Huan Lin traveled for two more weeks, moving only at night, until he reached Xianzhou, the jewel of the central plains. It was a city built on prosperity, wealth flowing through its arteries like an endless river of molten gold. Unlike Gutter's Edge, this place wasn't dirty; it was coldly clean, organized, and overwhelmingly intimidating.
The true architects of the massacre—the Banker, the Strategist, and the False Hero—did not lurk in dark corners. They owned the light. And here, the light was controlled by the Gold Weave, the financial empire of the Banker, Patriarch Qin.
Huan Lin shed his drab traveling clothes for the anonymous, functional attire of a minor scribe—the perfect mask of invisibility. He rented a stifling, windowless room above a tea house that specialized in gossip, spending the first week simply listening, his ears ringing with the unfamiliar language of commerce: interest rates, promissory notes, collateral, and amortization.
He realized quickly that this target was entirely different from the petty bandit, Ma Geng.
He had expected guards in reinforced armor. He had expected martial challenges. What he found was far more impenetrable: an ocean of paper.
The Gold Weave was a fortress built on debt. Its walls were contracts; its guards were clerks. Patriarch Qin was protected not by muscle, but by an untouchable reputation and a lattice-work of financial dependencies that spanned the entire Orthodox Alliance. To attack Qin directly would not just draw the attention of martial masters, but would crash the regional economy, uniting every powerful family against the assailant.
"He is not a General with a weak flank," Huan Lin muttered, tracing the faint outline of a ledger he had intercepted from a foolishly drunk clerk. "He is the ground itself."
His initial rage—the raw, physical hunger to inflict the Sanguine Thorn Art—was choked by this revelation. He couldn't kill a ledger. He couldn't drain a reputation. He had to learn the enemy's language.
Huan Lin began the slow, torturous work of espionage. He spent endless hours in low-rent, dusty libraries, poring over public records, memorizing the convoluted relationships between the Gold Weave, the Azure Dragon Sect (who provided security), and the Imperial Court (who benefited from the taxes).
The irony was a fresh, searing wound. He, the last disciple of a sect that revered the sanctity of life, was now dedicating his existence to understanding how to profit from its destruction.
Weeks crawled past. Days blurred into nights spent copying cipher codes, tracking the movement of caravans, and decoding the financial jargon that masked usury and exploitation.
This was the true cost of the Banker's revenge. It demanded patience, subtlety, and an absolute commitment to boredom, the antithesis of the martial path.
The Sanguine Thorn Art was not designed for quiet patience. It was a technique born of traumatic violence, meant for instant, agonizing extraction.
The dark Qi in Huan Lin's meridians began to rebel.
Instead of feeling the cold clarity that followed Ma Geng's death, Huan Lin now felt a continuous, throbbing irritation. It was like having a thousand tiny, blood-sucking thorns perpetually vibrating beneath his skin.
He would be meticulously copying a shipment manifest—quantities of medicinal herbs being redirected to the Banker's private research facilities, almost certainly for the corrupted longevity drug—when the dark Qi would surge.
Kill. Act. Stop the plotting. Rip the throat.
The impulse was not his own, but the Art's. It was the technique itself demanding to be fed the terror and vital energy it required for stability. To suppress the urge, Huan Lin had to actively lock down his spiritual sea, forcing the crimson Qi into a painful, suffocating dormancy.
This suppression came at a devastating cost. He didn't just get headaches; he suffered momentary fugues.
One evening, he looked into the cracked mirror of his rented room and saw not his own reflection, but a quick flash of his Master's face, smiling gently. He reached out, his throat tightening with desperate grief, wanting to clutch that last memory. The Sanguine Thorn Art reacted instantly, viewing purity as a threat. The vision twisted, the Master's smile melting into a horrific grimace, accompanied by a soundless, high-pitched scream in Huan Lin's mind.
He stumbled back, clutching his head, sweat pouring down his pale face. The STA had violently edited the memory, corrupting it to serve his hatred.
He realized the horror: the dark art was not just taking his soul one kill at a time; it was actively destroying his past memories, replacing them with fuel for his vengeance.
Every moment he survived and plotted required him to suppress the thirst for blood, but the consequence of that suppression was the slow, spiritual erosion of his former life.
After nearly a month of this agonizing dual existence—a silent, calculating scribe by day; a tormented, suppressing cultivator by night—Huan Lin finally found his first thread.
He uncovered a highly sensitive ledger recording "Special Acquisitions." These weren't normal debts; they detailed the immense, covert funds Patriarch Qin had routed to the Strategist, a female general, exactly two months before the Azure Canopy Massacre. More crucially, the ledger showed a continuous, high-volume expenditure on a rare, specific type of metal ore.
The ore was used in the construction of sophisticated extraction arrays—the very same tools that had been used to torture and steal his Master's Verdant Qi.
The entries were not just financial; they included the names of the few highly skilled artisans capable of forging such arrays. One name, "Elder Han," was attached to a specific Gold Weave subsidiary warehouse used for "high-value storage."
This was it. A point where paper met steel. A place where the Banker's cold, financial defense had a physical, human weakness.
Huan Lin closed the ledger, his hands trembling not from fear, but from the sudden, intoxicating validation. The Sanguine Thorn Art, dormant for weeks, finally hummed in quiet approval. He hadn't killed, but he had mastered the first step: he had successfully transitioned his raw, explosive hatred into a precise, calculated malice.
He stood in the darkness, allowing himself a single, chilling thought: I know how to hurt you now, Banker. And your pain will be a slow-moving balance sheet.
He was ready to leave the shadows and begin his infiltration.