A cool river breeze drifted through the courtyard of Stone-Willow Lane as Kaelen stretched his legs on the morning of their fourth day in Red-River City.
Another full cycle of unbroken slumber beneath the willow arbor had ticked cleanly onto his tally. In his dantian, the bronze channels of the Fallow Slate resonated with tranquil power.
[The Fallow Slate: Stage 2 Tri-Track Accumulation] [Track 1 (Cultivation Vessel): 172h 00m / 720h (173x Multiplier)] [Track 2 (Martial Combat): 72h 00m / 720h (73x Multiplier)] [Track 3 (Alchemy & Comprehension): 172h 00m / 720h (173x Multiplier)] [Current Status: True Fallow State Maintained]
One hundred and seventy-two hours of unbroken rest.
Every breath he took was backed by one hundred and seventy-three times his baseline efficiency. The nine diamond pulses in his chest felt like deep pools of liquid emerald, calm and heavy.
Kaelen slipped into his travel coat, tied his faded hemp belt, and stepped out into the bustling streets.
He needed raw materials. The upcoming breakthrough to Iron Bone Early required massive reserves of purified medicinal essence, and paying retail prices at the guild counters offended his sense of thrift.
Wilted stems of blue night-root crunched beneath Kaelen’s slippers as he poked through the Guild’s bargain herb bins half an hour later.
The rear courtyard of the Nine-Cauldron Herb Exchange smelled of damp earth, crushed mint, and bitter drying roots. While the grand front galleries sold pristine, dew-picked spirit grasses to wealthy young masters for outrageous sums, the back lot was reserved for damaged goods.
Here lay the bruised stalks, the roots clipped by clumsy spades, and the crates rejected by the master alchemists.
Kaelen knelt beside a weathered cedar tub labeled Tier 2 Discards.
With two lazy prods of his bamboo pointer, he pushed aside a layer of moldy lotus seedpods. Beneath them lay thirty knotted, dark-purple tubers of Tier 2 Spirit-Marrow root.
Their skins were scratched, and their root hairs were tangled with river silt, but their inner medicinal core remained completely intact.
“Forty spirit stones for the lot,” the old herb vendor grunted, chewing on a dried clove. “Take it or leave it, kid. Most folks only use them for pig feed.”
“Forty stones it is,” Kaelen said, dropping a pouch of forty Low-Grade Spirit Stones onto the counter. “My pigs have very refined palates.”
The vendor swept the stones into his lockbox, leaving Kaelen’s traveling pouch with a solid balance of five hundred and twenty spirit stones.
Forty stones for thirty bruised roots, Kaelen thought, feeling a wave of deep thriftiness. Once refined with Master Ash’s purity, these discarded tubers will yield at least twenty supreme pills. Paying retail price for herbs is a sickness of the wealthy.
Having completed his transaction, Kaelen showed no desire to rush back into the noisy street.
The morning sun had begun to climb over the tiled roofs of the exchange, casting a warm, golden beam across a stack of empty cedar crates.
Kaelen dragged two crates into the sunlight, kicked his slippers off, and leaned back against the warm brick wall.
He pulled a thick pamphlet titled The Bandit King’s Secret Bride: Book Two from his coat pocket. Then he grabbed an official guild booklet—The Nine-Cauldron Comprehensive Fire-Control Catalog—from a nearby waste barrel and propped it over his forehead as a sunshade.
Settling comfortably against the cedar wood, he began to read.
“You there! You shameless, disrespectful loafer!”
A sharp, furious voice shattered the morning calm.
Kaelen did not move the fire-control catalog. He simply tilted his eyes downward through the gap between the paper and his nose.
Standing three paces away was a nineteen-year-old woman in an alchemist’s high-collared gray robe, her meridians radiating the steady, tempered heat of the Iron Bone Early realm.
Despite her Iron Bone Early cultivation, she looked as if she hadn’t slept since the previous solstice. Dark purple hollows hung beneath her eyes like bruised plums, and her bloodshot sclera were webbed with crimson veins.
A wooden abacus hung from her left wrist, and two leather scroll cases were jammed under her right arm.
“Are you addressing me, or the crate?” Kaelen asked mildly from beneath his sunshade. “The crate is very sturdy, but its conversational skills are limited.”
“You’re using the sacred Fire-Control Catalog of Senior Master Wu to block the sun!” she cried, her voice cracking with exhaustion and outrage.
She stamped her cloth boot against the stone flags, sending a small cloud of dried herb dust into the air.
