### Chapter 2: The Black Miasma Valley and the Currency of Pain
The sun, a sickly, pale orb obscured by the perpetual smog of the Clear Water Market, finally dipped below the jagged horizon of the surrounding peaks. Dusk in the outer slums did not bring the romantic, painted skies of Earth; it brought a creeping, damp chill and the lengthening of shadows where desperate men hid with rusted knives.
Li Mo trudged back to his squalid shack, his body moving on autopilot. He had spent the entire afternoon meticulously tending the half-acre of spirit rice. He had hunted down every last iron-jawed locust, painstakingly channeled his meager, Level One Qi into the irrigation trenches, and ensured that not a single stalk of the Golden Cauldron Faction's crop was out of place.
He was putting on a performance for an audience of none, but in the brutal ecosystem of the cultivation world, paranoia was the only armor a weak man possessed. If Steward Wang—or anyone else—bothered to check on him, they would find exactly what they expected: a pathetic, broken teenager working himself to the bone out of sheer terror.
Pushing open the creaky wooden door of his shack, Li Mo secured it with a heavy wooden bar. It wouldn't stop a cultivator, but it might deter a mortal thief or a stray corpse-eating dog. He collapsed onto his straw bed, the dry, brittle stalks crunching beneath his weight.
He stared at the ceiling, the adrenaline of the day finally beginning to recede, leaving behind a cold, hard knot of anxiety in his stomach.
*Three days,* he thought, the silence of the room amplifying the ticking clock in his head. *I have exactly three days to produce two low-grade spirit stones. If I don't, Steward Wang will return. And this time, he won't just kick me.*
He knew Wang's type. Back on Earth, Wang would have been a middle-management tyrant, stealing credit and verbally abusing interns. Here, with the backing of cultivation and a local gang, that petty tyranny escalated to casual murder. If Wang realized Li Mo had somehow injured him—or even if he just felt annoyed that Li Mo had survived the beating so well—he would kill Li Mo on the spot.
Li Mo needed the money. He needed it fast, and he needed it without drawing attention.
He closed his eyes and sifted through the inherited memories of his predecessor. The original Li Mo had been a scavenger of information, constantly listening to the boasts and complaints of older cultivators in the market taverns, hoping to glean some secret to success. Now, those eavesdropped conversations were Li Mo's only lifeline.
*How does a low-level loose cultivator make quick money?* He categorized the memories like a spreadsheet.
**Option 1: Alchemical refinement.** Impossible. He had no cauldron, no recipes, and his fire-control skills were non-existent. Attempting to refine pills with a trash-tier four-element spiritual root usually resulted in explosive death—a fact his predecessor had proven by taking a badly refined pill.
**Option 2: Beast Hunting.** Highly lucrative. A Tier 1 low-grade spirit beast's core could fetch anywhere from three to ten spirit stones. The meat and hide were worth more. *The problem?* Li Mo didn't know a single martial art. He didn't own a weapon, aside from a rusty hoe. If he walked into the Whispering Woods, a basic Wind-Blade Wolf would tear his throat out before he could even blink.
*Wait,* Li Mo paused, a thought sparking in the darkness. *I can transfer negative statuses. If a wolf bites me, I can transfer the massive tissue damage and blood loss back to the wolf, or to a nearby tree.*
It was a tempting thought, but he immediately crushed it.
*Too risky. What if the wolf bites my head off? If my brain is destroyed instantly, I won't have the conscious thought required to activate the Golden Finger. What if it's a pack? I transfer the bite of one wolf, but the other three rip me apart simultaneously. I am a normal guy. I have a normal human reaction time. Relying on taking a lethal hit to deal damage is a gamble where a single microsecond of lag means permanent death. I am not an action hero. I am a coward. I need an asymmetrical advantage.*
He continued down the list.
**Option 3: Gathering Spirit Herbs.** This was the most common profession for the lowest dregs of the market. Finding a rare herb in the wild could set a cultivator up for months. But the surrounding forests had been picked clean for decades by thousands of desperate scavengers. To find anything of value, one had to venture into the "Forbidden Zones"—areas of extreme environmental hazard where even high-level cultivators hesitated to tread.
A specific memory floated to the surface of Li Mo's mind.
