Chương 33: A Message He Shouldn’t Read (1/3)

He didn't have his chipped straight sword anymore. He had deliberately abandoned the rusted jian back at the Iron-Blood Prefecture checkpoint—left half-buried in the mud beneath a weathered marker stone—ensuring his forged cover identity as a worthless corpse-handler went unquestioned by the mortal guards who wouldn't dare touch a blade touched by the dead.

Currently, his only lethal ranged asset was the perfectly balanced, high-quality steel dagger he had stripped from the dead mortal enforcer in the blood-slick alleyways of Skycloud City. The blade had served him well since—silent, reliable, and mercifully free of spiritual signature.

He slipped the dagger from its worn leather sheath at his belt, the motion economical and soundless.

The blade caught the faint moonlight filtering through the willow canopy, revealing a sickening, bioluminescent green sheen that pulsed faintly in the darkness like the belly of some deep-sea predator. He had reapplied the Grave-Rot toxin to the edge earlier in the marsh, crouched in the freezing muck while the rain hammered against his back. The acrid, medicinal stench of the poison still clung faintly to his gloved fingertips.

The blade weighed roughly fourteen ounces—an optimal mass for a clean, end-over-end rotational throw, the balance point sitting precisely two inches forward of the guard.

At a distance of sixty feet, his [45 Agility] and [45 Might] could easily launch the dagger fast enough to pierce the Physician's brain stem before the man could process the sound of the air breaking. The math was simple: velocity, arc, penetration depth. A textbook kill.

So that means even if I throw a Grave-Rot-poisoned dagger to execute the Physician from a safe distance, the target's corpse would instantly go limp and slump off the stone dais?

Hmm, but is it that easy? Shi Yan's brow furrowed slightly beneath the shadow of his rain-soaked bamboo hat as he ran the blast-radius calculations, his darkened gaze tracking the faint shimmer of heat radiating from the Physician's mutated body.

Physician Li is now Tier 2. Who knows if, when he dies, his mutated body will also explode? Just like Abyssal Overseer back then?

The memory of that detonation flashed through his mind—the searing white light, the wave of force that had turned stone to powder and flesh to mist. He'd survived that one by sheer luck and a convenient stone pillar. Here, there was no cover.

Then the sheer force would be immense—registering squarely within the parameters of a Tier-2 Late Stage detonation. It wouldn't just be an explosion of heat; it would act as an aerosolized acid bomb, a pressurized cloud of vaporized Demonic Qi and superheated blood that would expand outward in a perfect killing sphere.

By his estimate, the resultant shockwave would vaporize the swamp water into scalding steam, melt the hanging villagers into dripping wax, destroy the stolen Chamber goods he needed to recover—those precious spirit herbs reduced to ash—and entirely incinerate him before his Tier-2 Physique could absorb the impact. His bones would be dust before his nerves registered pain.

Tsk. That means throwing the dagger was off the table. It was a guaranteed mutual-kill scenario. Tactically unacceptable.

What about close-quarters combat?

Alternatively, if he charged forward with a standard CQC approach—boots pounding mud, body cutting through the thick, blood-scented air—the sheer displacement of air would alert the paranoid Physician. Those bloodshot eyes would snap toward him. Those three arms would move.

Thus…he was trapped in a tactical stalemate.

The suffocating grove pressed in around him, the steady drip-drip-drip of blood from overhead corpses counting down the seconds like a funeral drum.

…

Shi Yan crouched in the suffocating darkness, his scarred frame hidden behind the veil of hanging corpses and twisted willow roots. His breathing slowed to a negligible rhythm—shallow, controlled, the way he'd been trained to disappear from thermal scopes and motion sensors. His tactical mind aggressively dismantled the stalemate, searching for a mechanical loophole in the Daoist array's logic, treating it like any other explosive device that needed defusing.

The Array Eye requires physical mass and suppressive Demonic Qi to contain the volatile synthesis. So, a ranged kill removes the mass. A frontal assault forces the mass to dodge.

Both options resulted in catastrophic energy release. The blood grooves would overflow. The Yin-Yang synthesis would detonate.

The only viable solution was simultaneous mass substitution.

