Chapter 6: The Mark of the Eater
The silence that followed him was thicker than the filth.
The Debt-Slaves in the barracks didn't just recoil from his smell—they recoiled from him. It was a subtle, instinctual shift. Where before they'd seen a fellow ghost, they now saw something that carried the Pit's echo in its pores. They huddled on their pallets, eyes wide and wary, as if he were a wolf that had wandered into a sheepfold. Xiao Feng ignored them. He stripped his reeking rags and used the scant, icy water from the morning trough to scrub his skin raw. The claw marks on his forearm were already thin, pink scars. The beast-essences churning inside him seemed to accelerate his body's resilience, healing him with a violence that left no tenderness behind.
He slept a black, dreamless sleep. When the bell clanged, he rose with the others, his movements economical, his face a flat lake of nothing. Overseer Bo did not single him out. The man's eyes skittered away when they passed. Fear had been replaced by a deeper, more calculating wariness. Xiao Feng had become an unpredictable variable. In the world of the overseer, variables that didn't break were problems.
The work detail was different. No nettles, no slag-hauling. They were sent to the "Silent Orchards," a grove of spirit fruit trees that were dormant, their branches like twisted, gray hands against the sky. The task was to spread ash-fertilizer—the refined, powdered remains of spirit beasts from the lower Pits. It was clean, quiet, mind-numbing work. A demotion from punishment. A subtle attempt to bury him in obscurity.
Xiao Feng accepted the wooden rake and bucket without a word. As he worked, spreading the fine, gray powder that smelled of dry bone and faint regret, he felt it. A subtle, whispering energy. Not the violent tribulation of death, but the slow, melancholy tribulation of used-up-ness. The ash was final. It was the end of the cycle. It held no rage, only a hollow, settled silence.
He knelt, letting the ash dust his hands. The fragment stirred, not with hunger, but with… curiosity. It was a new flavor.
TARGET ANALYZED: POST-TRIBULATION RESIDUE. DESIGNATION: SPIRIT ASH. ENERGY STATE: NULLIFIED/INERT. EMOTIONAL RESONANCE: MELANCHOLY, ACCEPTANCE.
ASSIMILATION POTENTIAL: NEGLIGIBLE. PROCESSING POSSIBLE. INITIATE DECONSTRUCTION?
Deconstruction. Not eating, but… understanding. He nodded internally.
This time, there was no rush of power, no pain. The fragment extended a single, infinitely delicate thread of perception into the ash on his skin. It did not consume the energy—there was none. Instead, it read the story. The faint, fading imprint of the beast's original nature (a burrowing, earth-aligned Badger-Tusk), the moment of its quick, professional death (a clean sword strike to the spine, more efficiency than malice), and the long, slow burning that reduced it to this state.
It was information. A history of a minor tribulation, start to finish. Xiao Feng received it not as a memory, but as a cold, factual report. It was useless for power. Priceless for knowledge.
He now understood the Beast-Pits' hierarchy. The violent deaths, the potent rages—those were for the strong beasts, the ones that fought. This ash was from the livestock. Their tribulation was not in dying, but in being meaningless.
He spread the ash, his mind working. The fragment was more than a stomach. It was a library. A recorder of catastrophes.
The day passed in eerie quiet. The other slaves kept their distance. The overseer watched from the shade. Xiao Feng felt the new beast-energies inside him slowly settling, integrating. His Qi, at Stage Four, was a stormfront held behind a dam of his will. He could feel the rat's agility humming in his tendons, the scaled predator's residual lightning flickering at his fingertips, the corrosive-song beast's harshness lining his throat.
He was becoming a patchwork monster.
As dusk bled into the orchard, a commotion broke the silence. Not from the slaves, but from the path leading to the inner sect. A group of outer disciples, their faces tight with excitement and fear, hurried past, carrying stretchers. On the stretchers were two disciples, their robes torn and burned. One had a arm twisted at a sickening angle, the flesh blackened as if frozen and then shattered. The other was moaning, his skin covered in weeping, phosphorescent green boils.
"—got too close to the Festering Bloom…"
"Stupid.Trying to impress Senior Sister Luo…"
"The healers say the necrosis might spread to the dantian…"
Xiao Feng's rake paused. The Festering Bloom. He'd heard the name in hushed, fearful whispers. It was a spiritual fungus that grew in a cursed corner of the back hills, feeding on a leakage of poisonous earth-Qi and the residual hatred from an ancient, buried battle. It was a living, breathing environmental tribulation. The sect cordoned it off, not to cultivate it, but to contain it. Sometimes, arrogant disciples tried to harvest its spores for potent, if reckless, poison-based techniques.
The injured disciples were carried away. The orchard returned to silence.
But in Xiao Feng's mind, a plan—cold, audacious, and perfect—crystallized.
The Festering Bloom wasn't waste. It was a cultivated hazard. A garden of pure, natural tribulation, maintained by the sect itself. It was the next logical step. From discarded poison to curated plague.
That night, he didn't wait for full sleep. He moved as soon as the breathing around him deepened. He didn't take the stolen disciple robe. It was too clean, too identifiable. He smeared himself with dirt and ash from the orchard, becoming a shadow made of shadows.
The map in his mind, born from the fragment, had expanded. It now held not just pathways, but layers. It showed him the spiritual pressure gradients of the sect, the flows of energy. He could see, like a heat map, the cold, dead zones of administrative blocks, the warm, vibrant hubs of disciple dormitories, and the seething, toxic blotches of forbidden areas.
The Festering Bloom was a pulsating ulcer of sickly green and violent purple on that map.
Getting there was harder than the Array Grounds. It was patrolled, not by lazy outer disciples, but by silent, hooded figures from the Sect's Discipline Hall. They stood like statues at the border of the blighted zone, their presence a warning as potent as any wall.
