Chương 2: Hunt, or Wither

It was like hope itself had materialized—a lifeline cast down into the abyss, gossamer-thin yet impossibly vital. The corners of his mouth tugged upward despite the blood crusting his split lip. He couldn't lean forward; his fractured spine wouldn't allow even that small mercy.

Instead, he sagged deeper against the yielding mound of rot beneath him, feeling the brittle lattice of ribs crack and compress under his weight. Damp, liquefied flesh shifted sluggishly, releasing fresh pockets of putrid gas that made his nostrils flare.

The cold seepage of decomposition fluid soaked through the torn silk at his shoulders, clinging to his skin like funeral oil. Above him, the transparent blue screen hovered motionless before his face, its glow casting faint azure shadows across his blood-streaked features.

[Host Entity:] Foreign Soul Merged [Heavenly Alignment:] NULL (Daoless) [Vessel Status:] CRITICAL (Compromised structure. Estimated failure: 4m 45s) [Dao Embers:] 0 [ATTRIBUTES] Physique: 5 [WARNING: Massive blood loss. Spine fractured.] Might: 5 [WARNING: Left arm snapped.] Agility: 5 [WARNING: Lower motor functions paralyzed.] Spirit: 5 Anomaly: 5 [Daoless trait awakened.] [TECHNIQUES] None.

[SYSTEM DIRECTIVE] The Heavens have rejected this vessel. Ambient Qi absorption disabled. To survive, harvest [Dao Embers] from the fallen. Allocating Dao Embers to an Attribute will force a physical vessel reconstruction to accommodate the power.

Cost for next Attribute point: 5 Dao Embers.

A Dao Ember... like experience points, maybe? He'd played enough video games in another life to recognize the framework—the clean progression loops, the resource management, the numbers that promised power if you could just grind hard enough.

Four of the attributes tracked easily enough: [Physique], [Might], [Agility], [Spirit]. Standard fare. The bread and butter of every RPG system he'd ever touched during leave, hunched over a laptop in some dusty barracks halfway across the world.

But [Anomaly]?

His brow furrowed, the motion pulling at the torn skin along his cheekbone where dried blood had crusted over.

Some kind of resistance stat? Abnormal condition mitigation? The word itself felt deliberately opaque, wrapped in layers of meaning he couldn't quite peel back. And Daoless—that term scraped against the edges of understanding like fingernails on stone, carrying weight he didn't yet fully comprehend. So I have no karma tether. No spiritual lineage. No destiny thread. The heavens don't see me at all.

A laugh crawled up his throat—wet, bubbling, ridiculing—scraping against his damaged lung on the way out. His eyes squinted involuntarily, tears beading at the corners and threatening to spill down his temples.

Not from grief, never from grief. But from the sheer, crystalline absurdity of it all. Thrown into a corpse pit to rot, spine snapped like kindling, spiritual root ripped out by the very sect that had raised this body... and yet here he was, staring at a blue status screen like some kind of cosmic joke. At least the golden finger hadn't abandoned him entirely. At least the universe had seen fit to throw him one last bone before the curtain fell.

But now… what?

He turned his head slightly—slowly, because even that small movement sent jagged lances of white-hot pain shooting through his split ribcage. The bones ground against each other with an audible creak that echoed wetly in his ears.

Around him stretched the uneven mountain of the dead: skeletal hands frozen mid-grasp, their finger bones curled like the legs of dying spiders; splintered swords jutting from the decay at odd angles, their hilts wrapped in rotted leather; the sulfur-copper-sweet stench soaking into every breath, coating the back of his throat with a taste like tarnished coins.

The cold, unyielding stone pressed against his back through the torn silk of his robes, each ridge and crack digging into his shoulder blades. The damp air settled on his exposed skin like a funeral shroud, heavy and clinging, thick with moisture that smelled of deep earth and ancient death.

And...

The System Directive blinked again, pulsing with quiet insistence: To survive, harvest [Dao Embers] from the fallen.

Killing people. Or creatures. Probably both. The implication hung in the air like a drawn blade—cold, sharp, unambiguous.

His eyebrows lifted fractionally, but his pupils shrank to pinpoints as the timer flashed back into view, cruel and impassive, each second ticking away like drops of blood falling into still water.

