Chương 20: He Shouldn’t Be Here (3/3)

"Please, honored cultivator!" the old vendor wept, his voice cracking like splintered wood as he collapsed to his knees.

The impact sent a wet splash radiating outward across the mud-slick cobblestones. Filthy water soaked through the threadbare fabric of his trousers, the cold seeping into aged joints already trembling from more than just the chill. His gnarled hands—knuckles swollen, fingers twisted by decades of labor—lifted a single tarnished copper coin toward the thug. The metal was dull, scratched deep with use, barely catching the weak gray light filtering through the unrelenting rain.

Water streamed down the old man's weathered face in rivulets, carving paths through grime and desperation, mixing with whatever else might have been there—tears, snot, the rain itself indistinguishable from his misery.

"The rain has ruined business... nobody is buying!" His voice rose into a keening wail, raw and ragged, the kind of sound that clawed its way out of a man's throat when pride had already been ground to dust beneath a boot heel.

"This is all I have. I beg you, show mercy!"

Shi Yan paused mid-stride, shoulders square against the freezing downpour. The rain hammered the straw fibers of his cloak in relentless percussion, each impact a dull thud-thud-thud that blended into the roar of the crowd around him—the cacophony of haggling voices, screaming merchants, the clatter of cart wheels grinding over broken stone, the wet slap of footsteps through ankle-deep slurry.

A protection racket. His face remained blank as stone, jaw set, eyes forward. You see it in every war-torn slum on Earth. Different weapons, same human garbage.

A tiny, distant part of him—the part that had once sworn an oath to protect the innocent in another life, in a world of rifles and radios and rules of engagement—felt a faint twinge of disgust coil in his gut like a serpent stirring.

But he ruthlessly crushed it.

The moment I draw a sword for justice, some local gang lord tracks my Qi-less body, and I end up on a dissection table. This world is functionally overrun by demonic logic.

He could still smell the old vendor's fear—sour, acrid, mingling with the stench of rotting vegetables and open sewage that clung to this entire wretched district.

Sigh... save yourself first.

He exhaled slowly through his nose, breath misting white in the frigid air, and walked forward with measured, deliberate steps. No weapon drawn. No speech. He didn't even glance at the thug's scarred face—the crooked nose, the jagged tissue splitting the left eyebrow, the yellow teeth bared in a predator's grin.

He simply reached past the man's bulk, his calloused fingers moving with mechanical precision, and slammed a single silver tael onto the splintered counter with a sharp, ringing clink that cut through the ambient noise like a blade through silk.

The sound froze the entire tableau.

Shi Yan grabbed a wide-brimmed bamboo hat from the top of the pile, his movements smooth, unhurried, as though plucking fruit from a market stall.

Both men froze. The vendor's mouth hung open, rheumy eyes widening until the yellowed whites showed all around the irises. The thug's yellow teeth caught behind his chapped, scarred lip as his gaze locked onto the coin—bright, solid, gleaming faintly even in the storm's gray light. Worth fifty coppers easy. Maybe more.

"The hat is one copper," Shi Yan said. His voice was flat, hollow, stripped of threat or warmth—a dead man's monotone that carried no inflection, no emotion, nothing that could be read or exploited. He kept his gaze fixed on the silver tael resting atop the wet, splintered wood.

Not the thug. Not the vendor. Just the metal.

Rain continued to hammer down around them, drumming against bamboo hats stacked beside oiled-paper umbrellas, striking the sagging wooden roof of the stall with a hollow patter-patter-patter, streaming off the edges in translucent curtains.

"The rest settles his dues for the coming month. Trouble him again, and you'll answer for it."

The words hung in the air like smoke from a doused flame—no heat, no spark, just the lingering ghost of combustion.

Before the thug could spit a response—before his swollen knuckles could tighten around the rusted club, before the dirty yellow Qi flickering around his fists could flare into something more dangerous—before the vendor could choke out gratitude through his rotting teeth—Shi Yan pulled the bamboo brim low over his eyes, turned his back with absolute finality, and let the crowd swallow him whole.

