Chương 11: The Leak Is Gone

Curiosity is humanity's greatest evolutionary trait. Everyone possesses it—the scholar poring over forbidden texts, the child reaching toward flame, the cultivator standing at the precipice of breakthrough. The difference between a survivor and a casualty is simply the ability to restrain it, to cage that primal hunger behind bars of discipline and caution.

Now, standing in the dead center of a lethally corrupted zone, staring at a perfectly preserved, pitch-black pill cradled in the skeletal hands of a mummified ascetic, Shi Yan felt that curiosity burn hot beneath his ribs—a coiling heat that spread through his chest like smoldering embers refusing to die.

Another gold mine... or a landmine dressed in gold?

His brow furrowed sharply, dried mud cracking at the corners of his eyes and flaking down his temples in pale dust. His attention locked onto the altar of weeping human skulls—stacked in concentric rings with architectural precision, their hollow sockets dripping thin streams of blackish fluid that pooled into the surrounding mud with the patient rhythm of a water clock.

The skulls themselves were unnaturally clean, bleached bone without a trace of flesh or cartilage, as though they'd been ritually prepared rather than scavenged from corpses. Dark tributaries of that viscous fluid traced paths between the eye sockets, flowing down jawbones and through nasal cavities before collecting in the filth below.

The dense crimson mist swirling around him ruined his long-range visibility, reducing the world beyond ten feet to a shapeless, churning void. The fog moved with languid purpose, coiling and uncoiling like serpents made of smoke. Impossible to determine if this mummified ascetic was an abandoned relic—some forgotten elder who'd succumbed to inner demons during secluded cultivation—or meticulously set bait to lure in greedy scavengers foolish enough to mistake opportunity for fortune.

He didn't step closer.

Maintaining a strict ten-yard distance, he began to circle the altar with measured, deliberate steps. Boots squelched softly in the waterlogged gravel, each footfall releasing faint pockets of stagnant air that reeked of rot and cold stone. The sound was muffled, dampened by the oppressive atmosphere as though the miasma itself swallowed noise. His shoulders remained loose, weight balanced on the balls of his feet—the instinctive combat stance of someone who'd learned to move through minefields and ambush zones.

First, check the perimeter. Look for tripwires—or, rather, array formations or something similar. Maybe blood channels carved in the stone, too.

He crouched low, the straw cloak dragging through the muck with a wet rasp as he stared closely at the ground around the skulls. His fingers hovered just above the surface, tracing invisible lines in the air—checking for disturbed mud, unnatural grooves, geometric patterns in the stone, anything that suggested intentional design. The cold seeped through his knees where they pressed into the waterlogged earth, but he ignored it, eyes narrowing as he studied every inch of exposed ground.

It was dead silent.

The only movement was the faint, swirling red miasma drifting past his shoulders like slow breath, tendrils curling around his arms without ever quite making contact. Thanks to the System's interference, he remained completely unaffected by the localized curse, giving him the clarity to confirm there were no physical ambushers hiding in the immediate fog. No shadows shifted wrong. No breathing patterns disrupted the stillness. No spiritual pressure radiated from concealed positions.

But thinking back to how that group of grave robbers passed through this miasma, he was now more confident: they had a way, but the leader didn't tell him, and he didn't ask. Perhaps the leader wanted him dead in this miasma—one less mouth to feed, one less share to split, one less witness to whatever they'd found deeper in the abyss.

Well, unfortunate for you—I survived.

His lips curled slightly at the corners, a humorless expression that didn't reach his eyes.

Now, let's test the aggro radius.

Finding the first skull altar was safe—now it was the time.

In the world of gaming, Boss entities often possessed proximity triggers or reacted to structural damage. Invisible leash ranges. Aggression thresholds. Phase transitions at certain health percentages.

Who knew if this mummified ascetic was the same?

Thus, he bent down, scooping up a heavy, jagged piece of collarbone from the cavern floor nearby. Mud clung to its porous surface, cold and slick beneath his fingers, the bone slightly spongy from prolonged exposure to moisture. Winding his arm back with the practiced motion of a soldier lobbing a grenade into an enemy position, he hurled it directly at the mummified ascetic.

The bone spun through the air—a pale streak against the red fog, tumbling end over end—and struck the mummy square in the chest with a dull thwack that echoed briefly before being swallowed by the miasma.

It didn't react.

The mummy didn't twitch, its eyes didn't glow with sudden spiritual light, and the black pill remained perfectly balanced in its leathery palms—dried skin stretched taut over bone, fingers curled in a ritual mudra. The only sound was the resumed dripping from the skull altar beneath it, rhythmic and indifferent, like rain falling on stone. The collarbone fragment bounced off the corpse's chest and clattered down the side of the altar, coming to rest among the lower skulls with a hollow clack.

Shi Yan was patient.

He didn't immediately rush in. He stood motionless, one hand resting on the hilt of his chipped jian—thumb pressed against the guard in a ready position—watching. Watching the mummy's sunken face for muscle tension, for the subtle animation that would signal dormant consciousness. Watching the pill for vibration, for any shift in position or change in color. Watching the fog for sudden directional shifts, for the telltale swirl that preceded spiritual attacks.

