The man in the lead had a scar that cut completely through his left eyebrow, but Li Hao was mostly focused on the fact that the man smelled heavily of old garlic and wet wool.
It was a deeply unglamorous smell for someone who was presumably about to murder him.
"Four thousand," the scarred man said. He didn't bother adding 'spirit stones'. He didn't draw the heavy, serrated ring-blade resting against his hip, but he kept his thumb hooked casually over the crossguard. The Foundation Establishment aura rolling off him didn't feel like majestic spiritual pressure; it just felt like the air in the courtyard had suddenly become too thick to breathe.
Li Hao stood in the center of the cracked stones. His dark silk robes hung perfectly still. He didn't have any Qi. He didn't have a weapon. He had a caffeine headache that was slowly migrating to the base of his neck.
"You'll have the full amount in one month," Li Hao said.
Wei Liang's inherited baritone did most of the heavy lifting. It came out sounding bored, carrying the effortless, aristocratic weight of a man who found this entire conversation slightly insulting.
Scar-brow stopped walking. The four Qi Gathering thugs behind him shifted, their leather boots scuffing against the dirt.
"A month," Scar-brow repeated. A slow, ugly grin stretched the scar tissue. "Azure Void is a graveyard, Sect Master Wei. You have a crying fat kid and a mountain of rotting wood. I don't give extensions to ghosts. Show me the collateral, or I'm taking the first thousand out of your legs."
Li Hao kept his eyes locked on the space just above the man's right shoulder.
If I step back, I'm dead, Li Hao's brain supplied, remarkably unhelpful in its clarity. If I blink too fast, I'm dead. The xianxia novels always say the protagonist exerts 'killing intent.' How do you fake killing intent? Do I just look really annoyed?
Li Hao lowered his chin a fraction of an inch. He let the temperature of his gaze drop to absolute zero.
"Leave a receipt on the gate," Li Hao said quietly. "And step off my mountain."
Scar-brow's grin vanished. The thick air in the courtyard suddenly snapped tight. The man's knuckles went white around the hilt of his ring-blade. He took a heavy, aggressive step forward, opening his mouth to shout—
Directly above them, the rotting wood of the second-floor balcony simply ceased to exist.
CRACK.
It wasn't a heroic sound. It sounded like a massive tree splintering under the weight of a truck.
Four hundred pounds of solid, oxidized bronze plummeted from the sky.
The ancient ceremonial cauldron hit the stone pathway exactly six feet between Li Hao and the debt collectors. The impact didn't just rattle the ground; it punched the breath straight out of Li Hao's lungs.
The bronze was centuries old, completely saturated with stale, highly compressed ancestral Qi. The physical fracture of the metal cracked the seal.
It detonated.
A hurricane of pulverized stone, centuries of gray ash, and concussive force exploded outward in a radial shockwave.
Li Hao didn't flinch. He didn't raise his arms to protect his face. He stood completely, absolutely still as the shockwave washed over him, whipping his dark robes into a violent frenzy and coating his hair in fine gray dust.
He didn't stand still out of profound composure. He stood still because his knees had literally locked together in a spasm of pure, unadulterated primate terror, and his nervous system had flat-line crashed.
When the dirt finally settled, Li Hao blinked. The ash tasted like copper.
Scar-brow was on his knees, coughing violently, his heavy iron ring-blade blown thirty feet into the weeds. The four enforcers were flat on their backs, scrambling backward in the dirt like frightened crabs, their eyes wide with panic.
They looked at the smoking crater. Then they slowly, jerkily, looked up at Li Hao.
Li Hao was in the exact same spot. Hands still clasped loosely behind his back. Expression completely dead. To men who understood the world purely through violence, he looked like a supreme, unfathomable god of war who had just casually dropped a spatial bomb using nothing but his mind, perfectly calculating the blast radius to disarm them without dirtying his own sleeves.
"One month," Li Hao repeated. He couldn't hear his own voice. His ears were ringing a high, continuous pitch.
Scar-brow swallowed hard. The Adam's apple bobbed in his thick throat. He didn't reach for his sword.
"One month," the collector choked out. His voice cracked.
He scrambled up, grabbed the nearest enforcer by the collar, and dragged him backward. The five of them practically sprinted down the mountain path, kicking up fresh dust, not a single one looking back.
Li Hao watched them until they disappeared past the treeline.
Then his locked knees gave out entirely.
He caught himself against the edge of the smoking bronze cauldron, his breath hitching as he sucked in air. The metal was burning hot against his palms.
"That," Old Geezer's voice vibrated against the inside of his skull, drenched in an ancient, profound exhaustion, "was the most pathetic, undignified display of survival I have ever witnessed in three millennia."
"They left," Li Hao wheezed, his chest heaving. "It worked."
"You survived through structural rot and gravitational luck. You are a clown wearing a tiger's skin."
"Master!"
A wail echoed from above. Li Hao looked up, squinting through the dust.
Zhou Bao's round face was poking through the shattered, jagged teeth of the second-floor balcony. The boy was covered head-to-toe in centuries of grime.
