Early the next morning, preparations in the courtyard of Nanxi Pavilion were complete.

  The Hundred Thousand Mountains were located far away in Miaojiang, and the journey was long and treacherous. The old dogs at the Outer Sect's Mission Pavilion had only handed them a single bamboo slip, claiming sect resources were tight and telling them to "find your own way there." This was obviously a deliberate hurdle ordered by the higher-ups, hoping the squad would drain their True Qi or die at the hands of rogue bandits along the route.

  Xu Nan and Yan Zheng were completely broke (Xu Nan had his Jade Slip Ledger, but it wasn't liquid cash yet). Their pockets were cleaner than their faces. Naturally, they didn't have the capital for an expensive flight artifact.

  Left with no choice, Su Wan ground her teeth and pulled her trump card from the depths of her storage ring.

  It was a "Streamlight Cloud-Piercing Skiff," designed for a handful of passengers. Forged entirely from rare, century-old Crimson Feather Wood, the hull was carved with intricate flowing cloud and fire arrays. It gave off a faint crimson glow in the morning light. Even the gunwales were inlaid with Wind-attribute Low-grade Spirit Stones to deflect astral winds.

  The moment Xu Nan laid eyes on the skiff, his round eyes shot out a light more predatory than a starving wolf. He rubbed his chubby fingers over the hull, looking like he wanted to pry off a splinter and taste it.

  Tsk, tsk, tsk. Crimson Feather Wood frame, Wind spirit stones for array cores... This is at least a peak Mid-grade flight artifact! Even at a black market discount, the valuation is a minimum of eight thousand Low-grade Spirit Stones! Xu Nan furiously flicked the iron abacus in his mind. He looked at Su Wan like she was a living god of wealth. "Senior Sister Su, even if this venture costs our lives, you have to write a will transferring this asset to me first!"

  "Shut your cursed mouth and get on!" Su Wan glared at him and pinched a spell seal.

  The skiff let out a crisp hum, transforming into a streak of crimson light as it shot into the sky.

  Heading south from The Central Continent, they flew for three full days.

  Along the way, Xu Nan leaned over the edge, watching the landscape shift dramatically. The vast plains and aura-rich mountains of The Central Continent faded, replaced by increasingly jagged, bizarre peaks. The verdant pines twisted into a primeval jungle of eerie colors and tangled vines. The pure spiritual energy in the air grew heavy, tainted with the humid stench of rotting leaves and a faint toxic miasma.

  To Su Wan's surprise, the edge of The Hundred Thousand Mountains wasn't a barren, poisonous swamp. Instead, nestled between several massive peaks was a sprawling, smoke-filled Miaojiang settlement.

  The settlement was bustling. Stalls along the bluestone roads were packed with exotic herbs and beast pelts. Locals in black traditional clothing with silver ornaments mingled with traveling merchants and bottom-tier rogue cultivators from The Central Continent, haggling over prices. The black Miaojiang garments were covered in colorful, cryptic embroidered patches, rumored to offer blessings and ward off toxic bugs.

  "I thought The Hundred Thousand Mountains would be a literal hell. I didn't expect it to be this lively," Su Wan said, her tightly wound nerves relaxing slightly.

  "Senior Sister Su, the busiest markets hide the deepest scams," Xu Nan leaned in, his round eyes scanning the storefronts. He lowered his voice. "Everyone here is driven by profit. If these Gu-manipulating locals turned the perimeter into a dead zone, who would come trade with them? It's a classic bait-and-switch: open the doors to welcome the guests, then lock them to slaughter the sheep."

  Yan Zheng walked up front, his heavy sword wrapped in coarse cloth. He was quiet, but his sharp eyes swept the crowd. He could smell the hidden stench of blood beneath the prosperity.

  Just as the three of them reached the central guest pavilion, a white-haired Miaojiang elder adorned in complex silver ornaments greeted them with a warm smile.

  "Distinguished guests from afar, are you here to purchase Miaojiang medicinal herbs?" The old man pressed his hands together, his wrinkled face smiling like a blooming chrysanthemum. "I am the Village Chief of this Qingmu Settlement. You look travel-worn. Please, step inside and have some of our local Soul-Calming Tea!"

  Xu Nan seamlessly slipped on his "rich but slightly foolish merchant" smile. He stepped forward and bowed. "Aiyo! You're too polite, Village Chief! We are traveling merchants from The Central Continent. We heard the market trend for Red-Banded Snake Bladders is bullish, so we came to try our luck."

  A glint flashed in the Village Chief's eyes as his smile widened. "Excellent, excellent. We love doing business with Central Continent bosses. However..."

