Chapter 3: Stealing the Light
The command to evacuate traveled through the upper perimeter like a contagion. Panicked laborers dropped their shovels, scrambled up the slippery wooden ladders, and left the muddy pit as fast as their legs could carry them. None of them wanted to draw the ire of the Zhao Group’s private security, let alone risk being buried alive in a collapsing structural trench.
"Lin Feng! What are you doing? Get up here!" Lao Wang shouted from the top landing, waving his hand frantically toward the shadows beneath the heavy tracked excavator.
Lin Feng didn't move. He kept his back pressed against the cold steel of the machinery, completely concealing his thin frame from the swept beams of the guards' tactical flashlights.
"My shoe got stuck in the clay, Uncle Wang!" Lin Feng called back, his voice intentionally pitched with a tone of panicked, clumsy youth. "Go ahead! I'll catch up once I tear it free!"
"Stupid kid! Don't worry about a damn shoe, just run!" Lao Wang cursed under his breath, but as a heavy surge of water filled with thick black silt splashed near the base of the ladder, his survival instincts took over. He scrambled over the lip of the concrete retaining wall and disappeared into the rainy night.
Down in the depths of the pit, the atmosphere changed instantly.
With the workers gone, the three guards from the Zhao Vanguard Corps dropped their casual stances. Manager Zhou, the man with the jagged scar on his jaw, unclipped his heavy tactical baton and extended it with a sharp, metallic clack. A faint, high-frequency hum vibrated through the air as a pale blue current of artificial electricity rippled along the weapon’s alloy edge.
"Is the auxiliary jammer active?" Manager Zhou asked, his voice echoing coldly against the wet concrete pillars.
"Yes, sir," the guard to his left replied, tapping a sleek, matte-black device mounted on a tripod near the drainage shaft. "All civilian cellular signals within a two-hundred-meter radius are entirely suppressed. Even if the workers try to livestream or take photos of the water, their phones will show a localized network timeout."
"Good. The higher-ups at the corporate headquarters received a geological variance report three hours ago. The spiritual satellite arrays detected a massive micro-fracture beneath this specific grid," Manager Zhou muttered, stepping closer to the bubbling, frothy pool at the bottom of the trench. "They want the anomaly secured before the municipal inspectors arrive at dawn. If any laborer sneaks back in to take a peek, liquidate them on the spot and blame it on a structural cave-in."
Listening from the shadows, Lin Feng’s eyes narrowed into slits of pure ice.
As expected of the Zhao Group, he thought, his pulse remaining absolutely flat. Even before the Great Awakening officially rewrites global law, they are already treating human lives like disposable livestock. In my past life, I thought their ruthlessness was a product of the post-apocalyptic era. Now I see it was always baked into their corporate DNA.
Lin Feng took a long, silent breath through his nose, guiding the microscopic thread of pristine Qi he had accumulated from his hours of hard labor down into his heels.
His current physical body was terribly weak. If he engaged in a direct melee confrontation against three armed, military-trained security personnel, he would be run through by high-voltage batons within seconds. But Lin Feng didn't need to defeat them with brute force. He possessed the combat experience of a ten-year veteran scavenger who had survived the most treacherous, claustrophobic death-traps on Earth. He knew exactly how to use the environment as a weapon.
The water in the trench was rising rapidly now, but it wasn't a standard muddy brown. Beneath the layer of floating industrial silt, a deep, ethereal sapphire luminescence was starting to bleed upward from the bedrock. The temperature in the pit plummeted, turning the humid Jiangnan summer air into a freezing, mist-shrouded cauldron.
The Spiritual Seed is breaching, Lin Feng realized, his heart tightening with precision. The pressure is too high. The bedrock is about to snap.
"Look at that..." the third guard whispered, his voice trembling slightly as he stared into the glowing blue water. "The water... it’s shining. Is it some kind of radioactive phosphorus?"
"Shut up and prepare the containment capsule," Manager Zhou snapped, though his own eyes filled with greed as he looked at the sapphire light. "Whatever it is, it’s worth more than your life. Move!"
But just as the guard reached into his tactical pack for a titanium containment cylinder, the earth beneath their feet groaned. A sharp, explosive crack—like the sound of a heavy rifle firing—echoed from the very bottom of the trench.
A localized pocket of high-pressure spiritual energy had finally shattered the upper crust of the granite bedrock.
The mutation happened in a split second. A violent geyser of freezing, blue-tinted water erupted three meters into the air, tearing through the industrial drainage pump and throwing heavy, jagged fragments of cast-iron machinery across the pit.
