Chương 29: The Mad Physician’s Truth (1/3)

"Very well, but before that." Shi Yan paused, his shadowed gaze settling on the blood-jade token where it rested on the glowing spirit-jade table between them. The deep crimson surface caught the ambient light, throwing faint ruby reflections across the polished jade beneath.

"I require the absolute truth of the battlefield. What is the foundation of this Physician's cultivation? Furthermore, have your men divined the layout of his territory? Will I be stepping into killing formations or poisonous miasma?"

Su Yin's smile returned, sharper this time—the curve of her dark red lips carrying a predator's appreciation for caution mistaken as wisdom. Her pupils dilated slightly as she leaned back into her chair, the old wood creaking beneath her weight. He was inquiring about arrays and foundational realms. Hehe, interesting. The faint tap of her crimson-painted nails resumed against the jade surface, a slow, deliberate rhythm that filled the brief silence.

"He is highly paranoid," Su Yin answered, her voice smooth as silk drawn across a blade's edge. She lifted one hand from the table, gesturing lazily with two fingers as violet smoke curled between them.

"His foundational Qi is at the peak of the Ash-Marrow Realm. However, do not underestimate him." Her dark eyes narrowed, the pupils contracting to pinpoints as her tone dropped into something colder, heavier.

"He has utilized forbidden flesh-cultivation technique to forcibly graft demonic beast limbs onto his body."

She paused, letting the words settle like sediment in murky water.

"Assume his fleshly might rivals that of an early Furnace-Core cultivator. As for his territory—he has utilized the natural rotting fog of the Black-Ash Marsh as a barrier, layering it with corrosive Daoist mist arrays." Her fingers steepled above the table once more, the tips of her nails just barely touching. The formation anchors embedded in the distant walls hummed faintly, as if resonating with the weight of her words.

A peak Ash-Marrow Realm? Meaning the peak of Tier 1? With just a body equal to early Tier 2 and a home advantage, huh... that changed a lot. Beneath the damp straw cloak, Shi Yan's muscles shifted minutely, recalculating. The math was different now. Not impossible—just expensive in resources he didn't have yet.

"I understand," Shi Yan said, nodding slowly. The bamboo hat's shadow shifted across his rigid jaw.

"What is the immediate compensation upon the severing of his karma?"

"Like I said, an upfront bounty of five hundred medium-grade spiritual stones, with an additional five hundred silver taels upon presentation of his head," Su Yin offered smoothly, her long lashes lowering as she studied him with the patience of a serpent coiled in tall grass.

Spiritual stones, huh. This offer would be doubly enticing for cultivators. But he was Daoless. He could not absorb the Qi from spirit stones, so besides being a currency for high-tier items, they just sat there. His jaw tightened fractionally beneath the hat's brim. But still reliable. With a secure base and an intelligence network. The variables were adding up. Risk versus return. Acceptable margins if he controlled the engagement.

"May our future dealings be prosperous," Shi Yan said, offering a hand to shake—a gesture wholly foreign to this world's customs—which caused Su Yin to pause mid-breath. Her dark eyes flicked down to the extended gloved hand, then slowly back up to the unreadable shadow beneath his bamboo hat. A beat of silence stretched between them, filled only by the soft hiss of her smoldering pipe resting forgotten on the table.

Then she smiled, wider this time, genuine amusement flickering in her gaze. She reached across the glowing jade surface and clasped his hand firmly, her crimson-painted nails pressing lightly against the worn fabric of his glove.

"May the heavens still bless us," she murmured, her tone carrying the faint irony of one who knew the heavens had long since turned their gaze away from this broken world.

The torrential rain of Skycloud City slowly gave way to a suffocating, ash-laden drizzle as Shi Yan stepped beyond the towering obsidian gates of the Outer Marches. The transition was immediate and visceral—the oppressive weight of the city's demonic formations gave way to the raw, unfiltered hostility of the wilderness beyond. Cold moisture clung to his bamboo hat, beading along the woven fibers before dripping silently onto his shoulders.

Leaving the city had required flashing the Blood-Jade token to a weary, scarred gate captain. The old soldier—his face a patchwork of burn scars and poorly healed sword cuts—had stared at the deep crimson jade where it rested in Shi Yan's gloved palm, then slowly lifted his gaze up to Shi Yan's unreadable face beneath the bamboo hat. His expression tightened into a grimace of pity, the kind reserved for condemned men walking willingly toward their executions.

Deep lines carved into his weathered face deepened as his jaw worked silently, chewing on words he seemed reluctant to speak.

"The Silk and Ash Chamber sends another soul to feed Meng Po for reincarnation, sigh," the captain had muttered finally, shaking his head in slow, mournful resignation. The iron plates of his pauldron scraped softly as he pointed a heavily armored gauntlet toward the dark horizon, where bruised storm clouds churned above a landscape swallowed in shadow and ash.

