Lin Mu crouched in the shadow of the dense canopy, watching the absurd brawl unfolding in the distance with cold, detached eyes — a brawl born entirely of greed.
In the pitch-black forest, the robbers had completely lost their minds over a fortune they had not yet even touched.
The outcome became clear quickly.
One group of three had clearly spent years working together on exactly this kind of predatory work. Their Gu worms complemented each other seamlessly.
Not only did they weather the chaos of the melee, they seized on openings and cut down two isolated wandering cultivators in quick succession.
The remaining three stragglers, sensing the shift in momentum, were driven together by the shadow of death and formed a desperate temporary alliance.
Another savage exchange of blades and blood followed.
Thud. Thud.
Two screams. One man fell on each side. The field locked into a grinding stalemate — two against two.
The sharp stench of blood saturated the air.
And all the while, the grey-robed wandering cultivator — whom everyone had completely forgotten — was still running blindly ahead, on the verge of disappearing entirely into the depths of the forest.
The surviving leader of the three-man group — a scarred, thick-jowled brute — was heaving for breath.
His peripheral vision caught the "fat sheep" about to vanish, and he drove his blade forward in a single savage stroke, forcing the other two back.
"Stop!"
The scarred man bellowed with raw desperation. "Keep bleeding each other dry and the money walks away for good! Let's take him down together first — fifty-fifty split. What do you say?!"
The two wandering cultivators across from him were already running on empty, their Primeval Essence nearly spent.
They heard the offer, glanced back at the prey about to escape, hesitated for barely a moment, and gave a hard nod.
"Fine! Money first!"
From a hunt, to a bloodbath, to mortal enemies — and back to allies in the span of a breath.
The whole sequence was utterly absurd, yet entirely natural. A perfect illustration of the Gu world's coldest, most unforgiving law: no permanent friends, only permanent interests.
"What a performance."
From his perch high in the canopy, Lin Mu watched the four survivors abandon their quarrel, wheel around, and give chase like wolves locking back onto their prey. A cold gleam passed through his eyes.
He was too far away to make out their words, but his combat instincts told him everything he needed to know. The farce was over.
"Time to close the net."
Lin Mu rose slowly from the branch. A thread of pure, faint-red Primeval Essence surged into both legs.
Rank 2 — Leaping Hare Gu.
Crack.
The thick branch beneath his feet exploded into splinters under the force of the launch.
In the same instant, the refined Earth Ring Body condensed a dense halo across his body's surface — providing defense while dramatically cutting air resistance.
If the old Rank 1 Swift Ant Gu had made Lin Mu's movement feel like swift, steady ground-level crawling...
Then the Leaping Hare Gu paired with the Earth Ring Body's agility produced something of an entirely different order — a terrifying, qualitative leap in both speed and explosive force.
Boom.
Lin Mu tore through the forest like an ancient predator skimming the earth, leaving a sharp afterimage slicing between the trees.
Each push of his legs carried him dozens of zhang through the air.
In just a few bounds, he had crossed a vast distance, closing on the four robbers with suffocating, relentless pressure.
Ahead.
The grey-robed wandering cultivator had nothing left.
He caught his foot on a protruding root and went down hard into the mud. When he turned his head in despair, the four blood-soaked robbers were already on top of him, grinning with savage anticipation.
"Out of breath already? What happened to running?"
The scarred man advanced step by step, dripping blade in hand, his eyes burning with the greed of a man about to become rich. "Hand over the pouch like a good boy, and I'll make it quick."
The grey-robed wandering cultivator had completely given up.
His legs had turned to water — he could not even stand. All he could do was clutch the coin pouch to his chest and drag himself backward in the mud.
The scarred man's grin widened. He raised his blade.
And then —
BOOM.
Without any warning, a massive, sky-blotting cloud of grey-brown dust erupted as if from the earth itself, swallowing everything within several meters in an instant.
Rank 1 — Dust Escape Gu.
The sudden eruption threw the four robbers into immediate disarray, their vision gone.
"What the hell—?!"
"Cough, cough — who's playing tricks out there!"
As the most powerful among them — a Rank 1 peak cultivator — the scarred man recovered fastest.
After a brief flash of panic, the dense, unnatural quality of the atmosphere told him exactly what this was: someone moving in to steal the prize.
Whoever had laid this kind of concealment across this range without a sound was no ordinary figure.
The scarred man crushed down his fear, pressed his back against a tree trunk, and held his blade across his chest.
