Chapter 444: The Hunt Begins

The stagnant, oppressive air of the ruined subterranean geode weighed heavily upon the surviving members of the Imperial Vanguard. The scattered ash of the fallen demonic entity coated the cracked obsidian floor, drifting like gray snow across the shattered remains of the blood-vats. Commander Jin stood near the collapsed entrance, his golden halberd planted firmly into the stone. His dislocated left shoulder throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache, the stabilizing effects of the mysterious healer’s magic already beginning to fade, leaving a sharp friction in the joint socket with every intake of breath.

Beside him, Imperial Consort Su Xinyue and Imperial Consort Zhao Mengxue maintained a facade of serene, untouchable dignity. Their torn silk robes bore the heavy soot of the battlefield, yet their postures remained rigidly straight, their feet planted firmly to prevent their exhausted leg muscles from giving way. Alaric stood quietly in their shadow, leaning his weight upon his wooden staff, his head bowed to project the flawless image of an exhausted, overtaxed medicinal practitioner.

A sharp, violent crack of displaced atmospheric pressure shattered the silence.

Ten yards from the center of the crater, the fabric of space tore open. The rift jagged erratically, glowing with a volatile, unstable white light, before forcibly ejecting a figure onto the cold stone.

Commander Jin tightened his grip on his halberd, his golden Battle Aura flaring instantly as he stepped forward, placing his armored body between the anomaly and the Imperial Consorts.

Noble Consort Cui Yulan hit the obsidian floor. She did not land with the flawless, feline grace typical of the Violet Thunder Pavilion’s master. Her boots skidded unsteadily across the ash-slick stone, her knees buckling until she caught herself with her palms, her wrists trembling violently under her own weight.

The heavy, dark violet profound-steel armor she had worn into the catacombs was completely gone. In its place, she wore a simple, high-collared black silk robe—a spare garment hastily retrieved from her spatial ring. The silk clung tightly to her shivering frame, failing to conceal the severe, violent tremors wracking her musculature. Her pale face was devoid of color, her silver eyes burning with a terrifying, unadulterated fury that caused the ambient temperature in the cavern to plummet, frosting the edges of the scattered debris.

“Noble Consort!” Commander Jin called out, his voice echoing in the vast chamber. He lowered his halberd respectfully, bowing from the waist, ignoring the sharp spike of pain in his shoulder. “The perimeter is secured. We feared the spatial anomaly had consumed you entirely. Where is the warrior Corbin?”

Cui Yulan pushed herself into a standing position. Her thigh muscles cramped violently, the microscopic tears in her fibers burning like liquid fire. She forced her spine straight, locking her knees, refusing to show the catastrophic physiological ruin of her foundation to her subordinates.

“The man known as Corbin will not emerge,” Cui Yulan spoke. Her voice lacked its usual resonant thunder, reduced to a cold, vibrating rasp that carried the weight of absolute authority.

Commander Vane, leaning against a shattered stone pillar nearby, pushed himself forward, his heavy Earth Qi fluctuating erratically from his own untreated lacerations. “Noble Consort, did he fall to the anomaly? Did the spatial tear crush him?”

Cui Yulan’s silver eyes locked onto the foreign commander. The sheer, concentrated hatred in her gaze forced Vane to halt his advance, his heavy boots grinding to a stop against the stone.

“He did not fall, Commander Vane,” Cui Yulan declared, her chest heaving as she drew a shallow, painful breath. She could not speak the truth. To admit that a common warrior had stripped her bare, pinned her to the stone, and defiled her physical vessel would shatter her standing in the Celestial Empire forever. She required a casus belli that preserved her pride while guaranteeing his absolute destruction.

“The warrior Corbin harbored a forbidden demonic artifact,” Cui Yulan continued, her tone sharp and unyielding, carrying across the silent cavern. “The spatial anomaly was not an accident of the battlefield. It was a targeted, localized trap. He utilized the chaos of the Abyssal Bone entity’s death to isolate me.”

Commander Jin’s golden aura spiked, the profound-steel rings on his halberd rattling loudly. “Treason against the Imperial Court. To what end, Noble Consort?”

“He deployed a soul-draining array formation within the isolated space,” Cui Yulan stated, her hands clenching into tight fists at her sides, her fingernails biting deeply into her own palms until crescent moons of blood swelled beneath her skin. “He targeted my foundation. He utilized the demonic artifact to forcibly extract the core of my Beast Spirit Blood Essence. He stole my bloodline to fuel his own deviant cultivation.”

