Dragonblood Chaos Heir

Chapter 10: The Ogre of the Muddy Leaf Road

The Muddy Leaf Road was less a road and more a memory of one, a stubborn dirt track carved between the Blackroot Woods and the churning, silt-heavy river that gave it its name. It was the back route into Verdant Cloud City, used by merchants who valued discretion over speed, or those carrying goods that wouldn't bear too much official scrutiny. Tonight, it was a ribbon of moon-washed mud and shadows, perfect for an ambush.

Lin Feng waited.

He was above fifteen feet up in the skeletal branches of a lightning-struck oak that leaned over the track, his form a deeper patch of darkness against the night sky. The hooded cloak was gone, replaced by dark, close-fitting clothes he'd taken from a clothesline in a silent, river-side hamlet hours earlier. Frost Desire was a cold, comforting weight against his back, but he hoped he wouldn't need it. Tonight was about testing his new power against cultivators, not just beasts. About feeding the vortex with something more refined than boar essence.

His senses were stretched thin over a half-mile stretch of road. He could taste the damp, mineral tang of the river's energy, the slow, patient malice of the woods, and the distant, approaching heat of living creatures and churning wheels. The Earth-Spine Convoy.

His intelligence, gathered from drunken bragging and tavern whispers, was precise. One large, reinforced wagon pulled by two Spirit-Stone powered earth oxen. Four guards: two Deng clansmen in the 5th Layer of Qi Condensation, one hired mercenary blade at the 6th Layer, and the caravan master—an older, veteran Deng clansman rumored to be at the late 7th Layer, a significant threat. The cargo: twenty crates of raw, low-grade Spirit-Stone ore from the Deng mines, and five sealed leadwood boxes containing "consolidation documents" and "tribute" for Elder Tian.

Lin Feng’s target was the ore. Pure, concentrated earth-attribute energy. Food for the Chaos Dantian. A blow to his uncle’s coffers and his credibility.

The rumble of wheels and the low snort of the oxen reached his ears before he saw them. A minute later, the convoy lumbered into view around a bend. The wagon was as described, its wooden sides reinforced with bands of dull iron. A single lantern swung from a pole, casting a wobbly circle of dim light that did more to deepen the surrounding darkness than dispel it. The two Deng clansmen walked ahead, their postures bored, their earth-attribute auras flaring lazily like banked campfires. The mercenary, a lean man with a scar across his cheek, rode atop the wagon beside the driver, eyes scanning the tree line with professional disinterest. The caravan master was inside the covered wagon.

Too orderly. Too confident. They expected bandits, perhaps. Not a ghost.

Lin Feng dropped from the tree.

He landed in the middle of the road, twenty yards in front of the lead ox, his impact silent, absorbed by a cushion of chaotic qi. He stood up straight, a lone, dark figure blocking the path.

The convoy ground to a halt. The oxen lowed, sensing the unnatural stillness in the air.

"Ho! Out of the way, fool!" one of the lead Deng guards shouted, hand dropping to the hilt of his sword. "This is a Deng clan shipment! Move or be moved!"

Lin Feng said nothing. He simply raised his right hand, palm open toward them.

The mercenary on the wagon sat up straighter. "Something's off," he muttered to the driver.

The lead guard, irritated, took a step forward. "Last warning, rat!"

Lin Feng moved. Not toward the guard, but to the side of the road, his hand sweeping in a wide arc. He targeted not the men, but the road itself—the thick, damp, mineral-rich mud.

Chaos-Stealing Palm, applied on a macro scale.

A ten-foot-wide, thirty-foot-long section of the road directly in front of the convoy died. The latent earth energy, the vitality of the packed soil, was violently sucked away. The mud didn't just harden; it turned to a fine, lifeless gray powder, losing all cohesion and traction.

The lead earth ox, its next step expecting resistance, plunged its massive foot into the sudden dust bowl up to its knee. It bellowed in panic, lurching sideways and jerking its mate and the wagon off course. The front wheel of the heavy wagon slammed into the powder and sank, listing the entire conveyance at a drastic angle.

