The moment Su Bai and his two mortal companions stepped past the wooden palisades of the neighboring village, Su Bai’s internal alarms flared.

To the naked eye, the village looked like a bustling, desperate refugee camp. But to Su Bai’s Spiritual Sense, the entire area was drowning in a thick, invisible ocean of Demonic Miasma. It was heavier and far more concentrated here than out on the dirt roads.

He glanced down at the young mother and Yan’er. They were currently healthy because he had manually extracted the poison from their bodies, but if they stayed in this environment, they would simply be re-infected within hours.

"Look!" the mother pointed excitedly toward the center of the village.

A large, pristine white tent had been erected in the town square. A long line of desperate, coughing mortals snaked around it. Above the entrance, a wooden sign read: Charity Clinic. Several men and women in clean robes were actively administering medicine to the sick.

Su Bai frowned slightly. He swept his Spiritual Sense over the clinic and the people working there.

He couldn’t detect a single trace of Demonic Qi on the "healers."

They seemed like ordinary mortals doing charity work. In fact, the area immediately surrounding the tent seemed to be actively repelling the miasma.

"Go," Su Bai told the mother. "Get yourselves processed by the officials. But stay within the perimeter of that tent."

"We will, Big Brother! Thank you again!" Yan’er waved happily before her mother led her toward the registration desk.

Su Bai watched them go, letting out a soft sigh. He couldn’t just walk away. He had to fix the local environment first.

Slipping away from the crowds, Su Bai activated his Moon-Shadow Cloak and leapt onto the slanted roof of the tallest building on the edge of the village. He sat cross-legged, hidden from sight, and observed the invisible, swirling currents of miasma.

’Time to work,’ Su Bai thought.

He initiated the Forest Canopy Breath his master taught him.

Normally, when an orthodox cultivator used this purification technique, they had to actively burn their own precious Wood Qi to filter toxins from the air, creating a small, temporary safe zone for their allies. It was an incredibly exhausting, defensive spell.

But for Su Bai, this technique was a cheat code.

His Sapling Root didn’t burn Qi to filter poison. It ate poison to grow.

Su Bai opened his mouth and took a deep, massive inhale. He became a human industrial air-purifier. The dense, toxic fog swirling over the village was violently sucked toward the roof, funneling directly into his lungs.

Because it was pure, unadulterated Demonic Yin Qi, there was absolutely zero conversion lag. His Void-Sunflower Supreme Method devoured the miasma, instantly compiling it into massive waves of frictionless EXP that rushed into his Dantian.

He popped a Shattered-Soul Oblivion Pill to overclock his absorption rate, and a euphoric sense of progression washed over him.

The problem was the volume. The miasma was so thick and was constantly regenerating from somewhere in the village that Su Bai couldn’t move. If he stopped breathing for even ten minutes, the toxic levels would spike back to lethal concentrations for the mortals below.

So, he sat there.

For an entire day and night, Su Bai aggressively vacuumed the toxic fog. He acted as a stationary, heavily overworked biological air filter just to keep the ambient air breathable for the refugees.

...

By the time the sun rose the next morning, Su Bai had eaten so much miasma that the ambient fog had finally thinned out. The air over the village was crisp and breathable again.

More importantly, because the fog had thinned, Su Bai could now clearly trace the "current" of the toxic air to its exact origin point.

He opened his eyes, then tracked the faint, lingering trail of black Qi. It led directly to a heavily guarded, windowless stone warehouse on the edge of the village.

Su Bai vanished from the roof.

He slipped past the guards using his Falling Leaf Substitution and silently broke into the warehouse. The interior was pitch black, filled with a heavy, suffocating aura that would have instantly killed a normal mortal.

He navigated the dark halls until he reached the center room.

There it was. The generator.

Suspended in the air above an open grate that led directly into the village’s underground water supply was a pulsing, pitch-black sphere.

