**Chapter 3: The Art of Invisibility and the Black Market's Toll**
The sun, a swollen, bloody orb, finally began its descent behind the jagged, shadow-draped peaks of the Hundred Thousand Demonic Mountains.
In Section 4 of the Wang Clan's Azure Spirit Rice fields, the shift was finally ending. The deep, melodious chime of a bronze spiritual bell echoed across the flooded paddies, signaling the exhausted tenant farmers that they could stop their backbreaking labor.
Lu Chen remained bent over, his hands buried deep in the freezing, foul-smelling mud, maintaining his facade. To his left and right, cultivators collapsed onto the dry embankments, groaning in absolute agony. Their robes were soaked, their fingers bled from the thorns of the Iron-Root Weeds, and their auras flickered weakly, like candles caught in a tempest. They had drained their meager Qi reserves to the absolute dregs just to meet Overseer Zhao's tyrannical quotas.
Lu Chen, however, felt immaculate.
Beneath his filthy, mud-caked exterior, his newly widened meridians thrummed with the vibrant, powerful energy of a Qi Condensation Level 2 cultivator. He wasn't tired. He wasn't in pain. In fact, he had spent the last three hours subtly moving massive boulders underwater and crushing thick demonic weeds with a single squeeze just to test his new physical limits.
But as the bell tolled, he forced his body to slump. He let out a ragged, convincing gasp, dragging his feet through the ankle-deep water as he joined the procession of battered laborers heading toward the payment pavilion.
The atmosphere around the pavilion was suffocatingly tense. The usual sneering guards were pale and agitated, their hands resting nervously on the hilts of their spiritual swords. Overseer Zhao had been carried away hours ago, vomiting black blood and screaming about invisible demons tearing at his foundation. The sudden, inexplicable crippling of a Level 4 cultivator had sent shockwaves through the local Wang Clan hierarchy.
Suddenly, the ambient spiritual energy in the air froze.
It was a physical sensation, like a sudden drop in barometric pressure right before a massive hurricane. The hairs on Lu Chen's arms stood up, and a primal, overwhelming instinct to drop to the ground and hide screamed in his modern mind.
"Silence."
The voice was not loud, but it resonated directly within the chests of every single person present.
From the sky, a figure slowly descended. He did not use a flying sword. He simply stepped down through the air as if walking an invisible staircase. It was an elderly man wearing pristine, flowing robes of azure silk, completely unbothered by the mud and the stench of the slums. His hair was stark white, tied in a meticulous topknot, and his eyes glowed with a terrifying, piercing silver light.
*Foundation Establishment Realm,* Lu Chen realized, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. *An Elder of the Wang Clan.*
The several hundred loose cultivators present immediately dropped to their knees in the mud, pressing their foreheads against the ground in abject, terrified submission. Lu Chen followed suit instantly, burying his face in the foul-smelling dirt, making sure to tremble violently.
"Overseer Zhao of the outer sect was struck down today by an unknown, vicious curse of the Yin attribute," the Elder announced, his voice echoing with absolute authority. "The corruption in his Dantian is severe. Such an insidious attack within our borders will not go unanswered."
Lu Chen held his breath. He didn't dare to look up.
*He's looking for the culprit,* Lu Chen's modern accountant brain calculated frantically. *He's looking for lingering spiritual signatures. A spell that crippled a Level 4 cultivator would leave a trace. It has to.*
"I will sweep this area. If any of you harbor demonic arts, or possess an aura tainted by this foul deed, I will execute you on the spot to feed the spirit fields," the Elder declared coldly.
A wave of oppressive, suffocating spiritual sense swept over the crowd. It was like a physical wave of water washing over Lu Chen's soul. He felt the Elder's perception strip him bare, examining his cultivation base, his meridians, and the very nature of his Qi.
Lu Chen focused every single ounce of his willpower on the pathetic *Aura Drawing Scripture*. He ruthlessly clamped down on his Level 2 Dantian, hiding the pure, vibrant Qi he had stolen beneath a carefully constructed veneer of the murky, fragmented energy natural to his trash-tier Four-Element Root. He made sure to highlight the lingering traces of the chaotic mud-Qi he had absorbed earlier.
