Shen Tian exhaled slowly. The System had already notified him of his advancement to Level 10 at the end of the previous session. Now, with the ten meridians consolidated, one final task awaited him: learning to conceal them.
Xue Huang floated to the front of the platform, looking at him with a predatory smile still lingering on her lips.
"Good," said the Empress. "You have broken the ceiling of mortals. Now the hard part begins."
Shen Tian opened his eyes and looked around.
The gray mist had dissipated within a radius of one hundred meters. Ten statues of gigantic asuras now stood in a circle around the stone platform, each with eyes burning with white light that illuminated the astral plane.
He understood immediately: each statue represented an absolute meridian conquered, an immovable pillar in the foundation of his future cultivation.
A broad, euphoric smile, bold and confident, appeared on Shen Tian’s face. He had broken the ceiling of mortals.
Time in the Sea of Consciousness flowed differently. What seemed like hours outside were barely minutes in his mind. Even so, Shen Tian knew he could afford only a few sessions like that during the day. The foreman would be waiting for him.
Over the following weeks, Shen Tian’s life became a perfect machine of discipline and concealment.
Every three days, Shen Tian presented himself at Deacon Zhang’s residence with his head lowered and an expression of perfect submission. The old man interrogated him about the "purification of the method," and Shen Tian gave him deliberately incomplete fragments of information: partial diagrams, formulas that seemed promising but led nowhere. Zhang, eager to solve the petrification of his meridians, remained convinced that Shen Tian was buying time. The old man believed he was squeezing a lamb; the lamb was waiting for the right moment to bite.
By day, he remained the servant in a worn gray robe who hauled sacks of ore and cleaned the granaries of Clear Wind Peak. By night, under the shadow of the hut or in the secluded corners of the iron pine forest, he submitted to the merciless regimen of the Blood Empress.
The first thing Xue Huang demanded he master was the Cultivation Concealment Technique.
"If the mediocre deacon watching you discovers that you have reached Level 10 in a month, he will lock you in a dungeon and drain your blood in search of a treasure," the woman warned him.
Under her instructions, Shen Tian learned to seal his ten active meridians by means of micro-knots of Qi at the entrance of his Dantian. To any outside observer—even to a cultivator of the Foundation Establishment Realm—Shen Tian remained an insignificant servant who barely brushed Level 2 of Qi Condensation.
The Cultivation Concealment Technique deceived the senses of cultivators, while the System continued to display his real status on the blue interface. Shen Tian verified it with a quick internal glance: [Cultivation Base: Qi Condensation — Level 10 (Extreme Compression)].
This was followed by a merciless martial repertoire:
Iron Body Martial Technique: A tempering method that used the density of Qi to temporarily petrify muscles and skin, allowing him to stop ordinary steel blades with bare flesh.
Qi Control Technique (Telekinesis): The ability to project invisible filaments of energy from his fingertips to manipulate light objects at a distance or deflect projectiles.
Rising River Sword Martial Technique: A close-combat swordsmanship that channeled cutting bursts of Qi through any surface, turning a simple wooden rod into a deadly blade.
Spiritual Sight: A passive ocular ability that allowed him to see energy flows in the environment, the structure of others’ meridians, and the relative strength of cultivators around him.
In the privacy of Shen Tian’s mind, Xue Huang contemplated the young man’s progress with a mixture of bewilderment and silent fear.
"This speed of assimilation is insane..." the predecessor thought, watching the young man execute the Rising River Sword by cutting a granite rock in half with a piece of bamboo. "He remembers the diagrams and perfects them in the same breath. As if his soul had been waiting for this moment for centuries. What kind of monster was he in his past life?"
Midway through the month, while they rested after a day of heavy work on the mountain slopes, Shen Tian watched a group of elderly servants dragging a broken cart under the scorching sun. Their bodies were deformed by physical exertion and their faces reflected absolute despair.
Shen Tian took a drink of water from a bamboo canteen and communicated with the predecessor in his mind.
