The Corpse Hall smelled of ozone and rot.
It was a distinct, cloying scent that clung to the back of the throat—the metallic tang of residual magic mixing with the sweet, nauseating perfume of decay. To most disciples of the Azure River Sect, this smell was a nightmare. To Chen Wei, it was simply the smell of Tuesday.
He sat on a low wooden stool, scrubbing the cold, waxy hand of a corpse with a rough cloth soaked in vinegar. The water in the basin had long since turned a murky grey.
Chen Wei was sixteen years old. He was thin, his complexion the pallid white of a mushroom grown in the dark, and his eyes were framed by dark circles that spoke of too little sleep and too much worry. He wore the coarse, grey robes of a servant disciple—a uniform that rendered him invisible to the elites flying on their swords high above the mountain peaks.
'Scrub. Rinse. Repeat,' he thought, his movements mechanical. 'Just another lump of meat that dreamed of immortality.'
The body on the slab belonged to an Outer Sect disciple who had failed a breakthrough. His meridians had detonated, turning his internal organs into a slurry, though his skin remained surprisingly intact. It was Chen Wei's job to make him look presentable for the funeral pyre. It was a job for the trash of the sect, for those with "Shattered Spiritual Roots."
In the eyes of the sect, Chen Wei was less valuable than the vinegar he was using.
A sudden draft swept through the damp hall, causing the talismans pasted on the walls to flutter like dead leaves. The heavy iron doors groaned open, slamming against the stone walls with a sound like a thunderclap.
Chen Wei didn't flinch. He didn't look up. He just dipped his cloth back into the basin.
"You. Trash."
The voice was arrogant, dripping with the casual disdain reserved for livestock.
Chen Wei slowly set the cloth down, stood up, and bowed deeply, keeping his eyes fixed on the dirty flagstones.
"This servant greets the Senior Brothers."
Two men strode into the room. They wore the black-and-azure robes of the Disciplinary Hall, the fabric shimmering with protective enchantments. They carried a stretcher between them, though they held it carelessly, as if hauling a sack of spoiled grain.
They didn't bother to acknowledge his greeting. They simply walked to the nearest empty slab and dumped their burden onto it. The body hit the stone with a wet, heavy thud.
"Clean him up," the taller Enforcer said, wiping his hands on a silk handkerchief as if merely touching the stretcher had soiled him. "The cremation is scheduled for dawn. The Elders want this... unpleasantness handled quietly."
Chen Wei kept his head lowered.
"May this servant ask the cause of death? It determines the cleaning fluids required."
The Enforcer scoffed.
"Qi Deviation. His cultivation went berserk. A tragedy. Now stop asking questions and do your job, unless you want to join him on the pyre."
With a final sneer, they turned and marched out, the heavy doors booming shut behind them.
Silence returned to the Corpse Hall, heavy and suffocating.
Chen Wei waited a full minute to ensure they were truly gone. Then, he straightened his back and let out a long, weary sigh.
'Qi Deviation. Right.'
He walked over to the new arrival. The Corpse Hall was dim, lit only by the flickering green light of moss-lamps, but Chen Wei knew this face.
Everyone knew this face.
Lying on the cold stone slab was Senior Brother Han.
Han was—or had been—a Core Disciple. A genius. He was the golden boy of the Azure River Sect, handsome, talented, and destined for the Core Formation realm before he hit thirty. He was the kind of person who walked in the sun, while people like Chen Wei scurried in the shadows.
Now, he was just dead.
Chen Wei stared at the corpse. Han's face was frozen in a rictus of agony, his skin a mottled purple. His fine white robes were torn and stained with fluids that shouldn't be on the outside of a human body.
'If a genius like this can die like a dog,' Chen Wei thought, a cold shiver running down his spine, 'what hope is there for the rest of us?'
He grabbed a fresh bucket of water and a set of cleaning tools—bone scrapers, silver needles, and sewing thread. He needed to work fast. If the Elders wanted a dawn cremation, it meant they wanted the evidence gone.