The Elder's spiritual sense lingered on Lu Chen for a terrifying fraction of a second. Lu Chen could feel the ancient, powerful cultivator dissecting his aura.
*Please,* Li Wei prayed to whatever chaotic god governed this transmigration. *Let the panel's absolute causality be truly absolute.*
The presence moved on.
Lu Chen exhaled a breath he didn't know he was holding, the mud mixing with the cold sweat pouring down his face. The panel had not lied. The transfer was completely untraceable. To the Foundation Establishment Elder, Lu Chen was exactly what he appeared to be: a wretched, exhausted Level 1 piece of trash, completely incapable of harming a Level 4 overseer.
"Nothing," the Elder muttered, a hint of frustration in his echoing voice. "The attack came from outside. Perhaps a demonic cultivator passing through the mountains. Double the guard. Distribute the daily rations and dismiss these peasants."
With a flick of his sleeve, the Elder ascended back into the sky, vanishing toward the inner peaks of the Green Bamboo Market.
The collective sigh of relief from the hundreds of kneeling cultivators was a palpable sound. The guards, eager to be done with the cursed area, rapidly began tossing small, coarse linen bags into the mud.
Lu Chen scrambled forward, his movements jerky and panicked—a perfect imitation of a starving man—and snatched his bag. It contained exactly three pounds of low-grade Azure Spirit Rice. A month's wages for a day of agonizing labor.
He didn't complain. He tied the bag to his waist and joined the silent exodus back toward the outer slums, his mind racing with terrifying realizations.
Night had fully fallen by the time Lu Chen reached his dilapidated, freezing shack. He bolted the rotting wooden door, pulled the bamboo mat tightly over the window, and sat down on his three-legged stool in the pitch-black darkness.
He didn't light a candle; he couldn't afford one.
He untied the bag of rice, his hands trembling slightly in the dark. The encounter with the Wang Clan Elder had deeply rattled him. It had shattered any lingering illusions of safety his Level 2 breakthrough had given him.
*I am nothing,* Lu Chen thought, staring into the darkness. *Level 2 is an ant. Overseer Zhao was Level 4, and he was just an outer guard. That Elder could have killed me with a single thought, and no one would have blinked.*
More importantly, the Elder's scan had exposed a fatal flaw in Lu Chen's survival strategy.
He had successfully hidden his Level 2 cultivation using the *Aura Drawing Scripture*, but it had been incredibly close. The scripture's breath-concealment technique was notoriously garbage. If the Elder had been specifically looking for hidden cultivation bases rather than a specific Yin-attribute curse, Lu Chen would have been caught.
*A Level 1 trash with a Four-Element Root suddenly reaching Level 2 overnight after being near death?* Lu Chen analyzed the scenario, his modern logic running the probabilities. *They would capture me. They would interrogate me to find out what heavenly treasure or demonic art I found. They would tear my soul apart.*
He needed a true concealment art. A high-tier stealth technique that could hide his cultivation realm flawlessly. Furthermore, he realized with a sinking dread, he possessed absolutely zero offensive or defensive capabilities. If someone attacked him physically, without giving him the few seconds he needed to open his panel, mark them, and transfer a fatal wound, he would be cut down like wheat. He was a Level 2 cultivator whose only combat strategy was weaponized self-harm.
He needed spells. He needed a weapon.
And for all of that, he needed Spirit Stones.
Lu Chen summoned his panel in the darkness. The soft, ethereal blue light illuminated the squalor of his shack.
### **Causality Shift Panel**
* **Host:** Lu Chen
* **Cultivation:** Qi Condensation Level 2
* **Status:** Healthy
* **Marked Targets:** 2 / 3
* *Target 1:* Wang Ba (Status: Deceased. Cooldown: 10 hours remaining.)
* *Target 2:* Overseer Zhao (Status: Alive - Severely Crippled. Connection maintained.)
He stared at Zhao's name. He could unmark him, freeing up the slot, but keeping Zhao marked provided a crucial safety net. If Lu Chen absorbed any more deadly impurities or suffered a grievous injury, Zhao was his designated garbage bin. The man was already bedridden and dying; adding more pain to him was a moral line Lu Chen had crossed hours ago and firmly left behind.
