The still, green water of the drainage pond barely rippled as the morning sun climbed above the willow branches.
Kaelen Vance sat upon a low three-legged wooden stool on the muddy embankment, his shoulders relaxed against the trunk of an old weeping willow.
In his right hand, he held a slender bamboo fishing rod.
A length of waxed hemp cord dangled from the tip, hanging straight down into the murky pond water.
At the end of the line was a straight brass pin with no barb and no curve.
No bait rested on the metal.
Kaelen rested the bamboo pole against a notched branch, leaned back, and reopened The Bandit King’s Secret Bride Book 3 for a leisurely second read.
The autumn morning was crisp, but the sunlight filtering through the willow leaves kept his hands warm.
Behind him, the faint scent of drying roots drifted from the rear garden of the Third Herb Shed.
Since waking at dawn on the eighth day of his streak at one hundred and eighty-four hours, his internal timer had ticked forward with relentless precision.
[The Fallow Slate]
[188 Hours Abstained -> Multiplier: 189x READY]
He turned a page of the novel, enjoying the peaceful quiet of the back garden.
Fishing without a hook is the highest form of slacking.
A fish on the line forces a man to reel, fight, and gut dinner.
An empty line requires nothing except a steady hand and a comfortable stool.
Hours slipped away like fallen leaves drifting on the water.
The sun climbed to its midday peak, warming the damp earth beneath his slippers.
Dragonflies with emerald wings hovered over the reeds, darting across the glassy surface of the pool.
Kaelen remained as still as a mossy boulder, barely turning his wrist to flip each paper leaf of his romance serial.
By early afternoon, the slate passed another marker.
[The Fallow Slate]
[194 Hours Abstained -> Multiplier: 195x READY]
The heavy wooden gate at the end of the alley slammed open with a violent shudder.
Hurried, splashing footsteps sprinted down the damp path between the cattails.
Deacon Vane came rushing toward the pond, his embroidered purple robes hitched up to his knees to keep them from the mud.
His face was slick with sweat, his eyes bulging with sheer panic.
Behind him hurried Barnaby Holt, his single hand gripping a heavy oak club, his jaw clenched tight.
Deacon Vane stumbled to a halt five paces from the stool, then caught himself and dropped his voice to a frantic, theatrical whisper so he would not jolt Kaelen’s meditative calm.
“Young master Vance,” Deacon Vane hissed, pacing back and forth along the muddy bank in sheer panic. “Disaster has arrived. The shop is surrounded.”
Kaelen did not lift his eyes from the parchment page.
“You are scaring the mud snails, Deacon,” Kaelen said in a low drawl.
“There are no fish in that pond anyway,” Vane whispered urgently, wringing his silk sleeves as he paced beside the reeds. “Magistrate Vane-Locke’s yamen troops and Baron Derrick Vance’s main-branch guards have surrounded the Ashford Pill Pavilion.”
Barnaby paced right behind the deacon, his scarred brow furrowed deep as he kept his own voice low.
“Fifty armed men with iron chains and official seals,” Barnaby muttered. “They announced they will smash the doors at sunset if the Herb Shed does not surrender its apothecary licenses.”
“They brought an eight-hundred-pound iron battering ram,” Vane added in a trembling whisper. “Vane-Locke’s Rank 9 yamen lieutenant, Garrow, is already warming up his iron-skin fists on the pavilion steps.”
Kaelen turned another page of his novel with his left thumb.
“Sunset is still sixty minutes away,” Kaelen noted.
“Sixty minutes is nothing,” Deacon Vane whispered, clutching his hair as he wore a groove into the mud. “Lieutenant Garrow is a peak Mortal Pulse Rank 9 killer, and he is itching to reduce our storefront to rubble.”
“Sera has thirty mercenaries armed with twenty repeating arbalests,” Barnaby whispered, tapping his oak club against his boot. “We can march to the market square right now and pin them against the pavilion steps with venom bolts.”
“No,” Kaelen said.
Barnaby paused, staring down at him. “No? Are you going to let them smash our shop?”
“A battle on the market steps requires running,” Kaelen explained smoothly. “Running elevates the heart rate and circulates Qi through the meridians, which would ruin my rest.”
