Chương 19: He Shouldn’t Be Here (2/3)

The guard's iron boot slammed into the bronze-studded gate with enough force to send a metallic shudder through the frame, the impact resonating through the ancient hinges like a death knell. The sound was harsh, final—a judgment rendered in steel and contempt.

The hinges shrieked—metal grinding against corroded pins worn smooth by countless years of neglect—and the gate yawned open into the rain, revealing the throat of the city beyond. Cold wind howled through the widening gap, carrying with it the stench of unwashed bodies, cooking grease, and something fouler underneath—the sick-sweet rot of a city eating itself from within.

"Get through, filth. And don't drip abyssal sludge on my armor."

The guard's voice carried the casual cruelty of a man who'd kicked dogs and beggars so often he no longer distinguished between them. His lip curled as he spoke, nose still wrinkled beneath the gleaming silver helmet, as though even his words might be contaminated by proximity to this wretched corpse-handler.

Shi Yan dipped his chin lower, letting the hood shadow his face entirely, until nothing remained visible but the rain streaming from the frayed straw edges in thin, dirty rivulets.

He made a small, strangled sound in his throat—something between gratitude and exhaustion—a noise so perfectly broken it might have come from a man who'd forgotten what it meant to stand upright. The sound hitched just slightly, raw and wet, as though his lungs were half-drowned already.

His boots cleared the threshold just as the rain intensified, no longer broken by the pavilion's stone eaves. The shelter vanished behind him like a severed lifeline. Cold water struck his shoulders in heavy, stinging sheets, each droplet feeling less like rain and more like frozen needles driven through sodden fabric. Within seconds, the straw cloak clung to his frame, mud-stained fibers darkening further as freezing runoff streamed down his back in icy channels that traced the contours of his spine.

The weight of the water dragged at him, pulling the cloak tighter against his concealed density, but the rough weave held—just barely.

He hunched deeper, rounding his shoulders and dragging his feet through the slick stone path, each step a deliberate scrape of leather against wet flagstone. Mud squelched beneath his heels, thick and cold, seeping into the seams of his boots. Behind him, the bronze gates crashed shut with a bone-deep thud that reverberated through his ribcage like a war drum, the finality of it pressing against his sternum—then the sound dissolved into the roar of the ancient city.

The noise hit him first. A living wall of sound—voices screaming, haggling, cursing, pleading—all layered over the relentless hammer of rain against tile and stone.

Shi Yan raised his eyes.

The Outer Wards hit him like a wave.

Bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder in the narrow, twisting streets, a seething mass of humanity packed so tightly that movement itself became a form of violence. A man hauled a handcart stacked with wet firewood, the wheels scraping unevenly over broken cobblestones, each revolution grinding out a tortured metallic shriek. The wood was black with rain, bark sloughing off in soggy strips.

Rain poured off the edges of the cart in thin waterfalls that splashed against the filthy street, adding to the ankle-deep slurry of mud and refuse flowing between the stones.

A woman clutched an oil-paper umbrella, its frame already bent and useless, the ribs jutting at broken angles like snapped bones. Water hammered down on her head regardless, flattening her hair against her skull, streaming down her gaunt face in dirty rivulets. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, glazed and distant—the thousand-yard stare of someone who'd stopped expecting mercy from the world.

She didn't stop moving. Neither did anyone else. To stop was to drown.

Children crouched against stone walls, knees drawn to their chests, eyes sunken and glassy with the hollow emptiness of chronic hunger. Their clothes were little more than rags wrapped around stick-thin limbs, soaked through and clinging like grave shrouds. They didn't beg. They didn't cry. They just watched, tracking each passerby with the cold calculation of scavengers waiting for something—anything—to fall within reach.

A beast-drawn cart lurched past, its wooden wheels iron-shod and screeching against the uneven stone like nails across slate. The beast itself—some kind of ox-like creature with matted, rain-soaked fur and wild, rolling eyes—bellowed in distress as the driver lashed its flanks with a frayed rope. The driver bellowed a warning, voice cracked and hoarse, spit flying from cracked lips, but no one moved fast enough.

Bodies shuffled aside at the last second, boots splashing through puddles, muttering curses under their breath—low, venomous hisses that never quite resolved into coherent words.

"Steamed buns! Hot buns, two coppers!"

"Warding charms—real talismans, blessed by the Red Shrine! Keep the hungry ghosts away!"

"Incense! Cheap incense for your ancestors! Don't let them wander!"

The voices clawed over each other, raw and desperate, each hawker fighting to be heard over the relentless drumming of rain against tile roofs and the ceaseless roar of ten thousand conversations happening at once. Every shout was edged with hysteria, the frantic pitch of people who knew that silence meant starvation.

Shi Yan's nose caught the greasy, yeast-heavy scent of pork buns steaming under damp cloth, the smell rich and savory enough to make saliva pool beneath his tongue despite himself. Then the wind shifted, and the sharper bite of open gutters slammed into him—human waste and rotting vegetables mixing with rainwater, the stench so thick it coated the back of his throat like oil.