"Predecessor... The Jinyun Sect possesses hectares of resources and thousands of manuals on the middle slope. Why withhold a basic breathing method from the servants? If these people could cultivate even Level 1, work efficiency would triple."
Xue Huang let out an icy laugh in his mind.
"How innocent you are sometimes, brat. The Main Pavilion protects its resources. In the world of cultivation, lineage and blood have always been worth more than raw talent. Hand a manual to a servant, and you hand him the chance to think he is a human being. A human being who thinks ends up rebelling against the peaks."
Shen Tian clenched his fists against the wood of the canteen until the bamboo cane began to creak.
"What garbage," Shen Tian declared in a muffled voice but full of icy rage. "A pathetic excuse to raise obedient puppets and maintain control over the weak."
"It is the Dao of this world, boy," the predecessor responded, resting her head on her hands in the mental space. "If the rule turns your stomach, you will have to crush those who wrote it."
Amid the coldness of his path, the month brought small breaths of humanity.
Shen Tian frequently ran into Lin Yu in the lower kitchens or in the supply granaries. The boy he had saved from the bullies had changed drastically: he walked with his head held high and met the gaze of higher-ranked disciples with steady eyes. Although his cultivation barely brushed Level 1 of Qi Condensation, he worked with fierce determination.
At night, before curfew, the two sat at the back of the abandoned granaries sharing their meager rations of gray grain rice.
"Senior Brother Wang and his gang have kept their distance," Lin Yu said one night, chewing a piece of hard bread with a broad smile. "I heard them say they ran into a ’night demon’ in the alley. They know that if they try anything, you will break their joints again."
"The administration let the matter drop," Lin Yu added with a bitter smile. "Servants carry too little value for disputes. Wang said he fell down the stairs, and the matter closed."
Shen Tian kept his expression flat, yet he handed half of his own bread ration to the boy.
"Stand on your own feet, Lin Yu," Shen Tian said calmly. "Sects are hunting grounds for predators. Learn to use your own fists. If I leave this district, you will stand alone."
"I know," Lin Yu replied, accepting the bread with gratitude. "But while I am here, I will learn to stand on my own."
Shen Tian watched the boy in silence. For a man whose soul had been hardened by more than a century of killings and betrayals, Lin Yu’s simple loyalty, offered with pure sincerity, represented a subtle anchor to real life. It reminded him that he was fighting to claim the right to decide who lived and who died around him.
In the last week of the month, Xue Huang intensified the combat lessons, abandoning orthodox methods to teach him techniques oriented toward pure survival and pragmatic assassination.
"The swordsmanship of the pavilions is for idiots who seek applause in tournaments," the predecessor told him in the astral space. "In the real world, the one who hesitates for a second ends up with his entrails on the ground."
Under her tutelage, Shen Tian incorporated three arcane combat arts into his repertoire:
Fleeting Shadow Steps: A tactical movement technique that used short bursts of Qi in the soles of his feet to move over short distances at a speed the human eye could not follow, leaving behind an illusory image of Qi to confuse the opponent’s perception.
Devastating Tide Palm: A martial art of direct impact. When striking the enemy, the Qi bypasses skin and clothing, penetrating in the form of high-frequency concentric waves that destroy internal organs and fracture bones from the inside out.
Qi Needle Burst: A high-precision ranged attack. Shen Tian condensed the Qi from his fingers into filaments as thin as sewing needles, launching them to pierce the opponent’s acupoints and instantly paralyze their circulation of spiritual energy.
"Hand seals are the lost art of structuring Qi," Xue Huang said one night, while Shen Tian practiced the Rising River Sword. "Modern cultivators are brutes who throw energy like stones. You will learn to weave it. Each finger position opens and closes specific channels in your meridians, creating formations directly in the air. It is the supreme art of precision."
Shen Tian frowned.
"How many positions are there?"
"Thirteen basic. Hundreds advanced. You will start with the thirteen. You will practice every night until your fingers move faster than your thoughts. Until you can execute a complete sequence in less than a heartbeat."
