Reincarnated With The Degenerate System-Chapter 251: Ruined City

"Alright, before we move on to anything else, you need to master the foundation. And remember, you might be my lover, but I won’t go easy on you," I said as I gestured for her to sit across from me.

"Don’t worry. I’ll prove to you that I’m the best girlfriend you have."

She smiled. Her competitive side practically radiated from her eyes. That meaningful look in her gaze surprised me. She was more possessive than I thought.

"Ahem." I cleared my throat. For a brief moment, I thought about the choices I had made so far, then pushed the doubts aside and focused on training her.

"Cultivation starts with breathing. Get this wrong and everything built on top of it will eventually collapse."

Hai-Yen sat down without a word, her eyes carrying that same quiet intensity they always did.

"Close your eyes. Breathe in slowly — four counts. Hold for two. Release for six." I demonstrated, letting my own qi flow visibly along my meridians as a reference point.

"Feel the air as more than just air. It carries energy. Your task is to guide it through your body and use it to strengthen your organs, muscles, and bones."

She followed my instructions. Her first few attempts were rough — her rhythm kept breaking, her body fighting the unfamiliar pattern.

But by the third hour she had found something. A steadiness. By the end of the day the air around her was visibly shimmering when she exhaled.

I didn’t say anything but I made a note of it.

By the end of the day she had refined the technique to a degree that should have taken a month.

The next morning I moved her on to meridian work.

"There are three main meridian gates you need to open in sequence," I explained, sitting behind her and placing two fingers lightly against her back.

"The lower meridian sits below your navel — it’s your foundation, your physical reservoir. Think of it as the root of a tree. Without it, nothing above it holds."

"And if I try to fill the upper ones first?"

"You’d be building a house starting from the roof." I tapped the point gently.

"Focus here. Draw the qi you gathered yesterday downward. Don’t force it —control it.,"

She was quiet for a moment. Then I felt it through my fingertips — a faint warmth building at the base of her spine, slow at first, then growing more confident.

"Good. Keep it steady. Let it pool there naturally, like water finding the lowest point."

It took most cultivators several days just to locate the lower meridian gate properly. Hai-Yen had it filled to a stable level before noon.

I pulled my hand back and said nothing for a moment.

Terrifying. It was clear she was born to cultivate.

Her body reminded me of those rare talents in martial arts novels. The kind who rose fast because their foundation was already strong from the start.

It was not an exaggeration to call her physique Heaven’s Blessed rank, the same level I once obtained after doing simulations.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, glancing back at me.

"No. We’re moving to the middle meridian." 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

She raised an eyebrow. "Already?"

"You’ve earned it." I repositioned my fingers at the center of her back, between her shoulder blades.

"The middle meridian is different. The lower one is about accumulation — storing raw energy. The middle one is about refinement. The qi that flows through here gets filtered, purified."

"So it’s quality over quantity."

"Exactly. Now — don’t just push qi upward. Imagine passing it through a cloth. Let the coarse parts catch and dissolve. Only the clean current moves forward."

This one was harder. I could feel her struggling slightly, the qi moving in uneven pulses rather than a smooth continuous stream.

For a brief second I considered that this might be the wall — the place where even her talent would slow down and behave like everyone else’s.

Then the pulses evened out.

By late afternoon, the qi circulating through her middle meridian was already cleaner than everyone’s else.

I withdrew my hand and stood up slowly.

"How do you feel?" I asked.

She rolled her shoulders once, thoughtful.

"Like something that was blocked is now open. Like I’ve been breathing through one nostril my whole life and just now used both."

I almost laughed at that. "That’s actually a perfect way to describe it."

She turned to look at me, and there was something different in her expression — not just the competitive spark from before, but something quieter. More serious.

"What comes after the middle meridian?"

I looked at her for a moment. The upper meridian. The seat of spiritual perception.

However, it was still too early for her to focus on that.

"Master the first two stages. Once you break through further, I’ll teach it to you."

"Fine," she sighed. Disappointment showed on her face.

I cupped her cheek and kissed her.

"How about we go for a quick round? You’re much stronger now. You can handle it rougher," I said.

She smiled and kissed me back. "Do your worst."

***

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***

The weeks that followed blurred together in the way that intense, focused time always does.

We trained from dawn until the light died, and sometimes beyond that. I pushed her through breathing variations, qi circulation routes, basic elemental attunement. She absorbed everything like she was starving for it.

But somewhere around the third week I noticed something else changing — and it had nothing to do with cultivation or magic.

Government emergency lines rang endlessly without connecting. Even the satellites we could still technically ping were responding with automated signals — no human operators, no live data, just dead automated loops running on their own because no one had turned them off.

The last thing to go was the military emergency frequency. It connected once, briefly, to what sounded like an automated distress broadcast on loop — coordinates, a designation code, and then a single human voice underneath the static saying something I could only partially make out before the signal collapsed entirely.

It was safe to assume that most cities had already been destroyed.

The situation was growing darker and more uncertain, especially with Darkness’s plan. There was no way that organization would have been destroyed so easily by a mere horde of monsters.

Even my rushed plan to build a sanctuary had survived, so an organization that operated for decades would have been far better prepared.

To gather answers, I sent out my clone to check the other cities.

In my dragon form, I could travel almost anywhere without delay.

Many flying monsters tried to intercept me along the way. Each one fell quickly under my lightning.

After passing through a couple of ruined cities, one finally caught my attention.

Because the place behind those walls was breathing.

The air inside the city limits didn’t smell like decay; it smelled like an open wound.

As I banked my wings and glided lower, the scale of the horror became clear.

This wasn’t just a ruined city—it was a biological factory.

The skyscrapers, once symbols of human achievement, were now the skeletal framework for somethingdangerous and disgusting dangerous and disgusting

Thick, ropy veins of dark crimson muscle coiled around the concrete, constricting the buildings until the glass shattered and fell like rain.

The "muscles" didn’t just sit there; they twitched in a coordinated beat.

Every few seconds, a low, subsonic thrum vibrated through the air, making my dragon scales itch.

I landed atop a half-collapsed clock tower, my claws digging into the stone.

Below me, the streets were gone, replaced by a carpet of literal flesh.

Movement caught my eye near the city center.

A group of survivors? No. As I focused my vision, I saw figures clad in sleek, high-tech black armor moving with mechanical precision among the fleshy growths.

They weren’t fighting the infestation; they were tending to it.

​One of them held a device to a massive pulsing "heart" embedded in the side of a bank. They were harvesting something.

Darkness hadn’t just survived—they had upgraded. While I was building a sanctuary for life, they were building a monument of death.

Suddenly, the "muscles" on the building nearest to me tensed.

A row of eye-like slits opened along the fleshy vine, all of them swiveling with unnatural speed to lock onto my position.

The screech that tore through the city wasn’t just a sound; it was a physical wave of aggression. The "muscles" lining the skyscrapers rippled, turning from a dull crimson to a bruised, angry purple.

I didn’t wait for them to make the first move.

I pushed off the clock tower, the stone crumbling beneath my weight.

My wings caught the stagnant, humid air, and I banked hard as several of the "pods" hanging from the nearby buildings burst open.

Winged, flayed creatures with elongated limbs and needles for teeth lunged from the sacs.

"USELESS" I let out a low roar, and the static in the air coalesced.

A ring of lightning erupted from my scales in a 360-degree arc, vaporizing the nearest monsters before they could even touch me.