The heavy silence of dawn lay over the city like a thick fog. Mist coiled around the cobbled streets, and the scent of damp earth mixed with the faint aroma of morning incense burning in distant shrines. In the eastern district, where the streets were narrower and the homes modest, a creaking door broke the stillness.
Li Ming stepped out of his home quietly.
His black robes fluttered gently in the morning breeze as he walked forward, his expression as calm and emotionless as the surface of a still pond. His boots made soft, deliberate thuds against the stone path. As soon as the nearby townsfolk caught sight of him, they stepped aside instinctively. Their gazes avoided his face, and hushed whispers stopped mid-breath.
It wasn't out of reverence—they feared him.
He was an executioner.
For four long years, Li Ming had served the court, executing criminals and rebels alike. He had inherited this brutal job at the age of seventeen, after his father also an executioner had died. The connections his father had forged kept the job within the family. Since then, Li Ming had taken the lives of over a hundred people.
In the eyes of the people, he was a walking curse.
But he didn't care.
The memories of two lives now flowed through him—his own from a modern world, and the memories of the body he now inhabited. Something inside him had shifted, forged into a new version of himself. He had killed immediately after arriving without remorse. No guilt. No hesitation. Perhaps it was the fusion of two souls, or perhaps it was the darkness that had always lived within this world.
Either way, something new had been born here.
A silent predator in a world ruled by martial strength.
With a soft exhale, he left the cluttered streets behind and headed into the dense forest that fringed the city's western outskirts. The trees here were ancient—tall and thick, their roots coiled like serpents through the moss-covered soil. Birds flitted between the upper branches, chirping intermittently, and the occasional rustle in the underbrush spoke of hidden animals watching from the shadows.
It was quiet. Isolated. Just how he needed it.
As he moved deeper between the trees, thoughts weighed heavy on his mind.
"The County Magistrate is a bone refining warrior, and even though I've gained some cultivation from the system, I still don't know how I compare to someone at that level. I only have ten days... or I die. There's no other option."
He paused at the edge of a small clearing, the sunlight barely piercing through the canopy above. Shafts of golden light bathed patches of grass in an ethereal glow. Before him stood a massive tree,its bark gnarled with age, its base so thick it would take three or four grown men to embrace it fully.
Li Ming narrowed his eyes.
"I have to increase my cultivation level of the Slaughter Path. And to do that,I need to kill people. I've killed a total of 100 before, and that gave me 10 points. Now, it seems like I need 200 people for the next level. That's assuming they're mortals with no martial cultivation. I don't know if killing martial cultivators would give me more strength..."
He sighed, the breath curling like smoke in the cool morning air. Then, his expression hardened.
Raising his hand, he summoned his qi.
Crimson energy burst to life around his palm, forming a swirling aura that danced in a twenty-centimeter radius. It shimmered like blood turned to flame, vibrating with eerie vitality. He clenched his fist and shot forward with explosive speed.
The tree stood twenty to thirty meters away.
In a blink, he reached it.
With a roar, his fist struck the bark.
The tree exploded.
Wood splinters flew like shrapnel, the thunderous sound echoing through the forest. The thick trunk didn't just collapse it launched backward, crashing into another tree five or six meters away. That tree, too, shattered on impact before the carnage finally stopped.
Li Ming stood still, staring at the devastation.
He had seen skin refining cultivators before,powerful men, capable of snapping bones or breaking bricks with bare hands. His own guard captain had been one. But this level of power... this destruction...
"This power… not something a skin refining cultivator could achieve," he thought.
With narrowed eyes and steady breath, he came to a chilling conclusion:
His cultivation even at just the first level of the Crimson Vein was at least equivalent to a body refining cultivator.