Chapter 2: Roots in the Dark Earth
The first winter of Li Mo's marriage was a crucible of ice and gnawing hunger, a harsh reminder of the fragility of mortal life in the Great Wei Dynasty.
The Black Mountain Range transformed into a sleeping, white-furred beast. The snow piled high against the mud-brick walls of their hut, threatening to crush the thatched roof beneath its weight. Inside, the world shrank to the meager radius of warmth provided by the clay hearth.
Wang Cui, the First Matriarch of the future Li clan, proved to be exactly the asset Li Mo's cold, actuary logic had calculated her to be. She was a woman of few words but boundless endurance. While other young brides in the village might have wept at the coarse millet and the drafty walls, Cui simply tightened her padded cotton jacket and set to work. She possessed a quiet, stoic strength that Li Mo deeply respected.
She woke before him—a feat in itself—to boil water and prepare the morning gruel. She mended their clothes with meticulous, invisible stitches, her rough, calloused hands moving with surprising dexterity. When Li Mo and his father returned from the freezing mountains with nothing more than a half-starved squirrel or a handful of frost-bitten tubers, she never complained. She simply stretched the meat further, boiling the bones until they were soft enough to chew for their marrow.
Li Mo, in turn, treated her with a level of respect and gentle consideration that was entirely alien to the rural men of this era. He never raised his voice. He never struck her. He insisted she take the larger portion of the meat, citing his own "weak constitution" and need for her to remain strong to manage the household.
Cui found her new husband bewildering. He was not like her father, who shouted when the wine flowed, nor like the village youths who boasted loudly of their meager hunting exploits. Li Mo was like a deep, still pond. There were no ripples on his surface, regardless of whether they had a surplus of food or were scraping the bottom of the grain barrel. He planned everything with a terrifying, meticulous precision.
It was during these long, dark winter months that Li Mo's modern mind began to quietly revolutionize the Li household's survival strategy.
He didn't invent steam engines or gunpowder—such things would draw the eye of the authorities faster than a severed head in the town square. Instead, he applied actuary principles of risk management, resource allocation, and compound interest to their daily lives.
He mapped out their food consumption, calculating exactly how many calories they needed to survive versus how many they burned. He instituted a strict rationing system, hidden beneath the guise of 'traditional fasting days.' More importantly, he began secretly excavating a root cellar beneath the floorboards of the hut, digging a few inches every night while Cui slept, carrying the dirt out in his pockets and scattering it in the wind.
This hidden cellar became his absolute failsafe. While the rest of the village lived harvest to harvest, Li Mo began siphoning off ten percent of everything they acquired—dried meat, hardened grain, medicinal roots—and sealing it away in the dark, cold earth.
"Always have a retreat," he whispered to himself one night, patting the packed dirt over the trapdoor. "Always have a reserve."
And amidst all of this, the agonizing grind of the Iron Wood Body Tempering Art continued.
Every morning, before the sun dared to breach the horizon, Li Mo stood in the freezing wind behind the hut. His breath plumed in the air like dragon smoke. He had upgraded his striking implement from an iron-birch branch to a solid, polished club of blackwood, a dense timber that felt like solid iron.
Thwack. The sound was a dull, sickening thud against his ribs. He gritted his teeth, the pain sharp and vivid, driving the sleep from his eyes. He forced his breathing to follow the manual's crude rhythm—two short inhales, one long, pressurized exhale, pushing the sparse ambient Qi and his own blood vitality to the point of impact.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
His body was a map of fading yellow bruises overlaid with fresh, angry purple ones. It was a brutal, primitive method of forcing the body to adapt through sheer trauma. He knew he was accumulating hidden injuries. He could feel a dull, persistent ache deep in his joints that the cheap, wild herbs his father gathered could barely soothe.
But he didn't stop. He couldn't.
He would close his eyes, feeling the biting winter wind against his scarred skin, and look inward. The Golden Bloodline Tree floated in his sea of consciousness. It was still just a single, glowing root and a fragile sapling. It was a reminder of his ultimate vulnerability. If he died now, it was over. The grand millennium he had envisioned would vanish like a dream.
Patience, he told himself as he brought the blackwood club down against his thigh, ignoring the flare of agony. I am not a genius. I am a tortoise. But the tortoise outlives the hare.