Under her tutelage, Shen Tian incorporated the hand seals into his repertoire, along with the three arcane combat arts.
Several nights passed before Xue Huang considered Shen Tian ready to learn anything beyond the thirteen basic positions.
"There is a seal I will teach you later," Xue Huang said one night, in a tone that lost all its usual mockery. "The Seal of False Reality. It is a forbidden mental manipulation technique. It allows rewriting a person’s recent memories, replacing them with an illusion indistinguishable from reality."
Shen Tian opened his eyes in the gloom of the Sea of Consciousness.
"Why hold it back?"
"Because it demands a price you are not ready to pay yet," the Empress replied. "To rewrite another’s mind, you must first empty your own. The seal consumes one’s own spiritual essence as fuel, and with insufficient reserves, the overload can fry your meridians from within. Moreover—" her voice became graver "—reserve it for the direst circumstances. And only if you are willing to bear the weight of having rewritten the mind of another human being."
"And the application point?" Shen Tian asked, memorizing every word.
"The Spirit Palace," Xue Huang said, pointing to a point in the center of her own forehead, just above the brow ridge. "It is the point where the soul anchors itself to the body. The only place from which one can whisper to another’s mind. If you manage to touch it with the right intention and blood as a catalyst, you can plant a false memory with the solidity of an absolute truth."
"Have you ever used it?" Shen Tian asked.
Xue Huang was silent for an instant. When she answered, her voice was a whisper laden with centuries of regret.
"More times than I would like to admit, brat. And each one cost me a piece of my own soul."
Shen Tian assimilated the warning in silence. Before he could ask more, Xue Huang continued, in an even graver tone.
"There is another technique I will teach you much later. Blood Reversal."
"What does it do?" Shen Tian asked, frowning.
"It restructures a body on the verge of collapse," the Empress replied. "It allows transmuting the biology of a dying vessel, adapting it to an energy polarity it originally could not contain. It is used when a cultivator has absorbed a core or essence that his body cannot withstand, and the only way to save his life is to rewrite his flesh at the cellular level."
"Sounds useful," Shen Tian commented.
"Useful, and monstrous," Xue Huang said, and her voice became a whisper. "The price is absolute: the energy polarity destroys the original vessel. The body changes. The voice changes. The physiognomy changes. The man or woman who existed before the technique dies, and what remains is a new vessel, forged in the energy that consumed it. Reserve it for the moment when every other path has closed. And only if you are willing to bear the weight of having stripped someone of their own identity."
Shen Tian remained silent. The technique sounded like a tool of last resort, something he would only use in a desperate situation.
"When will you teach it to me?" he finally asked.
"When your cultivation reaches Foundation Establishment," Xue Huang replied. "It is a technique that requires a density of Qi your current body does not possess. And when you learn it, I hope the day never comes when you need it."
Shen Tian rehearsed each movement a thousand times until the techniques integrated into his muscle reflexes like second nature.
At the end of the first exact month of his stay in the Jinyun Sect, the routine was interrupted.
The System emitted a pulse of blue light.
"[Monthly Cultivation Summary:]"
"[Sessions completed: 30]"
"[Accumulated Cultivation EXP: 300]"
"[Progress toward the Skill Tree: 300/1000]"
"[Consistency Bonus: +50 Suppression Points.]"
"[Current balance: 1,200 Suppression Points.]"
Xue Huang let out a whistle.
"Thirty sessions, three hundred experience points, fifty bonus points," she read in a tone somewhere between mocking and impressed. "Your tool is generous. Or maybe it is just desperate to see you grow. Either way, put it to good use."
Shen Tian was in the granary esplanade aligning sacks of grain when the sound of firm steps on wooden boards made the workers fall silent. A deacon of the middle administration—a mature man in dark blue silk robes with a jade register hanging from his belt—advanced through the crowd with a haughty gaze.
The deacon stopped in front of Shen Tian.
