The launch of the sapphire projectile tore an empty pocket tunnel through the dropping crimson fog.
Traveling skyward at blinding speed, Lin Xiao left behind a glowing trail of azure sparks that crackled with stored striking force. The blast wave of his ascent sliced through the lower layers of yin-fire, blowing the nine wailing specters aside like cobwebs caught in a gale. In less than half a second, the two-foot blue sphere climbed five hundred arm-lengths into the roaring storm, arcing with clean, steady care over the lip of Elder Han Gu’s blood platform.
Elder Han Gu was still laughing when the blue blur whistled past his crooked nose.
The sonic backwash whipped the stitched human leather of his robes against his ribs, nearly unseating the skeletal elder from his cloud seat. Han Gu’s triumphant cackle choked in his throat as he jerked his head around. His bulging black eyes tracked the glowing blue orb as it gently crested its apex.
“What in the nine hells...” Han Gu rasped, clutching his dragon-bone staff with whitening knuckles. “How can a brainless water-blob jump five hundred paces straight into the sky?!”
Instead of tumbling back to earth, Lin Xiao deployed tiny fluid fins along his equator. By altering his water’s skin and riding the rising thermals of the cooking pot’s own roasting yin-flames, he slowed to a leisurely hover directly above the five-hundred-foot rim of the Nine-Ghost Blood Soul Cauldron.
From this high vantage, the entire battlefield lay spread beneath him like an autumn picnic rug. He could see the clean, orderly terraces of the safe hall, the gleaming slate roofs of Tie Shan’s fiery workshops, the winding azure ribbon of the Clear-Stone River where Elder Lu Da’s otters swam. The wide expanse of turnip fields currently threatened by black soot.
Four miles to the south, atop the fortified watchtower of the Hundred Treasures Trade Depot, Patriarch Lu Feng held a brass fortune-telling spyglass to his eye. The old merchant’s hands trembled so wildly that the polished lenses rattled in their brass housing.
“Heaven above...” Lu Feng breathed, his merchant assistants crowding around the low roof wall behind him. “That’s the old family Nine-Ghost Blood Soul Cauldron! Thirty years ago, the Blood Sea Sect deployed that exact ancient object to siege the Black Iron Castle. In three days, eighty thousand defenders were melted into blood paste. Why... Why is the Azure Sovereign floating over its rim like a customer inspecting a soup kettle in an open-air night market?!”
Beside Lu Feng, his chief bodyguard swallowed hard, clutching his broadsword. “Patriarch... Look at the blue master’s stance. He isn’t drawing a magic charm. He isn’t running. He looks like he’s deciding whether to ask for extra noodles.”
High in the sky, Lin Xiao dipped his rounded front forward. He peeked into the yawning bronze deep pit below.
“Now that,” Lin Xiao murmured to himself, his telepathic voice full of skilled admiration, “is an extraordinary soup pot.”
The inside of the cooking pot was a cavernous lake of boiling crimson marrow spanning three hundred feet from wall to wall. Giant bubbles of black blood rose from the depths, bursting with heavy, thick, sticky pops that released clouds of green phosphoric steam. Ancient blood-stone carvings, carved into the star-bronze walls by demonic grandmasters thousands of years ago, pulsed with rhythmic scarlet light like the arteries of a living giant beast.
Yet from a culinary standpoint, Lin Xiao found the execution thoroughly disappointing.
“Look at that heat spreading,” Lin Xiao pointed out to the Dao Spirit, floating lazily along the eastern rim while the searing heat buffeted his membrane. “The eastern dragon head is pumping out far too much heat, scorching the sides. Meanwhile, the western corner has cold spots where the marrow is congealing into rubbery fat. Any apprentice line cook would get thrown out of the kitchen for managing a heat source this sloppily.”
“Sky and chemical analysis confirms your watching, Host,” the Dao Spirit responded, her sweet-sounding tone tinged with cold and exact humor. “The cooking pot’s ancient heating arrays exhibit a forty-two percent smooth speed variance across quadrants. Plus, the stone content of the liquid phase is dangerously oversaturated with iron sulfides, rotting black bile, and raw heavy metals. Without a substantial acid counter-agent or aromatic seasoning, consumption would cause severe palate fatigue in standard living organisms.”
“Palate fatigue is putting it mildly,” Lin Xiao thought, wrinkling his jelly-like brow as he sniffed the rising vapors. “It smells like burnt copper nails mixed with bad vinegar and rotten garlic. If you served this at a family banquet, people would call the city judges. The star-bronze itself, though... That’s impressive. Look at those casting seams. Tie Shan would lose his mind over those meteor-iron rivets.”
