Night Erosion

The eighth day of the fifth month, high summer.

As the sun set, night descended.

Great Liang, Golden Glow Mountain. Dark clouds gathered as a chilling wind howled.

Cold... so cold...

Fragmented whispers echoed beside Xiao Fan's ears. Mad, bloodthirsty thoughts gnawed at the last of his reason like maggots eating to the bone.

Pain! It felt as though an invisible blade had carved his chest open alive!

"Cough! Cough..."

A heavy stench of blood flooded his lungs with every labored breath, choking him to the brink of suffocation.

He was lying facedown in a sticky, warm pool of blood.

Struggling to breathe, he tried to turn over, but his body seemed to have had its tendons and bones pulled out, limp as rotten mud. His lower body had gone completely numb, unable to move.

"Fuck... My spine seems broken, my spiritual veins are damaged, and my spiritual qi is exhausted..." A despairing thought flashed through his mind. "Before long... I'll..."

[Cultivation: Martial Path Qi Refining Realm (Ninth Rank), Mid Stage: 10/50]

[Calamity Poison Value: 107/100]

Two illusory lines of crimson text were branded into his blurred vision like death warrants.

His Calamity Poison Value had burst past the limit!

Then an eerie burning pain spread across the skin of his arm, as though something were desperately drilling its way out from the depths of his flesh and blood...

Scales! Cold, golden scales with a metallic texture!

The mutation had begun...

At the same time, the illusory text before his eyes continued to change... Calamity Poison Value +1... +1... +1...

What terrified him even more was the Calamity Poison Value flashing before his eyes at a suffocating pace: +1... +1... +1...

Death might not be the most brutal ending.

Mutating into one of those writhing heaps of twisted, malformed flesh sprawled all over the ground—that was an eternal hell ten thousand times more painful than death.

Xiao Fan gritted his teeth and gathered the last thread of spiritual qi, sensing his surroundings...

Other than himself, there were no living people left.

Dead... They were all dead!

Corpses lay scattered through the dim forest.

Escort guards, servants, armored protectors... Some still retained human forms, while others had bloated and rotted away, turning into indescribable, foul-smelling lumps of flesh or severed limbs covered in bizarre carapaces.

The air was thick with blood, along with a... rotten, cloying stench of mutation.

[Calamity Poison Value: 112/100]

The number coldly announced his countdown.

Soon, he too would become one of them—a twisted, crawling mass of rotten flesh.

By all reason, he should have ended his own life before fully mutating, granting himself a quick death... But he did not want to give up!

There were three breaths left until midnight... the boundary between life and death, human form and monster.

Three...

[Calamity Poison Value: 116/100]

Fine golden scales had already covered his arms, chest, and abdomen, their icy touch eating away at his consciousness.

Two...

[Calamity Poison Value: 118/100]

His neck stiffened. His vision filled with maddened whispers, and his consciousness seemed to sink into a viscous deep sea.

One...

[Calamity Poison Value: 120/100]

Amid utter silence, countless overlapping, chaotic roars and delirious murmurs exploded inside his skull! The dam of his reason stood on the verge of collapse!

[Midnight has arrived. Calamity Poison Value cleared. Obtained 120 points of purified cultivation.]

[Calamity Poison Value: 0/100]

[Cultivation: Martial Path Qi Refining Realm (Ninth Rank), Mid Stage: 130/50... Breakthrough successful]

[Cultivation: Martial Path Qi Refining Realm (Ninth Rank), Late Stage: 80/100]

"Cough! Cough, cough, cough..."

Xiao Fan abruptly opened his eyes, bolting upright from the throes of death! His heart hammered like a war drum, every breath carrying the scorching pain of surviving a catastrophe.

Not only had most of his strength returned, he had even broken through a minor realm. He felt clear-headed and refreshed, light as a swallow.

"I finally held on until midnight..."

The supernatural paths of this world were far from normal... It was said that the spiritual essence of heaven and earth was innately "poisonous."

The cultivation of any supernatural path produced Calamity Poison. One misstep, and one could mutate into a twisted monster.

And that was not all. When cultivators were severely wounded or near death and could no longer suppress the Calamity Poison within them, they would also undergo an irreversible mutation.

Those mutated corpses around him had come about in exactly that way...

