Chương 49: The Demon’s Raw Material (2/2)

Before he could depart the muddy kill zone, however, Shi Yan paused. The rain continued its relentless assault against his bamboo hat, drumming a steady rhythm that filled the silence left by death. He looked down at his new silver jian, water streaming off the polished blade in thin rivulets that caught what little storm-light remained.

He gave it a few experimental swings, cutting through the freezing rain. The weapon moved through the air with a clean, singing note—each arc producing a sharp whistle as raindrops split against the honed edge. Droplets scattered in perfect arcs, catching briefly in the dim light before vanishing back into the downpour.

It was incredibly sharp, resonant, and perfectly balanced—a fine, orthodox sect weapon. The weight distribution was flawless, the grip comfortable despite the rain-slicked leather wrapping. The silver tassel danced with each movement, leaving faint trails of motion in his peripheral vision.

It just... how should I say...

It was undeniably a masterpiece by the standards of ordinary mortal smiths.

But as the blade hissed through the air, Shi Yan's eyes narrowed into a dark frown. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, the muscles along his temple flexing as his lips pressed into a thin, dissatisfied line.

His mind flashed back to the moment his scavenged dagger had catastrophically shattered against the green tortoise-shell jade barrier of the junior disciple. The memory was visceral—the jarring shock that had traveled up his arm, the metallic ping of fragmenting steel, the sudden, horrifying weightlessness of holding nothing but a useless hilt.

Having your primary weapon disintegrate in the middle of a close-quarters engagement is a fatal operational error. Shi Yan clicked his tongue, the small sound of irritation swallowed immediately by the hiss of falling rain against stone and flesh.

If not for the enemy being too dumb to capitalize, it would have been fatal mistake I cannot afford to repeat. But what could he do?

If I carry multiple backup weapons strapped to my body, the excess bulk will compromise my agility and center of gravity. Furthermore...

Unlike normal cultivators, Shi Yan was entirely Daoless.

A normal cultivator could carry ten spare swords inside a folded-dimension spatial pouch and summon them directly into their hand with a mere thought, driven by a pulse of Qi.

Shi Yan couldn't do that. His fingers tightened fractionally around the jian's hilt, knuckles whitening beneath the grime and dried blood. Anything he wanted to use in a fight had to be physically mounted on his rig. If he drew his weapon and it broke, he was barehanded.

Besides, my baseline [Might] is already at 55. Under the activation of the [Black-Iron Body Art], my physical kinetic output violently spikes to 110.

A standard cultivator's sword is simply not engineered to endure that kind of raw, unmitigated kinetic impact. These weapons are designed to act as conduits—they are meant to channel Qi, not act as a crowbar against heavy armor.

He ran his thumb along the flat of the silver blade, feeling the subtle imperfections in the temper line where the smith had folded the steel. Water beaded and rolled off the polished surface, tracing the faint ripples of the metal's grain.

Perhaps if I strike another Peak Tier-2 entity with defensive Qi or a heavily plated demonic beast with my full muscular torque, this steel will flex, vibrate, and shatter in my hands within a week.

It is like... I am a sledgehammer trying to fight with a surgical scalpel.

He needed a heavy weapon. Something impossibly dense. Something forged specifically to leverage blunt-force trauma, momentum, and pure, unadulterated mass.

The problem was procurement.

Standard city blacksmiths in the Outer Wards could not forge such a thing, since most of them assumed weapons would be used with Qi. The craftsmen there hammered out serviceable blades for outer disciples and wandering cultivators—functional channels for spiritual energy, not instruments built to withstand the brutal physics of purely mortal strength amplified beyond human limits.

It was so rare that even the guards' weapons were mostly Qi-compatible weapons.

If I cannot buy the steel... what about forging? But what about material?

Shi Yan raised one eyebrow, his gaze shifting back down the rain-swept bedrock path toward the darkened Swamp Village, where Physician Li's corpse lay. Rain streamed down his face, tracing the hard angles of his cheekbones before dripping from his jaw. His pale eyes caught a faint glint of consideration—cold calculation settling over his features like a mask.

The grafted Demonic Beast Arm.

It is only Tier-1 Peak, yet it was dense enough to physically act as the central anchor for a highly volatile Yin-Yang blood array.

It took the brunt of the formation's thermal and acidic backlash without a single scale blistering. It is pure, hyper-dense biological material dragged from the Abyss.

Without a moment of hesitation, Shi Yan turned his back to Skycloud City and began sprinting silently back toward the desolate, hanging weeping willows of the flooded village. His boots hammered against the muddy ground, splashing through puddles of blood-thinned rainwater, each footfall sending up dark spray that was immediately swallowed by the storm. The silver jian bounced rhythmically against his hip, the scabbard's brass fittings clinking softly with each stride.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

…

He moved through the swamp like a phantom, the dark rain washing his tracks away. The twisted landscape swallowed him whole—gnarled roots and hanging moss created a labyrinth of shadows that his form melted into with practiced ease. Mist clung to the stagnant water's surface, coiling around his legs as he passed. When he emerged into the center of the village, the horrific Blood-Refining array had entirely burned itself out.