Year Two: The First Branch
Spring arrived with a torrential thaw, turning Clearwater Village into a sea of mud. But with the mud came life.
It was during the planting season, as they were sowing their rented half-acre of rocky soil with coarse wheat, that Wang Cui fainted.
Li Mo caught her before she hit the ground, his heart hammering a sudden, frantic rhythm against his ribs. He carried her back to the hut, his mind racing through a terrifying list of feudal-era diseases. But when the village midwife—a toothless old woman who smelled of fermented cabbage—was summoned, she merely cackled and demanded two copper coins.
"The soil is fertile, Li Mo!" the old woman wheezed, patting his shoulder with a bony hand. "Your wife is with child. Three months, I reckon. Make sure she eats well, or the cold wind will steal the seed."
When the midwife left, Li Mo sat by the bed, looking at Cui's pale, exhausted face. A profound, complex web of emotions tangled in his chest.
Joy. Terror. And a deep, vibrating resonance within his very soul.
He closed his eyes and sank into his sea of consciousness. The Golden Tree was reacting. The ethereal light pulsing through it was brighter, more vibrant. And there, slowly forming on the right side of the main trunk, was a tiny, shimmering node.
It wasn't a full branch yet. It was a bud. A promise of life.
For the first time since transmigrating, Li Mo felt a genuine, piercing vulnerability that had nothing to do with martial artists or gangs. It was the vulnerability of a father. That tiny, glowing bud represented a life that he was utterly responsible for. A life that, ultimately, would one day end and feed his own immortality.
The ethical weight of it pressed down on him again, heavier than before.
He opened his eyes and gently took Cui's rough hand in his. She stirred, looking at him with a mixture of fear and hope. In this world, childbirth was a threshold of death for both mother and infant.
"I will protect you," Li Mo said softly, his voice carrying an absolute, ironclad certainty. "I swear it."
The next six months were a testament to his paranoia and his planning. He strictly forbade Cui from doing heavy lifting, a mandate that scandalized the village gossips who believed pregnant women should work until the water broke. He took over her chores, pushing his own physically exhausted body to the breaking point.
He traded three of his best hidden fox pelts—wealth he had secretly hoarded—to a traveling merchant for a small block of low-grade brown sugar and a bundle of dried blood-replenishing dates. He fed them to Cui meticulously, watching her color return.
When the time finally came, on a crisp autumn night, Li Mo defied tradition. He refused to let the filthy, unwashed village midwife handle the birth. Instead, he barred the door. He had spent the last week boiling water, tearing old tunics into strips and boiling them to sterilize them as best as he could, and scrubbing the wooden bedframe with strong grain alcohol.
Dashan paced nervously outside in the cold, bewildered by his son's strange, obsessive demands, but he trusted the boy's bizarre wisdom.
Inside, Li Mo guided his wife through the agony. He held her hands, his voice a steady, calm anchor in the storm of her pain. He used his modern understanding of biology and hygiene to navigate a process that usually relied on superstition and luck.
Just as the sun began to peek over the Black Mountain, painting the sky in strokes of violent purple and red, a sharp, piercing cry shattered the silence of the hut.
Li Mo held the tiny, squalling, blood-slicked infant in his hands. He quickly and cleanly cut the cord with a knife he had held over an open flame, wrapped the child in the sterilized cloth, and gently placed him on Cui's exhausted, heaving chest.
"A boy," Li Mo whispered, his voice trembling slightly, betraying the stone-cold facade he usually wore.
He closed his eyes.
In his mind, the node on the Golden Tree burst open. A thin, delicate, but blindingly bright golden branch extended outward from the trunk. The connection was established. The Dao resonance hummed in his soul.
First Descendant.
"What... what shall we name him?" Cui gasped, looking down at the red, wrinkled face of her son with tears streaming down her dirt-streaked cheeks.
Li Mo looked at the boy. He thought of the violent world outside, the martial artists who crushed mortals like insects, the sweeping famines, and the cruel gangs.
"Changshou," Li Mo said, his eyes hard and resolute. "Li Changshou. Long life. He will outlive them all."
Year Five: The Fall of the Mountain
Time flowed like a relentless, carving river.
The Li household grew. Two years after Changshou, Cui gave birth to a daughter, Li Mei. The Golden Tree sprouted a second branch, symmetrical to the first.
