Chapter 001: The Barren Wasteland, Between Life and Death

Fierce, raging fire poison tore through his esophagus and crashed violently into the meridians of his dantian, churning up waves of bone-deep agony.

Gu Qingwei stumbled as he was shoved out through the stone archway of the Outer Sect. His thin, frayed hemp robe flapped wildly against the biting night wind. His knees buckled, nearly sending him sprawling onto the cold slate steps, but he gritted his teeth and forced his spine straight.

A thick, metallic taste surged up his throat, but he swallowed the mouthful of blood back down.

"Spit! Filthy wretch! Do you still fancy yourself a spirit farmer of the Outer Sect?"

Behind him, Wang Heng, a cruel overseer serving the outer affairs manager, raised a soaked horsewhip and cracked it sharply against the air.

CRACK!

A yellowed parchment stamped with a vermilion handprint and half a withered, moldy grain biscuit struck Gu Qingwei squarely in the chest before falling into the muddy puddle below.

"By order of Manager Zhao, the deficit of three thousand bushels of Scarlet Cloud Rice from the rear mountain spirit fields is the direct fault of low-life drudges like you neglecting your duties and colluding with thieves to illicitly sell sect property! By the laws of the Qingling Sect, your cultivation should be crippled on the spot, your limbs shattered, and your body thrown into the fiery pits to refine fiend-qi!"

Wang Heng looked down from atop the stone stairs, his heavy eyelids drooping, his lips curling with unmasked contempt and malice.

"Yet Manager Zhao is benevolent and values life. He has mercifully permitted you to assume death-labor—exiled to the Myriad Poison Barren Lands to reclaim wasteland and pay your debt. Get lost! Die in those wastes, and spare the execution yard from dirtying its punishment staves on your hide!"

Gu Qingwei did not turn back, nor did he utter a single futile plea.

He merely lowered his eyes, knelt slowly, and reached out with a hand covered in thick calluses—trembling uncontrollably from the searing pain—to retrieve the paper and moldy biscuit from the muddy water.

Upon the parchment, the crimson handprint had already dried into a dark crust. Just half an incense stick earlier, Manager Zhao, flanked by four hulking thugs, had pinned him to the punishment bench and forcefully pried his fingers open to stamp this confession of guilt.

The greasy, mocking grin on Manager Zhao's bloated face still echoed in his mind:

"Qingwei, someone has to plug the hole of three thousand bushels of missing spirit rice. You're a worthless servant with a five-element trash spiritual root—no family, no backing, your life cheaper than wild grass. If we don't use you to balance the books, do you expect this manager to take the fall? Swallow your grievance if you know what's good for you. If you dare utter a single syllable, the Crimson Fire Fiend-Qi palm I stamped into your heart will shatter your soul into dust in an instant!"

Over his heart, a fist-sized knot of dark crimson煞qi stirred sluggishly, eating away at the core of his life meridians like maggots in rotten wood.

Half an incense stick.

Gu Qingwei knew all too well that Manager Zhao’s hidden strike was venomous to the extreme. It seemed as though he had granted him a chance at exile, but the timing was meticulously calculated so that he would drop dead from the poison in the desolate wilderness, leaving no witness behind.

He tucked the blood-stained contract and the moldy biscuit into the ragged pouch at his chest. Then, he lifted his pale, lean face and gazed forward.

Dusk had fallen, and the dying sun bled across the horizon.

A vast, scorched wasteland unrolled silently into the gathering twilight. This was the Myriad Poison Barren Lands—a dead zone accumulated over tens of thousands of years by the Qingling Sect, where toxic alchemy slag and spent subterranean fire poison had been discarded without end.

The air was heavy with the nauseating stench of sulfur, charred earth, and rotting dampness. Gusts of wind whipped up black grit like weeping wraiths. Across the calcified ground, jagged fissures snaked out, glowing with an eerie, sickly sheen of dark purple and bruised iron.

For tens of miles, not a single speck of green could be seen. Not even the hardiest weeds or brambles could survive for more than a moment in this soil.

Gu Qingwei drew in a breath of the pungent, icy air, and a sharp, needle-like pain stabbed through his lungs.

His expression remained calm, yet deep within his gaze settled a terrifyingly resolute chill.

Whoever cuts off a farmer's lifeline, I shall cut off their immortal path.

Dragging his heavy, numb legs, he stepped forward into the scorched mire that reeked of decay.

The straw sandals on his feet had long worn through. Sharp fragments of mineral slag sliced into the soles of his feet, leaving dark streaks of blood that were instantly swallowed dry by the hard, thirsty poison soil.

Deep within the wasteland stood a single, semi-collapsed mud shack. Most of its thatched roof had been torn away by past storms, leaving broken wooden beams slanting into the black mud.

Beside the crumbling wall of the drafty hut, tied to a rotting stump, was another soul teetering on the edge of oblivion.

It was an emaciated, withered old yellow ox.

Its left horn had been snapped off clean at the base, leaving a jagged stump covered in blackened scabs. Its brown-yellow coat was patchy and peeling, its ribs protruding like wooden slats.

Its left hind leg was a mangled mess of shredded flesh and broken bone, so deeply infected that pale maggots writhed within the open wounds.

The old beast lay collapsed beside a puddle of foul runoff, its clouded, sunken eyes half-closed. Its breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps like a ruined bellows, clearly at its absolute end.

