The left side of Leon's world was entirely gone, replaced by a high-pitched, agonizing whine that seemed to vibrate directly against his skull.
He lay on his side, his face pressed against cold, dry earth. Every gasp for air tore through his chest like swallowed glass. His body was filled with bruises, micro-fractures, and searing muscle tears, but all of that paled in comparison to the blinding, radiating fire on the side of his head. Where his left ear used to be, there was only a mangled, weeping ruin of torn cartilage and sheared flesh. Hot blood continuously flowed down his neck, soaking the collar of his tunic and pooling in the dirt beneath him.
He had survived. By some miracle, or perhaps a joke, the Abyss Blight-Scale Serpent had not followed him through the impossible rift beneath the Mirrorwater.
Slowly, agonizingly, Leon forced his eyes open. His vision swam, fractured by shock and severe blood loss. The oppressive, rotting fog of the Mistveil Marsh was nowhere to be found. The damp, clinging mud that smelled of decay had vanished.
He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, fighting a sudden wave of extreme vertigo. As he took his first real look at his surroundings, his breath caught in his throat.
He was no longer in the outer edge of the wetlands. He had crossed the threshold. This was the Middle Region.
The Sunken Expanse.
It was a graveyard of a forgotten era. Massive, skeletal remains of an ancient civilization stretched out beneath a sky the color of purple. Colossal pillars of white marble, cracked and scarred by eons of time, reached toward the heavens like the ribs of a dead leviathan. Archways etched with unreadable, jagged runes lay half-buried in the ashen soil. Leon stared at the crumbled structures, his mind struggling to comprehend the sheer scale of the ruins. What kind of denizens had lived here? How powerful must a civilization have been to build such structures, and more terrifyingly, what catastrophic force could have reduced them to this silent, dead wasteland?
But as Leon took another breath, a different realization struck him.
The air.
Every breath felt like burning liquid rushing into his lungs. The profound energy here was incredibly thick, pure, and strong. It pressed against his skin and poured into his meridians like a wild river. Compared to this place, the famous Imperial Profound Energy Pool back in the Chromewell Empire was nothing but a small puddle.
A bitter, humorless smile touched Leon's pale lips. A few years ago, breathing this air would have done nothing for Leon , he wouldn't even be able to feel the Profound energy of this place . For the vast majority of his life, his profound veins had been completely crippled after the assasin attack. In a world where strength dictated the right to draw breath, he had been less than nothing. Even if he had access to the Imperial Pool, his broken body would not have been able to absorb a single drop.
Coupled with the fact that his home, the Fittora Barony, was a desolate, barren land utterly devoid of profound energy, his fate had seemed sealed. He was destined to be a cripple in a dying land.
But then, the "System" had awakened.
It was a strange, incomprehensible force that had suddenly fused with his soul, systematically repairing his shattered meridians and finally allowing him to step onto the path of cultivation. He could feel it now—his newly functioning veins eagerly, almost desperately, drinking in the dense atmospheric energy of the Sunken Expanse, trying to soothe the catastrophic damage to his physical body.
Leon forced himself to stand, using his short sword as a crutch. His legs trembled violently. He needed a place to hide. He needed to recover, or he would bleed to death before anything in this region even had the chance to hunt him.
He began to limp through the skeletal ruins, his right hand clutching tightly to the canvas sack slung over his shoulder. Inside it lay the Mystillin Maple Herbs. He had paid for them with his flesh, and he was not going to die before he could use them.
As he dragged his feet through the dust, a faint, pulsing crimson glow caught his eye.
Scattered amidst the white marble ruins were towering, jagged pillars of red crystal. They jutted out of the ground at unnatural angles, some as small as a man, others as large as a watchtower. They were beautiful, but there was something terrifying about them.
Leon stumbled toward the nearest formation, a jagged spike protruding from the base of a shattered archway. He reached out with a trembling hand.
The moment his fingers brushed the surface of the crimson crystal, he felt it , his eys voilently looking around him.
The sheer, concentrated density of the profound energy locked within the crystal was so extreme that touching it felt like pressing his bare hand against a roaring forge.
Leon's eyes widened, his pupils contracting to pinpricks. The high-pitched ringing in his missing ear seemed to fade entirely, replaced by the thunderous, frantic beating of his own heart.
These weren't just crystals.
They are High-Grade Spirit Stones.
The realization hit his exhausted mind like a physical blow. Spirit stones were the absolute currency and lifeblood of the cultivation world—crystallized profound energy used for trading, forging, arrays, and direct cultivation.
Leon's mind immediately flashed back to the Fittora Barony. His home. His suffering people. Fittora was constantly terrorized by a ruthless faction of local bandits, men who rode through the barony like kings of death. Their demand was absolute: a tribute of 300 low-grade spirit stones every three months.
To a wealthy sect, it was pocket change. To Fittora, it was a crippling, impossible sum. The barony bled itself dry, selling heirlooms, starving its people, and breaking its back just to scrape together those 300 low-grade stones to prevent a massacre.
And here, standing before Leon, was a literal mountain of wealth that defied human comprehension.
The conversion rates drilled into him by his grim reality played out in his mind. One middle-grade spirit stone was worth exactly one thousand low-grade stones. One high-grade spirit stone was worth one thousand middle-grade stones.
That meant a single high-grade spirit stone was equivalent to one million low-grade stones.