  He sighed, his face falling into a look of distress. "To be honest, the settlement hasn't been peaceful lately. My poor wife was bitten by an unknown toxic bug in the mountains a few days ago. She is bedridden and hanging by a thread. I wonder if you wealthy guests carry any life-saving premium pills? I am willing to pay a high price."

  Su Wan looked sympathetic. Just as she reached into her storage bag for a High-grade Antidote Pill, Xu Nan "accidentally" stepped in front of her with his chubby frame.

  "Aiya, what a terrible disaster!" Xu Nan slapped his thigh, looking absolutely heartbroken. "Village Chief, we're just poor runners! How could we afford premium pills? But my brother here has raw strength and knows some basic blood-circulating massage techniques. If you don't mind, how about I accompany you to check on the madam tonight?"

  The old Village Chief looked deeply at Xu Nan, thanked him repeatedly, and turned to order his servants to prepare food and wine.

  By evening, inside the master bedroom of the Village Chief's private courtyard.

  The old Village Chief carried a bowl of foul-smelling black liquid to his frail wife's bed. The old woman's face was as pale as gold paper, with black energy faintly writhing around her neck. She gasped in agony.

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  "Old companion..." The Village Chief's hands trembled, his eyes bloodshot and helpless. "Those kids from The Central Continent don't look evil. Especially that chubby one, his smile is so genuine... Are we really going to push them into the fire pit?"

  The old woman struggled to open her eyes, brutally gripping his wrist. Two lines of turbid tears rolled down her cheeks. "If we don't... the Dark Shaman Cult emissary will activate the Linked Mother Gu... our entire settlement of hundreds will die with ruptured guts! We have no choice. Let Heaven blame me for this sin..."

  The Village Chief closed his eyes in agony, exhaling a deep sigh as old tears streamed down his face.

  Simultaneously, inside the guest pavilion suite.

  "The Village Chief is lying," Yan Zheng muttered from the shadows, hugging his sword. "His silver ornaments have toxin-warding arrays. He isn't a normal mortal old man."

  "This entire Qingmu Settlement is a filtration net set up by the Dark Shaman Cult," Xu Nan sneered, pulling Sound-Isolating Talismans from his robes and slapping them on the doors and windows. "That old man faking a sob story for medicine was just a background check on our wealth. If Senior Sister Su had actually pulled out a premium pill, the three of us would be chopped up and fed to the gutter bugs tonight."

  "Then why are you still going to treat his wife?" Su Wan frowned.

  "If we don't enter the tiger's den, how do we audit their bottom line?" Xu Nan patted his belly. "Senior Brother Yan, guard Senior Sister Su. I'll be right back. I need to weigh this bad debt myself."

  Half an hour later, the night deepened. Xu Nan moved with the agility of a cat, sneaking into the Village Chief's master bedroom.

  The room was empty save for the emaciated old woman on the bed. Her breathing was faint, and the black energy around her neck writhed like a living entity.

  Xu Nan scanned the room. Confirming there was no surveillance, he approached the bed and placed his fingers on the old woman's wrist.

  The moment his fingertips made contact, Xu Nan's heart skipped a beat. The pulse radiated a chilling, evil energy. He could even faintly feel something crawling slowly through her meridian channels.

  As a bottom-tier reject at the third level of Qi Condensation, he obviously didn't know advanced Miaojiang Gu techniques. But his razor-sharp street instincts screamed at him: This isn't a bug bite! Someone is using this old woman as a flesh vessel to incubate an evil entity!

  Xu Nan's eyes darkened, his mind racing.

  Deep within his chest, The Heavenly Crucible emitted a faint hum. An invisible vacuum force tunneled through his fingertips into the old woman's meridians. In just one breath, it forcibly extracted a tiny sliver of that malignant source code and refined it.

  Such domineering evil qi. There must be a massive threat buried beneath this settlement. Xu Nan immediately pulled his hand back, his internal abacus already calculating a counter-strategy. He didn't have the full picture, but this recon proved one thing: the enemy was far more sinister than his initial risk models predicted.

  Meanwhile, in a hidden cave dozens of miles away from the Qingmu Settlement.

  Dim firelight flickered. The female assassin in black, Jiang Yue, knelt on one knee in a posture of cold respect.

  Standing before her was an extremely emaciated middle-aged man. Half his face was shielded by a cold iron mask; his exposed eye was dead and lifeless. This was Wu Zong, the drill instructor of the Night Owl Suicide Operatives.

  "Reporting to the Director," Jiang Yue said, her voice completely flat. "The targets have entered the Qingmu Settlement. The fatty and the swordsman are maintaining a tight guard, and since the settlement is a perimeter outpost for the Dark Shaman Cult, I haven't found a window for a clean kill. Also... that fatty seems terrified of dying, but his actions are highly bizarre."

