Power hummed beneath Kaelen’s skin, warm and heavy as molten bronze.
The golden light of the Fallow Slate filled his vision as he stood on the muddy embankment.
[The Fallow Slate]
[Multiplier: 200x ACTIVE]
[Burst Window Open: 1 Minute = 200 Hours Baseline Practice]
Kaelen did not waste a single heartbeat.
He moved his legs, crossing the garden path with the silent speed of Ash-Wind Footwork.
He stepped into the kitchen of the Third Herb Shed, where Barnaby and Mina were waiting.
On the table sat the wooden wash bucket containing the yellow silk cylinder.
Kaelen reached into the bucket and pulled out the Four-Directions Earth-Shield Array scroll.
He stripped away the silk wrapping, unrolled the thick calfskin parchment across the scrubbed pine table, and weighted the corners with two stone pestles.
His eyes swept over the complex web of geometric lines.
With two hundred times comprehension burning through his consciousness, sixty seconds expanded into two hundred hours of deep meditation.
The faded, water-damaged formation runes untangled in his mind like loose threads.
He picked up a slender wolf-hair brush from the desk, dipped the tip into cinnabar ink, and lowered the bristles to the parchment.
His hand moved with effortless grace.
In the northeast corner, he redrew the shattered foundation glyph, realigning the earth-gate node to channel underground Qi.
In the southern quadrant, he bridged two severed ley lines with a single looping stroke.
At the center of the mandala, he corrected the master rune, restoring the balance of the ancient barrier.
He lifted the brush and set it down in the porcelain dish.
The ink dried instantly under the heat of his spiritual pressure.
Sixty seconds had elapsed.
The ancient defensive formation of Ashford was completely restored.
Sixty seconds of work feels like a marathon after two hundred hours of lying still.
Still, thirty spirit stones was fair pay for three brush strokes.
Now comes the real work before this multiplier runs cold.
Kaelen rolled up the parchment and tossed it to Barnaby.
“Deliver that to Elder Corin after we finish here,” Kaelen said.
Barnaby caught the cylinder with his single hand, his scarred jaw slack with shock.
“You decoded the ancestral array in sixty seconds?” the old man muttered.
“I had an epiphany while watching mud snails,” Kaelen replied smoothly.
He turned toward the hearth.
The micro-fractured cast-iron stew-pot was already set over glowing red coals.
Beside the stove sat baskets of prepared spirit roots, silver moss, and dried red-bark ginseng.
Kaelen took the octagonal white jade vial from his inner pocket and placed the remaining two-thirds of the Tier 3 Void-Frost Lotus petal on a clean silk cloth.
[The Fallow Slate]
[Alchemy Burst: 10 Minutes -> 2,000 Hours Baseline Refinement]
Kaelen swept his hands across the baskets.
His fingers moved with transcendent speed, tossing the dried herbs into the boiling cauldron in precise, rhythmic sequences.
The steam rose in sweet, fragrant clouds of white vapor.
For ten minutes, Kaelen’s hands blurred above the iron rim.
He regulated the airflow with minute pulses of Qi, burning away every speck of plant slag and medicinal impurity.
In two thousand hours of compressed mastery, his flame control reached absolute perfection.
The bubbling liquid shrank into gleaming spheres of emerald and crimson.
A sharp, bell-like chime rang out from the bottom of the pot.
Kaelen flicked his sleeves, and thirty pills floated up into the cool air of the kitchen.
Twenty-nine of the spheres glowed with deep ruby light, encircled by swirling white mist.
They were Cloud-Veined Supreme Marrow-Warming Pills, containing zero Pill-Poison.
The thirtieth pill was different.
It was pure, translucent sapphire, radiating a soothing frost that crystallized the steam in mid-air.
It was the Void-Frost Lotus cure pill, crafted to purge the decay in Mina’s marrow.
Kaelen plucked the sapphire pill from the air and dropped it into a small amber vial.
He handed the vial to Mina.
“Keep this safe,” Kaelen said softly. “You will take it under the full moon in ten days.”
Mina accepted the vial with both hands, clutching it against her chest as tears warmed her eyes.
“Thank you, brother,” she whispered.
Kaelen turned back to the remaining twenty-nine ruby pills.
Together with the seven Supreme Pills already in his cedar box, he had thirty-six ruby pills plus Mina’s Void-Frost Lotus cure pill.
