[You decided to simply watch the chaos unfold, so you left your body behind and drifted through the streets in soul form.]
[You were expecting bloodshed—but not to this extent. The violence exceeded even your darkest predictions. Corpses of men littered the streets, some killed while resisting, others executed in their own homes. Many women were violated in front of their families.]
[The inner district was even more horrific. Fires consumed buildings. Burned corpses lay half-buried in ash.]
[Then, in the main square, you saw them—two monsters in human skin.]
[One of them was Song Yuren—the prodigy of the Song family. In a past simulation, he had once captured and beaten you to death in prison.]
[Facing him was Hou Qi – "The Iron Giant", commander of the Southern Hills Bandit Coalition. He stood like a tower, his massive shield dragging across the ground, scarred with old palm prints—remnants of lives crushed beneath it.]
[Their battle cracked stone and air alike. Hou Qi roared like a beast, using raw power and relentless shield bashes to force Song Yuren back. His swings shattered walls. His shield crushed carts like paper.]
[But Song wasn't ordinary. Despite being pushed to the edge, his techniques were clean, lethal—each movement laced with deadly precision.]
[Hou Qi, known as The Iron Giant, fought like a rampaging beast. His massive left hand swung like a hammer, battering the ground and crushing whatever stood before him. In his right, he wielded a giant iron shield, covered in the faded imprints of countless palm strikes from previous duels.]
[Song Yuren stood opposite him, bare-handed and calm. His robes were already soaked in blood, but his eyes remained clear, focused. He used no weapon—only the strength of his internal arts.]
[Each of his palm strikes crashed into Hou Qi's shield, leaving fresh palm-shaped dents on the iron surface. Every blow reverberated like thunder, shaking the nearby buildings.]
[At one point, palm and fist met directly—bone against brute strength. Song Yuren's right arm fractured with a sickening crack. His fingers bent unnaturally. He staggered back, grimacing.]
[But Hou Qi wasn't untouched either. Blood poured from his nose and mouth, his breathing turning harsh. Though he roared and swung with unrelenting power, the cracks were showing.]
[The duel dragged on for over ten minutes, both men refusing to fall.]
[Finally, the battered shield could hold no longer. A faint gap opened near its center—a fatal flaw.]
[Without hesitation, Song Yuren surged forward and slammed his palm directly into the opening. The strike connected—deep, precise, devastating.]
[But Hou Qi retaliated in that same moment. His massive fist smashed into Song Yuren's head.]
[Song Yuren flew backward and hit the ground. The left side of his face was crushed—his cheekbone shattered, his skull visibly dented. Even if he survived, he'd bear the mark forever.]
[Hou Qi remained standing for a breath longer, then coughed a final mouthful of blood. His eyes dimmed. His enormous frame stand still like a mountain.]
[In that moment, both men fell. One victorious. One dead.]
[You knew the time had come to return to your body. But as your soul drifted back toward the safehouse, you froze in horror.]
[Your body lay cold and lifeless on the floor. The throat was slit from ear to ear, blood long dried. Your safehouse—once hidden—had been discovered.]
[Rage surged through you. Even an incapable man like me wasn't spared? All the careful planning, the long months of study and sacrifice—reduced to ash.]
[The medical path was no longer viable. You couldn't continue your apprenticeship. The knowledge you were so close to mastering... now out of reach.]
[After the Great War, the Song family quickly withdrew from the city. In the aftermath, many other families followed suit, leaving behind only a few remnants—among them, a small, half-functioning clinic.]
[But in this chaos, you discovered something far more important than any building.]
[Because your body and soul had been separated at death, you had a rare opportunity to observe a crucial detail: the white soul had remained intact.]
[It was this pure, undamaged fragment—your white soul—that allowed your body to recognize you as human upon your return. Unlike the black soul, the body didn't reject it.]
[You created a new chapter: Cicada Shell Rebirth — a technique designed to automatically release your soul before it becomes fully corrupted. The principle is simple: when the white soul is on the verge of being consumed, the technique triggers, shedding your soul like a cicada molting its shell.]
[This allows the white portion of your soul to escape untainted. In its pure state, the white soul can be used as a weapon—unlike the black soul, which most human bodies instinctively reject, the white soul is accepted and welcomed. It can slip inside living beings, influencing them or hiding within.]
[After two years of cultivation and experimentation, you developed a new technique—a soul invasion method that harnesses supernatural force. The concept is brutal but effective: you shape your white soul into a needlehead, then embed it within your black soul, forming a spiritual weapon.]
[When this soul-needle enters a human body, the white soul acts as a bridge—accepted by the host's natural defenses—allowing the black soul to follow and begin invading from within.]