"I need money," Lu Chen whispered to the glowing screen. "And I can't farm rice for a year to get one stone."
He closed the panel and began to sift through the original host's memories of the Green Bamboo Market.
The inner market was heavily regulated by the Wang Clan. Every stall was registered, every transaction taxed, and the items sold there were priced for wealthy sect disciples. A decent concealment manual would cost upwards of fifty low-grade spirit stones. Lu Chen had three cracked spirit fragments. It was laughable.
But there was another place.
On the far northern edge of the outer slums, bordering the deep, treacherous forests of the Hundred Thousand Demonic Mountains, lay a place the loose cultivators simply called "Ghost Alley."
It wasn't an official market. It was a sprawling, chaotic black market that convened only after midnight. It was where grave robbers sold stolen sect artifacts, where demonic cultivators fenced their ill-gotten gains, and where desperate scavengers tried to pawn off whatever they managed to drag out of the monster-infested wilderness. It was highly illegal, insanely dangerous, and entirely unregulated by the Wang Clan.
It was also cheap.
*I can buy a technique there,* Lu Chen thought. *But I still need capital to trade.*
His mind turned toward the wilderness. The Hundred Thousand Demonic Mountains were a death trap for low-level cultivators. The outer rim was infested with rankless beasts, and the inner depths held horrors that even Foundation Establishment Elders avoided.
But there was a specific region on the immediate outskirts, only an hour's walk from the market, known as the Rotting Bone Swamp.
The swamp was notoriously avoided because it produced a thick, suffocating green miasma. The miasma was highly toxic; breathing it in for more than a few minutes would cause a cultivator's blood to literally coagulate and rot, turning their veins black. Detoxification pills required to survive the swamp cost ten spirit stones each.
Because it was so dangerous, the swamp was rich in unharvested resources. Specifically, it was the only place where the *Ghost-Face Mushroom* grew. These mushrooms were a primary ingredient in a popular hallucinogenic spiritual wine consumed by bored inner-sect disciples. A single, mature Ghost-Face Mushroom could sell for a whole low-grade spirit stone in Ghost Alley.
For sixteen years, the original Lu Chen had stared at that swamp from afar, knowing that a fortune lay within, but knowing it was a guaranteed death sentence.
Li Wei, however, smiled a cold, calculating smile in the dark.
"Miasma is a poison," Lu Chen stated aloud, the logic perfectly sound. "Poison is a negative status."
He didn't wait for morning. Time was a luxury he didn't possess.
Lu Chen stripped off his Wang Clan tenant uniform, hiding it beneath the floorboards. He dug out a set of completely shredded, anonymous gray rags left behind by his deceased parents. He wrapped his face and head in torn strips of cloth, leaving only his eyes visible. He looked like a leper, a walking corpse. In Ghost Alley, looking pathetic and diseased was the best camouflage.
He tied the rusted farming sickle to his waist, picked up a small woven bamboo basket, and slipped out of his shack into the freezing night.
The journey to the Rotting Bone Swamp was silent and tense. Lu Chen used his Level 2 senses to avoid the sparse patrols of Wang Clan outer guards, moving like a ghost through the muddy, sewage-filled alleys until he finally breached the treeline of the outer wilderness.
The air immediately changed. The ambient Qi here was wild, aggressive, and deeply unsettling.
An hour later, the dense forest gave way to a sprawling, sunken depression. Even in the moonlight, Lu Chen could see the thick, rolling banks of sickly green fog clinging to the dark, stagnant water and rotting, ancient trees. The smell was horrendous—a cloying, sweet scent of decay that instantly made his eyes water.
This was the Rotting Bone Swamp.
A few feet from the boundary of the fog, several skeletal remains lay half-buried in the mud—the remnants of desperate cultivators who had tried to hold their breath and run in, only to succumb to the miasma's insidious, fast-acting rot.
Lu Chen stood at the edge, his heart beating a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He was an accountant. He dealt in numbers, not toxic death clouds. His survival instincts screamed at him to turn around and run back to his safe, miserable shack.
But he thought of the Wang Clan Elder's terrifying, dissecting gaze. He thought of Overseer Zhao's whip. He thought of his own impending death if he remained weak.
"Target 2: Overseer Zhao," Lu Chen commanded mentally, priming his panel.
