With the group's departure, the small mountain village settled back into its usual, deep tranquility, the only sounds the rustle of bamboo leaves and the distant calls of birds. The local chieftain, a man far from virtuous who had built his power on intimidation and tribute, had learned his lesson the hard way and now maintained an unspoken, carefully observed truce with Su Min. They existed in a careful, mutual balance, two apex predators in a small territory, neither interfering with the other's affairs, a peace born not of friendship but of calculated respect for each other's capacity for violence.
Today, feeling the need for certain supplies she could not produce herself, she decided to venture into the city. The Kuntai Sect members had proven to be shockingly wealthy, leaving her with over a hundred taels of silver, which was far more than enough for her simple needs—salt, quality cloth, a few specific metal tools for her alchemy, and perhaps some spices to relieve the monotony of her diet. Weight was no concern for her, either. Although the game system had not granted her any special storage space, the spatial ring she possessed was truly a top-tier treasure, a beginner's item that defied the logic of this world.
Its internal storage measured one hundred units by one hundred units by one hundred units, a volume equivalent to a thirty-story residential building, vast and orderly. For Su Min's personal use, it was practically limitless, a pocket dimension at her command. Even better, time within the ring stood completely still, a perfect stasis field. An apple placed inside would remain as crisp and fresh a century later as the day it was stored, without a single brown spot.
She could spend every last tael without a single worry about spoilage or carrying capacity. The goods would not spoil, and the money itself meant little to her beyond its immediate utility; it was a means to an end, not a goal.
"I have not been here in years, and the city has changed a lot," Su Min murmured to herself, her voice barely a whisper. She now stood before the main, heavily weathered gates of Nanyao City, located in the southernmost region of the Great Wei Empire, a frontier settlement between the empire's control and the wild, untamed mountains. Years ago, during her desperate, heart-pounding flight south, she had passed through this very place, a fleeting shadow in the night.
Although she had stirred up quite a commotion in the northern parts of Great Wei—an army mobilized, a mountain burned, a general's grandson killed—it seemed to have had almost no ripple effect here in the distant south. Even the arrest warrants and bounty posters with her likeness, which she had expected to see plastered on every wall, had not reached this far, or if they had, they had been ignored or lost. When she entered the city today, she made a point to casually, unobtrusively check the public noticeboards at the gate and in the main square, but there were still none to be found.
Who knew whether the documents had been lost over the past two years, dismissed by local officials as irrelevant, or if they had never been delivered at all to this remote corner of the empire? Either way, Su Min did not care. The lack of her face on wanted posters was a convenience. She had dressed plainly for the trip, wearing slightly masculine, loose-fitting clothes of undyed hemp that hid her figure, and had tied her long hair into a simple, practical bun common to laborers, making it difficult for others to tell her gender at a casual glance.
"Boss, give me three jin of your roast meat, the fatty kind, and one jin of your strongest liquor," she said to a street vendor, her voice deliberately neutral, pitched low to avoid drawing attention.
Although Nanyao City sat at the empire's southern edge and faced constant, low-level pressure from the independent mountain tribes and local chieftains, it was not a grim, fortified military fortress. Instead, it had developed into a surprisingly bustling commercial hub, a place of exchange. After all, in this world, an unspoken rule seemed to hold: the more sparsely populated and wild a place, the richer and purer its spiritual energy tended to be.
Naturally, the surrounding mountains, teeming with this energy, produced an abundance of rare and potent medicinal herbs. While local doctors and shamans could not refine them into the potent, concentrated pills as Su Min could, even the raw materials, if of high enough quality, could be boiled into effective medicinal stews and tonics. Some herbs alone, simply chewed or brewed into tea, could nourish the body, invigorate the blood, or boost vitality.
The trade in these herbs yielded considerable profits for the merchants who dared to deal with the mountain folk. Villagers from the surrounding mountains often came to the city to sell their foraged herbs, rare woods, and animal pelts, and to buy salt, iron tools, and cloth. This constant flow of trade and barter was what fueled Nanyao's dusty, chaotic prosperity. But today, something was different... the usual commercial din was undercut by a new, desperate undertone.
"Why are there so many beggars?" Su Min muttered, more to herself than anyone, her brow furrowing slightly as she observed the scene.
She was now sitting in the second-floor dining hall of a modest, family-run tavern, where she had generously ordered a full spread of local dishes—a braised river fish, a stewed pork belly, a plate of wild greens, and a large bowl of rice. The food here was inexpensive, and a single tael of silver was more than enough to cover the feast. But as she looked down from the window at the crowded, muddy streets below, she frowned at the sight of so many destitute, hollow-eyed people huddled in doorways and under makeshift shelters.
"Oh, they are refugees from the north, miss," explained the young waiter politely as he wiped down her table with a damp cloth, his tone sympathetic.
"I heard that two years ago, a massive wildfire ravaged the northern provinces, and they say karma hit hard. Afterwards, rats swarmed everywhere, a black tide of them, eating up all the grain and crops in the fields and storehouses. Then came terrible floods in the spring and mudslides in the summer. After so many disasters hitting one after another like hammer blows, the entire north descended into chaos and famine. It is said the roads north are lined with bones."
