The world slowed to a crawl.
Feng Chen's newly awakened Sovereign Senses transformed reality into a canvas of perfect clarity. The five enforcers moved in what should have been coordinated simultaneity—Guo Han striking from the front, two flanking from the sides, and two more attacking from behind in a classic assassination formation. To a normal cultivator, the assault would have been overwhelming, impossible to track, lethal.
To Feng Chen, they might as well have been moving through honey.
He could see the *tension* in their muscles before they committed to strikes. Could perceive the flow of Qi gathering in their weapons, the spiritual energy coiling like springs about to release. Could read the micro-expressions on their faces—the determination, the fear masked by professional aggression, the uncertainty in the eyes of men who had suddenly realized their prey might be a predator.
The enforcer behind him—a scarred man with Body Tempering Layer 7 cultivation—thrust his spear toward the base of Feng Chen's skull. A killing blow, delivered with the precision of someone who had executed this technique a hundred times before.
Feng Chen tilted his head one inch to the left.
The spear blade passed so close to his skin that it disturbed a few strands of his hair, missing by a margin so impossibly narrow that the enforcer's eyes widened in disbelief. The man had committed his full weight to the strike, his Qi channeled into the thrust, and now he was overextended, vulnerable—
Feng Chen's hand moved with casual grace, grasping the spear shaft just below the blade.
The Dragon-Elephant Art flooded his grip with the strength of five juvenile elephants compressed into human fingers. The wood—spirit-treated ash that should have been able to withstand the blows of Foundation Establishment cultivators—*shrieked* as its molecular structure failed catastrophically.
The spear didn't just break. It *exploded*.
Wooden shrapnel burst outward in a lethal cloud, each splinter moving with the velocity of a crossbow bolt. The enforcer who had thrust the weapon had no time to retreat, no chance to defend. Dozens of wooden fragments—some as long as a finger, others mere needles—punched through his throat, his face, his eyes. His scream was cut off by the sudden rush of blood filling his windpipe.
He collapsed, dead before his body hit the ground.
Feng Chen hadn't even turned around.
"Formation!" Guo Han roared, his voice cracking with the first edges of panic. "Killing Formation! Now!"
The remaining four enforcers scattered and reformed, taking positions at the cardinal points around Feng Chen. Their weapons—three swords and Guo Han's spirit-forged blade—began to resonate with synchronized Qi, creating a web of spiritual energy designed to trap and slice anything caught within.
It was a technique meant for hunting spirit beasts two realms above the users' cultivation. Against a Body Tempering Layer 6 cultivator, it should have been overkill.
Feng Chen watched them with the detached interest of a natural philosopher observing insects.
"Kill him!" Guo Han screamed, and all four struck as one.
The formation collapsed inward like the jaws of a steel trap. Sword energy carved the air into geometric shapes of death, each blade aimed at a vital point—throat, heart, spine, skull. There was nowhere to dodge, no space to retreat.
Feng Chen raised his right hand, palm open, fingers splayed.
The Shattering Sword Intent *ignited*.
His palm didn't glow. Didn't radiate visible light or produce dramatic sound effects. But something fundamental changed in the space around his hand—a distortion so subtle it was almost invisible, like heat shimmer over summer stone, but carrying an implication of absolute destruction.
The first sword met his palm.
The blade—forged from spirit iron, inscribed with reinforcement formations, sharp enough to cut through granite—touched the center of Feng Chen's hand and simply *stopped*. Not deflected. Not blocked. *Stopped*, as though it had struck an invisible wall that existed at a level of reality beyond physical matter.
Then it began to disintegrate.
Starting at the point of contact, the sword transformed into metallic dust. The process moved up the blade with inexorable precision, erasing the weapon from existence one molecular layer at a time. The enforcer holding it stared in horror as his family heirloom—passed down through three generations—became glittering powder that dispersed on the night wind.
"Impos—" he began.
Feng Chen's other hand struck him in the chest.