Xiao Fan was not a native of this world. He had been "sent" here by a mud truck, and after transmigrating, he had obtained a [Calamity Poison System].

Not only could this system directly display his Calamity Poison Value, it also had a passive function: whenever midnight arrived, the Calamity Poison would be cleared and converted into supernatural spiritual essence.

The [Calamity Poison System] could absorb some of the Calamity Poison Value within his body, giving Xiao Fan greater resistance to Calamity Poison than ordinary cultivators.

However, there was a limit to the amount the system could bear. Once the Calamity Poison Value it absorbed exceeded that limit, mutation would still occur.

Tonight had been extraordinarily dangerous. Had midnight come even a moment later, Xiao Fan would probably have become a lump of flesh covered in scales by now.

The very thought sent a chill down his spine.

It all began half a year ago.

Xiao Fan had transmigrated here and become a martial artist with the same name and surname.

His father was a gold-ranked instructor at Great Liang's Armament Hall and had a few modest connections in the capital.

Through his father's introduction, Xiao Fan became a gray-clad agent of Great Liang's Shadow Pivot Court.

In the words of his previous life, he was an unofficial temp worker... specializing in doing the Shadow Pivot Court's dirty jobs that could not be made public.

This mission had been to secretly escort an important person from the palace to Jiang Prefecture. Yet when the party reached Golden Glow Mountain, they encountered a band of vicious bandits.

The bandits' objective was crystal clear: seize the palace dignitary, then kill everyone else to silence them.

They were immensely powerful, with several ranked martial artists among them. The escort party had no ability to resist at all.

As Xiao Fan circulated his power to heal his wounds, he muttered to himself, "What bloody rotten luck... My first mission, and I run into this kind of crap!"

Just then, a grim, bone-piercing gust of wind swept through the forest without warning.

The stench of blood, thick enough to make one retch, suddenly intensified, as though the entire space had been soaked in a pool of blood!

Thick, sticky black fluid silently seeped from the ground, tree trunks, and cracks in the rocks, spreading like a living thing.

Then, muffled squelch, squelch sounds rang out in succession as purple-black flesh tumors burst through the bluestone and rotting leaves, swelling and pulsating madly!

"Night Erosion!"

Xiao Fan's pupils contracted sharply, and his heart sank to the bottom.

The nights of this world were living nightmares!

The so-called Night Erosion phenomenon was when spatial distortions, environmental mutations, and the collapse of natural laws... could descend anywhere, at any time, devouring everything. To encounter it meant nine chances of death out of ten!

In the blink of an eye, the scene before him had been turned upside down...

The dense forest vanished! In its place stood a vast, dark-red cavity covered in slick folds and pulsating blood vessels!

Countless tiny flesh tendrils protruded from the "walls," waving greedily. Everything around him was inside the "stomach sac" of some living behemoth.

Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle...

Xiao Fan lowered his head. The black slime clinging to the soles of his shoes was giving off wisps of pungent white smoke, while the leather melted away at a visible rate.

He was being digested!

Overwhelmed with horror, his powerful instinct to survive crushed his revulsion.

He broke into a mad sprint, stumbling between the slick, writhing "stomach walls" as he searched for a possible "exit"!

"Ugh—bleurgh!!!"

The omnipresent rot stench and slimy touch finally shattered the limits of his endurance. The stomach sac convulsed violently, spewing out acidic fluid mixed with undigested scraps of food!

Just as his vision blurred and the world spun around him, an unsealed dark-red fissure of flesh appeared before his eyes, like a sliver of light shining out from hell!

"A way out!"

Xiao Fan's spirits surged. He squeezed every last bit of strength from his body and lunged forward, digging all ten fingers into the edges of the fissure as he tried to tear it apart!

The tough flesh membrane was forcibly ripped open into a gash! Viscous digestive fluid and foul-smelling "stomach gas" came gushing out!

The brute strength of a ranked martial artist revealed itself in full at that moment!

Without the slightest hesitation, without even having time to glance back at that hair-raising, writhing hell behind him, he braced himself against the foul wind blasting from the opening and scrambled out in a mad rush!

Behind him came the enraged writhing of the massive "stomach sac" and the bubbling gurgle of boiling digestive fluid.