The atmosphere in the Rising Dragon Arena remained heavy, a silent tomb of terror for those who had witnessed the swift destruction of Zhao Kui. As Hua Sui, standing under the alias Han Ming, stepped off the blood-stained stones, he felt the weight of the Elders' gazes pressing down on him like physical blows. Among them, Elder Mei's eyes were the sharpest—two burning suns attempting to incinerate his veil of anonymity. She leaned forward slightly, her fingers tapping rhythmically against the armrest of her sandalwood chair, a gesture that signaled a dangerous curiosity.
Through the Puppet Soul Seed, the chaotic terror of Su Qing hammered against Hua Sui's consciousness. She was sitting mere feet away from Elder Mei, her knuckles white as she fought to maintain the mask of a composed inner-court disciple. She could feel the Elder's suspicion radiating like heat; every breath felt like she was inhaling needles.
"Steady yourself, Su Qing," Hua Sui's voice echoed directly within her soul, cold and devoid of empathy. "Play the part of the impressed senior sister. If your mask slips and reveals the truth of the Soul-Severing Hut, I will ensure your spirit is the first thing I sacrifice to the cauldron tonight. Do not make me remind you who owns your breath."
The threat acted like a splash of freezing water, forcing Su Qing to find a hollow reserve of courage. When Elder Mei eventually turned to her, asking in a low whisper about this "Han Ming" from the peripheral peaks, Su Qing managed to bow her head with practiced grace. She whispered a carefully crafted lie about Han Ming's reclusive training in the frozen North Face caves, attributing his strange aura to a localized frost-essence cultivation. Her voice trembled just enough to pass for natural awe at a junior's hidden talent. Elder Mei nodded slowly, her suspicion momentarily diverted but not extinguished.
Hua Sui, meanwhile, vanished into the shadows of the participant tunnels. He didn't need to see their reactions; he had already tasted the violent, fire-flavored Qi of Zhao Kui, and it was currently churning within his vessels like molten lead. His internal organs felt as if they were being scorched from the inside out, the stolen energy fighting against the dark constraints of the Reverse Meridians.
Back within the suffocating mists of the Soul-Severing Hut, the night was spent in a ritual of pure, unadulterated agony. Hua Sui sat before the massive red-copper cauldron, but he was not refining medicine for others. He held a jade vial of Bone-Corroding Powder—a lethal substance intended for melting the marrow of high-rank spirit beasts—and began to apply the caustic dust directly into the deep incisions he had carved along his own forearms.
A low, guttural snarl escaped his lips as his muscles spasmed and turned a bruised purple. He forced the stolen fire-energy from the day's battle into those same wounds, using the corrosive powder to act as a catalyst. It was a process of "feeding the poison to the fire." The powder stripped away the impurities of Zhao Kui's Qi, while the heat of the fire burned off the toxic excess of the powder. His skin flickered with a sickly grey radiance as his bones were effectively unmade and reforged in a furnace of his own making. To any other cultivator, this was madness; to Hua Sui, it was the only way to build a foundation capable of containing the "Plague" he carried.
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By the time the first light of dawn pierced the sulfurous toxic miasma of the infirmary, the decay that Elder Mei had sensed was gone. It hadn't vanished; it had merely retreated, coiled tightly and hidden deep within his marrow like a hibernating predator. He emerged from the hut looking pale and unremarkable, the perfect image of a quiet, diligent disciple. The Elders would find no records of 'Han Ming' being anything more than a ghost, for the boy whose identity he had stolen was already a heap of forgotten bones in a collapsed mountain cavern miles away.
The final stage of the competition was not held on the blood-spattered arena floor, but at the foot of the Main Peak, before the massive stone gates of the Scarlet Cloud Sword Tomb. The air here was sharp, saturated with a thousand years of metallic sword intent that bit at the skin and made the spiritual senses ring with a dull ache. This was a graveyard of thousands of blades, where the spirits of fallen swordsmen were said to wander the metallic mists.
Sect Leader Yun stood atop the grand staircase, his white robes billowing in the mountain wind. His voice boomed across the assembly, cold and majestic. He spoke of the sacred duty of the disciples, of the Sword-Heart Grass that grew from ancestral blood-soaked soil, and of the Foundation Establishment Pill—the ultimate prize that sat within a golden box at his side. His eyes swept over the ten finalists, lingering for a fleeting second on Hua Sui. He felt a strange void where the boy's aura should be, a silence that felt too heavy to be natural.
As the heavy stone gates began to groan open, releasing a flood of cold, metallic fog that smelled of rust and ancient blood, a sharp-eyed disciple named Lin Yue approached Hua Sui. She was the daughter of a minor Elder, her jade rapier humming in its sheath with a rhythmic, arrogant pulse. She whispered that the Sword Tomb was a place of refined intent, not the clumsy brute force he had shown against Zhao Kui. She promised that once they were inside the mist, his 'rotten' tricks would fail him against the purity of her blade.
Hua Sui did not even turn to look at her. He simply watched the grey fog swallow the path ahead, his mind already calculating the spiritual density of the disciples walking beside him.
"In that fog," Hua Sui replied softly, his voice carrying a chilling finality that made the hair on Lin Yue's neck stand up, "there are no needles, and there is no intent. There is only the hunter, and there is the harvested."
Without waiting for her retort, he stepped into the metallic veil. The gates slammed shut behind the ten finalists with a thunderous boom, sealing them in a world where the laws of the sect were replaced by the law of the jungle. For Hua Sui, the time for lurking was over. The harvest had officially begun.
