**Chapter 2: The Ledger of Causality and the Human Filter**
The Green Bamboo Market's outer ring was usually a cacophony of desperate haggling, shouted obscenities, and the clatter of cheap wares, but as Li Wei—now fully committing to his identity as Lu Chen—stepped out of his shack, a heavy, suffocating silence had fallen over the muddy street.
A crowd had formed a wide, terrified circle around the spot where Wang Ba had collapsed. No one dared to step within ten feet of the corpse. The hulking enforcer of the Black Tiger Gang lay twisted in the frozen mud, his skin a horrifying shade of necrotic black and frostbitten blue. His eyes, bulging from their sunken sockets, were completely glazed over with a thick layer of ice. He looked less like a man who had died of a sudden illness and more like a mortal who had stumbled into a frigid hell-realm and been violently rejected by it.
Lu Chen hunched his shoulders, instinctively adopting the meek, defensive posture that the original owner of this body had perfected over years of abuse. He shuffled toward the edge of the crowd, making sure to keep his head down, letting his lank, unwashed hair obscure his face. He didn't want anyone to remember him being there, but he also needed to observe the aftermath. He needed to know if his "Absolute Transfer" left any spiritual residue that the local authorities could trace.
"Merciful heavens..." an old woman beside him muttered, her voice trembling as she clutched a string of cheap wooden prayer beads. "Did you see it? One moment he was beating little Sun, and the next... it was like a demon sucked the life right out of him."
"It's a curse," a younger cultivator hissed, his eyes darting around the rooftops as if expecting an invisible assassin to descend. "I told you, Wang Ba was too greedy. He definitely offended a passing Foundation Establishment senior. Only a high-level senior could inflict such a terrifying Yin-attribute backlash without even showing their face."
"Quiet, fool!" an older man snapped, slapping the young cultivator on the back of the head. "Do you want the Black Tiger Gang to hear you? When Boss Hei finds out his top enforcer was murdered in the streets, there will be a bloodbath. They'll tear this slum apart looking for clues."
Lu Chen's heart gave a slight, nervous flutter, but a cold logic quickly suppressed his panic. *They can look all they want,* he thought, his modern accountant's mind analyzing the situation like a balance sheet. *There is no physical evidence. There is no spiritual tether. The panel stated the transfer of causality is absolute and cannot be traced by standard means. To the world, Wang Ba simply experienced a spontaneous, catastrophic physical collapse combined with a lethal Yin poison out of nowhere. It is a completely unsolved mystery.*
Satisfied that no one was looking at him with suspicion, Lu Chen quietly backed away from the crowd. His stomach gave another violent, hollow rumble, reminding him of his immediate priority. He was healthy now, the long-term malnutrition erased from his system and deposited into Wang Ba's corpse, but his body still required immediate fuel to maintain this new equilibrium.
He navigated the twisting, sewage-filled alleys of the outer market, his boots squelching in the mud, until he reached a familiar stall near the boundary of the inner market. The inner market was where the real cultivators lived—those with sect affiliations, decent spiritual roots, and actual spirit stones to spend. It was protected by a faint, shimmering spiritual array that kept the stench and the desperation of the outer slums at bay.
The stall was run by Uncle Sun, an elderly mortal with a missing left arm who had somehow survived in this brutal world by selling the cheapest, greasiest food available.
"Uncle Sun," Lu Chen called out softly, keeping his voice carefully pitched to a submissive rasp.
The old man looked up from a steaming massive iron wok, his face crinkling into a weary smile. "Ah, Little Lu. Survived another week, did you? I heard the Black Tiger boys were on the prowl yesterday. You managed to keep your rice?"
"Barely, Uncle," Lu Chen lied smoothly, his face a mask of practiced misery. "Can I... can I get two meat buns? The cheapest ones."
He reached into his rough spun tunic and pulled out two of his three dull, cracked spirit fragments. In the grand scheme of the cultivation world, these were literal garbage—the leftover, exhausted husks of low-grade spirit stones that barely contained enough Qi to light a spark. But here in the slums, they were the currency of the desperate.