Before Lin Xiao could complete his metalworking check, the cooking pot reacted to the intruder hovering over its sacred inside.
The boiling marrow erupted.
Thousands of skeletal claws, woven from hardened blood-crystals and weeping ghost-filaments, surged upward from the crimson depths. The nine specters that had been scattered by Lin Xiao’s ascent reformed in the sky above, diving back toward the cooking pot mouth like vultures returning to an open carcass. Their hollow jaws unhinged, spewing waterfalls of emerald soul-melting fire directly into the vat to burn up the little blue visitor.
“DIE IN THE ANCESTRAL MARROW, VILE MAGGOT!” Han Gu screamed from his blood cloud, thrusting his dragon-bone staff down toward the cooking pot’s heart. “Let the hundred thousand souls you pity tear your mind into a million weeping shreds!”
The sky above the cooking pot vanished beneath a falling curtain of green death.
Down on the safe hall walls, several young fox apprentices gasped, burying their faces in their mentors’ silk robes. Tie Shan leaned forward over the low roof wall, his knuckles whitening on his hammer handle.
“Did Master just... Jump into the pot?” a young bear smith stammered, rubbing his furry brow in disbelief. “Tell me he didn’t jump into the demon pot.”
“He jumped,” Tie Shan rumbled, a slow, knowing grin spreading through his graying beard. The titan smith leaned his massive hammer against his hip and chuckled. The sound deep and was ringing like rolling stones. “He didn’t just jump. He looked at that five-hundred-foot demon vessel the exact same way he looked at my iron wok the day I finished polishing it. Heaven help that old monster. He brought a five-hundred-foot soup bowl to a sovereign who lives to eat.”
Beside Tie Shan, Xiao Hei let out a low, approving chuff. The great black wolf sat back on his haunches, his ruby eyes gleaming with total trust.
“The Master swallowed the Crimson Flame Pavilion’s flying swords when he was barely the size of a teacup,” Xiao Hei sent through the pack link. “A bronze kettle won’t give him indigestion.”
Su Ling’er didn’t blink. Her amber eyes remained fixed on the rim of the cooking pot, her three snowy tails swaying gently in the wind. “Watch carefully, little ones,” she told the apprentices. “You’re about to witness the true nature of our Safe hall’s foundation.”
Above the cooking pot, Lin Xiao didn’t dodge the rising forest of blood-claws. He didn’t retreat from the dropping curtain of emerald soul-flame.
Instead, he tilted his round body fully upright, aligning himself with the dead center of the boiling lake below.
“Well,” Lin Xiao muttered cheerfully into the roaring heat, “you can’t properly clean a burnt stockpot from the outside. You have to get right in there with a good scrub brush.”
With a happy, floating wiggle of his rear pseudopods, Lin Xiao pulled his fluid mass into a wind-cutting teardrop.
He plunged downward.
GLOOOOP!
The sound of his entry was shockingly anticlimactic. Against the world-ending thunder of nine screaming giant statues and the ear-splitting roar of three thousand degrees of demonic fire, Lin Xiao’s two-foot blue body struck the boiling surface of the marrow lake with the soft, wet squelch of a plum dropped into congee.
A tiny ring of sapphire ripples spread across the bubbling red surface.
Then, the boiling lake closed over him.
In the crimson sky above, Elder Han Gu froze. He blinked once, then twice, staring at the empty surface of the cooking pot in stunned disbelief.
“He... He dove in?” Han Gu whispered, his voice trembling before erupting into an ear-splitting, frantic cackle that shook the clouds. “AHAHAHAHA! FOOL! LUNATIC! SUICIDAL VERMIN! The Nine-Ghost Blood Lake melts dragons into marrow in three heartbeats! You jumped into your own grave!”
Han Gu raised his skeletal hands, wildly weaving mudras to chant the ancient refinement mantras. He sought to ignite every backup fire array, desperate to boil the blue intruder into royal pill paste before the little beast could try an escape.
Yet deep beneath the surface of the crimson lake, in the total center of the five-hundred-foot cooking pot’s belly, no melting took place.
Surrounded on all sides by three million gallons of boiling rotting marrow, Lin Xiao floated in calm, weightless comfort. The acid-burning yin-acids hissed against his azure skin, but his non-Newtonian cellular bonds simply tightened. That turned the chemical friction into pleasant shaking warmth. It felt no different than slipping into a slightly over-steamed sulfur stone bath after a long day of tending the orchard.
“Broth heat is stabilizing,” Lin Xiao observed, extending two curious sense pseudopods into the boiling dark. “A little peppery, a lot of iron, but surprisingly rich in calcium. Time to open the drain.”
At the very core of his azure existence, a single point of ancient darkness began to spin.