Chapter 2: The Art of Being an Ant
The door to the shack closed with a pathetic, splintering creak. Wei Chen slid the rusted iron bolt into place, though he knew it wouldn't stop anyone above Qi Refining Stage 2 from simply kicking the rotting wood into kindling. It was a psychological barrier, nothing more.
He stood in the center of the cramped, dim room, the silence of isolation washing over him. The stench of his own dried blood still clung to the floorboards, a grim reminder of the body's original owner and the catastrophic qi deviation that had ended his unremarkable life.
Wei Chen exhaled a long, measured breath. He closed his eyes and sank into a cross-legged position on the moldy straw bedroll.
Two years and four months, he thought, the numbers glowing like a beacon in his mind. Eight hundred and fifty days. Give or take.
To a mortal, two years was a significant chunk of time. It was enough time to fall in love, to build a house, to start a family, or to die of a wasting disease. To a cultivator, two years was a single closed-door meditation session. It was the time it took to refine a single batch of mid-grade pills.
To an immortal, it was a fraction of a fraction of a second.
Yet, Wei Chen did not let the intoxicating concept of immortality cloud his judgment. Immortality was his hidden truth, but his current reality was that of a fragile, destitute loose cultivator trapped at the bottom of the food chain. He could regenerate from a severed limb, yes, but could he regenerate if a Foundation Establishment expert burned his body to ash with a flick of a talisman? Could he regenerate if a demonic cultivator trapped his soul in a soul-refining banner, subjecting him to eternal torment without ever technically killing him?
He didn't know the absolute limits of The Binding Ledger of Myriad Returns, and he had zero intention of finding out.
"First order of business," Wei Chen whispered to the empty room. "Stabilize."
He closed his eyes and guided his awareness inward, seeking the pale blue vortex of his dantian. The original Wei Chen's memories provided the necessary framework: the Azure Breath Mantra, a universally available, trash-tier cultivation technique sold for half a spirit stone in any mortal city. It was incredibly inefficient, pulling in spiritual energy at a glacial pace and losing half of it through the pores before it could even reach the meridians.
Wei Chen began to cycle the mantra.
Instantly, he felt a faint, cool sensation in the air around him. It was spiritual qi, sparse and polluted by the smog of the Azure Cloud Sect's massive refinement furnaces miles away. He drew it in through his nose, guiding it down his throat, into his chest, and through the primary meridians of his arms and legs.
The process was agonizingly slow. The qi was sluggish, like trying to suck thick mud through a thin straw. As it traveled through his pathways, it scraped against the spiritual impurities left behind by the body's previous diet of cheap Bigu pills and unfiltered water.
When the qi finally reached his dantian, the pale blue vortex spun sluggishly, absorbing a minuscule fraction of the energy.
Wei Chen opened his eyes after an hour. He wiped a thin layer of grey, foul-smelling sweat from his forehead.
Incredible, he thought dryly. If I cultivate diligently for twelve hours a day, every day, without stopping to eat or sleep, I might break through to Qi Refining Stage 5 in about forty years.
He chuckled, a dry, rasping sound. It didn't matter. He didn't need to cultivate. In fact, cultivating too fast would ruin his cover. When Old Man Fang died, Wei Chen would instantly receive the old man's entire lifetime of cultivation. He would jump from Stage 4 to Stage 9 in the blink of an eye.
Wait. That's a problem.
Wei Chen frowned, his analytical mind snapping into focus. If he suddenly jumped five minor realms overnight, the neighbors would notice. The local enforcers would notice. In the cultivation world, a sudden spike in power meant one of three things: a miraculous heavenly encounter, possession by an ancient soul, or the consumption of a forbidden demonic treasure. All three scenarios ended with the cultivator being hunted down and dissected by stronger experts greedy for the secret.
"I need a cover story," he muttered, pacing the small room. "I need a reason for my sudden rise in power when the time comes."
He stopped and looked at the cracked iron sword leaning against the wall. Then, he looked at his hands.
"Old Man Fang is a talisman crafter," Wei Chen reasoned. "When he dies, I will inherit his knowledge. But if I suddenly start drawing perfect talismans after being a useless scavenger my whole life, I'll be dragged to the Azure Cloud Sect's interrogation halls."
