Pain.
It was a jagged, visceral agony, as if a rusted saw was being dragged rhythmically across the shattered meridians of his forearms.
Su Zhou opened his eyes. His vision was a blurred mosaic of viscous blood and black, putrid mud. He could hear the heavy, wet sound of labored breathing—his own—and the rhythmic squelch of heavy boots approaching through the mire.
"If you aren't dead, get the hell up. Don't play corpse here; it's bad luck for the rest of us!"
A iron-shod military boot, caked in dried dung and old gore, slammed into Su Zhou's ribs. A sickening crack echoed through his chest cavity. A broken rib pierced his lung, sending a violent spasm through his body. He coughed, spraying flecks of frothy, bright crimson into the stagnant puddle beneath him.
Su Zhou forced his head up, his neck muscles screaming in protest.
Standing over him was a man whose silhouette was defined by rolls of greasy fat spilling over a loose-fitting suit of black iron lamellar armor. This was Overseer Ma, the undisputed tyrant of the Cannon Fodder Camp. Ma looked down at Su Zhou not as a commander looks at a soldier, but as a butcher evaluates a piece of maggot-ridden meat that refused to rot quietly.
"Overseer Ma... Su Zhou's hands are ruined. He can't even grip a spoon, let alone a blade. Sending him out as bait... it doesn't fit the regulations, does it?"
A raspy, hesitant voice drifted from the side. Old Huang, a man whose face was a map of scars and whose left eye was a milky, sightless orb, shuffled forward. His gnarled hands were white-knuckled as he clutched a half-eaten piece of moldy black bread—his only ration for the day.
"Regulations?" Ma let out a bark of laughter, a sound like gravel grinding in a tin can. He spat a thick glob of yellow phlegm onto Old Huang's tattered boots. "The Black-scaled Panther in the Forbidden Forest hasn't tasted fresh meat in three days. If I don't deliver a 'bait' to draw it into the pitfall by sundown, the higher-ups will have my head. And if I don't have his head to give them, I'll take yours to fill the quota."
Ma turned his gaze back to Su Zhou, reaching into his belt and pulling out a pathetic excuse for a weapon. He dropped it into the mud.
It was a bamboo shortbow, its limbs cracked and gray with age, the string frayed into a dozen loose fibers. It looked as though a child's sneeze would snap it in half.
"Su Zhou, don't say I never gave you a chance. Take this bow and crawl into the woods. Lure the beast out, and you might live to see tomorrow. Fail, and you'll just be another pile of shit in the undergrowth."
The surrounding soldiers, men who had long ago traded their humanity for a few more days of survival, erupted into a low, cruel tittering. They knew the score. A man with shattered arms, a bow he couldn't pull, and a beast that could outrun a horse—this wasn't a mission. It was a death sentence.
Su Zhou didn't respond with a plea or a curse. He stared at the broken bow in the mud, his eyes uncannily clear, cold, and analytical.
As a transmigrator who had spent his previous life as a leading expert in cognitive science and behavioral logic, Su Zhou understood something these brutes did not: the world was not a chaotic mess of flesh and bone. It was a grand tapestry woven from fundamental laws, causal loops, and logical constants.
Even in this body—one he had occupied for only an hour since waking in this nightmare—he could feel the data beginning to stream.
Extension of forearms: Zero. Nerve damage: 48.3%. Muscle fiber density insufficient for a 30-pound draw...
He reached out with a trembling, bandage-wrapped hand. As his fingertips touched the damp wood of the bow, a high-pitched, crystalline ring vibrated through his skull.
BOOM.
The world lost its color. The muddy camp, the sneering faces of the soldiers, and the darkening sky dissolved into a monochrome grid of shifting vectors and glowing numerals.
This was his "Truth Vision"—the ultimate evolution of his cognitive prowess, fueled by the mysterious energy of this new world.
He no longer saw Overseer Ma as a man. He saw a structural mass of failing biological systems, a slow-moving cluster of high-probability errors. He didn't see a broken bow; he saw a map of "Stress Lines" and "Structural Collapse Points."
[Item: Damaged Bamboo Shortbow]
[Structural Weakness: 3 inches above the upper notch (Point of Catastrophic Failure)]
[Residual Value: Capable of one super-threshold discharge. Cost: Total structural disintegration.]
"Hey, cripple! You gone deaf as well as dumb?" Ma shouted, impatient. He delivered another kick, this one to Su Zhou's shoulder, sending him sprawling toward the tree line. "Get moving!"
Su Zhou used the momentum of the kick. Instead of resisting, he allowed his body to collapse and roll, dragging the broken bow with him. He vanished into the gloom of the Forbidden Forest without looking back.
Old Huang watched him disappear, letting out a long, shuddering breath. "Gods have mercy on that boy," he whispered.