Leon looked up at the towering pillar of crimson before him. It was massive, likely containing hundreds, if not thousands, of high-grade stones perfectly fused together. A single one of these pillars was worth billions of low-grade spirit stones. Billions.
Just a fragment—a single fist-sized chunk of this crystal—could pay Fittora's tribute for ten lifetimes. It could elevate his dying barony to unprecedented heights, allowing them to hire true experts, build defenses, and never live in fear again.
Greed, hot and blinding, flared in Leon's chest. It suppressed his pain, suppressed his exhaustion, and filled his veins with a frantic, desperate adrenaline.
He gripped the hilt of his short sword with both hands, ignoring the slick feeling of his own blood on the leather grip. With a feral, breathless grunt, he swung the blade as hard as his battered body would allow, striking the edge of the crimson pillar.
CLANG!
The sharp, metallic recoil vibrated violently up Leon's arms, tearing the scabs that had just begun to form on his wounds. He stumbled backward, dropping the sword.
He fell to his knees, staring in absolute horror at the blade. The steel had not even scratched the crystal. Instead, a massive, jagged chip was missing from his sword. The high-grade spirit stones, forged by eons of immense atmospheric pressure, were harder than profound steel. With his pitiful Elementary Profound strength, he couldn't even dent them.
The reality of his extreme weakness crushed the brief flame of hope.
Frantic, Leon dropped to the dirt, crawling around the base of the pillar. He desperately scanned the ashen ground, his bloody fingers sifting through the dirt, praying to find a loose piece. Just one piece. Just a sliver small enough to fit into his canvas backpack. But the crystals were seamless, deeply embedded into the bedrock of the ruins.
He sat back on his heels, the bitter taste of utter powerlessness thick on his tongue.
At this exact moment, surrounded by unimaginable, world-altering wealth, Leon deeply, violently cursed his weakness . He thought of the artifacts he had only ever seen people in the empire se—the Spatial Storage Rings. Forged by experts who had mastered the laws of space, these rings contained compressed pocket dimensions. A cultivator lucky enough to possess a spatial ring could simply wave their hand and store a mountain of these stones on their finger. They wouldn't need to break them; they could just uproot the entire pillar and carry it effortlessly.
But Leon was not a expert. He was an injured, half-deaf boy holding a chipped sword and a bloodstained canvas sack.
He stared at the crimson pillar, his breathing ragged. He was losing himself. The greed was clouding his judgment, blinding him to the fact that he was currently bleeding to death in a domain of death .
Leon closed his eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath. He ruthlessly forced the greed down, locking it away in the darkest corner of his mind.
Focus, he commanded himself, his voice a harsh, bloody whisper in his own mind. Wealth is useless to a corpse. You need to survive. You need to recover.
He forced himself back to his feet. He could not carry the stones. He could not break them. He had to let them go. He had to make do with the Mystillin Maple Herbs he had almost died to collect. They were a supreme treasure in their own right ,they could help him in his current predicament as well .
Leon scanned his surroundings, his remaining ear twitching as he listened for any unnatural sounds. The Sunken Expanse was dead silent. There was no wind, no movement, no sign of beasts. But Leon knew better than to trust the silence of the wetlands.
He limped toward the foundation of a collapsed marble temple. The ground here was slightly harder , unlike the outer wetlands .
Using his chipped sword and his bare hands, Leon began to dig.
It was an agonizing, humiliating process. Every movement pulled at the torn flesh on the side of his head. Blood dripped from his jaw, mixing with the dirt beneath his fingernails. His muscles screamed in protest, threatening to give out completely. But the sheer, stubborn will to live kept his hands moving. He clawed at the earth like a cornered animal, carving out a narrow, shallow trench just big enough to fit his body.
After what felt like hours, the pit was deep enough.
Nearby lay a large, flat slab of white marble, likely a piece of a shattered ceiling. Leon wedged his chipped sword under the edge, using it as a lever. Gritting his teeth until he tasted fresh blood from his gums, he pushed. The slab groaned, shifting across the dirt. Centimeter by centimeter, he dragged the heavy stone over the edge of the pit, leaving just enough of a gap for air and for him to slip inside.
Leon slid down into the cold, dark earth. He reached up, gripping the underside of the marble slab, and pulled it the rest of the way, sealing himself in pitch-black darkness.
The momentary solace of the pit's silence was overwhelming. Stripped of the visual grandeur of the ruins and the terrifying crimson pillars, Leon's body finally realized it was safe.
He lay in the suffocating dark, his chest heaving. His trembling hand reached into his bloodstained sack, his fingers brushing against the soft, glowing leaves of the Mystillin Maple Herb.
He pulled one of the translucent stems out and brought it to his mouth. He didn't bother to refine it through meditation—he didn't have the energy. He simply chewed the raw herb, the bitter, vibrant taste flooding his senses.
Almost instantly, a gentle, warming current of pure vitality bloomed in his stomach, spreading outward through his crippled, aching meridians. It was like cool water poured over searing coals. The profound energy of the herb began to forcibly knit his torn muscles and stabilize the chaotic blood flow in his head.
But before Leon could see the effect of the miraculous herb, his body collapsed. The last of his strength evaporated.
In the silent, grave-like dark of the pit, beneath a ruined civilization and an ocean of untouchable wealth, Leon drifted into a deep sleep.