Deacon Zhang’s flying sword cut through the morning mist with a dry whistle, revealing the sect’s true face in all its unvarnished detail. The elevated peaks shone in the sun with pavilions of golden tiles and cascades of spiritual water that seemed to float in the air. The sword descended far lower, passing beneath the magnificence of the upper summits.
The air grew dense, soaked with a rancid smell of moisture, burnt wood, and organic waste. The flying array deposited them roughly on a muddy flatland on the western slopes of Clear Wind Peak.
"Get off," Deacon Zhang ordered coldly, his gaze fixed on the horizon ahead.
Shen Tian jumped from the spiritual steel blade and stepped onto the thick mud. The ragged boots he wore soaked through in the humidity of the ground.
Around him stretched the Servitude Zone of the lower slope. Rotting wood and adobe huts covered hectares, where hundreds of men and women with ashen faces walked hurriedly carrying wooden buckets, baskets of raw ore, or bundles of low-grade herbs. They were the servant disciples and mortal workers of the sect.
"This is the outer territory of the slope of Clear Wind Peak," Zhang said, adjusting his blue tunics as he sheathed his sword on his back. "Your name has already been inscribed in the task registry of the lower administration. You will receive the standard ration: a bowl of gray-grain rice per day and a shared hut."
The elder stepped forward, shortening the distance until his face was a few centimeters from Shen Tian’s. The pressure of his cultivation in the Foundation Establishment Realm weighed on the young man’s shoulders like a granite slab.
"Keep your head clear, boy," Zhang whispered, his smile a thin cold line. "I brought you here as a servant under my personal jurisdiction. That is the full extent of your standing. Every three days you will come to my private residence to report your progress on the ’purification of the method.’ If I discover you have lied to me about Brother Yan’s formula, I will skin you alive before handing your remains to the Judgment Hall. Now, go to the supply granaries and present yourself to the foreman."
Shen Tian bowed his head with feigned submission, keeping his gaze fixed on the deacon’s embroidered boots.
"This humble disciple understands the Deacon’s orders," he replied in a muffled voice.
The elder let out a dry chuckle, turned on his heel, and leaped back onto his flying sword, rising toward the heights of the peak like a beam of silver light.
Shen Tian waited until the elder’s energy trail disappeared behind the upper mist banks before straightening up completely. He wiped a stain of mud from his tunic with parsimony and let out a slow exhale.
Deacon Zhang believed he had him cornered at the base of the sect, isolated and subjected to the fear of interrogation. For Shen Tian, Clear Wind Peak was a mine of unlimited resources protected by the sect itself.
Four days passed.
The routine in the servant zone was a crushing cycle designed to break anyone’s will. The tasks assigned to Shen Tian were intentionally abusive: hauling water from the Thousand Steps Spring at the base of the mountain to the intermediate kitchens, cutting spiritual pine wood with iron bark, and cleaning the excrement of the pack beasts in the lower stables. Deacon Zhang had ordered the zone’s foreman to saturate him with work to deprive him of sleep and break his mental resistance.
The elder had miscalculated the nature of his "prey."
Shen Tian treated physical exhaustion as raw material. In his past life he had spent decades cultivating in frozen caves and bloody battlefields. The muscle fatigue of a fifteen-year-old body registered as a minor biomechanical parameter. Every hundred-kilo bucket of water he carried on his shoulders became a muscle-tempering exercise. He used the weight to force his blood to circulate faster, synchronizing his steps with the Mud Lotus Breathing Art.
At night, while the other six people sharing the narrow wooden hut slept exhausted and impregnated with the smell of sweat, Shen Tian sat cross-legged in the darkest corner of the dirt floor.
For three uninterrupted hours, he cultivated.
The air on the slope of Clear Wind Peak carried a concentration of cosmic Qi at least four times superior to the putrid mud of Broken Dog Alley in the city. The channel of his second principal meridian—recently opened after reaching Level 2 of the Qi Condensation Realm—absorbed the mountain’s energy like a thirsty sponge.
