The cold wasn't in the air; it was in the marrow.
Zhuo Fan knelt on the obsidian tiles of the Great Black Sun Square, his knees aching from three hours of forced stillness. Around him, the wind howled through the jagged mountain peaks of the Heavenly Demon Cult, carrying the metallic scent of blood and incense. He didn't move. He didn't shiver.
Thirty years of surviving in the mud of the Great Border War taught you one thing: if you move when the predators are watching, you die.
Thirty years, he thought, his gaze fixed on a tiny crack in the stone. I spent thirty years as a human shield. A scout. A piece of meat thrown into the meat grinder because my meridians were 'shattered' and my mother was a woman who folded laundry.
He closed his eyes, and for a second, he saw the sky turning red. He felt the heat of the Forbidden Qi Bomb that had vaporized his squad—the last thing he had seen before the world turned white.
But when he opened his eyes, the white was gone. There was no fire. Only the familiar, suffocating shadows of the Cult's Academy.
He was fifteen again.
"Zhuo Fan."
The voice was like a blade dragged across stone. It came from the high dais, where the elders sat wrapped in furs and silk. At the very center, on a throne carved from the bone of a mountain titan, sat a man whose presence felt like a physical weight pressing down on everyone's lungs.
The Great Heavenly Demon. Zhuo Fan's father.
The man didn't look at him. He was looking at a scroll, his expression one of bored indifference. To the Lord of the Cult, Zhuo Fan wasn't a son; he was a clerical error. A biological byproduct of a night spent with a maidservant who had since passed away from overwork and heartbreak.
"The fifth son," the proctor announced, his voice echoing through the square where thousands of disciples stood in rigid formation. "Step forward for the Blood Induction."
Zhuo Fan stood. His legs were numb, but he moved with a strange, fluid grace that hadn't been there when he was fifteen the first time. In his first life, he had stumbled here. He had been trembling, his eyes wet with tears, begging for a scrap of recognition.
Now, his face was a mask of dead stone.
[System Initializing...]
[Syncing soul memories... 100%]
[Analyzing environment: Heavenly Demon Cult, Year of the Iron Serpent.]
A faint, translucent flicker appeared in his peripheral vision. It wasn't flashy. It didn't glow with the blinding light of a holy artifact. It looked like ink bleeding into water, a dark, subtle interface that only he could see.
[Host Status: Zhuo Fan]
[Condition: Shattered Meridians (Grade 9 Trauma)]
[Cultivation: None]
[Passive Skill: Akashic Eye (Active)]
[Archive: 1,402 Techniques recorded from the Border War (Locked: Insufficient Qi)]
Zhuo Fan walked toward the center of the square. Every step felt heavy. He could feel the gazes of his "brothers" burning into his back.
To his left stood Zhuo Tian, the First Son. Tall, golden-skinned, and radiating a terrifying aura of power. In the previous life, Zhuo Tian was the one who had signed the order to send Zhuo Fan's mother to the border laundry camps, knowing she wouldn't survive the winter.
To his right was the Seventh Disciple, a boy named Mo Rong. He was a distant cousin, a "genius" of the inner hall who spent his afternoons using Zhuo Fan as a living punching bag to test his Tiger-Rending Palm.
"Wait," Mo Rong called out, stepping forward with a smirk. He turned to the Elders and bowed. "Elders, why waste the time of the Great Lord? We all know the Fifth Son's meridians are like dried husks. The Blood Induction requires the candidate to circulate the Cult's core energy. If he tries, his veins will simply burst. It's messy. It's pathetic."
A few disciples chuckled. The sound was dry and cruel.
Mo Rong looked at Zhuo Fan, his eyes glinting with malice. "Fifth Brother, why don't you just kowtow three hundred times and ask to be sent to the kitchens now? At least you'll get to eat the scraps."
Zhuo Fan stopped walking. He turned his head slowly to look at Mo Rong.
In his first life, this moment had defined him. He had stayed silent, let the humiliation wash over him, and was eventually dragged away to the slave pits. He had spent years crawling in the dirt before being sent to the war.
Not this time.
"Mo Rong," Zhuo Fan said. His voice was quiet, but it carried a strange, cold resonance that silenced the chuckles. "You talk a lot for someone whose Qi is leaking from his lower dantian like a cracked pot."
The square went silent. Even the Elders shifted in their seats.
Mo Rong's face turned a deep, angry crimson. "What did you say, you piece of trash?"
"Your Tiger-Rending Palm," Zhuo Fan continued, his eyes turning a dull, hollow gray. The System blurred in his vision, overlaying a red skeletal map over Mo Rong's body. "You've been practicing the third form, haven't you? But you're impatient. You forced the circulation through your secondary veins because your primary ones couldn't handle the heat. Every time you strike, your left shoulder twitches three millimeters. It's not power. It's a nerve dying."
