Ten years.
To a cultivator seeking the eternal Dao, ten years was but a blink of an eye, a mere moment of secluded meditation in a cave. But for the soil of the Northern Province, ten years was long enough for the scorched earth of Mist-Veil Village to be buried under layers of weeds, thorns, and forgotten memories. The world had moved on, as it always did, indifferent to the screams of the weak. The Black-Tiger Sect had grown from a local pack of thugs into a regional cancer, their influence stretching across the province like a shadow cast by a dying sun.
In the heart of Maple-Leaf City, the "Whispering Crane" tea house was a microcosm of the world's indifference. Steam rose from porcelain cups, and the air was thick with the scent of roasted tea leaves, cheap tobacco, and the desperate, shallow gossip of mortals.
In a secluded corner, away from the warmth of the central stove, sat a young man who seemed to exist in a different dimension entirely.
He wore robes of moon-white silk, so clean they seemed to repel the very dust of the room. His long, black hair was tied back with a simple silver ribbon, falling over his shoulders like a frozen waterfall. His face was a masterpiece of celestial craft—brows like distant mountains, skin like polished jade, and eyes that held the depth of an ancient, frozen ocean.
This was Li Wei.
He was eighteen now. The warmth that had once radiated from his eight-year-old self had been surgically excised, replaced by a terrifying, hollow stillness. He sat with a book in one hand, his movements fluid and precise. To any observer, he was a scholar of high standing. But beneath the table, his fingers were subtly moving in a rhythmic, haunting pattern, invisible threads of Qi vibrating with every breath he took.
Li Wei wasn't just breathing; he was practicing the "Void-Heart Sutra."
The Echoes of the Frozen Wastes
As he turned a page, a brief flicker of a memory threatened to surface—the first three years of his disappearance.
After the fire, Li Wei had not sought help. He had walked North, into the Glacial Barrens, where the wind was sharp enough to flay skin. He had spent those years in a cave made of ice, eating raw snow and the frozen meat of winter wolves. It was there he found the skeletal remains of the "Ascetic of the Bone-Stitcher." He hadn't found a legendary sword or a divine pill. He had found a manual on the Anatomy of the 10,000 Species.
While other children his age were learning to play instruments or practice basic fist techniques, Li Wei was in that frozen cave, using a piece of sharpened ice to dissect frozen carcasses. He had memorized every nerve ending, every meridian pathway, and every fragile joint. He didn't cultivate to become a God; he cultivated to become a Surgeon of Death.
By the fifth year, he had discovered that the "Dead Heart" wasn't just a mental state—it was a cultivation catalyst. Because he felt no pain and no fear, his Qi was as stable as a diamond and as cold as the void.
The Boast of the Damned
At a large table in the center of the tea house, four men were drinking heavily. They wore the black-and-gold uniforms of the Black-Tiger Sect, their arrogance filling the room like a foul stench. Their leader, a man with a bloated face and a greasy beard named Zhang Bao, slammed his ceramic jar down, splashing wine onto the floor.
"I'm telling you," Zhang Bao barked, his voice thick with intoxication. "Elder Mang's new 'Cultivation Furnace' is a rare find. A girl of twelve, pure Yin constitution. Her screams during the refinement process were like high-pitched music! I haven't seen the Elder this happy since we burned down that village in the mountains a decade ago."
The other disciples roared with laughter, their eyes glinting with a disgusting hunger. One of them, a lean man with yellow teeth, leaned in. "I remember that day. We didn't even leave the dogs alive. Though, I still regret that we didn't capture that 'Jade Child'—the boy with the face of a god. He would have fetched ten thousand spirit stones in the capital's auction houses."
Li Wei's eyes didn't move from the page of his book. His heart rate remained a steady sixty beats per minute. He felt no anger. To him, these men were not enemies to be hated; they were merely biological anomalies that needed to be corrected. He closed his book with a soft thud. The sound was barely audible, yet it resonated through the room like a funeral bell.
