The midday sun beat down through the emerald iron-bamboo canopy. It cast dapple-patterned gold across the singing waters of the Clear Stream River. On a sun-warmed granite flat stone slab at the water’s edge, Lin Xiao rested his jelly-like azure form, gently swaying like a giant drop of morning dew. Inside his semi-clear belly, the little golden-veined carp drifted in languid circles, fluttering its chest muscle fins against the cool, clean fluid.
Beside him, Old Ba lay sprawled on his belly, his leathery neck extended as far as it would stretch to soak in the heat. For four hundred years, the ancient iron-shell tortoise had endured damp river mud, seasonal floods, and the occasional humiliation of getting stuck between river stones. But rarely had he enjoyed such dignified warmth.
“I tell you, young master,” Old Ba rumbled, his raspy voice shaking through the flat rock beneath them like a distant grindstone, “in all my four hundred summers swimming between the Crimson Ridge and the Southern Marsh, I’ve never seen a water spirit of your caliber. Shattering seventeen tons of granite with a single spit of water! It took the river god three dynasties to carve that gorge, yet you remodeled the channel before my moss could dry.”
Lin Xiao gave a small, rhythmic wobble of amusement. “I didn’t remodel anything, Old Ba. It was a simple high-pressure blockage. When water backs up behind an unstable gravel dam, you don’t fight the mass. You identify the fracture line and apply focused smooth-flowing pressure. Basic hydrostatics.”
Old Ba blinked his milky amber eyes, the wrinkles around his beak deepening into a mask of pure, confused respect. Smooth-flowing pressure? High-pressure blockage? Ah, the deep lexicon of the Primordial River Dao. Every word is steeped in the ancient mechanics of the Great Void!
“Indeed, indeed,” Old Ba agreed solemnly. He nodded his heavy snout until his chin tapped the granite. “The Dao of heaven is without contention, yet it cuts through mountain stone like heated lard. A deep truth. But master, you must remain vigilant. This outer ridge of the Grand Lonely Forest is no longer the peaceful safe hall it was two hundred years ago.”
“Oh?” Lin Xiao perked up, extending a pair of curious blue eye-nodes on his upper surface. “What kind of trouble comes through here?”
The old tortoise’s leathery neck tensed, his gaze shifting warily toward the jagged purple peaks rising beyond the western tree line.
“Human fighters,” Old Ba spat, a bitter edge entering his gravelly deep. “Specifically, the students and mercenary hounds of the Crimson Flame Pavilion and the Iron Vulture Gang. To the east lies the mortal border of the Azure Cloud Realm, where petty mortal kingdoms war over copper and silk. But to the west, beyond the Ironwood Gorges, the Crimson Flame Pavilion rules the mountain passes. They view our forest not as living land, but as an open medicine garden to be plundered.”
Lin Xiao’s inner core pulsed with mild concern. “Medicine garden?”
“They set rusted bone-traps—like the vile snare you devoured this morning—along every watering hole,” Old Ba explained grimly. “They slaughter spirit wolves for their pelts, butcher horned serpents for their gallbladders, and dredge the river beds to capture rare aquatic spirits. Any beast possessing even a wisp of old family blood is dragged off in iron chains to be melted in their pill furnaces or sold as novelties in the southern auction houses. That rusted snare would have drained my life-essence into an alchemy pellet in three days had you not rolled out of the clouds.”
Inside Lin Xiao’s core, the little golden carp trembled. He pressed itself closer to the warm, reassuring center of the slime’s mass. Lin Xiao felt the tiny fish’s heartbeat through his fluid matrix and gently pulsed a wave of soothing, oxygen-rich qi over its gold-trimmed scales.
So the training world is just as cutthroat as the old web novels described, Lin Xiao mused. His mind drifted back to his mortal days of endless freight spreadsheets. Corporations cutting corners, poachers setting illegal snares, and greedy young masters treating the living world like an extractive strip mine. Some things never change, whether you have a spine or not.
“Well,” Lin Xiao said aloud, his voice rippling through the air like a clear bronze bell, “they can set all the rusted traps they want. If they leave them in my river, I’ll just eat them. Steel has a decent stone crunch once you strip the corpse poison.”
Old Ba shuddered with deep admiration. To treat spiritual iron snares soaked in rotting venom as crunchy snacks... What impossible to understand ancient beast ancestor did this blue sphere go down from?
The tortoise pushed himself up on his stout, webbed legs. “Master, words alone can’t repay the grace of saving my aged shell. If your venerable self would permit, allow this old servant to guide you to the upper terrace behind the ruined tea shrine. Before the human hunters drove the wild folk away, that terrace was tended by a hermit monk. The tea bushes still drink from an earth-heat vein, and wild spirit yams grow beneath the black loam.”
At the mention of tea and yams, Lin Xiao’s entire jelly body bounced three inches into the air.
“Tea? Real mountain tea?” Lin Xiao asked, his sapphire surface shimmering with undisguised excitement. “And sweet yams? Lead the way, Old Ba! Lead the way right now!”
Leaving the babbling brook behind, the unlikely pair wound their way up the moss-covered stone steps that climbed the eastern slope of the ravine. Decades of neglect had allowed wild creepers and thick bamboo shoots to crack the ancient paving. But Old Ba’s thick claws pushed aside the underbrush with seasoned familiarity.
Lin Xiao didn’t even need to push. He simply tightened his stretchy mass into a compact sphere and rolled up the slope, effortlessly hopping over exposed tree roots and fallen branches with the floating bounce of a high-grade rubber ball. The physical freedom of his slime body continued to amaze him. No creaking knee joint padding, no shortness of breath, and no sweat soaking through a polyester collar.
Fifty yards above the river, hidden behind a curtain of wild flowering jasmine, lay a secluded mountain terrace.