The solution was simple, tedious, and perfectly suited to his new philosophy.
He had to become Old Man Fang's unofficial, unacknowledged shadow. He had to spend the next two years visibly orbiting the old man, acting like a desperate junior trying to steal glimpses of the talisman craft. He had to fail publicly, ask stupid questions, and make everyone in the Black Ash Market believe that he was obsessed with learning the trade.
Then, when the old man passed away, Wei Chen's "sudden" breakthrough could be passed off as a profound epiphany born of years of observation and grief over his senior's passing. It was a flimsy excuse, but in the slums of the outer market, flimsy was often good enough, provided you didn't threaten anyone's bottom line.
The Economy of Ants
The next morning, Wei Chen began his routine.
Survival in the Black Ash Market required a delicate balance of income and invisibility. Rent for his rotting shack was two low-grade spirit stones a month, payable to the Black Dog Gang, a group of vicious thugs who acted as the slum's de facto landlords. Food—or rather, the foul-tasting Bigu pills that prevented starvation—cost one spirit stone for a bottle of three, which lasted roughly a week if stretched.
With his savings of sixteen spirit stones, he had a buffer of maybe three months. He needed an income.
The original Wei Chen had made his living scavenging in the Ash-Wood Forest, a treacherous stretch of corrupted woodland bordering the market. It was teeming with low-level demonic beasts and, worse, other desperate cultivators willing to murder for a handful of Spirit-Thread Grass.
Wei Chen strapped the cracked iron sword to his back, pulled his hood low, and joined the early morning exodus of scavengers leaving the market.
The Ash-Wood Forest lived up to its name. The trees were twisted, bark black as pitch, their leaves a sickly, pale grey that crumbled to dust when touched. The air was thick with a damp, rotting mist that limited visibility to barely thirty paces.
Wei Chen did not venture deep. While other scavengers rushed forward, eyes burning with greed for valuable herbs or beast cores, Wei Chen stayed perfectly within the "Safe Zone"—the outermost two-mile ring of the forest that had been picked clean for centuries.
He moved slowly, his posture hunched, his eyes scanning the muddy ground. He wasn't looking for treasures. He was looking for scraps.
After three hours of meticulous searching, he found it: a patch of Gloom-Shroom, a low-tier fungus that grew on the rotting corpses of ordinary animals. It contained a negligible amount of spiritual qi, but it could be sold to the market alchemists to use as a stabilizing base for the absolute cheapest healing pastes.
He knelt in the mud and carefully harvested the grey, slimy mushrooms, placing them in a woven basket.
"Hey! Trash!"
Wei Chen froze. He slowly turned his head.
Three cultivators emerged from the mist. They wore matching leather armor, their faces smeared with dirt and arrogance. The leader, a man with a jagged scar across his nose, held a bleeding, decapitated low-level demonic wolf by the hind legs. He was at Qi Refining Stage 6.
"That's our patch, Wei," the scarred man sneered, dropping the wolf and taking a step forward. "We marked this territory last week. Hand over the basket."
Wei Chen's mind raced. He was immortal. He could easily let this man stab him, feign death, and then slit the man's throat when he turned his back. He had the element of absolute surprise.
But then what? The man had two friends. He would have to kill them too. That would mean hiding three bodies. It would mean dealing with the fallout if this gang belonged to a larger faction. It would mean drawing attention.
Stay low. Stay hidden.
Wei Chen instantly hunched his shoulders, trembling violently. He dropped his eyes to the mud, refusing to make eye contact.
"S-Senior Lu," Wei Chen stammered, pitching his voice perfectly to convey terror and submission. "I... I didn't know. The mist is thick today. I couldn't see the markers. Please, forgive this junior's blind eyes."
He took the woven basket, which contained three hours of agonizing, back-breaking work, and held it out with trembling hands.
Lu snatched the basket, sneering in disgust. He looked at the meager handful of Gloom-Shrooms and spat on the ground near Wei Chen's boots.
"Pathetic," Lu scoffed. "Thirty years old and still digging in the mud for pig feed. Get out of my sight before I decide to test my sword on your neck."