[Though it cannot yet achieve true possession, the technique allows you to infect, corrupt, and slowly wear down your target's soul.]
[Through countless experiments, you confirmed a terrifying truth: when your black soul makes contact with a target's white soul, it slowly corrupts it—turning it into a muddled gray.]
[This corruption isn't instant. It takes months with your current strength. But once the soul turns gray, it begins to decay, fragmenting like ash in the wind.]
[During this stage, the host descends into madness—a shell of their former self.]
[At last, you saw it—a path to possession. Not by force, but by erosion. If the soul crumbles completely, the body becomes an empty vessel. A house without a master. And you? You'll be the one to move in.]
[After five long years of corrosion, your experiment ended in failure.]
[Just before you could seize the host, your target died on his own. His mind had slipped too far—he began showing signs of extreme schizophrenia, obsessively hating his own body.]
[His family tried to restrain him, but it wasn't enough. One day, he bit off his own tongue and choked on the blood while trying to eat it. That was the end.]
[From this, you reached an important conclusion: it takes around 4–5 years to destroy a soul through this method. That isn't the problem.]
[The real issue is what happens during that time. The target becomes mentally unstable. If not closely watched and sedated, they'll destroy themselves—wasting the vessel.]
[If you want a clean body to take over, you must act before the soul collapses, suppress the target, and keep them in a coma through constant medication.]
[Getting a new body is problematic—but at least now, you have a path forward. Still, one question gnaws at your mind: how does a ghost possess a human body at all?]
[You can do it because of the white soul—it acts as a bridge, a disguise, something a living body can accept.]
[But what about an ordinary ghost, made purely of black soul? They can't even touch a human body, let alone enter one.]
[So how do the legends of vengeful spirits taking over corpses exist? Are they myths?]
[In the 8th year, you felt the overwhelming presence of a great Yin being—a pressure so vast it blanketed the entire city.]
[With all your accumulated knowledge, this shouldn't be possible. Even the birth of a minor ghost takes 20 to 30 years of constant soul erosion and Yin exposure. Such an event occurring naturally is nearly impossible.]
[This presence… it couldn't have formed on its own. It had to be helped—artificially cultivated, nurtured by someone or something.]
[People didn't have precise names for the strange things happening around them—so they just called them "weirds."]
[If your dead husband rose from his tomb to watch you while you slept, it was a weird. If the beautiful girl you married last spring drained your Yang energy every night and left you pale and hollow, that too was a weird. If your savings vanished from a locked chest, well… then it was probably just a thief.]
[This time, you decided to make contact with the being. You weren't sure what it was—ghost, spirit, or something older—but you believed one thing: anything this strong must have logic.]
[Under Heaven's suppression, all weirds—no matter how monstrous—possessed a certain instinct, a reasoning shaped by their origin and obsession.]
[If it had lasted this long without fading or falling to madness, then it had purpose. And purpose meant negotiation might be possible.]
[You saw the source of the weird. It was impossible to miss—close to two meters tall, her figure stood out with her hunched back and tattered robes. Her face… stitched together from different shades of skin, as if several lives were sewn into one.]
[People avoided her. They didn't just fear her—they sensed something fundamentally wrong.]
[You approached, positioning yourself directly in front of her and tried to greet her.]
[She shifted direction without a glance. Not even a moment of eye contact. You had expected a Yin-based soul creature—but she was physical. A normal old woman, at least on the surface.]
[Confused, cautious, and intrigued, you began to observe her more carefully.]
[After weeks of careful observation, you finally uncovered the truth—this creature was no ordinary ghost or freakish anomaly.]
[She was a skin-based monster.]
[You witnessed it personally—through a torn opening in her side, you glimpsed the inside of her body. There were no organs, no bones, no blood. Only skin. Layer upon layer of twisted, living skin.]
[Theoretically, this made her invincible. No heart to pierce. No lungs to suffocate. No brain to shatter.]
[She had no vital points—only one grotesque, seamless body.]
[And you couldn't help but feel envy.]
[Also, this anomaly wasn't an aggressive being.]
[Instead, it wandered graveyards in silence—cutting skin from corpses and stitching it onto its own body. That was its only ritual, repeated again and again.]
[It didn't attack anyone. It didn't speak. It didn't even seem to notice the living.]
[She had no house. No lair. No shelter.]
[Her only possessions were a single rusted needle and the tattered rags barely clinging to her body.]
[After weeks of observation, you finally understood—her main supernatural ability came from her stitching.]
[With that crude needle, she could sew any piece of skin onto her own body. It didn't matter the source—fresh, decayed, even different species.]