The air here was noticeably warmer. Steam drifted in thin, fragrant ribbons from fissures in the dark stone floor. There, a natural earth-heat spring bubbled into a shallow rock hollow before trickling down the cliff. Flanking the warm spring were several ancient, gnarled tea bushes with deep emerald leaves veiled in glistening morning dew. Along the terraced slope, thick, heart-shaped vines spilled across the dark loam, their swollen tuber roots bulging out of the rich earth.
“Cloud-Mist Iron-Bamboo Tea,” Old Ba said with deep awe, pointing with his leathery snout. “A wild spiritual cultivar. The leaves absorb the pure Yang fire of the earth-heat spring by day and the cool Yin mist of the river gorge by night. And those dark tubers are Earth-Marrow Yams. In the old days, passing immortals would trade three spirit stones for a single roasted tuber.”
Lin Xiao didn’t care about spirit stones. He cared about lunch.
Extending two slender, see-through blue tendrils, Lin Xiao carefully plucked twenty plump, dew-kissed tea leaves from the highest branches. He then probed the dark fiery loam. He wrapped his tendrils around four massive, forearm-sized purple yams. Then he slid them smoothly out of the soft dirt without snapping their delicate root fibers.
“Omniscient Dao Spirit, scan targets!” Lin Xiao commanded inwardly.
The crisp bronze bell rang through his spiritual sea, with a clean, glowing display:
Thermal Regulation? Lin Xiao’s core thrummed with pure, pure culinary ecstasy. Wait, Dao Spirit... Does this mean what I think it means?
“Affirmative, Host,” the calm female voice replied within his mind. “By synthesizing the underground Yang-fire marrow of the earth-heat loam with the high-sky Yin dew of the tea leaves, your Primordial Chaos Void has established internal heat-powered balance. You may now exactly modulate the surface heat of your fluid matrix between minus twenty degrees and one hundred and eighty degrees without suffering cellular fading away or breakdown loss.”
I’m a self-heating teapot, Lin Xiao realized, his semi-clear azure dome quivering with joy. I’m literally a mobile, heat-controlled, multi-stage culinary vessel!
He didn’t hesitate for a single second.
Lin Xiao slid the four massive spirit yams into a small pocket of his internal void. Instead of dissolving them into raw elemental qi, he channeled dry radiant Yang heat through his fluid pocket, slowly baking the tubers from the inside out. Within three minutes, the thick purple skins blistered and split, releasing an intoxicating, honey-sweet aroma of caramelized sugar and roasted earth that filled the sunlit terrace.
Meanwhile, he drew three cups of clean, ice-cold mountain spring water into a separated chamber near his upper surface. Activating his newly got heat control, he heated the water just shy of a rolling boil—the total golden standard for high-mountain green tea. He dropped the fresh Cloud-Mist leaves into the chamber.
Through his see-through blue membrane, Old Ba watched in stunned, slack-jawed silence as the clear water inside the blue slime turned a glowing, glowing jade-gold. Delicate eddies of emerald steam rose from a small sky-slit at the top of Lin Xiao’s body, carrying the fragrant, crisp scent of wild mountain bamboo, roasted chestnuts, and morning rain.
“Old Ba,” Lin Xiao called out cheerfully. He extended a tendril to scoop up two broad, clean lotus leaves from the spring pool. “Hold out your paws!”
Old Ba, his eyes wide as teacups, instinctively held out his broad webbed feet.
With gentle care, Lin Xiao deposited two steaming, caramelized roast yams onto the lotus leaf before the ancient tortoise. Then, curling another tendril into the shape of a smooth bamboo ladle, Lin Xiao poured a steaming stream of fragrant jade tea into a hollow stone cup resting beside the old beast.
“Eat up, Grandpa,” Lin Xiao said. He took a warm, caramelized yam into his own stomach chamber and savoring the rich, buttery sweetness that melted across his taste nodes. “Fresh roasted sweet yams and a pot of ninety-two-degree Cloud-Mist tea. Life doesn’t get much better than this.”
Old Ba stared down at the split purple tuber. The flesh inside was glowing amber-gold, weeping sticky, fragrant syrup. He took a hesitant, trembling bite with his toothless beak.
The rich, caramelized sweetness burst across his ancient palate, followed right away by a surging current of pure, warm earth-essence that flooded his aged spirit veins. The chronic chill that had plagued his shell joints for two hundred years dissolved like morning frost under a summer sun. He took a sip of the jade tea. The crisp, cleansing liquor cleared the murky fog from his spiritual sea, sharpening his vision until he could count the single veins on the bamboo leaves sixty paces away.
Tears welled in the corners of Old Ba’s milky eyes, dripping into the moss beneath his snout.
“In four hundred years,” the old tortoise whispered, his voice trembling with deep, almost religious awe, “every human fighter who walked these ridges brought nothing but slaughter, arrogance, and cold iron. They demanded my core to extend their worthless lives. Yet you... A supreme entity who commands the ancient fire of the earth and the sky dew of the heavens... You use the Dao of Yin and Yang to roast sweet yams for an old turtle.”
Old Ba pressed his forehead against the warm flat stone slab, trembling in heartfelt devotion.
“The highest good is truly like water,” Old Ba murmured into the stone. “It nourishes all things and demands nothing. Master Lin, this withered shell will follow you to the ends of the azure sky.”
Lin Xiao, floating contentedly in a puddle of warm earth-heat water while sipping his own internal tea, wobbled his jelly in peaceful delight.
A warm bath, caramelized sweet potatoes, and a loyal philosopher turtle, Lin Xiao thought. He looked out over the misty forest canopy. Whoever said being a slime was a downgrade clearly didn’t understand the simple joys of breakfast.