Rain hammered against the windowpane,
and outside, the whole of City C was shrouded in a gray haze of water vapor.
Lin Wei of the City C University of Science and Technology was curled up in a soft armchair by the window,
a mystery novel open halfway through on her lap.
But her gaze was not focused on its twisting plot;
instead, she looked out at the hazy world blurred by the rain.
A single warm floor lamp lit the room, its pale yellow light falling softly,
enveloping her in a small, tranquil halo, like an invisible barrier
separating her from the damp chill outside.
She frowned slightly and set down the book, her slender fingers unconsciously rubbing the warm ceramic of her cup.
Perhaps the unbroken spell of gloomy rain was too oppressive, leaving her unable to breathe;
perhaps the dark events described in the novel had unwittingly struck a chord;
lately, both scattered bits of information online and vague international reports in the news
had suggested that a great storm seemed to be brewing and breaking out somewhere in Southeast Asia.
Although mainstream media reports remained restrained, even seeming to deliberately play it down,
all manner of rumors and hushed discussions on forums painted a terrifying picture.
A vast, mysterious power known as the "Golden Club"
had recently suffered a devastating blow at its core stronghold in Nanyang, "Heaven Island."
Rumor had it that it had been nothing short of a one-sided, crushing massacre.
And the one who had carried it all out was said to be a supreme expert from the East-more precisely, from the mainland.
People called him "Shura Qing."
The name carried a strong stench of blood and an ancient Eastern character, like an avenger returned from hell.
Information about him was pitifully scarce. All anyone knew was that he was highly skilled in an ancient Eastern fighting art called "Guoshu"
and had once caused a sensation in the northern region of Jinmen, defeating countless challengers.
Tracing his path further back, the trail seemed to snap at City C, leaving no definite trace to follow.
He had appeared out of nowhere and dropped a bombshell on the international dark web in the fiercest, most brutal manner,
then vanished into the mist once more.
Lin Wei shook her head, trying to cast the jumbled information and inexplicable worries from her mind.
She was only an ordinary university student. What connection could those faraway events, which sounded like something out of a movie,
possibly have to her peaceful life?
Although all sorts of details felt vaguely familiar, how could that be possible?
"Master Li... Shura Qing..."
Lin Wei murmured to herself.
She raised her teacup and took a small sip.
The faintly astringent aroma of the tea briefly soothed her somewhat restless nerves.
Perhaps she really was overthinking it.
She picked up the book again, trying to draw her attention back to the world on its pages.
But the words seemed to have lost their meaning, unable to form coherent images in her mind.
The figure known by the code name "Shura Qing" gradually overlapped with Master Li,
and she could not easily dispel the image, no matter what she did.
Outside the window, the rain seemed to fall harder.
At that moment, Li Qingshan, the true center of the storm sweeping through Southeast Asia and even the global underworld, was immersed in an ultimate stillness.
Entirely unlike the outside world's image of him as a man living in constant fear or a bloodthirsty madman,
he was now deep in the rarely visited mountains along the border of a southeastern country.
There stood an ancient temple, long abandoned and quietly eroded by time and the jungle.
The temple was dilapidated, its broken walls and ruins covered in green vines. Only the main hall remained intact, barely able to keep out the wind and rain.
Moonlight poured like water through the windows, which had no lattices, spilling coldly onto the dusty floor
and onto the figure sitting cross-legged and motionless in the center of the hall.
Li Qingshan's eyes were half closed, his breathing long and faint, as he almost became one with his surroundings.
His presence was harmonious and restrained, no longer bearing the keen edge it had possessed just after his breakthrough. Instead, it had grown as deep as an abyss,
entering into a mysterious resonance with the breathing of the ancient mountain range, the flow of the night wind,
and even the flickering of the stars in the sky.
More than two months had passed since the earth-shattering battle on Heaven Island.
During those two months, he had not been hiding from place to place or planning his next attack, as outsiders guessed,
but had instead chosen to lie completely dormant and consolidate himself.
The Golden Club's roots and connections ran deep, and the network of forces behind it was far beyond what ordinary people could imagine.
The secret meeting of core members originally scheduled to take place three days later aboard a luxury cruise ship on the high seas had become highly uncertain after the club's successive crushing blows,
especially the inexplicable disappearance of several important key members.
Li Qingshan's mind was as clear as a mirror. His opponents were certainly not NPCs who went through the motions and followed fixed procedures.
After such an earth-shaking event, it would be truly foolish of them to dare hold a large gathering as scheduled.