Chen Wei wasn't stupid. He knew that "Qi Deviation" was often a euphemism for "Internal Sect Politics." But curiosity was a fatal disease in the cultivation world, and he had no intention of catching it.
He began to strip the ruined robes from the body. The flesh underneath was cold, the rigor mortis already setting in. It felt like touching a statue made of ice.
As he worked, his hand brushed against a jagged shard of porcelain embedded in the folds of Han's sash—likely a fragment of a protective amulet that had failed its master.
The shard sliced across Chen Wei's thumb.
"Hss."
He jerked his hand back, but a single, heavy drop of bright red blood welled up from the cut. Gravity took hold. The drop fell, splashing onto the center of the corpse's forehead.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then, the blood didn't smear. It sank.
It was absorbed into the cold skin like water into dry earth.
Chen Wei froze. He stared at the spot where his blood had vanished, his heart hammering against his ribs.
'What is this? Is the corpse demonic? Is it turning into a Jiangshi?'
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in his chest. He reached for the nearest weapon—a heavy iron mallet used for breaking rigor mortis in stubborn joints.
But before he could swing, the world shifted.
A low hum vibrated through his skull, not a sound, but a sensation, like a wire pulled taut inside his brain. The dim light of the Corpse Hall seemed to darken, the shadows stretching and twisting.
And then, a voice spoke.
It was a cold, mechanical voice. It held no emotion, no Qi, no humanity. It sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates.
[BLOODLINE RESONANCE DETECTED.]
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE.]
Chen Wei stumbled back, tripping over his own stool and crashing to the floor. He scrambled backward, his breath coming in ragged gasps, staring wildly around the empty room.
"Who's there?! Show yourself!"
There was no one. Just the rows of silent dead.
But the voice returned, echoing not in his ears, but directly in his mind.
[TARGET IDENTIFIED: HAN JIN. CULTIVATION: FOUNDATION ESTABLISHMENT (PEAK).]
[TIME SINCE DEATH: 4 HOURS, 12 MINUTES.]
[MEMORY EXTRACTION AVAILABLE.]
[TIME REMAINING: 19 HOURS, 48 MINUTES.]
A translucent blue box, comprised of light and geometric lines, manifested in the air before his eyes. It hovered there, defying the gloom of the hall, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the stale air.
Chen Wei stared at it, his mouth dry.
'I've finally snapped,' he thought, a hysterical laugh bubbling in his throat. 'The yin poison has reached my brain. I'm hallucinating.'
He squeezed his eyes shut, counted to three, and opened them again.
The blue box was still there.
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO PERFORM A SPIRIT AUTOPSY?]
[YES] / [NO]
Chen Wei sat on the damp flagstones, his chest heaving. He looked at the box. He looked at the corpse of Senior Brother Han.
He was a rational person. He didn't believe in miracles. Miracles were for people with intact spiritual roots. For trash like him, there were only accidents and misfortunes.
But...
"Spirit Autopsy," he whispered, testing the words.
He slowly reached out a trembling hand. His finger passed through the light, but as it did, he felt a mental click, like a key turning in a lock.
He selected [YES].
The world violently contracted.
The smells of the Corpse Hall vanished. The cold dampness was replaced by a sterile, white void. Chen Wei blinked, disoriented. He was no longer standing in the hall. He was standing... nowhere.
And in front of him, floating in the void, was the body of Senior Brother Han.
But it was different. The body was translucent, like a ghost. And overlaid on top of the flesh were glowing lines and markers, detailed annotations written in a script he had never seen but somehow perfectly understood.
[SPIRIT AUTOPSY INITIALIZED.]
[CAUSE OF DEATH: UNCONFIRMED.]
[ANALYSIS MODE: ACTIVE.]
