The morning sun did not bring warmth to Rylan. It brought a splitting headache that felt like a chisel driving into his skull.
He sat on the edge of his bed, sweat dripping from his nose. His breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. Inside him, the golden pool of his new Foundation Establishment energy was roiling like boiling oil.
He had ascended too fast.
Absorbing the Jade Coin, then the raw System reward from defeating Lin, and immediately forcing a breakthrough—it was reckless. His meridians, toughened but still adapting, were screaming under the pressure of the Azure Dragon's Breath manual he had tried to circulate.
Rylan coughed, covering his mouth. When he pulled his hand away, his palm was speckled with dark, clotted blood.
Impure Qi.
He waited for the familiar blue screen to pop up, for the System to offer a "Stabilization Pill" or a "Healing Guide."
Nothing happened. The air remained empty.
The System was silent. It had given him the power, but it didn't seem to care if that power tore him apart from the inside.
I am not invincible, Rylan realized, a cold knot forming in his stomach. I am just a vessel that is currently overfilled.
The door to the command room flew open. There was no knock.
"She is wasting everything!"
Lyra stormed in, her face flushed with anger. She slammed a ledger onto the table. Behind her, Mei hovered in the doorway, looking defensive and clutching a sheaf of blueprints.
Rylan wiped the blood from his hand onto his trousers before looking up, masking his internal agony with a mask of stoic calm. "Explain."
"The Artificer," Lyra spat the title like an insult, pointing a finger at Mei without looking at her. "She demands three barrels of Spirit-Oil for her 'Bramble Array.' Three barrels! That is half our stockpile. If we use that, we have nothing for the lamps, nothing for trade, and nothing for alchemy."
"It is necessary for the array's ignition sequence!" Mei shot back, her voice trembling but stubborn. "In the Jade Empire, we would use ten barrels for a perimeter this size! I am already cutting corners!"
"This isn't the Empire!" Lyra rounded on her. "We are a village in the mud! We scrape for every drop. You think because you warmed the Master's bed for one night, you can drain us dry?"
The room went deadly silent.
Mei went pale. The insult struck home. She looked at Rylan, waiting for him to defend her, to tell Lyra to back down.
Rylan didn't move. He felt the friction between them—the resource-scarce survivor versus the resource-heavy academic.
"Mei," Rylan said, his voice rough. "Lyra is right."
Mei flinched. "Master?"
"We do not have the Empire's logistics," Rylan said, standing up slowly. His joints popped. He suppressed a wince as his unstable Qi flared. "You cannot build a dragon out of mud. Redesign the array. Use one barrel. Supplement the rest with physical traps."
"But... the efficiency will drop by forty percent," Mei protested.
"Then make up the difference with ingenuity," Rylan snapped, his patience fraying under the pain of his internal injuries. "You are valuable to me because of your mind, Mei. If you need endless resources to be useful, then you are not an Artificer. You are just a spender."
Mei's mouth snapped shut. She looked hurt, but she also looked challenged. She bowed stiffly, her eyes hard. "Understood."
She turned and left, brushing past Lyra without a word.
Lyra watched her go, then turned her sharp gaze back to Rylan. She didn't look triumphant. She looked at the bloodstain on his trousers.
"You're bleeding," she stated. It wasn't a question.
"Cultivation backlash," Rylan admitted, sitting back down heavily. "The foundation is unstable."
Lyra walked over, her expression unreadable. She didn't offer comfort. She simply reached for his wrist, checking his pulse with her herbalist's touch.
"You moved too fast," she said clinically. "You act like a god, Rylan, but your body is still meat and bone. If the Jade Empire returns before you stabilize, you won't need to fight them. You'll explode on your own."
"I know," Rylan gritted out. "Do we have any Spirit-Harmonizing Grass?"
"No," Lyra said, dropping his hand. "That grows near the mines. The mines we don't hold."
She crossed her arms. "Speaking of the mines... Elara isn't back."
Rylan's head snapped up. "She should have returned by dawn."
"Exactly."
A chill that had nothing to do with cultivation settled over the room. Elara was the ghost of the forest. If she was late, it wasn't because she got lost.
"Prepare a team," Rylan ordered, standing up again. The pain spiked, searing his chest, but he shoved it down into the dark corners of his mind. "We go to the mine."
"You are in no condition—"
"I said prepare the team, Lyra!"
His voice carried the weight of the Imperial Aura, but this time, it felt brittle. Lyra held his gaze for a long second, assessing him. She wasn't cowed by his aura; she was calculating the odds.
"Fine," she said. "But if you collapse, I'm leaving you there. I won't let the village die for your ego."
She left.
Rylan stared at the closed door. Good, he thought. She has a survival instinct.
He grabbed his sword—a mundane steel blade he rarely used now that he had spiritual arts—and strapped it on. His spiritual energy was unreliable today. He might need cold steel.
The journey to the Spirit Ore Mine took four hours. Rylan moved slower than usual, conserving his breath.
When they reached the perimeter marked on the Baron's map, the forest went unnaturally quiet. No birds. No insects.
Rylan signaled for the small group of village scouts to halt. He activated his Structural Vision.
The world turned into a wireframe of stress lines and density. He scanned the tree line ahead.
There.
Fifty yards ahead, the natural flow of the forest was distorted. The trees were arranged in a pattern that looked random to the naked eye, but under his vision, he saw the faint, shimmering threads of spiritual energy connecting them.
"A Killing Array," Rylan whispered.
It was a trap. Not a hasty one like Lin's serpent, but a meticulous, static formation designed to shred anyone who walked through it.
"Elara?" Rylan hissed into the silence.
A faint, rhythmic thumping sound answered him.
Rylan followed the sound with his eyes. High up, in the branches of a massive pine tree at the center of the array, something was hanging.
It was Elara.
She was bound upside down by shimmering energy ropes. She wasn't dead, but she was unconscious, her face bruised, her stealth cloak tattered.
And sitting at the base of the tree, peeling an apple with a jagged dagger, was a man.
He didn't wear the jade-green robes of the Empire's cultivators. He wore grey, nondescript leathers. He had no overwhelming aura, no flashy weapon.
[Ding! Target Analysis Blocked.] [System Warning: Target possesses anti-divination artifacts.]
The System stayed silent on his stats.
The man looked up, locking eyes directly with Rylan, even though Rylan was hidden in the underbrush fifty yards away. The man smiled, revealing teeth that had been filed into points.
"You took your time, 'Emperor,'" the man called out. His voice wasn't loud, but it carried perfectly. "Your little bird is tough. She didn't scream until I broke the third finger."
Rylan's vision went red. The unstable energy in his Dantian flared, hot and violent.
He stepped out of the brush.
"Let her go," Rylan said, his voice low.
"Come get her," the man replied, gesturing to the invisible array between them. "Or... we can talk about the price of Jade."
This was not an arrogant Young Master. This was a professional.
And Rylan, wounded and unstable, had just walked into his kill zone.
End of Chapter 31