Chương 34: A Message He Shouldn’t Read (2/3)

Shi Yan hooked his injured left arm aggressively around the elbow joint of the beastly limb, applying a brutal, modern military arm bar with the cold precision of a trained combatant. His gloved fingers dug into the rough green scales, finding purchase despite the slickness of blood and swamp moisture coating the grafted flesh.

He ignored the sickening, agonizing grinding of his own fractured radius bone against itself—the sharp, jagged edges of splintered marrow scraping with every micro-adjustment of his grip. White-hot lances of pain shot up through his forearm and into his shoulder socket, but his face remained a mask of grim determination, jaw muscles bunching beneath scarred skin.

Leveraging his artificially doubled [45 Physique], he brutally wrenched the demon arm downward with the full mechanical advantage of the joint lock, completely destroying Physician Li's center of balance and violently jerking the Physician forward. The mutated cultivator's bare feet scraped across the blood-slick stone dais, toes scrambling for purchase as his body pitched forward involuntarily, preventing him from jumping off the Array Eye.

The obsidian talons raked uselessly through empty air, unable to find an angle of attack.

He had the perfect angle. The target was off-balance, his guard blown wide open, his neck horribly exposed—the vulnerable junction between skull and spine laid bare beneath the faint crimson glow of the array. The kill was geometrically guaranteed, a clean line from blade to brain stem with zero obstruction.

He was already committing to the finishing strike, his right hand adjusting the reverse grip on the poisoned dagger, muscles coiling for the final thrust.

Then a one-in-a-million variable intervened.

The sheer kinetic force of their violent clash—the thunderous shockwaves of two Tier-2 bodies colliding at the epicenter of a highly unstable magical zone—had fundamentally destabilized the rotting environment. The very air trembled with residual spiritual pressure, sending ripples through the hanging corpses overhead and disturbing the stagnant swamp water below.

High above, an ancient, decayed branch of a weeping willow tree groaned under the violent vibrations, its pale bark splitting with audible cracks that echoed through the canopy. Then a thick chain of hardened black Qi—its ethereal links suddenly weakened by the turbulent fluctuations in the atmosphere—abruptly snapped with a sound like shattering glass.

A comatose, half-drained mortal villager plummeted from the dark canopy, limbs splayed lifelessly as gravity seized the emaciated body.

The heavy, limp body crashed into the mud with a wet, meaty thud, landing squarely within the primary intersection of the glowing blood-grooves—directly across the flowing crimson channels—mere feet from the central dais. Black mud and stagnant water sprayed outward from the impact, droplets hissing where they struck the activated runes.

The delicate, highly volatile Yin-Yang circuit of the Daoist array was violently obstructed. The fluid dynamics failed in an instant. The biological pressure bottlenecked at the blockage point, spiritual energy backing up through the formation channels like dammed floodwaters.

Shi Yan's eyes widened as he heard the heavy thud and saw the disruption—the body sprawled across the glowing trenches like a cork jammed into a high-pressure valve. His lips puckered as he clicked his tongue against his teeth, the sharp sound drowned by the sudden whine of overloading spiritual energy.

What phenomenal bad luck. A literal one-in-a-million statistical anomaly!

Then, under his darkened gaze, the dense, crimson blood-Qi flowing through the trench in the mud hit the villager's body and had nowhere to go. It behaved exactly like a blocked fuel line in a high-pressure combustion engine, the spiritual fluid backing up against the obstruction with mounting force.

The dark red fluid instantly began to boil, violently turning a blinding, incandescent white that seared afterimages into his retinas. Heat radiated outward in shimmering waves, distorting the air above the array like desert mirages.

The Daoist runes carved into the surrounding stones began to shriek—a high-pitched, keening wail that set teeth on edge—micro-fractures spiderwebbing across the array lines as the ambient spiritual pressure spiked to critical mass. Fragments of stone flaked away from the grooves, glowing orange at their edges.

The Yin and Yang forces, denied their natural cyclical flow, began to aggressively cannibalize each other—opposite polarities colliding and annihilating in cascading chain reactions that sent visible shockwaves rippling through the formation.

Knowing exactly what would happen as he watched the energy condense into physical mass—the telltale compression signature identical to every improvised explosive device he'd ever identified in his former life—Shi Yan braced his core. He shifted his weight lower, boots grinding against stone, and tightened every muscle group from his calves to his shoulders.

Then, exactly as he expected, the array violently spasmed.

A geyser of highly corrosive, Tier-2, white-hot realm blood-Qi erupted from the obstructed groove like a ruptured steam pipe, shrieking skyward in a column of incandescent fury before arcing outward in all directions.