He took a deep breath, clenched his fists, and stepped directly into the thick, green fog.
The effect was instantaneous and horrifying.
Lu Chen didn't even need to breathe the fog in; the miasma was absorbed directly through his skin and into his pores. A violent, burning agony erupted across his entire body. It felt as if someone had injected boiling acid directly into his veins. His vision swam with black spots, and his muscles immediately seized. He looked down at his hands; the skin beneath the rags was already turning a sickening, necrotic black.
The panel screamed a warning directly into his mind.
**[Status Update: Rotting Bone Miasma (Lethal - Blood Coagulation Imminent). Estimated time of death: 45 seconds.]**
Lu Chen gasped, coughing up a spatter of black, foul-smelling blood. The pain was blinding, far worse than the Frost-Tail Centipede.
"Transfer!" he mentally roared.
**[Executing Absolute Transfer to Target 2: Overseer Zhao...]**
Inside the swamp, Lu Chen's knees buckled, but before he hit the mud, the agonizing fire in his veins simply vanished. The necrotic blackness on his skin faded back to a healthy bronze in the blink of an eye. His lungs cleared, pulling in the toxic green fog, but his body instantly rejected the poison.
He stood up straight, panting heavily, surrounded by the swirling, lethal mist.
He checked the panel. The "Rotting Bone Miasma" status flashed into existence every time he took a breath, and every single time, he mentally slammed the transfer button, routing it directly into the void of the causality link.
Miles away, within the fortified medical pavilion of the Wang Clan, Overseer Zhao, who was currently heavily sedated and surrounded by clan healers trying to stabilize his shattered Dantian, suddenly convulsed violently. His veins bulged, turning a horrifying, rotting black. He began to vomit massive quantities of coagulated, necrotic blood, his skin melting from the inside out.
The healers screamed in panic, completely baffled by the sudden appearance of a lethal, top-tier swamp miasma inside a sterilized room. Within thirty seconds, Overseer Zhao, the tyrant of the outer fields, was completely, gruesomely dead.
**[Target 2: Overseer Zhao (Status: Deceased. Connection severed. Slot will refresh in 24 hours.)]**
Lu Chen saw the notification in the corner of his eye. He paused in the swamp.
He felt a profound, chilling numbness settle over his soul. He had just executed a man from miles away. He had used an agonizing, melting death to clear his own path.
"He was going to starve me," Lu Chen whispered to the dark, gnarled trees of the swamp, his voice utterly devoid of emotion. "He crippled innocent people for fun. It was him or me."
It was a rationalization, but it was a necessary one. If he hesitated now, he would die in this world.
With his primary designated target dead, Lu Chen could no longer use his cheat to survive the swamp continuously.
"System. Mark myself with a temporary loop. No, that doesn't work," he muttered.
He looked at his panel. He had one open slot remaining (Target 3), but he couldn't just mark a tree. It required a sentient entity.
He was standing in the middle of a lethal swamp. He had seconds before the miasma overwhelmed him again without Zhao to dump it on.
Frantically, Lu Chen scanned the murky waters. *There has to be a demonic beast here. A toad, a leech, anything!*
A ripple in the stagnant water caught his eye. A massive, horrifying creature broke the surface. It was a Swamp-Corpse Crocodile, a heavily armored, rank-one demonic beast that fed on the bodies of foolish cultivators. It locked its glowing yellow eyes on Lu Chen, opening a maw filled with razor-sharp, rotting teeth, completely immune to the miasma of its home.
The beast lunged out of the water, its jaws snapping toward Lu Chen's torso.
Lu Chen didn't move. He didn't draw his rusted sickle. He simply stared the terrifying monster dead in the eyes.
"Target locked," Lu Chen commanded mentally, half a second before the jaws snapped shut.
**[Target Marked. Target 3: Swamp-Corpse Crocodile.]**
The miasma was already invading Lu Chen's body again. The agonizing burning in his veins returned.
As the crocodile's jaws clamped down on empty air—Lu Chen having desperately thrown himself backward into the mud—Lu Chen highlighted his status.
*Transfer.*
The massive, heavily armored crocodile suddenly froze. It let out a bizarre, gurgling hiss.
