For the second time in less than an hour, the world tilted on its axis.
[Identity of Remnant Soul: Lin Feng.]
The letters burned in my vision, a brand of pure, cosmic absurdity. My fists clenched so hard my knuckles went white.
Lin. Fucking. Feng.
It wasn't enough that he had a protagonist's halo. It wasn't enough that he was a cheat. It wasn't enough that Lyra, my own sister, was a regressor working to aid him.
No. On top of all that, a goddamn piece of his soul was already here, hiding inside this jumped-up alchemist like a parasite.
My mind, trained by twenty-five years of hatred, kicked into overdrive. This changed everything. This wasn't Lyra's pawn. This was Lin Feng, in a way. A proto-Lin Feng. An echo. Was this his main body? Unlikely. A remnant soul implied a fragment, a splinter that had somehow arrived before the main anomaly.
The implications were staggering. Was this remnant soul aware of the main body's future arrival? Was Lyra communicating with this piece of him? Was her 'Qi deviation' a signal specifically for this remnant?
The web of intrigue was deeper and more tangled than I could have ever imagined. My desire to simply kill this Jian Yue warred with the ice-cold logic of a predator. A living pawn was more useful than a dead one. A living pawn who contained the ghost of my most hated enemy?
The intelligence value was immeasurable.
My face remained a perfect mask of a desperate, hopeful brother. I watched as Jian Yue took the Silverleaf Soul-Calm Flower from my hand, his touch borderline reverent. The greed in his eyes was so thick I could practically taste it. The Lin Feng remnant inside him was clearly influencing his desires, pushing him towards accumulating resources.
"I will begin at once, Your Highness," Jian Yue declared, his voice filled with a new, fervent energy. "But the process is delicate. I will require absolute privacy. The resulting pill will be of the highest quality!"
"I don't care about quality, you idiot, I care about speed!" I snapped, playing my part to perfection. "How long?"
"One hour," he said, his eyes already locked on the shimmering cauldron. "One hour, and the Princess will be saved."
"Fine," I gritted out. "One hour. But if my sister's condition worsens because of you, I will personally burn this guild to the ground with you inside it."
It was the perfect threat from a hot-headed royal. He waved a dismissive hand, already lost in his alchemical fantasies. I turned and stormed out of the refining room, slamming the door behind me with enough force to shake the frame.
I didn't leave.
Instead, I melted into the shadows of the hallway.
...ACTIVATING SKILL: [SHADOW STEALTH - BASIC].
My form blurred, my presence dimming until I was little more than a patch of deeper darkness clinging to the wall. It was a low-level skill, easily detected by a powerful cultivator, but for a fool in the Foundation Establishment realm who was completely absorbed in his work? It was more than enough.
I watched the door, my mind a storm of calculation.
What was their plan? Jian Yue, possessed by Lin Feng's soul fragment, would refine the Heaven-grade flower. He would create a pill far more powerful than a simple Meridian Soothing Pill. He would "save" Lyra, earning the gratitude of the Imperial Family and securing a powerful position within the capital. From there, he could gather resources and influence, preparing for the arrival of his main body.
And Lyra, the grateful princess, would have her "savior." She'd have a direct line to her hero's vanguard.
It was a brilliant, elegant plan.
And I was going to rip it to shreds.
I needed to separate Jian Yue from the pill. I couldn't let him be the one to deliver it. The glory, the connection to Lyra—that had to be mine.
My eyes scanned the hallway. Two guild guards stood at the far end, their posture relaxed. Useless.
My gaze fell upon the window at the end of the hall, which overlooked the bustling market street three stories below. An idea, audacious and utterly villainous, began to form.
I needed a distraction. Something loud, chaotic, and messy. Something that would pull everyone, including those guards, away from this hallway for just a few crucial moments.
I slipped out of the shadows and crept down the stairs, my movements silent. I made my way back to the Apprentice Herbology Garden, the place where this whole charade began.
My [Alchemist's Discerning Eye] was still active, its 15-minute duration ticking away. I scanned the garden again, this time not for ingredients that healed, but for ingredients that reacted.