But in the shadows of the ancient trees, Su Zhou's eyes were no longer those of a victim. They were as sharp and unyielding as a surgeon's scalpel.
The forest was a cathedral of rot.
Su Zhou leaned against the trunk of a decaying cedar, his breath shallow and controlled. He could feel the vibration in the earth before he heard the sound.
Thump. Thump.
A shadow drifted through the canopy above him, silent as a ghost.
The Black-scaled Panther. Three meters long, its body encased in bone-like scales that could turn a spear tip. It was the apex predator of this sector, a creature of pure, instinctive malice.
In the panther's eyes, the creature below was nothing but a snack—fragile, bleeding, and stationary.
Su Zhou didn't move to run. He didn't have the strength to outrun a housecat, let alone this monster.
Instead, his mind raced through millions of calculations per second.
Relative humidity: 82%. Wind speed: 2 knots from the north. Soil density: Low (root-heavy).
He reached into the mud with his twisted fingers and pulled out a single, half-broken arrow he had scavenged from the camp's waste pile. It was blunt, the fletching gone.
He didn't nock the arrow. He couldn't. Instead, he wedged the arrow into a natural fissure in the rotting cedar tree at a precise angle.
Angle: 37.5 degrees.
Depth: 3.2 inches.
Then, he did something that would have looked like madness to any observer. He turned his back to the tree. He sat on the ground, pressing the lower limb of the broken bow against the trunk and bracing the string against his feet.
He wasn't using his arms. He was using the entirety of his back and leg muscles—the only parts of his body still capable of generating force—to pull the bow into a grotesque, screeching arc.
Groan...
The wood screamed. The Truth Vision highlighted the bow in a blinding, pulsing red.
[Warning: Structural Collapse in 1.2 seconds.]
[Predator Impact Prediction: 0.8 seconds.]
[Causal Convergence: Locked.]
"Growl—!"
The panther launched. It was a black blur of muscle and scales, descending from the branch with its jaws wide, aiming for the 'bait's' neck.
In Su Zhou's vision, a crimson "Causality Line" stretched from the panther's left eye to the tip of the blunt arrow wedged in the tree.
Now.
Su Zhou didn't release the string. He purposely shifted his weight, forcing the bow to twist against the irregular surface of the tree.
CRACK!
The bow didn't fire an arrow. It shattered.
But it shattered exactly where Su Zhou's logic had dictated. The stored kinetic energy didn't dissipate; it exploded outward, hitting the structural weak point of the cedar tree's rotting limb.
The heavy branch, under immense tension, snapped like a giant spring. It swung downward with the force of a falling hammer, striking the rear of the wedged arrow.
It was a mechanical lever, a transfer of energy that bypassed the limitations of Su Zhou's broken body.
The blunt arrow, propelled by the weight of a half-ton falling tree limb, became a bolt of lightning.
SHLUCK!
The sound was wet and definitive.
The panther could not maneuver in mid-air. It watched, with predatory confusion, as a piece of refuse wood intercepted its trajectory. The arrow didn't just hit the eye; it used the panther's own downward momentum to drive itself through the orbital socket and deep into the brain stem.
The beast slammed into the mud at Su Zhou's feet. Its massive body convulsed once, its claws digging deep furrows into the earth, before its golden eyes dimmed into glass.
The forest returned to its deathly silence.
Su Zhou didn't cheer. He didn't tremble. He simply let go of the jagged shards of the broken bow, his fingers raw and bleeding. He looked at the corpse of the monster, then at his own trembling, ruined arms.
"Logic," he whispered, his voice like dry parchment. "It seems even a god can be killed, if you find the right variable to strike."
He stood up, his legs shaking from the effort. He didn't leave the carcass. He reached down, and with agonizing slowness, began to drag the three-hundred-pound beast by its tail back toward the camp.
When the silhouette of the Cannon Fodder Camp appeared through the mist, the sentries stopped their talking. The laughter died in their throats.
Overseer Ma was leaning against a fence, tilting a flask of cheap wine into his mouth, boasting about how much he'd make from the "missing soldier" paperwork.
He froze as the gates groaned open.
A figure emerged from the treeline. It was a man drenched in black blood, his arms hanging limp and useless at his sides, his chest heaving with every ragged breath. And behind him, trailing a long, dark smear through the mud, was the head of the Black-scaled Panther.
Su Zhou stopped ten paces from Ma. He looked up, his face a mask of dried blood and cold, terrifying intelligence. He bared his teeth in a grin that held no warmth.
"Overseer Ma," Su Zhou rasped, dropping the panther's tail. "The beast is fed. It asked me... to bring you its regards."
The wine flask slipped from Ma's hand, shattering on the stones. For the first time in ten years, the butcher felt the cold touch of a predator's gaze.