[You didn't know her origin, but your best guess: she was once human. Then, somewhere along the way, she gained this stitching ability and walked the path of monstrosity.]
[She rarely showed any complex thoughts. Her eyes remained cloudy, her movements mechanical—like someone barely holding onto a sense of self.]
[You couldn't help but draw a parallel—her path felt eerily similar to your own ghost path.]
[Somehow, you had been pulled into the world of souls, twisted by greed and desperation. And now you existed as something no longer fully human.]
[You looked at the stitched woman and thought, Something must've happened to her too. Perhaps greed. Perhaps grief. But somewhere along the line, she crossed a boundary she could never return from.]
[Because her behavior mirrors yours during the early stages of your ghostly existence, you sense a strange familiarity.]
[She moves mostly on instinct—never hunting for fresh skin, only using what she finds from the dead. Likely to avoid confrontation.]
[Occasionally, she shows glimpses of decision-making, but most of the time her eyes remain clouded, as if she's only half-present.]
[To communicate with her, you resort to whispering—the only skill you possess as a soul-based entity.]
[Souls, as far as you know, don't speak. In all your years, Shen Li has never encountered a ghost or spirit capable of true conversation.]
[Whispering is the next best thing. Originally meant to confuse human hearing, it's a subtle vibration—less of a voice, more of a feeling.]
[In the first year, the woman didn't acknowledge your presence. She showed no sign of understanding—your attempts to communicate were met with silence.]
[By the second year, something shifted. Her cloudy eyes seemed to hold a flicker of comprehension. She dragged a freshly buried corpse from a nearby tomb and placed it in front of you.]
[Then, without a word, she stabbed her needle into the air—into you. She began stitching your soul to the dead man's skin.]
[You were stunned. You had only asked for guidance on how to possess a body or gain form—not this. But resisting proved futile. She was a physical being capable of touching Yin. That alone made her an existence far above you.]
[There was a clear class difference. So you endured. Sat still. Waited in silence as her needle pierced you again and again, each stroke eating away at your soul.]
[You decided: once she's done, you'll leave. And never come near her again.]
[After she stitched your soul to a square-shaped piece of leather, she seemed satisfied.]
[You were stunned. You had actually become a piece of living human skin—mobile, sentient, but skin nonetheless. It wasn't nearly as refined as the Stitching Woman's form—you lacked mass, couldn't hold a shape, and had no human features. But you could crawl.]
[Still, after a bit of awkward movement and experimentation, a strange satisfaction settled in. If you could gather more skin, stitch on more layers… you might eventually resemble a human again.]
[And the best part? This form had no vital points. You couldn't bleed. You couldn't break. In theory—you were immortal.]
[After your initial experiment, you made a decision: you would let her stitch more skin onto you. You needed more mass, and more importantly, a deeper understanding of her stitching method. What she did was crude, yet effective—and you wanted to learn every detail.]
[Once the woman wandered off, you tried to separate yourself from the stitched skin. Crawling through the streets like a stray sheet of flesh was far too conspicuous.]
[But then you discovered something terrifying.]
[You couldn't leave the skin.]
[No matter what you tried—shifting, pulling, unraveling—your soul was firmly bound to it, stitched not just physically, but spiritually. You were trapped.]
[For the first time in a long while, you felt panic.]
[The following days passed in pure misery. The skin you were stitched into began to rot—slowly, but unmistakably. Even worse, you could feel your soul being affected. You weren't sure what would happen if the skin decayed completely. Would your soul be destroyed with it? You had no way of knowing.]
[At least you didn't need food or water.]
[Still, you spent your days hiding in the sewers, filled with regret, lamenting your bad luck, and wondering how a simple experiment had become a prison.]
[Simulation Ends – 10-Year Simulation Complete]
[Please Select Your Reward:]
[Body and Condition at Age 19](Physique of a healthy laboring scholar, conditioned through travel and herbal gathering, steady hands, good stamina, increased resistance to fatigue, familiarity with basic medical tools and procedures)
[Memory Imprint: Medicine, Soul, Skin](In-depth understanding of herbology, poison, acupuncture, basic human anatomy, soul experiments, possession theory, yin separation, gray soul degradation, skin entity experience including stitching, merging, shapeless body movement)
[Refined Yin Soul](Peak-stage Yin Soul, higher density, improved soul resilience, devouring efficiency, greater stability in spiritual form)
[Skin Vessel Form](Peak form as a stitched skin entity, elastic structure, vitality-free movement, enhanced stealth, body fusion potential, semi-immortality through lack of vital points)
[Silver Soul Needle](Item)(Spectral-grade tool, binds white soul to flesh, pierces spiritual membranes, paralyzes low-grade soul defenses)