His breathing remained controlled. Four counts in through the nose. Hold. Four counts out through parted lips.

Two full minutes passed.

When nothing happened—no flare of killing intent, no activation of defensive formations, no phantom screams or spectral manifestations—his posture relaxed a fraction. The tension bled from his shoulders, though his hand never left the sword hilt.

Alright. It's an inanimate hazard, not a sleeper unit.

He finally closed the gap. Stepping up to the macabre altar with careful, deliberate movements, he reached out with two fingers—index and middle extended, the rest curled back against his palm in the minimalist contact method taught for handling unexploded ordnance.

The very millisecond his skin brushed the smooth, cold surface of the black pill—sensation like touching polished stone chilled by winter air—a maddening chorus of whispers, akin to a hundred desperate, screaming people all begging and wailing in overlapping cacophony, exploded directly inside his skull, completely bypassing his ears. The voices spoke in fragmented dialect he couldn't fully comprehend, words layered atop each other until they became pure anguish given sound.

Simultaneously, an ethereal screen violently flashed before his eyes, golden script burning bright against his retinas.

[Item Recognized: Pill of the Weeping Martyr.] [Status: Lethal soul-corruption detected.] He immediately severed contact, pulling his hand back with the sharp, reflexive speed of a soldier grabbing a hot rifle barrel—muscle memory overriding conscious thought.

No stumble. No gasp. He simply snapped into a defensive crouch, weight shifted back, center of gravity lowered, his heart rate spiking from resting sixty to a combat-ready ninety in the span of two seconds. Even with his hand pulled away—fingers still tingling with phantom cold—the phantom screams continued to echo in his mind like the deafening ring of a flashbang grenade, pressure building behind his eyes.

Soul-corruption.

He gripped the side of his head with his free hand, nails digging into the dried mud caked along his temple, scratching at his scalp through the grime. The sensation helped ground him—physical pain to anchor against spiritual assault. He forced his breathing to slow—four counts in, hold, four counts out. Box breathing. Combat stress management.

He maintained the tactical breathing until the lingering phantom whispers finally faded to a distant hum, and then absolute silence, leaving only the resumed dripping of the skull altar and his own controlled exhalations.

The warning was clear: it wasn't a biological poison that attacked the flesh through meridians or blood; it was a spiritual curse designed to melt the mind, to shatter consciousness like glass struck by a hammer.

Bad luck. Tsk.

He clicked his tongue against his teeth, jaw tightening as he stared at the black pill with renewed wariness. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

To eat it blindly would be suicide—a cultivator's death, consciousness scattered to the winds while the body remained a breathing husk. But walking away from what could be a jackpot was equally foolish, the kind of overcaution that left soldiers starving while supply crates sat fifty meters away across contested ground.

He opened his UI with a thought, the golden translucent screen materializing in the damp air before him, casting faint amber light across his grime-streaked features. He stared at his unallocated stat points, at the numbers that represented quantified survival advantage.

[Anomaly: 5] The Anomaly stat had just allowed him to walk right through a lethal demonic anomaly by isolating the foreign laws, treating him as an unrecognizable variable the corruption couldn't properly target. Since the pill was a physical manifestation of that same Demonic Qi—compressed, refined, weaponized—perhaps the same rules should theoretically apply?

I won't let my stomach digest it. Let's try if the System is able to filter it.

Relying on the [Anomaly] stat to act as his quarantine barrier—a firewall between corrupted input and vital systems—he issued a strict mental command with the clarity of a mission briefing.

System. I am going to consume the relic. I authorize maximum quarantine protocol. Do not allow biological digestion. Target the relic as raw systemic data, isolate the soul-corruption, and purge it from the vessel.

A couple seconds of silence.

The screen remained static, text unmoving. No acknowledgment chime. No confirmation prompt.

Perhaps it won't be able to receive advanced commands like this? Or—?

But then…

[Command Received. Anomaly trait standing by. Awaiting relic consumption.] Perfect plot armor.

He smiled—a genuine expression that cracked the dried blood at the corner of his mouth, revealing teeth stained with old grime. And now, with the safety net armed, he didn't hesitate anymore.

He picked the black pill off the mummy's leathery palm—the dried skin felt like old parchment under his fingertips, brittle and cold—and tossed it directly into his mouth, swallowing it dry before second thoughts could surface. It scraped down his throat like swallowing gravel, dense and chalky, refusing saliva. The texture was wrong, too solid, too heavy. Hit his stomach like swallowed coal—a dense weight that settled with unnatural cold.

"Ugh…"

A moment of intense, calculated agony tore through him.

His vision blurred violently, flashing between the ruined pagoda walls and screaming, phantasmal faces of dead cultivators—mouths stretched too wide in impossible rictus grins, eyes hollow and weeping black tears that ran like ink down translucent cheeks. Spectral hands reached toward him from the fog, fingers elongated and grasping. The temperature plummeted further, his breath misting in thick clouds.

The corrupted payload within the pill exploded inward, a tidal wave of Demonic Yin attempting to freeze his meridians and shatter his mind from the inside out—invasive code trying to overwrite his consciousness with madness and despair.