It was a Corpse-Blight Pearl, an infamous Demonic artifact. It was continuously dripping liquid miasma into the water, while simultaneously pumping toxic gas into the air.

Su Bai’s eyes turned incredibly sharp. ’They are poisoning the water supply to manufacture a plague.’

Without any hesitation, Su Bai walked forward and casually grabbed the Pearl.

The artifact reacted violently, attempting to flood Su Bai’s meridians with lethal, bone-chilling necrosis. But instead of being poisoned, his Reversal Body instantly inverted the attack, forcefully draining the Pearl’s core.

A massive, terrifying surge of concentrated energy exploded into Su Bai.

He instantly dropped into a meditative stance on the warehouse floor, then violently absorbed the energy while popping Oblivion Pills to handle the sheer volume.

Inside his Dantian, his flawless Thousand-Needles Crystal Asteroid Foundation Pedestal hummed.

In the Foundation Establishment realm, progression wasn’t just about accumulating Qi. It was about expanding the internal "lake" of energy above the pedestal, preparing to eventually condense it into a Golden Core.

But because Su Bai’s Dantian was a bottomless void, his "lake" didn’t pool. It orbited his Crystal Asteroid like a dark, violent ocean.

As the Pearl’s energy flooded him, his Sapling Spirit Root violently sprouted a brand-new branch. The black leaves rustled, exhaling a wave of pure power that violently expanded the boundaries of his internal Qi lake.

CRACK!

An invisible barrier inside him shattered. The volume of his Qi doubled instantly.

He had broken through to the 2nd Stage of Foundation Establishment, just like that.

Su Bai slowly opened his eyes, exhaling a breath of black mist. The Corpse-Blight Pearl in his hand crumbled into harmless gray dust.

With the miasma generator destroyed, the ambient illusions in the room faded. Su Bai looked around. He expected to see a dark, blood-stained ritual room filled with demonic altars.

Instead, he blinked in profound confusion.

It was an office. A meticulously organized, highly efficient corporate logistics office.

There were neat stacks of ledgers, filing cabinets, and a polished mahogany desk.

Su Bai walked over to the desk as his corporate instincts flared wildly. He picked up the main ledger and began to read.

As his eyes scanned the neat, perfectly calculated columns of ink, a cold, horrifying reality set in.

The people running the "Charity Clinic" weren’t healers fighting a plague. They were mortal collaborators of the Demonic Sect. They planted the Pearl to create a manufactured plague, forcing the desperate refugees into their clinic. Once inside the "safe zone," the refugees were quietly screened and processed as raw materials.

He flipped to the inventory list for the last twenty-four hours... the exact time Su Bai had spent sitting on the roof, acting as an air purifier.

His eyes locked onto a specific entry.

[Acquired: One dormant seed (female child, age 6, mixed root). One premium stealth-vessel (adult female). Exported 12 hours ago via Northern Caravan.]

The ledger dropped from Su Bai’s hands, hitting the floor with a heavy thud.

The gut-punch hit him so hard he physically staggered.

The mortal collaborators had used the entire day he spent "cleaning the air" to peacefully process and ship the mother and daughter. His attempt to logically, systematically solve the environmental problem had inadvertently given the system the exact time it needed to exploit them. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

’Big Brother! Are you walking with us?’ Yan’er’s bright, innocent smile flashed in his mind.

For the first time in his entire corporate life, spanning two different worlds, Su Bai felt a surge of pure, unadulterated, irrational fury.

It wasn’t the calculated anger of a bad business deal. It was the terrifying wrath of a man who realized he had failed to protect an investment he actually cared about.

Su Bai erupted from the warehouse. The stone walls exploded outward from the sheer force of his Qi.

He stood in the wreckage as his eyes locked onto the deep, heavy wheel ruts leading north out of the village.

The air around him began to violently distort. The temperature plummeted.

Su Bai was going to teach this Demonic Sect a lesson in hostile takeovers.