The icy air of the Qi blade cut the hair on Shen Tian’s neck. One single millimeter from his throat, the deacon’s golden energy vibrated with a sharp buzz that made the teeth of the spectators in the front row resonate.
In the blind spot of his vision, the System’s alerts flickered in a phosphorescent red, warning of an almost absolute eradication probability. For a fifteen-year-old mortal with a Fourth-Grade Spiritual Root, finding himself under the direct scrutiny of a cultivator of the Foundation Establishment Realm was equivalent to having his head on the guillotine.
However, Shen Tian held his gaze steady. His feet stayed planted.
Shen Tian’s response came as a long, heavy sigh of weariness. His shoulders relaxed deliberately, and when he raised his gaze, only a dull coldness met the elder’s eyes, accompanied by a slight grimace of annoyance at the corner of his lips.
That single reaction threw the elder off balance.
A demonic cultivator exposed would attempt a suicidal attack or show excessive panic. A guilty man gives himself away in the microexpression of terror. Shen Tian’s absolute apathy, however, froze the deacon’s fingers for a fraction of a second.
"The Mud Lotus Art?" Shen Tian asked. His voice came out hoarse, dry, carrying the indifference of someone who has repeated the same story a hundred times. "If this humble condensation technique is the mark of a demon, then the old lunatic from the swamp deceived me for three years while he made me carry buckets of water with my feet chained."
The deacon narrowed his eyes, reducing the pressure of the Qi blade by barely a thread, the destructive force of his palm still coiled and ready.
"Choose your words carefully, brat. The inverted vortex compression you used to mold that sphere of Qi belongs to the forbidden archives of the Dust Province. It is a technical structure designed specifically to condense pure energy while bypassing the amplitude of the meridians. Only the lineage of the Demon Patriarch executed that aberration."
"And that is precisely why it is incomplete, is it not?" Shen Tian interrupted, fixing his pupils on the elder’s.
The audacity of the interruption made the two examiner disciples of Qi Condensation Level 6 stifle a groan of astonishment. Insolence of that caliber toward a deacon of the Foundation Establishment Realm carried a death sentence by custom and by law.
"Continue," the deacon ordered in a dangerous tone.
"The old man who taught me this was blind and crippled," Shen Tian said, weaving the lie with surgical ease, mixing fragments of historical truth with a narrative impossible to verify. "He lived in a hut of reeds three days’ travel to the north, smelling of rancid medicine and rotting pus. Every night, as he coughed up black blood, he cursed the name of the Demon Patriarch. He said that art was a monstrosity that devoured the flesh of whoever used it if the original bloodletting was not filtered."
Shen Tian paused deliberately, letting the plaza wind stir the rags of his tunic.
"He called himself Brother Penitent Yan. He said he belonged to the Jinyun Sect a century ago, before being captured and forced to cultivate the demonic technique. He spent the last fifty years of his life cleansing the method, eliminating the blood harvest and converting it into an art of Qi purification through dry compression. He told me that if I ever met a cultivator of Jinyun, I should deliver the corrected diagram to settle his debt of guilt before dying."
The silence on the platform grew dense.
The deacon kept his hand raised, yet the golden light around his fingers began to fluctuate. The story was ridiculously specific. The Jinyun Sect had, in fact, lost more than thirty elite disciples during the extermination campaign a hundred years ago, their bodies or records buried in the void of history. The mention of a "penitent brother" touched a sensitive nerve in the sect’s archive.
However, the true anchor that stopped the execution lay in the microscopic observation Shen Tian made at that precise moment.
Despite the majestic golden aura the deacon emitted, Shen Tian noticed a slight ashen tone beneath his cheekbones and a micro-vibration irregularity in the Qi flow at the height of his sternum. In his past life, he had seen several elders of the Iron Cloud Sect succumb to the same ailment: Qi deviation from attempting to force a breakthrough. The symptoms were unmistakable. The diagnosis was evident: the deacon had suffered a Qi deviation while trying to break through the bottleneck toward the Mid-Level of the Foundation Establishment Realm, leaving his thoracic meridians partially petrified by spiritual toxins.
An old man trapped at the threshold of his own biological decline stood before him.
Shen Tian delivered the coup de grâce, tilting his head barely a centimeter toward the elder’s threatening hand.
"If the deacon considers Brother Yan’s purification to still be heresy, he can kill me right here," Shen Tian said in a whisper only the two of them could hear. "My life carries little weight. But the compression formula that dissolves pill residue in the dantian and cleanses calcified meridians will die with me. The Qi marble I just condensed served as proof that the method can soften the Qi stagnated in cultivators whose progress has been stalled for years."
The deacon’s pupils contracted until they became two tiny dots.
The psychological blow had struck the center of the target.
In the deacon’s mind, the arithmetic changed instantly. If he executed the boy in the plaza or handed him over to the Jinyun Sect’s Judgment Hall, the Main Hall would confiscate the boy and the Supreme Elders would keep any secret or corrected technique. He, a humble recruitment deacon relegated to the frontiers, would receive nothing more than a few spirit stones as reward.
