The silence broke with a wet, scraping sound.
A lackey’s fingers rubbed against the bark of the ancient tree, testing the smear like he didn’t quite trust his own eyes yet.
"The blood is still fresh, Young Master." The rat-faced lackey tracked the crimson trail up the trunk, following it with his gaze until it vanished into the canopy. "Someone climbed up here recently."
High above, Lin Tian froze.
His muscles locked into a coiled spring. His hand drifted to his belt on pure instinct, fingers wrapping around his last pouch of Corpse-Paralysis Powder before his conscious mind even caught up.
His heart hammered against his ribs, loud enough it felt like it belonged to someone else.
If Wang caught him now, there’d be no mercy waiting on the other side of it. Slaughtered on the spot, most likely, or stripped of every herb and the beast core he’d bled to earn.
Calm down. Analyze the variables. Control the response.
His mind built a wall against the panic clawing up his throat, the same discipline he’d once used to walk into a boardroom after a production outage without letting his voice shake. He slowed his breathing. Drew in shallow, silent sips of the toxic air, careful not to let his chest rise too far.
"System." He kept the thought razor-thin, barely more than a whisper of intention. "Keep [Insight Eye] active."
The violet-gold overlay darkened obediently. No stray light would reflect off his eyes now and betray his position in the gloom above them.
Through the leaves, he watched the four glowing wireframes moving below, each one tagged faintly by the System even in stealth mode.
Wang stood a few meters back from the tree, arrogant face pinched with a mix of caution and irritation he clearly wasn’t used to feeling. His grip tightened on the Wind-Piercer’s hilt. The azure arrays stitched through his robes hummed louder, responding to the tension in his Qi.
"Are you sure?" His voice dropped low, almost reluctant. "I deduced a high-level senior killed this Shadow Wolf. Disturbing them mid-rest would be a grave offense against the sect."
"I’m just pointing out the tracks, Young Master." The lackey stuttered, visibly cowed by Wang’s tone. He stepped back anyway, tilting his head up, squinting hard into the fog choking the higher branches.
Lin Tian pressed his back flat against the mossy trunk. Rough bark dug into him through the thin fabric of his windbreaker, but he didn’t dare shift his weight even an inch.
Twenty feet up. Not nearly far enough. Cultivators carried sharper senses than anything on Earth, even at the lowest levels of the Realm. One careless rustle would land in this silence like a gunshot going off in an empty room.
Wang thinks I’m a senior expert. The realization landed fast, and he held onto it like a lifeline. That single assumption was the only thing standing between him and a fight he couldn’t survive. Wang was arrogant, not suicidal — he feared offending an Inner Sect Elder far more than he wanted answers to a mystery.
"Senior?" Wang called out suddenly, cupping his hands into a forced, respectful salute toward the canopy. His voice carried clean through the ravine, echoing off the rock walls.
"I am Wang, Outer Sect Elite of the Crimson Nimbus Sect. My mother is Madam Shen, Head Manager of the Resource Hall. If I’ve disturbed your hunt, this junior begs forgiveness and guidance."
Silence answered him. Gray-green fog swirled lazily through the branches, indifferent to the question hanging in the air.
Lin Tian bit down on his lip until it stung. He couldn’t speak, not even a single syllable. One word, and Wang would instantly recognize the voice of the trash scavenger he’d mocked in front of half the Task Hall days ago.
The silence stretched a beat too long. Wang’s respectful mask started cracking at the edges, suspicion bleeding through the gaps like water finding a fault line.
"Young Master," another lackey whispered, already pulling a cheap spirit-light talisman free from his pouch. "Maybe the expert’s long gone by now. What’s up there could just be a scavenging beast, nothing more. Let me light the canopy and settle it."
Lin Tian’s pupils shrank to pinpricks.
If he lights the canopy, the camouflage is dead. Every advantage I have disappears in half a second.
He needed higher ground, and he needed it now. Three more feet up, into a thicker tangle of dead leaves and parasitic vine, would put him past the reach of any light thrown from ground level.
He reached for a thick branch above him, fingers finding what looked like a solid grip in the dark. He tested the weight carefully, the way he’d tested every piece of scrap he’d ever pulled out of the Graveyard.
It held.
Slowly, agonizingly, he shifted his weight off his right foot, transferring it into his hands to pull himself upward in near-total silence.
But the Graveyard and this forest weren’t the same environment, and he knew that without having fully internalized it yet.
He’d calculated tensile strength on pure instinct — the same instinct that had never once failed him repairing scrap metal — but he hadn’t accounted for the internal rot this forest’s acidic miasma ate into every piece of wood it touched, invisible until the exact wrong moment.
As his boot lifted clear off the lower limb, the sudden shift in leverage bore down on a hollowed-out section of wood he’d never had the chance to see.
CRACK.
The branch snapped clean. The sound tore through the dead-silent ravine like a gunshot fired point-blank.
Four heads snapped up at once, in perfect, damning unison.
Every trace of hesitation vanished from the group below. Their attention locked dead onto his exact position, no ambiguity left to hide behind.
"There!" The rat-faced lackey shrieked, finger jabbing hard toward the still-rustling leaves.
Wang’s eyes went wide, and he channeled Qi without a second’s hesitation. The Wind-Piercer erupted in blinding azure light, illuminating half the gorge in an instant.
"Who’s hiding there?! Show yourself, or I cut this whole tree down where it stands!"
The second lackey fed Qi straight into his talisman and hurled it upward with a practiced flick of the wrist. It shot into the canopy like a signal flare, bursting into a harsh white light that swallowed every shadow whole, leaving nowhere left to hide.
The light washed over the branches without mercy. Every inch of him lit up at once — the grimy windbreaker, the dirt-streaked face, the frail Level 1 frame he couldn’t hide behind cultivation power anymore, not even for another second.
Wang’s respectful caution shattered instantly, all at once, like glass under a hammer. The illusion of a senior expert resting quietly in a tree died right there in the harsh white glare.
"That’s no senior!" the rat-faced lackey yelled, squinting hard against the light. "Look at those clothes! That’s a scavenger’s jacket, not a cultivator’s robe!"
Wang’s handsome face twisted with fury, color rising fast in his cheeks.
An elite of the Outer Sect had just bowed his head and spoken with respect to a scavenger hiding in a tree. The insult landed like a physical blow, and his pride had nowhere near enough room to absorb it gracefully.
"A scavenger?" Wang roared, killing intent bleeding into every syllable. His Level 5 aura exploded outward without warning, rattling leaves across the entire canopy above them. "You dare make a fool of me in front of my own men?! Drag him down here! I want him alive — I’m breaking all four of his limbs myself, one at a time!"
"Yes, Young Master!" The three lackeys drew their weapons in near-unison. Cruel grins spread across their faces as they rushed the base of the ancient trunk, already fighting each other for the honor of climbing first.
The disguise was gone completely. There was nothing left up here to hide behind, not one more excuse or borrowed authority he could lean on.
High in the branches, the last traces of panic in Lin Tian’s eyes hardened into something colder, something closer to the calm that had gotten him through the Corpse Rat and the wolf both. The Vulture didn’t waste a single second cursing his bad luck or mourning the plan that had just fallen apart.
[Survival probability in direct confrontation: 0%. Escape probability using environmental hazards: 42%.]
As the lackeys scrambled up the thick roots below him, jostling for position, his left hand tightened around the pouch of Corpse-Paralysis Powder. His right thumb found the trigger ring of his wrist-blade without needing to look, muscle memory already ahead of conscious thought.
The hunt had just flipped into something else entirely, faster than he’d been ready for.
A fight for his life, with no traps left to set and no time left to plan one.
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