The air outside the Void-Pit was thin, lacking the heavy, iron-scent of the laboratory. For 3,650 days, Li Wei had breathed the breath of the dying. Now, the scent of pine and wild grass felt like an insult to his lungs.
He stood on the jagged cliffs overlooking the valley. Behind him, the mountain had swallowed Mo Ran and a decade of horror. Beside him, Xiao Chen was as silent as a stone statue, her silver eyes scanning the horizon with mechanical intensity.
As Li Wei looked at the distant smoke of a nearby settlement, a "Memory Leak" hit his mind. His **Anatomical Sovereign** domain tried to process it as data, but it was too raw, too human.
Before the Pit, before the blood, there was the Village of Fallen Petals.
Li Wei remembered the day he and his Mother were dropped at the edge of the Empire. He was six years old. The Imperial carriage had been cold, and the guards' laughter was even colder.
*"The 10th Prince is a blank slate. A waste of royal blood,"* they had sneered.
They were exiled to a place where the Empire's shadow didn't reach. His Mother, once a graceful concubine, had traded her silks for rough cotton. Her hands, once meant for the zither, became calloused from the soil.
And then there was **Li Mei**.
His little sister was born in that exile. She didn't know about thrones or Spirit Roots. To her, Li Wei wasn't a "failed prince"; he was the brother who could weave crowns out of willow branches.
He remembered the way she smelled of sun-dried wheat and lavender. He remembered her small hand gripping his finger as they hid in the tall grass, playing games while their Mother worked.
In those two years, Li Wei had almost forgotten he had a father.
The massacre didn't start with a battle. It started with a silence.
The birds had stopped singing. Li Wei, even then possessing an unnatural sensitivity to life-rhythms, had felt the vibration in the ground. The heavy, disciplined thud of armored boots.
The **Imperial Shadow Guards** didn't come to talk. They came to "sanitize" the Emperor's history.
Li Wei remembered the first scream. It was the village elder. Then came the smell of oil and fire.
He remembered his Mother's eyes—not filled with fear, but with a desperate, final strength. She had shoved him and Li Mei into the hidden crawlspace beneath their hut.
*"Don't breathe. Don't look. Just survive,"* she had whispered.
Through the cracks in the wood, Li Wei watched the world end. He saw the black-cloaked guards—men with the Imperial Crest on their shoulders—systematically slaughtering his neighbors. He saw a blade, cold and indifferent, part his Mother's throat.
The blood had seeped through the floorboards, dripping onto his face. It was his first lesson in anatomy: the way the carotid artery pulses before the light goes out.
When the fire reached their hut, the floor collapsed. Li Wei had grabbed Li Mei's hand, dragging her through the smoke. They were children running through a literal hell.
A blast from a guard's Qi-bomb threw them apart. Li Wei hit a stone wall, his vision blurring. Through the haze of heat and ash, he saw a guard grab Li Mei by her hair. He saw her reaching out for him, her mouth moving in a silent scream of his name.
Then, the darkness of **Mo Ran** had descended. The Master hadn't saved him from the fire; he had merely harvested him from the ruins.
Back in the present, Li Wei's fingers trembled as he held Mo Ran's private ledger. This book was a catalog of misery, a record of every life the Master had stolen or "processed."
His eyes locked onto a hidden entry, written in a different ink.
**"Entry 3002: The Sister (Li Mei). Talent: Latent Shadow Affinity. Note: Transferred to the 'Red Tower' for Project: Void-Walker."**
Li Wei's heart, which he thought had turned to stone, gave a violent, painful thud.
She hadn't died in the fire. The Emperor hadn't just killed his family; he had recycled them. He had taken his "trash" daughter and turned her into a weapon for the same unit that killed her Mother.
"Chen," Li Wei said, his voice a low, terrifying hum. "The Emperor didn't just throw us away. He used us. He is still using her."
Xiao Chen looked at him. Her **Celestial Silk** nerves hummed in sympathy with his rage. "The Red Tower. It is the heart of the Shadow Guards."
"Then we will perform an open-heart surgery on the Empire," Li Wei said.
Li Wei reached into his satchel and pulled out a featureless white porcelain mask. It was smooth, cold, and inhuman.
"The Prince is dead. He died in the fire twelve years ago," he said, fitting the mask over his face. "The boy who cried for his mother is gone."
He adjusted his cloak, hiding the roll of Star-Iron scalpels and the stolen Spirit Root.
"From this day, I am not a son of the Qin. I am the **Jade Surgeon**. And the world is my operating table."
He activated his **Anatomical Sovereign** domain. The world shifted. The trees became skeletons; the wind became a flow of thermal energy.
Five miles East. Six heartbeats.
They were strong, rhythmic, and cold. Cultivators. Stage 2 and 3. The signature of the Shadow Guards.
"They are looking for survivors from the Pit's collapse," Li Wei whispered. "Let's give them what they're looking for."
The six Shadow Guards were resting by a campfire near a stream. They were professionals—assassins who moved like whispers.
But they were still biological machines. And every machine has a kill-switch.
Li Wei didn't use a sword. He didn't even use a spell.
He moved between the trees, his **Celestial Silk** allowing him to vibrate his body at a frequency that made him nearly invisible to the naked eye.
He deployed six microscopic threads of Silk into the air. They drifted like spiderwebs, guided by his Qi.
One by one, the threads landed on the back of the guards' necks, finding the microscopic gap between the **Atlas and Axis vertebrae**.
*Snip.*
The first five guards didn't even fall. They remained sitting, their eyes open, their bodies perfectly preserved. But their brains had been disconnected from their limbs in a microsecond.
They were "Locked-in." Conscious, but unable to blink, let alone scream.
The leader of the squad, a Stage 3 veteran named Captain Zhao, felt a sudden chill. He went to reach for his blade, but his hand didn't move. He tried to shout, but his tongue was a lead weight.
Li Wei stepped into the firelight. The white porcelain mask looked demonic in the flickering flames.
"Captain Zhao," Li Wei said, his voice flat and clinical. "You were at the Village of Fallen Petals twelve years ago. I recognize the vibration of your heartbeat. It has a slight murmur... a defect in the mitral valve. Likely from the stress of killing children."
Zhao's eyes bulged in terror. He tried to circulate his Qi to break the paralysis, but Li Wei's foot pressed down on his **Dantian** point.
"Don't," Li Wei warned. "If you force your Qi, I will let it leak into your nervous system. You will experience the sensation of your own nerves being boiled alive. It is quite a fascinating process to watch, but I imagine it is less than pleasant to endure."
Li Wei knelt down, the tip of a Star-Iron scalpel tracing the line of Zhao's jaw.
"Tell me about the **Red Tower**. Tell me about the girl with the Shadow Affinity."
Zhao's eyes darted frantically. He realized he wasn't facing a cultivator. He was facing a surgeon who knew how to dismantle a soul.
"The... Red Tower..." Zhao managed to hiss through paralyzed lips. "It's... it's not a prison. It's a factory. She... she is no longer your sister. She is the Emperor's Shadow."
Li Wei didn't flinch, but the Silk beneath his skin glowed a violent blue.
"Then I will have to perform a transplant," Li Wei whispered. "Starting with your information."
The Imperial Arc had begun. Not with a war cry, but with the cold, precise extraction of the truth.
**Target Count: 3,000 (Remaining: 2,994).**
**Current Status: Information Gathering / The Hunt Begins.**
***