Chương 22: The System Said Yes (2/2)

When he saw the transparent screen flicker to life before him, he smiled—a thin, measured curve of his lips that didn't quite reach his eyes. The cold blue glow illuminated the harsh angles of his face, casting his features in skeletal relief against the darkness of the cramped room.

Perfect. The system can reorganize the item, which means...

But the jade slip was designed to hide an aura, whereas Shi Yan needed to project a fake one.

Sitting on the edge of the moth-eaten futon, he held the smooth, warm jade slip in the palm of his hand. The futon's stuffing had long since compressed into uneven lumps that dug into his thighs, the coarse fabric scratching against his wet trousers. Water from his still-damp clothing seeped slowly into the ancient bedding, darkening the already-stained surface.

The faint heat radiating from the jade slip felt no different than body warmth transferred from Gao Han's corpse—pleasant, almost, against the chill clinging to his skin from the rain outside. His fingers, still carrying the ghost-cold of wet cobblestones and iron grates, welcomed the subtle warmth like a man might welcome embers in winter.

He turned it over slowly between his thumb and forefinger, the pad of his thumb tracing the impossibly smooth surface. Not a single imperfection marred the jade—no tool marks, no grain, no evidence of mortal craftsmanship. Just flawless, glassy perfection that seemed to drink in the warmth of his palm.

It felt completely inert to him, or rather, looked like nothing special.

The surface caught the dim light from the cracked washbasin's reflection, glassy and unremarkable. The tarnished bronze cast weak, watery illumination that slid across the jade's face like oil on water, revealing nothing of its supposed profound nature.

Maybe because I can't feel or store Qi anymore?

Raising one eyebrow, he looked at the artifact once more, tilting his head slightly as he rotated it in the feeble light. Perhaps to a cultivator, this artifact would be humming with profound Daoist secrets—threads of spiritual resonance visible only to those whose meridians still pulsed with heaven's energy. They would see cascading layers of formations, taste the complexity of the refractive arrays, feel the harmonic resonance singing against their Dantian like struck crystal.

But to Shi Yan's Daoless body, lacking meridians and a dantian, it was indistinguishable from a polished river stone. Cool. Smooth. Dense. Nothing more than compressed mineral shaped by hands he would never understand using laws his body refused to acknowledge.

Not to mention that he lacked heaven alignment. It could be said he was not even mortal, as mortals had fate.

Yet despite having, or rather looking like he had, no way to use this item, he didn't bother closing his eyes to "meditate" or "seek enlightenment" like the cultivators in the original host's memories. Those rituals—the lotus positions, the carefully controlled breathing, the inward focus seeking the "dao-heart"—all of it was theater. Performance art for a spiritual infrastructure he simply didn't possess.

There is no point in that.

Instead... he raised his chin, looking at the empty air before his eyes. The boarding house room smelled of mildew and old sweat, the warped floorboards creaking faintly beneath his weight. Beneath those scents lay others—stale cooking oil that had seeped into the wood over decades, the acrid tang of chamber pots emptied carelessly, the nose-wrinkling sourness of bodies packed too close together in rotting architecture. The walls themselves seemed to exhale decay with every shift of air.

He opened his UI and stared directly at the artifact, his pupils tracking across invisible text only he could perceive.

System. Consume item.

The blue screen flickered, instantly throwing up a harsh red prompt that bathed his face in crimson warning light.

[Item Recognized: Daoist Phantom-Veil (Jade Slip).] [Error: Consumption failed. Target artifact requires active Qi pathways to transcribe technique parameters.] Hmm. Failed, huh.

Shi Yan's expression didn't change, but his eyes narrowed fractionally—the minute tightening of crow's feet at the corners, the subtle downward pressure of his brow. The faint glow of the error message painted his face in crimson-tinged light, casting the shadows beneath his jaw deeper, hollowing his cheeks until he looked more like a corpse examining its own bones than a living man.

He stared at the red text, unblinking, pupils fixed and dilated in the dim light, then turned the jade slip over again in his fingers. The smooth surface slid against the rough ridges of old scars on his palm—calluses built from rifle grips and knife hilts, not swords or spiritual treasures. The contrast between the artifact's supernatural perfection and his own brutalized flesh was almost insulting.

So, if this is a sealed lockbox, how can I unlock it without the key? Which is obviously Qi.