Li Mo was now twenty-one. He had grown taller, his frame filling out with dense, compact muscle hidden beneath his loose peasant clothing. To the village, he was exactly what he appeared to be: a quiet, unremarkable farmer and adequate hunter, a man who kept his head down and paid his taxes without complaint.
But beneath his rough-spun tunic, his skin had undergone a terrifying transformation.
Five years of agonizing, daily beatings with the Iron Wood Body Tempering Art, fueled by whatever meager scraps of meat he could safely hunt without drawing attention, had finally yielded a result.
One evening, deep in the forest, Li Mo sat by a small, smokeless fire. He drew his hunting knife—a crude iron blade he used for skinning. With a calm, clinical detachment, he pressed the sharp edge against his left forearm and pulled.
The blade slid across his skin. It left a white, chalky line, but it did not break the flesh. No blood spilled.
He applied more pressure, pressing down hard enough to slice a thick carrot in half. The skin indented, turning pale from the force, and finally, a tiny, shallow bead of red welled up.
Li Mo let out a long, slow breath, sheathing the knife.
Entry-level Skin Refining.
He had finally crossed the threshold. He was officially a martial artist, albeit of the lowest, crudest tier. In a major city, he would still be considered trash. But in Clearwater Village, he was a hidden tiger. He could now take a direct punch from an ordinary man without flinching. His physical strength had doubled; he could lift a three-hundred-pound boulder with moderate effort.
It had taken him five years of torture to achieve what a talented youth in a wealthy sect might achieve in a month with medicinal baths and spirit meat.
My talent is truly bottom-tier, Li Mo mused, looking at his calloused hands. If I had to rely on my own cultivation to reach the immortal realms, I would die of old age before I even saw the gate.
He stood up, kicking dirt over the fire. It doesn't matter. I am the soil. I just need to be strong enough to protect the saplings.
However, the joy of his breakthrough was overshadowed by a looming, inevitable tragedy at home.
Li Dashan was dying.
The old hunter's crippled leg, shattered years ago by a Bone Forging master, had always been a source of chronic pain. But over the last brutal winter, the ache had deepened into a bone-deep chill that no fire could warm. The flesh had turned mottled and dark. Infection had set into the old marrow, slowly poisoning his massive frame.
In a world without antibiotics or high-tier alchemical pills, it was a death sentence executed in slow motion.
Li Mo spent his hoarded silver on doctors from the town, but they all shook their heads, took their exorbitant fees, and prescribed useless, foul-tasting herbal sludges that only upset the old man's stomach.
On a rainy evening in late autumn, five years after Li Mo had transmigrated, Dashan's breathing grew ragged and shallow. The imposing, bear-like man had withered into a fragile husk, his skin pale and stretched tight over his bones.
Li Mo sat by the bed, holding his father's massive, scarred hand. Cui stood in the doorway, weeping silently, holding three-year-old Changshou against her leg.
"Mo'er," Dashan rasped, his eyes milky but focused intently on his son.
"I am here, Father," Li Mo replied, his voice soft, keeping his composure through sheer force of will. The original host's emotions—a deep, filial love—swelled in his chest, merging seamlessly with his own respect for the man who had protected him in this cruel world.
"You... you are a good son," Dashan coughed, a wet, rattling sound. "Better than I could have hoped. You see the world... differently. You don't have the hot blood that ruined me. You have... ice in your veins. Good. Ice survives the fire."
Dashan squeezed Li Mo's hand with the last vestiges of his fading strength.
"The gang... the officials... the martial artists. They are all wolves, Mo'er. Never let them see your teeth until you are ready to bite their throats out. Do you understand?"
"I understand, Father. I will hide. I will endure. I will protect the family," Li Mo promised, leaning closer.
Dashan smiled, a ghost of his former booming grin. "I know you will. Teach Changshou... teach him the bow. But teach him your patience, too. I... I am going to see your mother now."
The old hunter's chest heaved one final time, a long, shuddering sigh escaping his lips. His grip on Li Mo's hand went slack. The fire in the hearth seemed to dim in sympathy.
Li Mo sat in silence for a long time, listening to Cui's muffled sobs. He gently placed his father's hand down and pulled the coarse blanket over the scarred face.
