The Jin Clan's outer courtyard was bathed in pale light by the time dawn broke, casting long shadows across the worn flagstones and moss-flecked walls. Though the clan lands spanned acres, the outer residences were cramped and quiet—home to those whose names barely carried weight, who survived on thinning bloodlines and thinning patience.
Jin Wu-ren sat upright in the crook of a willow tree, its long branches curtaining him in shade. He was two and a half years old now, with limbs lean but firm, eyes sharp like obsidian under moonlight. His tiny hands rested over his abdomen, where the faint throb of his damaged soul core pulsed in a slow, persistent rhythm.
A mortal would have no idea how precarious his condition remained. But Jin Wu-ren was no mere child.
His soul burned with memory. The memory of stars torn asunder. The weight of thousands of years of cultivation. The betrayal of trusted disciples. And the agonizing stillness that followed his fall.
He had awakened into a weak body, yes—but with a mind forged in the crucible of divine war. His bones were soft, but his thoughts moved like blades honed over lifetimes.
He closed his eyes and inhaled.
The air in this Yu province, if he recalled correctly—was humid, thick with the scent of wet leaves and clay. It stuck to the throat. Back in the Immortal Realms, his palaces were built among clouds fed by the breath of spiritual ley-lines, every inhale a blessing upon the lungs. Here, even breathing felt like labor.
"Mosquito," he muttered. Another one bit the inside of his arm. He didn't slap it. He merely twitched his skin, and a faint surge of Qi snapped the insect in midair.
His lips curled upward—not in amusement, but in grim awareness.
He was powerful... compared to infants. But his soul core was still fractured, still healing. If he pushed his Qi too far, it would seize like a rusted wheel.
That was what gnawed at him. Not weakness, but constraint. Like a dragon shackled to a goat's pen.
His eyes turned toward the inner courtyard.
Today was the clan's monthly assembly. His father, Jin Yao, would attend—not because his voice carried weight, but because all adult males of the main bloodline were expected to show their faces. Mu Qinglan would stay behind, likely preparing soup from roots she gathered herself.
His father had aged rapidly in the last two years. He was once a rising talent in the clan's younger generation, but a duel with a rival branch left his meridians injured beyond healing. Now, he served in name only. His wife, a former outer sect disciple, had no dowry and no patrons. His home stood because it hadn't yet fallen.
But every day, they fought to keep it upright.
"Ren'er!"
The voice came from below—Mu Qinglan, soft-spoken and tall, with silvering hair tied in a simple knot. She had flour on her cheek. "Come down, child. Time to eat."
He obeyed. Not because he had to, but because her voice contained no pretense. She never told him how to be. She never warned him to "hide his cleverness" or "endure in silence." She simply smiled when he walked, even when he stumbled. She tucked him in at night even though he had meditated for hours in silence. She was, in a word, real.
Jin Wu-ren felt a pang. It was not love, quite. It was debt. Deep and dangerous.
He sat down on the floor mat and received the bowl of congee she offered. It was watery, but she had added roasted barley and a pinch of wolf salt, likely bartered from the herb woman at the foot of the hill.
As he ate, his eyes turned toward the cracked walls and mossy floor.
He had started to notice things. The way resources were distributed. The servants that bowed too deeply to Elder Jin Rou but ignored others. The way low-ranking cousins were sent on dangerous errands during beast tides. The subtle shift in power that accompanied a new cousin's breakthrough.
Power wasn't just a matter of cultivation here. It was bloodline. Proximity to the clan head. Favor.
He chewed slowly and thought. There would be no path to safety for his mother and father through patience. No safe harbor without strength—and more importantly, status.
But for now, he was still a toddler.
"Ren'er," his mother said, brushing back his hair. "Your father may return late. Elder Jin Rou... summoned all injured elders to review their household rations. It may not go well."
Jin Wu-ren paused mid-bite.
He had heard of this. Elder Jin Rou had been humiliated weeks ago when Granny Mei witnessed her petty cruelty toward Mu Qinglan. She had lost face. She couldn't retaliate directly—Granny Mei was a pillar elder with ties to the main house. But she could squeeze from the sides.
She would wait until no one was watching. She would wait until power could be exercised behind closed doors.
That's what small tyrants did. They worked in darkness, like parasites.
The toddler put down his spoon and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his robe.
He would observe the household today. Listen to the gossip. Follow the energy threads that moved between servants and courtyards. If Elder Jin Rou had laid a trap, he would find it.
And if she dared lay hands on his father—
He would crush her.
With a smile, of course. With a child's laugh, a clever trick, and just enough spiritual force to shake her nerves without exposing his core.
Because right now, he could not win with power. He had to win with precision.
The outer district of the Jin Clan compound was rarely quiet—not in the way the great cultivation halls of the Central Provinces had been. There, silence was sacred, broken only by the crackle of Qi in formation arrays or the soft hush of ancient scrolls being unrolled.
Here, silence meant something different.
It meant a servant had seen something they shouldn't.
