The silver light behind Kaelen’s eyes solidified into cold, polished runes.
[The Fallow Slate: Stage 1 — Mortal Tally] [Abstinence Cashed: 100 Hours] [Multiplier Active: 101x] [Burst Window: 59 Minutes, 59 Seconds Remaining] [Conversion Rate: 1 Burst Minute = 101 Baseline Hours]
Outside, wood groaned under another heavy kick. The painted porch sign clattered against the fence slats as Douglas roared a string of foul curses.
“Open up, you crippled rat!”
Kaelen didn’t blink. He sat upright on the hay bale, rolling his shoulders until his spine gave three satisfying pops.
Four days of reading trash, Kaelen thought. Now I have fifty-nine minutes to do four months of work before Douglas kicks through the inner latch.
“Kaelen!” Barnaby’s single hand shook as he held the iron fire-poker leveled at the splintering door. “Get Mina behind the drying racks! I will hold them off!”
“Put the poker down, Old Barnaby,” Kaelen said mildly. “You’ll throw your good shoulder out.”
“Are you insane?” Barnaby shouted, spit flying from his white mustache. “He is Rank 5! He will crush your skull like a dry gourd!”
Kaelen ignored him. He slid off the hay bale, his bare feet touching the cold flagstones.
With the 101x multiplier humming through his mind, the world moved with eerie clarity. The dust motes floating in the midday sunbeam seemed frozen in midair. He could hear the crunch of Douglas’s boots, the erratic fluttering of Mina’s terrified pulse, and the faint hiss of coal embers in the corner brazier.
Kaelen stepped over to the scarred pine workbench.
A yellowed parchment scroll lay pinned beneath an empty teacup. It was the Vance Frost-Pine Breath Manual, open to the second circulation diagram. Beside it rested a greasy bamboo strip detailing the Tier 1 Marrow-Warming Pill formula.
Kaelen looked down at the parchment.
[Comprehension Engaged: 101x Acceleration]
In baseline time, studying an unfamiliar meridian circulation chart took hours of meditation. A disciple had to trace the spirit pathways, calculate the pressure points, and test the flow drop by drop.
Now, one second of focused reading equaled nearly two full hours of deep study.
Kaelen’s gaze swept over the bamboo strip’s Tier 1 Marrow-Warming Pill formula, memorizing its heat ratios in ten seconds, before shifting to the breath scroll. The inked channels peeled off the paper to form a glowing meridian figure in his mind.
There, Kaelen noted silently.
The fifth meridian path dipped sharply beneath the collarbone before looping back into the lower chest. It looked like an ordinary stabilizing loop, but with cold poison lodged in the Second Meridian, that loop acted as a funnel that drove frigid Qi straight into the bone marrow.
The second flaw was even nastier. The exhalation rhythm skipped the throat gate, trapping stagnant chill inside the lungs.
Madam Evelyn really wanted me dead, Kaelen thought with a faint smirk. She disguised a meridian execution trap as a family heirloom.
He picked up a dry charcoal stylus from the bench. With two quick, fluid strokes, he crossed out the collarbone loop and drew a direct line from the third pulse gate to the palm channels.
[Comprehension Complete: Tier 1 Marrow-Warming Pill Formula & Vance Frost-Pine Breath Manual (Corrected)] [Time Elapsed: 60 Seconds (101 Baseline Hours equivalent)] [Mastery: Proficient]
Sixteen breaths had passed in the physical room.
Outside, Douglas slammed his shoulder against the outer gate. The iron latch snapped, and the gate crashed open against the stone courtyard wall.
“Old cripple!” Douglas bellowed, his heavy steps stomping across the flagstones toward the inner shed door. “You’ve got five seconds to drop to your knees!”
Kaelen turned away from the desk. “Old Barnaby, where are the bruised winter-roots?”
Barnaby stared at him like he was speaking a dead foreign language. “The... the what?”
“The bruised roots,” Kaelen repeated patiently. “The discard pile from yesterday’s sorting. The ones the main pharmacy refused.”
“In the bottom wicker basket,” Barnaby stammered, pointing his poker toward the corner. “Kaelen, what in heaven’s name are you doing? Douglas is three paces from the threshold!”
Kaelen walked to the corner, knelt by the wicker basket, and scooped up a double handful of shriveled, dark brown tubers. They were common iron-frost roots and sulfur grasses, bruised during harvest and destined for the mulch pit. The entire pile was worth maybe ten silver taels at market value.
Kaelen tossed ten silver taels from his pouch onto the wooden table to balance the shed ledger, leaving himself with four silver taels and thirty-two copper bits.
“Ten silver for the scrap,” Kaelen murmured.
