Choking steam billowed across Platform One as Chief Pill-King Helios lunged for his auxiliary bellows.
The three frozen sulfur bricks hissed violently in his open coal brazier, drowning his sacred solar ignition in a cloud of sulfurous mist. Helios coughed and hacked, furiously pumping the leather handles to revive his dying cinders.
His apprentices scurried in all directions, spilling baskets of spirit charcoal as they scrambled to reignite the golden sun cauldron before the inner temperature plummeted.
On Platform One, Helios wiped oily black soot from his eyelids. His ninth solar revolution was barely thirty percent complete.
Every minute required him to circulate his Saint-level Qi to keep the solar-flame cores from collapsing. His golden robes were stained with salt and charred herb dust, and his manicured fingernails were cracked down to the quick.
Across the volcanic amphitheater, the grueling contest ground through the night and into the following morning.
By the forty-eighth hour of the Grand Immortal Cauldron Conclave, the arena had turned into a slaughterhouse of spiritual exhaustion.
Eighty alchemists had already been eliminated from the competition. Across dozens of basalt platforms, cracked and blackened cauldrons sat abandoned, their bronze flues warped by catastrophic backfires.
