Location: The Badlands – Sector Zero (300 miles West of the War)
The air smelled of sulfur and rotting metal. The sky here was a bruised purple, choked by smog from the thousands of uncontrolled subterranean fires that had burned for centuries. This was the Badlands—a graveyard for failed sects, criminals, and ancient machines.
CRACK-THUMP.
Space twisted violently above a pile of rusted scrap. Three figures fell out of the void, hitting the jagged ground hard.
Lin Fan landed in a roll, coughing up bile. The Void-Shift Teleportation wasn't designed for comfort; it felt like being squeezed through a straw.
"Status," Lin Fan wheezed, checking his limbs. His Shadow Silk suit was shredded. His left arm was dislocated.
"Alive..." Fatty Wu groaned from a pile of trash. He was pale, clutching his stomach. "I think I left my liver in the tunnel."
Su Mei didn't answer. She lay on her side, unconscious. Blood was trickling from her nose. The pressure from Ancestor Xuan's domain had ruptured her eardrums.
Lin Fan popped his shoulder back into place with a sickening click. He didn't flinch. He crawled over to Su Mei and checked her pulse.
"Weak. Internal bleeding," Lin Fan diagnosed. He pulled a Regeneration Injector (crafted from healing herbs and a syringe) from his belt and stabbed it into her neck. Her breathing stabilized, but she didn't wake up.
Lin Fan sat back against a rusted engine block the size of a house. He opened his System Interface.
[Status Report]
HP: 35% (Critical).
Credits: 0 (Spent on Beacon).
Location: The Badlands.
Assets: Admin Token, Desert Eagle (12 Rounds), Thunder Steel Blueprint.
"We are back to zero," Lin Fan whispered. He looked at the desolate wasteland. Acid rain began to fall, sizzling on the metal junk around them.
"Boss," Fatty Wu sat up, shivering. "Why did we come here? This place is death. The poison rain... the Scrap Beasts..."
"We came here because the Alliance won't follow us," Lin Fan said, wiping rain from his glasses. "Cultivators hate this place. The ambient Qi is chaotic. It corrodes their meridians. To them, this is hell."
Lin Fan stood up, looking at the endless mountains of scrap metal. His eyes—Seal 2—flared blue.
To anyone else, it was trash. To Lin Fan, it was a buffet.
[Scan Result: High-Grade Titanium Alloy] [Scan Result: Depleted Uranium Core] [Scan Result: Ancient Circuitry]
"To us," Lin Fan smiled, a bloodied, terrifying expression. "This is a hardware store. Get up, Fatty. Pick up Su Mei. We need to find shelter before the Acid Storm hits."
Location: The Iron Blood Crater – The Victory Celebration
The war was over. The Iron Blood Sect was a smoking hole in the ground.
The Alliance disciples cheered. They planted their flags—Azure Sword, White Tiger, Mystic Valley—on the edge of the crater. They believed they had cleansed the world of a great evil.
But the Leaders weren't cheering.
Ancestor Xuan hovered over the magma pit. He held a twisted piece of metal in his hand—the barrel of the Railgun.
"This metal..." Xuan murmured, his brow furrowed. "It was not forged with fire. It was fused at the molecular level. And this design... it channels lightning without a spirit root."
"It is a demonic artifact, Ancestor," Jian Chen bowed low, his arm in a sling. "The heretic Lin Fan used it to kill the White Tiger Leader."
"No," Xuan crushed the barrel into dust. "Demons use blood. This... this is Logic. Cold, unfeeling logic."
Xuan looked at the horizon where Lin Fan had vanished.
"He is a cancer," Xuan declared. "He does not cultivate the Dao. He replaces it. If he is allowed to rebuild, he will make us all obsolete."
Xuan turned to the gathered armies.
"Hear my decree!"
The three thousand cultivators fell silent.
"The Iron Blood Sect is no more. But the Heretic Lin Fan lives. I issue a Continent-Wide Kill Order. 10 Million Spirit Stones for his head. 5 Million for his accomplices. Hunt him down. Burn every hole he hides in. Do not stop until his soul is harvested."
A roar of approval went up from the army. They didn't know they were cheering for their own future extinction.
Location: The Whispering Canyon – The Training Camp
Zhang Wei sat by the river, washing the blood off his Thunder Steel Spear. The water ran red.
He was quiet. He kept seeing the explosion in the trenches. He kept seeing the "Operators"—men and women who looked like him, former servants—being blown up by their own leader.
"You're brooding," Li Mu said, sitting on a rock behind him. "It's boring."
"He killed them," Zhang Wei whispered. "His own people. He used them as a bomb."
"He used them as assets," Li Mu corrected. "Lin Fan is a pragmatist. He calculated that their deaths bought him the time to escape. In his math, it was a valid trade."
"It's evil," Zhang Wei slammed his fist into the water.
"It's effective," Li Mu countered. "And that is why you lost. You fought with honor. He fought with calculations. While you were saving one person, he was sacrificing a hundred to save himself."
Li Mu threw the Thunder Breathing Manual at Zhang Wei's head.
"If you want to kill a man like that, you can't just be a 'Hero.' You have to be a Calamity. You have to be strong enough that his math stops working."
Li Mu stood up. His playful, drunken demeanor vanished.
"The war is over. But you aren't ready to hunt in the Badlands. That place eats Golden Core masters for breakfast."
"So what do we do?" Zhang Wei asked, standing up.
"We go to the Cloud-Peak Monastery," Li Mu pointed north. "It's an old friend's place. High altitude. Thin air. Perfect for training your lungs for Thunder Breathing. We spend three months there."
"Three months?" Zhang Wei asked. "Lin Fan will be far away by then."
"In three months," Li Mu said grimly, "Lin Fan will have built a fortress. You better pray that three months is enough time for you to learn Third Gear."
Li Mu looked at Zhang Yan, who was practicing freezing a leaf in her hand.
"And she needs to learn to control that ice. If she sneezes in the Badlands, she'll wake up things that have been sleeping for an epoch."
Location: The Badlands – Night
They found a cave. It was actually the hollowed-out skull of a massive, ancient beast, metal plating fused to the bone.
Su Mei was awake, sipping water. She looked broken.
"We lost everything," she whispered. "The factory. The army. The money."
"We lost the overhead," Lin Fan corrected. He was stripping wires from a piece of junk he found.
He connected the wires to his Admin Token.
Hummmm.
The Admin Token lit up. It acted as a generic power source.
Lin Fan projected a map of the Badlands onto the cave wall.
"We are here. Sector Zero."
He pointed to a glowing red dot in the center of the wasteland.
"The City of Rust."
"That's a myth," Fatty Wu argued. "A city run by criminal cultivators and exiled artificers. They say the City Lord there is a machine."
"It's not a myth," Lin Fan zoomed in. "And it has the one thing we need."
"What?"
"A Nuclear Reactor," Lin Fan smiled in the dim light. "Or the cultivation equivalent. An Ancient Spirit Core."
Lin Fan looked at his two battered followers.
"We aren't going to build a sect this time. Sects are inefficient. Vulnerable."
He picked up a piece of scrap metal and began to sketch a new logo. It wasn't a gear. It was a Corp.
"We are going to build a PMC (Private Military Company). We go to the City of Rust. We take over the black market. We sell weapons to the criminals. And we use the profits to build the MK-2 Railgun."
Lin Fan's eyes glowed blue in the darkness.
"Ancestor Xuan thinks he won because he has a big soul. I'm going to show him that even a God dies if you nuke him."