Uncle Sun took the fragments, tossing them into a worn wooden box. "Two buns. Coming right up." He used heavy wooden tongs to fish out two massive, fist-sized buns from a bamboo steamer. They were made from coarse brown flour and filled with the minced meat of a Horned Boar—a rankless, aggressive beast common in the nearby mortal forests.
Lu Chen took the buns, wrapping them in a piece of broad oil-leaf. The heat radiating from them felt like a tiny miracle against his palms. He didn't eat them right away. Instead, he thanked Uncle Sun, bowed his head, and scurried back to his dilapidated shack as quickly as his legs could carry him without looking suspicious.
Once he was back inside, the rotting wooden door barred shut behind him, Lu Chen practically collapsed onto the three-legged stool. He unwrapped the oil-leaf and bit into the first bun.
It was, objectively, terrible. The dough was tough and tasted faintly of dirt, and the boar meat was incredibly gamey, full of gristle and cheap, overpowering spices meant to mask the meat's impending rot.
To Lu Chen, it was a Michelin-star feast.
He groaned aloud, tears genuinely pricking his eyes as he chewed. His modern palate might have revolted, but his body, which had been starved for sixteen years, sang with desperate joy. He ate both buns in a matter of minutes, licking the grease from his dirty fingers. The warm, heavy food hit his stomach, radiating a slow, comforting heat that chased away the lingering psychological chill of the Frost-Tail Centipede venom.
"Okay," Lu Chen whispered to the empty room, taking a deep breath to center himself. "I'm alive. I'm fed. Now, I need to figure out how to actually survive in this nightmare."
He closed his eyes and focused his mind inward.
Cultivation. It was the alpha and omega of this world. Without it, you were livestock. With it, you could live for centuries, fly across the heavens, and crush mountains. Lu Chen was currently at the absolute bottom of the ladder: Qi Condensation Level 1.
He sifted through the original Lu Chen's memories, analyzing the *Aura Drawing Scripture*. It was a notoriously terrible, incomplete manual distributed basically for free to loose cultivators. It was the cultivation equivalent of trying to dig a well with a plastic spoon.
Following the manual's instructions, Lu Chen crossed his legs on the hard wooden bed, resting his hands on his knees in a rudimentary meditation posture. He slowed his breathing, trying to sense the ambient spiritual energy—the Qi—in the air around him.
Because the Green Bamboo Market was situated on a very weak, fractured spirit vein, the ambient Qi was incredibly thin and murky. After ten minutes of total concentration, Lu Chen finally felt it: a faint, tingling sensation against his skin, like tiny, warm dust motes.
He guided those motes into his body through his pores. Instantly, a sharp, stinging pain flared in his meridians—the invisible, spiritual blood vessels that carried Qi through the body.
This was the curse of the "Four-Element Spiritual Root."
In this world, spiritual roots determined your talent. A single-element root (Heavenly Root) absorbed pure Qi effortlessly. A dual-element root was considered a genius. Lu Chen had a mixed root of Metal, Wood, Water, and Earth. It meant that when he absorbed the neutral ambient Qi, his body couldn't properly filter it. The Qi was fragmented, clashing within his meridians, grinding against the delicate spiritual pathways like sandpaper.
He gritted his teeth, his brow slick with sweat, and forced the murky, abrasive Qi down into his Dantian—the spiritual center located just below his navel.
By the time he managed to complete a single circulation cycle, an hour had passed. He opened his eyes, gasping for breath. He felt utterly exhausted.
Worse, he could feel a heavy, dull ache settling deep into his chest and limbs.
He summoned the blue panel in his mind.
### **Causality Shift Panel**
* **Host:** Lu Chen (Li Wei)
* **Cultivation:** Qi Condensation Level 1
* **Status:** * *Erysipelas Buildup (Minor)* - Impurities from unrefined Qi obstructing meridians.
* *Meridian Strain (Minor)* - Micro-tears in spiritual pathways due to forced circulation.
* **Marked Targets:** 1 / 3
* *Target 1:* Wang Ba (Status: Deceased. Cooldown: 21 hours remaining.)
Lu Chen stared at the glowing blue text, his accountant's brain whirring to life.