A heavy, suffocated silence fell over the Vanguard. To steal the bloodline essence of an Imperial Consort was a crime that carried the penalty of nine familial exterminations.

“When his treacherous array formation collapsed under the strain of my resistance,” Cui Yulan added, delivering the final, fatal lie with a perfectly controlled exhalation, “he utilized a high-tier teleportation talisman to flee the space, leaving me trapped. He is a fugitive of the highest order.”

Commander Vane’s scarred face paled, the blood draining from his cheeks. “Noble Consort, the Earl’s faction had no knowledge of—”

“Silence!” Cui Yulan commanded, the sheer force of her remaining authority echoing like a whip crack. She turned her head toward Commander Jin, her silver eyes narrowing. “Commander Jin. Arrest Commander Vane and every surviving member of the Earl’s forces present in these catacombs. Bind their meridians with profound-steel shackles. They are to be transported to the deepest prisons of the Violet Thunder Pavilion. I will personally interrogate them to uncover the origin of Corbin, his true identity, and the location of his stronghold.”

Commander Jin did not hesitate. The loyalty of the Imperial Guards belonged entirely to the Heavenly Dragon Throne.

“Iron-Blood Vanguard, lay down your weapons!” Commander Jin ordered, stepping forward, his halberd leveled directly at Vane’s chest. The surviving Imperial Guards drew their straight-swords in unison, the ringing of steel filling the geode as they surrounded the mercenaries.

Vane looked at the ring of hostile blades. His men were battered, their Dantians running on empty, their armor heavily compromised by the necrotic venom of the mutated husks. To fight the Imperial Guards now would guarantee their immediate slaughter.

Vane dropped his heavy broadsword. The steel clattered loudly against the obsidian. “We yield to the Imperial Court. But we know nothing of this treason.”

“That will be determined in the interrogation chambers,” Cui Yulan stated coldly. She turned away, unable to bear standing in the catacombs a single second longer. “March them out. We return to the Pavilion immediately.”

Alaric watched the heavy profound-steel chains being locked around the mercenaries’ wrists. His face remained perfectly impassive, projecting the serene calm of a healer, but his analytical mind cataloged the flawless execution of his psychological snare. The Noble Consort had provided her own fabricated motive, sealing Corbin’s fate without Alaric having to lift a single finger or cast a single spell.

The long, arduous ascent from the subterranean depths took hours. The heavy boots of the guards and the clanking chains of the prisoners echoed endlessly up the spiraling stone stairwells. Cui Yulan refused a palanquin, walking under her own power despite the agonizing, tearing pain radiating through her pelvic floor and the hollow, freezing ache in her heart-meridians. She utilized sheer, uncompromising willpower to force her legs to move, masking her absolute physical ruin behind a mask of aristocratic ice.

Upon reaching the surface, the heavily armored convoys of the Imperial forces mobilized instantly, the banners of the Violet Thunder Pavilion snapping in the cold wind.

Days later, deep within the heavily fortified, lightning-wreathed walls of the Violet Thunder Pavilion, Cui Yulan lay isolated within her primary cultivation chamber.

The air in the room was thick with the scent of burning sandalwood and the sharp, medicinal tang of crushed herbs. She sat in the center of a grand, jade-carved bed, surrounded by dozens of empty crystalline vials.

She retrieved a ‘Nine-Spirits Rejuvenation Pill’ and placed it upon her tongue, swallowing it with a mouthful of hot spring water. The pill dissolved instantly, sending a wave of restorative thermal energy through her bloodstream. She followed it immediately by grinding a rare ‘Thunder-Marrow Herb’ between her teeth, the bitter, electrifying sap coating her throat and sliding down her esophagus.

The resources of the Celestial Empire were vast. The pills and herbs violently forced her cardiovascular system to repair the microscopic tears in her musculature. The thermal energy accelerated her cellular division, knitting the strained fibers of her thighs and abdomen back together. Her physical stamina slowly, steadily returned, the bruised flesh fading under the relentless alchemical bombardment.

However, her Dantian remained a hollow, aching cavern. The mythic Yang-Lightning essence of the Suanni was entirely absent, leaving a terrifying void in the center of her being.

She opened her silver eyes, the metallic sheen duller than before. She stared at the far wall, her mind replaying the absolute, suffocating darkness of the isolated space, the heavy, grating voice in her ear, and the brutal, relentless weight pinning her to the stone.

“I will find you,” Cui Yulan promised the empty room, her voice a low, vibrating hum of pure malice.