The "Rotting Bone Miasma" was highly toxic to human cultivators, but to a creature native to the swamp, it was just slightly uncomfortable. However, Lu Chen didn't just transfer the miasma. He transferred the *entirety* of his accumulated physical and spiritual exhaustion from the desperate dodge, along with the lingering micro-tears in his muscles from his Level 2 breakthrough exertion.
The crocodile staggered, its massive body suddenly overwhelmed by profound, inexplicable human fatigue.
While the beast was momentarily stunned, Lu Chen scrambled to his feet. He didn't fight it. He ran deeper into the swamp. He used the crocodile as his new, temporary filter. Every time the miasma threatened to rot his blood, he dumped it onto the beast. The crocodile, dragging behind him in the swamp, was robust enough to tank the miasma, acting as an unwilling, remote life-support system.
For thirty minutes, Lu Chen navigated the deadly fog. His Level 2 eyesight pierced the gloom, scanning the rotting roots of the ancient trees.
Finally, he saw them.
Glowing with a faint, ghostly white luminescence in the dark, a cluster of seven Ghost-Face Mushrooms grew at the base of a sunken log. The caps of the mushrooms literally resembled screaming, tormented human faces.
Lu Chen rushed forward, his heart pounding with triumph. He carefully extracted the mushrooms, their stems dripping a milky, hallucinogenic sap, and placed them into his bamboo basket.
Seven mushrooms. Seven low-grade spirit stones. It was a king's ransom for a loose cultivator.
His panel chimed a desperate warning. The causality link to Target 3 was failing. The Swamp-Corpse Crocodile, miles behind him now, had finally succumbed to the overwhelming, constant barrage of Lu Chen's concentrated miasma dumps. The sheer volume had bypassed its natural immunity, rotting it from the inside out.
**[Target 3: Swamp-Corpse Crocodile (Status: Deceased. Connection severed. Slot will refresh in 24 hours.)]**
Lu Chen had exactly zero marked targets left. The other two slots were on a 24-hour cooldown.
The miasma was closing in. If he took another breath, he would die, and he had nowhere to send the poison.
Panicking, Lu Chen utilized the only option left to him. He channeled every ounce of his Level 2 Qi into his legs. He didn't use a technique; he just forcefully pumped his muscles with raw spiritual energy and ran.
He held his breath, his cheeks bulging, and sprinted blindly back toward the edge of the swamp. He tore through the thick mud, thorny vines ripping at his rags, the horrific stench of the swamp clawing at his tightly shut lips.
His lungs screamed for oxygen. Black spots danced in his vision. Thirty seconds passed. Forty seconds. He was a Level 2 cultivator; his physical limits were higher, but holding his breath while sprinting through deep mud was pushing him to the absolute brink.
Just as his vision completely faded to black and his body instinctively opened his mouth to gasp in the lethal fog, he burst through the invisible barrier of the miasma.
He collapsed onto the dry, relatively clean dirt of the outer forest, violently expelling his breath and sucking in huge, greedy lungfuls of the crisp night air.
He lay there for ten minutes, staring up at the canopy of leaves, his chest heaving. He had survived. He had gone into the forbidden zone, manipulated the rules of life and death, and returned with a fortune.
He pulled the basket to his chest, protecting the glowing mushrooms.
"I am adapting," Li Wei whispered, a hysterical, breathless chuckle escaping his lips. "God help me, I am actually adapting."
Ghost Alley was not an alley. It was a sprawling, subterranean cavern located beneath an abandoned, collapsed spiritual mine on the edge of the market.
Lu Chen descended the crumbling stone steps, his face tightly wrapped in his rags, pulling his bamboo hat low over his eyes. The cavern was lit by patches of luminescent, glowing moss, casting everything in a sickly, green-hued twilight.
The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, stale blood, and cheap incense used to mask the scent of decaying, stolen goods. Hundreds of figures, all cloaked and masked, moved silently between makeshift stalls consisting of dirty blankets spread across the stone floor.
No one spoke loudly. Transactions were conducted in harsh whispers and hand gestures. Cultivators with terrifying, unstable auras stalked the perimeter, looking for easy marks.
