The rocky trail wound through the narrow fissures of the Broken Tooth Ravine like an uncoiled whip. He dropped into a sunken limestone cul-de-sac shielded from the wind. High above, sheer cliffs of slate and weathered dark rock blocked out the twilight sky. It cast deep, purplish shadows over the forest floor. Clinging to the damp stone faces were dense curtains of wild mountain jasmine. Their tiny white star-blossoms shook in the evening draft and releasing a delicate, honeyed sweetness into the stale air.
Yet that fragrant perfume couldn’t mask the coppery tang of fresh bright red blood.
Lin Xiao, perched comfortably atop Xiao Hei’s velvety black shoulders, peered around the mossy shoulder of a shattered boulder. Through the telepathic deep ring of the Primordial Soul Circuit, every scent and shaking in the clearing registered in his mind with clean, high-definition fidelity. Undercutting the sweet jasmine was the rancid reek of unwashed hide armor, bitter tobacco leaf, and the sickly, cloying stench of corpse-oil grease.
Twenty paces ahead, cornered against an upright wall of dripping black limestone, was the fox maiden.
Her vermilion silk robes, once clearly an article of noble craftsmanship, were shredded into ragged ribbons along the hem and sleeves, stiffened with road dust and dried mud. Her slender bare arms were crisscrossed with deep briar scratches. Her left shoulder was soaked in glistening crimson. Embedded deep into the meat below her collar bone was a jagged, three-pronged iron throwing dagger, its barbs oozing a sluggish black discharge that hissed softly where it dripped upon the moss.
Despite her agony, her stance was taut as a drawn recurve bow. A single bushy fox tail, vibrant vermilion with an ivory tip, curled protectively around her ankles. Her pointed fox ears twitched toward every footstep, pinned back in desperate fury. Meanwhile, her glowing violet eyes burned with an icy, unbroken defiance that refused to drop toward the dirt.
“Still glaring, little vixen?” a harsh, gravelly voice echoed off the granite walls. It was followed by the clinking of heavy iron links.
Standing in a loose semicircle around her were three men.
The speaker stood in the center. A broad-shouldered rogue with a scarred jaw and yellowed teeth, clad in grease-stained ox-hide cuirass plates. In his calloused hands, he lazily swung the heavy looped links of a twenty-foot iron chain. The metal was dark as dried blood, bristling every few inches with wicked, inward-curving barbed teeth that hummed with a sickly green foul fog. To his left crouched a spindly scout holding a cocked repeating hand-crossbow loaded with black-tipped quarrels. To his right loomed a brutish thug carrying a pair of serrated bone-hooks normally used to hang slaughtered cattle.
“You’ve led us on quite a dance through these thorns,” the scarred rogue chuckled, flicking the barbed chain against a loose stone with a sharp, ringing snap. “Two days of tracking through the mist. Ruined two pairs of my best boots. But look at you now—out of breath, out of magic charms. That Ghost-Weeping venom is already creeping into your heart spirit vein.”
The fox maiden didn’t beg. She leaned her back against the cold stone. She pressed her right hand against the poisoned dagger in her shoulder, her knuckles turning bone-white.
“Scavengers of the Iron Vulture Gang,” she whispered, her voice rough and dry as crushed leaves, yet possessing a melodic rhythm that carried an innate, high-born poise. “You dare enter the territory of the Grand Lonely Forest to hunt spirit clans? If my father’s court still stood, your bones would be ground into fertilizer for the boundary willows.”
The scarred leader threw back his head and laughed, a wet, phlegmy bray that startled a flock of nightjars from the high crags.
“Your father’s court?” he mocked, spitting a wad of dark tobacco onto the moss. “The Heavenly Fox Manor was turned to ash three months ago by the Crimson Flame Pavilion! Your elders are dead or in spirit-furnaces, girl. You’re nothing but a stray royal whelp with a bounty on your pelt. Do you have any idea what the mortal auction houses in South Peak City will pay for a genuine royal fox maiden with unbroken spirit veins? Fifty thousand low-grade spirit stones! Enough for me and my brothers to buy Foundation-building pills and spend ten years in the wine houses!”
He took a step forward, the barbed chain rattling like a nest of vipers.
“Drop your claws and let me slip the collar over your neck. If you struggle, the venom will rot your pretty face, and every scar knocks five hundred stones off the hammer price.”
Lin Xiao, watching from the safety of the boulder, felt a curious sensation rippling through his fluid core.
In his last life as a mundane logistics coordinator, Lin Xiao had kept a strictly even temper. He had dealt with difficult suppliers, irate truck drivers, and total delivery delays without raising his voice, preferring a calm breath, a cup of warm tea, and a pragmatic checklist. He genuinely loved peace. He loved the gentle murmur of a clean river, the aroma of slow-cooked meat. The quiet contentment of an undisturbed afternoon nap.
He didn’t enjoy unnecessary violence. But looking at these three greasy men cornering a poisoned, bleeding girl with barbed chains, something cold and uncompromising crystal-hardened within his azure matrix.
There are people who cultivate to seek truth, Lin Xiao thought quietly, his semi-clear outer edge shimmering with subtle turquoise light. And then there are cowards who obtain a scrap of power and right away use it to torment those who can’t fight back. Chasing a wounded girl through the woods with poisoned iron... What an utterly disgraceful way to spend a human life.
Beside him, Xiao Hei was trembling with held-back rage.
Through the Primordial Soul Circuit, Lin Xiao could feel the ferocious tide of wind-element qi churning within the hound’s tightly packed chest. The wolf’s ruby eyes were fixed on the scarred rogue’s exposed throat, his sharp teeth bared in an inaudible snarl that caused the air around his velvet paws to ripple with high-hum shear waves.