She stood up from the jade bed, wrapping a heavy silk robe around her shoulders. She walked to the heavy mahogany desk resting in the corner of the chamber. She picked up a calligraphy brush, dipping the tip deeply into a pool of crimson ink.

She authored the edict herself. It was a continent-wide kill order.

The bounty placed on Corbin’s head was astronomical—ten million top-tier spirit stones, a hereditary lordship within the inner provinces, and unfettered access to the Imperial Armory for whoever delivered the mercenary’s severed head to the Violet Thunder Pavilion.

She pressed her personal, jade seal into the hot wax, ensuring that every righteous sect, every mercenary guild, and every shadowy syndicate in the Celestial Empire would mobilize. The hunt would consume the continent.

Far beneath the sunlit courtyards of the Pavilion, isolated in a highly secure, subterranean stone chamber heavily warded against scrying, Alaric sat cross-legged on a circular platform forged from deep-earth lodestone.

The chamber was entirely silent, save for the low, rhythmic hum of the ‘Heaven-Shrouding Stillness Formation’.

Standing at the five points of the grand array were his most devoted protectors. Imperial Consort Su Xinyue, Imperial Consort Zhao Mengxue, Princess Huang Hua, Princess Huang Mei, and the fierce swordswoman Ling Ying channeled their respective Battle Auras into the formation nodes. Sweat beaded on their flawless skin, their arms trembling slightly under the sustained spiritual output. They maintained an absolute, impenetrable barrier that prevented a single fluctuation of mana or physical pressure from leaking into the Pavilion above, their minds entirely subjugated to the will of the gray-cloaked scholar.

Alaric closed his eyes, drawing his consciousness entirely inward.

The time for suppression was over. He released the esoteric locks binding his cardiovascular system.

The stolen, highly concentrated essence of the Nine-Heavens Violet-Gold Suanni erupted within his bloodstream. It was a torrential river of primordial Yang-Lightning, raw, untamed, and infinitely dense. It slammed directly into his Azure Spirit Lion foundation.

The physiological backlash was catastrophic.

Alaric’s spine arched violently, his head throwing back as the marrow within his femurs, ribs, and vertebrae superheated. The stagnant, legacy constraints of his Mythical Beast King lineage began to boil. The two mythic forces did not simply merge; they aggressively cannibalized each other within his veins, stripping away their respective biological weaknesses and fusing their absolute strengths.

His muscular density skyrocketed in a fraction of a second. The individual fibers of his chest, arms, and core tore under the sudden expansion, only to re-knit themselves instantaneously, weaving together like cables of profound-steel. His skeletal structure reinforced itself, the bone taking on a faint, indestructible violet-gold sheen to withstand the apocalyptic pressure of the mutation. A phantom roar—the majestic, terrifying fusion of a divine lion and a lightning-wreathed behemoth—vibrated through his sternum, echoing in the confined space of his own body.

He was ascending. He was breaching the absolute threshold into a true Beast Emperor grade bloodline.

The evolution completed its violent restructuring, finalizing his physical form into the Violet-Gold Celestial Spirit-Lion lineage.

As his physical vessel evolved, the foundational core of his Archmage mana responded to the massive influx of vitality. He did not advance in raw level—he remained firmly entrenched at the absolute peak of the Archmage tier—but the quality, density, and elemental attunements bound to his soul underwent a terrifying refinement. His mastery over Wind, Lightning, Flame, Water, and Ice sharpened drastically, the ambient mana in the chamber bending toward him, eager to obey the heightened, sovereign authority of his newly forged physical presence.

The spatial element underwent the most profound metamorphosis. The inherent spatial authority of the Beast Emperor lineage merged perfectly with his arcane understanding. He acquired the innate ability, ‘Spatial Rending Claws’, allowing him to seamlessly weave highly compressed spatial-severance magic directly into physical strikes, ignoring conventional armor and defensive Qi entirely.

Furthermore, the fusion of the Suanni’s Yang-Lightning and the Spirit Lion’s Yin-Wind birthed a devastating elemental hybrid: ‘Violet-Gold Tempest Flame’. It was a self-sustaining, hyper-destructive energy that carried the incinerating heat of plasma, the erratic, chaining properties of lightning, and the razor-sharp kinetic force of a hurricane.

Alaric did not stop the process there. He drove his concentration deeper, aiming for the rigid biological barrier separating his heart—the seat of his Archmage mana—and his Dantian—the traditional center of a Martialist’s Battle Aura.

Using the volatile, explosive momentum of the bloodline evolution, Alaric directed a concentrated spear of Beast Spirit Blood Essence directly at the barrier.

