Su Bai stepped out of the Liu Family Auction House with a slight spring in his step.

He had just successfully acquired all the necessary materials for a highly productive R&D session.

As he navigated the bustling streets of Grand Radiance City toward the mountain path, his steps suddenly faltered.

His head snapped to the left.

He felt... a ping. It wasn’t a physical sound but rather a sudden, magnetic pull in his spiritual senses.

His gaze landed on a small, battered stall tucked into the shadow of an alleyway. An old, scruffy cultivator was sitting behind a spread of scavenged goods. He was selling chipped swords, tarnished bronze mirrors, and bottles of suspiciously cloudy pills.

"Greetings, Young Master!" the old vendor called out. He offered a polite but cautious merchant smile. "Care to peruse? Found from ancient battlefields and forgotten caves!" 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

Su Bai ignored the weapons and the pills. His eyes were locked dead onto the corner of the stall.

Resting there was a small, heavily sealed wooden box wrapped in layers of yellow talisman paper. It was radiating a faint, biting chill.

Su Bai pointed a finger directly at it. "I want to see that."

The vendor’s polite smile instantly evaporated. All the color drained from his weathered face. He frantically reached out and threw a dirty cloth over the box, looking around like a terrified thief.

"Young friend from the Radiant Sky Sect, please!" the vendor whispered as his voice trembled. "This one is not for sale! I swear it!"

Su Bai raised an eyebrow. Usually, merchants used the ’not for sale’ tactic to drive up the price. But looking at the old man’s violently shaking hands, Su Bai realized the terror was completely genuine. The man looked like he was afraid of being arrested.

"I am not here to cause trouble," Su Bai said soothingly. "I simply felt a peculiar resonance with it. What is inside?"

The vendor swallowed hard, glancing at Su Bai. He knew lying to a sect member was a death sentence.

"It... it is a cursed jade slip," the vendor confessed miserably. "I dug it out of a frozen crypt years ago. I thought it contained a profound inheritance, but it’s a death trap! It literally killed the last four people who tried to read it by instantly freezing their meridians solid. I’ve been trying to find a way to dispose of it safely, but even touching the box makes my bones ache!"

Su Bai’s eyes lit up.

To the vendor, the jade slip was a cursed murder weapon. To Su Bai’s Reversal Body, it was a perfectly timed hardware patch.

"How much?" Su Bai asked, immediately pulling out a low-grade spirit stone.

The vendor recoiled as if Su Bai had just handed him a live grenade.

"No! No money!" the old man panicked. His mind raced. If he sold a known cursed item to a Disciple of the local overlord sect, and that disciple died... the Radiant Sky Sect would wipe his entire bloodline from the face of the earth.

But if he refused to give it to an interested Disciple, he might be killed right here in the street for giving offense!

"Young Master," the vendor’s voice dropped to a desperate whisper. "In the cultivation world, Karma is absolute. If I sell this to you, the cause and effect links us. But... you clearly might be its fated master. So, I will not sell it. I will simply leave it here. If you happen to take it... I received nothing. There is no transaction. We are completely unconnected!"

Su Bai paused. His brain instantly translated the vendor’s profound Daoist logic.

’Ah. He is forcing me to accept an implicit Liability Waiver to protect himself from a corporate lawsuit.’

"Very well," Su Bai nodded, respecting the old man’s legal savvy. "I am taking this of my own free will. You bear no responsibility."

Su Bai waved his hand, sweeping the sealed box into his storage ring. He gave the vendor a polite nod and walked away. He was immensely satisfied with his free loot.

Behind him, the vendor didn’t even wait for Su Bai to turn the corner. The old man frantically swept the rest of his scavenged goods into a sack, abandoned his wooden table, and began sprinting toward the city gates. He needed to be in a different province before that crazy disciple froze to death.

Oblivious to the sudden vacancy of the stall behind him, Su Bai continued his stroll.

Just then...

"Handsome Senior! Oh, peerlessly handsome Senior, please wait a moment!"

Su Bai stopped and turned. Sitting under a colorful canopy was a female fortune teller. She was young, heavily perfumed, and adorned with cheap mystical trinkets. She gave Su Bai a dazzling, flirtatious smile.

"Senior’s aura is extraordinary!" she cooed, then gestured to the empty stool across from her. "I usually charge five spirit stones for a reading, but seeing a face as heavenly as yours... I simply must tell your fortune for free. Consider it fate!"

Back on Earth, Su Bai would have treated this as a blatant tourist scam. But he had read enough in the sect’s grand archives to know that in the cultivation world, divination was a legitimate, highly respected Dao. Diviners could read the threads of fate, gauge a person’s lifespan, and predict bottlenecks.

It was essentially mystical data analytics.

’A free system diagnostic?’ Su Bai thought. ’Why not?’

He sat down and extended his arm across the table.

The fortune teller giggled. She batted her eyelashes as she reached out to take his hand.

The moment her warm fingers made contact with his incredibly pale, cold skin, her flirtatious smile completely froze.

She closed her eyes to read his fate.

A split second later, a bone-deep chill warned her that something was horribly wrong.

"GASP!"

The fortune teller violently yanked her hands back as if she had just touched a hot stove. Her eyes flew open, wide with sheer, unadulterated terror. All the blood drained from her face, leaving her just as pale as Su Bai.

"A-A-A ghost?!" she shrieked as her voice cracked.

Su Bai frowned. He looked at his own body.

’Did she really just call me a ghost?’ he thought, slightly offended.

"Sister, what do you mean by that?" Su Bai asked calmly.

The fortune teller didn’t answer. She was hyperventilating. Without breaking eye contact with him, she wildly grabbed her crystal ball, her incense burner, and her deck of tarot-like cards, then she stuffed them into a cloth sack with frantic, trembling hands.

She didn’t ask for money. She didn’t say goodbye. She just bolted out from under her canopy, shoved her way through the crowded street, and sprinted away as if the Hound of Hades was snapping at her heels. She didn’t look back once.

Su Bai sat alone at the abandoned fortune-telling booth. He stared at the empty space where the woman had just been.

He let out a disappointed sigh.

"Sigh... unreliable local analytics," Su Bai muttered, shaking his head.

He rationalized the bizarre encounter through his usual corporate lens. She must have noticed his identity as a Core Disciple, and realized she wasn’t licensed to practice divination on high-ranking sect members. She had clearly panicked and fled to avoid a hefty fine from the city guards.

"Everyone is so terrified of HR in this city," Su Bai mumbled as he stood up and brushed off his robes.

Feeling slightly amused by the locals’ extreme caution, Su Bai turned and finally made his way out of the city and up the mountain path.

He casually ascended the stone steps toward Clear Cloud Peak. He was completely and utterly unaware that his brief shopping trip had just caused two separate local businesses to permanently relocate to neighboring provinces out of sheer terror.