The screams still sounded outside his dwelling, but Li Ling currently did not have the frame of mind to notice them. Right now, he was seated cross-legged in a meditative posture with his head slightly tilted to the side, his eyebrows furrowed and his lips pursed, a clear sign of a person who was confused.
However, he was not confused about something as banal as what someone propounded or a random topic he thought up late at night, but rather the very foundation of his worldview.
For him, it was simple. As long as one acted cautiously, stayed within the rules, greased the right hands and avoided trouble, they would be able to survive in the cultivation world and even possibly have a chance to rise up.
Many things had happened to Li Ling over the years that tested his patience, tested his resolve and even made him grit his teeth, wishing to lash out. Each of those times, he swallowed it and bowed his head, defusing the situation in the least humiliating way that would prevent trouble.
He always bore with it, telling himself that it was the best way to live for someone of his talent and ability until he could make a difference.
So he held it in.
And held it in even more.
He was 20 years old this year, soon to be 21.
For almost an entire decade he held it in, because he believed it had a purpose, that it had an end goal.
But today shattered that belief.
It turns out that no matter how cautious you are, cowardly to the point of being invisible to almost everyone, tragedy can strike you absolutely randomly for no other reason than someone's whim.
You can live a perfectly good life, have a lovely wife, not disturb anybody or have any enmities - or even friendships - and still… you could only roar in futility as your wife was gang raped by multiple men.
…how does that make sense?
Seriously, how?
Being weak was one thing, Li Ling deeply understood the dog eat dog world mentality from the moment he was cast out. The things he had seen since then had only reinforced that, but it was precisely because he understood his weakness that he chose to forebear until he had strength.
But someone with the strength of the Captain, or any of the Market Guards, should not even intersect or coincide with the likes of those in Ivy Lane due to these same laws of the jungle. After all, whether dog-eat-dog or jungle law, both had underlying rules that enforced a form of natural order, but what was happening outside was a breach of that order.
It was simply chaos.
The kind of chaos that only sentient beings with free will like humans could introduce.
So what was the point then? What was the point of all that forbearance, all of that suffering? All of those years lowering his head, gritting his teeth for a better future, what was the point?
While he might not have a wife to be humiliated, friends to be tortured or money to be seized, what if he too was one day dragged out at random by a Market Guard then killed despite his overly cautious lifestyle?
Why cultivate at all? He had been told to his face that he would live and die in the first level of Qi Refinement, but his 'higher perspective' as someone who knew of higher cultivation realms above Foundation Establishment made him doubt the judgment of that fellow.
How could some rural Foundation Establishment cultivator possibly know the true situation behind him, a reincarnator from Earth? Even those near Immortal Ascension should not be too clear about the full situation behind things like his existence, much less the 'lowly' fellow his grandfather called.
But he, stuck at Qi Refinement level 1, had no right to think so because he couldn't even breakthrough the first small realm of cultivation no matter how much effort he poured in.
These years had been hell. Could you possibly understand what it was like to have poor talent at cultivation yet persevere day and night at it?
There were so many analogies and examples Li Ling could give, but if he were to tell his former self on Earth who knew nothing about actual cultivation, he would describe it quite simply.
Cultivating with his level of talent was like trying to download a file of a hundred megabytes with a download speed of 0.3 kilobits per second.
It was solely this belief that carried Li Ling forward all these years, that was the foundation of his cultivation, and all that it was built upon… and now it was crumbling.
A black aura began to rise from Li Ling's body as he remained in his confused daze. However, while this visual might look cool to an Earthling, a cultivator of Firmament Heaven would pale and flee, knowing that this was a terrifying event that few cultivators experienced, Qi Deviation!
It was heavily feared and demonized because it was more frequent in higher level cultivators, and the result of qi deviation was not just the loss of cultivation, but also the explosion of that cultivator's entire dantian.
For a Qi Refinement fellow, it did not sound like much, but if that person was in, say, Core Formation? The fallout could level an entire small sect to the ground.
As Li Ling continually dug a rabbit hole of thought, questioning his belief in cautious growth and being steady in the cultivation world, the black aura became stronger and stronger, his body beginning to heat up as the explosion was imminent.
However, just at the peak of his doubt, when his painstakingly cultivated strands of refined qi were about to blast apart then cause him to turn into blood and flesh across the walls and floor, a smartphone-like alert sounded in his mind as a brown tinted panel appeared before his eyes.
｢Conditions met for activation, Initiating…｣
｢Congratulations, Li Ling (Andrew Han), you have fulfilled the preset conditions and gained access to version 1 of the Infinite Slaughter System!｣
｢All things in the universe have a natural lifespan, contained in body, soul and spirit. It is now your prerogative to seize what was given by the laws of the universe for yourself, to become the God of Slaughter that stands above all!｣