Pyradine City sat like a glittering, jagged jewel in the southern dominion of the Chrysoprase Empire. It was a metropolis defined entirely by motion and ambition—a sprawling, multi-tiered stronghold where the heavy, blood-stained rivers of commerce, war, and martial factions violently collided.
The air here carried a permanent metallic tang, an ozone-heavy weight fueled by the rhythmic clang of cold steel from a thousand training yards. The atmosphere was thick with tension, churning with the collective desires of a million souls. Here, disciples drenched in sweat chased the elusive, blood-soaked dream of the martial apex, their battle cries and dying gasps alike lost in the overwhelming cacophony of the streets.
Merchants barked their wares from elaborately carved stalls with a desperation that bordered on theater, their voices amplified by sheer lung capacity and Internal Force.
"Medicinal herbs! Freshly harvested from the Jade Forests, still rich with vital energy!"
"Refined bone-cleaving blades! Blood-tempered and guaranteed to shear through an iron-hide beast's armor like winter silk!"
Through this ceaseless chaos, young masters and sword-maidens from affluent clans paraded in fluttering, brocaded silks. Their eyes were cold, carrying the effortless, terrifying arrogance of the high-born. They walked without yielding, fully expecting the sea of mortal commoners and wandering swordsmen to part before them.
Yet, those who truly knew the city—the veterans who had survived long enough for their hair to gray—looked past the flash of wealth and the boastful roars of arrogant youths. They watched the shadows. They observed the teahouses and the dark alleyways where the real experts moved: quiet, calm, and as dangerous as still water hiding unfathomable, monster-infested depths.
In Pyradine, life was cheap, but rumors were the only currency cheaper than copper.
Near the sweeping arches of the Southern City Gates, the shadows provided a brief respite from the sweltering midday sun.
"Have you heard?" a guard whispered, leaning his armor-clad shoulder into the cool stone of the archway.
"Heard what?" his companion asked, lazily shifting the weight of his ironwood spear. "That the Silver Cauldron Merchant Family is raising the price of wine again? Or that another outer disciple crippled his meridians trying to break through his bottleneck?"
"No, idiot. There's a shop over in the West District. They say… they say it lets you enter another world."
The second guard scoffed, wiping a thick layer of grime and sweat from his brow. "You've been drinking fermented rice wine before noon again. That's the oldest scam in the empire. It's just some two-bit charlatan using hypnotic incense to fleece a few country hicks out of their travel funds."
"I'm serious!" the first guard hissed, glancing around to ensure their captain wasn't within earshot. "Old Liu was doing his rounds yesterday. He saw a fighter—a real one, a recognized 2nd rate master—crawling out of the shop's doorway at sunset. The man was clawing at the dirt, screaming as if he'd stared into the very bowels of the abyss. Liu said the guy pissed his trousers."
"Sounds like a haunted house for fools," the second guard muttered. But despite his dismissive tone, his grip on the shaft of his spear tightened, his knuckles turning white.
In a city where every warrior hunted desperately for a hidden edge, an epiphany in battle, or a breakthrough in their martial arts, even a "haunted house" was worth a second look.
Far from the prestige of the main thoroughfares, tucked into a neglected, sun-starved corner of the West District where the dust lay thick and undisturbed, stood a dying shop.
Its wooden walls groaned under the weight of decades of neglect, the timber rotting from the dampness of the nearby canal. The sign above the door hung at a precarious, wind-battered tilt, its gold-leaf lettering peeling away like dead skin.
Origins Dungeon Hall.
It was a name far too grand, far too arrogant, for such a decrepit structure. And sitting beneath that sign, lounging in a battered bamboo chair, was Yuan Bi.
He was a young man, perhaps no older than twenty, with a posture that could only be described as aggressively lazy. He fanned himself slowly with a frayed paper folding fan, his dark eyes half-closed as he tracked the occasional stray dog wandering the empty, trash-strewn street. He wore plain, unadorned robes of faded gray, blending perfectly into the dismal background of the district.