Deacon Vane dropped his hands in pure disbelief.
“You are worried about breaking your tally while our sixty-thousand-tael storefront is about to be turned into firewood?”
Inside Kaelen’s skull, a dull, heavy ache pulsed behind his temples.
It was the Fallow Distension.
As the tally climbed toward two hundred hours, the sheer volume of dormant, compressed potential in his dantian created an immense pressure wave.
It felt like a swollen mountain reservoir pushing against a stone dam.
His temples throbbed in rhythm with his heartbeat, sending hot pulses across his brow.
Kaelen reached down to his sash, unstopped his bamboo flask, and took a slow, deep swallow of Soul-Cooling Tea.
The minty, bitter liquid washed down his throat like glacial meltwater.
The cooling medicinal herbs spread through his neck and skull, numbing the throbbing ache and soothing his swollen meridians.
[The Fallow Slate]
[198 Hours Abstained -> Multiplier: 199x READY]
He closed his eyes for three seconds, letting the tea restore his balance.
One hundred and ninety-eight hours.
The Fallow Distension feels like a sack of iron ore balanced on my eyebrows.
If I twitch a finger toward a weapon now, two hundred hours of patience goes down the drain.
I need exactly sixty more minutes.
Kaelen opened his eyes and looked up at Deacon Vane.
“Deacon, how many wealthy merchants are watching the pavilion steps?” Kaelen asked.
“At least two hundred people,” Vane sputtered. “Half the noble families in Ashford sent representatives to see if Master Ash would fall.”
“Good,” Kaelen said. “Go to the desk in the shed and take ten sheets of red mulberry paper. Stamp each sheet with Master Ash’s cinnabar wax seal.”
“What am I writing on them?” Vane asked, blinking.
“Write pre-order vouchers,” Kaelen said. “Each voucher entitles the bearer to purchase one Cloud-Veined Supreme Marrow-Warming Pill at tomorrow’s grand opening. Zero Pill-Poison, certified pure.”
Deacon Vane’s eyes widened. “Vouchers? In the middle of an armed siege?”
“Stand on the stone mounting block in front of the crowd and announce an emergency flash auction,” Kaelen continued calmly. “Starting bid is twenty Low-Grade Spirit Stones per voucher, cash only. Bidders must stand between the soldiers and the front doors to submit their bids.”
Deacon Vane’s jaw dropped open.
Then a slow, predatory gleam dawned across his sharp features.
“A human shield of greedy buyers,” Vane murmured, a manic grin spreading across his lips.
“Cultivators in Ashford would push their own grandmothers into a river for zero-poison pills,” Kaelen said, taking another sip of tea. “When you wave ten vouchers, the crowd will swarm the steps. Lieutenant Garrow will not be able to swing his ram without crushing forty clan elders.”
Greed is the best stalling tactic in the world.
Give a mob something to bid on, and they will fight each other for an hour.
All I need is sixty minutes of loud chaos.
“I will run like the wind,” Deacon Vane gasped, turning on his heel and sprinting toward the herb shed.
Barnaby shook his head, a raspy chuckle breaking from his throat.
“You are a shameless monster, boy,” the old man said, leaning against the willow trunk. “Using the town’s richest elders as sandbags against an iron ram.”
“It is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” Kaelen replied, turning his eyes back to his book. “They get pills, and I get an uninterrupted hour of fishing.”
Two miles away, in the bustling central square of Ashford, tension was reaching its boiling point.
The Barony Pill Pavilion stood tall and imposing, its two-story wooden facade painted in vermilion lacquer.
Surrounding the entrance were thirty yamen enforcers in iron breastplates and twenty Vance clan guards carrying polearms.
Standing on the third stone step was Lieutenant Garrow.
He was a hulking brute of a man, seven feet tall, with shoulders like an ox and fists wrapped in spiked leather bands.
His Mortal Pulse Rank 9 aura radiated outward in suffocating waves, pushing back the crowd of onlookers.
Four burly soldiers stood behind him, holding a massive pine log capped with a three-hundred-pound iron wolf head.
“Ten minutes until sunset!” Lieutenant Garrow roared, his voice booming across the plaza like thunder.