The Hunt in the Dark
As the moon climbed to its zenith, Zhang Bao stumbled out of the tea house. His comrades had stayed behind to gamble, leaving him to walk back to the sect's local outpost alone. He decided to take a shortcut through a narrow, lightless alleyway, the walls slick with damp moss and the stench of stagnant water.
Suddenly, the air grew cold. A biting, artificial frost settled directly into the marrow of his bones.
Zhang Bao stopped. He tried to take a step forward, but his right leg refused to obey. He looked down. A thin, translucent thread, almost invisible in the moonlight, was wrapped tightly around his thigh.
"Who's there?!" Zhang Bao hissed, reaching for the heavy saber at his waist.
But his hand wouldn't move. He looked at his arm and saw another thread coiled around his wrist, pulsing with a faint, crystalline blue light.
"The human muscular system is quite a marvel, isn't it?"
A voice, melodic and hauntingly calm, drifted from the shadows. Li Wei stepped into the moonlight. His white robes didn't catch a single drop of the alleyway's filth.
"You..." Zhang Bao gasped, his memory triggered by that divine face. "You're... the brat from the village? How... how are you alive?"
"My name is Li Wei," the young man said, his voice as sharp as a razor. "But that is a name for the living. For you, I am simply the Collector."
The Surgical Massacre
With a subtle flick of Li Wei's finger, the thread around Zhang Bao's thigh tightened.
Crrraaaaack.
The femur, the strongest bone in the human body, didn't just break—it was pulverized by a high-frequency Qi vibration Li Wei had perfected by cutting stones for seven years. The jagged ends of the bone tore through the quadriceps muscle and pierced the skin.
Zhang Bao's mouth opened to scream, but Li Wei had already threaded a needle-thin string of Qi through the man's vocal cords, paralyzing the laryngeal nerves. Only a wet gurgle emerged.
Li Wei reached into his sleeve and pulled out a small, silver tool—a surgical scalpel forged from Star-Iron.
"During my seventh year of exile," Li Wei murmured, "I practiced on the Mountain Bears of the North. I learned that there are 361 pressure points on the human body. Seventy-two of them, if struck with enough precision, can prolong the sensation of pain by a factor of ten by preventing the brain from slipping into the mercy of unconsciousness."
He began to move. His hands were a blur of white silk and silver light.
Squelch.
The scalpel dipped into Zhang Bao's shoulder. Li Wei didn't just cut; he peeled. He separated the deltoid muscle from the humerus bone while keeping every major artery intact. He wanted the blood to flow, but he didn't want the heart to stop.
"This is for the woman you stabbed in the back," Li Wei said, referring to his mother.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
One by one, he dislocated every joint in Zhang Bao's left hand. Then, using his Qi-Threads, he "stitched" the fingers back together in an inverted, twisted shape—a sickening flower made of broken bones.
Zhang Bao's eyes were rolling back into his head, his body convulsing in a level of agony that the human brain was never designed to endure. Every time he neared death, Li Wei would inject a burst of "Vitality-Locking Qi" into the man's heart—a technique he learned by keeping dying animals alive just to study their organs.
"Don't go just yet," Li Wei whispered, his breath cold against the man's ear. "We haven't even reached the internal organs. I want to see if your liver is as black as your soul."
For the next two hours, the alleyway was a theater of biological horror. Li Wei turned every nerve ending into a conductor of pure, unadulterated fire.
The First Debt Collected
Li Wei stood up, his white robes still as pristine as the moment he sat in the tea house. He looked down at the pile of meat that was once a cultivator.
"One down," Li Wei said softly. "Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go."
He wiped his silver scalpel with a clean silk handkerchief. Then, he reached into the mess and pulled out Zhang Bao's sect token—a small wooden tiger. He crushed it into dust.
"The Black-Tiger Sect wanted a butcher," Li Wei said to the silence. "Now they have one."
He merged back into the shadows of the city. Behind him, the wind carried a faint smell of iron and ash. The Butcher had finished his first lesson, and the world was about to learn that some ghosts don't stay buried.