But the System intercepted it.

A bright, flashing blue firewall materialized in his vision, geometric patterns forming a defensive lattice, aggressively combating the creeping black rot trying to infect his UI like spilled ink across glass. The two forces clashed in his awareness—blue light versus spreading darkness, order versus corruption.

[Foreign Soul-Corruption entering vessel.] [Quarantine initiated via Daoless Anomaly.] [Purging Malicious Data...] [Purging...] [Curse neutralized. Raw Dao Embers extracted.] [+1, 000 Dao Embers.] In the midst of the searing abdominal pain—sharp, radiating, twisting like a hot knife dragged through his guts—a wild joy sparked in Shi Yan's dead eyes, pupils dilating with sudden exhilaration.

One thousand points.

That wasn't a gold mine; it was a treasury. An armory. A logistics depot dropped in his lap.

Heheh!

The sound escaped his throat—breathless, almost manic.

As the agonizing side effects swiftly vanished—phantom screams fading, spectral faces dissolving, temperature stabilizing—his eyes snapped open wide, neck straightening as he immediately pulled up his stat screen with a thought. The golden script hovered before him, semi-transparent against the red fog, reflecting in the dark pools of his eyes.

The math to upgrade his vessel was going to be astronomically expensive due to exponential scaling—climbing into the high twenties cost 25 points per tick, and pushing through the 30s would cost a staggering 50 points per tick. The kind of resource investment that should take months of careful cultivation. But with 1, 180 Embers now sitting in his reserve—a fortune scraped from corpses and cursed relics—he finally had the logistical funding to officially end his greatest weakness.

System. Push both Agility and Physique to 35. Retain the remaining Embers as a medical reserve.

[System Calculation Request: Confirmed.] [Agility: 22 -> 35 (Cost: 450 Embers)] [Physique: 22 -> 35 (Cost: 450 Embers)] [Total Deduction: 900 Dao Embers. Remaining Reserve: 280] [Confirm Mass Allocation?] Yes. Now.

[ATTRIBUTES UPDATED] Physique: 35 [Tier-1: Obsidian-Frame minor realm achieved] Agility: 35 [Tier-1: Obsidian-Frame minor realm achieved] Might: 12 [Tier-1 Baseline] This was no minor recalibration. This was forced evolutionary trauma.

He dropped to his knees, boots sliding in the mud, burying his face in his scarred hands as a concussive pop echoed through every major joint in his body—elbows, shoulders, hips, spine—like bamboo snapping under pressure. His jaw locked so tight the bone creaked audibly, teeth grinding together with enough force to crack enamel.

As a soldier, he had experienced countless shrapnel wounds and burns, field surgery without anesthetic, bones set wrong and healed crooked—but this bypassed pain tolerance entirely, attacking at a cellular level.

His muscle mass didn't just densify; it functionally changed composition. Under his thin skin—stretched taut now, almost translucent—the muscles wove together like braided steel cable, fibers tightening, compressing, realigning with brutal efficiency. His arms bulged momentarily before settling into a leaner, harder configuration. Veins surfaced along his forearms and neck, standing out in sharp relief, pulsing with accelerated circulation.

"Arghhh!"

The sound tore from his throat—raw, animal, echoing briefly before the miasma swallowed it.

Most terrifyingly, a sickening, grinding sensation ripped through his skeletal structure—the sound audible from inside his own body, transmitted through flesh and tissue. The outer layer of his bones calcified—thickening, hardening, the marrow compressing—absorbing the corrupted ash-energy of the environment until they literally turned structurally similar to obsidian stone. His ribs creaked with the expansion. His spine straightened with a series of sharp cracks.

His skull felt like it was being compressed in a vice.

Dense. Heavy. Unnatural.

When the white-hot pain finally broke—the last wave cresting and receding like surf withdrawing from shore—he remained kneeling in the mud, chest heaving in ragged gasps that sent his shoulders rising and falling in violent motion. Sweat poured down his dirty face in rivers, carving clean streaks through the dried blood and bone-ash, dripping from his jaw and chin to patter into the muck below.

He slowly lowered his hands.

"Ha… ha…"

He felt... indestructible.

There was a wide smile on his face—cracked lips pulling tight against his teeth in an expression somewhere between triumph and madness, eyes gleaming with fevered intensity.

The oppressive gravity of the Corrupted Zone felt like nothing now—a mild pressure rather than a crushing weight. His body was so mechanically efficient, so brutally dense, that just clenching his fist produced a sound like stretching leather—fibers compressing, tendons rolling over bone with audible tension, the meat of his palm creating resistance against itself.

He stood slowly, testing his new equilibrium. His movements felt different. Heavier. More deliberate. But faster when he wanted them to be—explosive potential coiled in every muscle fiber.

He had officially achieved the physical equivalent of the peak Obsidian-Frame realm—a threshold that should require years of resource consumption and dedicated body tempering.

Then came the chime he had been waiting all night to hear.

[SYSTEM DIRECTIVE UPDATED] Massive breakthrough recorded. Extreme vascular and skeletal density achieved. Vessel containment is now absolute. Natural energy dissipation halted. Sieve Leak resolved.