[Analyzing 'Tiger-Rending Palm' (Low-Tier Earth Grade)...]
[Flaws detected: 14.]
[Copying mechanics... Stored in Archive.]
Mo Rong roared, his pride shattered in front of the entire Academy. "I'll kill you!"
He didn't wait for the Elders to interfere. He lunged. His hand curved into a claw, a faint yellow glow of Qi gathering around his fingertips. It was a move designed to tear flesh from bone. To a normal fifteen-year-old, it was an unstoppable force of nature.
To Zhuo Fan, it was slow motion.
He didn't see a "Genius" attacking. He saw a messy, undisciplined amateur. He saw the same flaws he had seen in the thousands of corpses he had stepped over in the trenches of the Border War.
He's leading with his weight, Zhuo Fan thought. His center of gravity is too high. His Qi is concentrated at the tips, leaving his wrist unprotected.
Zhuo Fan didn't use Qi. He couldn't. His meridians were truly broken—fragile, jagged things that felt like glass in his chest. Instead, he used Physics. He used Intent.
As the claw reached his face, Zhuo Fan didn't retreat. He stepped forward, entering the eye of the storm. He pivoted his lead foot by exactly forty-five degrees, letting the claw graze the air an inch from his ear.
With his left hand, he didn't punch. He simply placed two fingers on Mo Rong's extended wrist.
It was a feather-light touch, but he timed it at the exact moment Mo Rong's momentum reached its peak.
[Applying Counter-Vibration...]
Crack.
The sound wasn't loud, but it was sickening. By redirecting Mo Rong's own forward force back into his locked elbow, Zhuo Fan had turned the bully's strength against him.
Mo Rong's arm didn't just bend; it buckled. But Zhuo Fan wasn't finished.
He stepped into Mo Rong's shadow, his palm striking the boy's chest. Again, there was no Qi. But the strike landed exactly where the "leaking pot" of Mo Rong's dantian was. He used the vibration of the impact to disrupt the flow of the bully's own internal energy.
"Gah—!"
Mo Rong flew backward, his feet skidding across the obsidian tiles. He hit the ground hard, gasping for air, his face pale as he clutched his shattered arm. His Qi, normally a steady flow, was now chaotic and wild, causing him to cough up a spray of dark blood.
Zhuo Fan stood in his original position. His clothes weren't even ruffled. He looked down at his own hand, then up at the Elders.
"Is the Blood Induction still happening?" he asked calmly. "Or was that my test?"
The silence that followed was heavy. The First Son, Zhuo Tian, had stood up, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword. The Elders were whispering frantically.
And for the first time in fifteen years, the man on the bone throne—the Great Heavenly Demon—leaned forward. His golden eyes narrowed, landing on Zhuo Fan with the weight of a mountain.
"You," the Great Lord said, his voice booming. "Where did you learn to strike like that? There was no Qi in that blow. It was pure... slaughterhouse efficiency."
Zhuo Fan bowed, his head low to hide the cold light in his eyes. "I spent my time in the library, Father. While others practiced how to look strong, I studied how things break."
It was a lie, but it was a plausible one.
"The boy is a freak," one Elder hissed. "He has no talent, yet he defeated a disciple with an established foundation? It's a fluke. A trick of the air."
"A trick that broke an Inner Hall disciple's arm," the Great Lord mused. He waved a hand dismissively. "Pass him through. He has no Qi, so he cannot enter the Martial Hall. Send him to the Scripture Pavillion as a caretaker. If he likes books so much, let him rot among them."
Zhuo Fan's heart gave a small, cold thump of satisfaction.
The Scripture Pavillion. The place where the Cult's most ancient, discarded, and "unusable" manuals were kept. To the rest of the world, it was a dead end for failures.
To a man with a Copy System and thirty years of war experience, it was an armory.
"Thank you, Father," Zhuo Fan said, his voice dripping with mock gratitude.
As he walked away from the center of the square, he passed Mo Rong, who was being carried away by medics. The boy was sobbing, his future as a martial artist likely ruined by the disruption to his dantian.
Zhuo Fan didn't feel pity. In the previous life, Mo Rong had been the one to break Zhuo Fan's legs before he was shipped to the border. This was just a small down payment on the debt the world owed him.
[Mission Complete: Survival of the Induction.]
[Reward: Initializing 'Manual Synthesis' Function.]
[Warning: Host meridians are at critical instability. Fix recommended within 180 days.]
I know, Zhuo Fan thought, looking up at the dark, jagged peaks of the Cult's mountain. Somewhere in those caves is the Marrow. But first... I need to see what's in that library.
He walked toward the shadows of the Academy, a "trash" son with a broken body and the mind of a war-god. The gears of the world had shifted, and though the Cult didn't know it yet, the predator they had spent thirty years creating had just come home.