Bodies pressed close, shoving past with shoulders hunched against the storm. The reek of unwashed flesh, cheap wine, wet smoke from roadside shrines—it all closed around him like a living thing, a mass of humanity too desperate and too cold to care about one more shadow among thousands.

He hadn't saved the world. But he had secured his camouflage, diverted the thug's greed toward easier prey, and prevented a scene that would have drawn the City Guards with their silver-scaled armor and scanning arrays.

The transaction was mathematically perfect.

…

Pulling the wide brim low to obscure his features further, Shi Yan dropped into full reconnaissance mode.

He slipped sideways through the flow of bodies like a ghost passing through fog, boots deliberately avoiding the deeper puddles where gray water pooled thick with refuse. His movements were economical, precise—never bumping elbows, never drawing a second glance, just another broken laborer hunched against the storm.

He found a secluded alley behind a brothel—narrow, shadowed, the entrance half-hidden behind a sagging stack of rotting crates. The air here was different: stale, humid, reeking faintly of cheap wine, incense burned down to ash, and sweat-soaked silk clinging to unwashed skin.

The back wall of a rotting, five-story pagoda loomed above him, its wooden beams blackened by age and rain, its eaves drooping like the wings of a dying bird. Moss clung to the warped timber in thick, slick patches of sickly green. Water dripped steadily from the sagging roofline, creating a steady plink-plink-plink into the puddles below.

He scaled it.

His fingers found cracks in the warped timber—hairline fissures where the wood had split from decades of moisture and neglect. His boots pressed into gaps where the moss grew thick and slick, finding purchase on surfaces that would have sent a normal man tumbling backward into the filth below.

[39 Agility] and [39 Physique] turned the climb into something silent, fluid—muscles coiling and releasing like a serpent striking upward through tall grass. His shoulders moved in perfect rhythm, weight shifting with each handhold, tendons flexing beneath the soaked fabric of his cloak.

No scrape. No slip. Not even the faint skritch of fingernails dragging across grain.

Within seconds, he was on the roof, perched atop rain-slicked clay tiles that gleamed dully under the gray sky like the scales of some ancient, dormant dragon. The surface was treacherous—curved, slippery, angled steeply enough that a single misstep would send him sliding down five stories into the mud and broken stone below.

He didn't misstep.

From here, the city wasn't a wonderland.

It was a tactical chessboard.

He lay flat against the slanted surface, letting the freezing rain drum a steady, chaotic rhythm against his bamboo hat. Each droplet struck the woven brim with a sharp tap-tap-tap-tap, creating a percussive symphony that masked the sound of his breathing. His breath came slow and even, white mist curling from his nostrils in thin, controlled streams.

No shiver. His dense vascular system—reinforced by Tier-1 Peak Physique—kept his core temperature locked, blood circulating with the efficiency of a forge-heated engine. The cold bit at his knuckles where they gripped the tile edge, the clay slick and frigid against his calloused skin, but his focus didn't waver.

For the next three hours, he simply observed.

He let the rhythm of the city wash over him, breaking the chaos down into measurable data—patterns, rotations, vulnerabilities.

The Iron-Blood guards patrol the main thoroughfares in squads of four, his eyes tracked the glint of silver-scaled armor moving in tight formation beneath the swaying glow of red paper lanterns strung across the street like bleeding wounds. The light flickered and danced in the downpour, casting bloody shadows across the wet cobblestones.

Exactly fifteen-minute rotation intervals. He counted the seconds in his head, marking the moment each squad disappeared around a corner and reappeared precisely where predicted. They don't look up, and they don't enter alleys narrower than three feet. They rely on intimidation, not perimeter security.

A tactical weakness. Infantry thinking. Eyes forward, chest out, no vertical awareness.

He shifted his gaze deeper into the slums, where the gutters ran black with filth and the smoke from noodle stalls curled low before the rain beat it into the mud. Figures moved in and out of doorways—rough, quick, purposeful. Men with scarred knuckles and cold eyes. Women with daggers hidden in their sleeves. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The local gangs operate in the shadows, mostly Tier-1 Cinder-Blood thugs. He noted the way they moved—aggressive, territorial, but disorganized. No unified command structure. They mark their territories with cheap blood talismans slapped onto the brickwork.

