The freezing mountain fog grew so thick by midnight that the campfires turned into dim, ghostly smudges of orange. The hired guards walked their periters in tight pairs, hands white-knuckled on the hilts of their swords, jumpy at the sound of every snapping twig or whistling gust of wind.
Shen Jin sat in the cramped space beneath the undercarriage of a cargo wagon, ostensibly shivering from the cold. He had wrapped a frayed blanket tightly around himself, his head buried in his knees to maintain the look of a traumatized stable boy seeking shelter from a nightmare.
Beneath the blanket, his eyes were wide, focused, and entirely calm.
The second wave will be different, Shen Jin thought. The standard ambushers were just checking the waters. Now that they know Grandmaster Yu is protected by Chief Gao and a freak sequence of accidents, their commander will step in.
In his past life, the na of the commander who decimated this route was Blood-Handed Tie. He was a rogue cultivator at the peak of the fifth stage of the Qi Gathering realm, notorious for a brutal martial technique called the Crimson Hand of Pestilence. His style was loud, ssy, and designed to dissolve internal organs with a single strike. Chief Gao, who was only at the third stage, had been permanently crippled by him in the original tiline.
Shen Jin drew a deep breath, executing a minor circulation pattern of the Vanguard ridian Scripture. Thanks to his recent purchase of Kinetic Dissipation, the cold earth beneath his feet didn't numb his toes; instead, his body absorbed the thermal drop and recycled it into a steady, quiet internal warmth.
[🚨 DANGER SENSE ACTIVATED!]
High-Tier Hostile Approaching.
Cultivation Signature Detected: Fifth Seal of Qi — Qi Gathering (Peak Stage).
Distance: 45 ters and rapidly closing. Approach Vector: The upper western ridge.
Secondary Threat Assessnt: 6 tracking nodes deployed in a flanking crescent pattern.
Shen Jin’s gaze flickered. The system didn't give him any Vanguard Points on credit, and his balance was currently flat zero. If he wanted to survive the coming storm and protect his low-key status, he had to engineer an environnt where Blood-Handed Tie could be neutralized without Shen Jin ever executing an explicit, high-level martial art in front of Chief Gao.
He quietly slipped out from under the cargo wagon. The fog was his greatest ally. Moving with a slouched, shivering gait, he drifted toward the edge of the western periter, where the trail tightly bordered a dense thicket of frozen thorn-bushes and jagged listone spikes.
"Hey! Brat! What did I tell you about wandering off?" Old Barlow’s voice cut through the mist, though it was hushed and tense. The driver was standing near the horse lines, holding a heavy iron crossbow.
"M-Master Barlow," Shen Jin wheezed, his teeth clicking together perfectly. "I thought I heard one of the Draconic Oxen groaning by the rock face. I wanted to... to check if the harness was pinching its neck. I don't want it to kick the wagon again."
Barlow cursed under his breath, waving his crossbow toward the darkness. "The beasts are fine! Get back to the fire! If a mountain phantom snatches you, I’m not spending a copper coin on a funeral shroud!"
"I'll be right back, sir! Just checking the rear hoof!"
Shen Jin ducked past the rear wheel of the cargo wagon, instantly vanishing into the heavy gray wall of fog before Barlow could actively stop him.
The mont the mist closed around him, Shen Jin’s posture transford. His steps beca entirely weightless, leaving no imprints on the frosted gravel. His Danger Sense Radar map flickered wildly in his mind, pinpointing the red dot of Blood-Handed Tie descending like a giant predatory bat from the upper rocks.
Thirty ters. Twenty ters. Ten ters.
A sudden, foul odor sliced through the crisp mountain air—the tallic, sickening sll of coagulated blood and rotting copper.
A figure materialized on top of a jagged listone pillar five ters above the periter line. The man was massive, clad in dark crimson robes that slled of slaughter. His hands were bare, but the skin from his fingertips up to his elbows was stained a horrific, bruised purple-black, pulsing with a volatile, unrefined Qi. This was Blood-Handed Tie.
Tie didn't look at the camp. His eyes locked instantly onto the silhouette of Carriage Twelve further down the line. A cruel, jagged grin split his scarred face.