It meant someone was listening when they shouldn't be.
It meant something was wrong.
Jin Wu-ren padded quietly across the cracked flagstones of the northern servant courtyard, his tiny footsteps barely audible beneath the rustling of leaves and the murmuring of a shallow creek nearby. He wore a simple robe of gray linen, just oversized enough to mark him as a child of low priority. His hair had been combed back neatly by Mu Qinglan before breakfast—but now it was slightly windblown, as he had claimed to be playing "exploration games" around the ancestral pear orchard.
It was not entirely a lie.
He was exploring. Just not the orchard.
"Ah, young master Ren'er."
An old man bowed his head as he swept the entrance to the rations storehouse. His beard was thin, and his back hunched like a worn bowstring. This was Steward Hong, one of the three lower-ranked housekeepers who kept the clan's day-to-day operations functional.
"You're out early, little one. What brings you here?"
Jin Wu-ren smiled up at him, the picture of innocent curiosity. "Uncle Hong, are there more herbs arriving this week? Mother said she couldn't get dried chrysanthemum last time."
The old steward gave a hesitant chuckle. "Ah, yes… yes, that may be because there were… changes in allocation. Some adjustments from Elder Jin Rou's office."
There it was.
A flicker of guilt. A twitch at the corner of the mouth. The hesitation of someone who didn't want to say the truth—but didn't want to lie either.
Jin Wu-ren's mind sharpened.
In his past life, when commanding divine battalions and immortal sects, he had interrogated gods and monarchs alike—not with threats, but with silence. Most beings, regardless of cultivation, feared a question left unanswered more than a sword raised in anger.
He gave Steward Hong a confused, almost hurt look.
"Why would Elder Jin Rou take mother's herbs? She's not angry at Mother, right?"
Steward Hong flinched. "Ah… no, no, of course not! You mustn't think that. It's just… some elders believe resources should go toward cultivation first. Your mother isn't cultivating anymore, so…"
He trailed off.
So she doesn't matter. That was the unsaid message.
Jin Wu-ren lowered his head. "I see."
He bowed politely, thanked the steward, and walked on.
Inside, he was seething.
He had sensed it. He'd watched it grow. But hearing it spoken aloud—no matter how gently—unlocked something raw in his soul.
His mother was a kind woman. Quiet, competent, resilient. She had once fought for a place in a sect, traveled far from her mountain province, and chosen love over power. She deserved better than to be left scavenging roots while parasites in robes sipped alchemical tea.
Jin Wu-ren rounded a corner and ducked into the shadow of the inner garden wall. From here, he had a view of the minor warehouse entrance—a narrow wooden door flanked by two idle guards pretending not to be asleep.
This warehouse was where Elder Jin Rou had ordered a review of medicinal stocks. According to whispers he'd overheard earlier that morning, it wasn't just a review.
She was reassigning stocks from "non-cultivating households" to those under her direct supervision.
An unspoken punishment. A hidden reshuffling. One that could not be protested openly without seeming selfish.
That was her brilliance—small cruelties veiled in policy.
But Jin Wu-ren knew another kind of brilliance: precision retaliation.
He tapped the ground lightly with his foot, sending a minute pulse of Qi through the stones. Not enough to be noticed by any average cultivator, but just enough to pick up the faint traces of spiritual fluctuation.
There—inside the warehouse. Four sacks had been moved within the last hour. The weight displacement in the Qi field told him they had been infused with preservation talismans—valuable stocks, not common roots. Likely meant for redistribution to the inner compound.
He frowned. Then smiled.
Time for a seed of chaos.
He reached into the fold of his sleeve and withdrew a single strip of talisman paper—crudely made by his tiny hands, infused with only the faintest touch of spirit energy. To a trained cultivator, it was practically worthless. But it was cleverly inscribed with a resonance glyph—a minor enchantment he had once used to interfere with formation echoes in high-altitude battlefields.
He had used it once during the Siege of Cloudspine, where he'd disrupted enemy scrying arrays long enough for his elite troops to bypass detection. It was a simple spell... but devastating in the right place.
He slid the talisman through a crack in the windowframe and anchored it with a breath of Qi.
It would activate within the hour, releasing a wave of false signal pulses that would make the storehouse's defensive arrays react—panicking the guards, alerting nearby cultivators, and making it seem as if the warehouse had been tampered with by someone else.
Elder Jin Rou would investigate. She would find the tampered sacks. And then someone—likely one of her rivals—would discover that she had reassigned medicine meant for convalescing families to her own favored line.
Scandal would bloom like rot in spring.
Jin Wu-ren dusted off his robe, turned away from the scene, and began walking back toward the orchard with a child's serene gait.
Midday light filtered through hazy clouds, casting pale gold shadows across the Jin Clan's compound. The warmth should've been comforting—but a quiet tension now lingered in the air, like silk stretched taut over a blade.
Jin Wu-ren sat in the open courtyard of his family's modest residence, small hands folded neatly in his lap, pretending to concentrate on the stack of simple counting stones his father had left him as a "mental training game."