Chen Wei looked down at his own hands. They were glowing with a faint, blue light. He felt a strange calmness wash over him, a detachment that separated him from his fear. It was the cold, hard clarity of a machine.
He stepped toward the spectral body. His instincts—honed by three years of cleaning the dead—took over.
"System," he murmured, not knowing why he chose that word. "Show me the meridians."
The spectral body shifted. The skin became transparent, revealing the intricate network of spiritual pathways beneath.
They were a mess.
To the naked eye, Han looked like he had died of internal rupture. But here, in this space, the truth was laid bare.
[OBSERVATION: MAJOR MERIDIAN RUPTURE.]
[NOTE: RUPTURE PATTERN INCONSISTENT WITH INTERNAL QI COLLAPSE.]
Chen Wei frowned. He leaned closer, peering at the glowing blue veins.
"If it was Qi Deviation," he muttered, his mind racing, "the energy would have exploded outward from the Dantian. The blast radius would be centrifugal."
But the damage wasn't centered on the stomach. It was centered on the neck.
The spiritual veins around the throat were crushed, not exploded. They had been severed by an external force that compressed them until they shattered.
[DETECTED: LIGATURE MARKS ON SPIRITUAL BODY.]
[DETECTED: PETECHIAL HEMORRHAGING IN OCULAR MERIDIANS.]
Chen Wei pulled back, his eyes wide.
"He wasn't killed by his own cultivation," he whispered. "He was strangled. Someone strangled a Foundation Establishment cultivator."
But that was impossible. A cultivator of Han's level could reinforce their neck with Qi to be harder than iron. To strangle him, you would need...
[TOXIN DETECTED.]
[ANALYZING BLOOD SAMPLE...]
The view zoomed in on the heart. A dark, oily residue was clinging to the walls of the spiritual heart, pulsing with a faint, sickly green light.
[SUBSTANCE IDENTIFIED: SEVEN-STEP HEART-ROT POWDER.]
[EFFECT: TEMPORARY DISSOLUTION OF DEFENSIVE QI.]
Chen Wei felt the blood drain from his face.
Heart-Rot Powder. A forbidden poison. It didn't kill you instantly; it stripped away your power, turning an immortal back into a mortal for the span of seven breaths.
Someone had poisoned the genius of the sect, waited for his defenses to drop, and then crushed his throat. Then, they had pumped chaotic Qi into the body post-mortem to simulate a deviation event.
It was a professional hit.
[AUTOPSY COMPLETE.]
[CONCLUSION: HOMICIDE.]
[LOGIC: THE VICTIM WAS INCAPACITATED VIA TOXIN AND ASPHYXIATED.]
The white void shattered like glass.
Chen Wei gasped, lurching forward, nearly face-planting into the real corpse of Senior Brother Han.
The smell of rot slammed back into him. The darkness of the Corpse Hall felt heavier than before, pressing against his shoulders.
He stared at the dead face of the genius. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see it. The tiny, red dots in the whites of the eyes—petechial hemorrhage. The slight discoloration around the neck that was hidden by the high collar of the robe.
"Murder," Chen Wei breathed, the word feeling heavy on his tongue.
He stood up, his legs shaking. He backed away from the table until his back hit the cold stone wall.
He had expected to find a tragedy. Instead, he had found a conspiracy.
If he burned this body, he was destroying evidence of a crime committed by someone powerful enough to obtain forbidden poisons and infiltrate the sect. Someone who could order the Disciplinary Hall to cover it up.
If he spoke up, he would be silenced. A servant disciple accusing a higher-up? He would be dead before he finished the sentence.
But if he did nothing...
He looked at the blue box that was still hovering in his peripheral vision.
[MEMORY EXTRACTION AVAILABLE.]
[TARGET: HAN JIN.]
[REWARD: FRAGMENTED TECHNIQUE - 'CRIMSON PETAL SWORD ART' (40% INTEGRITY).]
[DO YOU WISH TO EXTRACT?]
