"Tch."
He knelt on one knee, gripping the knife in his right hand and bracing his left against the floor. The freshly scabbed wound on his palm split open again, blood seeping into the floorboards. He could only see through his right eye now, but his ability to track movement remained intact.
He could see the path of every muscular contraction in the cursed spirit and anticipate the angle of its next attack.
But even if he could predict it, his body was too badly injured.
He couldn't dodge.
The cursed spirit lunged again, this time with a sweeping strike.
A whip-like limb made of asphalt and bone spikes lashed toward his waist. Yan Si barely managed to raise his knife to block it. The instant the blade collided with the limb, the stainless steel fruit knife snapped, and the whip's tip struck his right ribs.
Crack.
Two more broke.
Yan Si was sent flying, overturning the coffee table. Its glass top shattered into countless sharp fragments beneath him.
A triangular shard buried itself deep in his right shoulder, while another sliced open his thigh. It wasn't serious, but blood gushed out.
[Points +10]
He lay on his back among the glass shards, the ceiling spinning. The cursed spirit "looked" down at him, his mangled figure reflected in its dozen-plus eyeballs.
A diner admiring a dessert it was about to eat.
Yan Si felt he really was quite sweet.
"How many points... for a knife through the heart?"
Yan Si's voice was soft, wet with the gurgle of bloody froth. His right hand still held the broken half of the knife, its edge pressed against his chest, precisely two centimeters above his heart-avoiding the aorta, but enough to cause near-death levels of agony.
He didn't actually need to ask aloud. He could simply talk to the system in his head, but he felt that saying something at a moment like this made for a better scene.
He asked while coughing up blood, his face pale as paper, yet his stunning purple eyes held a faint smile, as though he were asking what was for dinner.
[If you're ruthless enough, near death + pain: 100-200 points.]
"What about getting stabbed through the arm?"
[30-50 points.]
"A knife in the stomach?"
[50-60 points.]
"Two knives?"
[60-75 points. Repeated trauma to the same area triggers adaptive protection in the pain nerves, resulting in diminishing points.]
"So the second stab is half-price?"
Yan Si laughed, but the movement tugged at his broken ribs, turning his laughter into a violent coughing fit. More blood seeped between his fingers.
He leaned against the wooden wall beside him and lazily glanced at the wreckage strewn across the floor. Fragments of the rosewood coffee table, stuffing from the Italian sofa, and the blood he'd spat out.
"A forty-million house, furniture worth millions... You really don't appreciate nice things, little cursed spirit~"
The cursed spirit attacked again.
This time, instead of lunging, it whipped out three asphalt tentacles, closing off every escape route from three different angles. The one on the left coiled toward Yan Si's neck, the one on the right stabbed toward his abdomen, and the one in front lashed straight at his skull.
Yan Si didn't dodge.
"Isn't that a little too erotic a way to tie someone up~?"
He even moved forward to meet it.
The left tentacle wrapped around his neck, its immense strength lifting him off the floor as his cervical vertebrae groaned under the strain. The tentacle in front struck his right leg, and Yan Si felt as though he'd been hit head-on by a speeding truck-
Bam!
His right leg vanished below the knee.
It wasn't a fracture or a clean break. That brutal force had crushed, shredded, and torn it off. Flesh, bone fragments, and bundles of nerves exploded into a scarlet mist. The stump was ragged, white splinters of bone piercing the muscle as dark red arterial blood sprayed out.
The pain pierced his very core.
No, even that couldn't describe it. It hurt enough to make anyone scream, enough to drive anyone to despair.
His hundredfold pain sensitivity amplified the signal of "limb loss" to a cosmic scale. Yan Si felt his soul being torn to pieces by the agony.
His pupils suddenly dilated, then contracted. His eyes rolled back, and inhuman, muffled gasps escaped his throat.
Two tears fell.
It hurts.
The system worked frantically, some cold mechanical force gripping his consciousness and refusing to let it fall into the abyss of shock.
[Pain Immunity]-passive triggered. [Points +57]
Now.
On the verge of losing consciousness, Yan Si used his last shred of lucidity to drive the broken knife, without hesitation and with perfect precision, into a spot two centimeters to the left of his heart.
Little fruit knife, you've really given it your all today.
Shhk.
The blade pierced skin, muscle, and intercostal tissue, grazing the edge of his heart as it plunged into his chest cavity.
For that instant, time seemed to stop.
It wasn't a metaphor. Yan Si truly felt a kind of "standstill" beyond the physical realm-his heart skipped a beat the instant the knife tip brushed it, then raced wildly, uncontrollably, at two hundred beats per minute. Blood spurted from the wound in his heart, filling his chest cavity and compressing his lungs, making every breath an inhalation of his own blood.
Agony.
Agony beyond even losing his leg.
It was the pain of his very life force being torn apart, of his soul and flesh being roasted over a fire together. His hundredfold pain sensitivity magnified this final blow into pure, concentrated, liquid despair.
[Points +121] [Current points: 254]
Purchase Reverse Cursed Technique.
Yan Si's voice kept catching, every word bubbling with blood. "Ha... It fucking... hurts..."
Twenty points into speed, sixteen into strength, eighteen into cursed energy.
[Purchase confirmed. Points spent: 253.] [Points remaining: 1] [Total cursed energy: 9 + 30 (complimentary bonus with Reverse Cursed Technique) + 9 → 48] [Strength: 15 + 8 → 23 (you can now show off by punching through a security door)] [Constitution: 3 (normal human standard: 5)] [Speed: 2 + 5 + 10 → 16 (little yellow flash)] [Overall assessment: Grade 2 Jujutsu Sorcerer-Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer] [Reverse Cursed Technique: learned]
Yan Si glanced at his total cursed energy a few times, then at the words in parentheses, marveling.