*The Black Miasma Valley.*
Located about twenty miles north of the Clear Water Market, it was a deep, jagged scar in the earth, perpetually filled with a dense, purple fog. The miasma was highly toxic. It wasn't just poisonous to the mortal body; it was corrosive to spiritual energy. A Level One Qi Condensation cultivator who stepped into the fog would have their meridians rot and their lungs melt within five minutes. Even a Level Five cultivator couldn't last more than an hour without consuming expensive, high-grade Antidote Pills.
Because of this natural barrier, the valley floor was virtually untouched. It was a haven for Yin-attribute spirit plants. Specifically, it was the only known local source of the **Bone-Mending Gloom Stalk**, a key ingredient for mid-level healing pills. A single, mature stalk sold to the right pharmacy in the inner market would net him at least five low-grade spirit stones.
"The Miasma..." Li Mo whispered to the empty room.
He sat up, crossing his legs in a lotus position. He focused on his Golden Finger, feeling for that innate, instinctual connection to the laws of causality that resided in his soul.
The miasma was a poison. It was a corrosive agent that degraded cellular and spiritual tissue. It was, by every definition of the universe, a *Negative Status*.
If he could transfer the continuous accumulation of poison to something else, he would be functionally immune. He could walk the Black Miasma Valley as freely as a man walking through a public park. He wouldn't have to fight beasts; he just had to stroll in, pick up the money, and stroll out.
It was perfect. It required no combat, no martial arts, and no starting capital. It only required the willingness to subject himself to a horrifying poison and the mental fortitude to continuously cast it away.
"Alright," Li Mo said, his voice firming up. "That's the plan. Tomorrow at first light."
He didn't sleep. The modern Li Mo was too stressed about his impending doom, and the cultivator Li Mo's body was sufficiently rested from his earlier transfer of muscle fatigue to the spirit-weeds. Instead, he spent the night meditating using the 'Clear Water Breathing Technique'.
It was a garbage method, barely better than just breathing deeply. It drew in the ambient, polluted Qi of the slums at an agonizingly slow pace. But Li Mo wasn't trying to break through. He was just familiarizing himself with his own body. He needed to be intimately aware of his meridians and his internal state so he could instantly recognize when the miasma began to take effect.
As dawn broke, casting a gray, miserable light through the cracks in the walls, Li Mo prepared. He dressed in his darkest, most tattered set of hemp clothes. He took his rusty iron hoe—it could double as a walking stick and a crude digging tool. He tied a strip of dirty cloth around his lower face, a pathetic, mundane attempt to filter the air that would at least make him look like a standard, desperate scavenger.
He slipped out of the shack and into the waking market.
He moved like a ghost, keeping to the shadows of the eaves, avoiding eye contact with the few early risers who were setting up their stalls. He took the northern exit out of the slum, passing the crude wooden palisade that marked the boundary between the "safe" zone and the true wilderness.
The journey to the Black Miasma Valley took three hours of tense, exhaustive hiking through dense, jagged scrubland. Li Mo was not an outdoorsman. His idea of hiking back on Earth was a paved trail in a national park. Here, every rustling bush could contain a blood-sucking tick the size of a dinner plate, and every fallen log could hide a venomous serpent capable of melting his boots.
He walked slowly, testing every step. If he heard a noise, he froze. If he saw a strange-colored plant, he gave it a wide berth. He was a paragon of cowardice, and it kept him alive. Twice, he spotted the remains of other cultivators—bleached bones half-buried in the mud, their storage pouches long gone.
By mid-morning, the temperature dropped noticeably. The air grew still, heavy, and smelled faintly of rotten eggs and sweet, cloying decay.
Li Mo parted a thick tangle of thorny vines and stopped.
Before him, the land simply dropped away. A massive canyon, at least a mile wide and impossibly deep, cut across the landscape. And filling it to the brim, spilling over the edges like dry ice from a cauldron, was the Black Miasma.
It wasn't truly black; it was a bruised, swirling purple, so dense it looked like liquid. The vegetation at the rim of the canyon was dead, twisted into agonizing, skeletal shapes, petrified by the toxic fumes. There were no birds in the sky above it. There was no sound of insects. It was a zone of absolute, suffocating death.