“Do you have any idea how many hours of meditation went into those flame formulas?” she demanded. “And you... you’re lying on vegetable crates reading a trashy mortal romance!”
“Book Two is actually quite dramatic,” Kaelen replied, turning a page. “The bandit king just discovered his bride is a secret martial inspector. The plot moves at a brisk pace.”
People who yell before lunch are always deficient in liver Yin, Kaelen noted silently. Her bloodshot eyes tell me she has been awake for at least three days straight. Truly, industrious people are their own worst enemies.
The girl snatched the fire-control catalog off his forehead, clutching it to her chest like a rescued orphan.
Her brass guild badge gleamed in the sunlight: Alchemist Linnea, Tier 2 Candidate, Grand Vice-President’s Hall.
Grand Vice-President Harlan’s granddaughter, Kaelen recalled from Deacon Vane’s collateral notes. The girl who had to pawn her grandfather’s ancestral Tier 3 Earth-Fire Cauldron to Young Master Orson Junior to pay for the old man’s medicine.
“The preliminary furnace audit is in three days!” Linnea lectured, her finger shaking as she pointed at his nose. “If I don’t take first place, Orson Junior keeps my grandfather’s Tier 3 Earth-Fire Cauldron forever! True alchemists spend twenty hours a day refining their spiritual sense and studying twenty-four sacred minerals until their fingers bleed!”
“That sounds exhausting,” Kaelen said. “And messy. Bleeding on the herbs spoils the flavor.”
Linnea’s face burned with indignity. “You dare mock the sacred art? Look at you! A country bumpkin in a faded bathrobe buying trash roots from the discard bin! You probably don’t even know the difference between fire and ice herbs!”
“Roots are roots,” Kaelen said, closing his romance pamphlet with a quiet sigh. “They go in the water, they boil, and then you drink tea.”
“Ignorant fool!” Linnea snapped, her pride as the Vice-President’s granddaughter flaring to the surface.
She spun around, grabbed a wide wicker basket from the sorting bench, and slammed it down onto the crate between them.
The basket contained a chaotic, tangled mess of a hundred freshly harvested stalks. Half were crimson Scorch-Leaves with barbed stems, and half were pale-blue Frost-Ferns with needle-like fronds.
“These two herbs grew entangled in the northern greenhouse,” Linnea declared, crossing her arms with smug defiance. “Scorch-Leaf releases explosive fire vapor if snapped too quickly; Frost-Fern crumbles to powder if chilled by sudden wind. To sort them, an apprentice must use delicate finger Qi to trace each individual stem for forty minutes!”
She shoved the basket toward Kaelen’s chest.
“Sort this basket by hand without damaging a single leaf,” Linnea challenged. “If you can’t, you’ll hand over your testing badge and leave the Nine-Cauldron Guild forever!”
Kaelen looked at the tangled wicker basket. Then he looked at Linnea’s twitching, bloodshot left eye.
“Forty minutes?” Kaelen murmured. “Forty minutes of finger work sounds terrible. My wrist would get stiff.”
“Then admit your incompetence and crawl back to your marsh!” Linnea declared, raising her chin.
Kaelen stood up slowly, stretching his spine with a soft pop. He did not circulate a single strand of Qi. He did not focus his spiritual sense.
He simply picked up the entire wicker basket with both hands.
He turned toward the courtyard’s stone water trough—a ten-foot basin fed by a clean mountain spring, used by vendors to wash root vegetables.
SPLASH.
Without hesitation, Kaelen dumped the entire hundred-stalk mess straight into the deep water.
“No!” Linnea screamed, clutching her head in horror. “You idiot! You just ruined fifty spirit stones worth of medicinal grass!”
“Watch the water, plum-eyes,” Kaelen said calmly.
Linnea froze.
In the clear water of the trough, nature took its course.
The crimson Scorch-Leaves possessed thick, hollow stems filled with natural marsh-fire vapor—a botanical trait that made them volatile when dried, but buoyant as cork in cold water. Every single red stalk immediately bobbed to the surface, floating in a neat, tangled mat.
Meanwhile, the pale-blue Frost-Ferns were dense with heavy mineral salts absorbed from northern granite. The moment they hit the water, they sank like lead weights, settling quietly onto the flat stone bottom of the basin.
The separation was total, instantaneous, and completely undamaged.
Total elapsed time: eight seconds.
Linnea stood as still as a carved granite statue. Her mouth hung open, and her abacus dangled loosely from her limp wrist.
“Hollow stems float,” Kaelen said, reaching into the trough.