The Shattering Intent didn't just break the man's ribs. It ignored them entirely, passing through bone as though it were mist, and detonated at a *conceptual* level inside his torso. His heart exploded. His lungs burst. His liver ruptured into fragments. Every major organ was simultaneously destroyed, yet his skin remained intact, unmarked save for the single palm print on his sternum.
He fell with blood pouring from every orifice, his body an intact sack containing only liquefied meat.
The remaining three enforcers stumbled backward, their formation shattered, their weapons raised in trembling hands.
"Monster," one whispered. "He's a *monster*."
Feng Chen turned to face them fully for the first time, and his expression was utterly calm. Almost bored, like a scholar interrupted from reading by the buzzing of particularly persistent flies.
"You came to kill me," he said, his voice carrying that heavy, oppressive weight that made breathing difficult. "Did you expect me to die quietly?"
Guo Han's face had gone the color of old ash. Sweat poured down his temples despite the cool night air. But he was a survivor, and survivors knew when to abandon pride in favor of life.
His sword clattered to the ground.
"Wait!" He dropped to his knees, hands raised in supplication. "Please! This was just a job, nothing personal! I—I can give you information! Lin Clan secrets! I know where they keep their treasures, I can tell you about Feng Wuji's cultivation technique, I can—"
"I can become your slave!" He was babbling now, all pretense of dignity abandoned. "A servant! I'll swear a Soul Oath, bind my life to yours, I'll do anything, just please—"
Feng Chen walked toward him.
Guo Han's two remaining subordinates broke and ran, crashing through the underbrush in blind terror. Feng Chen's Sovereign Senses tracked them—fifty meters, seventy-five, one hundred—and then they passed beyond his perception radius. He let them go. Terrified survivors would spread stories, and stories had their own utility.
But Guo Han...
Feng Chen placed his hand on the kneeling man's forehead.
"What are you—" Guo Han's words cut off as the Myriad-Dao Divine Crucible *activated*.
The sensation was unlike anything it had done before. When extracting beast essence, the process had been straightforward—identify the concentrated spiritual energy within the creature's body and pull it into the Crucible's dimensional space for refinement. But a human cultivator was different. Their cultivation wasn't just stored in blood or bones; it was woven into their entire existence, twenty years of meditation and effort compressed into meridians and dantian.
The Crucible reached into Guo Han's Sea of Consciousness and *ripped*.
The man's screams were inhuman, a sound of soul-deep violation that sent birds fleeing from trees half a mile away. Feng Chen watched impassively as glowing threads of spiritual energy were torn from Guo Han's body—crimson and gold strands that represented decades of cultivation—and drawn into the black vortex that opened in his palm.
**[ HUMAN ESSENCE DETECTED ]**
**[ ANALYZING... ]**
**[ ASSESSMENT: BODY TEMPERING LAYER 8 - LATE STAGE ]**
**[ EXTRACTION EFFICIENCY: 87% ]**
**[ CONVERTING TO REFINEABLE FORMAT... ]**
Guo Han's screams faded to whimpers, then to silence. His eyes, once sharp and calculating, became dull and empty. His cultivation—the foundation he'd built through two decades of blood and sweat—was simply *gone*, leaving behind a mortal shell that would likely die within the week, unable to sustain itself without the spiritual energy that had become integral to its function.
Feng Chen released him, and the empty husk that had been Guo Han toppled sideways into the dirt.
He moved to the other corpses with methodical efficiency, placing his palm on each one in turn. The Crucible extracted what remained of their cultivation essence—less from the dead than from the living, but still valuable—and added it to its reserves.
**[ HUMAN ESSENCE COLLECTED: 5 UNITS ]**
**[ BEAST BLOOD COUNT: 56/100 ]**
**[ NOTE: HUMAN CULTIVATION ESSENCE CATEGORIZED AS "SUPERIOR BEAST" CLASS ]**
**[ INITIATING REFINEMENT... ]**
The process took less than a minute. When it finished, five new items materialized in Feng Chen's awareness, stored within the Crucible's dimensional space. He withdrew one and examined it in the firelight.
