Shen Tian walked down the alley with steady strides, his gaze fixed on the path ahead.
The cruel words landed, and calm settled over Lin Yu. He wiped the blood from his forehead with the sleeve of his torn tunic, looked at Shen Tian’s back as he walked away, and clenched his fists with a new and burning determination. For a boy who had only known cruelty and contempt in the sect, Shen Tian’s harshness landed as the first real lesson on how to survive.
On the morning of the sixth day, the foreman of the servant zone handed Shen Tian a new work order.
As a buried punishment sent from Clear Wind Peak by Deacon Zhang—who sought to drive Shen Tian to despair in order to reduce his mental resistance—he was assigned to clean the western pavilion of the Secondary Scripture Library.
The building was an ancient three-story pavilion constructed of black sandalwood, located on an intermediate plateau between the servant territory and the pavilions of the outer disciples. The sect’s Great Main Library held the mid- and high-grade cultivation techniques; this place served as a depository of intellectual garbage: obsolete geographical records, travel diaries of cultivators who had died in past eras, and defective manuals of low-grade martial techniques left to rot for centuries.
When Shen Tian crossed the creaking wooden door, the air received him with a dense layer of dust, mold, and old paper. The floor lay covered with dry leaves that the wind slipped through the broken windows of the upper floor.
"You have twelve hours to sweep the third floor and reorganize the shelves at the back," said the old keeper of the pavilion, a man with a yellowish beard hunched over his opium pipe, his attention wholly absorbed by his own small comforts. "The wooden boards of the ceiling stay as they are. Your attention stays on your own work. If you break any tome, I will deduct a month’s rice ration from you."
Shen Tian took the straw broom from the entrance and climbed quietly.
He went up the creaking wooden stairs to the third floor. The atmosphere there was even gloomier; endless rows of rotting wooden shelves stretched beneath a low ceiling laden with cobwebs. Thousands of tomes of withered leather, bamboo scrolls gnawed by insects, and cracked stone slabs were piled in total disarray.
Shen Tian began to sweep at a steady pace.
To a common observer, he looked like a simple servant performing a boring task. In reality, Shen Tian used the repetitive motion of the broom to maintain his mental focus, scanning the environment with his passive spiritual perception.
Three hours of uninterrupted work passed.
When Shen Tian reached the back of the pavilion, to a dark corner untouched by sunlight where the shelves were about to collapse under the weight of dust, a strange sensation began to tingle in the center of his chest.
The Qi inside his lower dantian—the compact Level 2 energy he had carefully purified—began to vibrate on its own.
This resonance pulsed with a frequency identical to the compression he generated with the Mud Lotus Art, yet infinitely older, denser, and charged with a vibration that made his meridians tremble. A recognition, as if the tome knew his technique.
Shen Tian stopped the broom.
He narrowed his eyes and approached the last shelf in the left corner. There, lying on the wooden floor and serving as an improvised support to level a broken leg of the furniture, lay a tome bound in completely withered and blackened vegetable leather. Its spine was bare, and the corners of its pages seemed to have been burned by a fire of extreme temperature.
The System, which until that moment had remained silent, flickered abruptly. A flashing yellow interface appeared in his vision:
"[High-value object detected: Consciousness Transfer Tome.]"
"[Warning: Unauthorized manipulation of this object may trigger a High-Level Causality Anomaly.]"
"[Recommendation: Do not open. Delivery to the System for purification is recommended.]"
"[Reward for delivery: 500 Suppression Points.]"
Shen Tian crouched down. He removed the tome from beneath the shelf’s leg with care.
The leather felt cold as ice upon contact with his fingers, but the interior of the book emitted a subtle heat that made the air around it vibrate in visible micro-undulations.
Shen Tian opened the worn cover.
The pages contained a script from a forgotten tongue, older than the common world or the modern sects. Small crimson runes that resembled intertwined human veins covered every surface. At the exact moment the ambient light touched the open pages, the crimson runes came to life.
"A seal trap...?" Shen Tian murmured, attempting to release the tome immediately.
Too late.
The crimson runes exploded in a blaze of red light, utterly silent. The light wrapped around Shen Tian’s face like a liquid fabric, penetrating directly through his eyes, nose, and ears.