"Master, I am so sorry!" Zhou Bao sobbed, tears cutting clean lines through the ash on his cheeks. "I was trying to clean the upper shrine, but the floorboard snapped and the cauldron was tilted and I—I dropped it!"
Li Hao stared up at the crying teenager.
He tripped, Li Hao realized, the sheer, hysterical absurdity of it hitting him all at once. The greatest intimidation tactic in the history of the Azure Void Sect, and it happened because a fat kid tripped over a rotten floorboard.
"Come down here, Zhou Bao," Li Hao said, forcing the aristocratic baritone back into his throat before he started laughing like a madman. "We have work to do."
They spent the afternoon cataloging the ruins of the main hall's lower levels. It was depressing, filthy work. The sect didn't hold hidden treasures. It held rusted hinges, moth-eaten tapestries, and the smell of wet rot.
Li Hao was sorting through a chest of cracked inkstones when Zhou Bao paused. The boy reached into a pile of splintered furniture and pulled out a tarnished silver medallion.
Zhou Bao stopped moving. He rubbed the dirt off the metal with a thick, callused thumb.
"Brother Chen Tian's," Zhou Bao muttered.
Li Hao paused. Chen Tian. The name surfaced from the fragmented mess of Wei Liang's memories. A disciple roughly Zhou Bao's age. He had left two months ago when the food ran out.
"He forgot it when he packed," Zhou Bao said quietly. He tossed the medallion onto the 'junk' pile. He didn't look at Li Hao. "There were three of us left after the disaster. The other two left when the grain silos went empty. They said staying was just waiting to die."
"Why didn't you leave?" Li Hao asked.
Zhou Bao wiped his nose with the back of a filthy sleeve. "I don't have anywhere to go. They had families in the capital. My parents sold me to the outer sect when I was six. I don't know the road back."
He didn't say it for pity. He just stated a bleak, ugly fact of the world.
Li Hao looked at the boy. Li Hao had been treating this transmigration like a video game—a puzzle to survive. But for Zhou Bao, this pile of rotting wood wasn't a game. It was the only roof he had ever known.
Li Hao didn't offer a comforting platitude. He picked up a bundle of rusted training swords and shoved them into Zhou Bao's chest.
"Put these in the courtyard," Li Hao said, his voice dropping the cold sect-master edge just a fraction. "I'm going to check the vault."
The underground vault was located beneath the ancestral shrine. Li Hao carried a flickering oil lantern down the damp, uneven stone steps. The air grew significantly colder as he descended, smelling heavily of preserved bitter herbs and old parchment.
"The vault is sealed," Old Geezer noted in his mind. "Bloodline locks. Your predecessor prepared it well."
"Will it open for me?"
"You wear his skin. Put your hand on the stone."
Li Hao reached the bottom of the stairs. He pressed his palm against the heavy stone door. The half-healed cut on his hand flared with a sudden, sharp heat. Deep within the rock, heavy mechanisms ground together. The door slid open, raining a curtain of ancient dust onto his shoulders.
Inside, on a central stone pedestal, lay a stack of three jade slips. They pulsed with a faint, rhythmic blue light.
Li Hao stepped into the room. He reached out toward the pedestal—
The light in the vault vanished.
Not just the blue pulse of the jade. The ambient gray light bleeding down the stairwell from the ruined roof above simply ceased to exist.
A shadow had passed over the mountain.
It wasn't a cloud. The hairs on Li Hao's forearms stood straight up. A heavy, oppressive pressure slammed down onto his shoulders, making his knees buckle slightly. The air tasted like static electricity.
The constant, simmering arrogance of Old Geezer's voice vanished instantly from Li Hao's mind.
"Do not move," the ancient god whispered.
It was an order born of absolute, primal terror.
"What is it?" Li Hao mouthed, not daring to push actual breath past his vocal cords.
The pressure above them moved slowly. It felt like standing at the bottom of the ocean while a leviathan swam overhead. It felt like a massive, unseen eye dragging its gaze across the dirt, the stones, the broken tiles of the courtyard above.
"A Heavenly Dao monitoring formation," Old Geezer said. His voice sounded impossibly old, stripped of all its grand titles. "It is circling the perimeter. Looking for the signature of the Soul Bond array."
The shadow hung there. Ten agonizing seconds. Li Hao didn't breathe. His lungs burned.
Then, slowly, the suffocating weight slid past the mountain peak. The thin, gray light from the stairwell returned.
Li Hao collapsed against the stone pedestal, gasping for air. Both of his hands were shaking violently now.
"You said we had a month," Li Hao whispered into the damp dark.
"I said a divine executioner would arrive within a month," Old Geezer corrected grimly. "The monitoring formations are the bureaucratic hounds. They catch the scent first."
Li Hao stared at the glowing blue jade slips on the pedestal. The silence in the underground vault felt heavier than before.
"It found us faster than I expected, boy," Old Geezer said softly.
Li Hao didn't answer. He just watched his own hand trembling over the stone.