"The Black-Ash Marsh isn't a place for men, Fellow Daoist. It is a mass grave of ancient grudges. The miasma out there gnaws at a man's meridians until his spiritual foundation collapses. Even senior cultivators from the inner sects do not linger there after nightfall."

His voice dropped lower, rough as grinding stone. The other guards flanking the gate—younger men with nervous eyes and white-knuckled grips on their spears—shifted uneasily, casting sidelong glances toward the wilderness as if afraid it might hear them speaking of it.

"Thank you for the reminder, Brother. I merely walk the path the arrangement requires," Shi Yan had replied smoothly, his tone neutral and respectful, although he noticed how the guards' attitude changed once he produced the aura of a cultivator at early Tier 1—a faint, cold pressure that rippled outward from beneath his cloak, brushing against their senses like the edge of a drawn blade. The younger guards straightened immediately, eyes widening slightly.

Even the captain's grimace softened into something closer to reluctant respect.

"I only need the most direct route to the stilt villages."

The captain had shaken his head once more, looking at Shi Yan as if looking at a dead man already measured for his funeral shroud, then motioning with a sharp jerk of his chin for the heavy iron turnstile to be drawn back. The ancient mechanism groaned as two guards threw their weight against the crank, chains rattling through rusted pulleys.

"Follow the sunken river. But if you hear the water boil, don't draw your sword. Just run."

The gate swung open with a deep, resonant clang that echoed across the empty road beyond. Cold wind rushed inward, carrying with it the acrid stench of rot and sulfur.

Shi Yan inclined his head once in acknowledgment, then stepped through.

Now, standing miles away from the city's oppressive walls, Shi Yan understood the captain's warning with absolute clarity.

Before him stretched the Black-Ash Marsh, an environment so fundamentally broken by ancient violence that the very air felt heavy with despair—thick and cloying, pressing against his lungs with every slow breath. It was not merely a swamp; it was the rotting corpse of a forgotten mythological battleground.

The stench was overwhelming: sulfurous decay mingled with the sickly-sweet rot of decomposing vegetation and something deeper, older—a mineral bitterness that clung to the back of his throat like ash from burned bone.

According to the local legends transcribed in the Pavilion's intelligence briefing—a scroll Su Yin had provided alongside the token, written in precise, flowing script—this vast, sunken crater was the final resting place of a corrupted Ba She: a mythical, mountain-swallowing serpent from ancient times.

Back then, long before the Heavenly Demon invaded and shattered the Heavenly Dao, an unnamed Sword Immortal from the upper realms had supposedly severed the beast's head thousands of years ago in a strike so devastating it permanently fractured the earth itself.

The myth was proven true by the staggering geography.

Towering out of the black, lightless water were colossal, calcified rib cages—each bone easily the width of a fortress wall—arching into the sky like the pillars of a ruined cathedral built by mad gods. They were overgrown with sickly, bioluminescent moss that pulsed faintly in irregular rhythms, casting a weak, ghostly green-blue glow over the bogs.

The light illuminated nothing comforting—only twisted roots, shattered stone, and the faint outlines of things that might once have been trees but now resembled clawed hands reaching desperately toward the ash-choked sky. The serpent's ancient, spilled blood had permanently poisoned the soil, mutating the flora and choking the area in a permanent blanket of ash-colored fog that rolled across the stagnant water in slow, deliberate waves.

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Shi Yan halted beneath the shadow of one of the massive bones. The calcified surface loomed above him, easily fifty feet overhead, its porous structure riddled with hollow chambers where smaller scavenger beasts had nested and died in turn. He slowly tilted his bamboo hat back, the motion deliberate and measured, his deadpan expression cracking just a fraction as he took in the sheer, impossible scale of the destruction.

His unblinking eyes traced the jagged fracture lines running through the bone, the way the marrow channels had fossilized into crystalline structures that glittered faintly in the dim bioluminescent glow.

On Earth, permanently altering geography required a tactical nuclear yield. His eyes shifted from the bone overhead to the shattered tectonic trench that formed the swamp, the way the land had collapsed inward in a perfect radial pattern, concentric rings of devastation spreading outward for miles. The mathematics of the force required made his mind pause mid-calculation.

Here, a single man swung a sword, cut a mythological god in half, and poisoned the biome for thousands of years just from the runoff.

Damn. That was sick.

For some reason, his dead eyes now blinked with eagerness as he looked at how amazing this was—a rare flicker of genuine emotion breaking through the controlled mask. His pulse quickened minutely. His hands, loose near his waist beneath the cloak, twitched with the ghost of muscle memory: grip, draw, cut.

When can I do this? Just as he thought of how he was still struggling against the Abyssal Overseer—or what they called a Demonic Beast King—and how he had to sneak around in Skycloud City like a rat avoiding traps... he sighed, the breath misting faintly in the cold, damp air. The brief spark in his gaze dimmed back into flat calculation.

Focus.

