Chương 109: Turning His Back (3/3)

Shi Yan focused his attention on the man in the spun-silver robes—the Tier-3 powerhouse seated at the very heart of the formation like a condemned emperor upon an invisible throne.

The man was staring intensely at the glowing red letters carved across the massive black stone, his pale face tilted upward at an unnatural angle that exposed the taut cords of muscle along his throat. His jaw was clenched so tightly that Shi Yan could hear the microscopic sound of the man's molars grinding together through the passive, low-frequency hum of his [Acoustic-Blood Tracker]—a faint, brittle crackling threading through the oppressive silence like hairline fractures spreading across winter ice.

The auditory feedback was grotesque. He could literally hear the horrifying friction of enamel fracturing under the sheer compressive force of the man's jaw muscles, each grinding rotation producing minute pulses of crystalline destruction as dental integrity collapsed inward upon itself.

The man's hands, resting on his knees in a mockery of meditative composure, were curled into rigid claws, the knuckles stark white and bloodless where bone pressed dangerously close to splitting through skin. The silk of his robes—likely woven from extremely rare, high-grade materials meant to repel spiritual contamination and mundane filth alike—was plastered to his skin in damp, uneven patches, soaked through with thick, greasy sweat that darkened the pristine fabric into shadowed blotches.

The silver threading along the hems still shimmered faintly despite the moisture, as if the spiritual weave itself refused to surrender its luster even as its wearer teetered on the precipice of obliteration.

Shi Yan stood still, his boots planted on the crushed bone-ash paving exactly one hundred feet away from the monolith's base, the powdery surface beneath his iron-shod soles compressed into shallow depressions from his weight. His shoulders remained squared, his breathing controlled and measured behind the iron slats of his mask. The cold violet light reflecting off the polished obsidian cast his silhouette in sharp, angular relief—a statue carved from vigilance and tactical awareness.

He watched the physical breakdown happen in real-time, analyzing it with the detached precision of a field medic cataloging battlefield trauma.

Suddenly, the man in silver convulsed. It wasn't a gentle twitch; it was a violent, full-body spasm, as if a massive electrical current had been pumped directly into his spine through invisible cables. His back arched so severely that his vertebrae audibly cracked in staccato sequence—pop-pop-pop—like knuckles being crushed in a vise.

Bright, arterial blood burst from his tear ducts, streaming down his cheeks in thick, dark crimson tracks that carved wet furrows through the ashen pallor of his face. It wasn't a slow trickle—it looked like extreme, catastrophic cranial pressure forcing blood out through the path of least resistance, the hot liquid steaming faintly as it met the frigid air radiating from the monument.

"Arghhhh!" The man let out a horrifying, desperate scream that shattered the silence of the plaza like shattering glass, the sound raw and animalistic, stripped of all human dignity. He pitched violently sideways onto the bone-ash floor, his pristine robes billowing briefly before collapsing around his thrashing form.

His hands clamped over his eyes, his fingers curling into hooked claws as he began to frantically, desperately tear at his own face, as if trying to physically dig something out of his own brain—fingernails raking through flesh, peeling back skin in ragged strips. He was tearing through his own eyelids, ripping away chunks of cheek and orbital tissue, driven by a primal, inescapable agony that originated entirely from within his own skull.

His body arced backward in a severe, uncontrollable seizure, spine bowing like a drawn bow ready to snap. His heels drummed wildly against the stone, cracking the obsidian tiles beneath him with each impact—sharp crack-crack-crack sounds echoing across the empty plaza like distant hammer blows.

BANG!

The kinetic force generated by his death throes was immense, sending shockwaves through the ground that vibrated up through the soles of Shi Yan's boots in rhythmic pulses, the tremors traveling through bone and sinew all the way to his jaw.

Then, exactly two seconds later, the man went entirely limp. His arms dropped to his sides with the boneless finality of severed puppet strings, fingers uncurling slowly as residual tension bled away into stillness. The blood pooling beneath his ruined face spread outward in a slow, viscous halo, filling the microscopic cracks in the obsidian with dark, branching veins.