*Erysipelas Buildup.* *Meridian Strain.*
In the cultivation novels he used to read on Earth, these were the ultimate banes of low-level cultivators. Because poor cultivators had bad techniques and bad roots, they absorbed a massive amount of impurities (Erysipelas) along with the Qi. Over time, these impurities clogged the meridians, creating an impenetrable bottleneck that prevented them from advancing. The meridian strain caused by forcing Qi through these blockages eventually led to permanent crippling or Qi Deviation—a state where the cultivator goes violently insane and explodes.
To clear these negative statuses, rich cultivators bought expensive Cleansing Pills and soaked in medicinal baths. Lu Chen couldn't even afford a decent steamed bun, let alone an alchemy pill. At his current rate, it would take him ten years of painful, agonizing meditation just to reach Qi Condensation Level 2, and the accumulated impurities would ensure he never reached Level 3.
*Unless...*
Lu Chen looked at his panel. The words "**transfer ANY negative status, condition, injury, curse, karmic backlash, or bottleneck**" burned brightly in his mind.
"Can I...?" he whispered, his heart beginning to hammer with a dangerous, intoxicating realization.
He didn't need cleansing pills. He didn't need a better spiritual root. He didn't even need a good cultivation technique.
If he could transfer the "Erysipelas" and the "Meridian Strain" to someone else... he could cultivate with absolute, reckless abandon. He could absorb the dirtiest, most chaotic Qi in the environment, forcefully ram it through his meridians to widen them, and simply dump the resulting damage and garbage onto a marked target.
He would become a human filter. He would keep the pure, refined Qi for his cultivation base, and he would excrete the toxic byproducts into the soul of his enemies.
A slow, wide smile spread across Lu Chen's face in the dark shack. It was not a heroic smile. It was the smile of an auditor who had just found a massive, legal loophole in the tax code that would make him a billionaire overnight.
"I need a new target," he murmured, his eyes glinting with a cold, predatory light. "Someone who deserves it. Someone whose suffering will directly benefit my survival."
He couldn't use his panel on random innocents. His modern morality, while heavily battered by the reality of this world, still drew a hard line at murdering bystanders. He needed an enemy. He needed a scumbag.
Fortunately, in the Azure Cloud Continent, scumbags were the most abundant natural resource.
The next morning, long before the sun had even considered cresting the jagged peaks of the distant Hundred Thousand Demonic Mountains, Lu Chen was already awake and walking.
He wore a faded, wide-brimmed bamboo hat and carried a rusted sickle tied to his waist. He joined a silent, shuffling procession of hundreds of other ragged loose cultivators heading toward the eastern edge of the market.
This was the domain of the Wang Clan.
The Wang Clan was a minor, but deeply entrenched, cultivation family that controlled the primary water source and the most fertile land around the Green Bamboo Market. They boasted a clan head at the late stage of Foundation Establishment—a veritable god to the mortals and low-level cultivators of the slums.
The Wang Clan's primary source of wealth was the vast fields of Azure Spirit Rice. This rice contained trace amounts of mild, easily absorbable spiritual energy. It was a staple food for lower-tier disciples of major sects, making it incredibly lucrative.
However, Azure Spirit Rice was notoriously difficult to grow. It required constant infusion of minor water-attribute spells, physical weeding of deeply rooted demonic weeds, and protection from the pests that swarmed out of the nearby swamps.
The Wang Clan, naturally, did not do this backbreaking labor themselves. They hired loose cultivators like Lu Chen, paying them a pittance—a handful of spirit rice a month and exactly one low-grade spirit stone a year—while working them to the bone.
Lu Chen arrived at the fields just as the heavy, oppressive spiritual array that protected the crops was deactivated for the day. The smell of damp earth, ozone, and stagnant water hit him like a physical blow.
The fields stretched out for miles, divided into square paddies flooded with ankle-deep water. The Azure Spirit Rice stalks were already waist-high, glowing with a faint, bioluminescent blue light in the pre-dawn gloom.
"Move it, you miserable maggots! The sun is rising, which means the Spirit-Blood Leeches are active! Get into the paddies and start clearing the rot-weed!"
