Zhang Chen returns from the mountains with a wild chicken and a roasted rabbit hidden in his coat, desperate to keep some food for himself. The fox next door uses soul emergence, sending her ethereal white-clothed form through the wall to plunder his catch. Sniffing out the hidden rabbit, she rudely reaches into his clothing. The moment her fingers make contact, Zhang Chen's Tier 1 Exorcising Golden Light erupts from his pores, blasting her soul and forcing her back into a thumb-sized phantom fox that flees screaming. Furious at being harmed, the fox retaliates physically from a distance, hurling a water ladle and a spoon that leave Zhang Chen with a swollen forehead and a black eye. This painful reversal teaches Zhang Chen a crucial lesson. His golden light can devastate spiritual entities but offers zero protection against physical attacks. To survive, he must find a way to upgrade his power before the fox resorts to throwing knives. To make matters worse, the fox spirit realizes that Zhang Chen has been secretly spying on her through the wall crevice for months. She admits that she only played along to toy with him, laughing at his futile attempts to hide his food. The power dynamic shifts instantly from a silent cold war to an open, hostile confrontation. Zhang Chen realizes he cannot escape the village because the fox has placed an invisible boundary around him, forcing him to remain her personal provider. He is trapped in a deadly cycle, forced to continue hunting and delivering game to the wall rack while his forehead still throbbed from her physical assault. The only path forward is to gather more points to upgrade his golden light, hoping the next tier will grant him the ability to actively project his power and defend against physical objects.

Driven by the need for massive points, Zhang Chen digs deep into a frozen mountain cave, discovering an ancient iron monument that refuses to decay. He slaughters a wild chicken and smears its blood on the monument to make a rubbing of its ancient runes. The stone absorbs the blood like a sponge and begins to bleed continuously. When Zhang Chen presses his golden-glowing palms against the monument, his light purges the blood-red veins writhing inside, causing the stone to drop a massive windfall of points and a new skill, Blood Absorption. This skill allows him to sprout fangs in his palm and drain the blood of animals to instantly heal his own physical wounds. However, his exploitation of the stone triggers a terrifying change. The monument, now transformed into a smooth jade stele, begins to slide twenty centimeters a day toward the cave exit to escape his purification. Zhang Chen is forced into a race against time to destroy the stele before it reaches the sun. The physical toll of this excavation is immense. The permafrost inside the cave is so cold that it freezes his fingers and stiffens his joints, forcing him to crawl out every half hour to thaw under the summer sun. Yet, the rewards are too great to ignore. Each strike of his golden light against the bleeding stone drops precious experience points, pushing him closer to the five thousand point threshold needed to upgrade his primary skill. When he tests his new Blood Absorption skill on a wild chicken, he watches in horror and awe as the bird is instantly reduced to a dry, bloodless corpse, while a fresh cut on his own hand heals without leaving a single scar. This horrific power gives him a desperate edge, but the moving jade stele remains a ticking time bomb. If the stone escapes into the wild and absorbs the essence of the sun and moon, it will transform into an unstoppable demonic entity, leaving Zhang Chen with no choice but to hammer and burn the stone to dust.

The outside world turns hostile as Landlord Li demands five taels of silver for rent during a devastating drought, and Blacksmith Cui is caught forging illegal military armor for rebels. Realizing the village will soon be swept up in a bloody purge, Zhang Chen spends a month refining high-purity explosives in the mountains, packing them into ceramic jars filled with iron shavings. The tension peaks when a red, indestructible scripture from the tomb begins to haunt the scholar next door, and a mimicking entity knocks on Zhang Chen's door in the dead of night, imitating his neighbor's voice. Deciding that a preemptive strike is his only option, Zhang Chen packs the wooden logs in his yard with explosives. When the fox spirit cooks while the scholar is away, Zhang Chen ignites the trap, blowing his own courtyard to smithereens to destroy the fox's physical body. The explosion is a desperate gamble that highlights Zhang Chen's cold, calculating nature. He knows that high-purity explosives will flatten everything within dozens of meters, but the years of humiliation and the threat of the impending rebel purge leave him with no room for hesitation. He hides in the yellow withered grass outside the safety zone, watching the fuse burn down. The resulting blast is deafening, reducing his own thatched cottage and the neighboring yard to a smoking crater of ash and debris. Although the explosion fails to completely vaporize the fox spirit, it severely damages her physical form and shatters her smug complacency. She is forced to realize that the honest hunter she spent years exploiting is actually a ruthless adversary armed with terrifying, unnatural weapons. This explosive confrontation destroys any hope of peaceful coexistence, leaving both parties standing on the brink of mutual destruction.

The explosion fails to kill the fox but forces a tense, mutual truce as she reveals she lured him to the tomb in the first place using a manipulated pheasant. She teleports Zhang Chen directly into the pitch-black stone chamber of the True Dragon Tomb. Inside, Zhang Chen secretly uses his accumulated points to upgrade his Light of the True God to its third tier and evolves his blood control to spawn thirty-six vampire bats. The fox leads him to the colossal skeleton of the True Dragon, where the dragon's remnant soul darts through the bones like a small fish. As the fox shrinks her form to chase the dragon's soul, Zhang Chen bides his time, holding her physical body in his arms while planning to drain her dry the moment she and the dragon's soul weaken each other. Inside the ancient stone chamber, the atmosphere is suffocating and silent, illuminated only by the gentle glow of a child-sized luminous pearl held by the fox. Zhang Chen walks across the smooth bluestone floor, his mind racing as he manages over two hundred thousand experience points on his interface. He strategically upgrades his skills, transforming his basic blood absorption into an unranked Blood Control technique that allows him to manifest miniature fangs in his palm and command a swarm of crimson vampire bats. He also masters the Water Control Technique, giving him power over all water flow within a five-meter radius. As they approach the massive dragon skeleton, the fox spirit is completely unaware of his power upgrade, believing she still holds the upper hand. Zhang Chen plays the role of the cautious ally, gently stroking her soft, fluffy fox body while secretly preparing to activate his vampire bats. The stage is set for a final, double-crossing betrayal in the heart of the ancient tomb.