Slipping silently back into the tarnished black-iron ring on the windowsill just a breath. The black-cloaked Blood-Fiend merchant departed through the alley trapdoor, Master Yao Chen narrowed his ancient eyes in the dark space of the ring and listened. Eighteen-year-old Lin Fan tucked the [Forbidden Blood-Slave Ring-Shackle Array] scroll inside his inner vest pocket.
“Hehe... five hundred silver taels well spent,” Lin Fan muttered to himself in the dim pre-dawn light. Rubbing his greedy hands together as he lifted the black-iron ring out of the bowl of cold dishwater and slipped it back onto his thumb.
“That Blood-Fiend merchant said that once I gather three drops of heart-blood from a pure-hearted spirit beast and paint this Blood-Slave Array onto the ring. I won’t have to beg this stubborn old ghost for recipes anymore—I can lock his soul inside the ring permanently. Drain his Golden Core alchemy memories and soul-origin straight into my own dantian!
Until I find the right beast blood, I’ll pretend to apologize so the old fool doesn’t suspect a thing!”
Putting on a fake, contrite expression, Lin Fan dried the black ring on his sleeve and spoke in a syrupy voice:.
“Master Yao... last night this disciple was blinded by anger after losing ten thousand silver and spoke disrespectfully to you. Please forgive my temper!
Take a few days to rest inside the ring—I won’t force you to brew any poison tonight.”
Inside the ring, Master Yao Chen didn’t utter a single syllable in reply, merely sneering behind his white beard as his last shred of guilt over his host oath evaporated like morning mist.
Pretending to apologize while hiding a Blood-Slave Scroll against your chest to devour your own master’s soul? the old Pill Sovereign thought coldly. Lin Fan, you truly think this old man is blind and deaf!
Consequently, over the next five consecutive winter nights, a hilarious midnight routine played out in the snow-covered back lane of Mud-Ditch Alley!
Every night at eleven o’clock sharp, as soon as Lin Fan drank a cup of cheap rice wine and fell into a heavy. Snoring sleep upstairs, Gu Changsheng would wheel his [Rank 3 Nine-Flavor Earth-Fire Chef Wok] into the alley with eight-year-old Gu Nian. Six-year-old Su Nuannuan bundled up in their fluffy rabbit winter coats.
And every single night, Gu Changsheng spent 1,500 to 2,000 Dad Points in [Dad’s Care-Package Upgrade Box] to prepare a brand-new. Steaming [Rank 3 Soul-Nourishing Midnight Banquet] on the low brick wall across from the boarding house:.
On Night Two, it was a platter of [Rank 3 Eight-Treasure Soul-Warming Roast Duck] stuffed with glutinous spirit-rice, red dates. Lotus seeds, paired with a tiny sugar-coated honey-orange gummy left on the edge of the saucer by six-year-old Su Nuannuan!
On Night Three, it was a clay tureen of [Rank 3 Hundred-Year Carp & Tofu Head-Soup] that smoothed out the old Pill Sovereign’s spiritual meridians until his translucent white hair shone like spun silver!
On Night Four, it was [Rank 3 Honey-Roasted Spirit-Lotus Root & Pine-Nut Pastry], accompanied by a hand-drawn crayon picture from Nuannuan and Gu Nian showing a white-bearded grandpa eating drumsticks under a smiling moon!
And on Night Five, it was a bubbling pot of [Rank 3 Golden-Ginseng Mutton Brisket], served alongside three sticks of [Supreme Nine-Heavens Sandalwood Incense]!
Every night at 11:05 PM, right after Gu Changsheng and the kids walked around the corner, translucent Master Yao Chen would swoop down from the second-floor window. Inhale the flaw-free Rank 3 culinary soul-essence with tears of bliss in his eyes, carefully fold the children’s crayon drawings to keep inside his phantom sleeve. Then drift over to the Gu Family Peace Pharmacy on Frost-Pine Street before returning to the ring!
Because twenty-four-year-old Auntie Qin always left her herb-proportion chalkboard standing beside the pharmacy’s bronze cauldron at night. Studying Rank 2 pill formulas, the grateful old Pill Sovereign couldn’t resist picking up a piece of red chalk with his condensed spiritual force and scribbling brisk. Masterly corrections along the margins of her board:.
— Little girl, your Wind-Clearing Decoction uses three drams too much dried ginger! Swap it for two drams of roasted licorice root and lower the Earth-Fire by one third at the third boil. Your pill yield will jump from six pills per furnace to twelve Perfection-grade pills!
— Hmph! Who taught you to crush Frost-Mint leaves with an iron pestle?! Use a warm jade roller at a forty-five-degree angle so the cooling meridian-oil stays locked inside the leaf veins!