(Compromised structure. Estimated failure: 3m) Before the weight of that countdown could fully settle—before the reality of his approaching death could wrap its fingers around his throat—his ears twitched.

A wet, rhythmic squelch-snap echoed through the oppressive silence, breaking the stillness like stones dropped into a stagnant pool.

The sound of claws sinking into decaying ribcages, compressing softened cartilage and brittle bone with each measured, purposeful step. The crunch of desiccated flesh giving way under weight. His raised eyebrows slowly lowered, smoothing back into neutral lines. The wild flicker of hope that had briefly lit his features drained away like water through sand, replaced by something colder. Sharper. More focused.

His pulse didn't spike—he wouldn't allow it. His breathing remained shallow, silent, and measured—combat breathing, the kind drilled into muscle memory through a thousand hours of training until it became as automatic as a heartbeat. Four counts in through the nose. Hold for four. Four counts out through barely parted lips.

His pupils constricted into hard black points, tracking the source of the sound with predatory precision, sweeping across the landscape of corpses until they locked onto the summit of the bone pile beside him—perhaps fifteen feet away, maybe less.

A silhouette crested the peak, backlit by the faint gray light filtering down from the distant sky.

A rat, hu—?

But "rat" was a miserable, woefully inadequate understatement.

It was a mutated corpse-feeder the size of an abyssal hound—hunched low over powerful haunches, bloated grotesquely with layer upon layer of carrion-fed muscle that rippled beneath diseased skin. Its fur was matted thick with black, toxic grease that glistened faintly in the dim light like beetle carapace, each strand clumped together in oily spikes.

Its elongated snout was stained deep with ancient gore—dried blood crusted in dark brown layers around its twitching, flared nostrils, painting its muzzle the color of old rust. Foam gathered at the corners of its mouth, white and viscous, dripping in slow strands onto the corpses beneath its clawed feet.

It paused mid-step, one massive paw still raised, and lifted its head. The scent of fresh, hot blood—his blood, still seeping sluggishly from the ragged hole in his chest—reached it on the stagnant air.

The beast's feral red eyes, glowing like coals in the shadows, locked directly onto his open chest wound with the single-minded intensity of a predator that had just found easy prey.

This will be troublesome…

Yet despite the dire assessment, his gaze remained clinical, cold, dissecting the creature with the same methodical precision an officer used when marking targets on a tactical map. Range. Movement patterns. Weak points. Kill zones. Then— [Entity Recognized: Corpse-Scavenger (Tainted Variant)] [Cultivation Resonance: Mortal Realm (Null)] [Threat to Current Vessel: LETHAL] [Estimated Yield: 5 Dao Embers] 5 Dao Embers. Exactly what he needed. Perfect.

His mind shifted seamlessly into tactical autopilot, the mental gears clicking into place with the smooth precision of a well-oiled machine.

Weight: Roughly seventy pounds, judging by the way its paws sank into the softer corpses. Heavy enough to crush his already broken ribs if it landed directly on his chest. The pressure alone would drive bone fragments into his compromised lung. Fatal within seconds.

Locomotion: It dragged its back-left leg slightly as it climbed over the uneven terrain of bones—the limb swung stiffly, not bearing full weight. An old injury, likely a shattered joint that had healed poorly, leaving the leg functional but compromised. That meant when it pounced, its trajectory would naturally drift rightward to compensate for the weaker launch point—toward his right side, where his one unbroken arm lay waiting.

Weapons: Jaw strength clearly capable of snapping human femurs—he could see the fragments of thick bone lodged between its yellowed teeth, gnawed clean and splintered. Razor-wire incisors designed specifically to shear through sinew and cartilage with minimal effort. Close-range combatant only. No ranged capabilities. It had to close distance to kill.

Tactics: It was a scavenger by nature, not a tactical fighter. No intelligence. No strategy. It wouldn't circle to probe for weaknesses. It wouldn't test his defenses or wait for an opening. It would lunge straight for the jugular to secure the kill as quickly as possible, driven purely by instinct and the maddening scent of fresh blood saturating the air.

He had three minutes left to live, zero mobility below the waist, a snapped left arm with exposed bone, and a barely functioning right arm that could maybe—maybe—grip something if he asked nicely.

Beneath his shoulder blade, pressing cold and insistent against his skin through the torn, blood-soaked silk, he felt the flat edge of a discarded sword. His fingers had already catalogued its position during his initial assessment—half-buried in the corpse mass, wedged between two skeletal torsos.

