Before the crossing, Kaelen Vance tilted his three-legged bamboo stool back against the threshold stone, careful not to crease page forty-eight.
He had spent five entire days sitting in the exact same patch of morning shadow, with the spirit-vein compression doubling his accumulation. He held the new-domain alchemy track for nineteen hours and fifty-three minutes of that interval; the other tracks ran throughout. The stone platform beneath him hummed with the resonance of the Heaven-Step Gate, but none of that cosmic pressure reached his slippers. He turned a page of Book 15 of The Bandit King’s Secret Bride, admiring the discreet leather binding. To anyone standing more than three paces away, it looked like Claire Vance’s family recipe book for braised cloud-pork.
The Bandit King just admitted he stole the holy jade seal only to buy three hairpin ribbons for the heroine, Kaelen thought, chewing a cold candied plum. A man of true vision. If he spent half as much time robbing caravans as he did brooding in weeping willow trees, the empire would have fallen six books ago.
A pale blue rectangular interface shimmered inside his vision, floating entirely within his sea of consciousness.
[The Fallow Slate (Stage 6: Sovereign’s Fallow Domain)] [Track 1 (Cultivation Vessel): 240h 00m -> 241x (Milestone Sealed)] [Track 2 (Martial Combat): 240h 00m -> 241x (Milestone Sealed)] [Track 3 (Alchemy & Comprehension): 200h 14m -> 201x (Active Accumulation)] [Track 4 (Dao & Array Comprehension): 240h 00m -> 241x (Milestone Sealed)] [Current State: True Fallow…