He snapped back into his operational state, the transition instant and absolute. Shi Yan lowered his hat with a sharp tilt of his head, shadow falling once more across his face, and moved deeper into the grim, decaying landscape. His footfalls were silent against the soft, waterlogged earth, each step tested carefully before committing his full weight. His eyes constantly swept the treelines and the murky waters—checking sightlines, noting cover positions, cataloging escape routes.

Eventually, the thick reeds gave way to a wide expanse of still, ink-black water that reflected nothing, swallowing light like a void. Looming in the heavy shadows ahead was his destination.

The Swamp Village.

It was a primitive collection of stilt houses built precariously over the dark waters, connected by rotting wooden boardwalks and bridges made of braided hemp that sagged dangerously low in places, brushing the surface of the stagnant pool below. The structures were simple—crude clay-and-thatch shelters raised on stilts carved from bog-iron wood, their surfaces blackened and warped by constant exposure to corrosive moisture.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been a poor but bustling settlement of mortal reed harvesters and lowly herb foragers, the kind of place where children played on the docks and fishermen sang vulgar songs while mending nets.

Now, it was completely devoid of life. There were no lanterns lit. No smoke rising from the clay chimneys. The small wooden fishing skiffs were smashed and floating idly in the muck, their hulls split open like cracked ribs, nets tangled and rotting in the black water. A single oar drifted past slowly, bumping softly against a submerged piling before disappearing into the reeds.

The silence was absolute, broken only by the faint drip of water from the sagging boardwalks and the distant croak of something unseen deeper in the marsh.

Shi Yan crouched behind the hollow husk of an ancient cypress tree—its interior completely rotted away, leaving only a fragile shell of bark—observing the perimeter with the patience of a sniper on overwatch. He did not charge in blindly.

He waited. Patient, like before. Minutes stretched into a quarter-hour. His breathing remained slow and shallow, his body motionless except for the minute shifts of his eyes tracking movement patterns in the mist, the faint ripples in the water, the way the reeds bent in the windless air.

Until his eyes narrowed as he noticed the faint barrier.

Entirely sealing off the perimeter of the village was a swirling, unnatural wall of corrosive green mist. It rose approximately eight feet high, churning in place like a living thing—coiling, uncoiling, breathing. It did not drift with the wind. It moved in deliberate, churning patterns, rising from shallow jade bowls buried in the mud along the village's edge. Shi Yan counted seven bowls visible from his position, each one emitting a thin tendril of green vapor that fed into the larger barrier wall.

The mist itself glowed faintly from within, lit by something other than natural light.

A Daoist killing formation, or what the intel said? Shi Yan narrowed his eyes behind the shadow of his hat. It said the Demonic Physician had locked the village down. A highly concentrated localized array. His mind immediately began running calculations: power draw, coverage gaps, sensor thresholds.

So there was a chance that the mist acted as both a physical wall and a spiritual alarm system.

He needed to understand the mechanics of the array before he committed his body to it.

Based on his understanding so far, cultivation formation arrays typically relied on sensing the flow of Qi or reading a target's spiritual root to trigger their lethal effects. Standard doctrine: they reacted to what they could perceive—spiritual signatures, intent, life force. If that held true here, then— Let's test it out...

To verify his theory, Shi Yan searched the mud near the cypress roots, his gloved fingers sinking into the cold, waterlogged silt. He found the shattered remains of a demonic beast's skull half-buried in the muck—something canine, judging by the elongated snout and serrated fangs still embedded in the jawbone. Its bone was still faintly thrumming with residual natural Qi, a low vibration he could feel through the leather of his glove.

He picked it up carefully, shaking off clumps of black mud, then rose to a half-crouch. With a smooth, practiced motion, he tossed it directly into the swirling green mist.

The reaction was instantaneous, but entirely different from the brute-force destruction of the red anomaly in the Abyss.

The moment the Qi-infused bone crossed the threshold, the green fog didn't just burn it. Instead, the mist reacted with terrifying, beast-like response—as if it were a living predator recognizing prey.

The fog condensed with a wet, organic sound, forming dozens of spectral, translucent green vines that whipped through the air with vicious speed, violently binding the skull mid-flight. They coiled around it like serpents, tightening with audible cracks as bone fractured under the pressure.

Wherever the phantom vines touched the bone, parasitic, glowing blood-red lotuses instantly sprouted from the marrow—bursting through the calcified surface with wet, tearing sounds. The petals unfurled in rapid time-lapse blooms, each one pulsing with stolen light.

The ghostly flowers rapidly bloomed, forcefully siphoning the residual Qi straight out of the skull. Shi Yan could see it—thin threads of silver-white energy flowing from the bone into the lotus petals, visibly draining like liquid through a straw.

Within a single second, the demonic beast bone was utterly drained of its essence. It didn't melt into sludge; it simply crumbled into a pile of lifeless, brittle white ash that scattered across the surface of the water like snow, the harvested Qi visibly flowing down through the vines into the mud below to feed the village's central array.