"No customers again," he murmured to the stagnant air, though there was no real disappointment in his tone.
Occasionally, a passerby would slow their pace. Their eyes would flicker toward the dark, gaping doorway of the shop before they leaned in to whisper to a companion.
"That's the place," a woman hissed, pulling her companion by the sleeve. "The shop of screams."
"It looks like a stiff breeze would knock it over," her friend replied, eyeing Yuan Bi with a mixture of pity and disgust. "Isn't that the Yuan boy? I heard he inherited this dump after his old grandfather passed away. Crossed paths with a ruthless young master and got his martial arts crippled just to amuse him. Shattered his dantian. Now he's just sitting there, waiting for the cold weather to take him."
Yuan Bi's eyebrow twitched. He snapped his folding fan shut with a sharp thwack.
"I can hear you," he said, his voice flat, carrying a bored resonance that seemed entirely at odds with the city's perception of him.
The two gossips stiffened, their faces flushing with embarrassment before they scurried away like startled rabbits. Yuan Bi sighed, reopening his fan.
Once, this place had scraped by selling chipped iron weapons and heavily watered-down healing salves. Once, Yuan Bi had sat here consumed by the bitter, suffocating despair of a broken young man, staring at the bottom of wine jars and contemplating which high bridge in Pyradine City would offer the quickest death.
But everything had changed forty-eight hours ago.
Yuan Bi had woken in the dead of night to a voice. It wasn't an external sound, but a cold, mechanical vibration echoing directly within his mind.
[System Initialization Complete.]
[Host Core Bound: Yuan Bi. Status: Dantian Shattered (Mortal).]
[Initiating First-Time Host Protocol: Dantian Reconstruction.]
He had frozen on his cot, waiting for the drunken hallucination to pass. It didn't.
Instead, an agonizing, blistering heat erupted in his lower abdomen. Yuan Bi had bitten down on his blanket to stifle a scream as he felt his withered, broken meridians snapping back into place. It was as if molten gold was being poured directly into his veins. The fragmented shards of his ruined dantian forcefully stitched themselves together, binding tighter, denser, and vastly more profound than they had ever been before.
When the pain finally subsided, leaving him drenched in sweat, a rush of pristine, roaring Internal Force had flooded his body. He wasn't just healed; his foundation had been rebuilt to a flawless state.
Following the miraculous healing, raw, crystalline knowledge had flooded his mind. He had been bound to an ancient, multiversal core—a relic capable of constructing "Trial Realms." These were localized shards of reality designed for one singular, brutal purpose: forcing evolution and growth through extreme, unmitigated combat.
And the System offered him a direct path to the absolute apex. It operated on a brutal but flawless law of equivalent exchange: slaughter for enlightenment. Because Internal Force was sealed within the trial, challengers were forced to rely purely on their physical bodies and instincts. The extreme pressure of genuine life-and-death struggle pushed their minds to the absolute limit. Upon surviving or dying in the trial, the System ensured that all the passive battlefield experience, muscle memory, and flashes of martial enlightenment were permanently transferred and retained by the challenger's physical body in the real world.
But the true benefit lay with the Host. Every kill registered within the dungeon generated "Shop EXP" for Yuan Bi. As the shop accumulated EXP and leveled up, the System would grant him massive, heaven-defying rewards, bypassing years of tedious meditation and brutal physical conditioning.
"A trial realm?" he had asked the empty room two nights ago, testing the flow of his newly restored Internal Force with a clenched fist. "No legendary martial manual? No hidden master waiting to pass on eighty years of power?"
Then, he had laughed. It was a soft, dark, amused sound. "So that's the game. I let other fighters do the bloody work. They endure the terror, their bodies adapt to the combat experience to keep them addicted, my shop levels up, and I reap the massive System rewards. The arrogant bastards who broke me won't even see me coming."
