Soon enough, the same men she had scared off earlier returned, but their demeanor was completely transformed, stripped of all aggression. This time, they approached her clearing with a hesitant, almost reverent politeness, carrying a simple wooden stretcher between them like a sacred palanquin. Their rusty blades were conspicuously absent, left behind to avoid any further misunderstanding.
"Young miss, honored healer, please, could you examine our sect leader?" the one who had spoken before asked, his voice low and respectful, his head slightly bowed.
They obediently presented a bamboo token, holding it out with both hands as if offering a tribute to a queen. How they had obtained it—through trade, threat, or favor—did not really interest her. She had already scanned the village and its surroundings from her mountain perch with her spiritual sense earlier and had sensed nothing spiritually unusual or powerful enough to be a threat.
"They probably just bought it from some hunter or farmer," she concluded silently. The origin of the token was irrelevant.
To her, these tokens were just a form of currency, a tangible promise of payment rendered for services to be received. As long as they were genuine, verified by the faint moonlight glow of her spiritual mark, she would honor the transaction. Business was business.
She glanced dispassionately at the pale, sweating man lying on the stretcher. "No missing limbs, no obvious gaping wounds, so this must be internal injuries then," she observed aloud, her tone matter-of-fact.
With that single, assessing glance, Su Min sensed his cultivation level at once. He was at the early stage of Body Refining, his spiritual energy a faint, flickering candle next to her own steady torch. This was not a simple illness caught from the elements. It was a wound, a violent disruption of his energy system, and a very peculiar one at that, feeling both fresh and deeply entrenched.
"Remove his robe," she instructed, moving to prepare a clean space on her porch.
"Yes, right away, Master!"
Still visibly shaken from their earlier encounter, the men moved with frantic efficiency, hastily but carefully stripping their leader to the waist, exposing his torso. Su Min stepped forward and, without ceremony, pressed a single, cool finger to the center of the man's back, between his shoulder blades. A surge of her own potent, late-stage spiritual energy followed the point of contact, flooding his weaker, damaged meridians with an undeniable, overwhelming force that brooked no resistance.
"Ugh!"
The middle-aged man, Zhao Yiping, had no time to register the touch before that foreign, powerful energy invaded his body, mapping his injuries with ruthless efficiency. Su Min was at the late stage of Body Refining, a full major stage above him. Her spiritual energy completely dwarfed his own, making his feel like a shallow pond compared to a deep lake. The sudden, stark realization of her immense strength left him both awed and terrified, completely at her mercy.
"Your name?" Su Min asked, her tone clinical, as if she were taking notes.
"Zhao... Zhao Yiping," he gasped out, the words strained.
"Cause of the injury?"
"An... an accident," he stammered, his eyes shifting nervously toward his men.
"Tell the truth," she said, her voice flat and uncompromising. "My finger is on your spine. I will know if you lie."
"Uh," he hesitated, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool mountain air.
"How am I supposed to prescribe the right medicine if you lie to me about the poison's origin? Your internal condition is critical. The energy is corrosive, eating you from the inside." She made the diagnosis sound like a minor inconvenience.
Withdrawing her hand, she sat down on a simple wooden stool across from him, her posture relaxed but her gaze sharp. His internal state genuinely puzzled her. He had five different conflicting energy strains warring inside him and seven serious meridian blockages. A mortal would have died instantly from any one of them. Yet his wounds showed clear signs of being recently inflicted, as if the damage was being renewed and amplified continuously, a poison that refused to settle.
"Sect Leader, this," one of his followers began, looking deeply worried about revealing too much.
"Enough. I will speak," Zhao Yiping interrupted, silencing them with a pained but firm look. This woman's strength far surpassed his own, and she held his life in her hands. More importantly, she clearly lived here in deliberate seclusion, far from the empire's politics and spies. Speaking the truth likely would not endanger them further here, while staying silent could mean a slow, agonizing death from his festering wounds.
"It began two years ago," he started, his voice gaining a little strength as he committed to the story. "The court, while hunting for some 'witch,' set the entire Minshan range ablaze. A monstrous act. But you see, in our beliefs, reckless burning on that scale, destroying a sacred mountain, invites heaven's wrath. It disrupts the natural order."
"..."
Su Min managed to suppress an eye roll with practiced ease. She knew this story intimately; she had been the one running through the inferno. But she kept her face a neutral mask, curious to hear about the events and consequences that had unfolded in the empire after her dramatic escape across the river.
"The fire itself caused no immediate harm to the surrounding lowlands. But the next autumn, as if the land itself was sickened, a terrible plague of rats emerged. They swarmed down from the scorched, lifeless mountains in uncountable numbers, devouring crops and grain stores faster than we could kill them. Several counties suffered complete harvest failure. Famine began to stalk the land."
"..."
She still showed no visible reaction, though internally she felt a grim satisfaction at the emperor's troubles. If the dog emperor had died in the ensuing chaos, she might have privately celebrated. But a rat plague and famine? This was nothing more than unfortunate, predictable collateral damage from his hubris.
