The CopyCat Immortal

CChapter 11: Threat from Behind the Scenes

The lanterns of the Azure Cloud Sect’s middle peak flickered with a dying amber glow as the midnight wind whistled through the jagged limestone arches. Ren didn’t need his eyes to see the path back to his shack; he could feel the cold dampness of the stones through the soles of his thin, worn sandals. More importantly, he could feel the gaze.

It was sharp, predatory, and smelled faintly of burned oil. Someone had been trailing him since he left the infirmary.

The "Core-Damper" ring on Ren's finger was practically screaming. Its steady hum had turned into a high-pitched whine as it struggled to stabilize the chaotic collision of the Earth-Crush resonance he’d just stolen from Sun Tao and the Inferno Burst that still sought to cook his liver. He was a walking ecological disaster, his meridians feeling less like pathways and more like high-pressure steam pipes nearing their breaking point.

"Come on out," Ren murmured, stopping in the center of the shadows cast by the Pavilion of Silent Oaths. "You’ve been breathing down my neck for three corridors. I don’t have any spirit stones left, and my mop is already broken."

From the velvet darkness of a hanging willow tree, a tall figure detached itself, followed by three others. These weren't the usual brainless thugs. They wore the dark indigo silks of the inner-track shadows—Xiang Wu’s personal cleanup crew.

Leading them was a man named Feng, his face bisected by a jagged scar that ran from his ear to his jaw. He didn't carry a sword. Instead, his fingers were curled into claws, each tipped with a faint, violet luminescence.

"You're a chatty one for someone who should be horizontal in a casket," Feng said, his voice a jagged whisper. "Senior Brother Wu isn't happy, Ren. You made a spectacle of a match that was supposed to be a burial. He hates spectacles that don't feature him as the winner."

Ren leaned against a cold stone pillar, his breathing shallow. "Xiang Wu’s pride is as fragile as wet paper. Tell him I’m sorry he has such high blood pressure. Maybe he should try tea instead of trying to kill laborers."

One of the disciples behind Feng laughed—a sharp, nervous sound. "The trash thinks he’s got jokes. Look at him, Feng. He’s leaning on the pillar just to stay upright. His shoulder is a mess, and his Qi is as stagnant as a swamp. How did he actually trip Sun Tao?"

"Doesn't matter how," Feng replied, his eyes narrowing until they were just two cold slits. "Xiang Wu wants him handled before the sunrise. No more miracles. No more 'lucky' trips. We’re ending the fluke tonight."

Feng raised his hands. The violet light intensified, turning into a deep, obsidian black that seemed to swallow the moonlight around it. "Have you ever heard of the Night Shot, Ren? It’s not like those loud fireballs. You don’t see it coming. You don’t hear it hit. You just stop breathing."

Ren felt the adrenaline surge, a bitter iron taste flooding his mouth. Night Shot – The Obsidian Whisper. A Tier-2 assassination technique that targeted the central nervous system with pressurized darkness.

"Sounds terrifying," Ren lied. He opened his meridians wide, dropping the defensive focus of the Earth Shield. To absorb this, he couldn't have any armor on. He had to let the needle hit the bone. "Go ahead. I’ve had a long day. A quick nap doesn't sound too bad."

Feng’s lip curled in disgust. "Die with some dignity, you freak."

Feng’s hand blurred.

There was no sound. Only a localized ripple in the air, a tiny, dart-like projection of solidified shadow Qi that screamed across the ten-yard gap in the blink of an eye.

Ren didn’t flinch. He couldn't.

THUK.

The projectile slammed into the hollow of Ren's collarbone, precisely between the third and fourth vertebrae. The impact was ice-cold. It felt like a freezing needle being hammered through his spinal column by a frozen sledgehammer. Ren's entire body went rigid, his nervous system screaming as the darkness Qi began to spider-web through his neural pathways, shutting down his muscle control one fiber at a time.

He slumped against the pillar, sliding down the stone. His eyes rolled back into his head, white and clouded.

"Direct hit," one of the thugs muttered, walking closer. "His heart's gonna stop in ten seconds. Night Shot doesn't leave a bruise. Clean work, Feng."

Feng walked up to Ren, standing over the limp body. He reached down, intending to snatch the Quartermaster's token from Ren’s belt as proof of death. "A damn waste of effort. Why did Wu want us to use a silent-kill art on a peasant? He could have just choked the kid in his sleep."

Inside Ren’s consciousness, however, it was high noon.

Absorption initiated.

Analyzing data-stream: Obsidian Pulse. Frequency: 1.2 Terahertz. Elemental resonance: Shadow/Negative Yin. Focal point: Spinal Tap. Grafting... begin.

The pain was beyond the physical; it was an erasure of his own self. But Ren was a man who had made a habit of visiting the void. He let the darkness crawl through his meridians, mimicking its sluggish, silent pace. He felt the cold black energy meeting the Inferno Burst in his core. Instead of clashing, the fire melted the ice, and the lightning gave it a faster transmission speed.

Mastery Synchronized: Night Shot – Assassination Grade – Absorbed.

"What the... his fingers," the third disciple gasped, pointing at Ren’s hand. "They're... they're twitching."

Feng paused, his hand inches from Ren’s chest. "Impossible. Night Shot paralyzes the involuntary nervous system. He shouldn't be able to—"

Ren’s eyes snapped open.

They weren't white anymore. They were two bottomless wells of absolute, light-devouring darkness. A thin, violet vein throbbed on Ren's neck, exactly where the needle had entered.

"My turn," Ren rasped, the words echoing with a strange, layered vibration that made the hair on the back of Feng's neck stand up.

Ren’s arm shot out like a coil of spring steel.

Feng was an Inner Sect disciple. He had instincts. He tried to dive, tried to pull his Qi into a shroud, but Ren was moving on a frequency Feng hadn't accounted for.

