The Shadow Wolf didn’t just run. It erupted.
Territorial rage drove it forward. It believed an intruder had invaded its ground. The beast became a blur of black fur and crimson fury.
The rock throw had worked exactly as planned. No hesitation left in it now. Pure instinct, pure momentum.
Damp earth exploded under its claws. It crossed the gap to the bottleneck in seconds. Every muscle fired with the raw power of a Level 3 entity.
From the underbrush, fifteen feet back, Lin Tian watched. His heart hammered against his ribs. His mind stayed cold, locked into place.
He tracked the wolf through the [Insight Eye] overlay.
Its aura hit even from fifteen feet away. Pure predatory weight, the kind that made every instinct in this body want to run.
A traditional cultivator would clash Qi against Qi here. Parry the charge with a blade. Trade momentum for momentum.
He wasn’t going to fight the momentum.
He was going to weaponize it.
The wolf crossed into the gorge. Rage kept its focus locked on the noise behind the dead tree. It never looked down.
It never saw the hair-thin filament hovering eight inches above the leaves.
It hit the line at full speed.
The physics were absolute. Six hundred pounds moving at fifty miles an hour met steel that refused to give. The kinetic energy had nowhere to go but through.
The filament didn’t snap.
The wolf’s flesh did.
A wet SCHLICK cut through the gorge, followed instantly by cracking bone. The filament sheared through fur, muscle, tendon — straight to bone — before the force ripped the beast’s front half to a dead stop.
The sound alone would have made a lesser man freeze. Lin Tian just tracked the trajectory, already anticipating the next move.
Its upper body was still moving at fifty.
Legs gone dead, center of gravity gone with them, the wolf flipped forward. It launched head over heels like a derailed train car. A confused howl cut off mid-note as it slammed into the mud.
It tumbled straight into the second kill zone.
CLANG! CLANG!
The steel traps sprang shut like prison gates. Iron teeth, slick with green paralysis paste, bit into flank and hind leg both.
"ARH-WOOOOOOO!"
The roar shook the trees. The wolf thrashed, eyes wild with pain. It tried to stand. Its front legs were shredded, bleeding out fast. Its hind leg stayed locked in the trap, iron biting deeper with every jerk.
Lin Tian didn’t move. Not a muscle.
He knew better than to trust a crippled beast. A Level 3 Shadow Wolf could still snap his neck in half a second if he got careless now.
The rat last night had almost gotten him at Level 1. This thing was three levels stronger, even bleeding out in the mud.
He waited for the poison to finish the job.
Patience mattered more than speed right now. Rush a wounded Level 3 beast, and even paralysis wouldn’t save him from one desperate lunge.
[Target : Adult Shadow Wolf]
[Status: Severe Physical Trauma. Major lacerations detected.]
[Warning: Lethal neurotoxin introduced into the target’s bloodstream. Accelerated circulation due to panic is increasing the rate of infection.]
The thrashing lost its power fast. Green toxin, driven deep by both wounds, overwhelmed its nervous system. Foam mixed with blood spilled from its jaws. Roars turned into wet, ragged gasps.
Its crimson eyes glazed. Pupils dilated as the paralysis spread.
[Threat Level: Plummeting. Target mobility reduced by 94%.]
"Checkmate." He said it quietly.
He stepped out of the brush. Gravel crunched under his boots. The wolf heard him and snapped its head toward the sound, baring fangs in a weak, useless snarl.
Its limbs wouldn’t respond. The connection between brain and muscle was already gone.
He didn’t gloat. No speeches, no theatrics — the kind of thing arrogant young masters loved to indulge in before a kill. In a world where the strong ate the weak, giving prey time to breathe was how you died stupid.
Fatty Leung would’ve stood there bragging. Young Master Xu would’ve filmed it in his own head for later. Lin Tian wanted the kill finished, not admired.
He moved to its blind spot. [Insight Eye] painted a violet reticle on the back of its neck, exactly where skull met spine.
[Target Weak Point: Medulla Oblongata. Armor calcification is thinnest at this junction.]
He raised his arm. Flexed his middle finger.
His hand didn’t shake. That surprised even him, distantly, in the part of his mind still processing everything at once.
SNIKT!
The wrist-blade shot from his sleeve, locking with a sharp ring. A thread of Qi fed into the rigged spirit stone, and the jagged edge crackled to life — crimson lightning, searing heat.
He drove it down without hesitation. Straight into the reticle.
SQUELCH.
The bypassed thermal regulator’s heat cut through skin and bone like nothing was there. Spinal cord severed. Brain stem boiled instantly. The wolf’s massive body seized once, then dropped, limp, into the mud.
Its eyes dimmed to gray.
[Ding! Target Eliminated.]
[Host has successfully slain a Qi Gathering Level 3 Demonic Beast.]
He exhaled, long and heavy. The tension in his muscles finally let go. Exhaustion crept in behind it, but so did something else — a hot, intoxicating rush that felt a lot like victory.
His hands were still shaking, but not from fear anymore. Adrenaline needed somewhere to go, and right now it was pushing toward triumph instead of panic.
A malnourished Level 1 scavenger, dropped in from an Earth cubicle, had just killed a Level 3 apex predator. Clean. Not a single scratch on him.
Two days ago he’d been debugging a server crash at midnight. Now he’d just field-tested a kill chain on something that could have torn him apart in one bite.
"Brains over brawn." He wiped a splash of mud off his cheek. "Keep the flying swords. Keep the martial arts. A thousand pounds of tension and a gram of neurotoxin wins every time."
He crouched by the carcass. The skinning knife cut past dense muscle, straight into the chest cavity. Moments later, he pulled his prize free — a glowing, ruby-red beast core.
Nothing like the sickly core from last night’s Corpse Rat. This one pulsed with pure, untainted Fire-attribute energy.
The System had already flagged that first core as barely worth trading. This one was different. He could feel the difference just holding it.
A genuine Level 3 beast core. Back at the Task Hall, this alone was worth serious contribution points.
He stowed it carefully. The mission wasn’t finished yet.
He left the carcass behind and retraced his steps past the traps, heading toward the ravine the wolf had charged out of. With the apex predator dead, the area was clear.
Two more cores to find. Nine more herbs, if the mission counted the one already in his pack. The math was simple now. It just needed executing.
[Insight Eye] lit up the dark, cutting through the gray-green fog. Deep in the ravine’s rotting hollows, soft blue icons started pulsing across his HUD.
[Resource Detected: Silver-Leaf Herb (Maturity: 100%)]
[Resource Detected: Silver-Leaf Herb (Maturity: 95%)]
He spent the next twenty minutes harvesting, quiet and efficient. Herbs went into cloth, then into the pack, right beside the beast core.
No wasted movement. No second-guessing which stem to cut. The System marked exact maturity levels, and he simply followed the markers one by one.
Standing among the towering trees, something shifted in him.
The fear that had gripped him since waking up in the Graveyard was gone. Completely.
Two days. That’s all it had taken. Two days ago he couldn’t have looked at a beast this size without freezing. Now he was already thinking about the next one.
[Insight Eye] let him see the world’s hidden truths. [Magnetic Allure] was his key into the world of powerful women above him. But today proved something else — his mind was the real foundation under all of it.
He didn’t need this world’s brute-force logic. He could rewrite the terms of every fight before it started.
"One core down." He looked toward the darker sectors of the forest ahead. "Two more to go."
He adjusted the pack straps, eyes sharp, already hunting the next target.
The first algorithm had compiled clean. Time to run it again.
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