He could not simply kill Physician Li; he had to physically lock the Physician's center of gravity to the Array Eye at the exact millisecond of neural death, effectively making the corpse a permanent, immovable lid on the magical cauldron. A dead anchor.

Tsk, that sounds hard to do. He clicked his tongue in annoyance, the quiet sound swallowed by the ambient drip of blood and the low hiss of toxic steam rising from the smashed deity statues.

Not only that, to achieve it, he would have to cross the mud—sixty feet of open kill-zone under the hellish crimson glow—and instantly sever the target's brain stem while simultaneously maintaining exact physical pressure on the Array Eye. No margin for error. No second chance.

It was an execution maneuver requiring micro-millimeter precision. A single misstep, a single flinch, and the swamp would be glassed in boiling blood. Every living thing within a hundred yards would be reduced to carbon scoring.

Sigh... Shi Yan exhaled a slow, silent breath, the cold vapor curling briefly in the freezing air pocket near the Frost-Jade coffin before dissipating. He gripped the poisoned dagger in a reverse hold, bringing it flush against his forearm to mask its reflection, the cold steel pressing against the inside of his wrist.

So… back to the old style...

The words echoed in his mind like a mantra from another life—spoken by an instructor with a face he could barely remember, in a place that no longer existed.

Shi Yan closed his eyes for a moment, taking another breath—deep, measured, centering his focus—then opened them and mentally activated the [Black-Iron Body Art]. Black veins surged across his skin like cracks spreading through porcelain, radiating outward from his chest in a spiderweb of corruption.

The sheer surge of power felt like swallowing a live fragmentation grenade. His muscles convulsed involuntarily. He could feel the blood vessels in his temples bulging painfully against the sudden, unnatural spike in blood pressure, throbbing in rhythm with his hammering pulse. His teeth clenched hard enough to make his jaw creak.

At a baseline of forty-five, a one-hundred-percent kinetic multiplier pushes my metrics to ninety, his cold vision narrowing into a tunneled kill-box, the edges of his sight dimming as his body prioritized oxygen flow to critical systems.

I am temporarily mimicking the physical output of a Tier-3 entity, perhaps. But structural integrity will catastrophically fail in exactly sixty seconds. Sixty seconds before my own heart detonates. Stolen novel; please report.

His mortal heart thudded like a siege hammer, each beat so violent he could feel it rattling his ribcage. The technique forcefully doubled his physical parameters, but it was burning through his biology like acid through parchment.

His [45 Might] and [45 Agility] skyrocketed, violently pushing against the absolute limits of human biology. The air around him actually warped, his body radiating a terrifying, invisible kinetic heat as his muscle fibers braided into dense, unstoppable coils that threatened to tear themselves free from bone. His hands trembled—not from fear, but from the sheer strain of containing that much raw force in mortal flesh.

Now or nothing!

He exploded from the shadows, his boots detonating the black mud beneath him into a spray of filth and water.

Of course, with that commotion, the sheer air displacement alerted the Physician. The sudden, violent rupture of the surrounding air pressure was the equivalent of a bomb detonating in a vacuum—a thunderclap that shattered the grove's oppressive silence and sent ripples through the hanging corpses overhead.

Physician Li's paranoid mind fired instantly. The weeping man's head snapped upward, blood and grime streaking his tear-stained face. His bloodshot eyes widened in absolute terror and rage, the whites visible all around the irises like a cornered animal's.

"Cloud-Mirror dogs!" Physician Li screamed, his voice a distorted, multi-layered roar of human grief and beastly malice that seemed to echo from two throats at once. Saliva and blood sprayed from his lips.

"You come for her?! I will boil your souls and refine your marrow into dust!"

The Physician did exactly as calculated—his three arms wildly reaching out in different directions, his bare chest heaving, his face twisting in grief and rage as he tried to jump backward to cast a defensive blood art. The massive demonic beast arm scraped against the blood-slick stone dais, obsidian talons carving deep gouges.

But Shi Yan was already inside his perimeter, closing the distance with inhuman speed.

Qi suddenly began to gather, the crimson glow of the array intensifying as the Physician drew on its power. Then Physician Li's human hands frantically formed a complex Daoist mudra—fingers twisting into unnatural angles, tendons standing out beneath the skin.