The blade was short—broken halfway down its length, snapped clean at some point during whatever battle had claimed its original owner. But when he'd shifted slightly, letting his hand brush against the exposed edge, he'd felt the answer in the way it bit at his fingertips: the edge still held. Still sharp enough to cut. Still useful. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He couldn't swing it. He didn't have the leverage, the muscle mass, the intact spine, or the proper angle. His left arm was worse than useless—a dead weight of shattered bone and torn meat. His right arm could barely maintain a grip, let alone generate striking force.

Let's see if this works.

Even if most of my training was with firearms… muscle memory from close-quarters drills in narrow corridors, clearing rooms with blades when ammunition ran dry, the cold logic of edged weapons when silence was mandatory. I won't swing, he decided, his jaw setting with grim determination. I'll let gravity and its own momentum do the work.

Right as he predicted, the mutated hound-sized rat lunged.

Because his body was wedged deeply between an overturned ribcage on his left—its curved bones forming a partial cage—and a crushed bamboo breastplate on his right, the rat had no room to flank. No space to circle.

The claustrophobic environment of the bone pit, littered with debris and uneven footing, forced the creature into a straight, predictable arc directly at his exposed face—a trajectory as locked-in and inevitable as an artillery shell fired down a barrel.

Rotten breath washed over him in a hot wave—sour, putrid, thick with the stench of decomposing meat and stomach acid. Razor-sharp teeth snapped shut an inch from his jugular, close enough that he felt the sharp displacement of air against his throat, close enough to see the festering gums and taste the foulness on his tongue.

He didn't flinch. Didn't blink. Didn't waste a single precious microsecond on fear.

He raised his already-snapped left forearm—the broken, mangled thing with bone jutting white through torn flesh—and thrust it directly into the beast's path. Offering the bait. Giving it exactly what its instincts screamed for.

The beast's jaws slammed shut on the meat of his forearm with a sickening, wet crunch. The sound of his own bones splintering echoed in his skull.

Pain exploded through his shoulder like white phosphorus, like shrapnel tearing through nerve clusters, radiating outward in waves so intense his vision briefly whited out at the edges. His teeth clenched so hard his molars ground together, enamel scraping enamel, and his eyes blazed with cold, iron fury that burned through the agony.

Hot blood spurted in thick jets, splashing warm across his cheek, filling his mouth with the copper taste of his own life draining away.

But by feeding it the broken arm—by sacrificing the limb he couldn't use anyway—he successfully locked its jaw in place. Trapped it in commitment. Forced it to follow through.

He forced his heart rate to remain steady, refusing to let adrenaline spike his pulse and accelerate the bleeding. Four counts in, pulling air deep into his one functioning lung.

Four counts out, exhaling slowly through clenched teeth. Clinical. Controlled. Detached. The same breathing pattern he'd used during sniper training, during ambushes, during the long seconds before pulling a trigger.

Beneath his back, his one functional right hand didn't fumble for a femur to use as a club. Didn't reach desperately for a discarded talisman or jade slip. It was already gripping the hilt of the broken steel sword he had assessed and targeted seconds ago—cold metal pressed tight against his palm, the leather wrapping rough and worn beneath his fingers. The jagged, snapped edge angled precisely upward at a forty-five-degree angle, positioned with geometric certainty.

He didn't try to swing it. Didn't waste strength he didn't have.

Instead, he simply braced the flat of the pommel solidly against the stone floor beneath the corpses, feeling the unyielding rock through layers of rotted flesh.

He wedged the hilt firmly between two skeletal spines for added stability, locking it in place like a fixed bayonet mounted in hardened earth. The broken tip pointed skyward, steady and immovable, a fang of steel waiting with infinite patience.

The rat shrieked—a sound like tearing metal and dying children—and pushed down brutally on his chest with its full body weight, trying to tear his left arm clean off at the shoulder.

Its claws scraped wildly over his exposed ribcage, the talons carving shallow furrows through skin and muscle, and the crushing pressure forced every molecule of air from his compromised lung in a rattling wheeze. His ribs bent inward, threatening to snap completely, grinding against each other with sounds like breaking ice.

That downward momentum—that savage, hungry commitment to the kill—was its death sentence.