He felt a profound emptiness, a stark realization of the absolute finality of death in this universe. Dashan was gone. He would enter the cycle of reincarnation. Because Dashan was an ancestor, not a descendant, there was no feedback, no golden light in the sea of consciousness. Just the cold reality of loss.
Li Mo walked out of the hut into the freezing rain. He stood in the dark, letting the icy water wash over his face, masking the few tears that escaped his iron control.
This is the curse of my path, he realized, staring up at the stormy, indifferent heavens. I will bury him. One day, I will bury Cui. And eventually, I will bury Changshou and Mei. I will stand at thousands of graves, accumulating their lives, bearing the weight of their memories, while I continue onward alone.
It was a terrifying, isolating thought. He was destined to be an eternal ghost watching his own bloodline flourish and die.
He wiped his face, his expression hardening into stone.
So be it. I will bear the weight. But I will make sure their lives mean something. I will build a legacy that the heavens themselves cannot shatter.
Li Mo buried his father on a quiet hill overlooking the village, marking the grave with a simple, unadorned stone. He did not invite guests. He did not host a banquet. He mourned quietly, entirely in the shadows, adhering strictly to his philosophy.
From that day forward, Li Mo was the sole patriarch of the Li family.
Year Eight: The Shadows Deepen
"Again."
The voice was quiet, lacking any anger, but it carried an authority that made the six-year-old boy in the clearing flinch.
Li Changshou wiped the sweat and dirt from his forehead, his small chest heaving. He was a sturdy child, inheriting his mother's broad shoulders and his father's dark, observant eyes. He stood in the hidden clearing behind the bamboo thicket, holding a wooden stick that was half his height.
"Father, my arms are tired," Changshou complained, his voice wavering slightly. He had been practicing the basic stances of the Iron Wood Body Tempering Art for two hours.
Li Mo sat on a nearby stump, whittling a piece of pine with his hunting knife. He did not look up.
"Tired arms can still block a knife," Li Mo said evenly. "Dead arms cannot. In this world, weakness is a sin that is punished by death. Do you want to be the butcher, or the pig on the block?"
It was harsh rhetoric for a six-year-old, but Li Mo was not raising a modern child; he was raising the first generation of an immortal clan in a world of monsters. He had to temper the boy's mind as much as his body.
"The pig squeals," Changshou mumbled, remembering his father's lessons. "The butcher eats."
"Exactly. Now, resume the horse stance. Breathe as I taught you. Feel the air moving to your center."
Changshou gritted his teeth, spread his small legs, and sank into a flawless horse stance.
Li Mo finally looked up, his eyes narrowing in observation.
He had started training Changshou a year ago, testing the boy's aptitude. And what he found both thrilled and terrified him.
Changshou was a genius. Not a heaven-defying, epoch-making prodigy that would alert the immortals, but compared to Li Mo's absolute trash-tier talent, the boy was exceptional. While Li Mo struggled to feel the meager Qi in the air after months of practice, Changshou had instinctively grasped the breathing rhythm in a week. When Changshou struck his own arms with a small birch twig, the bruises faded twice as fast as Li Mo's ever did, his young vitality surging to repair the damage.
If I give him the proper resources, Li Mo calculated, he could reach Flesh Tempering by twenty. Bone Forging by thirty.
It was a dangerous prospect. A Bone Forging expert in a rural area was a beacon. It would attract the Black Tiger Gang, the town magistrate, and wandering martial artists looking to challenge a local master.
"Stop," Li Mo commanded after ten minutes.
Changshou collapsed onto the grass, panting heavily. Li Mo walked over, handing the boy a bamboo canteen filled with slightly warm, salty water—a rudimentary electrolyte mix he had devised to prevent cramping.
"You are progressing well, Changshou," Li Mo said, sitting beside his son. "Your talent is good. Much better than mine."
Changshou beamed, puffing out his small chest. "I will be strong, Father! I will beat up the Black Tiger men when they come!"
Li Mo's hand shot out, not striking the boy, but gripping his shoulder with a sudden, vice-like pressure that made Changshou gasp. The smile vanished from Li Mo's face, replaced by a chilling, absolute seriousness.
"Listen to me, and listen to me well," Li Mo whispered, his voice intense. "If you ever, ever speak those words again, I will break your legs myself."
Changshou stared at his father, his eyes wide with shock and sudden tears. He had never seen his father look so frightening.