The sight of the wooden pavilion, the smell of old dust, and the broom he held in his hand dissolved in a fraction of a second. Shen Tian’s consciousness was torn from his physical body at a terrifying speed, leaving his mortal shell paralyzed standing in the corner of the library with his eyes completely white.
When the sensation of vertigo ceased, Shen Tian opened his eyes in a completely different place.
He stood on a surface transparent as crystal, floating above an infinite sea of pure spiritual water. The surface absorbed his every step with perfect stillness, reflecting a starless, moonless sky of dark violet.
The transparent ocean beneath his feet paled beside what rose around him.
As far as the eye could see in that astral plane, the space was populated by thousands of Ancestral Trees of Spiritual Energy.
Their trunks were made of veins of condensed light, and their canopies breathed with a resplendent golden tone. Each leaf of those gigantic trees carried a thread of cosmic Qi of such overwhelming purity that it made the air of the outside world seem like rotting mud. The trees absorbed and exhaled energy in a symphonic rhythm that made Shen Tian’s mental space tremble.
And at the exact core of this divine grove, the most colossal tree of all stood.
Its trunk measured hundreds of meters wide, built with veins of white jade and liquid fire that circulated through its bark as if it were blood. Its branches extended toward the violet sky, covering half of the astral vault with a canopy of resplendent red leaves that fell slowly like a rain of eternal embers.
Sitting on one of the main roots protruding from the surface of the spiritual water, was a woman.
Her appearance surpassed mortal beauty. She possessed an endless mane of red hair like liquid fire that flowed through the tree, cascading over a ceremonial tunic of crimson silk embroidered with threads of ancient gold. Her skin was as white and pure as fine porcelain, creating a hypnotic contrast with the intensity of her mane.
The presence emanating from her figure was a silent abyss, a majesty so ancient and unfathomable that it made the very reality of the mental space curve around her. This woman radiated something far older and colder than the coarse, noisy aura of Deacon Zhang.
Shen Tian kept his calm, forcing his consciousness to stabilize as he activated the System’s internal perception.
[!READING ERROR!]
[The entity’s energy signature exceeds all measurement thresholds.]
[Security Warning: Foreign Mental Domain detected.]
[Soul Assimilation Risk: 99.9%.]
Immediately, a second wave of emergency notifications appeared:
"[!EMERGENCY ALERT!]"
"[Entity of Unknown Level attempting to assimilate the host’s soul.]"
"[Estimated time before complete assimilation: 60 seconds.]"
"[Available options:]"
"[Option A: Activate Suppression Point overload for a desperate escape. (Survival probability: 8%)]"
"[Option B: Allow partial assimilation and negotiate from a position of weakness. (Survival probability: 45%)]"
"[Option C: Invoke the Heaven Suppression protocol. (Unknown consequences. Survival probability: 30%)]"
The woman raised her head slowly.
Her eyes, two orbs of resplendent gold that burned with the coldness of two dying suns, fixed directly on Shen Tian’s spiritual essence. A slow, beautiful, and terrifying smile drew itself on her red lips.
"A fifteen-year-old vessel... with a soul that has known death and returned," the woman said. Her voice vibrated directly in the core of Shen Tian’s mind, like thousands of bronze bells sounding in unison. "What a fascinating anomaly has fallen into my seal."
The woman stood up from the root of the giant tree. With a single step, the hundred-meter distance separating them evaporated completely.
She reappeared right in front of Shen Tian. The breeze of her presence smelled of burnt lotus and ancient blood. She raised her right hand—with fine fingers and nails painted a deep crimson—and extended it toward Shen Tian’s face.
At the edges of her fingers, thousands of red runes began to emerge, identical to those of the library tome, but charged with a devouring intent that sought to crush Shen Tian’s will.
"Your flesh shows its limits, yet the density of your soul is an exquisite mold," whispered the red-haired woman, as her golden eyes shone with an ancestral hunger that threatened to tear the young man’s mind apart. "Give me your body, little specter... and dissolve into my sea of energy."
The woman’s hand grazed Shen Tian’s forehead, and a wave of spiritual fire erupted inside his consciousness, beginning the process of devouring his soul.
Shen Tian clenched his teeth. The System’s options flickered in his vision, three possible paths in the midst of hell. Time ran thin.