For ten full breaths after Gu Changsheng’s handcart disappeared around the corner of Mud-Ditch Alley, the translucent phantom of three-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Master Yao Chen hovered beneath the frosty eaves of the boarding house. Scanning the rooftops left and right with his sharp Golden Core spiritual sense.
Not a single hidden guard, tracking talisman, or trapping array had been left behind in the alley.
The young Gu Clan Patriarch and his eight-year-old son had genuinely walked all the way back to their mansion through the winter snow. Leaving behind a hot porcelain platter with two Rank 3 [Soul-Mending Golden Roast Chicken Drumsticks] and three glowing sticks of top-grade sandalwood incense on the clean linen napkin!
“H-hmph! Does that mortal boy Gu Changsheng think this dignified Pill Sovereign can be bribed with two mere chicken legs?!” Master Yao Chen muttered to himself in the empty night air.
Stroking his singed white beard with stiff pride—even.
His translucent throat bobbed up and down with a loud gulp and his spiritual stomach let out a rumble that nearly shook the icicles off the roof. “I... I am merely floating down to inspect the herbal ratios of his ginseng glaze so that his Rank 3 culinary essence does not go to waste in the winter wind!
Yes, purely an academic inspection!”
Looking left and right one last time to make sure not even a stray alley cat was watching. The revered Rank 6 Pill Sovereign swooped down from the second-floor eaves like a starving white seagull, landed beside the brick wall. Bowed his nose over the porcelain plate and the brass censer!
whooooosh—INHALE!
With a single deep breath of his remnant soul, Master Yao Chen drew the rising purple-gold smoke of the three [Top-Grade Soul-Calming Sandalwood Incense] sticks and the rich. Shimmering golden aura of both [Rank 3 Soul-Mending Roast Chicken Drumsticks] straight into his translucent mouth!
BOOM—WARMTH!
If the tiny wisp of smoke that had drifted through the window crack earlier was a warm cashmere shawl. Inhaling the full essence of the two freshly roasted drumsticks and three sticks of fused sandalwood incense was like plunging into a sacred hot spring of liquid golden sunlight!
The rich, savory flavor of crispy honey-pepper chicken skin, ten-year mountain ginseng, and flaw-free Earth-Fire exploded across Master Yao Chen’s spiritual taste buds—which hadn’t tasted real food in three hundred years!
Even better, as the golden culinary essence coursed through his remnant soul from crown to heel, his faded. Flickering phantom body condensed until his robes and white beard looked almost solid in the moonlight. His soul recovery jumped from 45% straight to 60%!
“Good heavens... what divine fire-control!” Master Yao Chen whispered, his ancient shoulders shaking as two hot, translucent tears rolled down his wrinkled cheeks and dropped onto the linen napkin.
“Not a single speck of erysipelas toxin or charcoal ash in the ginseng essence!
Even when this old man was alive at the peak of the Golden Core Realm, my own disciples never once cooked me a meal with such warm, meticulous care!”
He thought of the past six months inside Lin Fan’s tarnished ring:.
How Lin Fan had screamed curses at him whenever a pill batch failed because of Lin Fan’s own sloppy fire-control. How Lin Fan had used the silver earned from Yao Chen’s healing salves to hire thugs and buy deadly poisons. How Lin Fan had dunked his ring into a bowl of freezing, greasy dishwater tonight just because Yao Chen refused to murder innocent children.
And how Lin Fan had never once burned even a one-copper stick of coarse temple incense for his master!
And then he looked at the clean white porcelain plate, the neatly folded linen napkin. The three sticks of priceless soul-calming incense left out in the snow by Gu Changsheng and his polite eight-year-old son.
Our family rules say we always leave a hot plate out for hardworking elders wandering in the cold.
“What a warm, upright father... and what a well-raised child,” Master Yao Chen murmured, wiping his eyes with his phantom sleeve as his Warmth Index toward Gu Changsheng’s family climbed past 40/100. “Wait—how could a mortal clan patriarch in a frontier town know that my remnant soul was starving in that boy’s ring tonight?