Master, Xiao Hei’s voice growled into Lin Xiao’s mind, low and shaking with total ferocity. Let me crush them. One breath. I will sever their spines before they take another step.
Patience, Xiao Hei, Lin Xiao sent gently. It sent a cool wave of calming chaos energy across the psychic filament to steady the hound’s bloodlust. We don’t just want to end the fight. We want to handle this cleanly. That girl is in critical condition. That black poison is actively corroding her spirit veins.
“Query recognized,” the sweet-sounding, cool voice of the Omniscient Dao Spirit chimed within his mindscape. “Starting immediate body and tactical test.”
A crisp chime sounded, and an analytical readout unfolded across his vision:
A hundred and eighty seconds before her spirit veins collapse, Lin Xiao calculated, his fluid body shifting into non-Newtonian readiness. No time for polite diplomatic overtures or sharing tea.
“Further notice,” the Dao Spirit added in her dispassionate tone. “The main offensive ancient object swung by Target Alpha is made from Grade-1 Cold Sanguine Iron, infused with ninety-two percent elemental iron and heavy trace phosphorus. Nutritional profile: highly dense stone marrow, suitable for Host’s load-bearing pulling fortification.”
Lin Xiao almost blinked his white eye crescents. Wait. You’re telling me that nasty-looking barbed chain is actually high in iron and minerals?
“Affirmative,” the Dao Spirit replied. “Internal Dantian Void can dissociate the cursed corpse-oil coating within three split seconds. That turned the iron into pure skeletal hardening alloy.”
Well now, Lin Xiao mused, his round blue body bouncing lightly atop the boulder. If they’re bringing snacks directly to my doorstep, it would be downright impolite to refuse.
Down in the cul-de-sac, the tension had reached its breaking point.
The fox maiden took a ragged, shuddering step backward. Her spine pressed hard against the upright limestone. The black poison had already crept up her neck, painting thin, spiderweb veins of dark purple across her pale cheek. Her right hand clutched the poisoned dagger. Her knuckles shook wildly as she tried to channel a final burst of spiritual fire into her fingers.
“Stay back,” she gasped, her voice cracking under the choking pressure. “I’d rather detonate my beast core and scatter my soul into the wind than become your chattel!”
“Detonate your core?” Hu Meng scoffed, stepping into five paces of her. “With that venom clogging your lower dantian? You couldn’t detonate a firecracker, little vixen. Boys, pin her arms!”
The crossbowman grinned, raising his iron weapon. Meanwhile, the burly thug brandished his serrated bone-hooks. He stepped forward to flank her from the left. Hu Meng drew his arm back, the heavy, barbed Cold-Iron chain whistling through the damp air as he prepared to cast the heavy loop directly over her bleeding shoulders.
Xiao Hei, Lin Xiao commanded across the Primordial Soul Circuit. Take the shadows. Cut off the back path so none of them run toward the outer forest. The front is mine.
Understood, Master!
In the space between two heartbeats, the tightly packed black hound dissolved into the darkness of the ravine like a drop of ink falling into deep water, vanishing without displacing a single leaf.
At the exact same instant, Lin Xiao launched himself from the crest of the boulder.
He didn’t go down with the earth-shattering roar of an immortal warrior or the blazing golden radiance of a righteous sect elder. Instead, he dropped with a remarkably casual, floating flight path, landing on the gravelly loam directly between the fox maiden and the three slavers with a soft, squishy sound:
GLOOP.
The sudden impact of a semi-clear, sapphire-blue sphere—roughly the size of a plump winter melon, gently wobbling on the moss with two relaxed white crescent eyes—brought the entire face-off to a screeching, confused halt.
Hu Meng froze mid-swing, the barbed iron chain drooping in his fist as he stared down at the dirt.
The crossbowman lowered his weapon by half an inch, his jaw slacking in sheer incomprehension. The thug with the bone-hooks blinked stupidly, scratching his greasy ear with a blunt thumb.
Even the fox maiden, whose eyes were clouded with dark venom and existential despair, stared down in stunned disbelief at the blue blob resting two feet in front of her muddy boots.
For three long, painful seconds, the only sound in the ravine was the steady drip of mountain water from the jasmine vines.
Then, Lin Xiao’s azure surface rippled with cheerful, unrushed warmth. Extending two tiny, elastic pseudopods from his upper hemisphere, he rested them politely against his curved sides like a neighbor greeting travelers on a country lane.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Lin Xiao’s clear, floating voice echoed through the stone hollow, perfectly calm and delightfully conversational. “I had to overhear your conversation from up on the ridge. You seem to be making a tremendous amount of noise, swinging rusty iron around, and kicking up gravel in my backyard.”
Hu Meng’s scarred face twisted from utter shock into pure, insult-fueled rage.
“What... What kind of bloated pond spirit is this?” the rogue leader snarled, glaring at the azure slime. “A water slug? A twisted river melon?”
“I prefer the term ‘peaceful homesteader’,” Lin Xiao replied pleasantly. “And as the resident homesteader of this valley, I must politely inform you that slave chains, poisoned daggers, and loud yelling are strictly forbidden. Now, if you would be so kind as to drop those rusty toys and apologize to the young lady, we can all resolve this like civilized adults.”
The three rogues exchanged dumbfounded glances before bursting into crude, ear-splitting roars of laughter.
“Apologize to the fox?” Hu Meng bellowed, his eyes flashing with vicious malice as he stepped forward. “Little blue bastard, you don’t even have legs! I’ll stomp you into a puddle of fish bait and scrape your jelly into my waterskin!”
With a violent snarl, Hu Meng whipped his arm forward. It sent the heavy, twenty-foot barbed Cold-Iron chain whistling through the evening air straight toward Lin Xiao’s center!