Li Mo swallowed hard. His modern brain was screaming at him to turn around, to go back to the office, to file a report on workplace safety hazards.
"Two spirit stones," he reminded himself aloud. "Or Steward Wang breaks my legs and sells me to Blood Refiners."
He gripped his rusty hoe tightly and stepped past the tree line, beginning his descent down the treacherous, rocky path into the fog.
The moment the purple mist touched his skin, the assault began.
It didn't feel like breathing in smoke. It felt like walking into a swarm of microscopic, burning needles. His eyes immediately began to water and sting. The air he drew into his lungs felt heavy, coating his throat and trachea with a corrosive slime that tasted of ash and bile.
Within ten seconds, his skin began to itch violently. He looked at the back of his hand; the flesh was reddening, small blisters forming rapidly as the toxic Qi tried to force its way into his pores to rot his meridians.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in his chest. *It's fast. It's too fast!*
He immediately reached inward, grasping the horrific sensations with his mind.
**[Negative Status: Acute Miasma Poisoning (Tier 2), Cellular Necrosis, Respiratory Corrosion detected. Awaiting Target.]**
*A target! I need a living target!*
Li Mo swept his gaze around. He was surrounded by dead rocks and petrified wood. *Shit. Where is the life? Nothing lives in here!*
The burning in his lungs intensified. He coughed, and a speck of blood splattered onto his dirty cloth mask. His meridians, completely exposed and fragile at Level One, began to scream in agony as the toxic Qi breached his skin.
He forced himself to calm down. *Focus. Look closer. Even in hell, something adapts.*
He stared at the petrified, dead tree root he was using for balance. It wasn't completely dead. Deep within the crevices of the gray, stone-like bark, he saw a patch of sickly, glowing green moss. It was a mutant variant, barely clinging to life, feeding off the trace spiritual energy of the decaying wood. It was primitive, it was barely alive, but it was organic.
*Transfer!* Li Mo aimed his intent at the patch of glowing moss.
*Whoosh.*
The relief was absolute. The burning in his lungs vanished, replaced by cool, clean air. The blistering on his skin receded instantly, leaving smooth, unblemished flesh. The heavy, sluggish feeling in his meridians evaporated, returning to a pristine state.
Li Mo watched the moss. The glowing green patch suddenly flared violently, turning a bruised purple, and then instantly liquefied into a drop of foul, black sludge that dripped off the root. The accumulated miasma had completely annihilated its cellular structure.
Li Mo took a deep breath of the purple fog. His body absorbed the toxins, the blistering began again, the lungs started to burn.
*Transfer.* He aimed at another patch of moss further down the path. The poison vanished. The moss melted.
"I can do this," Li Mo muttered, a wild, manic grin spreading beneath his mask. "It's a manual breathing exercise. Breathe in the poison, transfer it out. As long as I maintain the rhythm, as long as I find targets, I am invincible here."
He continued his descent. It became a bizarre, terrifying dance. He walked through a cloud of certain death, accumulating lethal doses of flesh-melting poison every thirty seconds, and systematically dumping that status onto the sparse, mutated flora of the valley. He transferred the necrosis to weird, fleshy fungi growing on the rocks. He dumped the respiratory failure onto a blind, colorless centipede he found crawling under a stone.
He was a walking, localized purification filter, violently sacrificing the valley's native, resilient life to maintain his own fragile human form.
After an hour of descent, he reached the valley floor.
It was an alien landscape. The ground was spongy, covered in a thick, gelatinous layer of purple rot. Strange, bioluminescent plants cast an eerie, sickly glow through the impenetrable fog. Large, bulbous pods pulsed slowly, exhaling concentrated bursts of miasma.
Li Mo kept his Golden Finger active, a constant, rhythmic pulse in his mind. *Accumulate. Target. Transfer. Accumulate. Target. Transfer.* He used the giant, fleshy miasma-pods as his primary dumping ground, accelerating their rot until they collapsed into puddles of goo.
He began his search, sweeping his hoe back and forth through the purple slime, looking for the distinctive skeletal structure of the Bone-Mending Gloom Stalk.
Time lost its meaning in the purple gloom. He walked for what felt like hours. He found a few lesser herbs—a clump of Stagnant Blood Moss, a withered Yin-Root—which he carefully dug up and placed into the pockets of his robe. They might be worth a handful of fragments each.