Driven by the beast's own crushing weight—seventy pounds of feral hunger and mutated muscle—the braced, jagged steel sword pierced smoothly upward through the soft flesh beneath the rat's jaw. The tip punched through the thin skin, slid past bone, and severed its vocal cords mid-shriek.

The blade continued its inevitable path, sliding deeper with the creature's own momentum, punching through the soft palate with a wet, tearing sound and driving directly into its brainpan.

There was a moment of resistance—the scrape of steel against skull—and then a wet, grinding pop as the tip burst through into gray matter.

A muffled, gurgling shriek vibrated down the length of the blade, rattling the hilt in his white-knuckled grip. He felt the vibration in his bones, in his teeth.

The rat thrashed violently, its nervous system firing in chaotic bursts as the brain damage spread. Its heavy claws scratched wildly over the surrounding corpses in blind panic, kicking up thick clouds of ash and bone dust that hung suspended in the stagnant air, coating his face and burning his eyes. Blood—hot and viscous, almost black in the dim light—poured down the blade in thick rivulets and spilled over his knuckles, slicking his grip.

He held perfectly still, every muscle locked in place, ignoring the frantic scratching that tore at his legs and torso. His right hand maintained its iron grip on the sword hilt with white-knuckled precision, refusing to let the weapon shift even a fraction of an inch, holding it steady as a mountain until the beast's thrashing gradually weakened, slowed, and finally ceased. Its weight sagged forward, driving the blade even deeper with a final wet squelch, and its jaws slackened around his ruined arm.

The pressure released. The claws went still.

Silence returned to the abyss, broken only by the distant drip of water echoing off stone far above and his own ragged breathing.

[Target Slain: Mutated Corpse-Rat. +5 Dao Embers.] He exhaled a long, shuddering breath—shallow, controlled, but edged with the faintest tremor of relief—and shoved the heavy carcass off his chest with his right hand. The dead weight rolled aside with a dull, meaty thud, its matted fur slick with mingled blood—his and its own. The body settled into the corpse pile with a soft crunch, already becoming just another piece of the landscape.

Without wasting a single second, he focused his mind on the floating blue text, the mechanical glow still hovering before his face like a patient attendant.

[Consume 5 Dao Embers to increase Physique Attribute by +1?] Yes.

[ATTRIBUTES] Physique: 5 → 6 [ANALYSIS: Massive blood loss. Spine fractured. Triage initiated.] The moment the attribute climbed, he didn't see magic—no glowing light, no celestial hymns, no divine intervention. He felt a violent, biological miracle.

The gaping wound on his chest—the ragged hole where his spiritual root had been torn free—didn't completely vanish or seal over with pristine skin.

But the flesh around the edges grew instantly dense, thickening and toughening like battle-scarred leather pulled taut over exposed muscle. The raw, weeping tissue hardened into something more resilient, more enduring.

His blood forcefully coagulated, the flow strangling itself into stillness as thick, fibrous scar tissue wove rapidly over the severed vessels like emergency sutures pulling themselves tight. The severed arteries sealed with brutal efficiency, cutting off the hemorrhage at its source.

It was brutal. Mechanical. Efficient. Not healing—stabilizing. The agonizing hollow sensation in his back—the phantom agony where his spine had snapped clean through, severing the connection between brain and legs—stabilized just enough to pull him back from the absolute brink of death. The vertebrae didn't fuse perfectly, but they shifted minutely into better alignment, held together by rapidly forming calcified tissue that locked them into a survivable configuration.

The flashing crimson death timer—that cruel countdown marking his final moments—vanished from the corner of his vision as if it had never existed.

He let out a long, slow breath, feeling his jaw finally relax for the first time since awakening in this corpse-filled hell. The iron tension bled gradually from his shoulders, his muscles unclenching one fiber at a time.

I'm stable. Not whole. Not healed. But alive.

But before his shoulders could completely drop—before he could fully process the reprieve he'd just been granted—the transparent screen glitched.

The blue text bled and distorted, pixels fracturing and reforming in jagged, violent bursts like a broken monitor struggling to maintain signal. The color shifted abruptly, flashing an aggressive, pulsing red that burned across his centerline vision, demanding attention, refusing to be ignored.

[ALERT: Vessel Leaking.] [Daoless physiology cannot naturally retain energy.] [Stamina/Qi dissipation detected. Hunt, or wither away.]