"Thank you, Senior Lu! Thank you for your mercy!" Wei Chen bowed repeatedly, taking quick, stumbling steps backward before turning and scurrying away into the mist, playing the role of the fleeing coward flawlessly.
Once he was out of sight, behind a thick cluster of dead trees, Wei Chen stopped. He leaned against a trunk, his trembling ceasing instantly. His heart rate, which he had artificially elevated, returned to a slow, calm rhythm.
He looked back in the direction of Lu and his cronies.
Qi Refining Stage 6. Scavengers. Violent. Unpredictable.
Wei Chen mentally opened The Binding Ledger. He had no intention of binding Lu—he was saving his slot for Old Man Fang—but he used the system's scanning function to observe the man's lifespan.
A ghostly text hovered in his vision.
[Target: Lu Ming]
[Lifespan Remaining: 4 Days, 12 Hours]
Wei Chen raised an eyebrow. Four days? He almost laughed. Lu was destined to die violently before the week was out, likely biting off more than he could chew deeper in the forest, or perhaps betrayed by those very friends standing behind him.
"Keep the mushrooms, Lu," Wei Chen whispered to the mist. "You'll need the extra copper to pay the ferryman."
He turned and continued walking along the perimeter, completely unfazed by the loss. He spent another four hours finding a few more scraps of herbs, just enough to earn half a spirit stone when he returned to the market. It was a net loss for the day, but he had successfully reinforced his identity as a harmless, pathetic coward.
That was worth a hundred spirit stones.
The Good Neighbor
As the sun began to set, casting long, bloody shadows across the smog-choked sky, Wei Chen returned to the Black Ash Market.
He sold his meager harvest, bought a small packet of the absolute cheapest, lowest-grade spiritual tea leaves, and made his way to Crafter's Alley.
Old Man Fang was exactly where he had been yesterday, hunched over his wooden plank, drawing talismans in the fading light. His cough was wet and rattling, echoing off the wooden walls of the nearby stalls.
Wei Chen approached quietly. He didn't speak. He simply pulled a small, battered clay pot from his robes, placed a pinch of the cheap tea leaves inside, and used a tiny burst of his own qi to heat the water he had drawn from the communal well.
He poured the steaming, fragrant liquid into a chipped wooden cup and set it gently on the edge of Fang's table.
Old Man Fang paused his brushstroke. He looked at the cup, then slowly raised his cloudy eyes to Wei Chen.
"I told you yesterday, boy," Fang rasped, suppressing a cough. "I don't take charity from scavengers. And I certainly don't teach my craft to those without the talent to grasp a brush."
"It's not charity, Senior," Wei Chen said softly, keeping his head bowed respectfully. "It is merely a cup of hot water and cheap leaves. The mist in the forest was heavy today. It chilled my bones. I thought Senior might be feeling the dampness as well."
Fang stared at him for a long moment. His ancient eyes, though dimmed by age and injury, were sharp with suspicion. In the cultivation world, nothing was free. A cup of tea was often a prelude to a request for a loan, a plea for protection, or a poisoned assassination attempt.
But Wei Chen just stood there, looking utterly ordinary, pathetic, and harmless.
Fang harrumphed. He set down his brush, picked up the cup with a trembling hand, and took a sip. The tea was awful—bitter, astringent, and lacking any real spiritual energy. But it was hot, and it immediately soothed the raw, scraping agony in his throat.
"Terrible tea," Fang muttered, taking another sip.
"I apologize, Senior. My pockets are shallow," Wei Chen said, a genuine smile touching the corners of his lips.
"Don't stand there hovering like a starved ghost," Fang snapped, though there was a fraction less venom in his voice than yesterday. "If you're going to block my light, sit down and keep quiet."
"Yes, Senior."
Wei Chen sat cross-legged in the dirt beside the stall. He didn't speak. He didn't ask questions. He simply watched.
He watched Old Man Fang draw talismans. He watched the way the old man held the brush, the precise angle of his wrist, the way he modulated his meager qi to infuse the cinnabar ink. Wei Chen didn't actually need to learn this; the Ledger would grant him perfect comprehension upon Fang's death. But he watched with wide, rapt attention, ensuring that anyone walking past Crafter's Alley would see Wei Chen, the useless scavenger, obsessively studying the talisman master.
