Chapter 4: The Paranoia of Accumulation and the Auditor's Arrival
The physical exertion required to drag a three-hundred-pound mutated Grey Wolf through knee-deep snow was immense, even for a newly minted Initial Skin Refining martial artist.
Li Han moved with a rhythmic, mechanical efficiency. He grabbed the wolf by its massive hind legs, dug his wrapped boots into the frozen earth beneath the snow, and hauled. Heave. Step. Heave. Step. He utilized his core, relying on the +1.8 Strength he had harvested from Zhao Mang to do the heavy lifting, while his +1.5 Vitality ensured his muscles didn't immediately flood with debilitating lactic acid.
It took him two grueling hours to drag the carcass back to his hidden cache beneath the ancient, frozen roots of the black-iron tree. By the time he arrived, the sky above the dense canopy had shifted from bruised purple to a flat, dead slate-grey. It was mid-morning, though the sun remained entirely obscured by the relentless winter clouds of the Great Yan Dynasty.
He dropped the wolf's legs, his breath pluming in massive white clouds. He didn't rest. In the wilderness, a stationary body was a cooling body, and a cooling body was a dead body.
He drew his rusted hunting knife. The blade, having already shattered the skull of a martial artist and pierced the heart of a mutated beast, was losing its edge. He made a mental note to spend the evening sharpening it on the river stone; a dull blade was an unacceptable liability.
Li Han fell into the butcher's trance. This was not the clumsy, frantic hacking of a starving peasant. This was a clinical, calculated deconstruction of a biological asset.
First, he bled the beast entirely, capturing as much of the thick, steaming blood as he could in a hollowed-out wooden basin he had carved from a fallen log earlier that morning. Blood was incredibly rich in iron and raw spiritual essence, especially from a mutated creature. He couldn't drink it raw—the risk of parasitic infection outweighed the caloric gain—but he could boil it later into a nutrient-dense, albeit foul-tasting, black pudding.
Next came the pelt. The Minor Night Vision he had just acquired proved invaluable in the gloomy twilight of the deep woods. His dilated pupils pulled in every available photon, casting the world in crisp, high-contrast shades of silver and dark grey. He could see the exact connective tissues binding the thick pelt to the muscle fascia. With surgical precision, he slipped the knife under the skin, peeling the massive, silver-and-charcoal hide away in one pristine, unbroken piece.
In Ironridge Town, a flawless mutated Grey Wolf pelt could fetch ten silver taels. It was a fortune, a ticket to secure housing and resources. But here, in the starving isolation of Blackwood Village, it was a death warrant. If anyone saw it, they would know he was hunting in the deep woods. They would know he possessed unimaginable wealth.
He folded the massive, heavy pelt tightly, tying it with strips of leather, and shoved it to the very back of his frozen hollow, burying it beneath a layer of rocks and packed snow. It would remain his secret treasury.
Then came the meat.
The Grey Wolf was a physiological marvel. Unlike the snow-hare, which possessed thin, stringy muscles adapted for short bursts of speed, the wolf was built for endurance and raw power. Its meat was a deep, rich crimson, marbled with thick layers of dense, yellowish fat.
Calculated Yield, Li Han thought, his actuary mind automatically crunching the numbers as he carved the heavy haunches and shoulders away from the spine. Total viable meat: approximately one hundred and sixty pounds. Caloric density: estimated at three times that of mundane beef due to the beast's mutated nature and spiritual absorption.
He was sitting on a mountain of fuel.
His enhanced metabolism, driven by the Iron Bark Physique, required roughly four thousand calories a day just to maintain his current muscle mass in the freezing temperatures. If he exerted himself, that number doubled. The twenty pounds of snow-hare he had stashed previously would have lasted him mere days. This wolf, however, guaranteed his survival and continued physical development for at least a month, perhaps two if strictly rationed.
He segmented the meat into manageable ten-pound blocks. He packed them tightly into the deepest recesses of the root hollow. The ambient temperature, hovering near zero degrees Fahrenheit, acted as a perfect, eternal deep-freeze.
He left the internal organs—the intestines, the stomach, the lungs—in a pile fifty yards away, downwind from his cache. It was a calculated diversion. Scavengers like foxes, wildcats, and smaller mundane wolves would be drawn to the smell of the offal. They would gorge themselves on the easy meal and ignore the frozen, buried meat of the cache.
