Her eyes narrowed slightly, a sudden thought striking her. "But what of my Master? What of the Frost Heart Pavilion? If you help me, and word gets out, their decree will fall upon your head. Do you not fear the wrath of a powerhouse who can crush this entire carriage with a thought?"
Lu Feng simply shrugged his shoulders, a casual, almost bored expression crossing his face. To him, a powerhouse from a distant sect was just a future target for his new system to likely surpass. With twenty thousand gold coins already in his pocket and a 10,000x multiplier at his disposal, the world’s rules no longer seemed to apply to him.
"I don’t care who she is," Lu Feng said smoothly. "And I don’t care about her decree. I brought you out of that market because I chose to. I am helping you because I want to. The rest of the world can line up to object, but it won’t change what I decide to do." None of them knew that his audacity came from the very same blue panels that had caused everyone to see him as a crazy individual.
Before Ye Chenxue could process the sheer audacity of his words, Lu Feng reached his right hand out into the open space between them.
To Han Lin and Ye Chenxue, what happened next completely left them speechless.
Lu Feng’s hand moved forward, and as it reached a certain point in the empty air, space itself seemed to ripple like the surface of a pond. His fingers, followed by his wrist and his entire forearm, literally vanished into thin air. It looked as if his limb had been cleanly severed by an invisible blade.
Han Lin choked on her own saliva, and Ye Chenxue violently flinched backward, her eyes threatening to pop out of their sockets.
A split second later, Lu Feng pulled his arm backward. As his limb re-emerged from the invisible ripple floating in the air, his fingers were wrapped around a flawless, small bottle carved from pure, translucent white mutton-fat jade.
The bottle radiated a comforting warmth that instantly heated the cool evening air of the carriage, carrying with it a scent so clean and pure it smelled like winter’s first snow.
Inside his mind, the system confirmed the withdrawal from the inventory.
Lu Feng didn’t give them time to question the spatial magic they had just witnessed. With a light movement of his hand, he casually tossed the priceless jade bottle across the carriage.
Ye Chenxue’s reflexes, honed by years of martial arts training despite her broken Dantian, kicked in automatically. She caught the bottle against her chest, afraid it would fall and its content would spill.
As she opened her hands, she trembled, feeling the vibrant, life-giving warmth that was contained and spilling out of the jade in her hands.
Lu Feng leaned back, settling deeper into his seat with a wide, confident smile spreading across his face as he looked at his first true investment.
"Swallow that," Lu Feng said, nodding toward the bottle. "And once you’ve taken it and become reborn, we’ll talk more about what the future holds for us both."
There was a questioning look on her face but before she had the chance to ask what was on er mind, Lu Feng did the honours of answering the question she wanted to ask.
Even Han Lin was interested in the contents of the jade bottle but she knew better than to ask.
"It’s a pill for mending and ascending. I believe it as the ability to fix you up as though you never experienced what you did."
Ye Chenxue just nodded having received the answer to her question before she could ask it.
While Lu Feng outwardly maintained the calm, unbothered posture of a supreme master who had everything under control, internally, his soul was practically doing backflips. If anyone could peer beneath that smooth, unreadable expression, they would have found a man vibrating with a level of anticipation that far surpassed even Ye Chenxue’s wildest hopes.
He was practically a child waiting to unwrap a divine present, and this immense excitement boiled down to two very specific, very calculating reasons.
The first reason was pure strategy. The Heaven-Mending Rebirth Pill was about to restore the shattered future of an acclaimed genius. By handing it to her so freely, Lu Feng was ensuring that a powerful female cultivator would forever be bound to him by the unbreakable chains of life-saving gratitude.
He had no intention of abusing this favor or treating her like a puppet, but in a world this brutal, having a fiercely loyal powerhouse at your back was the ultimate insurance policy.
The second reason, however, was far more absurd. It was the intoxicating drug of the system’s returns.
He was about to invest a one-in-a-million medical miracle into a discarded slave. By the absolute laws of his 10,000x Investment Mode, the system would inevitably hand him back ten thousand times the value of that pill.
But beyond the mere accumulation of divine medicine, a wild, audacious theory had taken root in his mind. If his investment was the sole catalyst for restoring her shattered core, would the system’s multiplier also affect him physically? Would he receive a dantian of his own as a return on this investment?
During his years as the family failure, locked away in his dilapidated courtyard with nothing but old, dust-covered texts to pass the time, Lu Feng had read extensively about the hidden anatomy of cultivators. Even though he barely knew some, he knew there existed multiple types of daintian—rare, mutated cores that granted extraordinary power to the elite.
He had memorized the ancient methods used to forge them, though he had never possessed the talent or resources to try. Now, his eyes were glued to Ye Chenxue, waiting to see if the heavens would finally open for him.
He watched as her trembling fingers raised the mutton-fat jade bottle. With a soft, hollow pop, she pulled the wooden stopper.
Instantly, an ethereal, blindingly sweet aroma billowed out of the small container, completely filling the wooden carriage. The scent was a mixture of frozen lotus blossoms and ancient, life-giving earth, so potent that even Han Lin felt her fatigue wash away just by inhaling the stray vapors.
They were entirely alone in this particular cabin, which was a blessing. The Grand Transport Agency operated on a massive scale; their carriage was merely one link in a long, armored convoy heading south toward Crimson Vale.
Up at the very front of the line, eight massive, iron-hooved bulls labored in unison, their thick muscles straining as they pulled the interconnected line of wooden coaches along the dirt road.
Outside their specific cabin, the world was normal. Two heavily armored guards stood on the narrow wooden platform at the front of each carriage, their hands resting on the pommels of their greatswords, ready to defend their respective cargo from bandits or stray spirit beasts. They had no idea that inside the coach behind them, the laws of mortality were being actively rewritten.
With a final, desperate leap of faith, Ye Chenxue tipped her hand. A round, iridescent pearl of a pill rolled onto her palm, glowing with a soft, silver light. She didn’t hesitate. She threw her head back and swallowed the pill, completely unaware of the violent miracle she had just invited into her flesh.
The moment the pill settled on her tongue, it didn’t just slide down her throat—it dissolved instantly into a liquid torrent of pure, unadulterated celestial energy.
Ye Chenxue’s eyes snapped wide, the pupils dilating until they were almost completely black. As she swallowed, a massive, explosive surge of energy flooded downward, roaring into her lower abdomen like a tidal wave confined inside a narrow pipe. She gasped, her hands immediately flying to her stomach as she collapsed forward against the carriage floor.
"Ah...!"
A low, muffled groan escaped her lips. She could feel it. The liquid light was hunting through her flesh, finding the jagged, frozen shards of her shattered dantian.
With the precision of a master blacksmith, the pill’s essence seized those broken pieces and began to pull them back together. The shattered fragments of her spiritual sea resisted, grinding against one another with an agonizing friction that made her veins bulge against her pale skin.
The process was far from peaceful; it was a brutal, systematic reconstruction. It was pure agony, causing her to wince violently, her teeth grinding together so hard a thin trickle of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth.
Yet, having survived the torture of her master’s strike and the humiliation of the slave pens, her tolerance for pain was freakishly high. She kept her hands dug into the wooden floorboards, absorbing the torment.
But as the mending reached its final, critical stage—as the core completely fused back into a single, flawless entity—the sheer intensity of the spiritual rebirth became too much to contain.
"Ahhhhh!"
Ye Chenxue threw her head back and screamed, a raw, piercing sound that vibrated the very wood of the carriage.