Chương 17: One Point Too Far (2/2)

His mind began to play out the scenario, rapidly sifting through the original host's fragmented memories of the Iron-Blood Prefecture—half-remembered glimpses of red banners snapping in mountain wind, the cold marble checkpoints where sect disciples inspected corpse-handlers with naked contempt, the sprawling guard formations at the surface gates.

No. They won't.

The guards hadn't built this array. They were stationed at the surface checkpoint to ensure things didn't crawl out of the abyss—not to shepherd what festered below. They were sentries, not shepherds. Wardens, not caretakers.

The Abyssal Overseer wasn't their guard dog or their pet; it was a terrifying mutation born of the Charnel Abyss itself, squatting here only because corpses were periodically dumped near the array like slop for livestock. The creature had claimed this territory through raw predatory dominance, drawn by the endless supply of flesh that tumbled down from above. Nothing more.

The haughty cultivators above were terrified of the demonic miasma down here—the bone-deep revulsion of immortals who feared corruption more than death itself. They wouldn't bother tracking the vitality of a beast they actively avoided, wouldn't waste spiritual sense probing into depths that reeked of sulfur and rot and spiritual pollution.

Logic settled—or I hope my assumption is correct.

Shi Yan stepped up onto the massive, floating stone slab.

The bedrock was smooth and cold beneath his frictionless soles, its surface worn ancient and seamless, polished by centuries of use until the stone itself seemed to drink in the dim golden light. Faint hairline veins of calcification traced patterns across the black rock like fossilized lightning. The platform hung motionless in the air, impossibly stable, without even the faintest tremor or sway.

In the center of the platform rested a slightly raised stone dais featuring a rectangular indentation, its edges sharp and deliberately carved with the geometric precision of ancient craftsmanship. The groove was perhaps three inches deep, just wide enough to cradle something flat and oblong.

Approaching it, Shi Yan pulled the bone-carved Cadaver Writ from his belt. The token was smooth and cold in his burned palm, its weight deceptively heavy for its size. Tiny characters etched into the yellowed surface seemed to shimmer faintly in the dim light, though whether from reflected runes or something deeper, he couldn't tell. The token slotted perfectly into the groove with a dry click, the sound sharp and final in the cavernous silence.

Instantly, the ancient golden runes carved along the edges of the slab flared to life, their glow spreading outward in rippling lines like veins igniting beneath stone flesh. Light crawled across the surface in branching paths, each character brightening in sequence as if awakening from a long slumber. The illumination was warm, almost liquid, pooling in the carved channels before overflowing outward toward the platform's rim.

The platform didn't simply rise; it detached from the laws of physics.

With a deep, resonant hum that vibrated in his teeth and rattled the black-iron vambrace on his forearm, the massive bedrock array began to float upward into the vertical shaft. The sound was felt as much as heard—a bone-deep thrumming that resonated through the stone beneath his boots and up through his skeleton. Loose dust and ash particles lifted gently from the platform's surface, suspended in the air for a heartbeat before drifting away into the darkness.

Shi Yan stood near the edge, looking down as the cavern floor shrank away into the fog. The Overseer's corpse became a dark smudge against the pale bone-ash, then vanished entirely as sulfurous mist rolled in to reclaim the space. Ash and steam swirled in lazy eddies below, already impossibly distant. The sundered Daoist statue—that broken monument to forgotten divinity—disappeared into shadow, swallowed by the gloom.

It's really flying… Without mechanics…

He marveled quietly at the sensation, his expression carefully neutral even as something like wonder stirred beneath his tactical awareness. As a modern soldier, his understanding of flight was rooted in thrust, aerodynamics, and loud, violently burning jet fuel—the shriek of turbines, the rattling fuselage, the physics of lift and drag beaten into him through training manuals and live drops. Metal and combustion and calculated vectors.

Yet here he stood on a million-ton slab of solid stone, ascending silently through the earth via glowing calligraphy. Ancient characters carved by hands long dead, powered by principles his scientific education had no framework to comprehend. It completely shattered his scientific worldview, left it in ruins as thoroughly as any artillery barrage.

The walls of the vertical shaft slid past in near-total darkness, broken only by the golden glow pulsing from beneath his feet. Occasionally, he glimpsed jagged outcroppings of rock, mineral veins glinting dully, or the skeletal remains of some long-dead creature wedged into a crevice—testament to how many things had tried and failed to climb this passage.

The ride up the vertical shaft would take several minutes.

So, Shi Yan opened his UI, his 5, 280 Dao Embers sitting like a massive war chest in the corner of his vision—a number so absurdly high compared to the desperate poverty he'd operated under just hours ago that it felt almost unreal.

Time to balance the loadout.