With Spiritual Sight active, Shen Tian analyzed the man instantly: Foundation Establishment Realm, Level 1. His Qi circulation was disordered and showed impurities in the leg channels, evidence of a rushed advancement through low-grade pills.
Shen Tian activated Causality Perception. The deacon was within his detection range. A faint, grayish thread emerged from his chest, extending beyond the limits of his perception, toward the heights of Clear Wind Peak. The energy signature at the other end was unmistakable: Deacon Zhang. So the transfer came from him. Zhang wanted to have him closer. Good. That meant the old man still believed he could squeeze him.
Shen Tian frowned internally. Zhang had kept silent about the transfer during his visits. The old man played chess with several pieces at once; he wanted Shen Tian to arrive at the Alchemy Pavilion while pulling strings from the shadows. That way, if something went wrong, Zhang could deny all involvement.
The deacon took out the jade register and read the name engraved on the slab.
"Shen Tian?" he asked in an authoritative voice.
Shen Tian immediately bowed his head, adopting the docile and submissive posture of an exemplary servant. He used the Cultivation Concealment Technique to show only the weak fluctuation of a newly reached Level 2.
"This humble servant greets the Deacon," he replied in a muffled voice.
The man examined him from head to toe. He observed the young man’s calloused hands, his clothes covered in grain dust, and the impeccable conduct that had been recorded in the foremen’s weekly reports. To the sect, Shen Tian was a silent, highly efficient worker who carried harmless aspirations.
"Your performance in heavy tasks during this month has been rated as superior," the deacon said, taking out a roll of paper sealed with red wax. "You have proven to be disciplined and patient. The middle administration has approved your transfer."
The deacon extended the document to him.
Shen Tian took the roll of paper with both hands, keeping his gaze fixed on the ground.
"Starting early tomorrow," the deacon announced indifferently, "you will be released from field work on the lower slope. You have been formally assigned as the assistant servant disciple of Alchemy Master Tang Songyang in the Alchemy Pavilion."
The deacon let out a slight mocking smile before adding:
"Make sure to be obedient. Master Tang’s patience runs thin with the clumsy; assistants who are useless often end up feeding the flames of his cauldrons."
"This disciple thanks the sect for its benevolence and will fulfill his duties," Shen Tian replied in a tone laden with feigned respect.
The deacon turned and withdrew with firm steps toward the upper part of the mountain.
Shen Tian remained motionless until the man’s figure disappeared behind the mists of the path. He unrolled the paper between his fingers and observed the red wax seal that authorized his entry into the Alchemy Pavilion.
The transfer kept him bound to Zhang’s obligations; he would continue reporting every three days. But now, in addition, he would have access to the Alchemy Pavilion. Two cages instead of one. Better. More resources to steal.
Shen Tian considered opening the System Shop. With 1,200 points, he could buy purifying pills, alchemy manuals, or even rare ingredients. He decided to buy a basic manual for identifying spiritual herbs (100 points) and a toxin resistance pill (200 points). He still had 900 left. The Alchemy Pavilion would give him access to more resources for free. Better to save them for something more valuable.
In his mind, Xue Huang’s voice resonated with an amused tone full of anticipation:
"Alchemy... What a convenient place for a brat who desperately needs rare ingredients and incompetent pill makers to steal knowledge from."
The System emitted a final pulse of blue light.
"[New Environment Detected: Alchemy Pavilion.]"
"[Emergent Mission: Infiltration of the Alchemy Pavilion.]"
"[Objective: Gain access to the resources and knowledge of Master Tang Songyang while keeping your true cultivation level concealed.]"
"[Reward: 200–500 Suppression Points depending on the level of infiltration.]"
Xue Huang let out a whistle.
"Emergent Mission?" she read in a tone somewhere between mocking and intrigued. "Your tool also gives you tasks. Interesting. Alchemy... Play your cards right, and you could come out of there with more resources than that Master Tang has seen in his entire life."
Shen Tian stored the roll in his robe. His gray eyes, hidden under the shadow of his bangs, shone with cold, implacable ambition.