The talismans glowed faintly in the gloom—crude, crimson script painted in animal blood, already running in the rain but still legible enough to warn off rivals.

Shi Yan exhaled slowly. A thin stream of white mist escaped his lips, dissipating into the rain like a departing spirit.

It is a good thing I possess silver, and my physical vessel is currently maximized for close-quarters lethality.

He paused, rain drumming steadily against the brim of his hat, the sound rhythmic, almost hypnotic. Below, the city churned—vendors screaming prices, beggars wailing for coppers, cart wheels grinding through slurry with wet, sucking sounds.

But capital and strength mean nothing if I don't secure a baseline identity.

According to the original host's fragmented memories—those scattered, half-dissolved impressions that flickered through Shi Yan's mind like ghosts in fog—Skycloud City operated on a ruthless factional economy.

If he wanted to fence the Abyssal Overseer's Mutated Core currently pressed tight against his spine, or take on high-yield bounties to farm [Dao Embers], he needed to enter the neutral shadow markets—places like the heavily guarded Vermilion Pavilion or the sprawling Bounty Pavilions where coin flowed like blood and questions were answered with steel.

But entering those zones required passing through Daoist security thresholds.

Similar to the gate guards, they used scanning arrays to filter out mundane rabble and hidden threats—formations carved into thresholds, jade slips embedded in doorframes, spiritual pressure sensors that could detect a cultivator's Dantian signature from ten paces away.

The world was ironic.

Only after it fell into the hands of demonic and cutthroat cultivators did people become obsessed with strict security scans. When the righteous sects ruled, gates stood open. Now, under the reign of blood and betrayal, every doorway was a checkpoint, every threshold a trap.

Well, when betrayal is your primary cultivation path, paranoia becomes survival, he thought, nodding faintly in the dark. Rain ran off the edge of his hat brim in a steady stream, splashing onto the tiles below with a soft patter-patter-patter. It makes perfect tactical sense.

His dead, unblinking eyes began filtering the sea of people moving through the muddy streets below, hunting for a specific profile.

Not a city guard—they travel in heavily tracked squads, their armor is serialized, and missing patrols trigger immediate lockdowns.

His gaze shifted to an opulent, covered palanquin being carried through the mud by six sweating, bare-chested porters whose backs gleamed with rain and exertion. The curtains were drawn—silk embroidered with golden phoenixes, worth more than a street vendor earned in a year. Surrounding the palanquin were four men in dark silk robes, their garments immaculate despite the storm, moving with the kind of relaxed, predatory grace that spoke of absolute confidence.

The pedestrians parted around them like water dividing before a ship's prow, eyes averted, heads bowed, instinctive fear radiating outward in ripples.

While the crowd was soaked and shivering, hunched under bent umbrellas and frayed straw cloaks, the four bodyguards walked with perfectly relaxed postures—shoulders loose, spines straight, hands clasped behind their backs as though strolling through a garden on a spring afternoon.

The freezing rain didn't actually touch their skin.

Shi Yan's eyes narrowed, focus sharpening.

Droplets struck an invisible barrier an inch above their shoulders and instantly flash-boiled into faint wisps of steam that curled upward into the gray sky, dissipating like incense smoke.

They radiate enough passive heat to vaporize water on contact.

Furnace-Core cultivators? Tier-2 elites.

Assassinating them for a cloaking artifact requires a prolonged, high-risk engagement.

Unacceptable.

He shifted his focus entirely to the shadowed alleyways, where figures huddled beneath sagging eaves and crouched beside roadside shrines with shallow bronze dishes burning joss paper. The smoke rose in thin, gray columns, mixing with the rain and the stench of rot.

What about the Beggar Sects?

The host's memories recalled whispered rumors of the so-called "Shadow-Bowl" vagrants.