This man… the Tier-3 expert, a being of the Shattered-Halo Realm. A living, breathing natural disaster capable of leveling fortified sect compounds with a casual gesture. Someone with a physical and spiritual density so immense that Shi Yan—even with his [55 Physique] and [55 Might]—knew he would likely be slapped to death in a direct frontal confrontation, his body reduced to a red mist before his nervous system could even register the impact.

This same pseudo-immortal was now… dead. Reduced to a bleeding, hollow-eyed husk sprawled in his own filth like discarded refuse.

Shi Yan remained speechless behind his Iron-Yaksha mask, the silence within his own mind absolute and crystalline.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. The other eleven cultivators sitting in the wide semicircle did not move. They didn't flinch. They didn't turn their heads to look at the fresh corpse lying less than twenty feet away from them, still twitching with residual nerve death. The sulfuric air carried the copper-iron stench of fresh blood and the acrid smell of released bowels—the final indignity of biological collapse.

They didn't scramble backward in a panic. They remained absolutely rigid, their spines locked straight as iron rods, their hands pressed flat or clenched white-knuckled against their knees. Their eyes remained locked in terrified, desperate concentration on the monolith, pupils dilated so wide the irises were barely visible—black voids ringed with thin crescents of color. Steam continued to rise from their shoulders and backs in lazy, curling tendrils.

They were too overwhelmed by their own invisible torment to spare even a flicker of awareness for the corpse cooling beside them.

Shi Yan slowly lifted his gaze from the bleeding husk of the silver-robed cultivator back to the colossal, bleeding stone. His eyes traced the monument's jagged silhouette against the inverted violet sky, the unnatural geometry of its surface seeming to drink in light rather than reflect it.

The line of sight. The glowing red characters pulsing in rhythmic, hypnotic sequence. The localized, perfect circle of the safe zone, precisely one hundred feet away, marked by the edge of where the closest cultivator was sitting—an invisible boundary as sharp and absolute as a blade's edge.

It wasn't a physical attack. It was a visual broadcast, a weaponized transmission of compressed meaning that bypassed flesh entirely to detonate directly within the soul-space.

The monument was emitting a localized, highly concentrated zone of conceptual radiation—an informational hazard zone analogous to standing within the blast radius of a memetic warhead.

Based on his assumption, by merely reading the characters—by tracing the ancient, encoded intent with their minds—these cultivators were pulling a mass of volatile raw data into their brains. It was an information payload that their biological and spiritual hardware simply could not process, decrypt, or cage without catastrophic structural failure.

In short, it was a localized psychic EMP. It perhaps overloaded the Dantian's spiritual circuitry, violently reversed the flow of Qi through meridians never meant to carry such density, and detonated the brain from the inside out through sheer, unadulterated cognitive pressure—like forcing an ocean through a straw.

As if verifying his tactical deduction, the pale blue interface of the System violently superimposed itself over the towering obelisk in his vision, the translucent text glowing with cold, clinical precision: [Entity Recognized: Stele of the Sunken Celestials] [Cultivation Resonance: Unknown (Pre-Epoch / High-Density Conceptual Construct)] [Threat to Current Vessel: CONCEPTUAL / COGNITIVE BIO-HAZARD (Avoid Direct Optical Connection)] [Condition: Entities possessing a Spiritual Root or actively cycling an internal Dantian will suffer immediate, catastrophic soul-degradation upon extended exposure.] Shi Yan read the floating blue text twice, his eyes tracking each line with deliberate care, cross-referencing threat parameters against known variables.

Is it an entity? A strange look crossed his gaze, visible only in the minute narrowing of his eyes behind the mask's slit. Entities possessing a Spiritual Root or actively cycling an internal Dantian? he repeated internally, rolling the phrasing across his mental workspace.

