Arin woke to the quiet agony of total exhaustion. The world was a mess of scent: damp earth, pine needles, and the cloying, metallic tang of his own internal injury. He was pressed deep into the root-tangled copse, his new, Bone-Forged body a rigid, heavy weight.
The transformation had saved his life, but it had nearly cost him his consciousness. His body's inner architecture was complete—his bones were now dense, durable, laced with the grey-silver runes of the third Mark but the process had left his muscles shredded and his spirit core a hollow void. His passive, defensive aura clung, protecting him from the harsh mountain air, but it was starving.
His Bone-Forged resilience was a shield against external harm, but it did nothing to accelerate internal repair without fuel. Every attempt to move sent a jolt of tearing pain through his core. He realised he was in a state of stable paralysis; he wouldn't die quickly, but he couldn't move quickly either. His stolen spiritual food was the only thing standing between him and collapse.
They will be here soon, Arin thought, forcing his mind to clear the haze of pain.
He reached for Seliora. 'Kaelen will report. What is his immediate move? I need to know how much time I bought.'
The voice of the goddess was a cold, precise whisper, slicing through the agony. "Kaelen Dravos is poisoned by his own pride, little anchor. He did not see a cursed labourer; he saw a powerful opponent with a hidden, high-grade cultivation technique that shamed him. He will never report the truth the divine Mark, the impossible deflection to his masters. That would expose his inadequacy."
"Instead," Seliora continued, "he will report that the fugitive is a powerful, dark-arts cultivator who has gone rogue and is actively trying to infiltrate the core of the sect. He will call for a targeted, massive sweep led by the Inner Disciples, using advanced spiritual nets. He will use overwhelming force, fueled by humiliation. You have bought less than one day."
Less than one day. In his current state, Arin wouldn't last an hour against a focused spiritual sweep.
He was out of time. He had to heal, and he had to move.
He dragged himself into a half-sitting position, ignoring the fresh wave of nausea. He took out the last meagre portion of his stolen sustenance: the dry spiritual grain and the final shrivelled Soul Strengthening Berry. It wasn't enough to power a single hour of active cultivation, let alone repair a body that had just undergone total skeletal replacement.
He needed a risk, a greater defiance.
He decided on a desperate gambit: consume the food for a baseline, then intentionally use the crescent Mark as a low-frequency, wide-net siphon on the ambient Qi flowing through the entire sect campus.
Arin ate the dry grain, chewed the bitter berry, and focused his consciousness on the Mark. He didn't try to draw power from the powerful, concentrated seal of the Triallands this time. That was too noisy. Instead, he opened the Mark like a giant, silent sponge, drawing the diffuse, low-level life force that permeated the air, the walls, and the ground around him the general "hum" of the entire Duskwind Sect.
The feeling was subtly corrosive. The ambient Qi was thin and tainted by the constant, chaotic cultivation of thousands of disciples, but the Mark did its job perfectly. It consumed the life force and, with a cold efficiency, channelled it directly into the process of internal repair.
The healing was violently fast. Where before, it had been a slow, agonising thrum, it now felt like a torrent of mortar and bone rushing to fill the gaps. His torn muscles began to knit together in minutes, and the deep internal bruising vanished rapidly. The grey-silver runes glowed faintly beneath his skin as they absorbed the stolen energy. The Bone-Forged defence meant he could handle the sudden, raw influx of energy far better than before.
Within two hours, Arin could stand. Within three, he could move without a crippling wave of pain. The defiance had worked. The Law of Balance was satisfied, for now.
But the price of such wholesale theft was not silence.
Arin felt a strange, cold pull in his peripheral spiritual vision. The entire Duskwind Qi field, vast and normally chaotic, had developed a barely perceptible ripple. It was like a single, quiet drain had been left running in a massive bathtub not a flood, but a low, persistent siphon that altered the subtle, natural flow of energy across the campus.
This ripple was too subtle for the Spirit-stage disciples to notice actively, but any automated low-grade ward or monitoring formation designed for routine system health checks would register the unnatural dip in ambient Qi flow across the Outer Court periphery. He had left his signature.
I am a hungry ghost in their machine, Arin thought, a cold smile lifting his lips.
He was healed enough to run, but he could not stay here. The systemic instability he had created would soon be traced to this location. The high-level sweep Kaelen was planning would soon converge on the "spiritual anomaly."
Arin slipped out of the thicket, abandoning the protection of the perimeter. He had gained a new Mark, humiliated the Heir, and healed himself through desperation. He now had the resilience to survive a confrontation, but he could not remain. His cellar base, now miles away, was too far. He needed a new sanctuary, one deeper inside the sect where low-grade wards were ignored and the sheer volume of Qi made his subtle ripple impossible to detect a place Kaelen Dravos would never dream of searching. The hunt had become an unavoidable game of constant, escalating infiltration.
This section now flows very smoothly, making Arin's desperation and cunning clear as he takes this huge risk.