They would surely be like startled venomous snakes, retreating into their nest to watch warily, reassess the threat, and adjust their strategy.
And that had given him precious time.
For the past two months, he had stayed here in seclusion, far from the clamor of the world.
His first priority was to digest and absorb the insights gained from his succession of bitter battles and fully consolidate the realm he had just entered.
His clashes with the Golden Club, especially the battle against the many armed guards and bizarre test subjects on Heaven Island,
had greatly tempered his spirit and physique.
Now, within his dantian, that "Golden Elixir," formless and insubstantial yet undeniably real, had become completely stable.
Round and glowing, it contained vast life energy and astonishing power.
His Jin force flowed throughout his body, reaching every minute part and leaving no place untouched.
He had truly attained the supreme realm of Elixir Jin: "With a Golden Elixir swallowed into my belly, my fate is mine, not heaven's."
But this was not his greatest gain.
The more important breakthrough had come on the spiritual level.
Through extreme rage, the settling of his spirit after the slaughter, and his insights into heaven, earth, and nature, his spiritual cultivation had broken through a crucial bottleneck in a single stroke,
entering the incomparably profound third stage of Embryonic Breathing, Primordial Breathing.
This realm was extraordinarily wondrous. His spiritual power was highly concentrated, and his ability to interfere with reality had greatly increased.
Most notably, he could use his own powerful will as a guide to seize the thin heaven and earth spiritual Qi permeating the void
and compress it until it became pure life energy in liquid form!
This liquefied spiritual Qi was gentle yet powerful, containing boundless vitality.
Not only could it replenish his own expenditure extremely quickly,
but it could also be transferred into others, cleansing their marrow and forging their meridians and bones to improve their physiques at the root.
It could even lay an incomparably solid foundation for them, almost a preliminary form of the legendary "foundation building and Elixir formation"!
Although heaven and earth spiritual Qi was exceptionally thin in the main world, making large-scale use of this method quite taxing on the mind,
it was no longer difficult to perform an initial marrow cleansing and foundation building for his closest loved ones.
Thinking of his parents, growing older day by day in his distant hometown, Li Qingshan felt warmth well up in his heart.
Once matters here were settled and the turmoil had calmed somewhat, he would certainly go home and quietly tend to the two elders' health, so they could live free of illness and pain and enjoy longer lives.
Perhaps this was the thing he most wanted to do after gaining his power, and the most tender-hearted of all.
Yet he still had to face the crisis before him.
After consolidating his cultivation, Li Qingshan had not stopped.
Two months ago, following the scattered clues he had obtained,
he had relied on his extraordinary perception and tracking abilities to follow the trail deep into Nanyang, to another, even more secret location:
a private island publicly advertised as an exclusive vacation retreat for the wealthy.
Its true face, however, was more like a den of demons filled with ultimate evil and twisted desires.
Its vile acts were outrageous, comparable to the "Lolita Island" rumored in his previous life, if not worse.
This was a more central and more secretive lair of the Golden Club.
What Li Qingshan saw and heard on the island utterly ignited the towering rage that had never gone out in his heart.
He witnessed powerful and famous figures from places such as Europe, America, and the island nation, who styled themselves as the civilized world,
playing so-called "hunting games" here, using living people as prey to satisfy their perverse desire to kill.
Even more outrageous, extremely cruel, inhumane so-called "immortality experiments" were also being conducted here,
treating living people as experimental materials to be cut apart and stitched together at will.
And what most challenged the very bottom line of human conscience was that true cannibalism openly prevailed here!
Those beasts in human clothing, in the depths of their depravity, regarded their fellow humans as "two-legged sheep" to be served at the table,
using this to flaunt their power and superiority.
An air of despair permeated every corner of the island, while pain and fear had nearly taken solid form.
No hell on earth could be worse than this.
Li Qingshan's rage reached its peak at that moment.
His killing intent boiled like a volcano, impossible to suppress any longer.
There was no strategy, no taking a roundabout route.
There was only the final judgment, carried out in the most direct, violent, and thorough manner!
That night, the moon was dark and the wind was high.
The fierce wind of his fists replaced words, and explosive astral Qi became the only symphony.
No mercy, no hesitation.
All the island's perpetrators, participants, and enablers, no matter how exalted their status or how powerful their backing,
were reduced to ashes in those flames of fury.
Screams, pleas for mercy, alarms, and explosions all fell silent in the end.
When the first faint light before dawn fell upon the island,
a lone bloodstained figure stood amid a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, the killing aura swirling around him enough to freeze the sea breeze.
Even a shura's battlefield was no worse than this.