But if he kept this boy alive, under his direct and personal custody... he would have exclusive access to a method capable of resolving the petrification of his own meridians.
The greed of cultivation was a force infinitely more dangerous than loyalty to the sect.
The deacon withdrew his hand slowly. The Qi blade dissipated in the air with a soft snap, leaving only a cool breeze on the platform.
The elder let out a short, deep laugh, changing his threatening expression for a rigid mask of benevolence that disoriented the entire crowd in the plaza.
"Ha, ha, ha! Excellent!" the deacon exclaimed in a resonant voice, allowing his tone to cover the entire plaza. "An iron will. Few young people can remain firm when a cultivator of the Foundation Establishment Realm tests their mental determination."
The two examiner disciples looked at each other, confused by their superior’s drastic change in attitude.
"Deacon Zhang... and the technique?" one of them dared to ask.
"Ignorant," Deacon Zhang responded sternly, turning his back on Shen Tian but deliberately placing himself between the boy and the rest of the crowd. "What this young man just executed belongs to the ancient annals of our sect as the manifestation of a Mutated Compression Physique. It is a rare variation of the Fourth-Grade Spiritual Root that compensates for the lack of volume with extreme density. Rare, and duly documented."
Murmurs of astonishment erupted in the plaza. The youths of the noble families who had previously mocked Shen Tian’s dirty rags stood with their mouths open, staring at the boy with a mixture of jealousy and resentment.
"However," Deacon Zhang continued, looking at Shen Tian with eyes full of poorly disguised possessiveness, "due to the instability of his mutated physique, he requires constant supervision. From this moment on, this young man will pass the initial test and will be registered directly under my personal jurisdiction as a servant disciple of Clear Wind Peak."
Shen Tian bowed his head with feigned respect, hiding the calculating smile that threatened to draw itself on his face.
"I thank Deacon Zhang for his benevolence," Shen Tian said in a humble voice.
"Go up to the rear platform and wait," the elder ordered, before addressing the rest of the aspirants in a cold voice. "The evaluation continues! Next!"
Shen Tian walked toward the back of the stage, moving away from the murmurs and envy of the crowd. He had achieved exactly what he wanted: he had dodged a lethal execution against an infinitely superior enemy, and he had secured his entry into the Jinyun Sect under the direct protection of a deacon who believed he was playing the blackmailer.
Deacon Zhang thought he had trapped a useful lamb he could squeeze in private. He had just let a wolf into his own house.
Three hours later, the recruitment in Dust Border City came to an end. Only twelve young people out of the thousands of aspirants had been selected. While the others were grouped to be transported in ground carriages, Shen Tian was personally summoned by Deacon Zhang to board the platform of his main flying sword.
The three-meter-long spiritual steel floated rigidly one meter above the ground. Shen Tian stepped onto the cold surface of the blade, maintaining his balance instinctively as the two sect disciples took their positions at the sides.
"Hold on if you don’t want to fall and turn into paste on the ground," Deacon Zhang said in a dry tone before channeling his Qi.
The flying sword rose at a right angle, breaking the sound barrier with a dull boom.
The icy air of the altitude struck Shen Tian’s face. Below, Dust Border City, with its stone walls, its noble districts, and the dark alleys of the slums where he had been on the verge of dying two days earlier, began to shrink until it became a grayish stain among the mountains.
At that instant, the crystalline blue panel of the System flickered before his vision, displaying the accumulated notifications that had been paused during the confrontation:
[Emergent Mission Resolved: Psychological Manipulation of Higher-Level Entity.]
[Performance evaluation: Exceptional. Eradication was avoided through the effective use of biased information and analysis of the entity’s weaknesses.]
[Reward granted: +300 Suppression Points.]
[Current balance: 650 Suppression Points.]
Shen Tian focused his mind on the System interface as the flying sword cut through the sea of clouds in the direction of the Jinyun Sect’s floating mountain ranges. A new module lit up in the shop menu:
[New function unlocked: Low-Level Pill Purification.]
Allows the elimination of 100% of toxic impurities from commercial spiritual pills through the expenditure of Suppression Points, converting trash medicine into Absolute Grade Pills.
A spark of pure satisfaction crossed Shen Tian’s thoughts.
For any cultivator with a Fourth-Grade Spiritual Root, the greatest obstacle was that the continuous consumption of pills accumulated toxins in the meridians, blocking long-term progress. With the System’s purification function and the resources he would extort or collect within the Jinyun Sect, that bottleneck had just lost its teeth.
From the corner of his eye, Shen Tian noticed the sidelong glance Deacon Zhang threw at him from the front of the sword. The elder was already calculating in his mind how to isolate him on Clear Wind Peak to extract the formula by force.
Shen Tian closed the system screen and contemplated the majestic peaks emerging from the mist on the horizon, where the immortal palaces of the Jinyun Sect shone under the afternoon sun.
Deacon Zhang believed he was carrying him as his private hostage.
Shen Tian adjusted his hands inside the sleeves of his ragged tunic, feeling the small Qi marble rotate with perfect stability inside his dantian.