The journey out of the Black Mist Forest was far slower than the way in. Yan Kesh had to stop every few hundred steps—not because of exhaustion, but because his body was undergoing a forced "recalibration."
Every time he drew a breath, an unfamiliar sensation bloomed in his chest.
Back when he was still a clan disciple, breathing with the Flowing Cloud Breathing Technique felt like inhaling warm, refreshing mist. Qi would enter his body, circulate through his meridians, and settle into his Soul Root as stored power.
Now, it felt like swallowing cold iron sand.
Yan Kesh found a concealed spot beneath the tangled roots of a massive banyan tree and sat down cross-legged to examine his condition. He turned his awareness inward.
What he saw made him fall silent.
Inside his dantian—the energy center below the navel—there should have been a Soul Root. For normal humans, it appeared as a crystalline sprout glowing with the color of their elemental affinity: red for fire, blue for water, green for wood.
Yan Kesh's had once been Ash White, a defective variant of the metal element—fragile and unstable. And back in Chapter One, the Grand Elder had shattered it into useless fragments.
But now, those fragments were gone.
In their place, something new had grown.
It was not a beautiful crystal. It looked like a charred stump of dead wood—dull gray, completely without luster. Its surface was rough, porous, and pitiful to behold.
If a normal Soul Root was a gemstone radiating light, this thing was a tiny black hole that absorbed it.
"Ugly," Yan Kesh commented honestly in his thoughts. There was no disappointment—only objective assessment.
He tried guiding a small amount of ambient Qi toward it.
Srrrtt.
The Qi entered—but it was not stored.
The dull gray stump did not retain energy at all. The moment Qi flowed in, it vanished, as if swallowed by another dimension.
"This container has no bottom," Yan Kesh analyzed swiftly.
"A normal Soul Root functions like a water jar. The larger the jar, the higher the cultivation realm."
"But mine… isn't a jar. It's a pipeline."
The implication struck him immediately—and it was terrifying.
Because he could not store Qi, his cultivation realm was zero. Forever.
He would never advance to Qi Refinement, never form a Core through conventional means—because there was no place to form one.
Technically, in the eyes of the cultivation world, he was an eternally crippled mortal. Irrecyclable trash.
But Yan Kesh viewed things through the lens of bookkeeping.
"Ordinary cultivators store wealth—Qi—inside their bodies. That makes them powerful, but it also makes them targets. When they die, their cultivation collapses."
"But me?"
"I own no assets. I only possess transactional access."
He conducted a small experiment. Focusing on the dull stump, he felt a faint connection snap into place—with The Audit, the ledger within his mind.
The gray stump was his pen.
His body was the paper.
And the external world was the ink.
Yan Kesh opened his eyes.
The way he perceived the world had subtly changed.
He did not see colorful auras like high-level cultivators. Instead, everything appeared in monochrome—black, white, and shades of gray.
The tree before him carried a sense of existential weight, a deep gray.
The grass beneath his feet felt like a lighter gray.
"The color of my Soul Root faded not because it is weak," Yan Kesh concluded.
"But because it is neutral. It favors neither fire nor water. It only answers to the Ledger."
He stood up and clenched his fist.
Physically, he was no stronger than a well-trained ordinary man. If struck by a martial artist, his ribs would still break.
Yet he felt more dangerous than ever before.
"The world will see me as a mortal with zero cultivation," he murmured, a faint smile curling his lips. "That's the perfect disguise. Who would be wary of a beggar with not a single coin to his name?"
When that beggar held the key to a national treasury.
Yan Kesh adjusted his tattered robe. His appearance was truly miserable—gaunt, dried blood on his skin, clothes torn and filthy.
"Status: Cultivation Zero.
Potential: Unlimited (payment pending)."
He stepped out of his hiding place. His goal was now clear: leave this forest and acquire his first capital.
And in a cruel world like this, the easiest capital to obtain was neither money nor spirit stones.
It was conflict.
From afar, his sharp ears caught the sound of clashing metal—the ring of blades colliding.
There were other humans in this forest.
Yan Kesh's pitch-black eyes turned toward the source of the sound. His gaze was not that of someone seeking help.
It was the gaze of a carrion bird that had just caught the scent of death.
"Let's see," he whispered softly.
"Whether this ledger can record someone else's debt."
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