Smoke drifted from roadside shrines where joss paper burned in shallow bronze dishes, the flames sputtering and hissing as rain droplets struck them. The thin gray threads tried to rise but the rain battered them back down into the mud, leaving dark smears across the stone like the fingerprints of restless ghosts.

Above, a cultivator vaulted from one slanted rooftop to another, his form a blur of silk robes and effortless grace. His boot left a faint golden trail in the air—Qi exhaust, barely visible through the storm, shimmering like molten sunlight—before it dissolved into mist. The man didn't glance down. Why would he? The mortals below were insects. Less than insects.

Once completely out of sight of the guards—having vanished into the shadowed bend of a dark alleyway where rain ran in thick streams down cracked stone walls, pooling in the deep grooves carved by decades of erosion—Shi Yan straightened.

His spine locked upright in one smooth motion, vertebrae clicking softly into alignment. The hunch disappeared like a discarded mask, the broken-man act evaporating as though it had never existed. Shoulders rolled backward beneath the heavy straw cloak, dense muscle settling into place with the quiet precision of a blade locking into its hilt, the motion almost silent save for the faint whisper of soaked fabric shifting against refined flesh.

He was officially inside the hunting ground.

But now—what should I do?

To pass the checkpoint without raising suspicion, he'd discarded his chipped steel sword at the bottom of the Ascension Array, tossing it into the void where it had tumbled end over end into the blackness below. The loss stung less than it should have. The blade had been poorly balanced anyway—a scavenger's weapon, not a soldier's tool.

Aside from the priceless Boss Core wrapped tight and hidden against his spine, pressed into the hollow just above his tailbone where the curve of his back concealed its unnatural hardness, his only capital consisted of a handful of cracked spirit stones and a few tarnished silver taels looted from the scavenger leader's corpse. Not much. Barely enough to last a week if he was careful.

Part of his transmigrator soul wanted to explore. To verify.

Like... it's really true, he thought, absorbing the chaos beyond the alley mouth, the sheer impossible reality of it pressing against his mind like a fever dream that refused to break.

The brothels really are fronts for sect intelligence networks? The kind where courtesans with painted faces and razor-sharp minds extracted secrets from drunken disciples and sold them to the highest bidder?

The jade auction houses really do sell pills that extend life? Pills that glowed with spiritual radiance and cost more than entire mortal villages? If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

High-and-mighty young masters really do start duels over trivial slights in broad daylight? Swords drawn over a spilled cup of wine or an insufficiently respectful bow?

His mind ran wild with possibilities for a fraction of a second, imagination spinning out scenarios like threads from a loom.

Then he exhaled slowly through his nose, breath misting faintly in the cold air.

Curiosity gets operatives killed.

He leaned his shoulder against the damp brick wall, feeling the rough texture bite through the soaked cloak, the chill of the stone seeping into his deltoid even through the layers. Cold water dripped steadily from a sagging wooden beam overhead, spattering onto the stones near his boots in a rhythmic percussion—plink, plink, plink—like a countdown clock measuring the seconds he wasted standing still.

A tourist wanders. A ghost establishes a foothold.

Not to mention his face—this body's face—was a liability. It was highly probable that friends, sect elders, or enemies of the original host still lived in this city, their memories intact, their grudges unresolved. Walking around openly was walking into a snare. He couldn't just stroll into a tavern and ask for rumors without potentially triggering questions he couldn't afford to answer. Questions like: Why don't you remember me? What happened to your cultivation? Where have you been?

Furthermore, in a city of cultivators, his current biological makeup was dangerous.

In this world, power equaled Qi. If a standard cultivator got into a street fight, their sword glowed with spiritual energy, the blade wreathed in elemental fire or crackling lightning. They hurled techniques with visible elemental force—ice shards that left frost trails in the air, wind blades that carved furrows through stone—and onlookers moved on without a second thought, barely sparing the clash a glance before returning to their business.

Flashy displays of cultivation were normal.

Expected. Qi—whether from a Body Refinement Cultivator or Qi Cultivator—was always emitted during heavy exertion, bleeding from the practitioner's meridians and Dantian like heat from a forge. Qi flared visibly. Glowing fists. Shimmering blade edges. Rippling auras that distorted the air like heat haze. It was the universal signature of anyone operating beyond mortal limits, the proof of power that everyone recognized and accepted.

But Shi Yan had zero Qi.

If this world followed normal xianxia cultivation rules, no one would dare kill him in broad daylight. Sect law, however unevenly enforced, still existed. Witnesses. Consequences.

But it's a demonic one.

If he found himself in a street brawl and used his Tier-1 Peak Physique to move at blinding speed and punch a man through a solid brick wall with pure, unbuffed muscle, the authorities would instantly notice the discrepancy. His strikes would leave craters, fist-shaped depressions in stone that shouldn't exist outside of high-level body cultivation. His movements would blur, covering distances in fractions of a second that defied mortal limitations. But there would be no glow.