He picked up two ruby spheres and swallowed them dry, leaving thirty-four ruby pills in his cedar box and thirty-five Supreme Pills in total. Nine ruby pills were marked for the family emergency box, fifteen for the auction, and ten for the voucher holders.
Then he reached down to the open floorboards and hauled out the iron-banded chest.
He plunged his hands into the spirit stones, grabbing three hundred Low-Grade Spirit Stones in three heavy linen sacks.
[The Fallow Slate]
[Cultivation Burst: 5 Minutes -> 1,000 Hours Baseline Circulation]
Kaelen sat cross-legged on the stone floor.
He emptied the three sacks into a basin, then pressed both hands into the mound of spirit stones.
Crack.
Three hundred spirit stones shattered at once, disintegrating into a swirling whirlpool of pure, unblemished spiritual energy.
Thirty thousand points of raw Qi flooded into the room like an overflowing river.
The two Cloud-Veined Supreme Pills dissolved in his stomach, creating a raging furnace of medicinal heat.
The massive wave of power rushed into his eight diamond-solid pulse gates.
Kaelen guided the torrent toward the base of his spine.
There, guarding the threshold of the ninth gate, lay the final mortal barrier.
It was a thick wall of hardened bone sediment, blocking the circulation to the upper skull.
In ordinary cultivators, piercing this gate took three years of painful grinding with toxic Crack-Pills.
Kaelen hit the wall with thirty thousand points of pure, unpoisoned Qi backed by a two-hundred-times surge.
Crack.
The barrier shattered like brittle glass under a bronze hammer.
A blinding column of golden light surged up Kaelen’s spine, erupting into his cranial meridians.
His vision sharpened until he could see the individual fibers of dust floating through the room.
His hearing expanded, catching the distant shouts of merchants two miles away in the market square.
His eighth and ninth gates locked together, tempering his skeleton into pure, diamond-hard resilience.
[The Fallow Slate]
[Breakthrough Successful: Mortal Pulse Rank 9 Achieved]
[Remaining Wealth: 300 Low-Grade Spirit Stones]
Kaelen stood up smoothly, feeling the effortless power humming through his limbs.
Mortal Pulse Rank 9.
Only one step left before Iron Bone.
If my dear father Derrick could see me burning three hundred stones in five minutes, his spleen would burst.
A distant boom echoed across the rooftops of Ashford.
The sound of an iron ram striking heavy oak rolled through the evening air.
“They are hitting the pavilion doors,” Barnaby barked, grabbing his club.
“Stay here and guard the shed,” Kaelen said, walking to the threshold.
“You are going alone?” Sera asked, stepping forward with her spear.
“One punch will be enough,” Kaelen replied.
He stepped out the door and vanished into the twilight.
His Ash-Wind Footwork carried him across the roofs of the southern district in silent, ghostly bounds.
Within two minutes, he reached the western edge of the market square.
The scene at the Barony Pill Pavilion was pandemonium.
Deacon Vane stood pressed against the stone wall, clutching his bundle of red mulberry pre-order vouchers.
The merchants had been driven back by a brutal charge of yamen polearms.
Standing on the central landing was Lieutenant Garrow, his seven-foot frame towering over the front steps.
Garrow and four heavy guards were swinging the eight-hundred-pound pine ram for the final blow.
The iron wolf head had already cracked the left door panel, splintering the red lacquer into jagged teeth.
“Bring it down!” Garrow roared, his veins bulging with peak Rank 9 Qi.
The four guards heaved the massive log backward, preparing to drive it through the threshold.
A quiet voice spoke from the bottom of the steps.
“If you scratch that red paint again, you will pay for the lacquer.”
Lieutenant Garrow paused, his thick brow furrowing as he glared down.
Standing on the lower cobblestones was Kaelen Vance.
He wore a plain gray tunic, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his hands resting casually at his sides.
“Who is this stray dog?” Garrow sneered, spitting onto the stone.
Behind the yamen squad, twenty Vance clan guards recognized the third son.
“That is Kaelen,” a guard sergeant whispered in confusion. “The useless third young master.”
“Get out of the way, boy,” Garrow barked, stepping away from the ram and cracking his iron-banded knuckles. “Or I will turn your skull into a bowl for my soup.”
Kaelen did not reply.
Inside his mind, he devoted the next five minutes of his two-hundred-times multiplier to martial practice.
