Chapter 155 | Within Limits

Chapter 155: 155 | Within Limits

Lin Tian moved through the rocky terrain. He stopped near a massive overturned tree. Spiritual energy gathered thickly beneath its exposed roots.

He dug through the damp soil and found a mature Moon-Shadow Ginseng. Its translucent root carried a faint silver glow, pulsing with dense Yin-attribute energy.

He extracted the root, sealed its spiritual essence, and stored it.

As he stood up, his spiritual sense caught a heavy, oppressive aura fifty meters away.

He did not draw his sword. He stepped silently behind a large stone pillar and observed.

In a small clearing, a three-meter-long Gray-Eyed Fang Tiger was feeding. Its gray fur blended perfectly with the petrified wood and moss. It had just killed a large mutated deer and was tearing into the carcass.

The tiger’s movements were aggressive, but its focus was entirely on its prey. Thick chunks of meat were ripped away, the sound of tearing flesh echoing softly in the quiet forest.

Lin Tian watched. He did not attack. An ambush would force him to fight the beast on its terms, risking unnecessary damage and wasting Qi. He was an engineer of combat, and he never rushed a calculation.

He analyzed the tiger’s structure.

The beast’s muscles were heavily reinforced, especially around its shoulders and limbs. Its thick hide was covered in calcified bone plates that could easily deflect a standard sword strike.

But every beast had a structural flaw.

The tiger’s gray eyes were sharp, but its peripheral vision was completely blocked by the large bones of the carcass it was holding between its massive front paws. Its neck was exposed, but only for a few seconds at a time when it lowered its head to swallow.

Lin Tian circulated his Qi, keeping his aura completely suppressed. He needed the tiger to feel absolutely no threat.

He waited. His breathing slowed to a crawl. His muscles locked into perfect stillness.

The tiger ripped a large chunk of meat from the carcass. It lowered its heavy head to swallow, its front paws pinning the prey. Its neck stretched out, exposing the soft, unarmored gap between its cervical vertebrae.

Now.

Lin Tian moved.

He did not use a wide sword swing. He closed the distance in three silent steps. He channeled a dense, piercing thread of Qi into the tip of his index and middle fingers.

He struck the exact gap in the tiger’s neck.

The focused shockwave of spiritual energy bypassed the beast’s thick hide and shattered the bone instantly. The force traveled directly into the spinal cord, severing the nervous system in a fraction of a second.

The tiger’s body went rigid. It tried to roar, but only a wet gurgle escaped its throat.

The massive beast collapsed heavily onto the moss, dead before it hit the ground.

Lin Tian stepped back, his breathing perfectly steady. He had not wasted a single drop of Qi on a wide attack. The kill was clean, silent, and efficient.

He walked to the carcass and extracted the beast core. The core was large, pulsing with a dense, gray light. It was a high-grade core, far superior to the weak cores of the outer forest beasts. It would be extremely useful for refining high-tier Qi recovery pills. He stored it and cleaned his blade.

***

Three kilometers away, the atmosphere in Gu Yan’s small camp was suffocating.

Hong lay on the ground, shivering violently. His face was a sickly shade of gray. The beast poison from the lizard’s bite was no longer just burning his leg; it was spreading deep into his meridians. Dark, twisted veins crawled up his neck, pulsing with a toxic black light.

"Senior Brother..." Hong whispered, his eyes unfocused and rolling back slightly. "The shadows... the shadows are moving. They are laughing at me."

Mei knelt beside him, her hands glowing with a faint healing light as she tried to suppress the poison. But her Qi was too depleted. The poison easily pushed her spiritual energy aside, burning her palms with its corrosive heat.

"His Dantian is destabilizing," Mei said, her voice trembling with genuine fear. "If the poison reaches his core, he will suffer severe Qi Deviation. We need a pure Yang attribute herb to balance the Yin poison, or he will die within two days."

Gu Yan paced back and forth. His sword was drawn, his knuckles white from gripping the hilt.

He was not just worried about Hong. His mind was trapped in a loop of deep, suffocating paranoia.