With one smooth sweep of his hand, he scooped the fifty floating Scorch-Leaves out of the water and dumped them onto a clean drying mat. Then he reached down and scooped the fifty submerged Frost-Ferns into a separate wicker tray.
He wiped his wet hands on his bathrobe and picked up his sack of bruised Spirit-Marrow roots.
“One hundred sorted herbs,” Kaelen said, looking at the stunned alchemist. “Total time spent: ten seconds. No Qi wasted, no fingers injured, and thirty-nine minutes saved for reading.”
Linnea lunged toward the drying mat, her trembling hands seizing a crimson Scorch-Leaf stem.
She brought it to her nose, sniffing frantically for ruptured sap. Then she pinched the hollow stem between two fingers, checking the delicate outer skin for thermal fractures.
There was not a single crack. The flammable marsh-fire vapor remained sealed within the buoyant core, perfectly protected by the plant’s natural waxy layer.
She dropped to her knees by the water trough, scooping up three pale-blue Frost-Ferns. The needle fronds were intact, cold and crisp against her skin, their heavy mineral salts undisturbed by the brief bath.
“They’re completely undamaged,” Linnea whispered, her voice trembling with disbelief. “The volatile oil didn’t ignite. The frost needles didn’t dissolve. It... it actually worked.”
“Of course it worked,” Kaelen said, setting his sack of bruised roots over his shoulder. “Plants grow in rainstorms. If five seconds of mountain spring water ruined them, they would have gone extinct a thousand years ago.”
“B-but the textbooks,” Linnea stammered, looking up from the stone flags. “The Academy doctrine specifies twenty minutes of gradual Qi warmth to separate conflicting elements.”
“Textbooks are written by scholars who get paid by the page,” Kaelen replied mildly. “The more complicated they make it sound, the more tuition they can charge your grandfather. It is a very respectable scam.”
Linnea’s jaw worked silently, but no sound came out. Her bloodshot eyes stared from the sorted trays to Kaelen’s calm face, her mind completely unable to process what had just happened.
Every manual on herbal sorting spends twenty pages on thermal sensitivity, she thought in dizzying shock. Every senior master taught me to pluck them stem by stem with jade tweezers. How did he... why didn’t anyone just use water?
“Alchemist Linnea,” Kaelen murmured, adjusting his straw hat.
The girl blinked, her bloodshot eyes snapping back to his face. “W-what?”
“Your eyeballs look like pickled plums,” Kaelen said frankly. “If you keep staring at fire catalogs without sleeping, your liver fire will burn through your temples and turn your hair white before you turn twenty.”
He turned and began strolling toward the courtyard exit, his slippers scuffing lazily against the gravel.
“Go home, drink some warm pear soup, and take a twelve-hour nap,” Kaelen called over his shoulder. “The world will still be here when you wake up.”
Linnea stood rooted to the flagstones for a long time, watching his faded robe disappear into the crowded herb market.
“Pickled plums?” she muttered to herself, her cheeks flaming with embarrassment and indignation. “He called my eyes pickled plums!”
She stamped her foot in fury, kicking a loose pebble across the yard. But as she looked down at the empty cedar crate where Kaelen had been lounging, something caught her attention.
Lying on the wood was a scrap of folded greasepaper Kaelen had dropped from his pocket when retrieving his romance pamphlet.
Linnea knelt down and picked it up.
On the front was a faded, oil-stained recipe for scallion flatbread, marked with garlic measurements and lard notes.
Linnea scoffed and prepared to crumple it into a ball, but then her eyes caught the charcoal sketches drawn across the reverse side.
Her breath caught in her throat.
Drawn with quick, careless strokes of a burnt twig was the cross-section of a three-tier subterranean alchemy flue labeled Booth 44 Bypass. Beside the sketch were six mathematical ratios detailing thermal expansion, draft intake, and sulfur-slag condensation.
Linnea’s hands began to tremble.
Kaelen had merely doodled a vent-angle adjustment to vent the sabotaged exhaust flues in Guild Trial Booth 44, yet the ratios applied to the entire tower. For the past three weeks, Furnace Hall Nine had been plagued by backfiring flames that stumped three senior guild deacons.
The rough charcoal scribble on this greasepaper did not just address the problem.
With four simple geometry lines and two draft ratios, it solved the entire furnace blockage in five seconds of deadpan logic.
Her fingers tightened around the greasy paper as a chill washed through her chest.
The lazy beggar in the faded bathrobe had not just doodled a flue.
He had rewritten the core thermal doctrine of the Nine-Cauldron Guild.