Could he possess an innate spirit-sensing eye, or did he hear Lin Fan shouting at the window? Let this old man go take a look at this Gu Mansion for himself!”
Leaving the physical meat of the drumsticks neatly on the plate for the alley’s stray dogs—since a spirit only absorbed the golden soul-essence—Master Yao Chen turned into a faint silver breeze. Drifted silently across three snowy street blocks toward the warm red lanterns of the Gu Mansion.
Before he left the brick wall, however, the white-bearded old Pill Sovereign carefully used a wisp of. His newly condensed spiritual force to slide eight-year-old Gu Nian’s charcoal-pencil note out from under the porcelain plate. Folded it four times with the reverence of an emperor handling an ancestral jade edict.
Tucked it safely into the inner pocket of his phantom alchemy robe.
In all my three hundred and eighty years, Master Yao Chen thought as he glided over the snow-covered roofs of Frost-Pine Town. Feeling the warm Rank 3 ginseng-and-sandalwood essence circulating through his mended soul-meridians like a gentle spring river. *Emperors have offered me cities of gold and sect elders have kowtowed three thousand times at my mountain gate to beg for a single pill.
Not one of their silk decrees ever warmed this old man’s chest like an eight-year-old boy’s charcoal drawing of a smiling drumstick!*
As he passed over the main avenue of Frost-Pine Street, the old Pill Sovereign paused for a moment above the blue-tiled roof of the [Gu Family Peace Pharmacy].
Even though it was past eleven o’clock at night, a warm amber oil lamp was still burning inside the pharmacy’s back compounding room. Twenty-four-year-old Auntie Qin was busily wiping down thirty neat rows of porcelain herb jars and preparing baskets of free winter-cough lozenges for the West-End Poor Orphanage.
Peering down through the skylight with his Golden Core alchemist’s eyes, Master Yao Chen stroked his white beard in quiet approval:.
“Clean bronze mortar, sun-dried licorice slices sorted by age, not a single speck of damp mold in the storage drawers, and ten-copper healing gummies sold at charity prices for poor townsfolk and orphans... This young lady Qin Wan’er only has an early Rank 2 mortal fire foundation, yet her healer’s heart is ten thousand times purer than those greedy Golden Core pill-merchants in the Central Plains!”
Floating invisibly over the courtyard wall of the Gu Mansion at half past eleven at night, the old Pill Sovereign was immediately struck by the pure, peaceful atmosphere wrapping the entire estate.
Unlike the cold, scheming cultivation clans he had seen across the continent—where brothers poisoned brothers for a handful of spirit stones. Guards whipped servants in the snow—every corner of the Gu Mansion radiated genuine warmth, order, and contentment.
Even the night-watch guards patrolling the verandas in thick sheepskin coats were sipping hot ginger-jujube soup from clay thermoses. Chatting quietly about how their children were learning to read and count from Butler Fu!
Curiously, Master Yao Chen drifted over to the warm amber-lit window of the main courtyard’s East Wing bedroom and peeked through a tiny gap in the wooden shutter.
Inside the cozy bedroom, heated from below by the [Rank 2 Nine-Yang Dragon-Stove Heating Array]. Eight-year-old Gu Nian and six-year-old Su Nuannuan were already washed and dressed in matching soft flannel rabbit pajamas. Sitting side by side under a fluffy goose-down quilt on the wide brick kang bed.
Gu Changsheng sat on a wooden stool beside the bed holding a warm ceramic tray with two small bowls of sweet honey-milk and the tender chicken wings he had saved from the Earth-Fire Wok.
“Here we go—one chicken wing and one cup of warm honey-milk for my two night owls,” Gu Changsheng smiled. Wiping a tiny mustache of warm milk off six-year-old Su Nuannuan’s upper lip with a soft cloth before tucking the goose-down quilt snugly around both children’s shoulders.
“Dad, do you think that cold grandpa in the alley ate the drumsticks we left on the wall?” eight-year-old Gu Nian asked sleepily, his eyelids drooping. He held his little sister’s hand over the quilt.
