Ashes To The Peak

Chapter 9: The Cold Calculation of Zareth Crow.

Zareth was utterly furious. He had spent the last two hours tirelessly accumulating that sphere of condensed Qi from scratch, only for this mindless brute to barge in and destroy it all in a single fraction of a second. With no core to retain the condensed Qi, every drop of energy he had gathered had vanished into thin air.

Because he was bedridden and utterly helpless, he couldn't even express the white-hot rage surging in his chest.

"This thug... this damn thug!" Zareth thought, his eyes burning as he stared up at the man. "He is a constant, intolerable thorn in my side!"

"Zareth! It's time for your meal!" Gao barked with his usual arrogant snarl.

It seemed the thug had gone directly to retrieve the boy's food after leaving The Roaring Panda inn. Moving roughly, Gao grabbed Zareth by the shoulder, hauling his limp upper body up into a sitting position against the wall before shoving a wooden spoon filled with bland food into his mouth.

"When I was walking back here, I was pissed off as hell and fully intended to drag your useless body through the mud," Gao grumbled, sneering as he fed the boy. "But looking at your pathetic state now... what more can anyone even do to a half-dead cripple, huh?"

Gao scoffed, wiping spittle from his chin. "However, the boss wants you to start working from tomorrow morning, so it can't be helped."

Without holding back, Gao explained everything the gang leader had ordered: the upcoming annual assembly of Blackwater Town's rival gangs, the threats of ambushes and hidden spies, and the absolute demand for Zareth to resume his intelligence-gathering duties immediately.

"So be prepared tomorrow morning," the thug growled, shoving the empty bowl into his coat. "I will come to drag you out myself."

With a harsh kick to the threshold, the thug turned, marched out into the alleyway, and slammed the door shut behind him, plunging the room back into quiet darkness.

"Calm down... calm down... calm down!"

Zareth was fuming deep inside, his heart pounding against his ribs like a trapped beast. He drew long, deep breaths through his nose, using his soul control to suppress the roaring flames of his temper, slowly restoring tranquility to his mind.

"These beasts truly don't care about a person's well-being or survival," Zareth pondered, analyzing the situation through the memories of his new vessel. "So... this is how the original Zareth Crow was treated all along."

He reflected on the bitter reality of the dead boy's life. Zareth Crow had worked endlessly for this ruthless gang without receiving any real incentives, living in a rotting, water-logged shack, trapped in perpetual poverty.

He had operated as a spy, a high-risk, dangerous occupation where a single slip-up meant being slaughtered in a dark alley, yet he had never complained, accepting his miserable fate as a helpless slave.

"Zareth Crow was a fool who didn't understand his own worth," he thought, his eyes narrowing in the dark as a cold, calculating light gleamed within them. "He possessed a rare, specialized talent for gathering intelligence, yet he allowed himself to be bound by a fake, inflated debt."

"A physician was brought to this filthy slum, and expensive pills were fed to what seemed like a corpse... That alone proves the gang leader knows Zareth is an irreplaceable asset! The boy was simply too weak and naive to realize his own value."

A dark, sharp smile slowly curved Zareth's pale lips in the quiet darkness.

"But this time, things will be done differently. A man must understand the cards he holds and bargain around his true worth. They want their spy back? Fine... but they are no longer dealing with a helpless, sickly boy."

"After all, it is very crucial for one to use what he has within his sleeves," Zareth thought, his mind racing as he meticulously calculated every single advantage left within his meager arsenal as the cripple he currently was. "At this point, I am no longer the Holy Son Belmoth, who could have utterly obliterated these low-life thugs with a mere thought. I am Zareth, a crippled youth who can barely move his own limbs, nor cultivate a single cycle of Qi."

He took a slow, deliberate breath, letting his soul settle into the dark reality of his current vessel.

What he possessed now, his sole, lethal weapon in this wretched state, was the brilliant, hyper-perceptive mind of Zareth Crow, combined with the vast, experience of a former Holy Son.

Before even attempting to draw upon the ambient Aether Qi again, Zareth sank deep into his internal sea, withdrawing his consciousness entirely from the physical world.

He reflected more and more on the precise nature of the vessel he now occupied, analyzing its strengths, its severe limitations, and how he was going to manipulate those very traits to turn the tables in these filthy slums of Blackwater Town.

When he was Belmoth, the pristine Holy Son living in the grand high towers of the Heavenly Ember Sect, he had never even heard of a place as wretched and obscure as Blackwater Town. Slums did not exist in his world of immortal peaks and grand palaces.

Yet now, he was forced to navigate the treacherous underbelly of mortal desperation from the very bottom.

For an entire hour, he remained in absolute, unbroken reflection, dissecting every memory, every alleyway, every player, and every hidden movement within Blackwater Town.

Slowly, his heavy eyelids fluttered open, revealing eyes that shone with a cold, terrifying intensity in the dark.

"So this is the true, grim reality for those who are born without talent..." Zareth muttered under his breath, his raspy voice echoing faintly against the rotting wooden walls.

"And it is not even just about lacking talent. Even if someone in these miserable slums were born with supreme, heaven-defying talent, there are no resources, no masters, and no opportunities to ever utilize it. That means countless geniuses in this vast cultivation world get ground down, wasted, and buried in the dirt before their names are ever known."

A bitter, dark flame ignited within his chest, burning away the last remnants of his self-pity.

"But as for me... I will get out of these slums," Zareth thought, his knuckles turning white as he tightly clenched his frail, trembling hands into fists.

"And these thugs... one way or another, they will be forced to pay for every single humiliation. I can feel the deep, bitter resentment surging from the lingering instincts of this body... A raw, screaming instinct that tells me Laura's death was no simple illness, she was murdered by these very thugs!"

He ground his teeth together, the dark crimson hatred of Belmoth Cross merging seamlessly with the agonizing grief of Zareth Crow, binding his two souls into an unyielding, vengeful whole.