Interesting. Based on his situation—which lacked Qi, spiritual roots, and Dantians—this Stele's radiation was specifically built to attack the metaphysical architecture of most Qi cultivators, targeting the very foundations that granted them their power and longevity.

Of course, despite knowing this, and despite the possibility that he might not be affected, there was no way… not a chance he would try it.

It was a highly probable theory, supported by system analysis and observational evidence.

And that was exactly why Shi Yan had absolutely no intention of testing it.

To take a risk without a guaranteed, calculated return on investment was the definition of suicidal arrogance—the kind of hubris that littered battlefields with corpses who'd believed themselves special.

Shi Yan shifted his gaze back to the Stele, carefully avoiding directly focusing on any single, specific character to prevent accidental optical connection. Instead, he observed the monument as a whole, mapping its structure in peripheral segments—cataloging dimensions, material density, probable weight distribution, and the pattern of liquid descent across its surface.

But his focus lingered more on those characters, even while refusing direct engagement. They were carved deep into the stone, each stroke gouged at least three inches into the black surface, the edges sharp and irregular.

They didn't look like elegant calligraphy penned by a wise sage in contemplative solitude. They looked like desperate, ragged claw marks gouged into the rock by a dying beast—each stroke jagged and frantic, as if carved by something fleeing its own inevitable annihilation.

More importantly, Shi Yan noticed that the characters were not static.

One string of ragged symbols near the base would violently flare with brilliant, blinding red light for exactly three seconds—pulsing like exposed arterial blood—before instantly dimming into dead, unreadable black stone, the crimson glow extinguishing as if a switch had been thrown. Simultaneously, another string of characters higher up the monument would ignite with the same intensity, the sequence cascading upward in a pattern too precise to be random.

Quite magical, he thought with dry, clinical appreciation. Interesting.

He briefly looked at the characters again, tracking the propagation pattern across multiple cycles, then observed the eleven remaining cultivators with renewed understanding.

A man to the far right, dressed in the dark leather of a rogue cultivator—no sect emblem visible, armor patched and worn from long travel—was leaning forward so far he looked ready to snap at the waist. His eyes were tracking a specific sequence of flashing characters, darting erratically across the stone's surface like a starving predator following prey, his head jerking in minute adjustments to follow each ignition.

So, in short, this is a race. A brutal, lethal race against time and cognitive endurance.

Perhaps… the intelligence must be invaluable if these elites are willing to risk brain-death just to comprehend a single character. The reward-to-risk ratio would have to be astronomical to justify this level of exposure.

The Ghost Market was a netherworld bazaar where everything had a price, usually paid in blood, lifespan, or souls—currencies far more liquid than gold or spirit stones in this realm.

For eleven high-tier existences to willingly subject themselves to an environmental hazard with a near-certain fatality rate, whatever was written on that stone had to be worth enough to shift the balance of power across entire regions, or perhaps even continents.

It was likely a legacy from a fallen immortal, an ancient map to sealed treasure vaults, or an uncorrupted Daoist truth from before the Heavens shattered—or those so-called secret realms, basically a tomb of those high-tier cultivators who'd transcended mortal limits only to be sealed away by jealous heavens.

But, completely irrelevant to him. He had no spiritual root to cultivate with, no sect to return knowledge to, no disciples to inherit his legacy.

In the end, I got nothing from this detour except witnessing a bizarre, supernatural execution, he concluded dryly in the silence of his own mind, the words settling like ash.

He took a long, slow breath, filtering the cold, sulfur-tainted air through the vents of his Iron-Yaksha mask, the metallic tang coating his throat. He clicked his tongue softly against his teeth—a quiet sound of dismissal—shaking his head in minute negation.

Turning smoothly on his heel, weight shifting from ball to heel in practiced military precision, he engaged the low-level suppression of his [Phantom-Ash Veil], erasing the sound of his armored boots against the stone as he prepared to withdraw from the plaza's edge and resume his primary objective.