"I cultivated in solitude at Kuntaishan for more than a decade, finally reaching this early stage of Body Refining two years ago," Zhao Yiping continued, a hint of pride in his weakened voice. "When I heard of the people's suffering, of the famine, I felt compelled to descend from the mountain to help. I am still of this world, after all. But the local officials and wealthy merchants, instead of aiding the relief effort, saw only opportunity. They hoarded what little grain remained and inflated prices until a peck of rice cost a family's entire savings. Millions starved in the streets while their warehouses bulged."
"Profit driven cruelty is not a rare thing," Su Min commented, unmoved. Such exploitation, the strong preying on the weak in times of crisis, had existed even in the modern, civilized world of her past life. "Did the court not send inspectors? Did the emperor not know?"
"The court?" Zhao Yiping let out a bitter, choked laugh that turned into a cough. "His Majesty had just acquired a new concubine, a woman of unearthly beauty. They reveled night and day in the palace, chasing the dream of immortality, deaf to the cries of his people. He ordered the realm's wealth—what little the people had left—seized to forge some grand 'Longevity Cauldron.' Relief? He raised taxes for the next decade to pay for his indulgences."
"Hmph."
Su Min could not help but let a soft, derisive sneer escape her lips. The pieces were falling into place with a familiar, almost tedious clarity.
A seductive consort corrupting a foolish emperor, leading to national suffering. It was the classic, tired plot of the first chapter's main storyline, playing out just as the game's lore had described.
"Outraged, I could not stand by. I took matters into my own hands and raided the granaries myself, distributing the grain to the people," Zhao Yiping confessed, a flicker of righteous fire in his eyes. "At first, it worked. No ordinary soldier or constable could stop me. But days later, as if summoned from the shadows, a fiend appeared. We fought, and though I managed to slay them in the end, this cursed wound is what remained." He gestured weakly to his chest.
"A fiend?" Su Min's interest was finally, genuinely piqued. This was new information, a deviation from the simple game narrative.
"Yes. Their cultivation felt... forcibly elevated. Unnatural, like a puppet on strings. Their techniques were vile, focused on poison and decay. I killed them, but not before they landed this single, lingering strike. It has been festering ever since, resisting all my attempts to purge it."
"Toxins," Su Min diagnosed aloud, nodding. "A rare, insidious corrosive type. It feeds on spiritual energy, using your own cultivation to sustain itself. In that case."
Turning, she walked back into her hut and retrieved a single, dark green pill, mottled like a serpent's skin, from a small, carefully labeled gourd. It pulsed with a gentle, cleansing energy.
"Take this. Now. Do not chew it. Then sit and circulate your energy to absorb it fully. It will guide the process."
[Detoxification Pills (Tier 1): Neutralizes most common poisons and low-level corrosive spiritual energies.]
"Thank you, Senior!"
Zhao Yiping took the pill without a moment's hesitation or question and swallowed it dry. The moment it touched his tongue, his body seemed to crave it, his meridians trembling with a deep, visceral response that confirmed its potency against the poison that plagued him. Closing his eyes, he began cycling his energy, slowly and carefully guiding the pill's cleansing effects through his damaged pathways.
Half an hour later
"Pah!"
Zhao Yiping's eyes flew open, wide with shock and relief, as he spat a mouthful of black, viscous, foul-smelling blood onto the packed earth before her porch. Where the blood struck the ground, it sizzled and smoked like a piece of meat dropped onto a hot grill, the grass withering instantly.
"Good. You have expelled a significant portion of the deep seated toxins," Su Min said, nodding approvingly at his noticeably improved complexion and the steadier, deeper rhythm of his breath. The grayish tinge had left his skin.
Before he could offer his profuse thanks, she pressed her hand to his back again, reassessing his internal condition with another, more delicate pulse of her spiritual energy, probing the roots of the damage.
"The bulk of the active, circulating poison is suppressed, but I can feel it has seeped into your marrow, clinging to the very foundation of your cultivation. It is rooted deep, like a weed that has taken hold. The Tier 1 pill can only manage the symptoms, not eradicate the source."
Her lips curled down in a slight, thoughtful frown.
"Senior, is there... a true cure?" Zhao Yiping asked, his initially hopeful expression beginning to crumple into despair.
"No true, instant cure exists for a poison specifically meant to be lethal and lingering," Su Min stated plainly, not sugarcoating the truth. "But my Detoxification Pills can eradicate it, given time and the correct potency. Unfortunately, the one I just gave you was only a Tier 1 pill. It is not strong enough to purge the poison from your bones and marrow. You would need a Tier 2 version, at minimum."
She maintained a neutral face, but her mind was racing, connecting the dots between his story, his position, and her own needs.
"Zhao Yiping... Jade Gate Sect's sect leader."
That sect was not some small, unknown group of bandits. Though formal, organized cultivation sects were a new phenomenon in this awakening world, spiritual energy had existed for millennia. Some isolated individuals, through sheer talent, luck, or discovery of ancient fragments, had learned to harness it on their own, gaining power far beyond mortal limits and gathering followers.
The Jade Gate Sect was known to house many such individuals, one of the first to emerge from the shadows.
And as she looked at the grateful but desperate sect leader before her, a man with resources, knowledge of the wider world, and a deep need for her unique services, Su Min began to form concrete plans for them. They could be very, very useful. A sect leader owed a life debt was a valuable asset indeed.