The internal impact caused a severe, ringing pressure in his body. His eardrums ruptured slightly, thin trails of crimson tracing down his jaw, but his focus remained absolute. He anchored his physical form against the pain, shifting his internal center of gravity to brace against the rupture.

The barrier shattered.

His mana and his physical vitality rushed into the vacant, unformed space of his Dantian. The resulting collision did not destroy him; it forged something entirely new, something fundamentally terrifying.

Alaric’s internal vision expanded. The Dantian was no longer a mere empty reservoir waiting to be filled with Battle Aura. The space blossomed outward, expanding exponentially into a vast, chaotic expanse of raw, conceptual geography.

He had forged an incomplete small world.

It was a barren, violent dimension floating within his core. Apocalyptic storms of untamed wind and lightning raged across a landscape of unformed, shifting tectonic plates. Rivers of molten, violet-gold flame clashed with glaciers of absolute, zero-degree ice. It lacked the refined, fundamental celestial laws required to sustain life, remaining a chaotic, hostile environment, but the sheer capacity for energy storage and generation was staggering.

He could now seamlessly interchange the refined, arcane complexity of his mana with the raw, devastating kinetic output of a Martialist’s Battle Aura, fueling both systems from this internal realm. He resolved, in that moment, to acquire and master top-tier cultivation manuals. If he could learn to properly cycle and control Battle Aura alongside his mana, layering martial arts over his spells, his combat parameters would shatter the accepted logic of the continent.

Alaric slowly opened his ruby eyes.

The air within the ‘Heaven-Shrouding Stillness Formation’ shuddered, visibly warping around his physical form as his new, sovereign aura settled into his flesh.

He looked at the five women maintaining the array. Sweat poured down their faces, their arms trembling violently from the exertion of containing his breakthrough. Their respective Battle Auras were completely drained, running on the absolute fumes of their vitality.

‘The ascension is complete,’ Alaric analyzed, his mind operating with a new, terrifying clarity, his spiritual strength and soul power vastly expanded, allowing him to process multiple streams of combat data simultaneously. ‘The small world requires celestial laws to stabilize, but the physical foundation is absolute.’

He raised a hand, snapping his fingers. The raw, oppressive pressure radiating from his body vanished entirely, instantly repressed beneath layers of flawless internal control.

The women collapsed to their knees, gasping for breath as the array powered down. The sudden cessation of the spiritual demand left them hollow and shaking. Su Xinyue looked up at him, her ethereal beauty marred by exhaustion, her chest heaving heavily beneath her blue silks.

“Master,” Su Xinyue breathed, her voice laced with absolute, corrupted devotion, her eyes glazed with a mixture of terror and awe. “The pressure… it was divine. You have transcended.”

Alaric stepped off the lodestone platform. He approached the kneeling Imperial Consort, resting his hand gently upon the crown of her head, feeling the rapid, frantic pulsing of her pulse point.

‘Cui Yulan remains a volatile variable,’ Alaric thought, his physical touch entirely disconnected from the cold calculations of his mind. ‘She wears heavy, soul-protecting jade artifacts specifically designed to repel spiritual tampering. I cannot directly rewrite her perception or enforce subjugation through my standard methods without triggering the wards and alerting her to my true nature.’

He would have to rely on psychological siege. He would use his position as the esteemed scholar, coordinating secretly with Su Xinyue and Zhao Mengxue, to slowly isolate the Noble Consort from her trusted advisors, feeding her paranoia and her rage until she broke herself upon her own vengeance.

Three weeks later.

The eastern provinces of the Celestial Empire were drowning under the torrential deluge of the monsoon season. The sky was a perpetual, bruised gray, unleashing heavy, unrelenting curtains of cold rain that turned the rural roads into impassable, churning rivers of thick brown mud.

Deep within a flooded trench, concealed beneath a canopy of rotting, water-logged weeping willows, Corbin sat with his back pressed against the slick, muddy embankment.

His physical state was a ruin. The catastrophic injuries sustained during his battle with the Demon Emperor, coupled with the violent, forced spatial relocation of his emergency teleportation, had left his body shattered.

His left femur had been severely micro-fractured, the bone grinding agonizingly with every shift of his weight. His internal meridians were stagnant, the pathways bruised and unresponsive. The constant exposure to the freezing rain caused violent, uncontrollable muscular tremors that wracked his broad chest.

He stared blankly at the translucent, golden interface hovering in the rain.

[System Notification: Host Vitality at 18%. Heart injuries have worsened.]

