Chapter 5: The Chute
The roar hit him first—a deep, subsonic thrumming that vibrated in his teeth and bones. Then the smell: a wall of hot ammonia, blood, wet fur, and something darker, a primordial musk of fear and rage. The Beast Pits of the Verdant Dragon Sect were not a zoo; they were a prison for monsters, a source of materials, and a training ground for the boldest inner disciples.
The Refuse Chute was its artery of filth.
Overseer Bo shoved him towards a yawning, brick-lined opening in a sheer rock face. A torrent of foul slurry—blood, offal, mangled bones, and clumps of matted fur—poured from it into a deep, seething catchment pit below. The flow was sluggish, choked by a half-visible mass of bones and solidified gore.
"There," Bo shouted over the cacophony of roars, shrieks, and crashing bars from the cavernous pens behind them. "The grate's blocked. You go in, you clear it. There's a pole and a hook." He pointed to rusted, blood-stained tools leaning against the wall. "You come out when it's flowing clean. Or you don't come out at all. Your choice, Dust-Boy."
He gave Xiao Feng a final, sneering look before retreating to a safer, upwind observation ledge, crossing his arms. The message was clear: this was a death sentence with a slim chance of reprieve.
Xiao Feng stood at the mouth of hell. The slurry splattered near his feet, each drop sizzling slightly with residual acidic bile or weak spiritual poison. The air was thick with invisible aggression—the lingering death-energies of countless powerful spirit beasts, their final moments of fury and terror imprinted on the very waste they left behind.
The fragment under his skin didn't just stir; it sang. A high, thin note of ravenous glee that resonated in his soul.
TARGET ACQUIRED: HIGH-YIELD BIOLOGICAL TRIBULATION SOUP. CONSTITUENTS: BEAST RAGE, PRIMAL FEAR, VIOLENT DEATH, TOXIC BILE, CORRUPTED SPIRIT. DENSITY: EXTREME. HOST VULNERABILITY: CRITICAL.
RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL.
EMOTIONAL RESONANCE DETECTED: RESIGNATION -> DEFIANT CURIOSITY. OVERRIDE ACCEPTED.
Xiao Feng picked up the heavy iron pole. It was slick. He took the hook. He looked at the roaring, viscous stream, then back at Overseer Bo's distant, smirking silhouette.
A cold, clear certainty settled over him. This was not just a punishment. It was an invitation. The sect had spent years feeding him scraps of contempt. Now, it offered him a feast of its violence. He would not refuse.
He waded into the shallow runoff at the chute's mouth. The filth was warm. It seared through his threadbare trousers, not with heat, but with a hundred tiny, biting spiritual impurities. It felt like walking into a swarm of invisible wasps. The fragment's energy automatically rose to meet the invasion, a thin, cold shell over his skin, but it was a constant, draining effort.
The chute was ten feet across, its walls stained a permanent, layered black and brown. The blockage was twenty feet in—a tangled dam of a giant ribcage, spinal columns, and unrecognizable, leathery hide. The slurry lapped against it, bubbling angrily.
He braced the pole, set the hook into a gap in the bones, and pulled.
Nothing moved.
He planted his feet in the muck, ignored the stinging, crawling sensation on his legs, and poured his physical strength into it. His new, tempered muscles from a week of consuming tribulations bunched. The bones groaned. A trickle of black fluid began to seep through.
And then, from within the tangled mass, two pinpricks of furious red light ignited.
A low, chittering snarl echoed from inside the blockage. Something was in there. Something that had crawled into the chute to feed and gotten trapped.
A Blood-Muck Rat. But not an ordinary one. This one was the size of a large dog, its fur plastered down with gore, its eyes glowing with feral intelligence and ingested spiritual poison. It was a mutant, a creature born and raised in this river of death. It wriggled free from the bones, baring teeth like yellowed daggers, dripping with saliva that sizzled on the slurry.
Overseer Bo, from his ledge, let out a coarse laugh. "Looks like you've got company, maggot!"
The rat didn't hesitate. It launched itself through the filth, a projectile of pure, streamlined malice.
Xiao Feng had no room to dodge. He swung the iron hook like a club.
The rat twisted in mid-air, impossibly agile. The hook whistled past its head. Claws, sharp as broken glass, raked down Xiao Feng's forearm, tearing through fabric and skin. The pain was instant and hot, but beneath it was a sharper, more invasive sensation—a venom. A psychic venom of pure, distilled fear and rot that tried to worm its way up his nerves towards his brain.
His vision swam. The roars of the distant beasts seemed to sharpen into coherent screams of die, die, die.
BIOLOGICAL/PSYCHIC TRIBULATION INBOUND. COMPOSITION: BLOOD-MUCK RAT FEVER-VENOM.
ASSIMILATE OR PURGE?
He was falling backwards, the rat scrambling up his body, its teeth aiming for his throat. The filth swallowed his legs. The world narrowed to the glowing red eyes and the reeking breath.
He didn't choose. His body, trained by the fragment, reacted.
The cold, devouring energy in his dantian didn't wait for a command. It shot towards the wound on his arm, a reverse tide against the invading venom. It met the psychic rot not with resistance, but with a greater, more absolute hunger.
The sensation was indescribable. It wasn't like eating lightning or poison. This was eating a scream. The rat' fever-venom, a biological tribulation fused with the beast's dying-moment terror, was violently unraveled, its energy stripped and absorbed. The coldness in his core grew heavier, denser, tinged with a new, feral sharpness.