His current stats were lopsided: [37 Physique], [35 Agility], and a miserable [12 Might].

In close-quarters combat, armor and speed only bought you survival. Endurance kept you in the fight. Agility let you disengage. But neither one finished the enemy.

Back at the bottom of the abyss, prioritizing defense and evasion had been a mandatory tactical choice; he had been too poor, too broken, and too weak to risk trading blows with apex predators like the Abyssal Overseer. Every encounter had been a calculated gamble—poison, positioning, environmental exploitation. Attrition warfare fought with a scavenger's toolkit.

He had built his vessel like a scout—fast and hard to kill.

Only desperate people were forced to choose between a shield and a sword.

But now, looking at the massive treasury of Embers shimmering in his vision, he realized he was no longer poor. No longer operating on starvation rations, scraping together ten Embers at a time from scavenged beast cores and gambling his life for scraps.

A good shield keeps you alive, but lethality ends the war.

He slowly flexed his [12 Might] hand, watching the fingers curl and straighten with deliberate control. The knuckles popped softly in the dark, the sound swallowed by the hum of golden runes beneath his boots. The movement felt weak—not fragile, but lacking true kinetic authority. Like swinging a training blade when you needed a warhammer.

I've been relying on the Black-Iron Body Art to deal burst damage, but that technique heavily taxes my stamina and triggers the Sieve Leak. I can't rely on it for every street fight. I need raw, passive kinetic output. Base lethality.

The kind of strength that let you break bone with a casual strike, crush windpipes with a grip, drive a blade through reinforced armor without technique or flourish. Pure, blunt force.

But before dumping thousands of points into Might, he needed to structurally test the system's exponential scaling limits at the top end. Understand the pricing curve. Avoid blind investments.

System, push Physique from 37 to 39.

The command was silent, issued through thought alone. The interface responded instantly, text materializing in clean, angular script across his vision.

[System Calculation Request: Confirmed.] [Physique: 37 → 39 (Cost: 50 Embers per point = 100)] [Confirm Allocation?] Execute.

The physical reaction wasn't the agonizing, bone-breaking trauma of the previous major evolutions—no violent restructuring, no sensation of his skeleton tearing itself apart and reforging in real-time. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Instead, it felt like the final, heavy iron bolts being locked into place on an armored chassis.

A deep, resonant hum vibrated through his skeleton, layering over the thrumming of the ascending platform until the two frequencies merged into a single harmonic. It wasn't painful—it was consolidation. Refinement. Like molten metal cooling into its final, perfected shape.

His skin tightened almost imperceptibly, his pores naturally closing up, sealing out the damp, freezing air of the ascending shaft. The sensation was subtle but undeniable—his entire dermal layer compressing inward, becoming denser, less permeable. More efficient.

The grime that had clung to him for hours—the dried blood, the bone-ash dust, the crusted sweat—seemed to separate from his flesh, sliding away as if repelled by something fundamental beneath the surface. Not actively expelled, but simply… incompatible. His skin rejected contamination now, shedding filth like water off oiled leather.

Every muscle fiber in his body felt fully optimized, coiling with the terrifying latent tension of a drawn bowstring forged from solid iron. His core felt denser, his limbs heavier with potential energy. Even at rest, his musculature thrummed with restrained power, ready to explode into motion at a moment's notice.

His reconstructed left forearm pulsed once—brief, hot, a flare of warmth that spread from bone outward through flesh—and then settled, denser still. The black-iron vambrace bit even harder into the enlarged tissue, the rivets groaning faintly under renewed pressure.

Solid, structural changes, but not a chaotic biological leap like before.

He nodded approvingly, rolling his shoulders once to test the integration. Everything moved smoothly. No imbalance. No weakness.

Then, his pupils narrowed slightly as he read the secondary notification.

[ATTRIBUTES UPDATED: Physique 39] [Tier-1 Absolute Peak Achieved.] Shi Yan blinked, his breath misting faintly in the cold shaft air. His deadpan expression shifted into a slight frown, the corners of his mouth tightening almost imperceptibly.

Absolute Peak? At exactly 39?

So this was the ceiling of the Tier-1 minor realms. Thirty-nine wasn't a round number.

In standard gamer logic, class changes and major promotions triggered at flat markers: level 10, 20, or 50. Clean multiples. Psychological satisfaction baked into progression systems designed for dopamine hits and player retention.

But tracking back to the vast library of web novels he had read in the barracks back on Earth—endless trash fiction consumed during downtime between deployments, stories of immortals and reincarnators and system-cheating protagonists—the Xianxia logic clicked into place.

Cultivation realms didn't follow decimal logic. They followed Heaven's numerical symbolism. Nine was completion. Perfection. The final step before transformation.

