Huan Lin found a forgotten relic of the Murim past—a crumbling, roofless watchtower perched high on the barren hills overlooking Xianzhou. It was far enough from the city to avoid discovery, yet close enough that he could feel the cold, financial pulse of the Banker's empire stretching below him. It was a perfect vantage point for a predator learning to hunt.
His task for this phase was twofold: forge an identity the Murim world would ignore, and perfect a non-lethal application of the Sanguine Thorn Art (STA). Elder Han, the artisan, was a vital piece of the puzzle; he could not be killed—not yet. He had to be emptied of knowledge, then left alive to serve as a distraction.
Huan Lin's natural state—pale, fragile, with the unmistakable glow of profound internal purity—was a beacon. In the Orthodox world, purity invited greed, and fragility invited predators. To survive, he had to become dull.
He began by observing the men Patriarch Qin employed for security: the mid-tier enforcers. These men were neither high-level masters nor expendable thugs; they were the ballast of the Alliance. They were characterized by their sheer lack of character. They were weary, predictable, loyal to the silver they were paid, and utterly anonymous.
This was the mask. Not a grand disguise, but an overwhelming ordinariness.
He used cheap, vegetable-based dye to permanently darken his startling white hair to a nondescript black. He practiced walking with a slight, habitual slump—the weary gait of a man who spent his life waiting for orders. He honed his features into a perpetual mask of mild boredom, the classic expression of someone who had seen too much and cared too little.
He spent hours practicing in front of a tarnished bronze mirror, forcing the Verdant Blossom Qi to lie absolutely dormant. The act of masking his internal state was physically exhausting. It required him to be consciously empty of intent.
But the Sanguine Thorn Art resisted this emptiness. The crimson energy inside him chafed at the mediocrity, constantly screaming for the high drama of true conflict.
Whenever Huan Lin successfully suppressed his own identity, the STA would surge, rattling the cages of his mind, whispering promises of violence. He was a vessel constantly trying to hold back an ocean of corrosive malice.
"You must be silent," Huan Lin would hiss at the turbulent energy. "You are not a blade yet. You are a scalpel. You must learn patience."
The primary function of the STA was to violently extract and condense life force, resulting in slow, agonizing death. To make it a tool of interrogation, Huan Lin needed to bypass the Dantian and target the sensory and nervous systems—to inflict the full measure of the technique's psychological terror without permanent, lethal damage.
This meant training on his only available subject: himself.
He began by testing the STA's interaction with inanimate objects, forcing the Qi to drain energy from a series of stones. He learned that by controlling the rate and target of the extraction, he could alter the resulting agony.
Lethal drain was a massive surge aimed at the core.
Non-lethal extraction, he discovered, required meticulous, nerve-shattering precision. He focused his mind, willing the crimson Qi to flow into the small channels that controlled sensory input.
His first successful test involved his index finger. He focused the STA, not on the finger's vitality, but on the nerves connecting it to his brain.
The resulting sensation was not pain; it was pure, unfiltered sensory terror. The feeling was akin to having every nerve ending simultaneously scraped by rusty metal, while his mind conjured the vivid, screaming conviction that his entire arm was being slowly dissolved by acid. He didn't just feel pain; he felt the certainty of his own immediate, horrific dissolution.
Huan Lin collapsed, gasping, sweat soaking his robes. The sensory overload lasted only a few seconds, but the residual mental trauma was crushing.
"It works," he rasped, his eyes burning. "The technique is a perfect conduit for extracted terror."
He spent the next week repeating this self-torture, pushing the STA into his temples, his solar plexus, and his fingertips. Each session left him temporarily blind, retching, and teetering on the edge of hysteria. He was forcing himself to experience the terror he planned to inflict, forging his mind into a vessel that could withstand the very agony it delivered.
The continuous self-inflicted pain and the constant mental suppression of the STA began to peel away his remaining humanity.
He noticed strange deficits. He tried to recall his Master's favorite joke—a silly riddle about a fox spirit—and the memory was suddenly hollow. The words were there, but the emotional warmth, the sound of his Master's chuckle, the context that made it funny—all of it was gone, overwritten by the stark, cold necessity of his revenge.
The Sanguine Thorn Art was not just an energy form; it was a parasitic philosophy. To be a perfect conduit of terror, one must become empty. To feel sorrow or joy was to introduce impurities that would clash with the STA's crimson flow.
Huan Lin was actively cultivating detachment. He was learning to look at his memories, his old life, and even the future, with the cold, critical eye of a strategist, not the passionate heart of a man.
On the final night of his training, he stood fully cloaked, his dark hair falling over the face of the weary, anonymous bodyguard.
He reached out and gently touched a nearby pine branch, focusing the refined STA. He didn't drain its life; he merely forced its internal energy to recoil into a silent, painful stasis, leaving the branch paralyzed but not dead.
He held the branch for a moment, then tossed it aside.
"The mask is set," he thought, his voice echoing in the silence of the tower. "The weapon is honed. Now, Elder Han. You will speak, and you will teach me how the righteous poison themselves."
He left the watchtower, descending into the calculated chaos of the city. He was no longer Huan Lin, the gentle healer. He was just a shadow, a mid-level hired hand, ready to deliver a terror more painful than death itself. The Banker's warehouse awaited.