He paused for a moment, staring at the jade slip. His breathing remained measured, controlled—four counts in through the nose, six counts out through slightly parted lips. An old habit. Sniper rhythm. The kind of breathing that kept your hands steady when a single tremor meant mission failure.

The Qi is just the authorization key. But perhaps... I don't need to speak their language to break the lock. I just need to bypass the security.

And to solve this miracle, there was only one possibility available to him, or inside him.

His eyes shifted to the bottom of his stat screen, gaze dropping with the deliberate precision of a man checking ammunition count before breaching a door.

[Anomaly: 5] He had never actively upgraded the stat, but he had empirically tested its logic.

When he swallowed the cursed Martyr Pill, the Anomaly stat hijacked the process—it isolated the soul-corruption and forcibly dismantled the pill's magical properties into raw [Dao Embers].

The Anomaly stat ignores the foundational rules of this world's Heavens, he concluded. His jaw tightened slightly, muscles bunching beneath the skin as he ground his molars together in unconscious thought.

It doesn't give any heaven-defying cultivation technique, create a pocket dimension, or grant superior Qi. It acts as an administrative exploit.

Which in other words also...

A cheat?

Then he was silent for a moment, tapping his fingers against his knee in a slow, rhythmic pattern—tap, tap-tap, tap—the dull thump of fingertips against wet fabric the only sound besides the endless hiss of rain hammering the clay tiles overhead. Water dripped somewhere in the ceiling above, a steady plink-plink-plink into some unseen puddle that marked time like a countdown.

He rolled the jade slip between his palms, feeling its faint pulse of residual warmth, the way it seemed to resist the cold clinging to everything else in this miserable room. His calloused skin rasped faintly against the smooth surface. Then finally spoke the words he had constructed, his voice low and deliberate, each syllable enunciated with clinical precision.

System. I want you to field-strip the technique. Rip out the Qi-fuel requirement entirely and hardwire the mirage effect directly into my vascular system. Power the camouflage using my excess body heat or stamina instead of Qi essence or spiritual essence.

A full three seconds of absolute stillness passed in the cramped, freezing room.

The warped floorboards didn't creak.

His breathing remained shallow and controlled, chest barely rising. His teeth ground slowly as he stared at the screen, jaw muscles flexing beneath his skin in visible cords of tension. A vein pulsed faintly at his temple, the only sign of the coiled anticipation running through his frame. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Back in the abyss, breaking down that pill worked... hopefully, rewriting a technical artifact effect isn't too complex.

He wondered for a tense moment if he had finally hit the limit of the System's capabilities. His fingers tightened incrementally around the jade slip, not quite hard enough to crack it—if it even could crack—but enough that his knuckles blanched white against the green-tinged stone.

But what if it can't?

Although a gradual sense of disappointment lingered in his gaze as he held his breath—chest motionless, lips pressed thin into a bloodless line—he still hoped. That old, stupid, human hope that refused to die even after everything. Even after the transmigration, the void, the systematic dismantling of his soul's connection to this world's natural order. Hope was the last thing that made him still resemble the man he'd been.

Then the blue screen flared brilliant gold, bright enough to illuminate every crack in the walls, every stain on the floorboards, every mote of dust suspended in the fetid air.

[Command Accepted. Anomaly trait engaged.] [Bypassing Daoist Qi-Locks...] [Extracting Optical Blueprint...] [Adapting Camouflage Technique to Cellular Physiology...] The jade slip in his palm didn't glow. It didn't crack with dramatic spiritual backlash or release a pulse of dying energy. It simply collapsed, instantly turning to fine gray dust that slipped through his fingers like sand through an hourglass and pooled on the floorboards like ash from burnt paper.

The powder was cool against his skin, lifeless, all its profound secrets reduced to inert mineral residue in the span of a heartbeat.

Before he could breathe in relief or feel any joy, an agonizing, blistering heat flared across Shi Yan's collarbones, spreading up his neck and down his spine like molten iron poured beneath the skin. His entire upper body seized, every muscle locking rigid as his nervous system screamed in protest.

"Ugh—" He bit back a harsh grunt, his heavily scarred left hand gripping the edge of the wooden table hard enough to splinter the rotted corner. Shards of ancient wood cracked audibly, flaking away beneath his white-knuckled grip. His knuckles went bone-white, tendons standing out like cables beneath his skin.