Furthermore, the offal pile served as a secondary hunting ground. When he needed minor essence boosts or fresh targets, he simply had to wait by the bait. It was the ultimate, low-risk farming strategy.
By the time the butchering was complete, Li Han was covered to his elbows in freezing, congealed blood. He scrubbed his hands and forearms vigorously with clean snow until the skin was raw and pink, removing as much of the scent as possible.
He packed five pounds of the prime wolf meat into his coat, checked the perimeter of his cache one last time, and began the long, silent trek back to Blackwood Village.
When Li Han slipped back into the village, utilizing the shadows and the howling wind to mask his approach, the atmosphere had noticeably thickened.
The panic from the morning's discovery of the "bandit raid" had settled into a suffocating, paralyzing despair. The three freshly dug graves at the edge of the village—hastily hacked into the permafrost—were marked only by crude wooden stakes. Zhao Mang and his lackeys were gone, and with them, the brutal, terrifying, but ultimately predictable order of the village.
Nature abhorred a vacuum, and human society was no different.
Li Han hunched his shoulders, adopting his pathetic, shivering facade, and walked slowly down the main path. His enhanced hearing easily picked up the hushed, desperate conversations emanating from the surrounding shacks.
"Wang says there's no grain left," a raspy female voice whispered from a nearby cabin. "Zhao Mang had it all. The bandits took it."
"Wang is a coward," a deeper, aggressive male voice replied. "He's hoarding his own stash. I say we take it. Better him than us."
Li Han kept his head down, his face entirely devoid of emotion. The calculus of starvation was a grim science. When caloric intake dropped below the threshold of baseline survival, morality was the first liability to be jettisoned. The village was rapidly approaching the critical inflection point where communal survival fractured into savage, individual self-preservation.
He reached the center of the village. Headman Wang was standing on the porch of the looted, bloodstained house, addressing a small, shivering crowd of about twenty villagers. Wang looked ten years older than he had that morning.
"We must ration!" Wang was pleading, his voice reedy and thin against the wind. "The bark from the black-iron trees... if we boil it long enough, it makes a paste. We can mix it with the remaining dried roots. It will keep us alive until the spring merchants arrive!"
Li Han stopped at the edge of the crowd, watching the spectacle with clinical detachment. Boiling tree bark. It yielded almost zero nutritional value; it merely tricked the stomach into feeling full while the body slowly digested its own organs. It was a palliative measure for the dying.
Suddenly, a commotion broke out at the front of the crowd.
A gaunt, skeletal man named Old Sun lunged forward, grabbing a woman by her ragged hair. "Give it back! That's mine!"
The woman shrieked, kicking wildly. In her hand, tightly clutched to her chest, was a half-rotted, frozen field mouse. "I found it! It was under the granary steps! It's mine!"
The crowd didn't intervene to break up the fight. Instead, several other villagers surged forward, their eyes wide, sunken, and feral, desperately trying to snatch the frozen rodent from the struggling pair. It was a pathetic, terrifying melee over a few ounces of diseased meat.
Li Han watched the brawl with absolute, unblinking focus.
His actuary mind overlaid the scene with cold, unforgiving data.
Action: Physical altercation over one frozen field mouse.
Estimated Caloric Value of Mouse: 50 calories. High risk of parasites.
Estimated Caloric Expenditure of Fight: 150 calories per minute of struggle. Increased risk of injury, infection, and subsequent death.
Net Yield: -100 calories. Total loss. Absolute irrationality driven by base biological panic.
He didn't feel pity. He didn't feel disgust. He only felt a profound, reinforcing validation of his own strategy. This was what happened when you failed to secure a margin of safety. This was the fate of those who relied on the heavens, on the magistrates, or on the scraps of others.
He turned away from the brawl, his expression an impenetrable mask, and walked back to his isolated shack on the edge of the village.
He locked his flimsy door, pulled the heavy wooden shutters closed, and plunged the room into absolute darkness. His Minor Night Vision instantly activated, turning the black void into a crisp, silver-toned sanctuary.
He pulled the five pounds of raw, frozen mutated wolf meat from his coat. He sat cross-legged on his hard wooden bed, drew his knife, and began to eat in silence.
The villagers were fighting to the death over a rotting mouse. Li Han, the invisible, starving orphan, was feasting on the flesh of an apex predator.
