Shen Jin felt a phantom ache in his chest—a sudden, sharp echo of a blade that had pierced him a lifeti ago.
The eyes peering through the slit in Carriage Twelve's black velvet curtain belonged to an old man whose face was mapped with deep, ancient scars. His skin possessed the sickly, gray undertone of soone whose life force was slowly leaking away like sand through a shattered hourglass. Yet, the sheer depth of the gaze made the ambient spiritual energy around the carriage warp slightly, compressing the air.
Grandmaster Yu, Shen Jin recognized imdiately, though his hands continued to clumsily tighten the leather straps on the Draconic Ox's brass collar.
In his previous life, the na of Grandmaster Yu had been a tragic legend. He was a retired elder of the Heavenly Sword Sect who had discovered a massive, corrupt conspiracy involving the sect's inner council and rogue demonic factions. Before he could expose them, he was poisoned with Shattered-Heart Embers and forced to flee into exile, disguised as a common rchant. The Iron Whales Transit Convoy had taken him in for a staggering sum of gold, entirely unaware that they were carrying a human lightning rod into the Black Ridge Mountains.
The old man stared at Shen Jin for three long heartbeats. He didn't speak, but his brow twitched slightly, as if trying to decipher the strange, paradoxical rhythm of the boy's breath. Thanks to the seamless shroud of [Absolute Obscurity], the old man saw nothing but a frail, nervous stable boy whose internal pathways were barely clear enough to breathe without coughing.
With a soft, dry click, the curtain snapped shut. The heavy, suffocating pressure vanished.
"Hey! Clumsy brat! Stop staring at the luxury boxes and get to the rear!" Old Barlow shouted from the front of the line, crackling his whip over the scaly back of the lead Draconic Ox. "We’re rolling!"
"Coming, Master Barlow! Coming!" Shen Jin yelped, quickly dropping a heavy iron wrench onto his own toe in his rush. He let out a sharp, theatrical squeak of pain, hopping on one foot into the dirt to ensure the surrounding guards laughed and shook their heads at his utter lack of coordination.
With a massive, synchronized groan from the draft beasts, the iron-bound wheels of the twelve carriages began to rotate. The caravan slowly crawled out of the fortified iron gates of the wharf, leaving behind the safe, polluted air of the lower docks and steering directly toward the jagged, shadowy teeth of the Black Ridge Mountains.
The first three days of the journey were an exercise in brutal, exhausting monotony.
As the lowest-ranking laborer on the roster, Shen Jin was given no horse. He marched on foot alongside the heavy, churning wheels of the rear carriages, swallowed by the thick cloud of yellow dust kicked up by the front of the convoy. Whenever the caravan halted to let the beasts rest, Shen Jin didn't rest; he was imdiately handed buckets of stinking well water, coarse brushes to scrub the scaly hides of the oxen, and shovels to clear the steaming, massive piles of manure left behind on the road.
Yet, to Shen Jin, this physical tornt was a perfect camouflage.
While the other hired guards—arrogant rogue cultivators at the first or second stage of Qi Gathering—sat around the campfires boasting about their minor achievents and drinking cheap rice wine, Shen Jin used every single second of his grueling labor to refine his own internal state.
He discovered that the Vanguard ridian Scripture possessed a hidden, incredibly practical characteristic: it thrived on physical exertion.
As he hauled heavy oak buckets of water up steep mountain trails, he didn't use brute muscle. Instead, he subtly shifted the center of his gravity, letting the weight of the water flow through his bones and directly down into the earth, just as he had practiced in the simulation subspace. With every step he took, his newly opened first seal of Qi quietly absorbed the sparse, crisp spiritual energy of the mountain air, filtering it through his core without generating a single ripple of external pressure.
By the fourth evening, the caravan had ascended into the high country. The road narrowed into a dangerous, rocky ledge carved directly into the sheer face of the Black Ridge. To their left was a wall of black stone stretching into the clouds; to their right, a dizzying, fog-shrouded drop into a bottomless ravine.
The sun had just dipped below the horizon, plunging the canyon into a deep, freezing twilight.
"Make camp here!" Chief Gao’s voice echoed from the front of the line, his hand raised to halt the carriages. "The mountain fog is rolling in early. Set up the iron stakes! Double the guard watches tonight!"
Shen Jin imdiately went to work, grabbing a heavy wooden mallet and a bundle of iron stakes to secure Carriage Twelve's stabilizing chains to the rocky ground.
As he dropped to his knees to drive the first stake into a crack in the stone, his vision violently shuddered. A sharp, icy blue light flared at the periphery of his eyes.
[🚨 DANGER SENSE ACTIVATED!]
Environntal Threat Evaluation: Ambush Matrix Ford.
Hostile Count: 14 signatures within a 50-ter radius.
Approaching Trajectory: Crest of the upper ridge, descending via silk ropes.
Primary Target: Carriage Twelve.
Current Phase: Stealth Deploynt. Initial Strike in exactly 45 seconds.
Shen Jin’s hands didn't shake. He kept his rhythm steady, the heavy wooden mallet swinging down with a dull, rhythmic thud, thud, thud against the iron stake.
Forty-five seconds, Shen Jin calculated, his internal Qi smoothly gathering around his ears, amplifying his hearing far beyond mortal limits.
Through the whistling howling of the cold mountain wind, he caught it—the microscopic, rhythmic shrr-shrr of silk ropes sliding against the jagged granite rocks high above their heads. The rogue cultivators of the Black Ridge had arrived. In his past life, this was the exact mont the caravan's periter guards were silently slaughtered, throats slit before they could even draw their swords.
If he let the ambush play out exactly as it did in the original tiline, Chief Gao would be severely crippled, Old Barlow would lose an eye, and seventy percent of the laborers would be butchered in their sleep. More importantly, a stray fire technique would likely incinerate Carriage Twelve, throwing the entire valley into chaos.
I have twenty Vanguard Points left in my soul mory, Shen Jin thought. And I am currently a weak, clumsy stable boy who just happens to be working in the dark.
He paused his hamr mid-swing. With an expression of sudden, intense stomach distress, he clutched his lower belly and looked around nervously, ensuring Old Barlow was looking the other way.
"Master Barlow," Shen Jin called out, his voice thin and trembling as he approached the driver’s seat. "My... my stomach is turning inside out from that salted pork. I—I need to step into the rocks for a mont."
"Useless piece of trash," Barlow growled, not even looking up as he cleaned his pipe. "Don't wander more than ten steps from the wheel, or the mountain wolves will have you for supper. And don't use the good canvas for wipes!"
"Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!"
Shen Jin turned and scrambled into the thick, dark shadows of the rocky boulders bordering the cliffside, disappearing from sight just as the system clock ticked down to fifteen seconds.
The stable boy had vanished. The Unseen Vanguard was about to take the stage.
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