The Human Origin Pill was the size of a cherry, its surface smooth as polished glass. But unlike the crimson vitality of the Blood-Qi Pills, this one held a ghostly luminescence—pale white shot through with veins of sickly green, like jade infected with decay. It pulsed with a faint rhythm, as though the essence of the cultivators who had died to create it still clung to some semblance of life.
**[ HUMAN ORIGIN PILL ]**
**[ GRADE: PERFECT ]**
**[ EFFECT: INSTANTLY ABSORB 20 YEARS OF CULTIVATION FOUNDATION. ADVANCE 1-2 MINOR REALMS DEPENDING ON CURRENT CULTIVATION. NO SIDE EFFECTS. ]**
Feng Chen held the pill between thumb and forefinger, studying it with clinical interest. There was power here—immense, condensed power that would take a normal cultivator decades to accumulate. And it was his for the cost of five lives that had been forfeit the moment they decided to hunt him.
He placed it back in storage. These were resources to be used strategically, not consumed on impulse.
The clearing had become a charnel house, but Feng Chen's work was not yet done.
---
The Earth-Core Dragon Cauldron sat exactly where he had left it, its soot-covered surface dull and lifeless in the firelight. To anyone observing, it would still appear to be nothing more than a piece of ancient junk, worthless salvage from a tomb that had yielded no greater treasures.
Feng Chen knew better.
He placed both hands on the cauldron's rim, and the Crucible's vision activated, showing him the artifact's true nature. Beneath the layers of accumulated grime and suppression seals, the cauldron *thrummed* with dormant power. But to awaken it—to unlock even a fraction of its capabilities—would require a catalyst.
Specifically, a spiritual flame.
His internal Qi could produce heat, could even manifest as fire in combat, but it lacked the fundamental properties needed to activate an artifact of this caliber. He needed something more refined, something that had already undergone its own cultivation evolution.
His gaze fell on the corpse of the Shadow Panther.
The Rank 2 beast had been dead for less than an hour, its body still containing significant residual spiritual energy. But Feng Chen's interest wasn't in the flesh or blood. The Crucible's analysis had identified something *within* the creature, a treasure that most cultivators would never discover because they lacked the vision to perceive it.
He carved open the Panther's chest with fingers enhanced by Shattering Intent, cutting through muscle and bone with surgical precision. The heart was massive, the size of both his fists combined, still warm and leaking dark blood that hissed when it touched the ground.
But nested within the heart's left ventricle, invisible to normal sight—
A flame.
It was tiny, barely larger than a candle flicker, and its color was wrong. Not the warm orange-red of natural fire, but a cold, flickering black that seemed to *absorb* light rather than emit it. A Yin-Shadow Flame Seed, born from centuries of the Panther cultivating in darkness, feeding on shadow Qi until its very essence had transformed.
**[ YIN-SHADOW FLAME SEED DETECTED ]**
**[ GRADE: SPIRITUAL FLAME (LOWEST TIER) ]**
**[ PROPERTIES: BURNS COLD. IDEAL FOR REFINING YIN-ATTRIBUTE MATERIALS. CAN EVOLVE THROUGH CONSUMPTION OF HIGHER-GRADE FLAMES. ]**
Feng Chen extracted the flame seed with careful precision, holding it in his cupped palms. It didn't burn his flesh—Yin flames operated on different principles than Yang fires, their "heat" manifesting as bone-deep cold that could freeze spiritual energy itself.
He brought the flame to the Earth-Core Dragon Cauldron and pressed it against the soot-covered surface.
The reaction was immediate and dramatic.
The flame seed was *pulled* into the cauldron, absorbed through the metal as though the artifact were drinking it. For a moment, nothing happened. Then—
*Crack.*
The sound was like ancient metal grinding against stone, a deep, resonant noise that vibrated through Feng Chen's bones. The soot covering the cauldron's surface began to peel away in sheets, falling to the ground as ash. Beneath the accumulated filth, the true surface emerged.
Dragon scales.
