Back in the courtyard, Austin opened his character screen.
“More stamina. Good.”
He rolled his neck until it popped. His lower back already felt better. After twenty years of carrying plywood and forcing crooked boards into place, he appreciated anything that spared his spine.
“Five percent isn’t a full health plan, but it beats living on painkillers.” He looked at the new command. “And /ignite_hearth sounds like a fancy pilot light. Fine. A man can’t live on radioactive chicken eggs. I need some vegetables.”
He chose the southeast corner of the courtyard for an oven. That morning, he had hauled several pieces of dense black stone up from the cliff. Back home, building a stone bread oven would have taken all day and a pile of special materials. Every joint had to be buttered to three-eighths of an inch, or the dome cracked on its first fire. Here, he had no schedule and no inspector but himself.
Austin set four slabs in a horseshoe against the cliff. He used two salvaged iron spikes to hold them in place, knocked off the jagged edges, and checked the shape by eye.
“Close enough for rough work.”
He put his hand on the top stone and activated the command.
[/ignite_hearth | Target: Stone Oven | Temperature: 1,400°C]
Violet-white fire jumped from his palm into the stone. The edges softened and flowed together. Within seconds, the joints had sealed into smooth black glass, with no mortar and no gaps.
Austin knocked on the dome. It rang like cast iron.
“Clean seal. Good draft. That’ll cook.”
Behind a broken basket in the lean-to, he found six shriveled mountain radishes. The old Chu Yuan had dug them up weeks earlier. They were dirty, tough, and probably bitter.
Austin scrubbed them with straw, cut lines across their skins, and sprinkled them with crushed wild pepper seeds. Then he laid them on a flat stone and slid it into the oven.
He bent to the air vent and blew gently.
Whuff.
Pale fire filled the dome. The radishes puffed up as their skins turned gold. Sweet syrup bubbled through the cuts and sizzled on the hot stone.
Four minutes later, a ribbon of lavender smoke curled from the vent and drifted down the mountain.
It smelled like roasted roots, butter, and honey, with a sharp hint of approaching rain.
Austin’s stomach growled.
“Now that’s proper food.” He tapped his bamboo tongs against the hearth. “Whoever designed the cooking system deserves a raise. If this game ever gets a trade server, I’m opening a diner on this ridge.”
***
Half a mile down the southern trail, twenty Iron Sword Hall disciples crouched behind limestone boulders, sweating through their leather armor.
“Young Master Bai,” Senior Brother Shen whispered. His teeth chattered. “We have to go back. You heard that thing underground. An Earth-Fiend screamed like a beaten dog and buried itself!”
“Shut up, Shen.”
Bai Chen crouched behind a juniper bush with his silk slippers sunk in red mud. His knees were shaking too, but greed kept his jaw set.
“You think Chu Yuan commands demons? He couldn’t command a three-legged mule. His spirit roots failed three years ago. That was an old ward left by the Founding Ancestor. The beggar set it off by accident.”
“But the sky turned purple—”
“A single-use charm! One charge, and now it’s gone.” Bai Chen wiped mud from his cheek with a trembling sleeve. “If he had real power, would he wear rags and dig weeds with a rusty hoe? The treasure is right there. Help me take it before the inner elders notice, and my father will make you an inner deacon. You’ll get five bottles of Foundation Pills too. Or would you rather spend forty years scraping rust off practice swords?”
Shen swallowed. Fear told him to run. The promise of a breakthrough told him to stay.
Then the wind changed.
Warm air rolled down from Sunset Peak, carrying the rich smell of Austin’s lunch.
Shen sniffed.
His back snapped straight. His pupils widened, and his sweaty fingers dropped his sword.
The sweet vapor filled his lungs. His sluggish qi surged through his spirit veins like water through a broken dam. An old blockage near his tailbone, left by a sword wound seven years earlier, broke apart with a sharp internal snap.
Golden light shone through his skin. His lungs cleared, his shoulders loosened, and the barrier that had trapped him in Early Foundation Establishment for nearly ten years vanished.
“The smell...” Shen clutched his throat as tears filled his eyes. “My spirit veins are clear!”
Behind him, the other disciples dropped their weapons.
“My injured wrist is healed!”
“My frost-lung is gone! I can breathe!”
“It’s an immortal medicine! Someone opened the Patriarch’s hidden store!”
Bai Chen took a deep breath. The spiritual energy in the vapor struck his dantian like a hammer. His eyes bulged.
“A Dao-Marrow Pill!” he shrieked, scrambling to his feet. “The cripple found the Patriarch’s stash! Attack! Even the smoke can push us toward Golden Core! Charge!”
He took two steps.
CRACK—BOOM!
A streak of green and violet sword light tore through the clouds. The shock wave shook loose gravel from the cliffs and sliced the tops off thirty pines in the gorge.
An old man descended on a flying sword. His white hair and beard were wild. His patched hemp robes were stained with herbs and spotted with burn marks. His bloodshot eyes had the wild look of a man who had not slept in days.
He carried a six-ton bronze alchemy cauldron by one leg as easily as a butcher carrying a mallet.
The pressure of a Golden Core elder rolled down the slope and pinned Bai Chen’s group to the ground.
“E-Elder Mu?” Bai Chen squeaked.
Elder Mu Chen ran the Medicine Pavilion. The three-hundred-year-old recluse had sealed himself inside the underground magma vents forty years earlier, swearing not to return until he made the legendary Nine-Solar Reversal Pill.
He didn’t even glance at the terrified disciples. His eyes were fixed on the lavender smoke above Sunset Peak.
A tearful grin spread across his sooty face.
“Purple Cloud Dao Vapor! That is the medicine I have been trying to make for three hundred years!”
He jumped off his sword and plunged toward the ridge. His knees struck Austin’s black courtyard at terrible speed. Still clutching his cauldron, he slid across the glass in a shower of sparks, heading straight for Austin’s lunch.