The faint, heavy coolness within his body flowed slowly through his limbs. Wherever it passed, the tearing pain seemed to be soothed by some mysterious power. Though far from healed, it was no longer unbearable. The suffocating exhaustion also faded somewhat, enough for his mind to regain its ability to think.
Leaning against the cold earthen wall, Ye Qiu's thoughts surged like a storm.
This was no illusion. The slowly rotating turquoise fragment deep within his consciousness, and those colorful motes of light floating in the air—visible only to him—clearly told him that the underlying logic of this world operated by rules utterly different from the physical laws he knew.
"Spiritual energy… Chaos Qi…" he murmured, silently repeating the two terms that had surfaced in his mind. From bits of conversation he'd overheard from the hunter and the scavengers in the dump, the pale white and cyan motes were likely "spiritual energy," the source of power for cultivators in this world. As for the heavier, almost transparent gray motes—those seemed to be "Chaos Qi," invisible and inaccessible to ordinary cultivators, but somehow, the mysterious fragment within him could attract and absorb them.
That might be his only advantage in surviving this unfamiliar world.
He calmed his mind, no longer chasing the lively pale motes, and instead focused all his intent on the fragment's shadow deep within his consciousness, guiding it to draw in the faint gray motes. The process was painfully slow. After a full hour, the Chaos Qi he had absorbed could barely be compared to a strand of hair, yet its nourishing effect on his body was remarkable. His dried meridians tingled faintly, as if long-parched earth had finally tasted rain.
When dawn's first light crept over the horizon, the dump began to stir. More ragged people appeared, moving like ants among the mountains of waste. Ye Qiu stopped cultivating—hunger and thirst now became his most pressing needs.
He had to act.
Mimicking the others, he stepped into the foul-smelling heaps. The garbage was a chaotic mix of rotting food, broken pottery, rusted weapon fragments, beast hides stained with unknown substances, and countless scraps of failed alchemical residues and discarded ore.
His modern sense of hygiene made his stomach churn, but survival outweighed disgust. Forcing himself to adapt, he swept his sharp gaze across the heaps, analyzing with a mind trained in structural engineering, searching for any clue of value hidden within this filth.
He quickly noticed that most people fought over half-rotten food, bits of meat, or relatively intact metals and bones. Almost no one touched the herbal residues or mineral scraps—they were clearly considered worthless.
Yet Ye Qiu's eyes lingered on those very wastes. With his engineer's sensitivity to materials, he spotted fragments of discarded ore whose fractured surfaces glimmered faintly with metallic hues unlike any mineral he knew. Some of the failed medicinal dregs, though lifeless to ordinary eyes, still emitted the faintest pulses of energy—something he could vaguely sense through the fragment in his consciousness.
"Chaos Token…" he decided to name the fragment for now. It seemed to possess an extraordinary sensitivity to anything containing unusual energy or material essence.
Just then, a commotion broke out nearby.
"Damn it! I saw that first!" a scar-faced man was snarling, tugging at a half-blackened flatbread clutched by a skinny boy.
The boy held onto it tightly, his face pale but defiant. "I… I dug it out myself!"
"Looking for death!" The scar-faced man kicked him to the ground and reached to snatch the food.
The others watched indifferently—no one interfered. That was the law of the dump: naked and cruel.
Ye Qiu frowned. He was no saint; he could barely protect himself, let alone others. Rationality told him to stay out of it—but the boy's desperate eyes stirred something inside him, a faint echo of his own helplessness when he first arrived. Logic and instinct battled, but in the end, he couldn't entirely look away.
He began to move closer, quietly, scanning the nearby garbage piles. Suddenly, he saw it—a dark red ore, the size of a fist, buried under herbal residue. Through the Chaos Token's perception, he sensed within it a trace of pure fire energy—extremely faint, yet far more concentrated than anything around.
Got it.
Just as the scar-faced man was about to seize the bread, Ye Qiu bent down abruptly, dug out the red ore, and lifted it high, shouting with feigned excitement, his voice trembling as though overwhelmed:
"Scarlet… Scarlet Flame Iron Essence?! Such a big piece! I'm rich!"
Though not particularly loud, the words "Scarlet Flame Iron Essence" and "rich" carried like a spell through the dump, immediately drawing everyone's attention. Even the scar-faced man froze mid-motion, greed flashing in his eyes as he turned toward Ye Qiu.
