The winds of winter were billowing mightily from the North, and the mountains were already covered from skirt to peak in snow.
Battered by such winds, and under siege by a ten thousand strong army, Yellow Leaf City was at the end of its fuse. The people had been rioting since the start of the siege, and the army morale was dropping with no reinforcements in sight.
The riots were not only fueled by hunger but also righteous fury as the nobles of the city had begun hoarding food and treasures while preparing to flee with the most elite part of the City's army as their escort.
Among them, the Patriarch of the Yellow Pine Family was currently packing his treasured Gale Spear into a Cold Steel Box. He was a man of great wealth, and as such he was forced into picking which treasures he would take and which he would leave behind before the walls fell. The wrong choice here might spell disaster for him at Black Peak City, which was Dark Mountain County's capital.
After all, none would care for his noble status there if he lacked the funds to buy enough land for himself at the capital. He was already busy packing, organizing the retreat, suppressing the riots, and planning where to settle at the capital that he actually forgot to pack one of his minor treasures with him.
The Venom of Ascension was a martial arts book rotting in the personal library of his family for centuries, its fearsome learning and cultivation methods turned any away from picking it up, but its great potential once cultivated stopped the family from selling it and risking its cultivation by an enemy of the family.
This book, too terrible to learn and too precious to forsake had finally fallen out of the abandoned bookshelf it rested upon 8 days after the Yellow Pine Family Manor was abandoned by its Noble residents. Of course, it was thanks to a trebuchet launching a several ton boulder into the manor, so the book was now resting under a small hill of debris.
Yellow Leaf City had been thoroughly sacked and most of its adult male population massacred by the invading Azure Whale County army.
Although Black Peak County and Azure Whale County both belonged to the Tyrant Dragon Empire, inner conflict between the counties was the norm. The Tyrant Dragon Empire was a nation of the survival of the fittest after all. Be it people, cities, or counties, they were all allowed to fight if they did not delay their taxes to the Tyrant Dragon Emperor.
That natural selection rule was also in effect in this ruined and wartorn city as well. Orphaned children and injured people were left to scavenge for food in the ruins of their city. A lively and energetic Tian Mingyun crawled through the ruins of the manor, not with the bright face of a child but with the distorted and wretched livelihood of a rodent.
Tian Mingyun, a kid barely 10 years old, was already a disliked orphan with an odd appearance and was the target of the local kids' ire. Now that those kids had gone through the horrors of war and survived with great mental scars, not to mention some of them becoming orphans themselves, they had become even more cruel with their targeting of him.
While Tian Mingyun was scavenging, the other kids were throwing small stones at him from afar while yelling obscenities at him.
"Cursed gray boy! You brought us misfortune!"
"This retarded cripple can't even speak but he dared to write his name on the walls of our house! What kind of orphan are you, that you can read and write when even my father can't!"
"Gray hair at this age, even my grandma has more youth in her than you!"
Tian Mingyun did not heed their taunts at all, the others were always doubtful that the cripple could even understand what they were saying. However, as if to escape from the stones they were throwing, he crawled into the ruins of the manor, not even fearing their collapse. The other kids could only keep yelling, now that they had nothing to take their anger out on.
"That idiot is going to get himself killed if those ruins collapse!"
"Crawling into debris like a rat, let him die if he wants it so much!"
Tian Mingyun did not know what he was chasing, but something deep inside of him called him. No, perhaps something in there was pulling at him from the outside. Whichever it was, he did not think about it much and simply kept following his instincts.
Several meters underneath the top of the debris hill was the room of the Patriarch, still partially standing thanks to the half broken pillars managing to somehow keep the ceiling up. When Tian Mingyun arrived at that opening, he crawled forth and finally stood up after nearly an hour of crawling. There were luxurious drinks and fruits all over the place, the fruits were so full of vitality that they had not even rotted after days of stay in a humid and dark place like this.
This was one of Tian Mingyun's abilities, he had no issue seeing in the absolute darkness, he simply could not see more than a few meters away from himself without light. For now, he sat down and started eating one of the fruits that looked like a pearly white peach. It was so delicious and sweet that Tian Mingyun could not help but roll on the ground in joy and whimper from excitement, his tightened and crippled vocal cords not allowing him to form any words to properly express his joy.
This one bite of the fruit was the best thing Tian Mingyun had ever eaten in his short 10 years of life. He could not even imagine who must have owned such a room full of precious and delicious fruits like this until his eyes finally found a plaque on the floor.
"Yellow Pine Family Patriarch Huangsong Joan" was what was written on the plaque.
Tian Mingyun suddenly understood this was one of the nobles who had escaped, he had not even had the time to pack all these delicious snacks. Truly, adults did not know what was important. What good was gold and silver with a full belly? Tian Mingyun might have been an orphan, but he had never gone hungry with how full of food restaurant dumpsters often were, not to mention the big pavilions and inns in the city. Of course, most were in ruins now after the war, but Tian Mingyun was more than satisfied diving into ruins like this.