He would fix his body. He would kill his brothers. And he would tear this system down, stone by stone.
But for today, he would just be a librarian.
The Scripture Pavilion was not the grand library Zhuo Fan remembered from the tall tales of the outer disciples. It was a tomb.
Located at the furthest edge of the Black Peak, the structure leaned against the jagged cliffside like a hunchbacked old man. The wood was black with rot, and the air surrounding it was thick with the scent of mold and drying ink. In the Heavenly Demon Cult, where power was everything, a library filled with "unusable" techniques was a monument to failure.
Zhuo Fan stood before the heavy iron-bound doors, the wind whistling through the cracks in the wood. Behind him, the life he had once lived—a life of cowering in the shadows of his brothers—was effectively dead.
"Enter," a raspy voice drifted from within.
Zhuo Fan pushed the doors open. Inside, rows upon rows of towering bookshelves stretched into the gloom, illuminated only by dim lanterns that flickered with a ghostly green light. Dust motes danced in the air like tiny insects.
At a small desk near the entrance sat a man so withered he looked like a specimen preserved in vinegar. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, and his skin was draped over his bones like parchment. This was Elder Han, the man the Cult had sent here to die of boredom thirty years ago.
"The fifth son," Han wheezed, not even looking up from a tattered scroll. "The one with the 'Broken Meridians.' They said you have a fondness for books. Or perhaps you simply have nowhere else to go."
"Both can be true, Elder," Zhuo Fan replied, his voice neutral.
The old man finally looked up, his milky eyes narrowing. He seemed to be looking for something—a spark of resentment, a tear of shame. He found neither. Zhuo Fan stood with his hands tucked into his sleeves, his posture as steady as a mountain.
"The keys are on the hook," Han said, pointing a gnarled finger toward the wall. "Your quarters are in the basement. You are responsible for dusting the shelves, organizing the returns, and ensuring the 'Forbidden Section' remains locked. Do not touch the scrolls on the third floor. They are 'Corrupted.' To read them is to invite madness."
"I understand."
"Go then. Your life is now paper and silence. Try not to die in the stacks; the smell of a rotting corpse is hard to get out of the books."
Zhuo Fan took the keys and walked deeper into the labyrinth of shelves. As soon as he was out of the Elder's sight, his eyes changed. The dull, subservient look vanished, replaced by the predatory coldness of the war-god.
[Akashic Eye: Passive Scanning Mode...]
[Environment: Low-Density Qi. High-Density Data.]
[Alert: Multiple High-Rank signatures detected in 'Corrupted' sector.]
Zhuo Fan smiled. In the Murim, a technique was labeled "Corrupted" for one of two reasons: either it was truly insane, or the requirements to learn it were so high that everyone who tried had ended up with their brain melting.
For someone with a System that could simulate the Qi flow before he even touched his own meridians, "Corrupted" just meant "Potent."
He spent the first few hours performing his duties with mechanical precision. He dusted, he stacked, and he memorized the layout. He noticed that the library was organized by rank: Mortal, Earth, and Heaven. But at the very back, hidden behind a heavy curtain of spiderwebs, was a section titled "The Rejected."
These were manuals written by geniuses who had failed, or by lunatics who had glimpsed the truth and lost their minds.
He reached out and pulled a scroll from the bottom shelf. It was bound in human skin, the leather cold to the touch. The title had been scratched out, but the System didn't need a title.
[Analyzing Manual...]
[Scanning Internal Logic...]
[Title: The Ghost-Step of the Damned.]
[Grade: Unknown (Incomplete).]
[Description: A movement technique that requires the user to 'stop' their heart for a split second to bypass the physical friction of air.]
Stop the heart? Zhuo Fan mused. No wonder they rejected it. A normal practitioner would just have a stroke.
But he kept reading. His mind, bolstered by the System, began to run simulations. He saw a spectral version of himself in his mind's eye, moving through the library. The "Ghost-Step" didn't actually stop the heart; it used a momentary burst of backward Qi-pressure to neutralize the body's inertia.
[Technique Recorded.]
[Syncing with Archive...]
"Not bad," he whispered. "But it lacks a finishing strike."
He spent the next three days in a fever of observation. During the day, he was the invisible librarian. At night, he was a ghost. He would sit in the center of the library, the System's light reflecting in his eyes as he "read" hundreds of books an hour.
He wasn't just copying; he was Synthesizing.
He took a "Basic Iron Skin" manual and merged it with a "Corrupted" technique called "The Stone-Womb Breath."
[Synthesis Complete.]
[New Technique: Obsidian Shell (Internal Variant).]
[Effect: Hardens the internal organs and the walls of the meridians against external shock.]
This is it, Zhuo Fan thought, his heart racing. This is the foundation I need before I can fix my meridians.