The psychic assault vanished. His vision cleared.
The rat was still on him, teeth inches from his face. But Xiao Feng was no longer afraid. He was angry. A clean, burning rage at this thing, at Bo, at the entire pit.
He dropped the hook. His free hand, the one not bleeding, shot up and clamped around the rat's thick, slimy neck. He didn't squeeze. He pushed.
He pushed the new, rat-venom-tainted energy, now his own, mixed with his own furious will, directly into the beast.
The rat's glowing eyes bulged. It didn't convulse. It… deflated. Its furious squeal died in a wet gurgle. The vibrant, aggressive life-force in it was siphoned away in a sudden, violent rush, sucked into Xiao Feng through the point of contact. The glow in its eyes faded to dull marbles. Its body went limp, fur turning brittle and grey.
He shoved the desiccated corpse aside. It floated for a moment on the slurry before sinking.
He stood, chest heaving, forearm bleeding but cleansed. He felt… invigorated. The drain from maintaining his protective shell was gone, replaced by a surplus. The rat's life, its furious essence, had been a potent dose.
He looked at the blockage. He looked at his hands.
A new, terrible understanding dawned. He wasn't just a consumer of after-effects. He could take it from the source. From living, dying things brimming with their own violent tribulation.
The chute was no longer a pit of death. It was a garden. And he was the harvester.
With renewed, grim purpose, he went back to the bone dam. He worked methodically, using the hook and pole, ignoring the occasional scuttling of more rats in the shadows. They kept their distance now, sensing the predator in their midst.
As he cleared larger pieces, the pressure behind the blockage increased. A foul geyser burst through a gap, drenching him. This wasn't just slurry. This was a concentrated pulse of fresh waste from the higher pits—where stronger, rarer beasts were butchered. It carried the essence of a scaled predator, something with lightning in its veins, and of a feathered beast that died singing a corrosive note.
The mixed energies hit him like a physical blow. Lightning-tinged blood, sonic-corrosion feathers, and potent rage. His fragment's shell buckled, and the energies flooded into him.
This was not a single venom to be assimilated. This was a riot.
He fell to his knees in the muck, his body a battleground. The foreign essences warred inside his meridians. He felt scales trying to form on his skin, a scream building in his throat that would shred his own vocal cords. His dantian churned, the fragment's core working furiously to process, to dominate, to consume.
It was the most pain he'd felt since the lightning. It was exquisite.
He didn't scream. He gritted his teeth and dug. He channeled all the pain, all the chaotic conflict, into the physical act of clearing the chute. He hauled on bones slick with spiritual offal, he shoved aside hunks of toxic fat, each movement a meditation, a way to grind the foreign energies into submission with the millstone of his own will.
Slowly, the blockage came apart. The slurry began to flow more freely, carrying with it the dissipating energies he couldn't immediately absorb. He stood in the center of the stream, a rock parting a river of filth, letting it wash over him, taking what he could, enduring the rest.
He was no longer just Xiao Feng. He was becoming something else. A creature sculpted from the sect's discarded nightmares.
Finally, with a grating crash, the last major bone tumbled away. The chute roared to life, a torrent of waste pouring freely into the pit below.
Silence, relative and sudden, fell. Only the rush of slurry and the distant beast cries remained.
Xiao Feng stood in the emptying channel, panting. He was covered head to toe in black and red filth. His forearms were a latticework of old silver tracings and fresh, shallow claw marks. His Qi was a turbulent, overfilled reservoir, buzzing with half-digested beast-rage and strange, potent attributes.
He had done it. He had survived the Chute.
He turned and slogged back towards the entrance. As he emerged into the marginally cleaner air, he saw Overseer Bo's smirk had vanished. The man was staring, his face a mask of disbelief and dawning unease. Xiao Feng should be dead. Or at least broken, poisoned, babbling.
Instead, he stood there, dripping, his eyes in the shadow of his matted hair holding a light that was neither human nor beast. A cold, assessing light.
He dropped the hook and pole at Bo's feet with a dull clang.
"It's clear," Xiao Feng said, his voice hoarse but steady.
He didn't wait for a response. He turned and began the long walk back to the barracks, leaving a trail of fetid drips. The other slaves would shrink from his smell. They wouldn't understand.
Inside, the fragment pulsed with satisfied warmth. His dantian felt like a packed furnace, burning with stolen, violent life.
DIRECTIVE COMPLETE. BIOLOGICAL TRIBULATION ASSIMILATION MASTERY: INITIATED. HOST PHYSICALITY AND SPIRITUAL CAPACITY: SIGNIFICANTLY ENHANCED.
CULTIVATION BASE STABILIZED AT QI GATHERING STAGE FOUR.
WARNING: HEAVENLY BRAND FLUCTUATION DETECTED. ANOMALY SIGNATURE EVOLVING.
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 1.2%.
Stage Four. He'd crossed another barrier in a river of blood and bile.
He didn't feel triumphant. He felt heavy. Laden with the screams of beasts and his own grim resolve.
The path was clear. The Verdant Dragon Sect had mountains of such waste. Rivers of such pain. Oceans of tribulation, waiting to be consumed.
Xiao Feng, the Debt-Slave, the Error, walked back into the darkness, his hunger now a vast, echoing thing. He had tasted the chute. He would not stop until he had consumed the mountain.