He called out in the coded slang of the underworld, projecting a bravado he did not feel:
"Easy now! Which great lord is conducting business here? I'm Scarface Liu — let's talk this out. We've got four men on our side."
"Friend, don't bite off more than you can chew, or you might end up with an eagle pecking out your eyes..."
His bluster had not even finished falling.
In the rolling, impenetrable dust, a streak of pale, cold light — faintly luminous, carrying something almost unearthly — split the void without warning, like lightning tearing through a moonless night.
Rank 2 Vital Gu — Metal Rend Leaf Gu.
"Noise."
A single word drifted from the depths of the fog — ice-cold, utterly contemptuous.
That streak of golden light expanded in Scarface Liu's pupils — desperate, horrified — and swept across his throat with the force of something that could not be stopped.
Shick.
A perfectly intact head launched straight into the air, the bluster still frozen on its face.
From the stump below, scalding blood erupted like a fountain, several feet high, drenching the surrounding trunks and dead leaves.
An instant kill.
A Rank 1 peak desperado — before the current Lin Mu, nothing more than a helpless chicken, erased in a single breath.
"Boss!"
"A ghost — RUN!"
The remaining three robbers were shattered by the sight. Every trace of their earlier ferocity evaporated. They spun and bolted in separate directions.
But this dust was Lin Mu's absolute domain.
"Come and go as you please?"
Lin Mu's silhouette flickered through the dust like a wraith. The Leaping Hare Gu's burst carried him behind a second fleeing cultivator in an instant.
Hand raised. Blade drawn.
Another clean, decisive sound of a cut throat. The second robber crumpled into the blood-soaked earth.
Two kills. The killing ground was his.
Then Lin Mu's movements stopped — deliberately.
He did not finish the remaining two.
He simply let the last pair — who had already soiled themselves in terror, legs too weak to hold them — collapse to their knees in the mud and kowtow frantically.
"Spare us, great immortal! Spare us, great lord! We were blind fools! Please, treat us like a fart and let us go!"
Both men slammed their foreheads against the stone-riddled mud with hollow, rhythmic thuds.
Blood ran freely down their brows. Neither dared stop.
Lin Mu stood at the edge of the thinning dust, his bamboo hat concealing his face, only a cold stretch of jaw visible below the brim.
He looked at the two trembling wretches.
His voice, deliberately distorted by a thread of Primeval Essence, came out hoarse and hollow — as though it arrived from every direction at once.
"Spread the word."
"I am Dustlord."
Lin Mu let the fabricated Demonic Path alias hang in the air, his tone carrying the casual arrogance of someone granting a mercy.
"My mood is generous today. I'll leave you two dogs your lives. Go back and tell every stray cur prowling Black Wind Ridge — do not cause trouble here again. Now get out of my sight."
"Thank you, Lord Dustlord! Thank you for sparing our worthless lives, grandfather!"
The two survivors received those words like a divine reprieve.
They did not waste a single breath on doubt or hesitation.
They scrambled to their feet and fled as though they wished their parents had given them eight legs, not daring to look back even once, tearing away from the blood-soaked clearing as fast as their legs would carry them.
Silence reclaimed everything. Only the clearing remained — strewn with severed limbs, soaked in blood.
The grey-robed wandering cultivator had witnessed every moment of the one-sided slaughter.
The despair of the robbers closing in. The shock of the mysterious figure's arrival. The blood of two Rank 1 cultivators spilled in the span of a breath.
The visual assault and the whiplash of terror and disbelief had completely overwhelmed this timid, bottom-rung wandering cultivator. His mind had simply stopped working.
When he had fallen earlier, the coin pouch he had clutched like his own life had split open on impact.
Over a thousand Primeval Stones were scattered across the ground, stained with the still-warm blood the robbers had just spilled — glittering in the midst of the carnage with a nauseating, deeply ironic greed.
Step. Step. Step.
Steady footfalls broke the silence.
The black-robed, bamboo-hatted figure who called himself Dustlord — terrifying as death itself — walked through the blood and scattered Primeval Stones, closing the distance one step at a time.
Watching that figure of death draw nearer, the grey-robed wandering cultivator felt the last shreds of his already-shattered composure give way entirely.
He did not even have the strength left to beg.
He closed his eyes in resignation, tears and mud running together down his face, and let out a broken, hollow murmur of surrender:
"Heaven above... just kill me already..."