Mo Huayan tilted her head as if she were admiring some rare performance and not… being slandered.

"Mm," she said pleasantly, lowering herself until she was half-kneeling beside him, her hair spilling like ink across the cracked ground. "You talk to yourself a lot. That's a sign of mental decay, you know."

Wang Chen rolled onto his side and pretended she wasn't there.

By the tenth day, he stopped reacting.

He just… accepted it.

He hunted, he hid, he trained. He slept with one eye open and his hands curled into fists. He learned to read the crying patterns of weaker resentment ghosts, learned which wails meant "lure" and which meant "backup incoming." He gauged the direction of the cold winds and the thin, bitter taste in the fog to determine when elite entities were nearby. He tracked his mana by feel.

And he did all of that while pointedly acting as if the beautiful woman hovering an arm's length away at all times simply did not exist.

At first, Mo Huayan had found that unbearable.

Then she found it fascinating.

After another ten days of silent tailing, she settled into his rhythm, drifting at his side like an elegant, uninvited guardian spirit.

He stalked alone through the ash-lit plains. She watched.

He jammed himself into a shallow pit to wait out a passing abomination, every muscle clenched and aching. She lay across the ground beside him like a lounging cat, chin in her palm, violet eyes flickering with amusement.

He fought.

She observed.

That was when her smile finally began to fade.

Because the longer she watched him, the more wrong things became.

"Interesting…" she murmured one day, her voice low and thoughtful rather than teasing for the first time. "He's so weak, yet he remains completely unaffected by the corruption of this godforsaken palace."

Her gaze sharpened.

By now she had followed him long enough to notice what anyone sane would have called impossible.

First: growth.

Every time he killed a resentful ghost — every single time — he became stronger.

Not by much. Not in a divine, dramatic way. But enough.

Enough for her to feel it.

His movements grew steadier. His reactions grew tighter. His strikes got cleaner. The trembling in his arms when he swung that pathetic scrap of metal disappeared day by day.

She watched a mortal in ragged clothes, barely clinging to life in a place that devoured souls, and saw him adapting.

That alone was unnatural.

Second: hunger.

He didn't eat.

Not once.

She realized this on the thirteenth day, and once she realized it, she couldn't unsee it. He never searched for food. Never rested to chew dried rations. Never hunted physical beasts for flesh. He would collapse, sleep like the dead for a handful of hours, then get up and continue as if nothing had happened.

A living body should not function like that.

Not in this place.

Not with that level of exertion.

Third: will.

The palace — this broken world of frozen rage and drifting agony — eroded everything.

She had watched it drive cultivators insane. She had watched it hollow them out, bleeding them down to screaming instincts until nothing remained but hate and hunger. That was the nature of this floor. That was the purpose of this prison.

But he… didn't rot.

He walked through hatred and remained himself.

He bled and remained himself.

He looked into the mouths of things that were born from despair itself, and remained himself.

That bothered her more than anything else.

Humans cracked here. They always cracked.

Yet this fragile little cultivator — who should've died on day one, whose class was a joke, whose mana was laughable — had spent weeks in a place that had broken saints, and his eyes were still clear.

His spirit was still his own.

Her expression cooled.

"This little cultivator…" she whispered to herself, floating alongside him as he crept along a shattered ridge, stalking a lone resentment ghost. "Theres something wrong with him."

Mo Huyan didnt have exact word to describe him, hew as not weak. Not pitiful. Not amusing.

he was just wrong.

He doesn't belong here.

The realization made something old and bitter stir inside her.

Because with time, a fourth truth surfaced — a truth that made her throat tighten.

The world fed him.

She was sure of it now.

He didn't draw strength from this realm the way normal cultivators did. He drew it from… somewhere else. Every kill, every desperate swing, every moment he refused to fall — it wasn't just survival. It was accumulation. Exchange. Transaction.

A deal.

Like a pact.

Someone — something — was feeding him power in return for slaughter.

And that was when her laughter stopped being pure.

Because she began to see it.

"I see…" she breathed one sleepless, starless cycle later, watching him sleep with his back to a jagged boulder, both hands clenched tight against his chest as if protecting something no one else could see. "So this is why he is my opportunity to get out this place."

A slow, predatory light entered her violet eyes.

If I stay with him long enough…

If I figure out what he's bound to…

If I make him mine…

Once I leave this rotting grave, the entire Upper Realm will kneel.

The thought slid through her mind like a blade being drawn.

Her lips curled. Her lashes lowered. A violent chill flickered through her gaze, then steadied into ambition.

Once I leave this prison of death, she thought, calm and certain, the entire Upper Realm will remember what true terror feels like.

And the funny thing was — through all of that, through her growing hunger, through the crackling glint of conquest in her eyes — Wang Chen still hadn't acknowledged her existence out loud in days.

He just kept walking.

Just kept killing.

Just kept surviving, one stubborn breath at a time, in a place that did not allow the living.

Which, to Mo Huayan's surprise, only made him more interesting, to the point a strange sense of excitment started to fill her heart.

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