By the next morning, the shop had been entirely purged. The dusty shelves and rusted swords of his grandfather's era were gone, absorbed by the System for raw materials. In their place, resting upon the creaking floorboards, stood four sleek, obsidian-black seats made of an unknown, light-absorbing alloy. Atop each seat sat a helm-like artifact of silver metal, pulsing with a slow, rhythmic, almost biological heartbeat.
At the entrance, he had placed a new wooden board, the calligraphy stark and bold:
OPEN: 8 AM TO MIDNIGHT
Entry Fee: 2 Spiritual Stones / hour
Trial Access: 5 Spiritual Stones
Maximum Time: 3 hours
Warning: Life and death within the trial feel one hundred percent real. Enter at your own risk.
Benefit: Random Reward
Violators of shop rules will be immediately suppressed.
"Perfect," Yuan Bi sighed in the present, leaning back in his bamboo chair and stretching his arms, savoring the hidden strength coursing just beneath his skin. "At these prices, no one in their right mind will ever come. Seven spiritual stones is enough for a common family to live comfortably for five years."
BANG!
The shop's dilapidated doors slammed open, violently rattling the loose floorboards and sending a cloud of dust into the air. A round, heavily perspiring figure rushed in, gasping for air as if he had just sprinted across the entire city.
Min Luan.
He was Yuan Bi's only remaining 'friend'—if one generously counted a man who spent most of his time trying to talk Yuan Bi into spectacularly failing business ventures. Clad in expensive, dark green merchant silks that clung unflatteringly to his wide frame, Min Luan glared at the new sign, his chest heaving.
"Yuan Bi! What in the name of the ancestors is this madness?" Min Luan wheezed, jabbing a fat, ring-adorned finger at the sign. "Seven spiritual stones? Are you trying to rob the district, or have the demons of madness finally consumed your mind? And what is this nonsense about 'Martial Enlightenment'?"
"Min Luan. A pleasure as always," Yuan Bi said, his voice like cooling silk. He didn't bother standing up. "It's a service. Quality demands a premium."
"A service? You're charging a small fortune to sit in a black chair and wear a metal bucket on your head!" Min Luan stepped closer, his voice dropping into a desperate, pleading whisper. "Look, Bi... I know losing your martial arts broke you. I know it hurts. But you can't run a scam like this! The city guards will drag you to the dungeons. Let me help you. I have a shipment of low-grade medicinal herbs coming in next week, we can—"
"Try it," Yuan Bi interrupted.
His gaze locked onto the merchant's eyes with a sudden, piercing intensity. He deliberately allowed a tiny, razor-sharp fraction of his restored Internal Force to leak into his aura. It hit Min Luan like a physical weight, making the merchant instinctively step back, the hairs on his arms standing on end. It wasn't the look of a broken cripple; it was the sharp, predatory pressure of a true martial artist.
"If it's worthless, if it's an illusion, I will refund you every single stone and sell myself into indentured servitude to your merchant house," Yuan Bi offered smoothly, pulling his aura back in.
"On your reputation?" Min Luan scoffed nervously, though he looked visibly shaken by the sudden pressure he thought he had just imagined.
"On my very life."
Min Luan stared at him, conflicted. He wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief. "You don't have much of a life left to pawn, you stubborn ass. But fine! I'll expose this scam of yours right now, and then you're going to listen to reason."
With a heavy, dramatic sigh, the merchant dug into his brocade pouch. He slammed seven glowing, translucent spiritual stones onto the wooden table. He marched over to the nearest obsidian chair, practically throwing himself into it, and yanked the pulsing silver helm over his head.
"Let's see this grand delusion," Min Luan's muffled voice echoed from within the helm.
Yuan Bi merely smiled, tapping his fan against his knee.
"System. Initiate Dungeon: The Undead Hall. Difficulty:Normal(Solo play)