The air inside the Third Tower’s inner laboratory had grown suffocatingly thick by noon on Day 20.
For fourteen grueling hours, Grandmaster Kaelor had been laboring over his Tier 5 Dragon-Roar Silver Cauldron.
The white wolf-fur robe he loved so much had been stripped off, tossed carelessly over a bronze stool. He stood clad in a sweat-soaked linen undershirt, his silver hair plastered against his red forehead. His hands shook with exhaustion as he manipulated eleven different silver intake valves along the cauldron’s base.
Inside the silver hull, an unstable slurry of Thunder-Marrow Root and Nine-Fold Ghost-Lotus was churning violently.
The Dragon-Roar Silver Cauldron was an ancient masterwork forged from celestial star-silver and abyssal dragon-bone. Seven sculpted dragon heads ringed its vaulted dome, each designed to channel a different frequency of subterranean thunder-fire.
Normally, refining a Tier 5 Soul-Tempering Pill required three master alchemists working in unbroken eight-hour shifts. One had to balance the volatile Yin of the Ghost-Lotus, while the second suppressed the explosive Yang of the Thunder-Marrow Root. That left the third master to anchor the spiritual matrix.
Kaelor was trying to do it entirely alone, desperate to prove himself worthy of the Conclave’s top honors before Grandmaster Volkov arrived.