A voice, thick with arrogance and cruelty, boomed across the staging area, amplified by a basic Qi technique.
Lu Chen shrank back into the crowd, his eyes darting toward the source of the voice.
Standing on an elevated wooden platform overlooking the fields was Overseer Zhao.
Zhao was a member of the Wang Clan's outer perimeter guard, a man who had stalled at Qi Condensation Level 4 for the last twenty years. Embittered by his lack of talent and his inability to enter the inner clan, Zhao took out his massive inferiority complex on the tenant farmers he managed.
He was a lean, rat-faced man dressed in the crisp, dark blue robes of the Wang Clan, carrying a long whip made from the braided tendons of a Wind-Wolf. He stood next to his mount, a massive, foul-smelling Earth Hound that growled menacingly at the terrified farmers.
Overseer Zhao was notorious. He routinely deducted pay for "infractions" that he invented on the spot. He beat workers who collapsed from exhaustion. Last month, a female cultivator had begged him for a day off because her meridians were in agony; Zhao had whipped her so severely she had been bedridden for weeks, losing her position entirely.
To the original Lu Chen, Overseer Zhao was a terrifying demon to be avoided at all costs.
To the transmigrated Li Wei, Overseer Zhao looked like a walking, talking trash can.
*Perfect,* Lu Chen thought, his heart maintaining a steady, icy calm. *You're exactly what I need.*
"You there! The scrawny one!"
A sharp crack of the whip echoed through the air, striking the mud just inches from Lu Chen's boots. Lu Chen flinched violently, instinctively dropping to his knees. It wasn't entirely acting; the sheer physical force of a Level 4 cultivator's whip strike was genuinely intimidating.
Overseer Zhao leaped down from the platform, his boots miraculously staying clean as a minor wind spell repelled the mud. He marched over to Lu Chen, looking down at him with an expression of profound disgust.
"Lu Chen, isn't it? The little orphan rat," Zhao sneered, prodding Lu Chen's shoulder with the butt of his whip. "I heard you took a sick day yesterday. Said you got bit by a bug. You look perfectly fine to me today."
"I... I was lucky, Overseer Zhao," Lu Chen stammered, keeping his eyes glued to the man's boots. "The venom passed. I am ready to work double today to make up for it."
Zhao laughed, a harsh, grating sound. "You'll work triple. Section 4 is completely overrun with Iron-Root Weeds. You will clear the entire acre by sundown. If you don't, I'm docking your entire month's rice ration. Now get in the mud, trash."
Zhao punctuated his sentence with a swift, brutal kick to Lu Chen's ribs.
The physical impact threw Lu Chen sideways into the flooded paddy. Mud and foul-smelling water splashed over his face. A sharp, hot pain blossomed in his side, though his cultivator physique prevented his ribs from cracking.
Laughter erupted from a few of the sycophantic guards standing near the platform. The other farmers simply kept their heads down, terrified of drawing Zhao's attention.
Lu Chen slowly pushed himself up from the mud. The cold water soaked through his thin robes. He wiped the dirt from his eyes, coughing weakly.
"Thank you, Overseer," Lu Chen wheezed, bowing deeply. "I will clear Section 4."
As he bowed, his eyes, hidden beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat and his dripping hair, locked dead onto Overseer Zhao's rat-like face.
The rage was there, a hot, burning coal in his chest. The original host's memories of constant humiliation mixed with Li Wei's modern outrage at the sheer, casual brutality of it all. But Lu Chen didn't let a fraction of that anger show on his face. He channeled it, focusing it entirely into a single, mental command.
"System," he whispered internally. "Mark target: Overseer Zhao."
**[Target Locked. Entity identified as Human Cultivator (Qi Condensation Lv 4).]**
**[Does the Host wish to use 1 of 3 Marking Slots to mark this target? Y/N]**
*Yes.*
**[Target Marked. Target 2: Overseer Zhao.]**
**[Connection established. Absolute causality link open.]**
A red reticle blinked in Lu Chen's vision, superimposed over Zhao, before fading away.
Lu Chen turned and waded deep into the flooded paddy of Section 4, his back to the overseer. He waded until he was waist-deep in the blue-glowing rice stalks, far enough away that he was just another anonymous gray shape in a sea of laborers.