Lu Chen kept his head down, forcefully suppressing his Qi to project the aura of a weak, Level 1 scavenger. He navigated the maze of blankets, his eyes darting from stall to stall.
He saw cracked jade slips, rusted flying swords, vials of mysterious, bubbling blood, and the severed horns of demonic beasts.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for: a relatively organized stall manned by a massive, morbidly obese cultivator wearing a smiling brass mask. The aura radiating from the man was dense and heavy—a peak Level 3, bordering on Level 4. A dangerous individual.
A wooden sign in front of the stall read in crude characters: *Acquiring Rare Herbs. Selling Low-Tier Arts.*
Lu Chen approached cautiously, keeping a respectful distance. He reached into his basket and placed a single Ghost-Face Mushroom on the blanket.
The fat cultivator behind the brass mask stopped polishing a bone-dagger. He leaned forward, his small eyes glittering through the slits in the mask. He picked up the mushroom, turning it over, examining the screaming face on the cap.
"Fresh," the man rasped, his voice sounding like two millstones grinding together. "From the Rotting Bone Swamp. You must have a death wish, little rat, to go in there for one mushroom. I'll give you five spirit fragments. It's a buyer's market."
It was an outrageous lowball. A fresh Ghost-Face Mushroom was worth at least one full spirit stone.
Lu Chen didn't argue. He simply reached into his basket and, one by one, placed the other six mushrooms on the blanket.
The fat cultivator froze. The casual, mocking demeanor vanished instantly. Seven perfect, fresh Ghost-Face Mushrooms. It was a haul that usually required a team of Level 4 cultivators and hundreds of stones worth of detoxification pills to acquire. And this scrawny, ragged beggar had just dumped them on a blanket.
"Seven," the fat man breathed, his aura momentarily flaring with blatant, unadulterated greed. Lu Chen could feel the murderous intent rolling off the man. The merchant was calculating if it was easier to just kill Lu Chen and take them.
"I want a concealment art," Lu Chen said, his voice a hoarse, disguised croak. He purposely made his voice tremble, projecting pure fear. "A good one. And a basic offensive spell. Water attribute. And the rest in low-grade stones. Don't cheat me, senior. My... my master is waiting outside the cavern for me."
It was a blatant, desperate lie, but in Ghost Alley, the threat of an invisible, powerful master was a standard deterrent.
The fat cultivator stared at Lu Chen for a long, suffocating moment. He weighed the risk. Finally, he laughed—a wet, hacking sound.
"Smart rat. Fine. The Wang Clan patrols have been tight lately; I need inventory."
The merchant reached into a large sack behind him. He tossed a cracked, yellowed jade slip onto the blanket. "The *Shadow-Breath Mud Technique*. Conceals your cultivation base up to one major realm below your actual level. It's an Earth-attribute art, but trash like you can use it well enough. And here." He tossed a second, smaller slip. "*Water Bullet*. The most basic offensive spell. Useless against a shield, but it will punch a hole through a mortal."
He then reached into his robes and pulled out four dull, slightly glowing stones. Low-grade Spirit Stones.
"Two arts, four stones. That's a fair trade for seven mushrooms," the merchant said, his tone leaving no room for negotiation.
Lu Chen knew he was being heavily ripped off. The arts were probably incomplete, and the four stones were a fraction of the true value. But he didn't care. He had what he came for.
He snatched the jade slips and the stones, shoving them deep into his rags, and immediately turned and melted back into the crowd.
He navigated the cavern quickly, making sure to take a winding, unpredictable path toward the exit. He felt the eyes on him. He knew that flashing that much wealth in Ghost Alley was painting a massive target on his back.
He climbed the crumbling stairs and burst out into the cool night air of the outer slums. He didn't head straight for his shack. Instead, he took a detour toward the abandoned, ruined district of the slums, a labyrinth of collapsed buildings and narrow, pitch-black alleys.
He walked for ten minutes before he stopped in the middle of a dead-end alleyway, surrounded by crumbling mud-brick walls.
"You can come out now," Lu Chen said into the darkness, his voice calm, entirely devoid of the trembling fear he had shown in the market.
From the shadows near the alley entrance, a figure stepped out. It was a lean, muscular man wrapped in dark leather, holding a wickedly curved, serrated dagger. The man's aura was clear: Qi Condensation Level 3.