Then, he saw it.
Growing near the base of a jagged, black obelisk of stone was a plant that seemed to defy the surrounding decay. It was about a foot tall, perfectly straight, and colored a stark, bone-white. It had no leaves, only a series of segmented nodes that resembled a human spinal column. At the very top, a single, delicate flower bloomed, its petals as black as a starless night.
A mature, perfect Bone-Mending Gloom Stalk.
Li Mo's heart leaped into his throat. *Five spirit stones. Maybe six, if I find a generous buyer. That's rent. That's safety. That's a few basic Qi Gathering Pills that aren't laced with poison.*
He hurried forward, his boots squelching in the rot. He dropped to his knees, ignoring the acidic mud seeping into his trousers, and reached out with his hoe to begin carefully excavating the surrounding dirt. The root system was the most valuable part; damaging it would halve the price.
*Hiss.*
The sound was soft, barely audible over the sloshing of the mud, but it froze Li Mo's blood in his veins.
He didn't move his body. He only moved his eyes, slowly panning toward the sound.
Coiled around the base of the black obelisk, perfectly camouflaged against the dark stone, was a snake. It was thick as a man's thigh, its scales a mottled pattern of black and deep purple. Its head was triangular, the size of a shovel, and its eyes were twin pools of toxic, glowing green.
A Tier 1 Mid-Grade Spirit Beast: The Miasma-Scale Viper.
The original Li Mo's memories supplied the terrifying stats. It was incredibly fast. Its scales could deflect low-tier flying swords. And its venom didn't just kill the body; it actively dissolved spiritual energy, permanently crippling any cultivator lucky enough to survive the physical rot. To a Level One trash cultivator, this was a god-tier boss monster.
The viper uncoiled slowly, its massive head rising above the Bone-Mending Stalk. Its forked tongue flicked out, tasting the air, tasting Li Mo's terror. It viewed the herb as its property, its catalyst for evolution. And Li Mo was an intruder.
*Don't run,* Li Mo's logical brain screamed. *It's faster than you. If you turn your back, you're dead.*
*But if I stay, I'm also dead!* his panic replied.
He was paralyzed, caught between the instinct to flee and the certainty of death. He was just an office worker. He had never been in a fistfight, let alone a life-or-death struggle with a magical, giant, acid-spitting snake.
The viper decided for him.
With a speed that defied its massive size, the snake struck. It was a blur of black and purple.
Li Mo didn't even have time to raise his hoe.
The viper's jaws slammed into Li Mo's left shoulder. The impact was like being hit by a speeding car. Li Mo was thrown backward, splashing violently into the toxic mud.
The pain didn't register immediately. The sheer shock of the impact numbed his nervous system. But then, the fangs injected their payload.
It was a sensation of absolute, unadulterated hell. It felt as though someone had injected boiling battery acid directly into his veins. The venom was so potent that Li Mo could actually hear the sizzling sound of his flesh and muscle melting inside his shoulder. The corrupted, corrosive Qi tore through his Level One meridians like a hurricane through a paper house, instantly turning his entire left arm dead and black.
He tried to scream, but the venom paralyzed his diaphragm. His vision began to tunnel, the edges turning a dark, bloody red. His heart stuttered, struggling to pump the rapidly thickening, poisoned sludge that used to be his blood.
*I'm dying. It killed me in one hit.*
Through the fading gray of his vision, he saw the Miasma-Scale Viper slithering toward him, its jaws unhinging, preparing to swallow him whole. It moved leisurely, knowing its prey was already dead.
*No.* A spark of desperate, furious defiance ignited in Li Mo's soul. It wasn't the heroic defiance of a brave warrior; it was the cornered, rat-like desperation of a coward who refused to be eaten.
He isolated the sensation. The melting flesh. The shattered collarbone. The paralyzed lungs. The corrupted, dying meridians.
**[Negative Status: Catastrophic Tissue Liquefaction, Tier 3 Neurotoxin, Meridian Annihilation, Imminent Organ Failure detected. Awaiting Target.]**
Li Mo stared at the approaching, glowing green eyes of the massive snake.