After filling his belly, and tearing off his ragged clothes to use them as a satchel to carry more fruit back into his hiding spot, which was simply a large thunderstruck pine tree that never seemed to rot and was hollow on the inside, Tian Mingyun got up and prepared to leave the ruins. However, that was when he caught sight of a dark red colored book lying on the ground with the words "Venom of Ascension" on the cover.
As an avid lover of books, since he could do nothing but read in his free time in his hiding spot outside of scavenging for food with nobody wanting to play with him, Tian Mingyun quickly grabbed the book and threw it into his satchel and crawled out of the ruins wearing nothing but a loincloth. More clothing could be scavenged, and lots of kids around his size seemed to be going asleep in the streets since that loud war, none of them ever seemed to be waking up though. Like the rats that the inn owners hit with their brooms, just lying motionless there.
Though the concept of death eluded Tian Mingyun, the concept of hiding one's precious things did not. He had been robbed of his scavenged food many times before, so he knew well to hide the good fruit under leaves and common edible mushrooms that grew on the side of the road, though nobody ate those mushrooms since they would give one a fever, it was fine since Tian Mingyun did not intend to eat them.
Thanks to his crafty ways, he made it back to his hideout, a gigantic pine tree that was struck by lightning again and again but refused to die, and kept growing new branches even if its insides were hollowed out and singed. Tian Mingyun took care of the tree as best he could, with what little knowledge he overheard from farmers. He often walked a few Li of distance from the tree to gather animal shit and mixed it with water to pour around the roots of the tree, he never hated how his hands smelled afterward but it kept the bugs away from him at night so he believed all the more that it was the right thing to do.
After climbing into the hollow trunk of the tree, Tian Mingyun sat down and started reading the odd book he found while putting away his newfound fruits. He felt more energetic and awake than usual, perhaps due to the taste of those fruits. He read the book, it's words not making much sense to him.
"In this world, every living being must eat and digest what they have eaten and circulate that vital energy in their blood in order to exert force onto the mortal world. As a cow feeds on grass, a wolf feeds on the cow and any myriad of mystical beasts may feed on the wolf. Yet, if a material of poisonous nature were to be mixed into the food, be it of living origin or a mineral, the one who ate it would suffer from a variety of negative consequences."
Poison was stuff that was bad to eat. Tian Mingyun already knew this much, this book was really boring. But having nothing better to do, he kept reading.
"Poison is easy to apply to an unassuming or an easily trusting foe, and one can even kill mystical beasts by poisoning their prey. However, it is useless against any who do not eat flesh or fruit, but instead feed on the Spiritual Qi of the Earth, or of their own Origin Qi. Thus, Poison Arts are fitting only for mortals or those who wish to slay lower realm mystical beasts."
Tian Mingyun was confused. Mystical beasts, he knew what those were. They were the weird looking animals that did strange things, the giant toad that swallowed horses in the bog to the East was one of those, Tian Mingyun had seen it himself when going there to catch mudfish to eat. However, he did not know many words on that page.
What was Qi? What were Poison Arts? Who was trying to harm who? What did mortal mean?
Tian Mingyun was curious now, he could only keep reading.
"So, one is wise to choose Venom Arts instead. For venom is when the circulation of blood, energy, or Qi is disrupted by Qi or substances. Since disruption of circulation is the goal, it works equally well on mortals and cultivators if one adjusts their method to suit the target."
Tian Mingyun did not know what cultivating meant, but he was starting to understand what kind of book this was. This book was going to teach him how to harm others. He did not know if he was fond of that idea, but what boy did not want to get stronger? Since he knew that he would not harm others just because he was strong, what harm was there in simply getting stronger and then deciding what to do after that?
"However, what is cultivation if not an adjustment of the flow of circulation? Does one not refine their body through circulating their vital energy in the impure parts of their body to drive out the impurities? Then, logic dictates that one can cultivate faster with the path of their circulation directed with the aid of certain venoms. The countless recipes in this book shall guide one's path of cultivation up to the Divine Illumination Realm. Afterward, it is up to one's comprehension of the Venom Arts to guide themselves."
Tian Mingyun managed to understand a little bit. His body was impure, and if he did as the book told, he would become stronger and make his body more pure. Tian Mingyun wondered if he could become as strong as one of those soldiers that carried that huge log to break the city's gates. Perhaps this is what everyone did and that was why the book was just left there abandoned. After all, if everybody knew something, it was not worth coveting much.
Tian Mingyun simply did not know that what this book mentioned as common sense was one of the Unorthodox paths of cultivation that involved great risk and harm to the one cultivating it, in return for a guaranteed performance for those lucky enough to survive to its end. Most such books would be locked away for centuries until a child with an appropriate physique was born into a family. For this book, such a physique would be the Bottomless Gourd Physique that absorbed and generated a lot of energy easily but had difficulty guiding it within the body. Tian Mingyun's physique was no such named physique.
Ignorant of the thorny path ahead of him in this life, Tian Mingyun smiled and started reading the recipes and cultivation techniques written within the book, adamant that he should read all of it before doing what is said in the book, just in case this is some cruel prank by an adult to poison and kill dumb kids. Judging by Tian Mingyun's interaction with adults so far and the plentiful beatings he got for scavenging, such an assumption was far from unrealistic.
