With the group's departure, the small mountain village settled back into its usual, deep tranquility. The only sounds were the gentle, dry clatter of bamboo leaves in the wind and the distant, melodic calls of unfamiliar birds hidden deep within the canopy. The local chieftain was a man far from virtuous who had built his power on intimidation and tribute extracted from the villagers.
However, he had learned his lesson the hard way. He now maintained an unspoken, carefully observed truce with Su Min. They existed in a fragile, mutual balance like two apex predators sharing a small territory. Neither interfered with the other's affairs. It was a peace born not of friendship but of a calculated, wary respect for each other's proven capacity for violence.
Today, feeling the need for certain supplies she couldn't produce herself in her secluded hut, she decided to venture into the city. The Jade Gate Sect members had proven to be shockingly wealthy. They had left her with over a hundred taels of silver after their visit. This was far more than enough for her simple needs. She needed salt, quality cloth for new robes, a few specific metal tools for her alchemy work, and perhaps some spices to relieve the monotony of her daily diet.
Weight was no concern for her, either. Although the game system that brought her here hadn't granted her any special storage space, her spatial ring was a top-tier treasure. It was a beginner's item that defied the normal logic of this low-energy world.
Its internal storage measured one hundred units by one hundred units by one hundred units. This volume was equivalent to a thirty-story residential building. It was vast and orderly. For her personal use, it was practically limitless. It was a pocket dimension entirely at her command. Even better, time within the ring stood completely still. It was a perfect stasis field. An apple placed inside would remain as crisp and fresh a century later as the day she stored it. It would stay without a single brown spot or hint of decay.
She could spend every last tael of silver in the city market without a single worry about spoilage or carrying capacity. The goods won't spoil. The money itself meant little to her beyond its immediate utility. It's a means to an end, not a goal in itself. It's a means to an end, not a goal in itself.
"I haven't been here in years, and the city has changed a lot," Su Min murmured to herself. Her voice was barely a whisper. She now stood before Nanyao City's main, heavily weathered gates. The city was located in the Great Wei Empire's southernmost region.
It was a frontier settlement perched between the empire's tenuous control and the wild, untamed mountains that stretched beyond. Years ago, during her desperate, heart-pounding flight south to escape pursuit, she had passed through this very place. She had been a fleeting shadow in the night.
She had stirred up quite a commotion in Great Wei's northern parts. An army had been mobilized. A mountain had burned. A general's grandson had been killed. Yet, it seemed to have had almost no ripple effect here in the distant south. Even the arrest warrants and bounty posters with her likeness hadn't reached this far.
Or if they had, they had been ignored or lost in the bureaucratic chaos. When she entered the city today, she made a point to casually, unobtrusively check the public noticeboards at the gate and in the main square. There's still none to be found.
Who knows whether the documents had been lost over the past two years, dismissed by local officials as irrelevant, or if they had never been delivered at all to this remote corner. Either way, Su Min didn't care.
The lack of her face on wanted posters was a convenience she appreciated. She had dressed plainly for the trip. She wore slightly masculine, loose-fitting clothes of undyed hemp that hid her figure. She had tied her long hair into a simple, practical bun common to laborers. This made it difficult for others to tell her gender at a casual glance.
"Boss, give me three jin of your roast meat, the fatty kind, and one jin of your strongest liquor," she said to a street vendor. Her voice was neutral. She pitched it low to avoid drawing unnecessary attention.
Although Nanyao City sat at the empire's southern edge and faced constant, low-level pressure from the independent mountain tribes and local chieftains, it wasn't a grim, fortified military fortress. Instead, it had developed into a surprisingly bustling commercial hub. It's a place of exchange between the empire and the mountains. After all, in this world, an unspoken rule seemed to hold: the more sparsely populated and wild a place, the richer and purer its spiritual energy tended to be.
Naturally, the surrounding mountains produced an abundance of rare and potent medicinal herbs. While local doctors and shamans couldn't refine them into concentrated pills as Su Min could, even the raw materials could be boiled into effective medicinal stews and tonics. Some herbs alone, simply chewed or brewed into tea, could nourish the body or invigorate the blood.
The trade in these herbs yielded considerable profits for the merchants who dared to deal with the sometimes volatile mountain folk. Villagers from the surrounding mountains often came to the city to sell their foraged herbs, rare woods, and animal pelts. They came to buy essential goods like salt, iron tools, and cloth. This constant flow of trade and barter was what fueled Nanyao City's dusty, chaotic prosperity. But today, something was different. The usual commercial din was undercut by a new, desperate undertone.
"Why are there so many beggars?" Su Min murmured. Her brow furrowed as she observed the scene.
She was now sitting in a modest, family-run tavern's second-floor dining hall. She had generously ordered a full spread of local dishes: a braised river fish, a stewed pork belly, a plate of wild greens, and a large bowl of rice. The food here was inexpensive. A single tael of silver was more than enough to cover the feast. But as she looked down from the window at the crowded, muddy streets, she frowned. She saw so many destitute, hollow-eyed people huddled in doorways and under makeshift shelters.
"Oh, they are refugees from the north, miss," the young waiter explained politely. He wiped down her table with a damp cloth.
"I heard that two years ago, a massive wildfire ravaged the northern provinces. They say karma hit hard. Afterward, rats swarmed everywhere. It was a black tide of them. They ate up all the grain and crops in the fields and storehouses. Then came terrible floods in the spring and mudslides in the summer. After so many disasters hitting one after another, the entire north descended into chaos and famine. It's said the roads north are lined with bones."