Xiao Feng didn't approach them. He climbed. He scaled a rocky, barren cliff-face that overlooked the cursed valley from upwind. The climb was treacherous, but the rat-agility in his limbs made him sure-footed. The corrosive-song essence in his throat helped him breathe through the thin, toxic haze that began to seep upwards.
From the cliff edge, he looked down.
The valley was beautiful, in a horrific way. Luminescent fungi of putrescent green and bruised violet covered every surface, pulsing gently like diseased hearts. The air shimmered with miasma. In the center stood the mother organism—the Festering Bloom itself. It was a giant, pulsating sac the size of a cottage, veined with black, dripping a sweet, cloying sap that burned holes in the stone beneath it. Spore-clouds, glowing with malevolent life, drifted lazily around it.
The very sight triggered a visceral revulsion in his soul. Every instinct screamed to flee.
The fragment erupted in a silent symphony of desire.
TARGET ACQUIRED: CURATED ECOLOGICAL TRIBULATION. DESIGNATION: FESTERING BLOOM PRIME. CONSTITUENTS: CONCENTRATED ROT-DAO, ANCESTRAL BATTLE-HATRED, EARTH-POISON CORE. DENSITY: EXTREME. TOXICITY: LETHAL.
WARNING: DIRECT CONTACT WILL DISSOLVE HOST PHYSICALITY IN 4.7 SECONDS.
PROPOSAL: REMOTE FEEDING PROTOCOL.
Remote feeding? How?
The answer came as instinct. He focused on the churning energies within him—the beast-rages, the lightning, the cold void. He focused on his own emotional state: not fear, but a calculated, intense want. He projected this complex signature down into the valley, not as an attack, but as a… beacon. A challenge.
He was a living anomaly. His energy signature, branded by the heavens, was the ultimate discord. To the Festering Bloom, a being of pure, curated corruption, his presence was an insult. A rival poison.
The giant sac trembled. The drifting spore-clouds coalesced, swirling towards the cliff face. They didn't drift; they attacked, a glowing green fog of dissolution moving with predatory intent.
He had provoked the tribulation. Made it come to him.
The spore-cloud hit the cliff edge. Where it touched, stone hissed and pitted. A wave of nausea, dizziness, and a deep, psychic urge to simply lie down and rot washed over him.
REMOTE FEEDING INITIATED. PROCESSING INCOMING CORRUPTION.
He didn't try to block it. He opened himself. He stood at the cliff's edge, a silhouette against the moon, and let the killing mist envelop him.
It was agony of a different color. This wasn't the sharp pain of lightning or the hot struggle of beast-venom. This was a slow, insidious unmaking. His skin prickled and burned. His lungs felt full of wet, decaying leaves. Despair, not his own, seeped into his mind—the accumulated hatred of a thousand dead warriors, their final, futile rage given fungal form.
The fragment worked furiously. It wasn't just consuming the physical toxins; it was parsing the emotional and historical data woven into them. It was a full-spectrum assimilation. Xiao Feng felt his own consciousness thinning, stretched between the agony of his body and the flood of alien memories—a sword breaking, a curse screamed into mud, the slow embrace of root and rot.
He held on by a single, fraying thread: the memory of his mother's hand, warm and alive.
He didn't know how long he stood there. Time became the rhythm of consumption. Inhale corruption. Exhale purified, dark power. His dantian swelled, straining at its new limits. The foreign energies weren't just stored; they were forced into a brutal synergy. The Bloom's Rot-Dao tempered the beast-rages, giving them a slow, grinding patience. The ancestral hatred sharpened the lightning, giving it a cruel, spiteful edge.
He was no longer just a patchwork. He was a crucible where opposing poisons were being forged into a new, unified toxin.
Suddenly, the attack ceased. The spore-cloud pulled back, retreating to the valley below. The Bloom had spent a significant portion of its defensive energy, and this strange, devouring rock on the cliff gave nothing back. It was an unsatisfying exchange for the fungus.
Xiao Feng collapsed to his knees, vomiting a black, viscous liquid that steamed on the stone. His skin was covered in a lattice of fine, green cracks that slowly faded as his reinforced body fought the residual damage. He shook uncontrollably, not from cold, but from systemic shock.
But he was alive. And he was changed.
REMOTE FEEDING CONCLUDED. ROT-DAO PRINCIPLE INTEGRATED. ANCESTRAL HATRED ARCHIVES PARTIALLY DECODED.
CULTIVATION BASE AT CRITICAL SATURATION. BREAKTHROUGH TO QI GATHERING STAGE FIVE IMMINENT.
WARNING: HEAVENLY BRAND ACTIVITY SPIKING. SIGNATURE NOW BEARING DISTINCT CORRUPTION/DEVOURING ATTRIBUTES. DETECTION RISK: ELEVATED.
Stage Five. At the cusp of mid-stage Qi Gathering. In mere weeks, he had traversed a path that took ordinary disciples years. He had done it by feasting on the sect's shadows.
He pushed himself up, his body feeling both heavier and more potent. He looked down at the Festering Bloom, now pulsing with what seemed like sullen annoyance.
A grim, twisted sense of gratitude washed over him. This sect, with its pits and poisons, was the perfect teacher. It taught only one lesson: consume or be consumed.
He turned from the cliff, his steps firmer. The walk back was a haze of exhaustion and dawning power. As he slipped into the barracks just before dawn, a single, clear realization settled in his soul, colder than the fragment's void:
He was no longer just hiding from the inner sect disciples.
He was preparing a meal for them.
The mark of the eater was upon him, and his hunger was now a deliberate, patient thing. The Verdant Dragon Sect had many such gardens. He would visit them all. And when he was strong enough, he would turn from the discarded tribulations to the source.
He would eat the cultivators themselves.