[Balance: 650 Heavenly Martial Points.]

He had spent weeks dragging himself through the mud, hiding from Imperial patrols, surviving on grubs and dirty rainwater. He had systematically engaged in brutal, desperate life-or-death struggles against the native beasts and the rogue cultivators who sought to claim the continent-wide bounty on his head.

The bounty explicitly listed his combat strength as equivalent to a Half-Step Martial Emperor. Thus, the opportunists who hunted him were not weaklings. They were seasoned, ruthless Martial Kings.

Corbin’s mind flashed back to a skirmish just two days prior.

He had been cornered in a flooded mangrove swamp by a Level 62 rogue cultivator wielding a pair of hooked hook-swords and utilizing a dense, Water-affinity Battle Aura.

The rogue had initiated the combat with a probing exchange, launching a volley of ‘Piercing Rain Darts’—highly compressed needles of water that tore through the foliage. Corbin, his left leg dragging in the knee-deep mud, had swung his greatsword in a wide, horizontal arc, deflecting the darts. The kinetic impact of the water needles against his steel sent agonizing shockwaves directly down his spine, testing the limits of his poorly set femur.

The rogue escalated instantly, deploying a ‘Tidal Lock Domain’ that turned the swamp water into thick, clinging sludge, attempting to anchor Corbin’s boots to the floor. The rogue closed the distance, the hooked swords aiming to sever Corbin’s Achilles tendons.

Corbin possessed no points for defensive buffers. He relied entirely on raw, mechanical brutality. He shifted his center of gravity entirely to his right leg, abandoning defense. He brought the greatsword down in a desperate, unrefined execution of ‘Absolute Tyrant Cleave’.

The Weapon Essence sheared through the ‘Tidal Lock Domain’. The rogue, arrogant in his elemental superiority, attempted to parry the heavy steel with his hook-swords. The resulting clash shattered the rogue’s weapons instantly, the sheer physical weight of Corbin’s strike overpowering the intricate martial art. The greatsword continued its downward trajectory, cleaving the rogue’s collarbone and biting deep into his chest cavity.

The rogue died instantly, his body collapsing into the bloody swamp.

[System Notification: Target Eliminated. Level 62 Martial King.]

[Penalty: Teleportation Debt Deduction Applied (-90% Reward Yield).]

[Net Gain: 120 Heavenly Martial Points.]

The toll for his emergency escape from the void was staggering. Instead of earning thousands of points for slaying high-level threats, his rewards were heavily garnished, forcing him to grind endlessly just to accumulate a meager handful of currency.

Corbin gritted his teeth, the memory fading as the cold rain plastered his hair to his forehead.

‘System,’ Corbin commanded, his mental voice a harsh, exhausted rasp. ‘Open Marketplace. Purchase High-Tier Bone-Mending Elixir. Purchase Phantom-Visage Jade Diguise.’

[Transaction Confirmed. Deducting 600 Heavenly Martial Points.]

[Balance: 170 Heavenly Martial Points.]

A small, intricately carved crimson vial and a thin disk of pale, shimmering jade materialized in the mud beside his knee.

Corbin snatched the crimson vial. He uncorked it with his thumb and downed the thick, chalky liquid in a single gulp.

The physiological reaction was immediate and horrifyingly painful. The elixir did not gently soothe his injuries; it aggressively reconstructed his skeletal structure. Corbin clamped his jaw shut, a low, guttural groan tearing from his throat as the osteoblasts in his left femur violently accelerated their cellular division. The micro-fractures in the bone snapped and ground together, fusing with localized, searing heat. The calcium hardened in seconds, knitting the bone back into flawless, structural perfection. He felt his bruised meridians forcibly expand, the pathways clearing as the residual necrotic taint from the Demon Emperor’s aura was chemically purged from his bloodstream.

He collapsed forward into the mud, panting heavily, his muscles twitching as the intense biological overhaul concluded. His leg was healed, but his spiritual strength remained severely depleted.

He reached out with a trembling, mud-caked hand and picked up the pale jade disk.

He pressed the artifact directly against the center of his chest, channeling the absolute last spark of his accessible Battle Aura into the formation runes carved upon its surface.

The jade disk dissolved into a liquid, shimmering light that washed over his entire body. The ‘Phantom-Visage Jade Disguise engaged. The heavy, brutal scars crisscrossing his face slowly faded, concealed beneath an optical illusion of smooth, unblemished skin. The rugged, sharp angles of his jawline softened into anonymity. His pale blue eyes darkened into a common, unremarkable shade of muddy brown. His towering, muscular frame subtly shifted, the visual projection shaving inches off his height and bulk, rendering him entirely average.