The path of the cautious reaper was lonely, but it was undeniably effective.
The next two months were a masterclass in relentless, agonizing routine.
Winter tightened its icy, suffocating grip on the Great Yan Dynasty. The snowdrifts piled high against the shacks of Blackwood Village, burying the windows and blocking the doors. The temperature plummeted to a sustained thirty degrees below zero.
The village began to die in earnest.
Every few days, a wail of grief would echo through the frozen air, signaling that another resident had succumbed to the cold or starvation. The survivors stopped digging graves. The ground was like solid iron. They simply dragged the bodies to the edge of the woods and left them for the scavengers, retreating to their unheated shacks to wait for their own inevitable turn.
Li Han isolated himself entirely. He became a ghost, venturing out only in the dead of night or the earliest, darkest hours of the morning.
His life was reduced to a ruthless, highly optimized spreadsheet of survival and martial accumulation.
Variable 1: Caloric Intake and Storage.
He visited his hidden cache every three days, retrieving exactly enough wolf meat to sustain his massive metabolism and fuel his physical development. The twenty pounds of snow-hare had been consumed long ago. He was halfway through the wolf. He supplemented his diet by hunting the scavengers that came to his offal pile—two foxes and a remarkably large, aggressive badger.
Variable 2: Martial Arts Progression.
This was where Li Han discovered the agonizing reality of cultivation without a sect, a master, or proper resources.
The Iron Bark Physique at Initial Mastery provided him with a tough hide, but to progress to Minor Success, the manual dictated that he must "temper the flesh through external pressure and internal circulation." In layman's terms: he had to beat himself half to death while forcing his blood to heal the damage denser than before.
Every night, deep in the frozen woods, Li Han engaged in self-mutilation.
He stripped off his coat, standing bare-chested in the freezing blizzard. He took a heavy, solid branch of black-iron wood, wrapped slightly in a piece of scrap leather to prevent the bark from tearing his skin open, and began to strike his own body.
THWACK! He struck his ribcage.
THWACK! He struck his forearms.
THWACK! He struck his shins.
He hit himself with enough force to shatter a normal man's bones. He activated the Iron Bark Physique, forcing the skin to harden at the exact moment of impact. The pain was blinding. It felt as though his muscles were being tenderized with a sledgehammer. Deep, horrifying purple and black bruises blossomed across his pale skin, mapping the constellation of his agonizing discipline.
He would beat himself until he could barely stand, until his enhanced Vitality was pushed to its absolute breaking point.
Then, he would retreat to his shack, devour massive quantities of the nutrient-dense, mutated wolf meat, and fall into a dead sleep.
His enhanced metabolism, fueled by the spiritual essence lingering in the wolf's flesh, would go into overdrive. It repaired the micro-tears in his muscles, reinforced the bruised tissue, and thickened the dermis.
When he woke up, the bruises would be faded to a dull yellow, and his skin would feel infinitesimally tougher.
Variable 3: The Harvest.
His Gold Finger, the interface, remained active, but the returns had plummeted exactly as he had calculated.
He killed a scavenging fox.
[Harvested: 1/2 of target's remaining lifespan (2 years, 1 month)]
[Harvested: 1/2 of target's physiological essence (Agility +0.05)]
He killed the massive badger.
[Harvested: 1/2 of target's remaining lifespan (4 years)]
[Harvested: 1/2 of target's physiological essence (Vitality +0.08, Strength +0.02)]
The math was brutal. His baseline stats were now so high—sitting firmly at the peak of the Initial Skin Refining stage—that the essence of mundane beasts barely registered as a rounding error on his overall power.
He was experiencing the fundamental bottleneck of all cultivators: to grow stronger, you must consume higher-tier resources. To consume higher-tier resources, you must take massive risks.
"I am hitting the ceiling of this ecosystem," Li Han murmured to himself one night, sitting cross-legged on his bed, inspecting the callouses forming over his knuckles. "If I want to break through to the Flesh Refining stage, or even push the Iron Bark Physique to Minor Success, I need the essence of another martial artist, or a true Demonic Beast from the inner ring."
Both options were currently mathematically unacceptable. There were no martial artists left in Blackwood, and entering the inner ring of the forest was a variable with a mortality rate exceeding ninety percent.