The eerie green miasma had finally dissipated, leaving behind nothing but charred dirt and the hanging, skeletal corpses of the drained villagers gently swaying in the wind. The bodies creaked softly as they turned on their ropes, bone grinding against desiccated ligament. The smell of death had changed—no longer the hot copper reek of fresh blood, but the colder, earthier stench of decay settling in.

Rainwater dripped from exposed ribs and hollow eye sockets, creating a grotesque percussion against the scorched earth below.

A handful of surviving, unsacrificed villagers—the ones Shi Yan had inadvertently spared by preventing the array's full detonation—were huddled near the desecrated Daoist shrine. Their clothes hung in tatters, soaked through and clinging to emaciated frames. Hollow eyes stared out from gaunt faces marked by streaks of mud and ash.

Among them was the elderly man, Uncle Chen, clutching a rusted hoe with trembling, white-knuckled hands. His fingers were wrapped so tightly around the weathered wooden handle that the knuckles had gone bloodless white, standing out starkly against his mud-stained skin. His entire body shook—not just from cold, but from bone-deep terror that had settled into his very marrow.

When Shi Yan stepped out of the swirling fog, the villagers froze. Every muscle locked simultaneously, as though an invisible hand had seized them all at once. The collective breath left their lungs, replaced instantly by sheer, primal horror.

He did not look like a savior. He looked like an entity dragged straight from the lowest ring of hell.

His dark tunic was soaked entirely in vivid crimson blood—layers upon layers of it, some fresh and glistening, some dried to a rust-brown crust that cracked faintly with his movements. Black swamp mud coated his heavy boots and pants, clinging in thick, wet clumps that made each step a sodden, heavy declaration. Spatters of darker fluids—things that weren't quite blood—streaked across his chest and sleeves.

White steam still rolled faintly off his shoulders into the freezing rain, the heat of recent system reconstruction creating wisps of vapor that curled upward like the exhalations of some infernal forge. And a pristine silver-tasseled sword—wildly incongruous with his terrifying, butcher-like appearance—swung at his hip, the elegant weapon's polished perfection only serving to make the rest of him appear even more monstrous by contrast.

"I-immortal..." Uncle Chen stammered, his knees buckling under him. His voice cracked on the word, breaking into a strangled wheeze halfway through.

The rusted hoe dropped from his hands, splashing into the mud with a wet thud. He fell to the dirt, kowtowing frantically, his forehead striking the wet earth with dull, meaty impacts that sent up small splashes of muddy water.

"Spare us... please... we have nothing left... the blood is gone... please don't start the fires again..." Each word came out as a desperate, breathless sob. His entire body pressed flat against the ground, arms outstretched in the traditional posture of absolute submission.

Behind him, a young woman clamped a hand over her child's mouth, weeping silently in absolute terror, utterly convinced they were witnessing the arrival of a new, even more ruthless demon to finish the harvest. Tears carved clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks, and her shoulders shook with suppressed sobs. The child in her arms stared at Shi Yan with wide, uncomprehending eyes—too young to understand, but old enough to absorb the terror radiating from every adult around him.

Shi Yan paused for a moment, looking down at his blood-soaked clothes, and then at the groveling masses. His expression remained utterly neutral—not cruel, not kind, simply... empty. Dead-eyed. The rain continued to stream down his face, washing thin pink rivulets from his jaw.

From their perspective, I suppose I do look like the next executioner in line.

But he didn't bother speaking. He didn't offer them reassurance, and he certainly didn't try to play the righteous hero. Words were a waste of calories and time. They were noncombatants and therefore irrelevant to the mission parameters.

He simply walked past the weeping villagers without uttering a single syllable, his heavy boots squelching loudly in the mud until he reached the central stone dais. Each footfall was deliberate, measured, utterly indifferent to the human misery surrounding him. The survivors flinched with every step he took, pressing themselves deeper into the mud as though they could somehow sink through the earth itself and escape his notice.

Physician Li lay dead exactly where Shi Yan had broken him, right beside the Frost-Jade coffin enshrining his deceased wife. The physician's body had already begun to stiffen with rigor mortis, his remaining human arm twisted at an unnatural angle across his chest. His face was locked in an expression of final anguish—jaw slack, eyes glazed and staring sightlessly at the weeping sky above. Rain pooled in his open mouth and unseeing eyes.