The entire cauldron was covered in them—thousands of interlocking scales, each one no larger than a fingernail, each one inscribed with formations so complex they hurt to look at directly. The scales were black, but they held depths of color that shifted as Feng Chen's viewing angle changed—midnight blue, deep purple, the iridescent green of a beetle's wing.
And from the cauldron's interior, the Yin-Shadow Flame burst to life.
It filled the vessel's bowl like liquid darkness, black fire that moved with eerie fluidity, licking at the air and leaving trails of frost in its wake. The light it cast—if it could be called light—made the surrounding forest seem darker by comparison, as though the flame was actively consuming the ambient illumination.
**[ EARTH-CORE DRAGON CAULDRON: AWAKENING 7% ]**
**[ YIN-SHADOW FLAME: INTEGRATED ]**
**[ ALCHEMY TIER UNLOCKED: TIER 1 (SPIRITUAL GRADE PILLS) ]**
**[ NEW FUNCTION AVAILABLE: CONCEPT EXTRACTION ]**
Feng Chen stared into the black flames, feeling their cold power resonating with the Crucible in his Sea of Consciousness. He had taken his first step into true alchemy—not the crude pill-making that any competent herbalist could manage, but the refinement of reality itself, the transformation of base materials into treasures that could defy heaven.
A presence registered at the edge of his Sovereign Senses.
One hundred meters away, on a ridge overlooking the clearing, a figure stood perfectly still. Their spiritual energy was suppressed to near-invisibility, their breathing controlled to the point of absence. But Sovereign Senses detected more than just physical presence—it read *intent*, and this observer's emotions were bleeding through their concealment like light through cracks in a wall.
Fear. Profound, bone-deep terror.
But also... calculation. Opportunity. The grinding of mental gears as someone tried to decide between multiple courses of action.
Feng Chen turned his head slowly, his golden eyes—reflecting the black flames of his cauldron—fixing on the exact spot where the hidden observer stood.
"Since you've seen the show," he said, his voice carrying across the hundred meters of forest with unnatural clarity, "leave your life, or leave your greeting."
On the ridge, Elder Shen Yao of the Heavenly Sword Sect felt his blood turn to ice.
He was a Core Formation Realm cultivator, an expert who could shatter mountains and part rivers. He had lived for two hundred years, had witnessed countless geniuses rise and fall, had seen wonders and horrors that would drive lesser men mad.
But he had never seen someone refine *humans* into pills.
He had never seen a Body Tempering cultivator kill five warriors two realms above him with the casual ease of swatting insects.
And he had never—*never*—been detected through his Void-Hidden Mantle by someone who should have been a mere mortal.
The boy in the clearing was either a devil cultivator of the highest order or something far more terrifying—an Ancient Sovereign, reborn into a young body, walking the world again with power that defied conventional understanding.
Either way, Elder Shen had two choices.
Report this to the Heavenly Sword Sect as an existential threat and watch them try to kill a monster that had just slaughtered five enforcers without breathing hard.
Or...
Elder Shen stepped out of concealment, his hands raised in the universal gesture of peace, and bowed deeply.
"This humble elder means no offense," he called out, his voice steady despite the terror clawing at his heart. "I am Shen Yao, representing the Heavenly Sword Sect. I have come... to extend an invitation."
In the clearing below, surrounded by corpses and black flames that ate the moonlight, Feng Chen smiled.
---
**[ Sovereign Status ]**
**Host:** Feng Chen
**Realm:** Body Tempering (Layer 7 - Early Stage)
**Physique Progress:** 56/100 (Human Essence integrated)
**Alchemy Tool:** Earth-Core Dragon Cauldron (Awakened: 7% - Tier 1)
**Internal Flame:** Yin-Shadow Flame (Seed Level)
**Loot:** 5x Human Origin Pills (Ready for consumption)
**Current Observation:** 1 High-Level Human (Sovereign Senses: Sensing "Fear" and "Hesitation")
**Status:** "The hunt continues. All paths lead to ascension."