Wizard: I Have a Cultivation System

Ron watched him take the pill. His lips moved, but he hesitated to speak.

"If you have something to say, say it," Uncle Scar said, glancing at him. He carefully tucked the canister back inside his shirt and leaned against the cold wall.

"Uncle Scar..." Ron hesitated, then lowered his voice. "The Master is with us for the time being. With him around, those who’d prey on us won’t dare get close. Can’t we take a break? The pills... can you stop taking them? Or at least take less?"

He looked up at the pitch-black tunnel beyond their platform and lowered his voice even more. "Taking too many Nightmare Pills deepens the early stages of Nightmare Transformation. It makes you a target for those ’collectors.’ We had no choice before. We had to take them to survive, to have the strength to work. But now..."

A glimmer of hope flashed in his eyes. "With the Master here, we’re much safer. Maybe we can find work that doesn’t depend so much on the pills?"

Uncle Scar fell silent for a moment. In the dim light, his murky eyes seemed bottomless.

"Ron," he began, his voice hoarse. "I know what you’re thinking. You think that because the Master is here, we have someone to lean on. That we can use his reputation to find a better place, get better things... like status, a decent life?"

Ron flushed, his thoughts laid bare, but he nodded anyway. "At least we wouldn’t have to stay in this hellhole. The Master... he looks so clean, so different. He’s clearly not an ordinary person. Following him has to be better than what we had before."

Uncle Scar shook his head, a bitter smile on his face. "You’re wrong, kid. The Master... he’s not from our world. He’s here today, but he could be gone tomorrow. You think he’s our protector? No. We’re just a couple of bugs who happen to be near him. A bug can hide from predators in a behemoth’s shadow for a time, but the behemoth won’t stand still forever, and it certainly won’t go out of its way to protect a bug."

He paused, his gaze sharpening. "What’s most important is that we have to rely on ourselves. Status, a place to live, food, medicine... in the end, we have to earn—or take—all of it with our own two hands. The Master might not wish us harm, he might even be letting us follow him for now, but expecting him to solve all our problems? That’s impossible. He has no obligation to."

"But—" Ron started to argue.

"No buts!" Uncle Scar cut him off. "We’re safe right now only because the Master is here. But that’s temporary. The moment he leaves, we’ll be meat on the chopping block again!"

He took a deep breath. The pill was starting to work; the pain seemed to lessen, and his thoughts cleared. "So, we have to use this breather to recover as fast as we can. We need to figure out how to get more resources, whether it’s money, weapons, or information. We can’t just lie around daydreaming in some false sense of security because ’the Master is here’!"

"Then... what about the pill?" Ron asked, gesturing toward Uncle Scar’s chest.

"I have to take it," Uncle Scar said without a trace of hesitation. "Without it, this arm hurts like hell. I’ve got no strength. Even walking is a struggle, let alone working or dealing with trouble. The risk of the Nightmare Transformation getting worse? I know all about it. But that’s a problem for later. If we can’t survive today, there won’t *be* a later!"

He looked at Ron, his expression complex. "I know you’re just looking out for me. But in a place like this, sometimes you just have to worry about the here and now. You have to survive first to earn the right to think about the future."

Ron opened his mouth, but in the end, he said nothing. He just nodded silently.

Just then, an extremely faint groan drifted in from the darkness beyond the platform.

The sound was quiet, almost lost in the faint gurgle of flowing sewage, nearly imperceptible.

But both Uncle Scar and Ron flinched as if pricked by a needle. They shot their heads up in unison, the color draining from their faces.

Ron panicked instantly, his voice cracking. "Un... Uncle Scar! Did you hear that? It’s... it’s the Master!"

The look on Uncle Scar’s face was just as grim.

He had just been lecturing Ron about self-reliance, about not depending too much on the mysterious Master. But now, that groan—Murphy’s groan—was like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head.

’He understood better than Ron what it meant. If even a being so powerful, so unfathomable, could make a sound of pain or distress, what did that imply?’

’It meant danger. It meant something had gone wrong. It meant they were facing a situation that even the "Master" might not be able to handle!’

’If even the Master was in trouble, he could only imagine the fate awaiting two powerless nobodies like them!’

Ignoring the pain in his arm, Uncle Scar scrambled to his feet. His voice was hoarse and urgent. "Quick! Let’s go check!"

The two of them scrambled to push aside the broken plank that served as their door, stumbling out of their crude "home."

The dim glow of an oil lamp barely illuminated a short stretch of the tunnel beyond the platform.

Murphy was standing a few meters from the platform, near the edge of the filthy stream. His back was to them, and he still wore the same immaculate black robes.

But now, he looked entirely different from the aloof, pristine figure they were used to.

Countless minuscule yet intensely dense streams of black light were seeping out from deep within Murphy’s body, seemingly beyond his control.

The blackness was deeper and more viscous than the darkest shadows of the sewer, possessing a quality that seemed to devour all light.

It twisted, writhed, and roiled around Murphy like a living thing, coiling about his body and even showing signs of spreading into the surrounding air.