Inside, Mu Qinglan hummed softly as she boiled herbs—less now than the week before, Jin Wu-ren noted. The faint bitterness of dried ginger and ginseng clung to the breeze. From down the corridor, the faint sound of voices—urgent, clipped, and trying too hard to stay calm.
The warehouse incident had been discovered an hour ago.
Just as he'd predicted.
A wave of false Qi pulses had radiated from the storage area, triggering two overlapping alarm talismans. The guards—already lazy and inattentive—panicked, rousing several nearby inner court elders. When they burst into the warehouse, they'd found the sacks that Elder Jin Rou had quietly reallocated. The seals had been loosened, the names of their original recipients still barely visible.
To most, it would seem a minor error. A bureaucratic misstep.
But to Elder Jin Rou's rivals, it was evidence. Ammunition. Proof that she had bent rules under the guise of order.
And worst of all? It had occurred on her watch.
She'd arrived ten minutes later, calm and composed—but Jin Wu-ren had once seen ancient dragons roar in fury with less heat behind their eyes. He didn't need to be there to know what followed. Someone would be blamed. Preferably someone below her rank, someone expendable. But the seed was planted.
And more importantly: the clan's confidence in her judgment had been bruised.
"Ren'er?"
Mu Qinglan's voice called him from his musings. He looked up to see her kneeling beside him with a cup of warm lotus root tea and a tired smile.
"You've been quiet this morning."
"I like it here," he said simply, gesturing at the open garden around them. "It's calm."
She smiled, tousled his hair, and didn't press. She never did. Jin Wu-ren made a mental note to prepare something for her birthday this time. Last life, he hadn't even known the date.
As she returned to her brewing, he closed his eyes. Inside, he was already planning the next move.
The first strike was never meant to win a war. It was meant to draw attention—to make enemies shift, whisper, distrust one another. That's when the real damage begins.
And already, the cracks were forming.
He had seen Elder Jin Rou's eldest son, Jin Fei, shouting in the hall near the elders' pavilion. Something about favoritism. About misused stocks. That would stir rumors.
He had seen Elder Meng, an aging figure with few allies, suddenly invited to lunch by one of Jin Rou's former supporters. That meant shifting alliances.
Even Jin Yao—his own father—had muttered something strange over breakfast.
"…those old bats have started playing their little games again," he'd said under his breath, as if to no one in particular.
Jin Wu-ren took it all in silently.
He would let this chaos play out. He would observe. He would remember every word, every twitch, every ambition exposed by panic.
Then—he would choose how to use it.
But that was later.
Now, it was time to begin cultivating again.
He slipped into his room just after lunch while his mother napped. He unrolled a straw mat in the corner beneath the wooden shelf where his "toys" were kept—a few carved animals, some stones, and one worn-out talisman book.
In truth, the toy shelf was a smokescreen. The mat concealed a faintly drawn array, carved with the bone tip of a cooking skewer and dusted with powdered ash. It was crude, and the lines weren't as clean as his former self would have liked—but it worked.
He sat cross-legged, pressed two fingers to the array, and inhaled.
The air was still thick with mortal scent—wood smoke, drying herbs, the damp of soil. But beneath it, he felt the faint thrum of spiritual energy.
He began the first movement of the Jade Root Spiral, an old internal cultivation method from the Eastern Coldfire Sect—one of the earliest techniques he'd mastered after entering the immortal path in his first life. It focused on subtle Qi accumulation, steady as roots burrowing deep.
The spiral was meant to be performed with absolute stillness.
But he added a twist.
Instead of letting the Qi circulate evenly, he allowed it to spiral more sharply toward his damaged soul core, letting each cycle grind away at the crusted fragments like water smoothing a cracked stone.
Pain flared at first—sharp, like needles driven through his navel.
But he gritted his teeth.
This was nothing.
In his former life, he'd rebuilt his meridians after they were severed by a divine lightning tribulation. He'd reformed his spirit core after being poisoned by the Ninefold Demon Vine.
He would not be undone by discomfort.
He exhaled, narrowed his mind, and allowed the flow to deepen.
Half an hour passed. Then an hour.
When he opened his eyes again, sweat had soaked the collar of his robe, but his breath was smooth. The array beneath him shimmered faintly before fading.
His soul core pulsed once.
Still fractured. Still weak.
But healing.
And he had progressed two full steps beyond what any child his age—hell, anyone under Foundation Stage—should have been capable of.
He allowed himself a smirk. Then, slowly, he reached for the talisman book on the shelf.
It was a child's book, filled with fake glyphs and simplified characters. But behind the back cover, he had hidden three scraps of real formation diagrams—copied from memory and redrawn with charcoal.
One of them: a compression seal that could make a child's cultivation pressure seem nonexistent to low-level scans.
Perfect for masking early breakthroughs.
He would activate it next week.
Tonight, he would rest.
Tomorrow?
Tomorrow he would begin the next stage of his plan.