*TAKE IT BACK!*
He mentally screamed the command, hurling the entirety of his dying state with the force of a psychic cannonball directly into the viper.
The shift was so violent it created an audible *crack* in the air.
Li Mo gasped, his lungs suddenly expanding with clean air (which was immediately replaced by the burning miasma of the valley, but he was used to that now). The agonizing, melting pain in his shoulder vanished. He looked over. The flesh was whole, the bone intact. His arm responded instantly. He was perfectly fine.
Ten feet away, the Miasma-Scale Viper stopped.
It let out a horrific, gurgling hiss that sounded like a tea kettle screaming.
The beast's massive, armored body began to violently thrash in the mud, whipping back and forth with enough force to shatter the surrounding petrified rocks. Its mottled scales, previously impenetrable, began to rapidly turn a sickly, necrotic black.
The viper was a creature born of poison. It was immune to the miasma. It was immune to its own venom.
But it was *not* immune to the physical reality of a shattered collarbone, instantly liquefied internal organs, and the catastrophic, terminal shock of a shattered meridian system being forcefully pasted over its own biology. Li Mo hadn't just transferred the venom; he had transferred the *effect* of the venom, the absolute physical destruction it had wrought on his fragile human body, scaled up and applied directly to the snake's anatomy.
The viper's thrashing grew weaker. Its massive head slammed into the mud. The left side of its body visibly caved in, the internal structure melting into a slurry under the effects of its own transposed destructive power.
With a final, pathetic twitch of its tail, the Tier 1 Mid-Grade beast lay still. Dead.
Li Mo lay in the mud, panting heavily, his heart hammering against his ribs. He didn't move for five full minutes, his eyes locked on the massive corpse, half-expecting it to rise from the dead.
When he finally gathered the courage to stand, his legs were shaking uncontrollably. He walked over to the dead snake and poked it with his hoe. It was soft, the flesh beneath the scales utterly ruined by the internal necrosis.
"Holy shit," Li Mo breathed, his voice muffled by his dirty mask. "I really am a monster."
He had killed a beast that would have required a team of Level Five cultivators to hunt safely. And he had done it by getting bitten.
The shock faded, rapidly replaced by the pragmatic calculus of a man who needed rent money. The snake's body was ruined, the meat tainted by the extreme necrosis he had transferred to it. The scales were likely compromised too. But the fangs... and the venom sac... and the beast core. Those were internal, mostly localized in the head, which he hadn't targeted with the specific "liquefied shoulder" status.
He drew the cheap, rusted iron knife he kept at his belt. It took him twenty minutes of grueling, nauseating work to pry the massive fangs loose and excavate the skull. He found the beast core—a glowing, purple gem the size of a walnut, thrumming with toxic Qi. He carefully wrapped it in a large, fleshy leaf he found nearby.
Then, he went to the Bone-Mending Gloom Stalk. With hands still trembling with residual adrenaline, he carefully dug around the root system, extracting the pristine white plant. He wrapped it in a piece of clean cloth he had brought specifically for this purpose and placed it securely in his inner robe pocket.
He didn't push his luck. He had the stalk, he had a beast core, and he had a terrifying realization of how potent his Golden Finger truly was in combat. It was time to leave.
The journey out of the valley was significantly faster, driven by the lingering terror of the place. He maintained his rhythm of breathing in the poison and transferring it to the rocks and dead trees, emerging from the purple fog two hours later, exhausted but completely unharmed.
He found a small, relatively clear stream on the edge of the safe zone. He stripped off his outer robe, which was caked in toxic, purple mud, and washed himself vigorously. He couldn't risk carrying the miasma back into the market.
He redressed, applying a liberal amount of normal, brown mud to his face and hair. He tore the sleeves of his robe, making himself look even more ragged and pathetic than usual. He hunched his shoulders, practicing his limp.
He was no longer the apex predator who had melted a giant snake from the inside out. He was just Li Mo, a lucky, miserable scavenger.
The Clear Water Market was bustling when he returned in the late afternoon. The main thoroughfare was crowded with cultivators haggling, arguing, and displaying their wares on rough wooden mats.
