Chapter 3: The [Insight Eye] and the Trash World
The Federal Special Waste Treatment Plant No. 23 was not a place for the weak.
Its denizens simply called it the Artifact Graveyard.
Under the hazy yellow sky, a purple, polluted swamp bubbled with corrosive gas. Mountains of metallic shards, broken flying swords, and rusted crystal processors jutted from the muck like the shattered spines of dead beasts.
Lin Tian stood amid the desolation, his thin frame wrapped in a dirt-yellow windbreaker that let him blend into the endless sea of trash.
But the mind running this frail body wasn’t the scared eighteen-year-old scavenger anymore. It was the cold, calculating mind of a twenty-seven-year-old engineer — augmented now by a cheat that defied heaven itself.
“System,” Lin Tian whispered, his voice lost beneath the distant crack of volatile arrays fracturing in the trash heaps.
“Activate [Insight Eye].”
[Ding! (Insight Eye) activated. Calibrating visual overlay…]
A warm tingle washed over his corneas. The rusty world flickered, then transformed — a violet-and-gold holographic HUD snapping into his vision, seamless in a way no Earth technology had ever managed.
He turned toward a group of scavengers digging through a collapsed scrap mound fifty yards off. He focused on a tall, lanky man prying apart a scorched crystal casing.
A glowing data box unfolded beside the man’s head.
[Target: Nameless Scavenger]
[Cultivation: Qi Gathering (Level 2)]
[Talent Rating: 0.5 Stars (Trash)]
[Flaw: Severe Qi deviation in the right lung from prolonged toxic rust inhalation. Right leg bears an old, untreated fracture, reducing mobility by 40%.]
[Motives: Desperately searching for a low-level spirit stone to buy painkillers.]
His breath hitched. He shifted his gaze to a hunched woman clutching a rusted spear.
[Target: Nameless Scavenger]
[Cultivation: Qi Gathering (Level 1)]
[Flaw: Malnourished. Spiritual veins are 90% clogged with impurities. Highly susceptible to surprise attacks from the left blind spot.]
“Incredible,” he murmured. “A diagnostic debugger, running on human beings. Every hidden injury, every bottleneck, every fatal weakness — laid bare.”
In a world where cultivators guarded their weaknesses with their lives, this was a loaded gun pointed at everyone he met.
Know a man’s blind spot, and even a Qi Gathering Level 1 weakling could land a lethal strike.
More importantly — as the System had promised — this same tool would one day expose the fatal, hidden flaws of the Matriarchs who ruled this world. He could become their sole cure. Their weakness, and their salvation, in one.
Heavy boots crunched against gravel behind him.
“Well, well, well. Look what the swamp dragged in. If it isn’t the little trash rat, Lin Tian.”
His HUD flickered as he turned. Three figures blocked the narrow valley of rusted armor plates, dressed in grimy rags but gripping metal spades and iron rods with practiced menace.
Leading them was a youth whose face was stamped red with arrogance — bloated, his nose nearly swallowed by his own fat, like an angry, mutated pig. Fatty Leung. A notorious bully who made his living extorting weaker scavengers.
Lin Tian stayed still, swallowing the spike of fear that belonged to the body’s previous owner. He locked eyes on the hulking figure.
[Target: Fatty Leung]
[Cultivation: Qi Gathering (Level 3)]
[Talent Rating: 1 Star]
[Flaw: Excessive fat deposits severely hinder agility and cardiovascular endurance. Unstable lower Dantian from forceful, improper cultivation. Extremely greedy and short-sighted.]
[Motives: Intends to bully the Host into handing over any salvaged valuables. Willing to inflict severe physical harm.]
Level 3. His own body was barely Level 1.
A direct fight carried a 98% chance of ending in severe injury or death. Fighting was not an option.
“What’s the matter, mute?” Fatty Leung sneered, tapping his iron rod against his palm. “I heard you found a working circuit board yesterday. Hand it over, and maybe I won’t break your legs.”