If he tried to fix his shattered channels now, the sudden influx of power would blow him apart like an overfilled balloon. He needed to make his "insides" tough enough to handle the repair.
On the seventh night, as he was deep in the forbidden stacks, he heard a faint sound.
Cling.
The sound of a metal buckle hitting stone.
Zhuo Fan vanished behind a bookshelf, his breathing becoming so shallow it was non-existent. He activated the Akashic Eye.
Through the gaps in the books, he saw a figure. It was a girl, perhaps sixteen, dressed in the dark blue silks of the Inner Hall. She was beautiful, with sharp, fox-like features and eyes that glowed with a faint, violet light.
Zhuo Yan. The Fourth Daughter. His half-sister.
Unlike the other brothers, Yan was quiet. She was a master of poisons and stealth. In the previous life, she had been the one to find the "Marrow" first, using it to become the Cult's Head of Assassins.
She was currently standing before a hidden wall panel, her fingers tracing the stones with practiced ease.
She's looking for the map, Zhuo Fan realized. The map to the Forbidden Zone.
In his first life, he hadn't known the map was hidden here. He had only heard rumors of it years later. He watched as she pressed a specific stone. A small drawer slid out, containing a cylinder of ancient jade.
She grabbed it, a small, triumphant smile playing on her lips.
"So," Zhuo Fan's voice drifted through the darkness, cold and dry as the dust on the shelves. "The 'Genius of Poisons' has to steal from the archives to find her path?"
Zhuo Yan spun around, a needle appearing in her hand instantly, glowing with a lethal green toxin. "Who's there?"
Zhuo Fan stepped out of the shadows. He didn't look like a master. He looked like a tired boy in a dirty robe, a feather duster still tucked into his belt.
"The librarian," he said.
Yan relaxed slightly when she saw it was him, but her eyes remained cold. "The fifth son. The trash. You should have stayed in your hole, little brother. Now I have to kill you."
"You could try," Zhuo Fan said, stepping forward. "But if you use that needle, the vibration will trigger the alarm bell hidden in the ceiling. Elder Han is old, but he's a Peak-Stage Master. He'll be here in three seconds. You'll be executed for stealing Forbidden Lore."
Yan paused, her eyes darting to the ceiling. She didn't see a bell, but the conviction in Zhuo Fan's voice stopped her.
"What do you want?" she hissed.
"The jade cylinder," Zhuo Fan said, holding out his hand. "Give it to me, and I'll tell you how to actually open it. If you try to force it, the self-destruct mechanism inside will melt your hands off."
"You're lying. You can't even cultivate. How would you know about the seals on a jade slip?"
"Because I've spent seven days reading the books you think are trash," Zhuo Fan said. He took a step closer, his eyes locking onto hers. "In the third row, ninth shelf, there is a diary of the architect who built this place. He was a paranoid man. He didn't like thieves."
[System: Target Heart-Rate Rising. Psychological pressure: 78%.]
Yan looked at the jade, then at him. She was a gambler by nature. She tossed the cylinder to him. "Prove it."
Zhuo Fan caught it. He didn't look at the seal. He didn't need to. The System had already scanned the structural integrity of the jade. He pressed three points on the cylinder in rapid succession, his fingers moving with the precision of a surgeon.
Click.
The jade glowed softly, and a holographic map of the mountain's interior projected into the air between them. It showed a path leading deep beneath the volcano, to a chamber glowing with a golden light.
The Marrow.
Yan's eyes widened. "You... you actually did it."
"The map is yours," Zhuo Fan said, closing the projection and handing the jade back. "But the path is guarded by a Blood-Ape. You can't kill it with poisons; it has no blood. You'll need a cold-steel blade and a strike that hits the soul."
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked, her suspicion returning. "What do you want in exchange?"
Zhuo Fan turned his back to her, walking back toward the shadows.
"I don't want anything," he said, his voice echoing. "I just want to see if a 'Genius' like you can survive where a 'Trash' like me is going to thrive."
He didn't tell her the truth: he had already copied the map. The System had recorded every coordinate, every trap, and every secret passage. He didn't need the jade. He just needed her to go first—to trigger the traps and distract the guards.
As he vanished into the stacks, he heard the faint sound of the library doors closing. She was gone.
[Mission Update: The Path to the Marrow is Open.]
[Current Objective: Synthesize 'Obsidian Shell' to 100% before the Full Moon.]
Zhuo Fan sat down in the darkness, surrounded by the wisdom of dead men. He closed his eyes, and his internal vision showed his shattered meridians—the jagged, broken canals of his soul.
"Soon," he whispered. "Soon, I won't be a librarian anymore."
In the silence of the tomb, the Fifth Son began to breathe. It was a slow, heavy rhythm—the rhythm of a stone heart starting to beat.