He found a dense patch of Iron-Root Weeds—a parasitic plant that aggressively drained the soil of spiritual energy. Pulling them required gripping the thorny stalk and funneling a surge of Qi into the hands to physically rip the deeply entrenched, metallic roots from the mud. It was exhausting work that drained a Level 1 cultivator completely within a few hours.
Lu Chen gripped the first weed. But instead of carefully managing his meager Qi reserves like he usually did, he did the exact opposite.
He opened all the pores on his body. He fully engaged the *Aura Drawing Scripture*, but he intentionally ignored the safety guidelines. He didn't filter the Qi. He didn't try to soothe it.
He sucked in the ambient spiritual energy of the rice paddy—energy that was thick, chaotic, and heavily laced with the earthy, stagnant impurities of the mud and the aggressive, wild essence of the demonic weeds.
It was like inhaling a cloud of microscopic glass shards.
Lu Chen gasped, his eyes going wide beneath his hat. The raw, unfiltered Qi slammed into his meridians like a physical blow. The pain was immediate and excruciating. His pathways, accustomed to tiny, thread-like streams of energy, were suddenly flooded with a raging river of abrasive sludge.
His panel immediately began flashing urgent warnings.
**[Status Update: Erysipelas Buildup (Moderate - Increasing rapidly)]**
**[Status Update: Meridian Strain (Severe - Risk of rupture detected)]**
**[Status Update: Spiritual Exhaustion (Moderate)]**
His body began to tremble violently. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth as the microscopic tears in his meridians multiplied. The impurities from the muddy Qi began to immediately clog his Dantian, forming a thick, gray sludge that threatened to solidify and permanently cripple his cultivation.
He was literally destroying his own foundation. If he kept this up for another ten minutes, he would die of Qi Deviation.
But Lu Chen didn't stop. He gritted his teeth, a manic, desperate smile stretching across his mud-streaked face.
He grabbed the Iron-Root Weed, channeled the violent, chaotic Qi into his hands, and ripped. The weed tore out of the mud with explosive force, splattering water everywhere. He grabbed the next one, yanking it out, then the next. He was working at an impossible speed, fueled by the sheer, destructive volume of energy he was indiscriminately absorbing.
Every second, his internal injuries worsened. Every second, the toxic sludge in his Dantian thickened. The pain was blinding, a white-hot agony radiating from his core.
*More,* he thought, his vision blurring. *Take in more. Make the garbage as thick as possible.*
He worked like a madman for five straight minutes, clearing a ten-foot radius of weeds in a fraction of the time it normally took. Finally, when he felt a distinct, terrifying tearing sensation in his primary chest meridian, he knew he had pushed it to the absolute brink.
He brought up the panel.
### **Causality Shift Panel**
* **Host:** Lu Chen
* **Status:** * *Erysipelas Buildup (Critical - Bottleneck imminent)*
* *Meridian Strain (Critical - Micro-hemorrhaging)*
* *Spiritual Exhaustion (Severe)*
* *Blunt Force Trauma (Rib contusion)*
"Transfer," Lu Chen commanded in his mind, his mental voice a feral growl. "Empty the trash."
**[Executing Absolute Transfer to Target 2: Overseer Zhao...]**
The relief was instantaneous, violent, and utterly euphoric.
One second, Lu Chen was drowning in an ocean of internal agony, his meridians screaming, his Dantian clogged with heavy, toxic sludge. The next second, it was gone. All of it.
The abrasive, murky Qi he had just absorbed remained, but every single impurity, every speck of Erysipelas, and the physical damage of the meridian strain were violently excised from his body and fired across the invisible causality link.
What remained in Lu Chen's Dantian was pure, unadulterated spiritual energy. The chaotic sludge had been forcefully filtered. Because his meridians had been stretched to their absolute limit and then instantly healed, they were now fractionally wider and more resilient than they had been a moment ago.
He stood in the mud, breathing deeply. The heavy ache in his ribs from Zhao's kick was also gone. He felt pristine. He felt incredibly, terrifyingly powerful.
"Again," Lu Chen whispered.