Lin Tian kept his face an unmoving mask — the same detachment he’d once used to survive server crashes at 3 a.m. Fear would invite cruelty. He needed the flaw the System had already handed him: extremely greedy and short-sighted.
“I sold it,” he lied, voice steady. “But if you want real profit, you’re wasting your time on me, Leung.”
Fatty Leung’s tiny eyes narrowed. “Are you playing games with me, boy?”
Lin Tian pointed casually toward the western horizon. “A garbage ship from the Upper East Side just dumped its load in Sector 4. Wild Wolf’s gang is already heading there. They don’t run solo.”
He paused, just long enough to let the greed take root.
“Waste time on me, and by the time you’re done, they’ll have stripped a dozen mountains bare. Won’t leave you a single screw.”
Fatty Leung’s face shifted color. The greed in his eyes swallowed whatever appetite he’d had for bullying.
He knew exactly how efficient Wild Wolf’s gang was. Weigh a Level 1 weakling’s pocket change against a fresh dump site full of high-grade artifacts — the choice made itself.
“You got lucky today, trash.” Fatty Leung spat, jowls jiggling as he turned to his lackeys. “Move! We need Sector 4 before Wild Wolf clears it out!”
Lin Tian watched the three of them vanish behind a mound of rusted flying swords.
He exhaled slowly, adrenaline draining out of him.
“Brains over brawn.” In a world of meatheads, information was the only weapon that mattered.
He turned away from the prime scavenging spots — the ones that drew men like Fatty Leung and Wild Wolf — and pushed deeper into the graveyard.
This section was older. More unstable. The garbage mountains here looked ready to collapse into a shrapnel avalanche at the slightest disturbance.
He kept [Insight Eye] active, no longer as a diagnostic tool but as a radar, sweeping the violet-gold HUD across the junk.
Trash. Trash. Toxic waste. Ruined array.
Then a faint red outline pulsed, buried deep in a collapsed mound of charred spirit-beast bones and melted crystal casings.
He navigated the treacherous mound carefully, boots sinking into the spongy, tainted ground. He dug with his bare hands, ignoring the metal shards slicing into his skin.
Ten minutes of grinding effort later, his fingers brushed something cool and metallic.
He yanked it free and wiped away the crust of corrosive sludge.
A dagger. Or what used to be one.
The blade was snapped clean in half, jagged and dull. The hilt was scorched black, its carved glyph arrays fractured, leaking a faint, dying spark of crimson spiritual energy.
“A Thunder-Fire Dagger.” The memory surfaced from the body’s previous owner — a basic artifact used by outer sect guards, meant to channel a cultivator’s Qi into a blade of lightning and flame.
In its current state, it was scrap. Nothing more.
“System.” He kept his voice low. “Scan this.”
[Scanning Target: Damaged ’Thunder-Fire Dagger’…]
The [Insight Eye] projected a glowing 3D blueprint straight into his mind. The dagger disassembled itself, breaking into hundreds of components floating in a digital void.
To any cultivator, repairing this would demand years of crafting training and deep spiritual resonance with the blade.
To Lin Tian, it looked exactly like broken code sitting in an IDE, syntax errors highlighted in red.
[Flaw Analysis: The primary induction array is shattered. The spiritual energy conduction wires are severed in three places. The thermal regulation core has melted.]
“The logic structure’s still sound.” A manic grin spread across his dirt-streaked face.
“Main blade’s gone. But the secondary induction coil in the hilt is intact. Bypass the thermal regulator. Reroute the spirit wires. Shorten the circuit. Condense what’s left.”
His fingers traced the scorched hilt.
He wasn’t going to repair this dagger. He was going to re-engineer it.
“A hidden wrist-blade.” Something small, concealed under his sleeve. A point-blank kill switch.
He clutched the broken artifact to his chest and looked up at the toxic sky.
The fear of this world was gone now, replaced by the thrill of a programmer who’d just found the perfect exploit in a firewall no one thought could be breached.
He had a weapon.
He had a plan.
And with the [Sovereign Matriarch Conquest System] lighting up his vision, he was going to hack this entire cultivation world from the ground up.