"Strength that is seen is a target," Li Mo lectured, his grip softening slightly but his tone remaining hard. "The tallest tree in the forest is the first to be chopped down for firewood. The loudest bird is the first to be shot by the hunter. Do you understand?"
Changshou nodded rapidly, though he was clearly confused. "But... but if I am strong, I can protect us."
"You protect us by making them think we are entirely worthless," Li Mo corrected. "If the Black Tiger Gang thinks you are a martial genius, they will not praise you. They will murder you in your sleep before you can grow strong enough to threaten them. Or worse, they will kidnap your mother and sister to force you to serve them as a dog."
He pointed a finger at the boy's chest. "Rule Number One of the Li Family: Hide your strength. If you can lift a boulder, pretend you struggle to lift a bucket of water. If you can run like the wind, pretend you limp. The only time you reveal your true strength is when you are absolutely certain you can kill your enemy, and ensure no one else will ever find out."
It was a dark, paranoid philosophy, but it was the cornerstone of the Gou path.
"I... I understand, Father," Changshou whispered, rubbing his shoulder.
Li Mo sighed, pulling the boy into a brief, rare hug. "I am harsh because I love you, Changshou. The world outside this village is a sea of blood. I want you to learn to swim, not to jump in and attract the sharks."
Year Ten: The Unseen Strike
The true test of Li Mo's philosophy, and his concealed martial arts, came during the deep autumn of his tenth year in this world.
A severe drought had plagued the Azure Province all summer. Crops withered in the fields, turning to dust. The Black Tiger Gang, desperate to maintain their own supplies, had doubled the autumn tax.
Clearwater Village was starving. People were eating tree bark and boiling leather belts.
The Li family, however, was surviving. Li Mo's hidden root cellar, stocked meticulously over a decade, proved its worth. They ate coarse grain mixed with dried meat in the dead of night, ensuring no smell escaped the hut. During the day, they joined the villagers in digging for roots, looking just as haggard and gaunt as everyone else. Li Mo even rubbed dirt and ash into his children's faces to make them look sallow and undernourished.
One bleak afternoon, while Cui had taken the children to the river to search for freshwater clams, Li Mo was behind the hut, repairing a broken plow.
He heard the sound before he saw anything. It was a subtle, wet crunch of a heavy boot stepping on dry leaves, moving with a speed and stealth that no ordinary villager possessed.
Li Mo didn't stop his work. He didn't turn around. He simply slowed his breathing, his senses expanding.
Someone is watching me.
He kept his posture slumped, playing the role of the exhausted, starving farmer. He picked up a wooden mallet and tapped at the plow, his movements sluggish.
From the shadows of the bamboo thicket, a man stepped out.
He was dressed in tattered, blood-stained rags. He clutched his left side, where a dark, wet stain was rapidly spreading. In his right hand, he held a jagged, rusty machete. His eyes were wide, manic, and feral with desperation.
He wasn't a gang member. He was a fugitive. A bandit who had likely crossed the wrong person and fled into the mountains to die.
"You," the bandit hissed, his voice raspy. He stumbled forward, the machete raised. "Food. Give me whatever food you have. Now."
Li Mo slowly stood up, turning to face the man. He let his face slacken into an expression of abject terror. He raised his hands defensively, dropping the wooden mallet.
"L-lord," Li Mo stammered, his voice trembling perfectly. "We have nothing. The drought... we are eating dirt. Please, spare me."
He was analyzing the man rapidly. Footwork is unsteady. Breathing is ragged, catching on the inhale. Left lung might be punctured. Grip on the machete is tight, but his arm is shaking. He has martial arts training—perhaps mid-tier Skin Refining, based on the muscle density beneath the rags. But he is bleeding out. He is a dying animal.
A dying animal was the most dangerous kind.
The bandit sneered, spitting a glob of bloody phlegm onto the dirt. "Liar. I saw you... I saw you walk. You don't have the weakness of a starving man. You have a stash. Take me to it, or I'll chop your limbs off one by one."
The bandit lunged forward. Despite his injuries, his speed was terrifying. It was the explosive burst of a martial artist pushing his body beyond its limits. The rusty machete swung in a vicious, horizontal arc aimed directly at Li Mo's neck.
To an ordinary man, it was a death sentence. There was no time to dodge.