My eyes landed on two plants growing suspiciously close to each other. One was a puffy, purple mushroom called a 'Volatile Puffball'. The other was a spindly vine with bright red, crystalline sap known as 'Sunstone Creeper'.
Individually, they were harmless. The Puffball released a noxious but non-lethal gas when ruptured. The Sunstone sap was merely warm to the touch.
But the system, drawing on the knowledge of the Abyssal Shadow Devouring Art, provided a hidden insight.
[Alchemical Combination Detected]
[Volatile Puffball Spores + Sunstone Creeper Sap = Highly Unstable Explosive Compound.]
[Warning: Detonation is extremely violent.]
A wicked, shark-like grin spread across my face.
"Perfect."
I carefully harvested a handful of the mushrooms and dripped a generous amount of the red sap into a spare pouch. I crept back inside, my heart thumping with the thrill of pure, unadulterated sabotage.
My target was the guild's main storage hall on the first floor—a place filled with countless shelves of flammable, volatile, and ridiculously expensive ingredients.
I slipped inside, the air thick with the scent of a thousand dried herbs. Using [Shadow Stealth], I became a ghost. I found a dark corner, a place where several large barrels of refining oil were stored.
I opened my pouch, the mixture inside already feeling unnervingly warm.
I set my makeshift bomb, using a simple tripwire I fashioned from a loose thread on my robe. The first person to enter this room after I left would trigger it.
With my work done, I melted back into the shadows and made my way back to the second floor, my pulse steady, my mind clear.
I positioned myself near Jian Yue's door, a silent predator waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
The timer was almost up. Jian Yue would be finishing soon. All I needed was the cue.
And then it came.
A thunderous, earth-shattering BOOM erupted from the first floor.
The entire building shook violently. Glass shattered. Alchemists screamed in panic and confusion. Thick, acrid smoke began pouring up the stairwell.
The two guards at the end of my hall shouted in alarm and, without a second thought, abandoned their posts to rush towards the explosion.
The entire guild was in chaos.
It was the perfect distraction.
I dropped my [Shadow Stealth] and kicked open the door to the refining room for the second time.
Jian Yue whirled around, a look of pure fury on his face. In his hand, he held a single, luminous pill that pulsed with a golden light far beyond that of a mere third-rank concoction.
"What in the blazes is going on now?!" he bellowed.
"Assassins!" I screamed, my face a mask of absolute terror. "The guild is under attack! Someone tried to blow us all up! We have to get out of here!"
I grabbed his arm, "pulling" him towards the hallway. "Give me the pill! I'll take it to my sister! You need to save yourself!"
He was disoriented, caught between the explosion's shockwave and my frantic performance. His greed, however, was still paramount.
"No! This pill is a masterpiece! I must deliver it myself!" he insisted, trying to pull away.
"There's no time, you fool!" I roared, shoving him towards the window at the end of the hall. "They're coming for you! The assassins! They want the pill!"
I gave him one final, mighty shove.
He stumbled, his eyes wide with a dawning, horrified realization as he crashed through the ornate window frame.
For a moment, he hung there, silhouetted against the sky. Then, with a scream of disbelief, Jian Yue—alchemist, prodigy, and vessel for the ghost of my enemy—plummeted three stories to the stone street below.
In the chaos, no one saw it. No one but me.
I turned back. The golden pill, knocked from his hand in the struggle, lay on the floor, gleaming like a fallen star.
I calmly walked over, picked it up, and slipped it into the cheap bottle I had bought earlier.
I turned and walked out of the room, my expression shifting back to one of desperate, heroic urgency.
As I ran through the smoke-filled halls of the burning Alchemist Guild, a final notification from the system confirmed my victory. It was a twist I hadn't even planned for, a bonus from the universe itself.
[Lin Feng's Remnant Soul, tethered to the host body of Jian Yue, has suffered critical trauma from the fall.]
[Remnant Soul has entered a forced dormant state to survive.]
[Estimated time to reawaken: 6 months.]