  Wu Zong clasped his hands behind his back, his cloudy eye staring coldly toward The Hundred Thousand Mountains outside the cave.

  "The client wants a clean slate," Wu Zong's voice grated like sandpaper. "Since the Dark Shaman Cult wants to use them as blood sacrifices, don't alert the snake in the grass. Keep watching. Wait until they bleed each other dry with the Cult, then strike. Remember, an assassin's blade is only drawn for a guaranteed kill."

  "Understood!" Jiang Yue bowed her head. She blurred into an eerie blue phantom and melted into the night.

  Wu Zong didn't know why the higher-ups wanted to recruit the Dark Shaman Cult; he just had to wait for the Cult Master to emerge from closed-door cultivation. Watching Jiang Yue disappear, he sighed slowly, his thoughts unreadable.

  The next morning.

  Xu Nan yawned, pushing open the doors of the guest pavilion to get some well water from the courtyard.

  He was gleefully plotting how to leverage external forces to scam the Dark Shaman Cult out of a fortune.

  Suddenly, an unprompted, tiny demonic wind swept across the flat ground.

  Heaven's toll fee arrived right on schedule.

  Mid-stride, Xu Nan's left foot twisted at a physics-defying angle, perfectly tripping over his own right heel.

  "Aiyo—!"

  Xu Nan let out a voice-cracking shriek. His flimsy foundation was useless against the demonic wind. He completely lost his balance and face-planted hard against the bluestone pavement.

  Crack.

  A crisp sound echoed. Xu Nan saw stars. He spat out a mouthful of bloody water, and right there in the puddle was half of a stark-white front tooth.

  Just as he clutched his mouth, mentally cursing Heaven's ledger to bankruptcy, a massive shadow blocked out the sun above him.

  Xu Nan looked up through teary eyes.

  Standing before him was a Miaojiang girl, almost as broad-shouldered and tall as Yan Zheng. She wore coarse martial clothes and was casually dangling a freshly killed, black-bristled wild boar by the leg.

  This was A'Jiao, widely known in the Qingmu Settlement as the "Female Vajra."

  A'Jiao looked down, her eyes as big as copper bells locking onto Xu Nan, who was sprawled on the ground with a mouth full of blood.

  Xu Nan was a bit chubby, and his round face naturally looked friendly and approachable. Usually, his smile had a goofy, endearing charm. Right now, clutching his mouth with tears in the corners of his eyes, he looked exactly like a wronged, defenseless scholar.

  In Miaojiang, the men were mostly lean, dark, and hardened fighters. In her entire life, A'Jiao had never seen a Central Continent man like Xu Nan—pale, plump, radiating prosperity, and looking absolutely "squishy" and easy to bully.

  "You look very pleasing," A'Jiao rumbled, her voice like muffled thunder.

  She dropped the boar, reached out a hand the size of a palm-leaf fan, grabbed Xu Nan by the collar, and hoisted him into the air like a baby chick.

  "My dad says the men in this village are too dark and skinny to be worthy of me." A'Jiao broke into a rustic grin that sent chills down Xu Nan's spine. Her calloused hand viciously pinched Xu Nan's chubby cheek. "These cheeks are so soft! From today on, you are my man! I'll protect you!"

  Behind the second-floor window of the pavilion, Yan Zheng and Su Wan stared at the scene, completely dumbfounded.

  Dangling in mid-air, missing half a tooth, Xu Nan's round face was consumed by sheer terror. He let out the most desperate wail of his life: "Senior Brother Yan! Help! This contract is bankrupting me down to my underwear!!!"

  Simultaneously.

  Hundreds of feet away, hidden in the dense canopy of an ancient banyan tree.

  A faint ripple of eerie blue light shifted in the shadows. Jiang Yue, the black-clad assassin, hung upside down from a branch like a breathless bat. The old burn scar on her pale neck faintly pulsed.

  Her emotionless eyes coldly watched the toothless fatty wildly flailing in mid-air, currently being held hostage by the village girl.

  As a top-tier assassin, she had evaluated countless targets. No matter how she looked at it, this greedy piece of trash who tripped on flat ground couldn't have possibly survived the lethal traps of Wind-Rending Gorge.

  But the more absurd the scene was, the more her assassin's intuition warned her of danger.

  Jiang Yue's fingers gently stroked the edge of her blue dagger. She silently rendered her verdict: Playing the fool. Let's see what lethal schemes you're hiding under that soft fat.

  She didn't make a move. Instead, she silently shrank back, melting completely into the thin morning mist of Miaojiang.