After confirming that the villagers were blind to the miracles drifting in the cold air, Xian's eyes narrowed slightly.
Perhaps... they needed to be touched for the so-called system to acknowledge them. Perhaps only then would they fully manifest in the material world.
But even the thought made his skin prickle.
Even without actively revealing themselves, the treasures exuded a faint, almost inducing presence — like tiny suns hidden under tattered cloth.
In a village like this, at the edge Eastern Continent, the probability of encountering a cultivator — much less a powerful one — was practically zero.
The Eastern Barrens were desolate, forgotten by the world's great sects and clans, due it low spiritual currents.
Items with this level of spirituality, fully revealed, would be like lighting a beacon fire in the dead of night. Spiritual perception was not something confined by distance or reason.
A true great figure, even slumbering miles away, could catch the faint ripple of a priceless treasure blooming into the world.
They would come — drawn like vultures to the scent of blood.
Xian exhaled, his breath scattering like smoke in the frigid air.
His body was ruined — meridians torn, vitality withered, cultivation crumbling to dust.
His gaze fell to his hands, fingers crooked and nails blackened with years of decline.
All but one.
The right hand thumbnail still gleamed faintly under the grime, pulsing with a hidden shimmer only he could sense.
A secret built for emergencies — a storage space woven directly into his flesh, forged when trust was a luxury he could no longer afford.
One cubic meters of silence and safety, buried where no thief or enemy could easily find.
He rubbed his thumb absently — a habitual motion, almost unconscious. But the pressure awakened the sensation of the space within.
He probed it, and his brow furrowed.
Nearly full.
Fragments of his past — a chipped short sword, several talismans, medicine, books, and manuscripts of secret techniques — all taking up space.
He frowned deeper as he eyed the floating items before him.
He could store the pill box and the scroll, but the broom… that seemed not possible.
A sigh slipped past his lips — a quiet sound of stubbornness.
"If only I could just store them all…" he muttered under his breath, feeling misfortune for getting such items out in the open.
But before he could continue—
The three illusory treasures pulsed with soundless ripple, then unraveled — not vanishing, but dissolving, their forms breaking down into threads of ethereal brilliance.
The box, the scroll, the staff — all turned to pure light, sucked upward and inward like dust into the windless sky.
Xian stumbled back half a step.
A familiar chime echoed in his mind.
...
[Uncollected rewards have been stored. You may access them anytime.]
...
Xian didn't move. His mind, however, was already dissecting the moment.
Sigh, so it can do that…
Seeking confirmation, Xian focused his will, wishing to collect the items once more.
The air trembled, subtly. Three items reappeared, materializing from nothing, each having their own information displayed.
Without hesitation, he wished to store them again — and, expectedly, they vanished.
He tapped his thumb once against his index finger, then shook his head faintly.
"Still making a novice's mistakes, even after a hundred years…"
Then his lips curled — not into a smile, but something thinner.
"I didn't survive this long to die from being an idiot, but here we are."
The self-mockery ended there, Without further hesitation, Xian's body shifted.
The beggar's rags, the weary frame — they all blurred at the edges, dissolving into something half-real, half-unreal.
A whisper of spiritual energy stirred at his feet.
Xian blurred figure appeared as he was sinking into the earth, swallowed by it.
Earth Escape Technique
A mid-grade movement art, crude compared to the soaring flight skills of greater sects, yet rarely matched when it came to fleeing unseen across rough ground.
It did not propel him like wind nor launch him like thunder. Instead, it let him sink, bleed into the land itself, moving as though his weight, his scent, even his spirit had been swallowed by the earth.
The world around him shifted.
Sights grew hazy. Sounds became muffled, as if heard through a wall of running water.
Villagers, fields, crooked fences — all blurred into grey smudges.
Only a faint trembling of dust, a ripple along the cracked soil where his feet once touched.
He moved toward the outskirts, slipping between the ribs of the village like a wraith returning to the dirt.
Minutes — or perhaps only heartbeats — later, Xian emerged from the blurred mists into a more secluded place.
A thin forest sprawled before him, rough and stunted, where crooked trees twisted between ancient stone walls.
The rocks jutted from the ground like broken tombstones, slick with old moss and time-worn cracks.
And from the embrace of the earth, Xian's figure surfaced — like a dead man clawing his way out of darkness.
His body lurched up from the soil in a ripple of dust, and the moment his feet touched solid ground, a violent spasm seized him.
Cough! Cough!
kneeling in the uneven, dirt-caked earth, He coughed — hard, violently.
Each breath scraped raw against his throat, and every cough brought a fresh wetness to his lips.
He doubled over, wheezing between broken gasps, one trembling hand pressed against a nearby stone to stay upright.
A smear of blood — dark, almost black — painted his palm.
It oozed slowly between his fingers, viscous and heavy, like oil dredged from a poisoned well.
'Huu... even a little energy use worsens my state'
For a moment, Xian simply knelt there, hunched and shaking in the muted half-light, his entire frame wracked with tremors.
But he refused to collapse.
He swallowed the copper taste of blood, wiped his palm against his bloody lips, and straightened — slowly, stubbornly.
Xian's eyes, dim yet stubborn, swept across the rugged landscape.
Ahead, a rocky slope loomed — an ancient wall of stone, its surface rough and weathered, like the hide of some forgotten beast.
It was large enough to serve his needs.
Without hesitation, he staggered toward it, each step dragging a little more of his weight into the ground.
Reaching the base of the stone wall, he lifted his blood-smeared hand and pressed it firmly against the cold surface.
The rock was unyielding, robust.
Good.
His fingers moved — slow, deliberate, painting crude yet intricate symbols in blood across the stone's face.
Each symbol pulsed faintly the moment it was completed, drinking greedily of his vitality and spirit.
Xian grimaced, the pain biting deep into his chest, but he endured, his mind narrowing into a singular, stubborn line.
Under his breath, he began to chant — low and ancient, a tongue spoken only in the shadows between dying stars.
The final symbol was drawn.
He stumbled back a single pace, his legs shaking.
A tremor rippled through the rock wall.
It shuddered once, then again, as though some unseen hand was gouging into its flesh.
Before Xian's grim, blood-flecked gaze, the stone surface began to twist inward — a swirling, groaning motion.
Within seconds, a large hole tore open, ragged but stable, forming a mouth-like cave leading into darkness.
A crude abode, but an abode nonetheless.
He exhaled — a harsh, shuddering breath — and wiped the remaining blood from his lips and hand onto his tattered robes.
Then, without a moment to rest, Xian stepped into the crude, blood-forged cave.
Behind him, the rock wall trembled once more — stones grinding, dust swirling in lazy eddies.
As if reluctant to release him, the scattered rubble and loosened dust drew together, pulled by an unseen will.
Slowly, the hole began to mend itself — stones crawling back into place, dust sealing the cracks like a scab forming over a wound.
In moments, the entrance was no more than a faint, uneven scar upon the cliff face — hidden to all but the most scrutinizing eye.
Xian stood still for a moment in the dimness, the weight of the earth settling around him like a shroud.
Without looking back, he moved deeper into the darkness — vanishing from the world outside.
...
[COMING NEXT] - CHAPTER 4 - A Miraculous Pill
...
GLOSSARY -:-