Patience. He had to rely on his ultimate weapon: Time.
He currently possessed over one hundred and ten years of accumulated lifespan. He was immortal compared to the starving wretches dying around him. He didn't need to rush. He would grind the +0.05 stat increases. He would beat his own skin until it turned to iron. He would wait for the spring.
But the Great Yan Dynasty rarely respected the careful plans of cautious men.
It happened in the dead of winter, during the second month of Li Han's grinding isolation.
A blizzard of unprecedented ferocity descended upon the Northern Wastes. The wind didn't just howl; it screamed with the voice of a million dying men. The snow fell so thickly that visibility was reduced to less than three feet. The temperature dropped so low that the very sap inside the black-iron trees froze and expanded, causing the massive trunks to violently crack and explode in the forest with sounds like cannon fire.
Blackwood Village was completely entombed. No one ventured out. Even the desperate search for frozen bark ceased. The village simply huddled in the dark and waited for death.
Li Han was sitting on his bed, the darkness absolute, practicing his internal blood circulation. His breathing was slow, measured, drawing the microscopic traces of spiritual energy from the mutant wolf meat deep into his marrow. He was warm, well-fed, and entirely detached from the suffering occurring just fifty yards away.
Suddenly, his eyes snapped open. His Minor Night Vision flared, casting the dark room in sharp silver.
His enhanced Perception, boosted by the wolf and the badger, pricked at the base of his skull like an icy needle.
It wasn't a sound. The roaring blizzard masked all auditory input. It was a vibration. A rhythmic, deliberate vibration traveling through the frozen earth, transferring up through the wooden stilts of his shack and into his floorboards.
Thud. Pause. Thud. Pause. Thud.
Li Han ceased his breathing exercise instantly. His heart rate, normally a slow, rhythmic drum, slightly accelerated.
He pressed his ear flat against the freezing dirt floor of his cabin.
The vibrations were faint, but undeniable. They were footsteps. Heavy, coordinated footsteps.
Data Analysis, his mind instantly calculated. Footsteps in a severe blizzard. Variable A: Desperate Villagers. Probability: 0%. The villagers are starved, weak, and uncoordinated. These steps are heavy, driving through knee-deep snow with mechanical precision.
Variable B: Wild Beasts. Probability: 5%. A pack of wolves might move through the storm, but beasts do not march in synchronization. Their steps are erratic, spread out.
Variable C: Martial Artists. Probability: 95%. Only individuals possessing internal energy or advanced body-refining techniques could march through a blizzard of this magnitude with such heavy, unyielding cadence.
Li Han rolled silently off his bed. He didn't grab his bow; a bow was useless in a whiteout blizzard. He drew his rusted hunting knife, his hand gripping the worn leather hilt with terrifying, white-knuckled intensity.
He crept toward the front wall of his shack. There was a small, dime-sized knothole in the rotting wood, previously stuffed with dry moss to keep the wind out. He pulled the moss free with a single finger and pressed his eye to the hole.
The world outside was a chaotic vortex of white and grey snow.
Through the swirling maelstrom, his Minor Night Vision pierced the gloom just enough to make out three silhouettes emerging from the main southern road.
They were not bandits. They were not starving refugees.
They were auditors.
The three figures wore identical attire: heavy, dark grey cloaks lined with pristine white fur, far superior to the ragged pelts of the villagers. Beneath the cloaks, Li Han caught the dull, metallic gleam of chainmail armor. At their hips rested long, straight swords secured in polished black scabbards.
But the most terrifying detail was the crest embroidered on the left breast of their cloaks, barely visible through the driving snow: A silver mountain peak pierced by a single, jagged iron sword.
The Ironridge Sect.
Li Han's breath caught in his throat. His predecessor's memories recognized the crest immediately. The Ironridge Sect was the ruling martial power in the region, based out of Ironridge Town. They were the ones who demanded the crippling grain taxes. They were the untouchable overlords of this brutal feudal hierarchy.
These weren't elders or inner sect masters—they looked young, likely outer sect disciples sent on mundane errands—but to a village of mortals, even an outer disciple was a walking god.
They didn't trudge through the snow. They moved with a terrifying, supernatural lightness. Every step they took, despite their heavy armor, barely sank into the snowdrifts. It was a basic movement technique, an application of internal Qi to lighten the body's mass.