Li Mo didn't panic. His mind, honed by ten years of brutal, paranoid preparation, entered a state of absolute, icy clarity.
He didn't try to block the blade. He didn't retreat.
Instead, he collapsed.
He intentionally gave way in his knees, dropping his entire body weight straight down, faster than gravity alone could pull him. The rusty machete whistled through the empty air, mere inches above his head, chopping a thick stalk of bamboo cleanly in half.
The bandit, his momentum carrying him forward and his strike missing its target, stumbled, his injured side tearing further. He let out a grunt of pain, exposing his right flank.
Li Mo, now crouched on the ground, moved with a sudden, explosive violence that completely shattered his guise of a weak farmer.
All the power he had accumulated from ten years of the Iron Wood Body Tempering Art—the dense muscles, the toughened tendons, the refined skin—surged in a single, perfectly calculated motion.
He didn't use his fists. Fists could leave bruises that could be identified. Fists could break.
He shot his right hand upward, his fingers stiffened into a rigid spear, aiming for the softest, most vulnerable point on the human body that required no immense force to destroy.
Thwack.
It wasn't a loud sound. It was sickeningly soft.
Li Mo's stiffened fingers drove straight up, burying themselves deep into the hollow of the bandit's throat, crushing the windpipe and severing the carotid artery in a single, devastating strike.
The bandit's eyes bulged to the point of popping. He dropped the machete, his hands flying to his ruined throat. He tried to scream, but only a horrific, bubbling gurgle escaped. Blood sprayed violently, coating Li Mo's arms and face in hot crimson.
Li Mo didn't hesitate. He didn't give the man a chance to thrash and make noise. He stood up, grabbed the dying man by the hair, and violently twisted his neck.
SNAP.
The bandit went completely limp, dropping to the dirt like a sack of grain.
Silence descended upon the clearing, broken only by the sound of Li Mo's steady, perfectly controlled breathing.
He stood over the corpse, his hands dripping with blood. His expression was entirely blank. There was no adrenaline rush, no triumphant roar, no guilt. It was simply the completion of a necessary, calculated equation.
Threat identified. Threat eliminated. Exposure zero.
Li Mo worked quickly. He knew Cui and the children would return within the hour.
He dragged the body deep into the dense, thorny underbrush at the base of the mountain, far off any game trail. He used his hunting knife to dig a grave—not a shallow one, but a six-foot-deep hole in the hard, rocky soil, his Skin Refining strength allowing him to dig like a machine.
He stripped the bandit of everything—the rags, the machete, even his boots. He buried the naked body face down, covering it with heavy rocks before packing the dirt tightly and scattering dead leaves over the disturbed earth to make it look entirely natural.
He took the bloody clothes, the machete, and the boots, and carried them miles away to a deep, fast-flowing gorge in the mountains, tossing them into the churning water where they would be lost forever.
When he returned to the hut, he stripped off his own blood-stained clothes, burned them in the hearth until they were nothing but ash, and scrubbed his body with coarse sand and cold well water until his skin was raw.
When Cui and the children returned, complaining of the heat and their meager haul of clams, Li Mo was sitting on the porch, methodically weaving a straw basket.
He looked up, his face pale and tired, the perfect picture of a struggling, ordinary man.
"Did you find anything, my wife?" he asked softly, offering a gentle smile.
"Just a handful, husband," Cui sighed, setting the wooden bucket down. "It's so hot. Did you rest?"
"I rested," Li Mo replied, looking past her, toward the deep, silent woods where a man lay buried beneath the earth, his existence erased from the world. "It was a very quiet afternoon."
That night, lying in the dark, Li Mo checked his sea of consciousness.
The Golden Tree stood tall. The trunk was slightly thicker. The two branches representing Changshou and Mei glowed steadily. A third, tiny bud had recently appeared—Cui was pregnant again.
He had protected them. He had killed, cleanly and without consequence. He had kept his secret safe.
He was twenty-six years old. He had reached the first step of martial arts. He had a growing family. He had a hidden stockpile of resources.
And he had absolute, unbreakable patience.
Let the geniuses fight over heavenly treasures. Let the sects wage war across the provinces. Let the dynasties burn.
The Immortal Ancestor was planting his roots deep in the dark earth, waiting for the centuries to pass.