Shi Yan and Physician Li, locked in brutal close-quarters combat atop the dais, were caught at the source of the eruption.

The expanding shockwave blasted laterally across the grove, flattening reeds and sending hanging corpses swaying wildly on their chains. The acidic blood-fire swept over the western edge of the camp, instantly melting through the thick wooden pilings of several stilt houses—the support beams collapsing into bubbling, carbonized ruin—and incinerating nearly half of the carefully stacked crates containing the Chamber's stolen spiritual herbs.

Jade-green flames erupted from the medicinal materials as they ignited, adding acrid herbal smoke to the choking miasma. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

The majority of the eruption vented sideways through the formation channels, following the paths of least resistance carved into stone and earth. Even so, the backlash that struck Shi Yan was horrific.

There was no time to evade.

The thermal shock slammed into his right side with the concussive force of a heavy artillery shell, the impact rattling his teeth and driving the air from his lungs. His rain cloak vaporized instantly, turning to ash in midair—gray particles scattering on superheated wind. Demonic heat punched straight through his tunic, the fabric blackening and curling away from his skin, blistering the flesh of his shoulder, ribs, and thigh in spreading patches of angry red and white.

Agony exploded across his nerves like liquid fire poured directly into his veins.

The smell of ozone mixed with that of his own roasting flesh—the sickly-sweet, pork-like stench that every combat veteran recognized instantly. The pressure wave battered his body from multiple angles, threatening to rip him from his footing entirely and hurl him backward into the twisted willow roots.

If he allowed himself to be thrown back, Physician Li would break free.

The moment the demonic cultivator escaped the Array Eye, the formation would lose its physical anchor.

Without that stabilizing mass suppressing the cauldron's core, the entire swamp would detonate in a Tier-2 equivalent explosion, vaporizing the crystal coffin, the surviving villagers hanging overhead, and every scrap of critical intelligence he still needed to recover—especially after hearing the words Cloud Mirror Sect spoken from the Physician's own lips.

So he accepted the damage.

Jaw clenched against the flesh-searing pain—teeth grinding together so hard his molars creaked—Shi Yan drove his entire body weight directly into the raging shockwave. His scarred face twisted into a rictus of determination, temple veins bulging as black veins still writhed beneath his blistered skin.

His boots ground against the stone dais, worn leather soles scraping across blood-slick rock as he fought for every inch of purchase.

Muscles strained beyond their natural limits, fibers tearing microscopically under the impossible load. Tendons screamed in protest, pulled taut as bowstrings. Leveraging every ounce of his enhanced physique and years of military conditioning, he forced himself to hold position against the spiritual eruption—a mortal man standing firm against the fury of Heaven and Earth.

Variables.

Even as the heat washed across his face, evaporating the sweat and moisture from his skin and leaving it cracked and tight, Shi Yan cursed inwardly, his eyes narrowing into cold, predatory slits through the shimmering haze of thermal distortion.

The plan had been sound.

It was always the unpredictable variables that got people killed.

In one simultaneous, fluid motion—muscle memory executing without conscious thought—Shi Yan violently stomped his heavy boot squarely over the Physician's right foot, driving the heel down with enough force to shatter the metatarsals. The wet crunch of splintering bone was audible even over the dying roar of the eruption.

Shut up and die already.

He pinned the demonic cultivator's leg firmly to the stone surface of the Array Eye, grinding down with his full enhanced weight, ensuring the mass needed to maintain the array's suppressive pressure remained perfectly constant even as the body began to fail.

"Lan'er—!" On the other hand, Physician Li screamed, his voice raw and breaking—a howl of pure, animalistic grief that echoed across the darkened grove.

Ignoring the agony of his crushed foot—toes bent at unnatural angles beneath Shi Yan's boot—and Shi Yan's looming presence above him, the weeping man's bloodshot eyes fixed desperately on the Frost-Jade crystal coffin resting just below the dais. The pristine surface reflected the dying crimson glow of the array, casting ghostly light across the preserved face within.

Despite the demonic arm thrashing wildly behind him—talons raking furrows through empty air in blind, reflexive spasms—Physician Li reached out with his normal, trembling human hand. His fingers clawed at empty air, stretching until the joints popped, stopping just inches away from the pristine glass of his dead wife's resting place. Blood dripped from his fingertips, spattering against the coffin's surface.

There was no hatred in his naked gaze in that final fraction of a second, only the pathetic, all-consuming grief of a broken, kind physician pushed too far by a merciless world—a man who had once healed the sick now drowning in the blood of innocents.

