridor.
"This is it." A ruthless smile settled across his face. "The bottleneck. Multi-layer trap network, right here. I’m not hunting them in their territory. I’m aggravating them, pulling aggro, and dragging them into my server."
He dismissed the map, the projection folding back into his vision. Poisoned filament, hidden wrist-blade, steel traps, rope — all of it packed tight into his survival pack.
He stood, casting a long shadow across the stone in the afternoon light.
No glowing robes. No brilliant flying sword strapped to his back. Just a destitute scavenger from the outer slums, exactly as he appeared.
An hour ago, three arrogant disciples had laughed him out of the Task Hall for taking this mission. None of them had bothered to ask what he was actually planning to do with it.
But behind that appearance sat years of Earth’s technological warfare thinking, and none of the cultivators past the wall had ever needed to develop a defense against it.
Cultivation ruled this world. Physics, biology, and gravity didn’t care.
A beast could breathe fire or shatter stone with its claws — none of that mattered once its nervous system seized under poison and its legs gave out against filament it never saw coming. It would bleed out exactly like anything else built from flesh.
He’d run the numbers on this before ever picking up the jade slip in the Task Hall, back when the mockery was still ringing in his ears. Eighty-nine percent fatality assumed a fighter walking in with a sword and a prayer. It said nothing about someone who intended to never actually fight at all.
"Let the young masters fight with their honor and their Qi." He turned toward the fog-choked treeline in the distance, adjusting the straps of his pack, feeling the weight of everything he’d just built settle across his shoulders.
"I’m an engineer." His voice dropped, flat and certain, final. "I don’t fight the system. I exploit its bugs."
With that cold resolve settled behind his eyes, Lin Tian stepped past the last edge of the Crimson Nimbus Sect’s safety and began the long, silent walk toward the Dark Mist Forest.
The hunt was about to begin.