Chaos erupted. Guards shouted. The driver cursed, sawing at the reins.

"AMBUSH! FORM UP!" the mercenary roared, leaping down from the wobbling wagon, his blade already singing from its scabbard. His aura was a sharp, metallic silver—a metal-attribute cultivator. Fast. Precise.

This was the test.

The two Deng guards, recovering, charged at Lin Feng, their earth qi solidifying around their fists like rocky gauntlets. "Crush him!"

Lin Feng met the first with another devouring palm slap. The man's earthen fist-guard disintegrated into dissipating brown mist, absorbed. Lin Feng’s follow-up kick, enhanced by the stolen energy, took the guard in the chest, hurling him back into his companion. They went down in a tangle.

The mercenary was already there, his sword a silver streak aimed at Lin Feng’s throat. No brute force. Surgical. Deadly.

Lin Feng didn't try to steal the metal qi; it was too sharp, too focused, like trying to drink a lightning bolt. Instead, he used the Chaos Shuffle Step, his body blurring sideways. The blade tip grazed his shoulder, drawing a thin line of blood that burned with cold metallic energy. Poison? No, just the invasive nature of metal qi.

Good, Lin Feng thought, the pain a crisp data point. He pivoted, his hand shooting out not for the blade, but for the guard's sword arm. The mercenary was fast, retracting, but not fast enough. Lin Feng’s fingers brushed his wrist.

He didn't try to steal all the energy. He focused on a disruption—a pulse of raw, discordant chaos into the man's carefully controlled metal qi pathways.

The effect was instantaneous and devastating for a cultivator reliant on precision. The mercenary's flawless silver aura flickered, sputtered, and short-circuited. His sword arm convulsed violently, the blade dropping from nerveless fingers. He cried out, more in shock than pain, stumbling back as his own rebelling qi bit into his meridians.

"Demonic arts!" he gasped, clutching his arm.

Before Lin Feng could finish him, a new pressure descended, heavy and deep as a landslide.

The canvas flap of the wagon tore open. The caravan master emerged. He was a bull-necked man in his fifties, his face a roadmap of old scars and deeper displeasure. His aura wasn't a flare; it was a presence. A thick, deep-brown, almost gravitational field of earth qi that made the very air feel dense. Late 7th Layer Qi Condensation. The ground seemed to solidify around his feet.

"So," the old Deng clansman rumbled, his voice like stones grinding. "A lone wolf with some tricky energy-draining trick. Thought you could snack on a Deng shipment?" He didn't wait for an answer. He raised a foot and stomped.

Earthen Shockwave.

The road in a fifteen-foot radius around Lin Feng didn't just tremble; it heaved, as if a giant fist had punched it from below. Chunks of compacted earth and stone erupted upward, not as projectiles, but as a crushing, encircling prison aiming to trap and pulverize.

This was no brute-force charge. This was area control. A direct counter to a mobile, disruptive foe.

Lin Feng couldn't shuffle-step out of the radius in time. He did the only thing he could: he consumed downward.

As the earth surged up to engulf him, he dropped into a crouch, slamming both palms onto the rising ground. He unleashed the full, hungry pull of the Chaos Dantian, not trying to stop the technique, but trying to eat the energy fueling it.

It was like trying to drink from a geyser. A torrent of raw, potent, deeply anchored earth qi flooded into him. It was massive, overwhelming, threatening to burst his newly forged meridians. The vortex inside him screamed in protest, then in frantic, ecstatic conversion. It spun into a blur, frantically processing the flood.

The earthen prison that should have sealed and crushed him instead stalled. The rising walls of dirt and stone trembled, their structural integrity leeched away, and collapsed back into a mound of loose, inert soil around him.

Lin Feng stood in the crater, panting, steam rising from his skin. His meridians felt scorched, but whole. His dantian was swollen, thrumming with an overload of freshly converted power. He’d just swallowed a mountain's worth of qi.

The caravan master's eyes bulged. "Impossible! That should have... What are you?!"

Lin Feng answered with action. He was done testing. He surged forward, not with grace, but with the raw, staggering power of the energy he’d just consumed. He was a cannonball of contained chaos.

