I died young at the start, but I'm reincarnated with unlimited skill points!

Time flies.

Five years have passed since Su Yu was picked up by the old beggar.

The drafty shacks in the slums have been replaced by a small courtyard with blue bricks.

The courtyard wasn't big, but it provided shelter from the wind and rain, and there was an iron pot propped up in the corner.

The old beggar leaned against the threshold, chewing on a black flatbread, his cloudy eyes fixed on Su Yu in the courtyard.

Five-year-old Su Yu was small and thin, but his complexion was not ashen like that of the children from Black City who had been corrupted by demonic energy. His limbs were well-proportioned and healthy.

The old beggar thought the child was lucky.

This "good fortune" has truly benefited him.

In recent years, Su Yu often rummaged through corners and garbage dumps to find wild grass and rotten leaves, which he would then use to boil water for the old beggar to drink.

The old beggar was initially skeptical, but after drinking it for half a month, his cough, asthma, and back pain miraculously improved.

This was precisely because Su Yu, relying on his deep understanding of alchemy and pharmacology from his previous life, used ordinary herbs to cleanse the accumulated demonic energy and toxins in his body.

Moreover, these ordinary herbs were the key to Su Yu breaking through the limits of cultivation over the past five years.

Over the past five years, although Su Yu has been purifying demonic energy through his breathing day and night, he is still extremely dissatisfied with his progress in cultivation.

The meridians of a ninth-grade spiritual root are too narrow, like drawing water through a thin bamboo tube. The spiritual energy purified by breathing alone is extremely limited.

In order to completely break through this innate bottleneck of physical constitution, he created a heaven-defying method several years ago.

The Devouring Heaven and Transforming Yuan Technique!

Although ordinary herbs lack spiritual energy, their medicinal properties are pure.

He used his own body as a furnace to forcibly extract and purify the medicinal properties of the herbs he ingested, transforming them into extremely faint traces of primordial life force.

Instead of transforming it into magical power, it is used to continuously cleanse and nourish one's withered and closed spiritual roots.

They spared no effort in using anything that could be used in medicine, whether it was for clearing heat, detoxifying, or promoting blood circulation.

In fact, with Su Yu's current heaven-defying comprehension that almost sees through the laws of heaven and earth.

In the normal world of cultivation, one only needs to comprehend a few secret techniques that seize the destiny of creation, and supplement them with some rare and precious materials, and improving one's spiritual root is simply a matter of course.

But over the past few years, he has often sighed helplessly in his heart.

This world has been invaded by evil spirits, and the laws of heaven and earth have been completely corrupted by malevolent demonic energy.

Let alone rare and precious materials, it's impossible to find even a low-grade spiritual herb containing a trace of spiritual energy!

Make bricks without straw.

He possessed extraordinary talent, yet he was forced to gather the mundane weeds, withered branches, and rotten leaves scattered throughout the streets to build a tower from sand.

It took five whole years and countless bitter herbs to prepare.

Only through sheer willpower did he slowly transform and improve his spiritual root aptitude from the most useless ninth rank to the eighth rank!

But that's enough.

With 24-hour passive and uninterrupted cultivation, plus an eighth-grade spiritual root.

At the tender age of five, Su Yu managed to break through to the second level of Qi Refining in this desolate place filled with demonic energy.

If this were to spread to the outside world, it would be enough to shock the world.

But in Su Yu's eyes, this speed was barely passable.

In daily life, he relies on Su Yu's seemingly unintentional "childlike words" for guidance.

The old beggar also learned to distinguish several herbs used to treat basic ailments.

In the impoverished area where medical care and medicine were scarce, he went from a beggar who barely made ends meet to a herbal medicine vendor who could barely make ends meet.

The old beggar actually had a name: Old Dog.

His surname wasn't Lao Gou (Old Dog), but that's what everyone called him from childhood to adulthood, and it became his name after a lifetime.

A humble name makes a child easier to raise.

He certainly lived long enough.

In a place where the average lifespan of ordinary people in the Black City is no more than forty years, Old Dog lived to be sixty-four.

That in itself is a kind of luck.

In order to make Su Yu easier to raise, he named Su Yu Gouwazi (Dog Boy).

"Hey kid, stop playing in the mud and come eat some meat!"

The old dog barked merrily, scooped out several pieces of fatty meat from the iron pot, and stuffed them all into Su Yu's bowl.