But his focus completely bypassed the tragic romance of the scene. His eyes locked exclusively onto the demonic arm.

He knelt in the mud beside the corpse, the cold, viscous mixture immediately soaking through his trousers and pressing against his knees. The sensation was familiar—just another battlefield, just another body. He gripped the artificially grafted appendage—a grotesque, heavy, scale-plated limb covered in thick, hardened bone spurs. The texture was like petrified ironwood beneath his palm, unnaturally cold even through the rain.

Each scale was the size of a copper coin, overlapping in perfect defensive layers that would have turned aside any normal blade. Dark purple veins, now emptied of blood, threaded through the gaps between scales like a macabre roadmap.

His hand hovered over the hilt of his newly acquired silver jian, but he immediately stopped himself.

Hmm, this silver blade is.. Perhaps for cutting softer flesh.

He looked at the jian, studying the elegant curve of its edge, the way rainwater beaded and rolled off the pristine steel. Its razor edge was forged for precision strikes through soft tissue, vascular gaps, and heart valves—the swift, clean executions favored by orthodox sword cultivators who augmented every cut with flowing Qi.

If I use it to hack through petrified demonic cartilage and reinforced bone, I will roll the edge, dull the blade, and risk microfractures in the steel.

Thus, his eyes scanned the bloody stone dais, moving with tactical efficiency across the scene. Physician Li was exactly that—a physician. He hadn't grafted the beast limb using immortal Art alone; he had physically cut his own spine open to do it. The evidence lay scattered around him—dark bloodstains that the rain hadn't yet washed away, fragments of human vertebrae mixed with demonic tissue, the raw brutality of flesh-work performed without anesthetic or mercy.

Resting on a dark iron tray beside the Frost-Jade coffin lay exactly what Shi Yan needed: a row of macabre, rust-stained surgical instruments. There were flesh hooks with wickedly curved points designed to peel back layers of muscle, wide scalpels with handles wrapped in stained leather, and a thick, heavy, serrated bone cleaver used for amputations. The cleaver's edge was notched and dulled from extensive use, its surface bearing the ghostly stains of old blood that had eaten into the pitted iron.

Shi Yan grabbed the bone cleaver without hesitation. It was crude, heavy, and stained with dried blood, but entirely practical. The weight felt substantial in his grip—a tool built for function over form, designed to sever limbs with brutal mechanical efficiency rather than surgical grace. The handle was slick with rain and old residue, but his fingers wrapped around it with the practiced familiarity of a man who'd handled far worse.

He pressed the brutal, serrated edge against the rotting surgical seam where the dark beast flesh met the dead physician's human shoulder. The transition point was grotesque up close—human skin stretched and stitched to reptilian hide with thick black thread that had partially torn through the necrotic tissue. The smell that rose up was overwhelming—rot, preservative herbs, and something deeper and fouler that came from the demonic limb itself.

With horrific, brutal indifference, he threw his weight onto the heavy iron and began physically sawing the massive arm completely off the corpse. The serrated teeth bit into the tough cartilage with each stroke, catching and tearing rather than cutting cleanly. Rain mixed with dark fluids that oozed from the widening gap, creating a thin black sludge that ran down the physician's torso and pooled on the stone beneath.

The wet, tearing sound of tough cartilage giving way, followed by the sickening crack of the human humerus snapping under his leverage, echoed loudly in the silent village. The bone didn't break cleanly—it splintered, fragments piercing through the remaining flesh with sharp, jutting points. Shi Yan adjusted his angle and continued sawing, each stroke producing fresh wet sounds that made even the hardened survivors at the shrine turn away and retch.

At the shrine, the villagers whimpered, pressing their faces deeper into the mud. Some covered their ears, trying desperately to block out the sounds of desecration. Others simply closed their eyes and prayed to gods who had already abandoned this cursed place.

Then, tossing the bloody cleaver aside with a metallic clatter against stone, Shi Yan hoisted the severed arm into the air. It was staggeringly heavy—easily thirty jin of solid mass—and required both hands to lift properly. Dark fluids dripped from the ragged stump, pattering against the ground like thick rain.

The limb radiated an oppressive, earthy Yin-Qi that immediately caused a thin layer of frost to form on the surrounding dirt, spreading outward in delicate crystalline patterns that crackled faintly as they expanded. His breath misted more heavily in the suddenly colder air, and his fingers began to ache from the supernatural chill seeping through the demonic scales.

Perfect raw material, Shi Yan nodded to himself, pale eyes studying the appendage with the clinical assessment of a quartermaster evaluating salvaged equipment. The bone spurs would need to be removed, the scales possibly harvested separately, but the underlying skeletal structure was exactly what he needed—dense, resilient, and proven under extreme conditions. I just have to hope some blacksmith is capable of smelting this down into a weapons-grade chassis.