No spiritual pressure radiating from his body like a furnace. No recognizable Daoist framework governing his power.

At first, people would assume he was an eccentric body cultivator, some rural hermit who'd stumbled upon a forgotten manual and practiced in isolation. But the elite sects wouldn't see him as a warrior; they would see him as a highly suspicious anomaly, a deviation from the natural order that demanded investigation.

No martial arts lineage recognized by the registry. No sect markings tattooed or branded into his flesh. No Dantian heat signature—yet capable of fighting like a Qi Cultivator.

Or worse, they would see him as a lab rat.

And according to the original host's fragmented memories—hazy impressions of bloodstained tables and screaming test subjects—the Flesh-Forge Pavilion, a sect notorious for dissecting anomalies in the name of alchemical advancement, operated openly in Skycloud City. They had imperial sanction. Legal protections. And an insatiable appetite for subjects who didn't fit the normal rules.

His brows furrowed as he massaged his temples, calloused fingers pressing hard against the bone, rain streaming down the edges of his hood in cold rivulets that traced the line of his jaw. The cold did nothing to ease the calculus running through his mind, equations of risk and survival stacking up like bodies after a siege.

It was then— If I have a false aura, any brutal physical feats I perform will simply be written off as standard cultivation technique?

A glowing fist that shatters stone? Perfectly normal for a body refinement cultivator using a basic Iron Palm technique. No one would look twice. Just another disciple showing off.

Pulling his coarse straw cloak tighter to hide his imposing build, shoulders rolling inward once more to collapse his silhouette back into something forgettable, Shi Yan merged back into the crowd, movements deliberate and unremarkable. Just another broken laborer trudging through the rain. Invisible.

Which means I need a cultivation technique. But first...

He navigated the muddy, rain-slicked thoroughfare, keeping his eyes averted from the passing cultivators, gaze fixed on the filthy cobblestones and the streams of gray water rushing between them. Each step was calculated—weight distribution, stride length, the subtle drag of exhaustion in his gait. The Outer Wards of Skycloud City smelled of wet foggy smoke, cheap wine, and desperate poverty, the scents layered thick enough to taste on the back of the tongue.

It was a sprawling, chaotic slum of rotting pagodas, where the strong preyed relentlessly on the weak, and justice was whatever the man with the sharper blade said it was.

The heavy, blood-stained straw cloak concealed his dense musculature, the fabric hanging loose enough to obscure the unnatural proportions beneath, but his face was still exposed to the freezing rain and prying eyes.

A hat.

...

Through the curtain of the downpour, visibility reduced to gray shapes and blurred movement, he spotted a cramped, dilapidated wooden stall wedged between a steaming noodle shop and a shuttered apothecary. The stall was little more than a lean-to propped against the crumbling brick wall, its roof sagging under the weight of accumulated water.

The vendor—a hunched, trembling old man missing half his teeth, the remaining stumps yellow and rotting—was nervously organizing a stack of oiled-paper umbrellas and woven bamboo hats, his gnarled fingers shaking so badly he kept dropping them. His eyes were rheumy and red-rimmed, darting left and right like a cornered animal.

Standing over the old man was a burly, scarred thug wielding a rusted wooden club studded with iron nails, the metal dark with old bloodstains that hadn't fully washed away despite the rain. His face was a roadmap of violence—nose broken and healed crooked at least twice, a jagged scar splitting his left eyebrow, knuckles swollen and misshapen from years of brutal brawling.

Faint wisps of dirty yellow Qi danced around the thug's knuckles—a pathetic, untrained display of early-stage power, flickering like dying candlelight, but more than enough to terrify a mundane mortal. The energy sputtered and hissed in the rain, each droplet that struck it evaporating with a faint sizzle.

"I told you, old man! The Black Lotus Sect's tax doubled today!"

The thug's voice was gravelly and loud enough to draw stares from the nearest pedestrians—who immediately looked away and quickened their pace, shoulders hunching, heads ducking as though eye contact alone might drag them into the altercation. Fear radiated from them in waves, the primal instinct to avoid predators overriding any impulse toward compassion.

He slammed his club against the wooden counter. The cheap planks splintered with a sharp crack, sending a spray of wet splinters across the stall, fragments bouncing off the old man's chest and face. The vendor flinched, arms coming up instinctively to protect his head, a whimper escaping through his broken teeth.

"Five coppers! Pay up, or I snap your fingers one by one."

The thug leaned in closer, his scarred face splitting into a yellow-toothed grin that stretched wide enough to show the blackened gums beneath, his breath visible in the cold air—thick with the sour-sweet stench of cheap baijiu and rotting meat. Saliva glistened at the corners of his mouth.

"Maybe I'll take your daughter as collateral!"