"Old dog Yu," Tie murmured, his voice like grinding stones. "You ran far, but the Heavenly Sword council always collects its debts."
Tie raised his right hand. The black-purple Qi erupted, condensing into a swirling, ghostly palm print that hovered in the air, crackling with corrosive energy. He was preparing to launch a long-range strike that would blast Carriage Twelve entirely off its axle.
Shen Jin stood directly beneath the listone pillar, entirely cloaked by the fog and the absolute containnt of [Absolute Obscurity]. To the world, he didn't exist.
If he throws that palm strike, the carriage explodes, and the quest fails, Shen Jin calculated. I need to throw off his aim.
Shen Jin looked down at his feet. A heavy, iron-headed crowbar used for wedging wagon wheels out of mud lay half-buried in the frozen dirt.
Using his toe, Shen Jin flicked the crowbar upward, catching it cleanly with his wrapped right hand. He didn't channel his Qi outward into a flashy projectile. Instead, he utilized the fundantal weight distribution of the Vanguard Scripture, coiling his internal energy around his shoulder and forearm like a tightly compressed steel spring.
He threw the heavy iron crowbar through the fog.
He didn't aim for Blood-Handed Tie's head or chest—that would trigger the man's martial instincts and defensive Qi barriers. Instead, he aid precisely for the jagged base of the listone pillar the commander was standing on.
WHOOSH.
The crowbar cut through the fog like a silent arrow.
CLANG-CRACK!
The iron tool struck a crucial structural fault at the base of the frozen listone pillar with the force of a battering ram. The frozen stone, already stressed by the extre temperature drops and the weight of the massive cultivator, shattered instantly under the localized kinetic impact.
"What—?!" Blood-Handed Tie gasped.
The towering stone pillar tilted violently to the left. Tie’s perfect, high-level martial stance was instantly broken as the ground literally dissolved beneath his boots. His focus shattered, and the massive, corrosive Crimson Hand of Pestilence he had been channeling slipped entirely from his control.
Instead of flying toward Carriage Twelve, the explosive, purple-black palm strike was discharged downward at a chaotic angle, blasting directly into the nearby frozen thorn-bushes.
BOOM!
A massive explosion of dirt, rotten wood, and purple acidic smoke erupted across the western periter. The shocking noise shattered the silence of the night, instantly alerting every single soul in the caravan.
"Enemy attack! Western flank!" Chief Gao’s voice roared, a brilliant flare of yellow Qi igniting around his sword as he vaulted over a cargo carriage, rushing toward the sound of the blast.
Blood-Handed Tie tumbled through the air, landing heavily on his feet in the gravel, his crimson robes covered in white listone dust. His face was contorted in absolute fury. He looked at the shattered base of the pillar, then looked around the foggy trail, his fifth-stage Qi senses flaring wildly to find the high-level master who had sabotaged him.
But his senses found nothing. There was no master.
There was only a scrawny, terrified stable boy nad Shen Jin who had apparently been knocked flat on his back by the shockwave of the explosion, currently screaming at the top of his lungs while clutching an empty, rusted iron buckler he had "found" in the dirt to cover his face.
"Help! The mountain exploded! The demons are here!" Shen Jin wailed, rolling across the gravel like a pathetic ball of fear.
Blood-Handed Tie stared at the rolling kid, his brow twitching in sheer confusion. An accident? Did the pillar just happen to give out because of my own Qi fluctuation?
Before Tie could think further, Chief Gao materialized through the fog, his yellow-flad blade cutting a crescent arc through the air straight toward the commander's neck.
"Rogue scum! Die!" Gao roared.
[PING.]
[Mishap Initiated: Target Combat Deviation Successful.]
[Assessnt: The host disrupted a high-tier lethal strike, alerted the main defense force, and preserved asset integrity while maintaining an uncompromised civilian profile.]
[Current Karma Points Accrued via Ledger: 20 VP.]
[Current Balance: 20 VP.]
Shen Jin scrambled backward into the thick fog, his panicked whimpers fading into the background as steel t steel behind him. The real battle had begun—and his ledger was no longer empty.
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