He dove back into the weeds. He repeated the cycle. He inhaled the toxic, muddy Qi, forcefully circulated it to accumulate max-level impurities and meridian damage, and then, right before he collapsed, he hit the transfer button.
*Transfer.* The sludge vanished. The pure Qi remained, stacking up in his Dantian.
*Transfer.* His meridians stretched wider.
*Transfer.* He was clearing the acre of weeds at an absurd, terrifying pace, leaving a trail of uprooted, withered demonic plants in his wake. To anyone watching closely, it would have looked like a miracle. But the other farmers were too busy trying to survive their own quotas, their heads bowed low.
Over on the wooden platform, Overseer Zhao was having a very confusing morning.
He had just poured himself a cup of warm spirit tea from a jade flask. He brought the cup to his lips, feeling quite pleased with himself. Kicking that pathetic rat Lu Chen had set a good tone for the day. Fear was the only language these peasants understood.
Suddenly, as he swallowed the tea, a sharp, inexplicable ache bloomed in his chest.
Zhao frowned, rubbing his sternum. *Strange,* he thought. *Indigestion?*
A moment later, a wave of profound, bone-deep exhaustion hit him so hard his knees buckled. He grabbed the wooden railing of the platform to steady himself, gasping. His spiritual energy, which he usually kept perfectly circulated, suddenly felt sluggish and heavy.
"Overseer? Are you unwell?" one of the guards asked, stepping forward with concern.
"I'm fine," Zhao snapped, waving the man away. "Just... a momentary lapse."
He tried to cycle his Qi to banish the fatigue, a standard practice for a Level 4 cultivator.
As he pushed the Qi through his meridians, a jolt of sheer, blinding agony ripped through his arms and chest. It felt exactly as if someone had taken a handful of rusted razor blades and dragged them through his spiritual pathways.
Zhao let out a startled, undignified yelp, dropping his teacup. It shattered on the wooden floorboards.
"Sir?!"
"Stay back!" Zhao roared, panic creeping into his voice. He dropped into a lotus position right there on the platform, ignoring the dirt, and frantically turned his inner vision toward his Dantian.
What he saw terrified him down to his soul.
His Dantian, which he had spent twenty years slowly purifying, was suddenly coated in a thick, dark layer of Erysipelas. It was the kind of impurity buildup you would expect from a beggar who ate raw, unrefined spirit stones for a decade. Furthermore, his primary meridians were laced with hundreds of micro-tears, actively leaking his precious, hard-earned Qi.
*How?!* Zhao's mind screamed. *This is impossible! I haven't cultivated since last night, and I only use refined clan resources! Where did this toxic sludge come from?!*
Before he could even begin to formulate a theory, a sudden, sharp pain struck his ribs, exactly mirroring the force of a heavy kick. He wheezed, clutching his side.
And then, another wave of exhaustion hit him. Another wave of meridian tearing. Another massive dump of toxic Erysipelas materialized out of thin air, crashing into his Dantian like a mudslide.
"Ahhhh!" Zhao screamed, a horrifying, gurgling sound. He vomited a mouthful of dark, foul-smelling black blood onto the platform. His aura, usually a steady, oppressive Level 4 pressure, began to wildly fluctuate, plunging toward Level 3.
The guards rushed forward, panicking, trying to stabilize him, but they didn't know what to do. There was no enemy attacking him. There was no visible poison. Their overseer was simply collapsing from the inside out.
Down in the muddy paddy of Section 4, a mile away, Lu Chen didn't look up. He didn't smile. He just kept working, his hands moving in a blur, his face obscured by the bamboo hat.
Inside his body, a profound transformation was occurring.
By using Overseer Zhao as a human garbage disposal, Lu Chen had accumulated an obscene amount of pure, filtered Qi in his Dantian in the span of thirty minutes. It was more Qi than the original Lu Chen had gathered in two entire years of bitter, painstaking cultivation.
The pool of spiritual energy in his center began to boil. It expanded, pushing against the invisible, spiritual walls of the Qi Condensation Level 1 boundary.