"Oh?" Su Min responded lightly, taking a sip of her tea, though she already suspected it was not just a simple, unfortunate chain of natural disasters. That man surnamed Zhao had probably not understood the full, sinister extent of it either. This had the feel of a system breaking down, of a realm's fortune turning sour.
"These poor souls have been fleeing south ever since, a slow river of misery, trying to find any way to survive," the waiter continued, his voice dropping to a murmur. "But there is hardly any surplus grain left, even in the imperial granaries down here. Only those communities hiding deep in the southern mountains, who rely on hunting and foraging, have managed to barely survive the shortages. The northerners are not used to the water and soil down here, and they fear the poisonous miasma of the deep jungles, so they do not dare venture too far from the city walls into the truly wild lands."
"The lands just outside the city are not completely safe either," the waiter added, shaking his head with a look of resignation. "The local chieftains, who rule the foothills, are greedy beyond measure. Their taxes and 'protection' fees have long since bled the common folk dry. They take most of what little the refugees can scavenge or grow."
Su Min sneered inwardly at the mention of the chieftains. One such chieftain had once boldly demanded taxes from her and had even tried, in a drunken stupor, to claim her as his concubine. Naturally, she had taught him a very physical, memorable lesson in boundaries.
She had tied him to a tree, broken both his legs, used a basic healing pill to mend the bones, and then, once he could walk again, broken them a second time, repeating the cycle of agony and recovery until he spent an entire year either immobilized in bed or limping in terror at the sight of her. The message had been received.
No one had dared to stop her. Now, the local powers treated her like a vengeful mountain spirit they hoped to appease through avoidance. Incidentally, her medical skills had become locally famous precisely because of this brutal episode; no one else could heal broken bones so completely and quickly, a fact that inspired both awe and fear.
"Sigh."
The waiter shook his head again, his own worries surfacing. His family-owned tavern had survived the economic downturn only by luck and by avoiding the exorbitant rents charged in the more central, desirable parts of the city.
"Those beggars you see now survive by waiting for scraps and leftovers from restaurants and kitchens like ours. Most of them are too weak from hunger for hard labor, you see. Some of the stronger ones, the ones who still have some fight in them, go into the nearby foothills to gather firewood, dig for wild vegetables, and hunt for mushrooms. If they are very, very lucky, they might catch a wild rat or two for a meager mouthful of meat."
"But it is dangerous to leave the city walls nowadays. You would not believe the stories that come back..."
A patron at a nearby table, a man with a merchant's shrewd eyes and a traveler's worn boots, overhearing the conversation, leaned over and cut in, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and morbid excitement.
"Miss, you may not know this, being new here, but up north, in the abandoned lands near the old trade road..." The man leaned in dramatically, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper that was still easily heard by Su Min. "At night, the abandoned hills and old graveyards glow with strange, wandering lights, will-o'-the-wisps that lead men astray. Vendors selling food, sugar figures, and candied hawthorns suddenly appear out of the mist, their stalls lit by single, guttering lanterns. And if you are fool enough, or hungry enough, to look into their cooking pots..."
"What?" Su Min smiled slightly, a faint, knowing curve of her lips, already guessing the punchline of this common, universal ghost story. It was a tale as old as time, designed to scare children and the superstitious.
"Heads!" The man said eagerly, pleased to have a captive audience, especially a young woman. "They are steaming human heads in their buns, I tell you! Those big, bubbling soup pots you see? They are full of boiled human thigh bones, making a broth for the damned! And those red, glistening candied hawthorn skewers? They are all eyeballs on sticks, staring right back at you!"
"Enough of that!" The waiter snapped, shooting the man a sharp, warning look. "We are eating here. This is a place of business. One more word of that grisly nonsense, and you are out. I will not have you scaring off the other customers."
The man clicked his tongue in disappointment, giving up with a resigned shrug. He had wanted to see this young, pretty woman scream and panic, to enjoy the reaction, but her response was unusually, disappointingly calm.
It was natural, of course, since Su Min was from the modern world, saturated with fictional horrors. After years of watching gory horror films and then surviving in this genuinely chaotic and brutal cultivation world, she was utterly unfazed by a few campfire ghost stories. Reality was far stranger and more dangerous.
A few gruesome tales would not scare her. Even if she were thrown into one of those so-called ghost markets right now, she might feel a wave of disgust at the scene, but she would never feel afraid. She was the predator in any situation, not the prey.
"It seems this world is truly about to fall into chaos," Su Min thought to herself, ignoring the disappointed, slightly lecherous gazes from the men at the nearby table. She began planning her next steps internally, her mind cool and analytical. "The natural order is unraveling. The signs are everywhere—famine, strange phenomena, the emergence of cultivators and fiends. Once the treasure gourd ripens and I have the Qi Inducing Pill, I will need to travel, to see more of this changing world with my own eyes. Seclusion can only teach me so much."
As for the leering stares from the nearby tables, Su Min had not bothered to overly hide her appearance once seated. Anyone with half a brain could tell she was a woman, and a comely one at that, despite her plain clothes. A few men had already tried to make clumsy, suggestive comments or gestures, but unfortunately for them, that kind of cheap, mortal trickery had absolutely no effect on a cultivator of her strength and temperament.
Their words were like the buzzing of flies, easily ignored, and their intentions were as transparent as glass. They were beneath her notice, mere background noise in the symphony of a world descending into thrilling, dangerous change.