"Blood-Refining Art: Crimson Lotus Cleave!" he shrieked, his voice cracking with desperation.

From his palms, a surging tide of Demonic Qi—perhaps equal to Late Tier-2 White-Hot intensity—erupted in a violent gout, forming three massive, crescent-shaped blades of boiling, highly acidic blood. Each blade was six feet across, spinning with saw-like fury, their edges glowing molten orange.

The blades tore through the mud, ripping toward Shi Yan with the intent to sever him at the waist, the ground exploding in their wake.

Tf, what kind of art is that? But despite his internal complaint, Shi Yan's eyes were calm, his scarred face betraying no emotion. Predicting the trajectory from the angle of Physician Li's wrists—the slight rotation of the shoulders, the forward lean—he did not break his forward sprint.

He dropped into a harsh, sliding crouch, his knees carving two deep trenches into the black mud, filthy water spraying up around him.

The immortal Art manifested not as mere light, but as physical, high-velocity plasma forged from corrupted human vitality—the stolen life force of thirty-seven villagers compressed into three executioner's blades.

The three crescent blades screamed through the air, vibrating with such dense, White-Hot spiritual weight that the stagnant swamp water immediately beneath their flight path flash-boiled into toxic, green steam that hissed and roiled.

Even without making direct contact, the sheer ambient thermal wash was agonizing.

Ugh! The skin on the back of Shi Yan's neck instantly blistered red, the intense demonic heat behaving like aerosolized acid that threatened to sear the flesh right off his bones through proximity alone. He could smell his own skin burning—a sickly-sweet, pork-like stench that filled his nostrils.

The Crimson Lotus Cleave shrieked inches above his back, the corrosive heat singing the damp fabric of his cloak, threads curling and blackening. The blood blades impacted a massive willow tree behind him, instantly melting the ancient wood into bubbling sludge that sloughed off in steaming, liquefied chunks. The tree groaned, tilting dangerously, roots tearing free from the earth.

"Die!" Physician Li roared, spittle flying. Realizing his attack had missed, the Physician unleashed his grafted Tier-1 Late demonic beast arm.

The massive, green-scaled limb lashed forward with serpentine speed, muscle and sinew rippling beneath the scales. Obsidian talons—each as long as a butcher's knife—swiped in a devastating horizontal arc designed to crush Shi Yan's skull into pulp, the claws leaving afterimages in the crimson light.

I can't dodge, but— Shi Yan popped up from his slide, mud streaming off his legs. He did not dodge the massive beast arm. He stepped into the strike, closing distance instead of retreating.

Raising his left forearm, hardened to the equivalent of Tier-3 density by the [Black-Iron Body Art], the black veins pulsing with unnatural vitality, Shi Yan aggressively blocked the sweeping talons.

CLANG!

"Gwack!" The impact sounded like a bronze bell struck by a battering ram, the shockwave visible as a ripple in the air. Shockwaves blasted outward, ripping the nearby reeds from their roots and sending debris flying in all directions. Several hanging corpses swayed violently overhead.

The sheer force of the demonic arm cracked the radius bone in Shi Yan's forearm—he felt the sharp, splintering snap travel up through his elbow—but his Tier-2 cellular density held the limb together, the fractured bone fragments held in place by supernaturally reinforced muscle.

Using the momentum of the block, Shi Yan rapidly slid his broken left arm up the scaled demonic beast-limb, his gloved hand scraping across rough scales that cut through leather. He stepped past the beast's guard and entered the absolute dead zone of Physician Li's CQC radius—the space too close for claws, too intimate for arts.

"Hiiks!" Panic flashed in the Physician's bloodshot eyes, the pupils contracting to pinpoints.

In close quarters, a heavily grafted cultivator relied on overwhelming spiritual pressure to crush opponents before they could close—a invisible wall of force that shattered bones and ruptured organs.

But Shi Yan was Daoless.

The oppressive, suffocating Demonic Qi radiating from Physician Li—thick as tar, hot as forge-fire—rolled over Shi Yan's body without slowing him for a single fraction of a second. It slid off him like water off oiled leather, finding no spiritual core to crush, no Qi channels to rupture.