“Master Ash has proven himself a coward! When the sun touches the western wall, this illegal den of false medicine falls!”
The crowd of merchants and rogue cultivators watched in hushed anxiety.
Suddenly, a loud, shrill screech cut through the square.
“Emergency proclamation from Master Ash!”
Deacon Vane scrambled onto the marble horse-mounting block at the corner of the steps.
He held a thick bundle of red mulberry parchment high above his head, the red wax seals glowing in the evening light.
“Ten pre-order vouchers for Cloud-Veined Supreme Marrow-Warming Pills!” Vane shrieked at the top of his lungs. “Certified zero Pill-Poison with guaranteed delivery tomorrow at noon! The flash auction begins right now!”
The crowd froze for half a second.
Then the plaza exploded into total madness.
“Twenty stones!” a rotund silk merchant bellowed, shoving past two guards.
“Thirty stones for the first voucher!” an elder from the Iron-Hammer Hall screamed, lunging up the steps.
“Forty stones! I have fifty Low-Grade Spirit Stones right here in my purse!”
Within thirty seconds, over one hundred wealthy merchants, clan elders, and rogue martial artists charged forward.
They swarmed the pavilion steps like starving locusts finding a wheat field.
They pressed in from all sides, waving heavy purses of gold, silver, and spirit stones in Deacon Vane’s face.
Lieutenant Garrow was instantly overwhelmed.
“Get back, you dogs!” Garrow bellowed, shoving an elder away.
“Touch me and the Mason’s Guild will cut your timber supply!” the elder shrieked back, waving a pouch of spirit stones.
Four merchants wedged themselves directly in front of the iron battering ram, using their heavy bodies to block the soldiers from swinging the log.
Whenever a yamen guard tried to draw his blade, three clan stewards yelled threats of commercial boycotts.
Deacon Vane stood on his mounting block like an emperor of commerce, auctioning each voucher with theatrical slowness.
“Forty-five stones to Elder Wu! Fifty stones to Master Lin! Count the stones carefully, Deacon’s eyes are slow today!”
The minutes ticked away in furious, shouting confusion.
The chaotic bidding dragged on through the twilight.
Ten minutes slipped past, followed quickly by twenty more.
Forty minutes later, the frantic shouting was still echoing across the square.
Lieutenant Garrow was trapped in a dense wall of screaming elders waving velvet money bags.
His face turned dark purple with mounting fury.
He looked toward the western sky.
The fiery orange ball of the sun was sinking rapidly toward the distant stone battlements of Ashford.
Only a thin golden crescent remained above the parapets.
“Enough!” Garrow roared, his Mortal Pulse Rank 9 Qi exploding from his chest.
The blast of force threw three silk merchants down the stone steps into the dirt.
Garrow gestured toward the iron battering ram at the base of the stairs, ordering his thirty enforcers forward with leveled polearm shafts.
“Clear the steps or be crushed!” Garrow snarled, his eyes bloodshot with rage. “The deadline is up! Drive this rabble back and haul the ram to the doors!”
Thirty polearm shafts surged into the packed crowd, shoving the shouting elders step by step down the stone terrace.
At the foot of the stairs, four burly soldiers heaved the eight-hundred-pound log onto their shoulders, waiting for the landing to clear.
The iron wolf head gleamed with deadly malice in the fading twilight as the crew began its slow march toward the pavilion doors.
Two miles away, beside the quiet drainage pond, the last golden ray of the sun disappeared behind the western stone wall.
Kaelen Vance did not hurry.
He lifted his bamboo fishing rod and reeled in his waxed hemp line with a smooth, effortless motion.
Droplets splashed softly among the lily pads as the hookless brass pin rose from the dark water, glistening in the evening twilight.
Kaelen set the pole against the grass, stood up from his three-legged stool, and stretched his arms toward the sky.
He folded his romance novel, tucked it into his sash, and drew a slow, deep breath of cool autumn air.
Inside his dantian, the Fallow Slate erupted into a blinding conflagration of celestial gold.
[The Fallow Slate]
[199 Hours Abstained -> Multiplier: 200x READY!]