Which means… If I add one more attribute point and reach 40, that means Tier 2, huh?

Progressing from the Tier-1 Ash-Marrow realm into the Tier-2 realm wasn't just a physical level-up—wasn't simply adding another stat point to an incrementing counter.

It was a complete biological mutation.

Who knows—maybe it meant igniting the Dantian, burning away mortal impurities, and merging the physical vessel with the laws of the Heavens. Ascending from flesh to something… other. Something that no longer followed purely physical rules.

Which meant 40 was the threshold. The line between mortal and cultivator.

Shi Yan narrowed his eyes, staring at his gloved, blood-stained hands as the stone array carried him higher through the shaft. The golden runes reflected faintly across the leather, pulsing in slow, hypnotic rhythm like a heartbeat carved into stone. His fingers curled slowly, testing grip strength, feeling the way reinforced tendon and bone moved beneath skin that now felt almost too dense to be called flesh.

In all the novels, powerful cultivators naturally radiate an oppressive pressure.

When a soldier steps off a helicopter, no one feels it unless they look at him. He's just another man in fatigues, boots hitting tarmac, rifle slung. Presence is earned through action, not existence.

But when a high-tier cultivator walks into a room, the air grows heavy. Mortals instinctively lower their heads. Weaker cultivators feel their Qi circulation stutter, their breathing constrict. Animals flee. Candles gutter.

It's an orange-like Qi signature. An Aura.

If he pushed any of his stats to 40 right now, his body would undergo that major biological ignition. The system would recognize him as having crossed the threshold, and his physiology would respond accordingly.

He would officially shed his mortal shell. He would stop appearing as a mundane scavenger and begin passively radiating the heavy, oppressive Qi pressure of a seasoned elite—the kind of presence that made guards straighten reflexively, that turned heads in crowded streets, that marked him instantly as someone dangerous.

Or at least that's how the memories based on the original host described it.

The Iron-Blood Prefecture's outer disciples, the ones who manned checkpoints and supervised corpse-handler labor, typically hovered around the mid-Tier-2 realm. They carried themselves with smug confidence, secure in their superiority over mortals and low-realm trash. They radiated just enough spiritual pressure to keep the laborers cowed without wasting energy.

Then let's say, if a lowly, filthy corpse-handler walked up to a heavily fortified military checkpoint radiating the ferocious energy of a Tier 2 master, the Iron-Blood guards wouldn't just kick him through the gate with casual contempt like they did with every other piece of human refuse.

They would draw their weapons, surround him on all sides, and have him vivisected by sect alchemists under suspicion of spiritual espionage. Demonic possession. Hidden infiltration by rival sects. Any number of convenient excuses to dissect something that didn't fit the expected pattern.

For now, stealth is survival. Thirty-nine is my camouflage.

His eyebrows furrowed with a hint of annoyance, and he sighed through his nose, the sound lost beneath the deep hum of the ascending platform. A thin plume of mist escaped his lips, dissipating instantly in the cold shaft air.

He genuinely hated the overused novel trope where the protagonist deliberately acted weak and hid their strength just to invite arrogant enemies to underestimate them, then "slapped faces" with exaggerated reveals and self-satisfied monologues.

It was a juvenile, ego-driven plot device. Transparently masturbatory wish-fulfillment designed to let readers vicariously humiliate fictional bullies.

But this wasn't a novel anymore. This was a hostile infiltration of an ancient, hyper-lethal society where information asymmetry was the only advantage he possessed.

In the military, hiding your thermal signature wasn't "playing weak"—it was absolute Operational Security (OPSEC). Radio silence. IR suppression. Minimizing your profile to avoid detection until the moment you needed to strike. You didn't advertise capability. You concealed it until deployment was tactically optimal.

He could not gamble with his life for the sake of pride.

He quickly ran his internal calculus and formulated his absolute limit, mapping out the distribution that would maximize combat effectiveness without crossing the threshold into spiritual visibility.

System. Maximize Agility and Might to exactly 39. Do not cross the threshold. Leave the rest securely banked for combat triage and medical reserves.

The command was crisp, military-clear. No ambiguity.

[System Calculation Request: Confirmed.] [Current Reserves: 5, 180 Dao Embers] [Might: 12 → 20 (8 pts × 10) = 80 Embers] [Might: 20 → 30 (10 pts × 25) = 250 Embers] [Might: 30 → 39 (9 pts × 50) = 450 Embers] [Total Might Cost: 780 Embers] [Agility: 35 → 39 (4 pts × 50) = 200 Embers] [Total Deduction: 980 Dao Embers. Remaining Reserve: 4, 200] [Confirm Mass Allocation?]