He turned toward the small iron stew-pot sitting on an unlit charcoal brazier. It was the same pot Barnaby used to boil turnip soup. The cast iron was pitted, grease-stained, and cracked along the rim.
Barnaby’s one eye widened. “You cannot refine medicine in a stew-pot! Where is your bronze cauldron? Where is the cleansing brine?”
“A cauldron is just metal that holds heat,” Kaelen said. “The fire does the work.”
And five minutes at 101x is five hundred hours of constant furnace practice, Kaelen thought. If five hundred hours of alchemy can’t produce a basic warming pill from an iron pot, Old Barnaby should hit me with his ladle.
Kaelen blew a single puff of breath into the brazier.
A spark caught the spirit-charcoal. A dull red glow flared beneath the iron pot.
Kaelen dropped the bruised roots into the dry pot without chopping them. He reached out with both hands, placing his palms flat against the pitted iron walls.
[Alchemy Engaged: 101x Acceleration]
The heat spiked instantly.
To Barnaby, Kaelen simply stood there with his hands resting on a cold cooking pot. But inside the pot, the temperature rocketed from room warmth to a blinding white furnace in less than three seconds.
The bruised tubers didn’t burn to ash. Under the accelerated vibration of Kaelen’s intent, the black rot and dirty outer skins vaporized into odorless steam. The pure, medicinal sap pooled at the bottom of the iron basin like liquid amber.
Barnaby stepped forward, his mouth falling open. “Wait. The impurity steam is clear? Where is the black smoke?”
In standard pill-refining, burning away plant impurities produced thick, choking clouds of dark soot. Even a master alchemist had to vent the slag through bronze flues.
Here, the heat rose so fast and with such terrifying precision that the impurities never had time to burn. They simply ceased to exist.
Mina stopped shivering. She sniffed the air, her pale brows knitting together. “It smells like sweet honey.”
Kaelen rotated his wrists.
Inside the iron pot, the liquid amber separated into ten perfect, glowing spheres. The swirling medicinal liquid condensed, hardened, and began to spin with high-pitched hums.
Faint white mist drifted out from beneath the pot’s lid. The mist didn’t dissipate. It clung to the iron rim, curling into three distinct, cloud-like rings that hovered over the cooling metal.
[Alchemy Complete: Tier 1 Marrow-Warming Pill x10] [Purity: 100% (Cloud-Veined Supreme)] [Pill-Poison: 0%] [Time Elapsed: 5 Minutes (505 Baseline Hours equivalent)]
Kaelen lifted his hands from the pot. The cast iron was red-hot, but his skin didn’t show a single blister.
He tipped the pot slightly. Ten glossy, pearl-sized pills rolled out onto the scarred pine table with a gentle wooden clatter.
Each pill was translucent crimson, with three spiraling white cloud veins etched into the hard surface. A wave of dry, clean warmth rolled through the shed, banishing the chill that had hung in the room for days.
Barnaby dropped the iron fire-poker.
The heavy tool struck the flagstones with a loud clang, but the old man didn’t look down. He stumbled toward the table, his single eye bulging so far it looked ready to pop from the socket.
“Cloud... Cloud-Veined Supreme?” Barnaby choked on his own spit. He reached a trembling finger toward the pills, then snatched it back as if afraid they would vanish. “No Pill-Poison? Zero residue?”
Barnaby looked up at Kaelen, his face completely pale. “In an iron soup pot? Without an herb flame? In five minutes?”
“The pot has good heat retention,” Kaelen said modestly. “Old grease adds flavor.”
“Are you possessed?” Barnaby hissed, clutching his head with his lone hand. “The Vance Clan’s Chief Alchemist has worked thirty years and never refined a single Cloud-Veined Supreme! Even Standard-Grade pills carry twenty-five percent Pill-Poison! These ten pills could buy a street in Ashford!”
“They’re not for sale,” Kaelen said.
He picked up two of the warm crimson spheres.
Without a second thought, he popped both pills into his mouth and swallowed them dry.
Barnaby shrieked. “You swallowed two at once? The Yang heat will burn your meridians to charcoal!”
The Yang heat won’t burn anything, Kaelen thought. It’s about to do three years of plumbing in sixty seconds.
The pills dissolved on his tongue like hot honey. A river of molten sunlight rushed down his throat, pooling directly in his lower dantian.
[Cultivation Engaged: 101x Acceleration]
Kaelen sat back down on the hay bale, crossing his legs loosely. He drew a deep breath through his nose, circulating the corrected Vance Frost-Pine Breath Manual.
In his lower dantian, the pure Yang essence met the stagnant frost from the three-year-old poisoned arrow.