"Watch out!" Manager Zhou roared, throwing himself backward as a piece of shattered iron pipe tore through the air, slicing a deep gash into the arm of the guard holding the tripod jammer.
The tripod collapsed, crashing into the rising pool, and the matte-black jamming device instantly short-circuited with a spectacular shower of yellow sparks. The sudden, violent disruption of the spiritual fault line caused the heavy, saturated clay walls of the trench to lose their structural integrity. Tons of wet, shifting earth began to slide downward like a slow-moving avalanche, burying the equipment and clouding the entire area in a dense, blinding fog of pulverized mud and vaporized water.
"Damn it! The wall is giving way! Get back to the concrete pillars!" Manager Zhou yelled through the blinding mist, his flashlight beam scattering uselessly against the thick, swirling fog.
Amid the absolute chaos, Lin Feng moved.
He didn't run away from the geyser; he ran straight toward it.
Using the thick curtain of mud and steam as absolute cover, Lin Feng glided across the slippery ground with the silent, fluid grace of a phantom. His unconditioned muscles screamed in protest, the sudden burst of explosive speed threatening to tear his tendons, but he ignored the pain, steering his body using the memories of a master scavenger.
He plunged straight into the freezing, glowing geyser at the center of the pit.
The moment his skin made contact with the water, an agonizing, bone-chilling cold ripped through his nervous system. It felt as though a thousand liquid-nitrogen needles were being driven directly into his pores. Ordinary human flesh would have gone into immediate, fatal shock from the sheer thermal and spiritual density.
But Lin Feng didn't resist the cold. He opened his mouth and let out a silent, rhythmic exhalation, activating the absolute core technique of the Nine Heaven Circulation Scroll.
“Heaven divides the earth, the earth fractures the soul, but the Nine Channels remain unbroken.”
Instead of tearing his fragile body apart, the violent, surging spiritual energy contained within the geyser found a perfectly smooth, unawakened path. Like water rushing into a dry, perfectly cleared canal, the sapphire energy surged into Lin Feng’s open meridians.
At the center of the swirling, luminous vortex, floating just inches above the fractured granite bedrock, was a single, crystal-clear droplet of pure, condensed liquid light. It was no larger than a pine nut, pulsating with a rhythmic, heartbeat-like warmth that defied the freezing water around it.
The premature Spiritual Seed.
Lin Feng didn't hesitate. He reached out his mud-stained hand, his fingers slicing through the violent current, and scooped the glowing seed directly into his palm.
Without a moment's delay, he swallowed it whole.
The seed dissolved the instant it touched his tongue, turning into a searing, white-hot line of liquid fire that shot straight down his throat and slammed into his empty Dantian.
BOOM.
An invisible, spiritual shockwave detonated within Lin Feng’s internal consciousness. The calcified impurities, the structural blockages, and the accumulated pollution of his twenty years of mortal existence were violently, ruthlessly incinerated in a single breath. His bones popped with a series of sharp, rapid cracks as his skeletal structure was compressed and reinforced. His dull, sluggish bloodstream suddenly began to circulate with a deep, rhythmic hum, driven by a brand-new, indestructible core of pure, unblemished Qi.
Mortal Flesh Refinement—Stage 1!
Stage 2!
Stage 3!
The breakthrough didn't stop until his physical constitution was completely overhauled, stopping at the absolute peak of the third stage of mortal refinement. In less than ten seconds, his physical strength had multiplied fivefold, his senses sharpening to such an extent that he could hear the distinct sound of raindrops hitting the mud twenty meters above him.
The sapphire glow in the water instantly faded, its entire spiritual essence thoroughly drained and anchored within Lin Feng’s body. The geyser died down into a mundane, muddy puddle.
"Zhou... Manager Zhou! The light... the blue light is gone!" a panicked voice shouted from through the clearing fog.
"I can see that, you idiot!" Manager Zhou’s angry voice came closer, his heavy boots splashing through the mud as he waved his flashlight around. "Find the seed! It must have been washed down into the main drainage pipe when the bedrock cracked!"
Lin Feng stood up from the mud, his body drenched, his old clothes covered in black silt. But beneath the filth, his skin possessed a faint, pearlescent sheen, and his eyes glowed in the darkness like twin stars before returning to a calm, deceptive dullness.
A faint, dangerous smile played on his lips as he looked at the flashlight beams drawing closer to his position.
The mishap had rearranged the board perfectly. He had the seed, his foundation was set, and now... it was time to handle the corporate clean-up crew.