[The Fallow Slate]
[Martial Burst: 5 Minutes -> 1,000 Hours Baseline Practice]
[Target: Vance Clan Fist Art]
One thousand hours of pure martial comprehension surged through Kaelen’s consciousness.
His Great Success mastery of the Vance Clan Fist Art dissolved, reforming into something far deeper and more terrifying.
The clumsy, rigid forms of the clan manual shed their mortal limitations.
The ancient spirit of the roaring tiger merged with the fluid weight of falling mountains.
[Vance Clan Fist Art Advanced: Transcendent Dao Intent Achieved (400% Strike Force Output)]
Kaelen took a single step forward.
The air around him compressed, groaning under an invisible gravitational pull.
Lieutenant Garrow felt the hair on his arms stand up.
A sudden sense of suffocating danger gripped his throat.
“Die!” Garrow roared, panic overriding his arrogance.
The lieutenant threw his full weight forward, driving his massive, spiked fist straight toward Kaelen’s face with all the crushing power of peak Mortal Pulse Rank 9.
The punch broke the sound barrier, howling like a gale.
Kaelen did not duck.
He did not dodge.
He simply rotated his right hip, drew his right arm back two inches, and pushed his bare knuckles forward in a basic straight punch.
The strike carried the weight of four hundred percent Transcendent Dao Intent, backed by the diamond-solid power of Mortal Pulse Rank 9.
Boom.
The two fists did not even meet.
Kaelen’s strike slipped beneath Garrow’s arm, sinking cleanly into the center of the lieutenant’s heavy iron breastplate.
The solid iron plate folded like wet paper.
A shockwave of white kinetic force tore through Garrow’s chest, blowing out the back of his leather armor in a cloud of shredded wool.
The sound was like an anvil falling from the clouds onto hollow cedar.
Garrow’s eyes bulged until the whites were entirely crimson.
His breath exploded from his lungs in a shower of bloody mist.
His seven-foot frame lifted off the steps, hurtling backward like a sack of grain struck by a runaway wagon.
He sailed thirty feet up the stone stairs, smashed through the carved stone archway of the pavilion, and crashed straight into the marble plaza fountain behind the courtyard.
Water geysered twenty feet into the air.
The fountain bowl shattered into four jagged chunks, burying the limp, broken lieutenant in splashing foam and broken masonry.
The square fell into absolute, paralyzed silence.
Lieutenant Garrow lay half-submerged in the ruined fountain, his breastplate caved into his ribs, his limbs twitching feebly in the bloody pool.
His peak Rank 9 cultivation had been shattered in a single blow.
Derrick Vance’s twenty clan guards stood frozen, their eyes wide with horrified disbelief.
Clatter.
A guard sergeant dropped his iron spear, and the weapon clattered uselessly against the stone steps.
Within three seconds, fifteen more spears hit the pavement as the guards backed away in terror, their knees knocking together.
On the mounting block, Deacon Vane let out a loud, breathless shriek of hysterical triumph.
“Behold Master Ash’s divine fist!” Vane screamed, waving his arms at the sky.
The gathered crowd of merchants and rogue cultivators erupted into a deafening roar of awe, scrambling to get out of Kaelen’s path.
The thirty yamen enforcers broke formation, dropped the iron battering ram, and scrambled toward the fountain.
They dragged the bleeding, unconscious lieutenant from the wreckage and fled into the northern streets like hunted foxes.
Kaelen lowered his hand, shook out his wrist, and wiped a speck of red brick dust from his knuckle.
One punch is plenty of exercise for a week.
Now my hands need a long rest.
He then deliberately closed the unspent remainder of his sixty-minute window. Inside his dantian, the golden light of the multiplier gently subsided.
The two-hundred-times surge had completely burned out, returning his inner vessels to tranquil calm.
[The Fallow Slate]
[Tally Reset: 0 Hours Abstained -> Multiplier: 1x]
Kaelen looked up at the rising moon.
Ten days remained until the full moon.
Ten days was exactly two hundred and forty hours, the maximum vessel cap of the Mortal Tally.
He turned his back on the cheering crowd and walked toward the quiet darkness of the south lane.
In ten days, his final stack would hit two hundred and forty hours for a two-hundred-and-forty-one-fold multiplier, and Magistrate Vane-Locke would pay for every ruined afternoon.