The Qi flowed through his nostrils, passed through the lotus purification inside his lungs, and deposited itself in his lower dantian in the form of threads of crystalline gray color.
The density of his energy climbed with every session. Shen Tian focused on compressing the existing Qi, delaying any extension toward the third meridian. He wanted every drop of energy inside his body to be as solid as refined metal.
By the fourth day, his dantian housed a reserve of Qi so compact that, despite being at Level 2, his impact capacity and physical resistance equaled that of a common cultivator at Level 4 of Qi Condensation.
That same afternoon, at the fifth hour, Shen Tian was assigned to transport sacks of fodder to the transport beast stables at the northern end of the servant district.
The path wound behind the abandoned granaries, a stretch of wild weeds where patrols rarely passed. As he walked at a steady pace carrying two linen sacks on his back, the Level 1 Radar Mode of his vision flickered subtly.
Three energy signatures of pale blue color appeared fifty meters away.
Shen Tian stopped his steps and hid behind the corner of a half-ruined stone wall. He lowered the sacks in silence and observed the scene.
In the small dead-end alley between two hay warehouses, three young men dressed in the gray tunics of servant disciples had cornered an extremely thin boy.
"Hand over this month’s spirit stone fragments, Lin Yu!" growled the leader of the group, a stocky young man with a face marked by acne and a tunic that was too small for his shoulders. "We know the tea pavilion manager gave you three pieces for cleaning the deacon’s jade cups!"
"Senior brother Wang, I have already given you everything!" pleaded the cornered boy, clutching a small cloth bag against his chest as he shrank against the stone wall. "These stones are all I have. My little sister needs a bloodletting pill from the village market... Please, let me off this time!"
"Your sister can rot, you piece of trash!" mocked one of the companions, giving him a kick in the stomach that made the boy double over in pain and fall to his knees in the mud.
The leader, whom they called Wang, grabbed Lin Yu by the hair and slammed his head against the stone wall. Blood began to gush from the boy’s forehead, staining the mud he was crawling on.
"Beg," Wang said with a cruel smile. "Crawl like the dog you are, lick my boots and maybe I’ll let you keep one piece. Come on, lick!"
Lin Yu wept uncontrollably, trembling with terror. With bleeding hands, he began to lower his head toward the attacker’s manure-covered boot, murmuring apologies between pathetic sobs.
From the shadows of the wall, Shen Tian contemplated the scene.
Across 135 years of his previous life, Shen Tian had encountered a thousand youths like this one—and watched every one of them vanish into oblivion. The annals of the great sects would close over Lin Yu like water, and the rivers and lakes of cultivation would forget him with the same indifference they forgot dust. He was a dry leaf in the whirlwind of the world, an insignificant mortal whom the world would bury without a trace.
The tactical calculus urged restraint. Intervening meant risking his cover, sacrificing Suppression Points, and drawing the attention of the servant gangs.
Shen Tian’s knuckles tightened involuntarily.
Compassion had died inside Shen Tian decades ago. What rose in his chest as he watched Lin Yu crawl in the mud, crying with his face covered in blood and submission, was a visceral and profound disgust.
Because looking at Lin Yu, Shen Tian saw himself.
He saw himself in the first ten years of his past life: a crippled boy with a miserable root who cried in the corners of alleys, who begged the thugs of the lesser sects to leave him his leftover food, who believed that by bowing and crawling in the filth he would manage to survive one more day. Seeing Lin Yu was like looking into a mirror of the past, a repugnant reminder of the pathetic and despicable being he had been before understanding the ruthless nature of the immortal path.
"Pathetic," Shen Tian murmured in an inaudible whisper.
He took a step out of the shadow.
The sound of his boots creaking on the stones drew the attention of the three aggressors. Wang released Lin Yu’s hair and turned with a frown, looking at the newcomer with contempt.