They are at least at the Flesh Refining stage, possibly Bone Refining, Li Han calculated, the cold sweat of genuine terror prickling across his back. My Initial Skin Refining is a joke to them. My +1.8 Strength means nothing against internal Qi.
The three disciples didn't stop to seek shelter. They didn't knock on any doors. They moved with absolute, terrifying purpose, cutting a straight path through the center of the village.
They headed directly toward the largest house. The former elder's house.
The house where Li Han had murdered Zhao Mang and his two lackeys.
Li Han backed away from the knothole, his mind racing at a million miles an hour, desperately calculating this catastrophic new variable.
Why were they here? In the middle of the worst blizzard of the decade?
Hypothesis 1: Routine Tax Collection. Unlikely. Sects collected taxes in the autumn, after the harvest. They didn't send disciples into a death storm for a few coppers from a starving village.
Hypothesis 2: Zhao Mang. The pieces fell into place with sickening clarity. Zhao Mang had possessed a rudimentary Iron Bark Physique manual. He had possessed twenty silver taels. He had ruled the village with absolute authority.
Zhao Mang wasn't just a random thug who got lucky. He was a local asset. An informant, a minor affiliate, or perhaps a disgraced former servant of the Ironridge Sect, placed here to keep an eye on the Blackwood Forest periphery.
And Li Han had slaughtered him.
The narrative he had so carefully crafted—the random bandit raid—was about to be subjected to a forensic audit by actual martial artists.
If they were simply looking for a missing asset, they might accept the bandit story. But martial artists possessed enhanced senses. They might inspect the house. They might notice that the blood spatter patterns didn't match a chaotic melee. They might notice that the single, massive impact that shattered Zhao Mang's skull was the work of a blunt force or a highly specific, concentrated strike, not the wild hacking of a starving bandit.
If they deduced that a hidden martial artist had killed their asset, they would lock down the village. They would interrogate everyone. They would use Qi to sense the vitality of the villagers.
And if they scanned Li Han, they wouldn't find a starving, frail orphan. They would find a hyper-dense, hyper-vital Initial Skin Refining martial artist masquerading as a peasant.
The conclusion was absolute: Discovery meant capture, torture, and a gruesome death.
"The margin of safety has evaporated," Li Han whispered into the dark, his grip on his hunting knife tightening until the leather creaked.
He had three options.
Option A: Flee immediately. Run into the blizzard, into the Blackwood Forest.
Probability of Survival: Less than 10%. The storm was lethal, and his tracks would be visible to martial trackers once the snow cleared. Furthermore, abandoning his frozen meat stash meant certain starvation within a week.
Option B: Preemptive Strike. Ambush the three disciples while they investigated the house.
Probability of Survival: 0%. He was an Initial Skin Refining novice with a rusted knife. They were three trained, armored, Qi-wielding swordsmen. It would be a mathematical suicide.
Option C: Maintain the Facade. Trust the cover-up. Trust that the two months of decay and freezing temperatures had degraded the evidence enough to fool them. Play the starving, terrified orphan, and pray that their arrogance blinded them to the truth.
Probability of Survival: Unknown. It depended entirely on the competence of the auditors.
It was the worst possible scenario for an actuary. He had to rely on luck.
Suddenly, a massive, booming voice echoed over the roaring wind, carrying the undeniable, vibrating resonance of internal Qi. It rattled the very wooden boards of Li Han's shack.
"VILLAGERS OF BLACKWOOD! GATHER AT THE CENTER SQUARE IMMEDIATELY! ANYONE WHO DOES NOT APPEAR WITHIN THIRTY BREATHS WILL BE EXECUTED ON SIGHT!"
The disciples were not hiding. They were demanding an audience.
Li Han closed his eyes. He took one long, deep, stabilizing breath, forcing his raging heart rate back down to a pathetic, fluttering rhythm. He deactivated his Iron Bark Physique, allowing his muscles to relax into a state of simulated weakness.
He rubbed a handful of cold ash from his hearth onto his face, ensuring his cheeks looked suitably hollow and filthy. He wrapped his tattered, freezing coat tightly around his shoulders.
The ghost had to step back into the light.
Li Han pushed his door open, stepping out into the blinding, screaming whiteout of the blizzard, preparing to face the auditors of his first murder. The careful, lowkey accumulation was over.
The true test of his survival had just begun.