Ren didn't use a fist. He used a single, flicking gesture of his index and middle fingers.

A needle of concentrated, sapphire-edged darkness whistled out.

It was Feng’s own Night Shot, but accelerated by the Azure Static and reinforced by the Earth-Crush resonance. It was faster, heavier, and ten times more lethal.

Feng didn't even have time to scream. The dart slammed into his thigh, and he collapsed as if his bones had suddenly turned to liquid. His entire leg went numb instantly, the violet corruption spreading across his trousers.

"Feng!" the other thugs shouted, paralyzed by the sheer impossibility of what they were seeing.

Ren didn't wait. He didn't want a long fight. His body was already beginning to hemorrhage internal Qi from the sheer stress of combining five techniques in under a minute.

He moved—a blur of Wind-Blade speed—intercepting the second disciple. Ren grabbed the man’s face, his palm glowing with a dim, smoldering heat. Inferno Burst mixed with Bile-Sting toxins.

"Go to sleep," Ren hissed.

He slammed the disciple into the ground. The impact didn't just break the stone; it injected a cocktail of burning venom into the man's system. The disciple spasmed once, his eyes bulging, before passing out from sheer systemic shock.

The remaining two were terrified. This wasn't a laborer. This wasn't luck. This was a nightmare dressed in rags.

"He's a demonic cultivator! He's using forbidden arts!" one yelled, scrambling backward toward the pavilion gates.

Ren looked at the last man. "Go ahead. Run. Tell Xiang Wu everything. Tell him I took your 'hidden threat' and made it my own."

Ren raised his hand again, his fingertips crackling with the Azure Static. He didn't fire. The mere threat was enough to make the survivors trip over their own robes as they bolted into the fog, dragging Feng’s limp, screaming body with them.

When the courtyard was finally empty, Ren let the facade drop.

He fell to his knees, vomiting a thick, blackened fluid that hissed against the stone. His collarbone felt like it had been hit with an axe. The Core-Damper ring on his finger was glowing cherry-red, hissing as it touched his skin.

"Dammit... too much," Ren groaned, clutching his chest. "I’m taking too much too fast."

The Night Shot was sitting in the back of his mind, cold and patient. It was a terrifying technique—one that specialized in striking from the blind spot of the soul. He felt its potential. With this, he wouldn't need to "fluke" his way through the quarter-finals. He could end matches before they began.

But at what cost? He looked at the palms of his hands. Tiny violet fissures were appearing under the skin—cracks in the foundation.

"Ren? Is that blood?"

He spun around, his hand instinctively going to his hip, before he saw the familiar, hunched shape of Elder Zhou standing on the shadow-line of a bridge. The old man was leaning on his walking stick, his face obscured by the rim of his wide hat.

"Just... an upset stomach, Elder," Ren coughed, wiping his mouth with a sleeve that was now more blood than hemp.

"Obsidian Qi smells of the void, Ren. You shouldn't play with such things in the dark," Zhou said, walking closer. He didn't look at the damage on the stones. He looked directly at the ring on Ren’s finger. "The ring is nearly at capacity. If you take another hit like that, you won't be able to hold the 'mask' anymore. You'll become a beacon of conflicting signatures."

Ren stood up, though he had to grip a stone pillar for support. "What do you want, Elder? If you’re gonna report me for fighting back, just do it. I’m too tired for another speech."

Zhou looked up, and for a split second, his mercurial eyes flickered with a raw, terrifying intensity. "Report you? The sect is full of arrogant children who believe their parents' lineage is a shield. You’ve just crippled Feng, a senior disciple with six years of pedigree, using his own shadow."

Zhou chuckled—a low, rattling sound. "I don’t want to report you. I want to see where the fluke ends. The Quarter-finals are two days away. Xiang Wu won't send his 'shadows' next time. He’ll come himself. And he’s already petitioning the Council to allow the 'Lethal Force' exception."

"Lethal Force?" Ren felt a chill. That meant the kills weren't just accidental—they were sanctioned.

"Yes. They want to bury you, Ren. Legally. Efficiently." Zhou turned to walk away, his figure already fading into the midnight mist. "You're a scavenger who has survived too long. If I were you, I’d stop looking for fire, and start looking for a way to breathe through a closed throat. Because that's all that's waiting for you on the main stage."

Ren stood alone in the cold moonlight. He felt the Night Shot vibrating in his neural pathways, a dark promise of lethal silence.

Xiang Wu had moved from petty bullying to a professional hit. The masks were coming off. The "behind the scenes" threats were bleeding into the spotlight.

"Lethal force," Ren whispered, a sharp, obsidian light catching his gaze. "Good. It'll save me the trouble of apologizing when I break him."

He turned and began the long walk back to his shack. The pain in his collarbone was fading into a deep, icy numbness—a new weapon, a new death. He looked up at the stars, but for the first time, he didn't look at them with wonder.

He looked at them as targets.

Ren of the servant's quarters was dead. What walked back into the barracks that night was something far colder, woven from stolen lightning and recycled shadows. And the Azure Cloud Sect was finally beginning to understand that their biggest threat didn't come from the Pale Shadows or the enemy temples.

It was scrubbing their floors and counting the seconds until the bell rang.

"Night Shot," Ren murmured, flicking his fingers toward the dirt. A tiny dot of absolute black appeared on the ground, deleting a square inch of shadow.

He didn't sleep that night. He spent the dark hours folding his secrets into a sharp enough blade to kill a god. The trial was no longer about promotion. It was a reckoning.

And as the sun began to peek over the jagged peaks of the sect, Ren of the servants was ready to show them that some trash, no matter how hard you burn it, simply refuses to stay buried. He would be at the Arena. And he would be the last thing they never saw coming.