Li Mo bypassed the street vendors. They were sharks who would rip him off and likely follow him home to rob him later. He needed a legitimate business. He navigated through the muddy streets, heading toward the inner circle of the market, where the ground was paved with actual stone and the buildings were made of polished spirit-wood rather than rotting planks.
He stopped in front of a three-story building adorned with red lanterns and a grand, gold-leaf sign: **The Thousand Treasures Pavilion**.
It was a neutral merchant faction, boasting branches across the entire Azure Cloud Continent. They had a reputation for fair dealing and, more importantly, customer confidentiality. They didn't care if you were a righteous sect disciple or a demonic cultivator covered in blood, as long as the goods were real and the spirit stones spent.
Li Mo took a deep breath, perfecting his posture of subservient desperation, and walked through the grand double doors.
The interior was a stark contrast to the slums outside. The air smelled of sandalwood and refined incense. Glowing pearls embedded in the ceiling cast a warm, clean light over glass display cases containing shimmering weapons, neatly rows of jade pill bottles, and ancient-looking scrolls.
A clerk in a neat, gray uniform approached him. The clerk's eyes briefly flicked over Li Mo's muddy, tattered appearance, but his expression remained a mask of professional, polite indifference. The Pavilion trained its staff well; even beggars sometimes found ancient relics.
"Greetings, valued customer," the clerk said, his voice smooth. "How may the Thousand Treasures Pavilion assist you today? Are you looking to purchase or to sell?"
"S-sell," Li Mo stammered, artificially lowering his voice and making it tremble. He kept his head bowed, looking at the clerk's immaculate silk shoes. "I... I got lucky. Very lucky. I need to see an appraiser."
The clerk nodded. "Please, follow me to one of our private evaluation rooms."
Li Mo was led down a quiet hallway and ushered into a small, windowless room furnished with a heavy wooden table and two chairs. A few moments later, an older man entered. He wore luxurious blue robes and had a meticulously groomed white beard. His eyes, however, were sharp, cold, and calculating. He radiated the aura of a Level Six Qi Condensation cultivator—a true expert in this backwater market.
"I am Appraiser Zhao," the old man said, taking a seat across the table. He didn't offer a greeting, merely steepling his fingers. "Show me this 'luck' of yours, boy. And make it quick. My time is expensive."
Li Mo nodded frantically. His hands trembled—a genuine reaction to the man's oppressive spiritual pressure—as he reached into his robes.
First, he placed the beast core on the table, still wrapped in the fleshy leaf.
Zhao raised an eyebrow, picking up the leaf and unwrapping it. His eyes narrowed as he felt the thrumming, toxic Qi radiating from the purple gem.
"A Miasma-Scale Viper core," Zhao muttered, his tone shifting from dismissive to mildly surprised. "Tier 1 Mid-Grade. And entirely intact. The toxicity is pure." He looked up at Li Mo, his sharp eyes piercing through the mud on Li Mo's face. "A Level One trash cultivator did not kill a beast that resides in the Black Miasma Valley. Where did you steal this, boy?"
"I d-didn't steal it!" Li Mo cried, shrinking back into his chair, acting terrified. "I swear! I was scavenging near the edge of the canyon. I saw a group of Golden Cauldron cultivators go down into the fog. A few hours later, only one came crawling out, screaming. He... he died on the edge. I just... I just looted his bag before the scavengers found him. Please, sir, I just need the money."
It was a perfect lie. It fit the brutal reality of the market, it explained how a weakling got high-level gear, and it deflected any suspicion of Li Mo possessing hidden strength.
Zhao stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment, probing Li Mo with his spiritual sense. Li Mo offered no resistance, letting the old man feel his pitiful, shallow Level One Qi pool.
Finally, Zhao snorted, the tension breaking. "Typical. A rat feeding off the corpses of the arrogant. Very well. The core is high quality. I can offer you eight low-grade spirit stones."
*Eight?* Li Mo's heart skipped a beat. That was a fortune. But he knew better than to accept the first offer. "T-ten?" he squeaked.
Zhao's eyes grew cold. "Do not push your luck, rat. Eight. Take it or leave it, and pray I don't report your little grave-robbing venture to the Golden Cauldron Faction."
"Eight is fine! Eight is perfect!" Li Mo babbled, bowing his head.
"Is that all?" Zhao asked, preparing to stand up.
