He hadn't expected that a simple shouting match would let him skate by so easily. Too bad he didn't manage to slip the hospital bill in for reimbursement…
Of course, Li Pan didn't for a second believe the company was that easy to fool.
Aside from not yet knowing he'd sworn brotherhood with a "monster" and personally stepped onto the board, HQ had probably guessed most of the Security Bureau's little scheme. If they were turning a blind eye, it was because the others were dead and Li Pan was the one left standing—pinch your nose and accept it.
From the board's and GM 01's vantage point, they weren't going to assume some local Security Bureau mucky-muck had taken offense and, on his own, staged a revenge play to boost a home-turf manager by murdering the competition.
Their take would be: people inside the Security Committee are sick of TheM's long monopoly in the monster market; they've started coordinating, pushing ACA to the front as a rival while quietly leveraging Bureau factions to give them cover—i.e., market competition.
Uh-huh. A few deaths? That's just normal competition. If it escalates, it becomes interworld corporate war.
So unlike those earlier "bold leap, global purges" resolutions, the higher-ups were very restrained this time. Or better: very serious.
The semiconductor radio spoke up in person? Says it all.
After all, the opponent wasn't some frog-in-a-well cooperative; it was a multiversal conglomerate capable of starting wars across worlds—peer weight class to TheM.
Out of basic respect, both sides would hold back and play within Security Committee protocols—for a while. Until one side couldn't stomach it, tore up the pact, and flipped the table.
Then it'd be all-in, cards face-up, fight to a finish.
For now, it was fencing and gradual raises.
A small loss? No big deal; the game's long and the company can afford it.
Li Pan gathered all staff and relayed the meeting line.
"Second wave of out-of-towners just posted. Ah-Qi, you're HR—help coordinate.
"Rama, Old Liu, Warehouse 42 got looted—Logistics rebuilds it.
"Ops: first recover those 007 corpses. Start with 081007; talk to the Security Bureau and collect what you can. If the radiation's nuts, photos and a write-up will do.
"And stay away from the Collector's site for now. It's too dangerous.
"Eighteen—GM 0213 shared his bundle with Tech; trace 0213007's contacts since arrival and which black-lab is cloning the temps.
"That's it. Keep me posted."
With tasks handed off, Li Pan assigned himself a "warehouse inspection" run—city was chaos last night, maybe other depots got hit; as GM he had to take a look…
Then he walked out, turned left, grabbed a cab, and went home to recuperate. If he could stall for a bit, great; once Warehouse 1 blew up, he'd pin that on the riots too.
Speaking of Red Tengu…
He pinged Chengzi the coordinates of the New Tokyo University (Pacific Campus). Note: a friend had seen Huang Dahe near the Engineering School—worth a look.
Truth is, it wasn't that they weren't looking or that he couldn't be found—there were too many leads.
Expelled and cut off from the system, Dahe could only be confirmed by eyeball; and in Night City, an Asian college kid with average build and features is invisibility incarnate.
Short hair, glasses, checkered shirt, a backpack—poof, gone in the crowd. Who'd pick you out?
So Chengzi had been collecting "sightings" every so often—without drawing attention.
That dance around him had another reason: at this juncture, Li Pan had to avoid at all costs that the company, the Security Bureau, or any force anywhere sniff out a link between him and his avatar.
This was corporate wartime; for all he knew, they were already listening or tailing. You can't be too careful.
And, honestly, that was all he had.
Last night, he didn't show his face because he didn't want to scare Dahe half to death covered in blood; seeing the kid was with Red Tengu by choice and not knowing what those terrorists wanted storming a university lab, he shadowed them in secret.
Good thing he did. If that prickle in his neck hadn't hit and he hadn't yanked the mech at the last second, the kid would've been vaporized with the machine in a single shot.
Thankfully that custom over-specced prototype was a beast: with a deflection field on board, even naval-grade beam fire only left it mid-crippled; the cockpit was largely fine.
Li Pan traced the shot and flew after the sniper—never expecting to run head-on into 0213007. Bonus catch.
He still didn't know why the guy had fired first and blown his position; without that, the Security Bureau would've struggled to find him.
Later, busy hunting the other 007s, he didn't track which way Red Tengu bolted.
News said Cerberus did the heavy slaughtering around the inner ring; along the elevated beltways almost no one remained. Toward the peripheral campus of New UT, no major firefights: likely Red Tengu slipped away.
As long as Dahe was alive in Night City, there'd be a chance.
Back at his suburban block, the moment he got out of the cab he caught corpse stink. A homeless man lay in the gutter—beaten, drunk, OD'd? Who knew. The hole-in-the-wall shops at the entrance, wontons and all, were burnt out.
Well, of course. With the whole city killing and torching, mobs nearly breaching the urban core, the rest wouldn't fare better—only by degree.
The elevator was blown open; the floor gummy with blood. Maybe some cyber-psychotic snapped waiting. Stairs it was.
Around the tenth floor, he ran into the wonton shop owner, sitting, hollowed out. The shop was gone; the loss, huge.
Li Pan passed, stopped, turned back.