Chen Wei stared at the prompt.
A technique. A cultivation art from a Core Disciple.
For someone with Shattered Spiritual Roots, cultivation was a closed door. He could gather Qi, but it leaked out of him like water from a cracked jar. He had been told he would never advance beyond the second stage of Qi Condensation. He was destined to be a mortician until he died of old age at fifty.
But this System... it wasn't asking him to cultivate. It was asking him to extract.
Was this his chance? Or was it a trap?
'I'm already trapped,' he thought, looking at the heavy iron doors. 'The moment I saw the truth, I became a loose end.'
The killer knew Han had been poisoned. If the poison wasn't entirely destroyed by the fire—and Heart-Rot Powder left a distinctive green residue in the ash—then whoever collected the urn would know that the mortician had seen it.
Li Feng. The name popped into his head unbidden. Han's rival. The man who stood to gain everything from Han's death.
If Li Feng came to check the ashes...
"I'm dead," Chen Wei said to the empty room. "I'm already dead."
He looked at the prompt again.
If he was going to die, he might as well die knowing what it felt like to hold power. Even if it was just a fragment. Even if it was stolen from a dead man.
He stepped forward. He placed his hand on Han's cold forehead.
"Extract."
[CONFIRMED.]
[EXTRACTING MEMORY FRAGMENT...]
[WARNING: HOST SOUL IS WEAK. INTEGRATION WILL BE PAINFUL.]
[BEGINNING.]
Pain, white-hot and blinding, drove a spike through his skull. Chen Wei opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
He didn't just see the memory. He became it.
He was standing in a bamboo grove. A sword was in his hand. The blade was an extension of his arm, a part of his soul. He didn't swing it; he willed it.
The wind blew, and petals drifted from the trees. He moved.
Strike. Parry. Flow.
Qi surged through his meridians, hot and vibrant, roaring like a river. It was a feeling of absolute power, of control.
The Crimson Petal Sword Art. First Form: Falling Blossoms.
The sword flickered, turning into a blur of red light. Three bamboo stalks fell, cut so cleanly they didn't realize they were dead.
Then, the vision fractured.
The memory dissolved into static. The feeling of power vanished, leaving a hollow ache in his chest.
Chen Wei collapsed to the floor of the Corpse Hall, retching. His nose was bleeding. His head throbbed as if it had been split open with an axe.
But in his mind... there was something new.
A geometric shape. A crystal, floating in the darkness of his consciousness.
[EXTRACTION COMPLETE.]
[TECHNIQUE ACQUIRED: CRIMSON PETAL SWORD ART (INCOMPLETE).]
[CURRENT SLOT USAGE: 1/3.]
Chen Wei lay on the cold stone, panting. He wiped the blood from his lip.
He slowly pushed himself up. He looked at his hand. He flexed his fingers.
They felt different. They felt... dangerous.
He looked around the room until his eyes landed on a rusted iron poker used for stoking the furnace. He walked over and picked it up. It was heavy, unbalanced, and crude.
But as his fingers wrapped around the handle, his posture shifted. His feet slid into a stance he had never learned. His breathing synchronized with a rhythm he had never practiced.
He swung.
Whoosh.
The heavy iron rod cut through the air with a sharp, whistling sound, stopping mere millimeters from the stone table. The movement was fluid, precise, and deadly.
It wasn't a master's strike—the memory was fragmented, the technique incomplete—but it was lightyears beyond anything a servant disciple should be capable of.
Chen Wei lowered the poker. He looked at the corpse of Senior Brother Han.
"Thank you for the gift, Senior Brother," he whispered, his voice raspy. "I'll try to put it to good use."
He turned to the incinerator.
He had a body to burn. He had evidence to hide. And tomorrow, when the killer came to check his work, Chen Wei would have to act the part of the terrified, ignorant servant.
But beneath the grey robes, he was no longer just a mortician.
He was an Archivist.
And the dead had just given him a sword.