"I am... I am bringing you back..." Physician Li choked out, tears of blood leaking down his face in crimson rivulets, tracing paths through the grime and mixing with the sweat and mud.

Tough shit, bastard. You got me injured. Shi Yan, in that exact same millisecond, slid his poisoned blade cleanly into the base of the Physician's skull with the surgical precision of a professional killer.

It bypassed the hardened demonic scales entirely—finding the narrow gap where mutated flesh met mortal tissue—slipping into the soft mortal tissue at the nape of the neck and cleanly severing the cervical vertebrae with a practiced twist. The blade grated against bone, steel edge finding the vulnerable space between vertebrae with unerring accuracy.

The Grave-Rot toxin flushed directly into Physician Li's brain stem—the bioluminescent green poison spreading through neural tissue like burning acid—accompanied by the brutal, calculated twist of Shi Yan's wrist that completely disconnected the man's spinal cord from the rest of his mutating nervous system. The blade rotated a full ninety degrees, ensuring total severance.

Shi Yan locked his own leg muscles tightly, thighs and calves going rigid as iron, fully substituting the Physician's dying, thrashing weight with his own immense, Tier-2 downward kinetic pressure. He became the anchor, his boots grinding deeper into the stone as he bore down with every ounce of mass and force his enhanced body could generate.

The massive array below the dais spasmed wildly, crimson light flaring and dimming in erratic pulses, threatening to blow entirely as it registered the sudden shift in spiritual pressure, but the localized mass pressing down upon the Array Eye remained perfectly constant—Shi Yan's weight seamlessly replacing the Physician's in the precise moment of transition.

The volatile, Tier-2, late-stage, white-hot realm energies, finding no release valve and no gap in the suppressive force, were forced to find their equilibrium once again. The blinding light slowly shifted back into a dormant, pressurized crimson glow, receding safely back into the mud like a beast retreating into its den. The runes ceased their shrieking, fractures freezing in place.

Because the Physician had been positioned upon the raised dais directly at the head of the coffin, and because Shi Yan's heavy boot kept his lower body anchored—foot still pinned, leg locked in place—the target did not fly backward or collapse away from the critical position.

Then the Physician's body finally went limp.

With his spine severed, all motor function ceased in an instant—nerve signals cut off at the source. The body simply folded forward, dropping dead in place directly over the top of the crystal coffin, torso draping across the smooth Frost-Jade surface as gravity claimed him. His human hand came to rest softly against the cold glass above his wife's face—fingertips splayed across her preserved features as if reaching through the barrier between life and death.

The crimson glow stabilized, pulsing once, twice, then settling into a steady, dormant rhythm.

Silence gradually returned to the swamp—the absence of sound almost deafening after the cacophony of erupting spiritual energy. Only the gentle drip of blood from overhead corpses and the distant hiss of smoldering debris broke the stillness.

The array did not explode.

Shi Yan ripped his dagger free with a wet, sucking sound—blade sliding out of vertebrae and brain matter—and took a ragged, staggering step backward. His right leg nearly buckled beneath him, muscles spasming uncontrollably, but he forced himself to remain upright through sheer stubborn will.

F-finally... The grueling timer on the [Black-Iron Body Art] hit its absolute sixty-second ceiling, the internal countdown reaching zero with the finality of a death sentence avoided by milliseconds.

He immediately severed the technique with a mental command.

The bulging black veins aggressively receded beneath his burnt skin, sinking back into his flesh like retreating serpents, instantly replaced by the terrifying, overwhelming surge of extreme lactic acid buildup. Every muscle fiber in his body screamed in unified agony as the chemical byproducts of impossible exertion flooded his system.

His mortal heart fluttered dangerously, skipping beats in irregular patterns as it struggled to handle the horrifying drop in blood pressure—the organ straining like an overtaxed engine on the verge of catastrophic failure.

His vision swam, edges darkening as his brain fought for adequate oxygen. The air surrounding him was choked with the smell of vaporized blood, burnt wood, and sulfur—a nauseating cocktail that made his stomach churn.

Right at that moment, a transparent screen flashed before his eyes as he, still breathing heavily in harsh, ragged gasps, dropped to one knee on the damp ground to triage his own catastrophic physical limits. His left arm hung useless at his side, radius bone grinding sickeningly with each involuntary tremor. His right side was a patchwork of blistered, weeping burns.

[Target Slain. Tier-2 Late Boss Entity (Mutated Physician Li)] [+10, 000 Dao Embers].