"Hey… if it burned, reopen. I'll float you twenty thousand, yeah?"
The man looked up.
"Ah Zhen… is dead."
Silence.
"…I'm sorry."
He barely remembered Ah Zhen: a braided girl who'd sometimes watch them play ball.
And that was it.
In a place like Night City—with gang wars, "air-conditioner riots," plagues vanished—those kids he'd run with… some studied, some went underworld, some died in the street, some simply vanished. In time, they couldn't even field a team, and their faces faded.
"…I'm sorry."
He patted the man's shoulder and went on.
A single gunshot cracked.
He paused… then climbed on.
Back home, he looked at the crystal ball on the shelf.
Night City inside was black too, like it had just been broiled.
So 01044's power hadn't dissipated.
"Hey, 044—still alive?"
Knock, knock—no answer.
He shrugged, sat on the couch, and settled into cultivation.
Yes—no matter how much he'd seen or how many he'd met, no matter the carnage, he could still still his heart and practice.
Not because he was cold-blooded or broken. Because he was used to it.
Come on—if you don't even know where tomorrow's meal is coming from, and a stray bullet could take you any moment, who has time to care about someone else's fate?
But this time a nameless urgency tugged at him, like an invisible hand clutching his heart.
He used to be a frog at the bottom of a well—knew nothing, wanted only money.
He still didn't know much, but now he'd seen enough to grasp this:
The worlds under the Security Committee weren't as safe as they looked, and you couldn't buy a good night's sleep.
Inside those countless Earths, undercurrents writhed—resistance everywhere, a powder keg waiting for a spark.
And outside those worlds, in the vacuum's dark, dangers lurked too.
When mankind still ate raw meat, the reach of our torches marked the boundary of reason; beyond lay abysses of nameless gods.
With civilization's advance, the light of reason grew, shadow after shadow receded, and we grew deluded—we could understand, create, control everything.
But as the Committee's research ships push into the multiverse and infinite space at unthinkable speeds, the halo of reason has reached its limit.
At least now, we're brushing up against the other side of science, another possible human future.
No—by the look of it, that road leads nowhere.
The Void Abyss: where nothing exists and nothing will; extinction, heat death, nihility.
That's what Li Qingyun saw beyond Penglai.
Taiji Heaven had already been devoured by the Abyss.
Void-Star Heaven won't last either.
Even the Grand Ancestor Taishang, incarnation of the Dao and eternal, can't halt the end of ten thousand ways.
All he can do is save the lineage, ferry the remaining disciples to other worlds, prolong the spark a while, snatching a night's peace before the Abyss arrives.
They had already fled to this world.
Which meant that devouring Abyss wasn't far from 0791.
He had to power up. Otherwise he'd end up like the wonton owner—watching everything slip away, helpless, collapsing inside until he died.
After the Penglai visit, Li Pan finally understood where he was failing.
He'd blamed the world… Sure, the world's a mess, but the main problem was him.
Not "Li Pan" in the abstract—this Li Pan of Earth 0791: his aptitude for cultivation… didn't cut it.
He hadn't grasped it earlier because the Nine Yin True Scripture doesn't say it.
It really doesn't. Whoever wrote that book, it's like a stack of formulas—tools and equations, "now go design a carrier"—not one extra word.
Later Li Qingyun hadn't seen it either because the Shangzhen Dao Canon doesn't say it.
And it doesn't… because they never needed to. After skimming the Taishang Nine Truths Sect's rules and that mountain of problem sets, Li Qingyun got it:
Penglai's threshold is sky-high.
They're orthodox Dao, seekers of the Way—immortals.
If your native aptitude doesn't reach "refining qi, transforming spirit," you can't even enter the gate.
An inner-door novice already starts as a great cultivator—life and fate dual cultivation, three flowers crowning, five breaths toward origin.
Not undergrad or grad—PhD.
What they discuss daily is the Way of nature, the truth of the cosmos, how to stop the Abyss's expansion, heat death…
And you show up with college-entrance questions? "Shifu, shixiong, I can't solve this equation…" Who cares? Who has time? The problem banks are there—go grind!
Now Li Pan understood.
Because the Blood Talisman Heavenly Book spells it out.
It's a scripture anyone can redeem with merit, meant to teach the masses: plain language, tireless patience, preaching and spreading.
And that path goes against the current: only at the end do you condense the soul and forge the body, until you have the divine body of the Lord.
So the basics—training the body—which other schools gloss over, the Blood Lord explains meticulously.
Bottom line: Li Pan's problem is unsolvable… in the standard path.
Because humans are born different.
Because humans are born unequal.
We aren't perfectly reproducible clones.
There are defects, mutations, infinite possibilities.
And the vast majority of people, genetically speaking, cannot cultivate—can't refine qi—mere mortals.
But a few are born tuned to special laws of nature: children of the Dao.
Touch them and they understand; they learn in a flash—stellar aptitude, superb bone-root, preternatural comprehension, "born knowing": rare Dao seeds.
Given a hand into orthodoxy and provided they don't self-sabotage, they will become "refining qi, transforming spirit"—Dao heirs.
