As the dense canopy of the lower mountain ridge thickened, the damp mist swallowed the path behind them. Ethan maintained his slouched stride, but internally, his focus shifted.

For hours, he had kept his senses locked down, feeling utterly suffocated. It was a classic situation where you don’t truly appreciate what you have until it’s taken away; walking around with his spiritual perception artificially blinded felt like trying to navigate a forest with one arm securely tied behind his back. He desperately needed to stretch his hidden capabilities.

With a silent command, he activated his Amethyst Eyes.

He had kept them tightly sealed because their distinctive, deep purple glow was far too obvious to risk around anyone with a proper cultivation base.

However, the family walking ahead of him was simply too weak to detect the subtle, microscopic shift in his pupils. More importantly, it had been hours since the distant, heavy gazes of the Azure Mist Province sentinels and the Heavenly Sword Pavilion watchers had faded from his perimeter. To be absolutely certain, he ran a quick diagnostic through his mind.

"Crul, are we completely clear of external surveillance?"

["Scanning a six-hundred-meter radius, Master. Zero high-level spiritual signatures detected. The local tracking arrays do not cover this deep into the ravine. You are currently in a blind spot."]

With Crul’s confirmation, the world before Ethan instantly shifted into sharp, vivid clarity. His Amethyst Eyes peeled back the layers of reality, revealing the flow of raw mana through the trees, the subtle energy pathways of the soil, and a series of faint, glowing golden threads attached to certain distant mountain creatures.

They were the visible markers of future destiny.

"Crul, what are those golden lines?" Ethan whispered in his mind, fighting the desperate urge to peer deeper into the timeline. He knew the backlash of spying on the future could shatter his mind, and he had no intention of dying over a curiosity. "Do those beasts possess some kind of hidden treasure?"

["Every living entity carries a thread of casualty, Master,"] Crul explained, his voice echoing smoothly in Ethan’s consciousness. ["Those marked with a golden resonance are destined for a fortuitous encounter. At some point in their timeline, an event will grant them the opportunity to transcend their current limitations and evolve. It is a manifestation of worldly luck."]

Ethan’s amethyst pupils contracted with a flash of cold greed. A fortuitous encounter? It sounded incredibly valuable. His first instinct was to use his eyes to actively spy on the exact coordinates of those future events and steal the luck for himself. But the sudden, agonizing thrum of his Spiritual Core warned him of the sheer danger of tampering with the laws of fate. With a heavy sigh, he restrained himself, merely using the passive glow of his eyes to observe the unique anatomical structures of the creatures, noting how their spiritual veins aligned with the mountain’s natural energy grid.

He deactivated the purple glow just as the terrain flattened into a jagged, stone-strewn plateau. They had been climbing the ridge for another twenty minutes when a sharp, ear-splitting screech echoed through the valley, followed by the heavy, splintering of ancient wood.

Ethan didn’t even need to blink to know what it was. Through his residual spiritual awareness, he had already mapped the massive, charging silhouette of the Silver-Horned Boar bursting through the bamboo thicket three hundred meters away.

However, Mary, Louisa, and Roy remained completely oblivious to the incoming threat. Mary was still carefully scanning the ground for tracks, her ample figure bent forward as she pointed at a broken twig, entirely unaware that a three-ton battering ram of bone and muscle was screaming down the path directly toward them.

"Watch out!" Ethan yelled, forcing his voice to pitch with a perfectly frantic, panicked edge as he stumbled backward.

Roy let out a despective snort, casting a thoroughly contemptuous look at Ethan. The boy clearly thought very little of their ragged companion’s courage, assuming Ethan was just a coward losing his mind over a random rustle in the bushes.

Mary, however, didn’t hesitate for a single second. With the seasoned instincts of an experienced frontier widow who had survived the brutal realities of the outer ridges, she grabbed Louisa by the shoulder and violently shoved the girl behind her. In the same fluid motion, she drew a long, heavy hunting dagger from her belt, her feet dropping into a rock-solid defensive stance.

"Not bad," Ethan praised inwardly, noting her quick reflexes. "She’s got some real steel in her spine."

But the moment the brush completely exploded open, the entire family couldn’t help but violently shudder.

Bursting through the shattered bamboo was a monstrous, jet-black beast that defied the standard definition of a common farm animal. The Silver-Horned Boar was a titanic engine of destruction. Standing easily as tall as a grown man at the shoulder, its massive, muscled frame resembled a heavy, armored truck hurtling down the narrow mountain path with terrifying velocity. Two glistening, razor-sharp silver horns jutted from its snout, gleaming with a lethal, metallic sheen as it tore up the earth, leaving deep trenches every stride.

Looking at the sheer mass of the violent, charging behemoth, Ethan couldn’t help but narrow his eyes behind his submissive facade. "Two thousand low-grade stones is a complete rip-off for a monster like this," he thought, his analytical mind already dissecting the creature’s trajectory. "The Pavilion is definitely underpaying the locals."

Still, he had a role to play, and he needed to act immediately before the beast crushed Mary and her children into paste. The profound spiritual seal buried deep within his meridian network strictly restricted his high-level cultivation, locking his magical attributes away from the world—but it didn’t do a single thing to diminish the raw, terrifying density of his conditioned physical body.

With a tight grip on the cheap twine of his rusted, blackened scrap metal blade, Ethan braced his feet against the loose dirt. To the family, he looked like a terrified casualty about to be pulverized.

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Author Comment: Hi everyone..!! How are you all doing? I really hope you are enjoying the novel so far. It would help me out a lot to know what you think about everything that’s happening lately. What do you think of these new sagas? And how about the footnotes with the skill explanations? I added them to keep things clear and avoid any confusion, so I’d love to know if they are working for you.

Any comments, recommendations, or suggestions are super welcome, and I read all of your feedback! Thanks a ton for all your support.

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From this moment forward, to avoid confusion regarding cultivation ranks, I will include this footer with the current established levels.

Note: These are only the ranks mentioned so far to avoid spoilers.

Body Refinement Realm

Skin Refinement / Bone Refinement / Organ Refinement

Spiritual Gathering Realm

Spiritual Perception / Spiritual Mist / Spiritual Condensation

Spiritual Core Realm

Core Solidification / Core Awakening / Spiritual Collapse (Half-step Spiritual Core)

Spiritual Soul Realm

Spiritual Soul Awakening / Soul Nourishing / Soul-Core Fusion

Golden Core Realm

Prime Fusion / Core Perfection / Core Destruction

Spiritual Sea Realm

Stage 1 ?? / Stage 2 ?? / Stage 3 ??

Dao Manifestation Realm

Stage 1 ?? / Stage 2 ?? / Stage 3 ??

Spiritual Transcendence

Stage 1 ?? / Stage 2 ?? / Stage 3 ??