"And who the hell are you?" Wang spat. "Get out of here or I’ll beat you too, newbie."
Shen Tian walked on toward them, steady and calm. His face was a cold mask, his gray eyes two wells of frozen water.
"Listen when you’re spoken to, idiot!" shouted one of the lackeys, advancing with his fist charged with a clumsy current of Qi from Level 1 of Qi Condensation. "I’ll teach you to—"
The threat died in the man’s throat.
With the speed of a feline, Shen Tian shifted laterally, dodging the disorderly punch by barely a few millimeters. He continued his momentum, driving the tips of his index and middle fingers into the attacker’s left armpit.
Shen Tian moderated the output of his Qi, allowing it to appear as a clumsy Level 1 burst. Revealing his true density before a bunch of gutter thugs would be wasteful. A small burst of compressed Qi penetrated directly into the nodal point of his joint meridian. The attacker’s arm became completely paralyzed, and the boy let out a shriek of agony as his legs gave way, falling to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
The second lackey blinked, surprised by the violence of the action, and tried to draw a bone dagger from his belt.
Shen Tian was already in front of him. He grabbed his wrist with an iron hand, twisting it at an unnatural angle until the bones creaked. With the other hand, he delivered a dry blow with an open palm to the solar plexus. The dense Qi of Level 2 exploded inside the thug’s chest, knocking all the air from his lungs and sending him rolling through the mud three meters away, where he lay convulsing and spitting saliva.
The entire exchange had taken less than four seconds.
The leader, Wang—who possessed a cultivation of Level 2 of Qi Condensation—took a step back abruptly, his face pale and his forehead soaked with cold sweat. He tried to activate the energy of his dantian to defend himself, but the presence emanating from Shen Tian belonged to someone who had survived a century of humiliations, who had learned to move among predators and keep his skin intact, who had stared death in the face so many times that fear had withered away.
"What... what are you?" Wang stammered, taking several steps backward as he stumbled over his own feet.
Shen Tian answered with a single step forward and a straight front kick to the center of Wang’s chest. The impact was so brutal that it broke Wang’s sternum, sending him flying backward until he crashed against the stone wall, where he fell unconscious with a thread of blood gushing from his mouth.
The other two lackeys, crawling through the mud, managed to stand up as best they could and fled in terror carrying their unconscious leader, leaving the alley wrapped in absolute silence.
Shen Tian shook his hands, wiping the fine mud dust from his knuckles.
On the ground, Lin Yu stared at him with eyes bulging from astonishment. The boy trembled, but this time from absolute veneration. He crawled quickly toward Shen Tian’s feet, clasping his hands in a gesture of supplication and gratitude.
"Thank you, senior brother! Thank you!" Lin Yu sobbed, trying to touch the edge of Shen Tian’s tunic. "I am Lin Yu... I owe you my life, senior brother. I will do anything for you, I will be your servant, I will give you my spirit stones..."
Shen Tian stepped back, moving the tunic out of the boy’s reach. His gaze descended on Lin Yu with a severity that made the boy’s sobs stop dead.
"Get up," Shen Tian ordered. His voice was icy and surgical.
Lin Yu blinked, confused by his savior’s coldness.
"But... but you saved me..."
"Save your gratitude," Shen Tian said, turning his back to pick up the fodder sacks he had left on the ground. "I acted for myself. Watching a dog crawl sickened me, and I put an end to it. Weakness in this world is a crime, Lin Yu. Every time you crawl on the ground hoping the aggressor will have mercy, you are screaming to be crushed in the head."
Shen Tian slung the sacks over his shoulder.
"Learn to clench your fists. The next time I see you bowing your head like that, I will be the one who breaks your legs."
He turned and walked off.
In the blind spot of his vision, a notification flickered:
[Low-impact event detected. Alteration of Established Destiny: Insignificant. No Suppression Points generated.]
Shen Tian already knew the answer. Gutter thugs were noise. Sometimes noise also deserved to be silenced.