The Outer Wards were crawling with "crippled" beggars who sat in the mud, faces hidden beneath hoods, bodies twisted in exaggerated displays of deformity. Yet they possessed conspicuously sharp eyes—too alert, too focused—calculated breathing patterns that spoke of internal cultivation, and unnaturally clean fingernails beneath the grime.

They were the premier intelligence network of the lower city. Eyes and ears for hire. Whispers sold to the highest bidder.

No. They are expert spies, but they rely on numbers and mud to hide. They don't carry high-grade magical artifacts. If I kill one, I just get a rusty dagger and, perhaps, a bounty on my head.

He needed a lone wolf. Someone who operated alone, possessed high-grade equipment, and was already trying to hide their identity—someone whose disappearance wouldn't immediately trigger alarms or send hunting parties into the streets.

And finally, he found his target.

Below him, walking briskly through a narrow market street lit by glowing, crimson blood-script talismans nailed to wooden posts, was a lone man wearing a dark gray, oiled-cloth raincoat that shed water in smooth, continuous streams.

Wait.

Shi Yan squinted, his focus locking entirely on the man's head and neck, filtering out the chaos of the crowd—the vendors screaming, the beggars wailing, the clatter of carts, the hiss of rain striking hot steel from a blacksmith's forge two streets over.

The rain... it's not hitting his face correctly.

Reaching 39 in Agility and Physique didn't just make his muscles faster or his bones denser; it radically upgraded his optic nerves and perceptive processing speed. Neural pathways fired faster. Visual cortex processed stimuli with military-grade precision. To Shi Yan, the chaotic, blurring downpour of the storm seemed to slow into distinct, trackable droplets—each one visible, each trajectory predictable, like watching tracer rounds arc through night sky.

Through the deluge, Shi Yan noticed that whenever the heavy raindrops passed within a millimeter of the man's face, the water unnaturally curved outward, bending mid-trajectory, sliding off a perfectly smooth, invisible dome that enveloped his head like a second skin.

The droplets never touched skin. They bent mid-fall, redirected by something unseen—an energy field, a formation, a technique.

Furthermore, as the man passed beneath the crimson glow of the street lanterns—those blood-red paper constructs swaying on iron chains—the space around his upper chest subtly rippled.

It produced a faint illusion effect—precisely like the heat haze rising off sun-baked stone in high summer, the kind of distortion that made distant objects shimmer and waver, edges blurring, details melting into mirages.

Shi Yan's eyes narrowed to slits, rain streaming off his hat brim in steady rivulets.

He mentally dug into the fragmented memories of the dead boy he had replaced—those scattered, half-dissolved impressions flickering like candle flames in wind. Not much surfaced; the original host was just a lowly cultivator, cannon fodder, livestock raised for slaughter.

But...

The original host had been only a "livestock" disciple of the Cloud-Mirror Sect, but the Sect didn't raise complete idiots.

The memories were faint, edges blurred, but he could recall lectures delivered in cold stone halls, elders droning on about techniques and artifacts, disciples frantically scribbling notes on bamboo slips.

The original body host didn't need that knowledge himself, but he often heard of high-ranking elders sneaking into brothels disguised as lowly men so they wouldn't scare the ladies of the house, using… what was the word called…

Refraction, Shi Yan realized, the corners of his lips curling upward into something that wasn't quite a smile—more a baring of teeth, cold and predatory. A perfect disguise technique.

The host's manual called it a "Daoist Phantom-Veil." It bent ambient light around the user's body, distorting visual perception, masking their true cultivation base and physical appearance. Generated by a specialized jade slip usually hidden inside the collar, constantly fed with a thin stream of Qi to maintain the illusion.

The logic clicked perfectly into place like puzzle pieces snapping together.

This man wasn't a random civilian. The gait was too confident, too purposeful—eyes scanning rooftops, hand resting casually near his waist where a weapon would be sheathed. Perhaps... he was some kind of mid-level enforcer using a continuous, localized Daoist distortion technique to mask his identity while moving through a dangerous block.