"N-no. One more thing."
Li Mo reached into his inner pocket and withdrew the clean cloth bundle. He placed it on the table and gently unfolded it, revealing the pristine, bone-white stalk and its black flower.
Appraiser Zhao froze. His eyes widened slightly, the mask of professional indifference slipping for just a fraction of a second. He leaned forward, producing a small magnifying crystal from his sleeve, and examined the plant intensely.
"A Bone-Mending Gloom Stalk," Zhao breathed, his voice barely a whisper. "Mature. Roots entirely intact. The Yin energy is incredibly dense. It hasn't been bruised or mishandled in the slightest."
He looked at Li Mo, the calculation in his eyes now entirely different. He wasn't looking at a rat anymore; he was looking at a golden goose.
"You found this on the corpse too?" Zhao asked, his tone deceptively mild.
"Y-yes," Li Mo lied smoothly. "It was in a jade box in his pouch. I put it in the cloth so I wouldn't drop it."
Zhao knew it was a lie. The ambient Yin energy proved it had been harvested within the last few hours, far too recently to have been sitting in a dead man's pouch. But Zhao didn't care *how* Li Mo got it. He only cared about acquiring it for the Pavilion. A stalk of this quality could be sent to the sect headquarters and refined into a pill that could save the life of a Core Formation elder.
"This is a rare commodity," Zhao said, leaning back, re-establishing his negotiating posture. "However, the market for Yin-attribute healing herbs is volatile. I can offer you twelve low-grade spirit stones."
Li Mo's predecessor's memories screamed that twelve was a lowball offer for a perfectly harvested, mature stalk. A fair price in the inner market would be closer to fifteen, maybe twenty at an auction.
But Li Mo was a coward. He was a pragmatist. Haggling over three spirit stones with a Level Six expert who could casually snap his neck was the height of stupidity. He didn't need twenty stones to survive; he needed two. Everything else was pure profit. Taking a slight loss to ensure a smooth, quick transaction without drawing unnecessary attention was the cost of doing business safely.
"Twelve is... very generous, Senior Zhao," Li Mo said, bowing deeply. "I accept."
Zhao looked momentarily surprised by the lack of pushback, but quickly hid it behind a satisfied smirk. He waved his hand, and a small pile of glowing, crystalline stones appeared on the wooden table.
Li Mo counted them carefully. Twenty low-grade spirit stones. They were the size of large marbles, pulsing with a gentle, pure, white light. It was more wealth than the original Li Mo had ever seen in his entire life.
He swept the stones into his crude hemp pouch, securing it tightly to his belt.
"Pleasure doing business with you, boy," Zhao said dismissively. "If you ever... stumble across any more corpses... the Pavilion's doors are always open."
"Thank you, Senior," Li Mo mumbled, bowing his way out of the room.
He left the Thousand Treasures Pavilion and immediately plunged back into the crowded, muddy streets. He didn't head straight home. He spent an hour walking aimlessly, doubling back through alleys, ducking into taverns, and using the chaotic flow of the crowd to ensure he wasn't being followed. Paranoia was his best friend.
Only when the sky turned completely pitch black, and the cold bite of the night set in, did he finally return to his shack.
He barred the door. He sat on his bed. He pulled the pouch from his belt and dumped the twenty spirit stones onto his lap. In the absolute darkness of the shack, they glowed like tiny, captured stars, illuminating Li Mo's dirt-streaked face.
He picked one up. It felt warm to the touch, thrumming with pure, usable energy.
He needed two for Steward Wang. That left him with eighteen.
Eighteen stones. With eighteen stones, he could buy enough pure, unadulterated Qi Gathering Pills to push his cultivation to Level Two safely. He could buy a basic array flag to secure his shack. He could buy a decent weapon. He could buy *food*. Real, hot food, not just staving off starvation with his Golden Finger.
He had survived his first real test. He had weaponized his cowardice, turned a horrific poison into an environmental shield, and used a massive, deadly beast as a trash can for his own lethal injuries.
Li Mo lay back on his straw bed, the spirit stones clinking softly in his hand.
"I am going to live a very, very long time," he whispered into the dark, a genuine smile finally gracing his face. "As long as I never, ever fight fair."