Chapter 117 - 116: The Winter Fever
The winter that descended upon Qingshui Town was not a simple change of seasons. It felt like a living beast had come to devour the weak and the poor, as biting winds howled down from the northern mountains, carrying thick sheets of blinding snow that buried the cobblestone streets and covered the market squares in white.
Inside the Azure Swallow School, the dilapidated state of the wooden architecture offered almost no sanctuary. The icy drafts slipped effortlessly through the cracked slates of the roof and the warped floorboards, turning the main hall into an absolute icebox.
Lin Yuan had spent the meager tuition money he had earned from his three students on heavy sacks of charcoal and basic winter rations. But it was not enough to keep the relentless, creeping frost at bay.
The brutal cold seeped directly into the dojo.
And then, the absolute nightmare began.
It started with a minor cough during morning stances. By evening, seven-year-old Lin Fan was shivering violently, huddled beneath three layers of patched blankets in the back room. By midnight, the boy’s skin was burning with a terrifying heat.
Lin Yuan knelt beside the bed, pressing his freezing hand against his son’s forehead. The heat radiating from the boy’s pale skin was catastrophic. Fan’s breathing was incredibly shallow and rapid, his small chest heaving with the desperate effort to draw air into his congested lungs.
A winter fever. In the mortal world, among the poor, it was a death sentence.
Panic seized Lin Yuan’s heart. It was the exact same feeling of crushing helplessness that he felt when his wife, Su Rong, lay dying in this very same bed just months prior.
Lin Yuan knew that if he could endure this hardship and overcome this particular hurdle, his Mortal Heart would be tempered to an extraordinary degree.
This was not merely another challenge within the dream domain. It was an opportunity to experience hardship that he could never truly understand as a cultivator. If he could endure it without relying on his cultivation, he would take another major step toward perfecting his Mortal Heart.
Lin Yuan did not hesitate. He grabbed the small leather pouch containing the very last of their copper coins and rushed into the roaring blizzard.
He struggled through the knee-deep snow, the freezing wind cutting into his face and his own lips slowly turning blue from the cold. Despite this, he kept moving until he finally reached the heavy oak doors of the town’s only apothecary. He then raised his frozen hand and pounded desperately on the door.
When the elderly apothecary finally opened the door, wrapped in luxurious furs, he took one look at Lin Yuan’s handful of copper coins and sneered.
"Willow-bark extract and white-root powder," the apothecary stated, his voice devoid of any human empathy. "That is the only concoction strong enough to break a severe winter fever. But it requires rare herbs imported from the south. It costs two taels of silver, Master Lin. Not a copper less."
"I have three students now. I can pay you the rest in a month!" Lin Yuan pleaded. "Please. My son is burning up. He will die without it."
"I am a merchant, not a charity," the apothecary replied coldly. "Bring me two taels of silver, or go dig another grave."
The heavy oak door slammed shut, the sound echoing like a death knell in the howling wind.
What Lin Yuan was experiencing now was one of the few things the mortal world and the cultivation world had in common.
Cruelty.
The act of one person inflicting suffering upon another simply because they possessed the power to do so.
In the cultivation world, the strong bullied the weak. Powerful cultivators could take whatever they wanted, destroy whatever stood in their way, and show mercy only when they felt like it.
The mortal world was not so different.
Here, the rich bullied the poor, those with influence looked down upon those without it, and those with money could often decide who received help and who was left to suffer.
The methods were different, but the underlying principle remained the same.
The strong held power over the weak.
Lin Yuan stood in the snow, his mortal body shaking uncontrollably. If he were in the real world, and if he so desired, he could have ripped the door off its hinges, vaporized the apothecary, and taken the entire shop. But here, in this meticulously crafted dream domain, he possessed no cultivation. A battle against the harshness of nature and disease could not be punched or slashed away.
With that, Lin Yuan ran back to the dojo. He tore through the main hall, his eyes desperately scanning the shadows for anything of value. They had already sold the furniture. They had sold Su Rong’s ancestral loom to the Black Tiger Gang just to buy a month of peace. There was absolutely nothing left.
Except for one thing.
Resting on a wooden mount at the front of the training hall was a long, unadorned iron sword. It was not a magical artifact. It was simply a masterfully forged blade of folded steel. Within the context of this simulated reality, it was Lin Yuan’s most prized possession. It was the sword passed down to him by his mortal martial arts master, the symbol of his authority as the head of the Azure Swallow School, and his primary weapon.
In the cultivation world, Lin Yuan had always valued artifacts. Thanks to the Millionfold Return System, he possessed treasures that ordinary cultivators could only dream of obtaining.
He possessed the Emperor’s Primordial Sovereign Sword, a divine weapon capable of severing even the conceptual laws of the universe. He also possessed the River of Years Pagoda, the very artifact he was currently using, which allowed him to experience vast amounts of time while only a short period passed in the outside world.
To a cultivator, a powerful weapon was more than just a tool. It was an extension of their strength, a trusted companion on the path of the Great Dao, and sometimes even a sacred partner that accompanied them throughout their journey.
Lin Yuan understood this deeply. But as Lin Yuan stared at the iron sword, a profound shift occurred within his psyche. The complete dissolution of material attachment washed over him.
Lin Yuan the cultivator might have valued the legacy of a blade. But Lin Yuan the father looked at the cold, useless chunk of metal and realized it was absolutely worthless compared to his son’s breath. He did not care about martial pride. He did not care about his master’s legacy. He only cared about the small, shivering boy dying in the next room.