It was one of the guards who had been standing near the fat merchant's stall.
"You're not as stupid as you look, rat," the assassin sneered, twirling the dagger. "But your bluff was pathetic. You don't have a master waiting for you. You're just a lucky little scavenger who stumbled onto a patch of mushrooms."
"The trade was concluded," Lu Chen said, keeping his hands empty, hanging loosely at his sides. "I accepted the merchant's price."
"Boss doesn't like paying rats," the assassin laughed, stepping deeper into the alley, blocking the only exit. "He told me to get the stones back. And the arts. I'll make it quick if you just hand them over."
Lu Chen sighed. It was a heavy, exhausted sigh. He was so tired of this world. He was tired of the constant, unending brutality. Every single interaction was governed by violence and theft.
He looked at his panel.
### **Causality Shift Panel**
* **Host:** Lu Chen
* **Cultivation:** Qi Condensation Level 2
* **Marked Targets:** 0 / 3
* *Target 1:* (Cooldown: 7 hours remaining.)
* *Target 2:* (Cooldown: 22 hours remaining.)
* *Target 3:* (Cooldown: 23 hours remaining.)
A cold dread pooled in his stomach. He had completely forgotten. In his desperation to survive the swamp, he had burned out his target slots on Zhao and the crocodile. The cooldowns were active. He had no way to mark this man. He had no way to use his cheat.
He was a Level 2 cultivator with no spells, no weapon, and no combat experience, trapped in an alley with a Level 3 assassin armed with a spiritual weapon.
"Hand them over!" the assassin barked, lunging forward, the serrated dagger flashing in the moonlight, aimed directly at Lu Chen's stomach.
Li Wei, the accountant, had never been in a knife fight.
But Lu Chen, the street rat who had survived sixteen years of beatings, had instincts.
As the blade thrust toward him, Lu Chen didn't try to block or counter. He threw himself entirely backward, scrambling wildly in the dirt. The tip of the dagger sliced through his thick rags, drawing a shallow, burning line of blood across his ribs.
Lu Chen rolled violently, coming up onto his knees, his hand instinctively grabbing a handful of loose, broken mud-brick and dirt from the ground.
The assassin laughed cruelly, stepping forward to finish the job. "Pathetic."
Lu Chen didn't hesitate. He threw the handful of dirt directly into the man's eyes, simultaneously channeling his Level 2 Qi into his legs.
The assassin cursed, throwing his hands up to shield his face, momentarily blinded.
Lu Chen didn't use the opening to attack. He used it to run. He sprinted toward the crumbling wall at the back of the dead-end alley. With a desperate, Qi-empowered leap, he scrambled up the rough mud-bricks, tearing his fingernails, and threw himself over the top just as the assassin's dagger slammed into the wall where his legs had been a second prior.
Lu Chen hit the ground on the other side hard, rolling through a pile of rotting garbage. He didn't stop. He scrambled to his feet and ran like a madman into the labyrinth of the slums, utilizing his newfound physical strength to outpace his pursuer in the twisting, chaotic darkness.
He ran until his lungs burned, his bare feet bleeding, taking an utterly convoluted path back to his shack.
When he finally barred his door and collapsed onto the dirt floor, he was shaking uncontrollably. The shallow cut on his ribs burned, but the terror in his heart was far worse.
He pulled the four Spirit Stones and the two jade slips from his rags, clutching them to his chest.
He had survived. Barely.
He had learned a crucial, terrifying lesson. His Golden Finger was absolute, but it had limits. It had cooldowns. He could not rely on it as a universal shield. If he was caught out without a slot, he was just as mortal, just as vulnerable as anyone else.
In the pitch black of his shack, Lu Chen gripped the jade slip containing the *Shadow-Breath Mud Technique*.
He would learn it tonight. He would learn the *Water Bullet* spell tomorrow.
He was done being a victim of circumstance. He was done relying solely on a system panel to save his life. If he wanted to lie low and live a cautious life, he needed to be capable of murdering anyone who discovered him, with or without his cheat.
The normal guy from Earth had died in that alley. The loose cultivator, Lu Chen, had finally truly awakened, and his paranoia was now matched only by his desperate, cold-blooded drive to survive.