Scarlet Flame Iron Essence was a common material for forging low-grade magical tools. Even a small piece was worth enough to feed them all for months.
In an instant, every gaze shifted from the boy and his bread to Ye Qiu and the "treasure" in his hands.
The scar-faced man's expression darkened. Releasing the boy, he stalked toward Ye Qiu. "Brat, hand that over!"
Ye Qiu's face showed just the right amount of fear as he clutched the ore to his chest, stepping back. "I… I found it first!"
"Courting death!" The man lunged forward, grinning viciously.
At the last moment, Ye Qiu's foot seemed to catch on something—he stumbled, arm flailing—and the red ore flew from his grasp in a wide arc, landing squarely in the hands of a burly, bald man standing nearby, who had been watching the whole scene silently.
The bald man caught it easily, hefted it, and his cold eyes swept over both Ye Qiu and the scar-faced thug.
The latter froze. A flicker of wariness crossed his face—clearly, he knew this bald man and didn't dare provoke him. After glaring at Ye Qiu, then at the ore, he spat on the ground and retreated, grumbling curses as he disappeared into the garbage.
Crisis averted.
Ye Qiu exhaled slowly, his back soaked with cold sweat. The whole thing had been a gamble—a bet that the ore's appearance would attract stronger attention, that the bald man would intervene, that the scarred thug would back off. Fortunately, he had been right.
He helped the frightened boy to his feet. The boy clutched his dirty bread tightly, whispering, "Thank you…"
Ye Qiu shook his head, saying nothing. His attention turned to the bald man, who was now examining the ore with a frown.
"Kid," the bald man said in a low, gravelly voice, "you call this Scarlet Flame Iron Essence?"
Ye Qiu's heart stirred, but he kept his expression puzzled. "Isn't it? I saw the color and thought—"
"Hmph." The bald man sneered, scraping a red flake from the stone with his thumb. "Just a piece of ordinary iron baked by ground fire, coated with residue from a real Scarlet Flame Stone. Trash among trash—completely useless."
With that, he tossed the ore back to Ye Qiu and walked away, his eyes glinting with mild contempt.
Those who had been eavesdropping burst into derisive laughter. Their looks toward Ye Qiu were filled with scorn before they turned away to continue scavenging.
Catching the "worthless" ore, Ye Qiu put on an appropriately embarrassed look—but inside, he was calm. He had already sensed through the Chaos Token that the ore's internal energy was unstable, far from genuine Scarlet Flame Iron Essence. What he wanted was not the mineral itself, but its convincing appearance and its ability to draw attention for just long enough.
Goal achieved.
He returned to his corner, holding the ore. The skinny boy hesitated, then followed and sat a few steps away, quietly nibbling his bread.
Ignoring him for the moment, Ye Qiu examined the ore carefully. The bald man had been right—its core energy was chaotic and impure. Yet when the ore had touched his palm earlier, the Chaos Token's phantom had trembled faintly, emanating a trace of hunger.
Not for the ore itself, but for the chaotic, volatile fire energy within it.
He focused, channeling a thin thread of Chaos Qi to wrap around the flickering core.
Something remarkable happened. The moment Chaos Qi touched that energy, it didn't repel—it merged, like water soaking into a sponge, enveloping, breaking down, and assimilating it. Within a few breaths, the fiery energy was gone, replaced by a purer, calmer strand of Chaos Qi that flowed gently back into his body.
Though the amount was minuscule, the process was seamless—natural.
Ye Qiu's eyes lit up with sudden realization.
He understood!
The Chaos Token's true power wasn't merely absorbing stray Chaos Qi—it could decompose and assimilate all things, breaking them down to their primal essence and transforming them into pure Chaos energy!
This dump, seen by others as a wasteland of trash, was, to him, a treasure trove—especially those fragments containing residual energy, unstable structures, or rejected as worthless. They were precious resources for his cultivation's early stages!
He raised his head, looking again at the endless sea of waste with renewed eyes.
This wasn't a dead end—it was a hidden gold mine waiting to be unearthed.
He needed to learn more about this world—its materials, medicines, and cultivation systems. And the boy beside him… might be the key to that.
Turning toward the wary youth, he spoke in as gentle a tone as he could manage.
"My name is Ye Qiu. Do you know where I can learn how to identify these things?" He pointed toward the dump—and at the dim, lifeless piece of ore in his hand.