It felt as though a hundred burning needles were tattooing invisible lines directly into his pores and sweat glands, carving pathways where none had existed—foreign roads being bulldozed through living tissue with no anesthetic, no mercy, no regard for the agony of restructuring a human body at the cellular level.

His jaw clenched so tightly his molars ached, grinding together with enough force to make his temples throb. A thin sheen of sweat broke out across his forehead despite the room's freezing temperature, droplets beading and rolling down the sides of his face to drip from his jaw. His breath came in short, controlled hisses through his nose—in-two-three, out-two-three—fighting to maintain discipline even as his body tried to convulse.

The System wasn't downloading ancient knowledge of the artifact into his brain, or teaching him how to imitate the jade slip's refractive effect through meditation and practice; it was physically hardwiring the ambient light-bending cultivation technique into his muscular and cardiovascular network. Rewriting him. Editing his biology like source code, inserting alien functions into human flesh.

[Technique Acquired: Phantom-Ash Veil (Physiological Toggle).] [Effect: Manipulates vascular heat exhaust to project a localized simulated aura. Drains minor stamina to maintain.] The burning sensation slowly faded into a dull, lingering warmth that pulsed beneath his skin like a second heartbeat—steady, rhythmic, foreign. His muscles trembled faintly with residual shock, small tremors running through his shoulders and down his arms.

Shi Yan stood up, rolling his stiff shoulders with audible pops of tension releasing from locked joints. His whole face reddened for a moment, blood rushing to the surface as his body adjusted to its new internal architecture—capillaries dilating, fresh oxygen flooding tissues that had just been traumatically remodeled. His eyes widened briefly, pupils contracting sharply in the golden afterglow of the System screen, before settling back into their usual dead calm.

The brief flash of pain-shock faded behind the familiar mask of controlled neutrality.

Then he walked over to the tarnished bronze washbasin, boots scraping softly against warped wood that groaned under his weight, and peered down at his reflection in the cracked, polished metal. The stagnant water inside rippled faintly from his movement, concentric circles distorting his mirrored face into something wavering and uncertain. The scummed surface caught what little light remained, showing him a ghost of himself—pale, hollow-eyed, jaw still tight from the pain.

When he looked at the transparent screen hovering before him, he smiled. Not the thin, controlled expression from before. This one carried a razor-edge of satisfaction, the barest hint of teeth showing between his lips.

Good. It worked.

Activate.

There was no Qi emitted from him, no technique drawing on the Qi that flowed between meridians before accumulating in the dantian and pathways, no use of Dao Embers either.

He simply initiated the technique the same way he would flex his bicep or intentionally slow his breathing—a conscious command sent to muscles that had not existed five minutes ago. He contracted a newly formed, deeply buried cluster of muscles near his sternum—muscles that shouldn't exist, now threaded through tissue like foreign wiring grafted beneath the skin—forcing a sudden, rapid flush of blood through his upper chest.

The sensation was alien, uncomfortable, like discovering you could wiggle a sixth finger you'd never noticed before.

A noticeable chill washed over his skin as the technique violently pulled his excess body heat outward through his pores, siphoning thermal energy from his core and bleeding it into the surrounding air. Goosebumps rippled across his forearms. His breath misted faintly in the cold air despite the lack of exertion, small clouds of vapor curling from his lips.

In the bronze reflection, the air around his shoulders and face suddenly rippled, distorting faintly like heat shimmer rising from sun-baked stone—waves of refracted light bending and folding around his silhouette.

But it wasn't the transparent, invisible dome the courier had used.

Because Shi Yan had inverted the logic, the expelled heat bent the light outward, creating a faint, convincing pulse of artificial thermal "Qi" radiating from his center. His body had become a controlled furnace, bleeding warmth in precise patterns that mimicked spiritual circulation. To the naked eye, he didn't look any different—same wet clothing, same dead expression, same unremarkable posture.

But to a cultivator's spiritual sense or a Daoist scanning mirror, the terrifying, anomalous void of his Daoless body was completely masked by the physiological thermal mirage.

He now perfectly emitted the mediocre, undeniably average "spiritual heat," or Qi, of an Early Tier-1 rogue cultivator. Not impressive. Not threatening. Not worth a second glance from anyone with real power.

Or what they called a Cinder-Blood Cultivator.