Hearing footsteps, the ox’s eyelids twitched slightly. With great effort, it tilted its head to look at the youth stumbling toward it.

Within those cloudy, ancient pupils, there was no panic of impending death—only a vast, weathered desolation that had seen through the cold cruelty of the mortal world.

Gu Qingwei stopped three paces before the ox.

Fellow castaways. Fellow dregs.

He looked down at the battered beast for a quiet moment. Reaching into his breast pocket, he retrieved the hard, greenish moldy biscuit.

With a pinch of his rough fingers, he broke off the small, relatively clean edge of the crust and popped it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, letting the dry, sandy grain scrape down his parched throat.

Then, he bent down and gently pushed the remaining larger half toward the dry, cracked lips of the old ox.

"Eat," Gu Qingwei said softly, his voice rasping yet steady and gentle. "On the road to the Yellow Springs, it's better to be a sated ghost than to die on an empty belly."

The ox’s massive frame shuddered faintly.

Its clouded eyes stared at the dry biscuit upon the dirt, then slowly lifted to meet Gu Qingwei's gaze once more.

It did not eat the biscuit. Instead, its throat rolled violently, expelling a hot breath tinged with flecks of bloody froth. The rough, dry puff of air brushed against Gu Qingwei’s knuckles, carrying a strange, fading warmth.

BOOM!

At that exact heartbeat, the last ember of twilight slipped beneath the western ridges, and eternal night plunged over the wasteland.

The heavy yin poison accumulated over ten thousand years surged up from the depths of the earth, and the wisp of Crimson Fire Fiend-Qi lurking within Gu Qingwei’s chest detonated like dry kindling in a tempest!

PFFT—!

A mouthful of black, foul-smelling blood sprayed from his lips.

Gu Qingwei felt as though a thousand red-hot blades were carving through his internal organs. The virulent toxin raced up through his meridians, causing his vision to fracture and collapse.

His limbs went completely numb, and his entire body crashed down into the icy, blackened mud.

The half-incense deadline had arrived.

Consciousness receded like the ebbing tide, and boundless darkness rushed in from every direction. The icy chill of death seized his flesh.

Was he to die here?

Like an abandoned mongrel, rotting into the poisonous earth to pave Manager Zhao's gluttonous climb up the sect ladder?

"No..."

Gu Qingwei's blood-soaked fingers dug violently into the toxic mire. His fingernails tore back, fresh blood welling from the beds.

His poison-ravaged heart hammered against his ribs. A single drop of concentrated, unyielding lifeblood escaped his cracked skin, quietly soaking into a small, battered trinket hanging against his bare chest.

It was a piece of broken bronze barely an inch square, crusted with deep green verdigris.

He had worn it against his skin since childhood, unaware of its origin, as unremarkable as a stray river pebble.

Yet now, when that scalding drop of essence blood seeped into the faint, ancient cloud pattern carved at the artifact's heart—

HUMMM—!

A solemn chime, like a bell echoing from the primordial dawn of creation, rang out deep within Gu Qingwei's soul!

The bronze talisman did not burst into blinding, heavens-spanning light. Instead, a gentle wisp of profound azure radiance, as warm as spring rain and as deep as the vault of heaven, detached from the bronze and slipped effortlessly into his sea of consciousness!

Archaic, heavy golden runes manifested slowly at the center of his mind:

【The Myriad Transformations Seal】!

Heaven and earth hold no partiality; ten thousand things transform and flourish.
Diminish the excess to replenish the void; command the microscopic to balance the cosmos!

In an instant, two crystalline rings of subtle, profound light flared within Gu Qingwei's unfocused pupils!

The world before him shattered and reconstructed itself.

The scorched earth, the freezing night, the noxious vapors... all macroscopic shapes disintegrated, dissolving into an infinite sea of drifting, vibrant motes of light!

In this wondrous microscopic sight, he clearly "saw" the Crimson Fire Fiend-Qi ravaging his body—a swarm of violent, ember-red molecules tearing through his frail cells.

And beneath him, within the dead soil of the Myriad Poison Barren Lands, the scene was even more staggering.

Lead, mercury, sulfurous fire, discarded alchemy residue... countless deadly toxic particles were packed layer upon layer, suffocating the soil’s primordial vitality into an iron plate fathoms deep.

Yet, at the absolute core of that suffocating dead zone—

Barely half an inch before his fingertips buried in the dirt, a faint yet brilliant speck of emerald light was pulsing with stubborn vitality.

It was not a lethal poison. It was not a malignant spirit.

It was a cluster of microscopic mycelium that had mutated and survived through ten thousand years of toxic refinement—feeding upon extreme subterranean fiend-qi!

They breathed in quiet rhythm beneath the dead mire. With every tiny pulse, they steadily inhaled, neutralized, and digested the furious fire poison around them. At the absolute nadir of destruction, they nurtured a boundless sea of life waiting to overturn heaven and earth!

Say not the toxic fiend holds no purpose; before spring thunder rolls, the tender grass already knows.

Lying prone in the muck, a deep, cold smile curled upon Gu Qingwei's deathly pale lips.

The path to survival had been found.

Author's Note: Thank you for reading! If you're enjoying Gu Qingwei and the old Kui-ox's journey to turn toxic wasteland into an immortal harvest, please consider hitting that Follow button and leaving a Rating/Review. Every favorite and rating helps this humble barren ridge grow more than you know!