How do you compete? You don't.
There's the rub.
Li Qingyun is one, absolutely—but he's not human; he's a Candle Dragon.
His human form is sorcery.
The Nine Yin was designed for him.
Li Pan stumbled on that manual, but he's no dragon—he's mortal.
Born in a world that in sixty years can't gather a hundred Dao seeds—one among fourteen billion.
So, almost certainly, Li Pan isn't a Dao seed; he's someone who can cultivate a little.
To orthodoxy, that's "trash"; to the Blood Church, "salvageable trash." Considering most people here can't even congeal a soul, Li Pan is a gem in the garbage.
But garbage is garbage: no matter how many manuals you hoard, it won't do.
Breaking the mortal shell to reach the peak of "refining essence into qi" is already the limit of this Li Pan's effort and potential.
It isn't only the world's shackle—it's his shackle.
But that's fine.
There's still a way.
The Blood Lord says: the body isn't the most important thing; if you can step onto the path, that's enough.
Mediocre talent? Poor root? Low IQ and— ahem, that one's a no-go: brain damage is incurable, sorry.
Anyway—as long as you're not cognitively impaired and have some affinity, if your quality is low, the Blood God-Child Grand Law will make up for it! The Lord will take you by the hand, step by step, to the Great Dao!
He was down to skin and bones and still rebirthed and realized the Dao—are you worse off?
Li Pan could only nod: "Not at all. You win."
That's why people believe in that Church: it's monstrously effective. No argument.
He wasn't about to throw everything out and switch to their path—he already had an avatar doing that—but he could cross-reference: using the Heavenly Book of Blood plus the teachings of the Lord and Master Xiǎn, he derived an improved method for his Nine Yin Body-Refinement.
Helped that the Blood Book includes "refine-and-devour" methods for many body-ways, including how to devour/analyze a draconic body.
It's truly ecumenical: broad, deep, inclusive. No wonder believers conquer worlds to redeem it.
And yes, the Taishang Nine Truths Sect is profound: the Lord can integrate orthodox secrets to forge his own way, and Master Xiǎn—scholar of scholars—can call out each borrowed tweak, explaining causes and effects (snark included).
One thing's sure: the Blood Book is far easier to grasp than the Nine Yin.
So with Li Pan half-lidded and Li Qingyun the other half,
Nine Yin in the left hand, Blood Book in the right—double-barreled!
Soon he worked out how, with this human body, to break into Nine Yin Fourth Turn and achieve Core Formation.
Put simply: past failures came down to not enough qi or not enough meat.
Per Nine Yin as designed for a Candle Dragon, the "right" order is: evolve the flesh first, shed skin and become a dragon, condense the inner core, then reverse and assume a human Dao body.
But the mortal flesh and Heaven's cap stopped him at step one: no draconic potential, no qi to sustain super-evolution; his inner landscape also limited qi storage—he could never reach core thresholds.
Luckily, after drinking dragon blood and manifesting as an apostle, he now had endless qi and latent power—the objective condition for a breakthrough.
What remained was the body's ceiling.
And that hardest problem proved the simplest:
If this body won't do, change it.
Li Qingyun's human Dao body is already "refining qi, transforming spirit."
There's your answer.
Copy it.
Blood-refinement is the wedge.
Flip the script: first build a "refining-qi, transforming-spirit" body, then flood the inner channels with qi, and finally train the true form of Nine Yin.
Riding the ebb of the anesthesia, teeth clenched, Li Pan performed major internal surgery:
With blood-refinement he ruined his own cells, erased human meridians, visualized Li Qingyun's Dao body, and cloned it in place, skipping every intermediate: organs and meridians remade to match a "refining-qi, transforming-spirit" cultivator—Li Qingyun's Dao body.
Turn a mere mortal into a Core-Formation cultivator.
Bypass Heaven's law; cheat nature's rule.
Not with qi but with dragon blood and human flesh, simulate Li Qingyun's "core."
This wasn't the human method of forming a core, nor Li Pan's invention.
It was a technique Master Xiǎn annotated in the appendix: Archaic humans imitating beasts by cultivating an external elixir.
Having a pedantic, gossipy teacher is a blessing!
Its name: Complete Demonization.
I'm done being human!
It worked.
Breakthrough.
Shortcut taken.
Qi surged back, swelling nonstop.
No rain, no thunder, no lightning. No smiting.
Natural, water over a brim.
Palm on his dantian, he could feel the "core" in his gut, wrapped in dragon blood, like a reactor, a nuclear engine, pumping qi through him without end.
No—if he's on the demonic-body path now, it's no longer a "core."
It's a Dragon Pearl.
.
.
.
⚠️ 30 CHAPTERS AHEAD — I'm Not a Cyberpsycho ⚠️
The system says: Kill.Mercs obey. Corporates obey. Monsters obey.One man didn't.
🧠💀 "I'm not a cyberpsycho. I just think... differently."
💥 High-voltage cyberpunk. Urban warfare. AI paranoia.Read 30 chapters ahead, only on Patreon.
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