Lin Yuan grabbed the sword, wrapped it in a cloth, and ran back out into the blizzard.
He found a pawnshop run by a notoriously greedy pawnbroker. The man inspected the blade, recognizing the high-quality folded steel, but knowing Lin Yuan’s desperate situation, he ruthlessly lowballed the offer.
"Two taels and fifty coppers," the pawnbroker grinned, revealing yellow teeth.
Lin Yuan did not argue. He did not threaten the man. He snatched the silver, left the symbol of his martial pride on the counter without a second backward glance, and sprinted back to the apothecary.
He purchased the willow-bark extract and returned to the freezing dojo just as Lin Fan began to violently convulse from the soaring temperature.
Lin Yuan brewed the foul-smelling medicine over a small, dying charcoal fire. He propped his son up, gently forcing the bitter liquid down the boy’s throat, massaging his neck to ensure he swallowed it all.
’So this is what it means to be a father in the mortal world. When one is weak, he sacrifices everything just to scrape by. When one is strong, he...’
Lin Yuan fell silent.
Everyone was simply trying to protect their own interests. The pawnbroker had clearly understood his situation and used it to obtain the sword for far less than its true value. If Lin Yuan had wasted time arguing over the price, trying to squeeze out a few more copper coins, then Lin Fan...
His thoughts stopped there.
This Mortal Heart has truly allowed me to experience such things.
The helplessness of being weak. The willingness to sacrifice. The bitter compromises made for the sake of family.
These were things that no cultivation manual could teach him.
Then, for three days and three nights, Lin Yuan did not sleep. He did not eat. He barely blinked. He sat on the freezing floor beside the bed, a bucket of well-water by his side. Every few minutes, he would soak a torn rag in the water, wring it out, and gently press it against Lin Fan’s burning forehead, trying desperately to draw the heat out of the boy’s fragile body.
"Stay with me, Fan’er," Lin Yuan whispered, his voice completely hoarse, his eyes bloodshot and sunken. "Do not leave me. Please."
As the hours dragged into an endless eternity of darkness and howling wind, Lin Yuan experienced the paralyzing fear of losing a child. He stared at the wooden ceiling, terrified that the Heavens were coming to take his son exactly like they had taken his wife. In the real world, he wished to defie the Heavens. Here, he wept and begged them for mercy.
That was when Lin Yuan understood something profound.
The very idea of defying the heavens was something that belonged almost entirely to cultivators. Cultivators possessed the strength to challenge fate, reject the will of Heaven, and carve their own paths through the Great Dao.
Mortals were different.
They did not have the strength to defy Heaven.
They could only pray to it.
They begged for good harvests, prayed for their families to remain healthy, and hoped that the heavens would show them mercy. They did everything they could to survive within the rules Heaven had given them, desperately trying to adapt to a world far beyond their control.
The fear of losing Lin Fan felt like a physical weight crushing his chest, squeezing his heart until it ached. He realized that this terror was the true price of love. To love someone was to give them the power to hurt you through their absence. Every moment of fear, every desperate thought of losing his son, was forging an unbreakable bond of paternal devotion deep within his soul.
He loved this boy with the same intensity with which a cultivator cherished the hope of immortality.
On the dawn of the fourth day, the howling wind outside finally ceased.
Lin Yuan, his head resting against the edge of the mattress, exhausted beyond human limits, felt a slight, weak movement beneath his hand.
He shot up, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Lin Fan’s eyes were open. The terrifying, unnatural flush had vanished from the boy’s cheeks. His skin was cool to the touch, coated in a thick, purifying sweat. The fever had gone.
"Father?" Lin Fan murmured, his voice incredibly weak and raspy. "I’m thirsty."
Lin Yuan let out a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh. He collapsed forward, carefully wrapping his arms around the boy, burying his face in Lin Fan’s sweat-soaked tunic. The tears flowed freely, washing away the dirt and exhaustion from his face. He had fought the harshest battle of this life without throwing a single punch, and he had won.
Weeks passed. The brutal winter slowly lost its grip on Qingshui Town. The snows began to melt, turning the streets into muddy rivers, and the first green shoots of spring cautiously broke through the frozen earth.
Lin Fan fully recovered, his youthful resilience bouncing back with the changing of the seasons. The Azure Swallow School resumed its operations. Lin Yuan trained his three students, and slowly began to rebuild the strength in his own mortal body.
They had survived. The school had survived.
One bright, sunny morning, Lin Yuan stood in the courtyard, watching Lin Fan playfully mimic the sword stances with a wooden stick. A genuine, warm smile graced Lin Yuan’s face, the heavy burden of the winter completely lifted from his shoulders.
But the peace of the mortal world was a fleeting, fragile illusion.
BANG!
The main doors of the courtyard were violently kicked open, splintering the wood.
Lin Yuan turned, his smile instantly vanishing, replaced by a cold, hardened stare.
Standing in the entryway was Wang of the Black Tiger Gang, accompanied by six heavily armed thugs. They stepped into the muddy courtyard, their rusted machetes gleaming in the spring sunlight.
"Spring has sprung, Master Lin!" Wang sneered, his cruel eyes scanning the courtyard before locking onto Lin Yuan. "We gave you the winter to survive, but the grace period on your wife’s debt is officially over. And since you made us wait through the freeze... the boss has decided that the interest on the debt has doubled."