Su Yu patted the dirt off his hands, walked over and sat down, quietly chewing.

The old man knew that young children need the most nutrition as they grow, so now that he had some spare money, he would go to the market every few days to buy some meat and stew it.

Compared to the days five years ago when we couldn't even get enough to eat with that black gruel, this bowl of meat soup with oil floating on top is like living in paradise.

The old dog couldn't bear to eat the meat himself, so he only scooped out half a bowl of meat broth and soaked some coarse grain cakes in it.

He finished the last bite with satisfaction, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and looked at Su Yu with deep emotion.

"You're such a lucky kid, how come you're so fortunate?"

"By following you, even this old dog has benefited."

"Even in my old age, I'm still able to live a comfortable life where I can have meat at every meal."

Su Yu didn't reply, but just lowered his head and drank the hot soup in his bowl.

Having spent five years living and working together, he knew very well what kind of person Lao Gou was.

Although at first, Old Dog only intended to raise him for seven or eight years before selling him to Blood Refining Workshop.

But in reality, ever since he carried Su Yu back to that drafty shack, the old man had never mentioned that idea again.

He himself was so hungry that he had to eat tree bark, but he still tried his best to get some clean rice water to feed Su Yu.

For an old beggar who had spent his entire life living a lonely and miserable life in the slums.

Su Yu, the child he picked up, became the only light in his life, which was like mud.

And now, life is a comfortable life that Lao Gou never dared to dream of.

He even spent money to bribe the person in charge of household registration in the outer city to get Su Yu a proper commoner's household registration.

He felt that as long as he lived peacefully like this...

When Su Yu grows up and gets married, his life will be complete.

……

After dinner.

The old dog was mending winter clothes inside the house.

Su Yu stood alone in the corner of the courtyard, his gaze passing over the wall and looking towards the very center of this world.

There stood a massive city wall, hundreds of feet high, made entirely of dark red iron.

Within the city walls lies the inner city, ruled by demons.

Beyond the city walls lies a vast mortal kingdom stretching for thousands of miles—the Great Li Dynasty!

Over the past five years, through Lao Gou's casual conversations and his own observations of various phenomena in the outer city, Su Yu has thoroughly figured out the ecological structure of this world.

This is a world that even this old monster, who has experienced several cultivation worlds, finds extremely uncomfortable.

In the past, cultivators were high above others and regarded mortals as worthless.

But that was merely indifference, a natural barrier formed between two different levels of life.

Cultivators are busy competing for spiritual veins and seizing magical treasures, and rarely target mortals, because mortals are of no value to them.

But it's different here.

The demons here treat mortals as necessities for cultivation, as blood and medicinal ingredients to maintain their realm.

In this world, mortals are not insignificant.

They are pigs and sheep on an assembly line, crops raised in enclosures on vast lands.

The Great Li Dynasty was the overseer of the farms established by those evil spirits in the mortal world.

Every year.

The Great Li Dynasty would hold an extremely grand ceremony throughout the country, a ceremony called "Blood Tribute" that was given a sacred name!

Tens of thousands of enormous black iron prison wagons, escorted by the army, would drive into every state capital and every city.

They selected hundreds of millions of ordinary people like choosing livestock.

The ordinary people here not only did not resist, but instead flocked to it.

The enslavement and brainwashing that have become so commonplace have long since distorted the perceptions of ordinary people on this land.

The laws of the Great Li Dynasty stipulate that any family selected to participate in the "Blood Tribute" will be exempt from taxes for three years and receive a reward that is enough to feed the whole family for a year.

Under the deliberate propaganda of the imperial court, being sent to have one's bones and marrow extracted by evil spirits was not considered sending oneself to death.

That's called shedding one's mortal bones and ascending to the blissful holy realm!

They eat their own kind, and find it sweet.

This is a morbid ecosystem that has been completely shut down by evil forces through absolute force and a distorted system.

In the cultivation world, the strong prey on the weak, because it's all about competing for limited resources of the Great Dao.

But the evil here is digging up the very foundation of the world.

They use the flesh and blood of mortals to build up their cultivation, and use polluted demonic energy to assimilate heaven and earth.

This short-sighted approach not only cuts off the path to survival for mortals, but also severs the path to immortality in this world.

Su Yu withdrew his gaze.

His eyes held neither the fury of a hot-blooded youth nor the cynical curses; they merely uttered a sigh.

"This world is corrupted..."