He kept thinking about the clearing from yesterday. The sweet, rotting smell of the blood-bait. The way the Iron-Bone Scaled Lizards had tracked them perfectly through the dense fog.

Beasts did not hunt like that. Beasts followed natural scents. But that smell... it was artificial. It was a lure.

"Someone set that trap," Gu Yan muttered, his eyes darting toward the dark trees.

Mei looked up, confused and exhausted. "Senior Brother?"

"The lizards did not just find us!" Gu Yan snapped, his voice cracking loudly. "Someone mixed our blood with a beast lure. Someone wanted us to walk into that nest!"

Hong let out a sudden, high-pitched giggle, his mind slipping further into the poison’s hallucinations. "Lin Tian... he is in the trees. He is watching us. He is feeding us to the beasts..."

Gu Yan’s eyes widened. He spun around, pointing his sword at the empty forest.

"Show yourself!" Gu Yan roared at the empty trees, wasting a massive burst of fire Qi into the air. "Lin Tian! I know you are out there! You think you can play games with Alchemy Peak?"

Silence answered him. Only the rustling of dead leaves.

Mei stood up, her expression shifting from fear to deep suspicion. "Senior Brother... are you sure it was Lin Tian? He is only an Early Stage cultivator. How could he set a trap for six Iron-Bone Lizards?"

"Do not question me!" Gu Yan shouted, his chest heaving. "He applied for the expedition to sabotage us! He knew we were looking for the Pure-Yang Lotus. He wants to take it for himself!"

Gu Yan’s logic was completely broken by fear and exhaustion. He could not accept that his team was simply weak. He needed a scapegoat. He needed to believe that Lin Tian was a hidden master plotting against him, rather than admitting his own poor leadership and wasted Qi.

Mei quietly reached into her spatial ring. Her fingers brushed against a small, low-grade Yin-clearing pill she had saved for herself. It was not enough to cure Hong, but it might ease his pain for a few hours.

She crushed the pill and mixed it with a drop of water, then gently pressed it to Hong’s lips.

Hong swallowed weakly, his shivering slowing down just a fraction. The hallucinations faded from his eyes, replaced by sheer, agonizing pain.

"Thank you, Senior Sister," he whispered, his voice barely audible.

Mei looked away, her heart sinking. The pill was a temporary fix. They were running out of supplies, out of Qi, and out of hope. And their leader was completely lost to paranoia.

"We keep moving," Gu Yan ordered, his voice dropping to a harsh, unstable whisper. "We find the Lotus before he does. If I see him, I will cut him down."

***

Far to the east, Lin Tian wiped a speck of tiger blood from his sword hilt.

He did not look back. He did not care what Gu Yan was doing. The trap in the northeastern sector had served its purpose. Gu Yan’s team was crippled, their Qi depleted, and their minds fractured by paranoia. They were no longer a threat to his mission.

Lin Tian felt a shift in the ambient spiritual energy.

The chaotic, messy Qi of the outer forest was beginning to thin out. Ahead of him, the spiritual currents were flowing in a much more organized, dense pattern. The ground beneath his boots felt heavier, the spiritual pressure pressing down with a steady, rhythmic pulse.

The physical landscape shifted. The soft, damp soil of the outer forest gave way to jagged, unstable rock formations. Massive boulders were stacked at impossible angles, held together only by dense, crystallized spiritual energy.

Lin Tian did not just walk through them. He analyzed the structural integrity of the rocks. He saw the hairline fractures in the stone, the weak points where a single misstep could cause a collapse.

He moved with calculated precision. He placed his boots only on the solid, load-bearing stones, bypassing the unstable sections entirely. His spiritual sense mapped the safe path in real-time, allowing him to navigate the dangerous terrain without slowing his pace.

This was the central region. The environment itself was a trap for the careless.

He paused near a narrow ravine. The spiritual pressure here was thick enough to make the air feel heavy in his lungs. He circulated his Qi to filter the dense energy, keeping his meridians clear.

Ahead, the faint, pulsing glow of high-grade herbs began to appear through the rocky gaps.

Lin Tian’s eyes narrowed. The real harvest was about to begin.