Usually, when opposing elements collided in the body, the cultivator experienced agony. Meridian walls tore, blood boiled, and internal organs suffered concussive shock.
But Kaelen’s circulation was running at 101 times normal speed.
Every microsecond of friction was smoothed out by hundreds of rapid, microscopic adjustments. The Yang fire didn’t smash into the cold blockage; it enveloped it like boiling oil poured over a thin sliver of river ice.
HISS.
A faint plume of grey, foul-smelling steam drifted from Kaelen’s ears and the pores of his shoulders.
Inside his Second Meridian, the dark blue toxin that had crippled him for three years dissolved into harmless grey vapor. The pulse gate snapped open with a deep, echoing resonance that rattled his ribcage.
[Second Meridian Unsealed] [Meridian Toxin Fully Cleansed]
The flow of Qi didn’t stop.
The remaining medicinal energy of two 100% pure Supreme Pills was enormous. Without any Pill-Poison to clog the pathways, the clean spiritual force flooded into his Third Meridian like a raging spring river.
Crack.
The Third Meridian unsealed.
[Mortal Pulse Rank 3 Reached]
Kaelen exhaled a steady stream of warm air. His pulse quickened, his heartbeat thudding with the steady cadence of a war drum. His muscles expanded slightly, shedding the lingering lethargy of three years of sickness.
The pure medicinal power surged forward, slamming into the fourth pulse gate at the base of his spine.
Crack.
[Mortal Pulse Rank 4 Reached]
The entire breakthrough took barely five minutes of physical time.
Kaelen opened his eyes, and the dull grey haze that had clouded his vision for three years was gone. His senses were razor-sharp, drinking in the cool air and the dense hum of Rank 4 Qi coursing through four clear meridians.
He glanced at the eight remaining pills on the desk.
He scooped them up and dropped them into an empty ceramic ointment jar, tucking the jar into his sleeve.
Mina stood beside the workbench, her mouth open in stunned silence. She looked at Kaelen’s face, then down at his arms. The blue lines beneath his skin had completely vanished, replaced by healthy, sun-bronzed vitality.
“Kaelen...” Mina whispered, her eyes wide as moons. “You... you’re warm.”
“Told you ginger and willow bark works,” Kaelen said deadpan.
Barnaby sat down hard on an empty salt barrel. The barrel groaned under his weight, but the old man didn’t move. He stared at Kaelen like a man who had watched a sparrow turn into a golden dragon.
“Rank 4,” Barnaby muttered weakly, his mustache drooping. “From Rank 2 to Rank 4 in the time it takes to boil tea. And the arrow poison is gone. Just... gone.”
Outside the inner door, a heavy iron club crashed against the oak planks.
BOOM!
The iron reinforcement bands bent under the savage impact. Splinters flew across the threshold, raining down upon the flagstones.
“Kaelen Vance!” Douglas roared from the other side, his voice booming like thunder. “Your time is up, you useless cripple! Come out and face clan justice!”
Another savage blow smashed into the center of the door. The heavy pine timber split straight down the grain, bursting inward with a shower of jagged wood.
Douglas kicked the shattered lower half of the door aside, stepping into the shed with a cruel sneer on his broad, scarred face.
He stood over six feet tall, with shoulders like an ox and thick forearms corded with iron-hard muscle. In his right hand, he carried a heavy, iron-banded punishment club, its blunt head darkened with old blood stains. Behind him, two younger enforcers hovered on the porch, smirking as they held iron chains and balance scales.
“Third Young Master,” Douglas said, resting the iron club on his shoulder. “Second Young Master Garrick has ordered the immediate seizure of all assets in the Third Herb Shed. Furthermore, for the crime of insulting an internal affairs auditor, you will receive thirty lashes in the punishment hall.”
Douglas took a heavy step forward, his iron-tipped boots crushing the wooden debris.
“On your knees, cripple. Don’t make me break your—”
Douglas stopped mid-sentence.
The words caught in his throat like a dry bone.
A dense, invisible pressure rolled off the hay bale in the corner. It wasn’t the feeble, fluttering aura of a sick Rank 2 invalid. It was a clean, heavy wave of pure, unblemished Mortal Pulse Rank 4 Qi, rolling through the shed like the morning tide.
The two junior enforcers on the porch stumbled back a step, their faces draining of color.
Douglas’s sneer froze on his lips. His knuckles tightened around the iron club until the leather grip creaked. His eyes traveled from the floor, up Kaelen’s linen trousers, and locked onto Kaelen’s face.
Kaelen remained seated on the hay, his hands resting casually on his knees.
A faint, mocking tilt curved Kaelen’s lips.
“You’re standing on my dried mint, Douglas,” Kaelen said softly. “And that door cost four silver taels to hang.”