An hour passed. The market grew darker.
Fang finished his batch, packed up his wooden plank, and prepared to head to his own shack, which was located just a few streets over.
"Are you going to follow me home like a stray dog, too?" Fang asked, coughing into his gray handkerchief.
"Only if Senior requires assistance carrying his inkstone," Wei Chen offered politely.
"I have enough strength left to carry my own burdens," Fang grumbled, turning away. "Go back to your hole, Wei. And if you bring tea tomorrow, at least try to find leaves that don't taste like swamp weed."
"I will try my best, Senior."
Wei Chen watched the old man shuffle away into the gloom. He felt the invisible, intangible tether connecting them—a tether of absolute certainty.
Day two, Wei Chen thought. Only eight hundred and forty-eight left to go.
The Winter of the First Year
Time, to an immortal, was a strange river. When one was no longer frantic to seize every passing second, the days blurred into a comfortable, rhythmic cycle.
Spring turned to summer, and summer baked the Black Ash Market into a foul-smelling oven of sweat and rotting garbage. Wei Chen maintained his routine. He scavenged the safe zones, surrendered his findings to bullies without a fight, paid his rent on time, and spent every single evening sitting beside Old Man Fang's stall, providing a cup of cheap tea and a silent audience.
Slowly, imperceptibly, the dynamic shifted. Fang stopped telling him to leave. Sometimes, the old man would grumble about the poor quality of modern talisman paper. Sometimes, he would correct a hypothetical mistake, lecturing the air as if Wei Chen wasn't there.
"You see this stroke?" Fang rasped one evening in late autumn, pointing to a complex curve on a Fire-Spark Talisman. "Ninety percent of you young fools try to force the qi here. Wrong. You have to let the qi flow like water down a hill. Force it, and the paper burns before you even finish the seal."
Wei Chen nodded enthusiastically, wide-eyed. "I see, Senior. The flow of water. I will remember that."
He wouldn't need to remember it, but he played the part of the eager, untalented disciple perfectly. He even went so far as to buy a cheap, frayed brush and practice drawing runes in the dirt while Fang worked, making deliberate, obvious mistakes. Fang would look at the dirt, scoff in disdain, and call him an idiot. It was a flawless cover.
Then, winter arrived.
It did not snow in the Black Ash Market—the heat from the distant sect furnaces prevented that—but the temperature plummeted, and a freezing, bone-chilling sleet rained down for weeks on end.
For the loose cultivators, winter was a culling. Those without enough spirit stones to buy warming arrays or high-quality food froze to death in their shacks.
Wei Chen sat in his freezing room, listening to the wind howl through the cracks in the walls. He wore three layers of ragged clothing, shivering violently.
Or rather, he forced his muscles to simulate shivering.
In truth, he felt perfectly fine. The Flesh of the Eternal was a passive, absolute law. His body maintained optimal temperature and cellular health regardless of external conditions. The freezing air touched his skin, but it could not damage his tissues, nor could it lower his core temperature. He was a bastion of infinite vitality sitting in a frozen wasteland.
Yet, he had carefully applied a layer of grey ash to his lips to make them look blue. He hunched his shoulders and practiced chattering his teeth. If a neighbor looked through a crack in the wall, they had to see a man on the verge of freezing to death.
A heavy, booming knock shattered the rhythmic patter of the sleet against his door.
"Rent collection! Open up, trash!"
It was the Black Dog Gang.
Wei Chen immediately heightened his shivering, making his hands tremble wildly as he fumbled with the rusted bolt. He pulled the door open, letting the freezing wind whip into the room.
Standing in the doorway were two massive men draped in thick, spiritually treated bear furs. They radiated heat and violence. The one in front, a man with a shaved head and a brutal, iron-studded club resting on his shoulder, sneered down at Wei Chen.
"Two stones, Wei. Hand 'em over. And don't give me that 'I couldn't scavenge in the winter' excuse, or I'll break both your legs and use you for firewood."
"N-no excuses, Senior," Wei Chen chattered, his breath misting in the air. He reached into his robes with shaking fingers, pulling out two dull spirit stones. It was half his monthly budget, carefully hoarded for this exact moment.