"Oh?" Su Min responded lightly. She took a sip of her tea. She already suspected it wasn't just a simple, unfortunate chain of natural disasters. That man surnamed Zhao had probably not understood the full, sinister extent of it either. It was a sign of deeper spiritual decay.
"These poor souls have been fleeing south ever since. It's a slow river of misery trying to find any way to survive," the waiter continued. His voice dropped to a murmur. "But there's hardly any surplus grain left, even in the imperial granaries down here. Only those communities hiding deep in the southern mountains have managed to barely survive the shortages. The northerners aren't used to the water and soil down here. They fear the deep jungles' poisonous miasma, so they don't dare venture too far from the city walls."
"The lands just outside the city aren't completely safe either," the waiter added. He shook his head with a look of resignation. "The local chieftains are greedy beyond measure. Their taxes and protection fees have long since bled the common folk dry. They take most of what little the refugees can scavenge or grow."
Su Min sneered inwardly at the mention of the chieftains. One such chieftain had once boldly demanded taxes from her. He had even tried, in a drunken stupor, to claim her as his concubine. Naturally, she had taught him a very physical, memorable lesson in boundaries.
She had tied him to a tree and broken both his legs. She used a basic healing pill to mend the bones. Then, once he could walk again, she broke them a second time. She repeated the cycle of agony and recovery until he spent an entire year either immobilized in bed or limping in terror at the sight of her. The message had been received loud and clear. No one had dared to stop her.
Now, the local powers treated her like a vengeful mountain spirit they hoped to appease through avoidance. Incidentally, her medical skills had become locally famous precisely because of this brutal episode. No one else could heal broken bones so completely and quickly. This fact inspired both awe and fear in equal measure.
"Sigh."
The waiter shook his head again. His family-owned tavern had survived the economic downturn only by luck. "Those beggars you see now survive by waiting for scraps and leftovers from restaurants and kitchens like ours. Most of them are too weak from hunger for hard labor. Some of the stronger ones go into the nearby foothills to gather firewood, dig for wild vegetables, and hunt for mushrooms. If they're very, very lucky, they might catch a wild rat or two for a meager mouthful of meat."
"But it's dangerous to leave the city walls nowadays. You wouldn't believe the stories that come back..."
A patron at a nearby table was a man with a merchant's shrewd eyes and a traveler's worn boots. Overhearing the conversation, he leaned over and cut in. His eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and morbid excitement.
"Miss, you may not know this, being new here, but up north, in the abandoned lands near the old trade road—" the man leaned in dramatically. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper that Su Min easily heard.
"At night, the abandoned hills and old graveyards glow with strange, wandering lights. They are will-o'-the-wisps that lead men astray. Vendors selling food, sugar figures, and candied hawthorns suddenly appear out of the mist. Their stalls are lit by single, guttering lanterns. And if you're fool enough, or hungry enough, to look into their cooking pots..."
"What?" Su Min smiled slightly. She already guessed the punchline of this common, universal ghost story. It was a tale as old as time, designed to scare children and the superstitious.
"Heads!" the man said eagerly. He was pleased to have a captive audience. "They are steaming human heads in their buns, I tell you! Those big, bubbling soup pots you see? They are full of boiled human thigh bones making a broth for the damned! And those red, glistening candied hawthorn skewers? They are all eyeballs on sticks staring right back at you!"
"Enough of that!" the waiter snapped. He shot the man a sharp, warning look. "We are eating here. This is a place of business. One more word of that grisly nonsense, and I won't have you scaring off the other customers."
The man clicked his tongue in disappointment and gave up with a resigned shrug. He had wanted to see this young woman scream and panic. He had wanted to enjoy the reaction. But her response was unusually, disappointingly calm.
It was natural, of course, since Su Min was from the modern world. She was saturated with fictional horrors. After years of watching gory horror films and then surviving in this genuinely chaotic and brutal cultivation world, she was utterly unfazed by a few campfire ghost stories.
Reality was far stranger and more dangerous than any fiction. A few gruesome tales wouldn't scare her. Even if she were thrown into one of those so-called ghost markets right now, she might feel a wave of disgust, but she would never feel afraid. She was the predator in any situation, not the prey.
"It's seems this world is truly about to fall into chaos," Su Min thought to herself. She ignored the disappointed, slightly lecherous gazes from the men at the nearby table. She began planning her next steps internally. Her mind remained cool and analytical. "The natural order is unraveling. The signs are everywhere: famine, strange phenomena, the emergence of cultivators and fiends. Once the treasure gourd ripens and I have the Qi Inducing Pill, I will need to travel to see more of this changing world with my own eyes. Seclusion can only teach me so much."
As for the leering stares from the nearby tables, Su Min hadn't bothered to overly hide her appearance once seated. Anyone with half a brain could tell she was a woman, and a comely one at that, despite her plain clothes. A few men had already tried to make clumsy, suggestive comments or gestures. But that kind of cheap, mortal trickery had absolutely no effect on a cultivator of her strength and temperament.
Their words were like the buzzing of flies, easily ignored. Their intentions were as transparent as glass. They were beneath her notice, mere background noise in the symphony of a world descending into thrilling, dangerous change. She finished her meal in peace, paid with a small piece of silver, and left the tavern to continue her errands. Her mind already far away, plotting her path forward in a world on the brink.
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Disaster Chain Reaction:
Fire → Ecosystem collapse → Rodent overpopulation → Crop failure → Famine
Parallels Ming Dynasty "Little Ice Age" calamities