The old clansman met him with a technique called Mountain's Embrace, crossing his arms before him, his qi solidifying into the phantom image of a rocky cliff face.

Lin Feng didn't strike the cliff. He plowed into it.

BOOM.

The impact sounded like two boulders colliding. The phantom cliff shattered. The caravan master was thrown backward, his arms numb, his spiritual sense reeling from the violent dissolution of his technique. He crashed against the listing wagon, splintering wood.

Lin Feng didn't let up. He was on him in an instant. A hand clamped on the older man's shoulder. The Chaos-Stealing Palm activated at point-blank, full power.

This wasn't stealing a technique's energy. This was draining the core.

The caravan master screamed. It was a raw, primal sound of utter terror. He could feel it, his lifelong cultivation, his earth qi, the very essence of his strength, being ripped out from his dantian, sucked down a hungry, bottomless vortex. His brown aura guttered like a candle in a hurricane. His skin, once ruddy and tough, began to gray and dried up.

"NO! STOP! PLEASE!" he begged, his voice cracking.

Lin Feng looked into his terror-filled eyes. He saw not an enemy, but a resource. A battery for his vengeance. He remembered his father slumped in his chair. Old Chen's fate. The coldness in his own heart hardened.

He didn't stop.

Ten seconds later, he released his grip. The caravan master slumped to the ground, a withered husk of a man, breathing in shallow, ragged gasps. His cultivation was gone, reduced to the 1st Layer of Body Tempering, his meridians irreparably scarred. He was alive, but he was less than a mortal. A living warning.

The other guards were either unconscious or fleeing into the woods in abject terror. The mercenary was gone, his precision shattered by chaos.

Silence returned to the Muddy Leaf Road, broken only by the panicked snorts of the earth oxen and the old man's whimpers.

Lin Feng turned to the wagon. He ripped open the canvas. There they were: twenty crates stamped with the Deng crest. He broke one open. Inside, glowing with a soft, steady, yellow-brown light, were raw chunks of Spirit-Stone ore. Pure, condensed earth energy.

He placed a hand on the open crate.

He unleashed the Chaos Dantian.

It was a feast. A river of dense, sweet, potent earth essence poured into him. It was clean, refined, far easier to process than the wild energy of the beast or the violent flood of the caravan master's technique. Crate after crate, he drained them. The glowing light within each box faded, dying, until they were just boxes of dull, grey rock.

His dantian swelled. His meridians sang. He felt a barrier, the threshold to the next layer of Body Tempering, strain, then shatter.

2nd Layer of Body Tempering. Achieved.

Power, raw and intoxicating, flooded his limbs. His senses expanded further. He could feel the individual roots of the trees for a hundred yards, the specific currents in the river.

He turned away from the drained ore. He walked over to the leadwood boxes. He broke the seals. Inside were not just documents and gold. There was a small, iron-bound chest. He pried it open.

Mid-Grade Spirit Stones. Fifty of them. And a single, jade slip sealed with the personal emblem of Deng Lei, the Deng Clan Patriarch, a message of alliance and a first payment to "Elder Tian."

Lin Feng took the spirit stones. They hummed in his hand, a concentrated symphony of power. He pocketed them. He read the jade slip, imprinting its contents, the promises, the plans for joint control of Verdant Cloud City's earth-attribute resource trade, into his memory. Then, he crushed it to dust.

He stood amidst the wreckage of the convoy, the drained ore, the broken men. He was no longer just a ghost. He was a force of nature. An ogre haunting the Muddy Leaf Road.

He looked down at the weeping, broken caravan master. "Tell them," Lin Feng said, his voice echoing with the weight of consumed power. "Tell Deng Lei. Tell my uncle. Their ore turned to dust. Their alliance is ash. The debt has just begun."

He turned and walked into the Blackroot Woods, not as prey, but as its newest, most terrifying predator. Behind him, the first tangible pillar of his uncle's new regime lay in ruins, and a new name would soon be whispered in fearful tones across Verdant Cloud City:

The Ore-Devourer. The Chaos Ghost.

The dragon was awake, and it was hungry.