He handed them over, keeping his eyes on the muddy boots of the enforcers.
The bald man snatched the stones, inspecting them briefly before tossing them into a heavy leather pouch at his waist. "Lucky for you, scavenger. Keep your head down."
They turned to leave, trudging to the next shack.
Wei Chen peeked through the crack in his door, watching them go. The shack next to his belonged to a young, hot-headed cultivator named Lin, who had recently broken through to Qi Refining Stage 5 and thought he was destined for greatness.
The enforcers kicked Lin's door open. Shouts immediately erupted.
"I told you yesterday!" Lin's voice rang out, filled with arrogant defiance. "I spent my stones on a cultivation manual! I'll pay you double next month when I hunt a frost-boar! Back off, dogs!"
Wei Chen sighed softly, closing his eyes.
Fool.
The sound of flesh tearing and bone snapping echoed through the sleet-filled night. A wet, gurgling scream was cut short by the sickening thud of an iron club meeting a human skull.
Two minutes later, the enforcers walked back past Wei Chen's shack. One of them was wiping blood and grey matter off his club with a piece of Lin's robes.
"Stupid kids," the bald man grunted. "Always think they're the protagonist of some legend."
They vanished into the sleet.
Wei Chen stood quietly in the dark for a long time. He felt no pity for Lin. In this world, arrogance without the strength to back it up was a terminal disease.
He walked back to his straw bed, laid down, and stared at the ceiling. He was immortal, yet he lived like a rat, bowing to thugs and hiding his true nature. Did it wound his pride?
He searched his feelings and found nothing but a cold, tranquil ocean of patience.
Pride was a mortal failing. Pride was for men who feared death and needed to leave a legacy to prove they had existed. Wei Chen would never die. He would outlive the Black Dog Gang. He would outlive the Azure Cloud Sect. He would outlive the very stars in the sky.
Why rush? Let them have their fleeting moments of power. Let them swing their iron clubs and demand their paltry spirit stones.
"Ten thousand years from now," Wei Chen whispered to the darkness, "I won't even remember your names."
The Decline
Year two of his transmigration arrived with a quiet, somber shift in the Black Ash Market.
Old Man Fang was dying.
It wasn't sudden. It was a slow, agonizing slide into the abyss. The necrotic qi that had been trapped in his shattered dantian for sixty years had finally eroded his remaining life force.
Fang could no longer walk to Crafter's Alley. He was confined to his shack—a slightly larger, marginally cleaner dwelling than Wei Chen's, filled with the pungent scent of medicinal herbs and decaying flesh.
Wei Chen seamlessly transitioned his routine. He no longer scavenged. He had saved just enough spirit stones to afford Bigu pills and his rent for the next few months. His full-time job was now the devoted caretaker.
He sat by Fang's bedside every day. He boiled water, wiped the black, corrupted sweat from the old man's brow, and listened to him rave in his delirium.
In his fever dreams, Fang was no longer a crippled old man in a slum. He was young again. He screamed about secret realms, about betrayals, about a woman named 'Yue' who had stolen his Foundation Building Pill.
Wei Chen listened to it all, his expression a mask of dutiful sorrow, his mind a fortress of clinical observation.
He kept the door open slightly, ensuring that the neighbors saw him. They saw Wei Chen, the useless scavenger, carrying out bedpans and boiling herbs for the dying talisman master. The narrative was cemented. When Fang passed, Wei Chen would be the grieving pseudo-disciple. No one would question if he suddenly inherited Fang's leftover tools or developed a "sudden" talent for the craft.
"Wei... boy..."
Fang's voice was barely a whisper. It sounded like paper tearing.
Wei Chen leaned in closely. "I am here, Senior."
Fang's cloudy eyes struggled to focus on Wei Chen's face. His skeletal hand reached out, trembling violently, and gripped Wei Chen's sleeve with surprising, desperate strength.
"My... my tools," Fang gasped, a thin line of black blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. "Under... the floorboards. The jade slip... my master's notes. Not... not much. But..."
He coughed, a wet, terrible sound that shook his entire fragile frame.