He was no longer the heavily scarred, terrifying warrior from the Iron-Blood Province.

He adopted the alias ‘Mo Chen’—Silent Dust.

Corbin leaned his head back against the mud embankment, the cold rain washing over his disguised face.

‘Who did this?’ Corbin thought, his mind churning with a relentless, obsessive fury that burned hotter than the healing elixir.

He was the most wanted man in the empire. He had seen the bounty posters nailed to the trees in the abandoned villages he had crawled through. Ten million top-tier elemental spirit stones.

He tried to piece together the absolute, baffling chaos of the void chamber. He had been paralyzed, deafened, and blinded by a magical construct that entirely bypassed his system’s defenses. When he awoke, Cui Yulan had attacked him with suicidal, berserk rage, accusing him of stealing her bloodline and defiling her.

‘Someone else was in that void,’ Corbin deduced, his fists clenching in the mud, his fingernails digging into his palms. ‘Someone who possesses magic capable of isolating a system, masking their presence entirely, and extracting a Noble Consort’s foundation without leaving a single trace of their own Battle Aura.’

He swore a bloody, uncompromising oath to the stormy sky. He would rebuild his foundation. He would grind for points in the darkest, most dangerous corners of the empire, paying off his teleportation debt one corpse at a time. And when his strength was fully restored, he would hunt down the unknown orchestrator who had framed him, and he would sever their limbs one by one.

A week later, on the absolute ragged edge of the eastern border, a dilapidated tavern sat sinking into the marshlands.

The interior of the establishment smelled heavily of cheap, fermented rice ale, wet wood, and the sour, pungent sweat of unwashed cultivators. The wooden floorboards groaned under the weight of the patrons. The room was packed with rogue cultivators, mercenaries, and traveling merchants, all seeking refuge from the relentless monsoon rains hammering against the thatched roof.

At a large, round table in the center of the room, a group of heavily armed rogues sat drinking, their voices loud and boisterous over the din of the storm.

“I am telling you, the bounty is real,” a scarred cultivator declared, slamming his wooden tankard onto the table, sloshing ale over the rim. He wore the insignia of an Early-Stage Martial King on his breastplate. “Ten million top-tier elemental stones! A hereditary lordship! The Violet Thunder Pavilion issued it directly. This Iron-Blood Warrior is a dead man walking.”

“I heard the bastard tried to assassinate the Noble Consort in the catacombs,” another rogue chimed in, leaning forward with a dark, missing-tooth grin, a heavy saber resting across his knees. “They say she is so furious, she ordered her loyalist armies to march on the Earl’s estates. They burned three of his manors to the ground just yesterday for associating with the fugitive.”

“Assassination?” The innkeeper, a stout man wiping a dirty glass with a rag, snorted loudly from behind the bar. “The rumors in the cities say it was far worse than an assassination attempt. They say he used a demonic rtifact to steal her very cultivation base!”

“Whatever he did,” the scarred cultivator laughed, a harsh, grating sound that vibrated with cruel amusement, “when she catches him, it won’t be a clean execution. I place my bets on Lingchi—death by a thousand cuts. She will chop him into so many pieces, you could fit his remains in a teacup.”

The table erupted into dark, morbid laughter, the men eagerly betting copper coins on the exact method of the fugitive’s impending, gruesome demise.

In the darkest, most obscured corner of the tavern, sitting alone at a small, rickety wooden table, sat Mo Chen.

He wore a heavy, rain-soaked bamboo hat pulled low over his unremarkable, brown eyes. A simple, frayed gray cloak concealed his recovering frame. He held a small, chipped ceramic cup of cheap ale in his right hand.

Corbin listened to the men laughing, placing bets on his own grisly obituary. He did not react. He did not shift his center of gravity. His breathing remained perfectly, mechanically even, betraying absolutely no spike in his heart rate.

He slowly brought the ceramic cup to his lips, taking a measured sip of the bitter ale.

He lowered the cup, his gaze fixed on the laughing men through the shadows of his bamboo hat. His system interface overlaid their figures with faint, targeting reticles.

[Target Scan Complete: 4 Hostiles. Average Cultivation: Level 63.]

He calculated the exact angle required to draw his greatsword, sweep the table, and sever their necks before they could fully deploy their Battle Auras. The teleportation debt was heavy, but four Martial Kings would yield a necessary influx of points to recover and upgrade himself.