This was the bottleneck. It was the ceiling that separated the weak from the slightly less weak. Breaking through normally required deep meditation, perfect tranquility, and usually a minor breakthrough pill to provide a final burst of energy to shatter the barrier.
Lu Chen felt the pressure building. It was uncomfortable, a suffocating tightness in his core, like a balloon inflated to its absolute breaking point but refusing to pop.
His panel chimed softly.
**[Status Update: Cultivation Bottleneck detected. (Qi Condensation Level 1 -> Level 2)]**
**[Condition: Severe internal pressure. Breakthrough probability with current root talent: 12%. Risk of Qi backlash: 88%.]**
Lu Chen almost laughed out loud. Even with a massive surplus of pure Qi, his trash-tier Four-Element Root was still trying to hold him back, making the barrier impossibly thick and resistant.
"A bottleneck is a negative status," Lu Chen murmured, his hands covered in the mud and the crushed, bleeding sap of demonic weeds.
He didn't bother trying to push through the barrier. He didn't try to comprehend the profound mysteries of heaven and earth.
He simply highlighted the "Cultivation Bottleneck" status on his panel.
"Transfer."
**[Executing Absolute Transfer...]**
A mile away, on the platform, Overseer Zhao, who was currently convulsing and bleeding from his nose as his cultivation base teetered on the edge of permanent regression, suddenly felt an impossible, invisible mountain slam down upon his Dantian. It was a spiritual lock, thick, unyielding, and utterly foreign.
Zhao screamed as his Level 4 cultivation was forcefully, violently sealed by a Level 1 bottleneck that didn't belong to him.
Simultaneously, in the mud of Section 4, Lu Chen exhaled.
The barrier didn't shatter. It simply ceased to exist.
The boiling pool of pure Qi in his Dantian surged outward, flooding into the newly widened, completely healed meridians of his entire body. A wave of profound, intoxicating power washed over him. His hearing sharpened, picking up the frantic shouts of the guards on the platform a mile away as if they were whispering in his ear. His vision pierced through the morning gloom, the colors of the world suddenly vibrant and distinct. The physical fatigue of the manual labor vanished, replaced by the humming, vibrant strength of a true cultivator stepping further onto the path of immortality.
He had done it.
He was Qi Condensation Level 2.
Lu Chen stood perfectly still in the waist-high water, letting the sensation wash over him. He felt like he could punch through a brick wall. He felt like he could run for days without stopping.
*This is it,* he thought, awe and terror warring in his mind. *This is why they are so obsessed with cultivation. The power... it's addictive.*
He immediately clamped down on his aura. He used the basic breath-concealment technique taught in the *Aura Drawing Scripture* to forcefully suppress his energy signature. To the outside world, to anyone sweeping the fields with their spiritual sense, he was still the pathetic, sickly, Level 1 trash he had been yesterday.
He resumed pulling weeds, his movements returning to a slow, methodical, exhausted pace. He made sure to occasionally stumble in the mud, acting exactly as a starving, abused tenant farmer should.
He glanced briefly toward the distant platform. Overseer Zhao was currently being loaded onto a makeshift stretcher by his terrified guards, the man's robes soaked in his own black, impurity-laced blood. His aura was barely registering at Level 3, completely crippled by the massive influx of toxic Erysipelas and the foreign bottleneck.
Lu Chen felt a cold, hard knot form in his stomach. The absolute cruelty of his power was undeniable. He was a parasite. He was growing strong by forcefully cannibalizing the foundation, the health, and the sanity of others.
*I am a normal guy,* Li Wei told himself, the mantra repeating in his mind like a protective chant. *I just want to live quietly. Zhao was a monster. He beat a woman half to death over a sick day. He was going to starve me. This is simply the cost of doing business in the Azure Cloud Continent.*
He lowered his head, pulling another weed, letting the mud coat his hands.
He had found his path. He wouldn't fight for resources. He wouldn't compete in bloody sect tournaments. He would just find the most arrogant, cruel, and powerful scumbags in the world, smile submissively at them, mark them in the shadows, and use them as disposable filters on his quiet, invisible ascent to immortality.
The ledger of causality was open, and Lu Chen, the transmigrated accountant, intended to make sure the heavens owed him a very steep debt.