“I’m sure he did, Nian’er,” Gu Changsheng said gently, patting both children’s heads in a slow, soothing rhythm. “And now that his tummy is warm, he won’t freeze in the winter wind tonight.”
“Tomorrow night, Nuannuan wants to leave a honey-orange gummy on the plate for the cold grandpa too!” six-year-old Su Nuannuan murmured around a tiny yawn. Hugging her wooden toy rabbit to her chest as she drifted off into a sweet, dreamless sleep.
“So the grandpa’s mouth will be sweet...”
Outside the window shutter in the falling snow, three-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Pill Sovereign Yao Chen pressed a trembling phantom hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t sob out loud!
For six months, he had watched Lin Fan look at this eight-year-old boy and this six-year-old girl as nothing more than stepping stones to be crippled, poisoned, or locked in a centipede jar.
Yet under Gu Changsheng’s roof, these two children with terrifying innate physiques—an Innate Chaos Demon Bone. A Sweet Honey-Candy Empress Body that Yao Chen’s Golden Core eyes recognized at a single glance!—had been raised into the purest. Kindest, most polite little angels in the world.
Worrying about whether a strange old ghost’s mouth was sweet before they went to sleep!
[ DING! MASTER YAO CHEN WARMTH SURGE! ]
* Target : Master Yao Chen (Rank 6 Pill Sovereign Remnant)
* Warmth Index : 34/100 -> 48/100 (“These children are angels!”)
* Daily Income : +21,000 DP/day -> +23,000 DP/day!
Wait just a few more days, little ones, Master Yao Chen vowed silently by the bedroom window, his ancient eyes shining with warmth. Even if this old man cannot break the ring’s host contract on my own, I will never let that beast Lin Fan harm a single hair on your heads!
However, just before dawn, when Master Yao Chen floated quietly back through the boarding-house window in Mud-Ditch Alley to re-enter the black-iron ring on the windowsill, his translucent heart skipped a beat.
Lin Fan was no longer asleep on the straw pallet!
Sitting in the dark corner of the room with a sinister, paranoid sneer on his face, eighteen-year-old Lin Fan was whispering to a hunched. Black-cloaked traveling merchant from the Blood-Fiend Cult—and in Lin Fan’s hand was a newly purchased, blood-stained parchment scroll labeled [Forbidden Blood-Slave Ring-Shackle Array]!
“Remember, young master,” the hunched Blood-Fiend merchant rasped in a voice like grinding grave-stones. He pocketed a pouch of stolen silver that Lin Fan had pried out of a sleeping timber-merchant’s saddlebag earlier that night. “This [Forbidden Blood-Slave Ring-Shackle Array] was carved from the skin of a Rank 4 Demonic Soul-Eater.
If the remnant spirit inside your ring ever refuses to obey your orders or tries to hide its alchemy formulas from you. Simply spit three mouthfuls of your own tongue-blood onto the first half of the scroll to lock twelve demonic blood-chains around its soul-origin! Once those chains lock, the array will burn ten percent of the spirit’s soul every hour and pour that pure spiritual energy straight into your own dantian!”
Lin Fan’s bloodshot eyes gleamed with greedy, predatory delight as he stroked the dark-red runes on the parchment scroll.
“And what about the second half of the scroll?” Lin Fan whispered eagerly, glancing toward the bowl of cold dishwater on the windowsill with a cold sneer. “How do I swallow all three hundred years of the old fool’s Golden Core pill memories at once so I don’t need him anymore?”
“For the second stage,” the Blood-Fiend merchant chuckled darkly. Slipping out through the alley trapdoor, “all you need to do is slaughter a living pet or spirit-animal that is deeply loved by pure-hearted children. Smear three drops of its warm heart-blood across the ring!
The despair of the innocent will shatter the old spirit’s righteous Dao-heart in a single breath, allowing you to devour his soul-origin down to the last drop!”
Hovering outside the window crack in the pre-dawn frost, translucent Master Yao Chen felt a chill colder than the winter wind run down his spine. He looked at the vicious smile on Lin Fan’s face.