Wei Chen felt a strange, alien twinge in his chest. It wasn't pity, exactly. It was a profound understanding of the tragedy of mortality. This man had fought the heavens, failed, and spent sixty years rotting away, only to die in a squalid hut, passing his meager legacy to a cowardly scavenger because there was no one else left.
"I will protect them, Senior," Wei Chen said, his voice soft, injecting a note of genuine reverence into his tone. "I will not let your craft die with you."
"Idiot... boy," Fang managed a ghastly, blood-stained smile. "You... you have no talent. You'll blow yourself up... trying to draw a... simple spark..."
The old man's eyes widened suddenly. He stared at the ceiling, looking past the rotting wood, staring into a void only he could see.
"Yue..." he whispered.
His grip on Wei Chen's sleeve slackened. His chest heaved once, a massive, shuddering breath that refused to leave his lungs. And then, he was still.
The silence in the room was absolute.
Wei Chen sat frozen. He didn't move. He didn't breathe.
Deep within his soul, the colossal bronze ledger snapped open with a sound like shattering mountains. The ancient runes on the parchment blazed with blinding, golden light.
[Bound Soul 'Fang Zhi' has perished.]
[Initiating Harvest of Myriad Returns.]
Wei Chen closed his eyes as the world around him dissolved into a torrent of golden energy.
It didn't hurt. It was the most euphoric, overwhelming sensation he had ever experienced. It was as if a dam had burst inside his mind, flooding his consciousness with sixty years of memories, knowledge, and sheer, refined power.
He felt the intricate details of thousands of talisman runes burning themselves into his muscle memory. He understood the flow of qi, the balance of cinnabar and spirit water, the precise resonance required to trap elemental fire onto a piece of paper. The knowledge wasn't just downloaded; it was integrated. He knew it as intimately as if he had spent decades practicing it himself.
Simultaneously, a massive surge of pure, refined spiritual energy flooded his shattered dantian.
The pale blue vortex at Qi Refining Stage 4 roared to life. It expanded rapidly, consuming the new energy.
Stage 5.
Stage 6.
Stage 7.
There were no bottlenecks. There was no risk of qi deviation. The energy flowing into him had already been refined and tamed by Old Man Fang over decades. It stacked onto his foundation seamlessly, building a structure of absolute perfection.
Stage 8.
Stage 9.
The vortex stabilized, spinning with a heavy, dense power that Wei Chen had never possessed. He could feel the sheer density of his qi. He could sense the microscopic movements of dust motes in the air around him. He could hear the heartbeats of the rats scurrying beneath the floorboards of the next shack over.
The golden light faded. The ledger snapped shut and vanished back into the depths of his soul.
[Harvest Complete.]
[Host Cultivation: Qi Refining Stage 9]
[Time until next Binding: 7 Years, 8 Months]
Wei Chen slowly opened his eyes. He looked down at his hands. They were the same hands, but they hummed with a lethally quiet power. He was now at the absolute peak of the Qi Refining Realm. In the slums of the Black Ash Market, he was practically a god. He could walk out the door right now and slaughter the entire Black Dog Gang without breaking a sweat.
He could demand respect. He could take the best resources. He could be a king among the trash.
Wei Chen stood up. He carefully pulled the blanket over Old Man Fang's face, hiding the lifeless, staring eyes.
Then, he walked to the corner of the room, found the loose floorboard Fang had mentioned, and retrieved a small wooden box containing a few high-quality brushes, some aged cinnabar, and a cracked jade slip. He tucked them securely into his robes.
He walked to the door, took a deep breath, and artificially accelerated his heart rate. He forced tears into his eyes, trembling his bottom lip.
He threw the door open, stumbling out into the muddy street, clutching his chest and wailing at the top of his lungs.
"Senior Fang! No! Senior Fang is dead! The heavens are blind! Ahhh!"
He collapsed to his knees in the mud, weeping loudly, drawing the irritated stares of his neighbors. He was the perfect picture of a devastated, pathetic junior who had just lost his only patron.
Inside, beneath the tears and the mud, Wei Chen's heart beat with cold, calculated rhythm.
Stage 9 achieved. Next goal: Foundation Establishment. Time remaining until next binding: Seven years. The long game had officially begun.