Amazing. A freebie worth 150 points.
Yan Si began using Reverse Cursed Technique.
A scorching, unprecedented energy erupted from Yan Si's abdomen. It wasn't pain, but something more primal, more ferocious: vitality.
Through his cursed energy, it surged along his blood vessels, rushing into his severed right leg, his collapsed chest, his pierced heart, and every shattered corner of his body.
His right leg began to grow.
It wasn't slow healing, but visible, bloody regeneration. White bone extended before his eyes, blood vessels reconnected themselves, nerves rejoined, and finally a layer of pale, new skin covered everything.
The wound in his heart closed within three-tenths of a second. His broken ribs realigned themselves, his punctured lung reinflated, and an invisible force smoothed away the wounds on his face.
Yan Si dropped from midair, landing on one knee.
His newly grown right leg pressed against the broken glass, sending up a faint stinging sensation. He stood and rolled his neck, his cervical vertebrae making soft cracking sounds.
He looked down at his hands-pale, clean, completely intact. Even the old wound on his palm had vanished.
He raised his head, looked at the Grade 2 Cursed Spirit, and gave it a stunning smile.
"Hehe..."
The cursed spirit seemed stunned. Its dozen-plus eyeballs contracted simultaneously, uneasy ripples spreading over its asphalt-like body.
It couldn't understand why the prey it had just torn to pieces was now standing there perfectly intact, radiating entirely different fluctuations of cursed energy.
Yan Si beamed.
That smile rested on his excessively beautiful face, the scarlet mark between his brows an uncanny red. The cursed spirit's twisted figure was reflected in his deep purple eyes. He raised his right hand, spread his fingers, then swiftly clenched them into a fist.
"Thanks for the meal."
His voice was soft, sounding both like thanks and a sentence being pronounced.
"Now-"
He moved.
With his speed at 16, he was already fast enough. No flashy cursed technique, no complicated Cursed Speech. He simply brought his fist crashing down.
Strength: 23.
Within the range of a Grade 2 Jujutsu Sorcerer, that was already normal.
His fist appeared above the cursed spirit's head. Four times an ordinary person's explosive muscular power, enhanced by 48 cursed energy, became pure destructive force.
"My turn to treat you, right?"
BOOM!!!
That punch slammed into the cursed spirit's disgusting body.
Its asphalt-like body caved inward in an instant, then erupted with a deafening roar. The Grade 2 Cursed Spirit shrieked.
[Points +5]
Yan Si's lovely eyes curved into a smile.
"How does it feel? I'm going to beat you to death, nice and slowly."
He wasn't feeling so great either. Constitution: 3. It felt as though his hand was about to break, so he looked down.
Ah, okay. It already broke.
His body was in terrible shape. But that didn't matter. He had Reverse Cursed Technique.
His cursed energy dropped a little, and his hand instantly recovered.
Hahaha...
Why am I feeling a little happy?
Okay, actually, I'm really happy. I'm super happy~
Punch after punch, over and over. After the cursed spirit repeatedly failed to escape, one final heavy blow finally killed it.
That punch utterly dismantled the cursed spirit. Black slime, shattered eyeballs, and broken bone spikes sprayed in every direction in the savage gust from his fist, evaporating into black ash.
In the end, nothing remained. Wonderful.
[The cursed spirit experienced pain. Points +5] [Current points: 17 (points gained from Yan Si's pain + points gained from the cursed spirit's pain during the repeated attacks just now)]
Yan Si stood in the center of the ruins, his head tilted back, letting the dust carried on the breeze settle on his long hair, his shoulders, and his eyelashes.
He opened his mouth and took a deep breath.
The air was thick with the smell of blood, scorched wood, and the distinctive stench of rotting flesh left behind when a cursed spirit was destroyed.
"It stinks."
He spoke.
"But that was so much fun."
Then he laughed again, laughing until he doubled over, laughing until tears came out.
"Only five points?"
Yan Si straightened and wiped the tears of laughter from the corner of his eye with his thumb. "This cursed spirit was worth that little?"
[Host, the core principle of earning points is "the pain you personally endure," not "the pain your enemies endure." Inflicting pain on enemies only provides a small additional reward.] [Points for completing missions belong to a separate category of fixed system rewards.]
"Got it." Yan Si nodded, kicking aside a piece of broken wood at his feet. "Self-harm is still the quickest way to make money."
He looked around.
The living room was a complete wreck. The sofa was gone, the coffee table was gone, the screen had become firewood, and there were three large holes in the walls. A few shafts of sunlight leaked through the ceiling, illuminating the debris covering the floor.
Yan Si walked over to the bottle of Sprite that hadn't been knocked over and bent down to pick it up. The bottle was still cold, its bubbles still fizzing.
He unscrewed the cap, tilted his head back, and took a long gulp.
Cold sweetness, with a stinging bite.
"Forty million... What a husky. Wonder if insurance will cover it..." He surveyed the ruins around him and smacked his lips. "Forget it, forget it. Can't be bothered arguing. I'll have someone renovate it when I get around to it."
Carrying the Sprite, he strolled toward the stairs across the broken glass and cursed spirit ash. His waist-length black hair swayed gently behind him, a few specks of black ash clinging to the ends.
"For now, a shower~"
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