— Also, tell that six-year-old honey-body little girl that if she adds one drop of morning pine-dew to her pink watering can. Watering the winter blood-ginseng, the root whiskers won’t curl at the tips!
Every morning when Auntie Qin walked into the pharmacy and saw the red-chalk notes on her chalkboard, her eyes lit up like stars!
“Brother Changsheng! Look at the chalkboard!” twenty-four-year-old Auntie Qin cried on the fourth morning, holding up a tray of twelve round, glowing, golden-brown [Rank 2 Perfection: Meridian-Soothing Pills] that smelled like warm pine honey.
“The mysterious Midnight Chalk Grandpa came again last night!
When I adjusted the roasted licorice root and rolled the Frost-Mint leaves at forty-five degrees just like his red chalk note said, not a single pill cracked in the cauldron! Even the Chief Alchemist of the Prefecture City Guild can only refine six Rank 2 pills per furnace, and our pharmacy just refined twelve Perfection-grade pills on the very first try!”
Standing beside the counter in her pink rabbit dress, six-year-old Su Nuannuan clapped her small hands happily. Eight-year-old Gu Nian carefully copied the red-chalk characters into a clean notebook so they wouldn’t be erased.
“The Midnight Chalk Grandpa is super nice!” six-year-old Su Nuannuan cheered, opening her little silver-and-jade candy pouch and picking out the biggest, roundest strawberry milk drop. “Tonight when we go to the alley with Dad’s stove, Nuannuan is going to leave two strawberry milk drops and a drawing of a big green turtle for Grandpa Chalk.
Grandpa Fu says turtles live for ten thousand years!”
“And I’ll leave him a cup of warm wolfberry tea next to the incense censer so he doesn’t get thirsty after eating the mutton brisket,” eight-year-old Gu Nian added thoughtfully. Checking his pocket to make sure he had a fresh piece of charcoal pencil.
Following the mysterious “Midnight Chalk Grandpa’s” instructions raised Auntie Qin’s alchemy mastery so rapidly that by the fifth afternoon, she was effortlessly refining twelve flaw-free Rank 2 pills per cauldron!
Better yet, because the [Rank 3 Nine-Flavor Earth-Fire Chef Wok] possessed a spiritual resonance link between chef and diner. Every time Master Yao Chen—a genuine Rank 6 Golden Core Pill Sovereign soul—digested one of Gu Changsheng’s midnight dishes and radiated pure spiritual gratitude back into the night air. A rich stream of purified Golden Core fire-comprehension and spiritual feedback flowed back into Gu Changsheng’s own dantian!
On the fifth night at midnight, as Gu Changsheng sipped a cup of warm wolfberry tea in his kitchen while listening to the system chimes, a warm. Surging river of golden-red internal qi broke through all twelve of his primary limb meridians at once!
RUMBLE—SNAP!
From Rank 2 Early Martial (Iron-Bone Stage), Gu Changsheng stepped cleanly into Rank 2 Mid Martial (Meridian-Clearing Stage), his base physical strength surging from 2,500 pounds to 4,500 pounds per fist. His internal organs and twelve meridians hummed like taut dragon-tendon bowstrings!
Yet when Gu Changsheng glanced at the system’s live status panel for Master Yao Chen, he couldn’t help laughing out loud and shaking his head:.
[ DAD’S PLOT-SPOILER NOTEBOOK — NIGHT 5 POACHING PROGRESS ]
* Host Realm : Rank 2 Mid Martial (Meridian-Clearing Stage!)
* Target Spirit : Master Yao Chen (Soul Recovery: 60% -> 85%!)
* Current Warmth: 59/100 (STUCK AT 59 FOR THREE NIGHTS!)
* DP Contribution: +0 DP/day (Requires 60+ Warmth & New Vessel!)
Right at that moment, up on the snow-dusted roof tiles of the Gu Mansion’s kitchen, translucent Master Yao Chen was sitting cross-legged by the warm chimney. Happily licking a trace of honey-orange gummy essence off his white mustache while muttering stubbornly to himself:.
“Hmph! Let it be known to Heaven and Earth that Pill Sovereign Yao Chen is a man of iron principle who never breaks an alchemist’s host contract lightly! I am coming here five nights in a row purely to test Patriarch Gu’s culinary fire-control.
Make sure that silly pharmacy girl doesn’t ruin good herbs—I am definitely NOT defecting for a plate of roast duck and a little girl’s crayon drawing!”
Down in the kitchen, reading the old ghost’s exact word-for-word monologue in [Dad’s Plot-Spoiler Notebook], Gu Changsheng chuckled and wiped his hands on his apron:.
“Stuck at 59 Warmth while keeping every single one of Nuannuan’s crayon drawings in his sleeve? Let’s see how much longer this tsundere grandpa can pretend he isn’t part of our family.”
Sitting at the corner of the kitchen table counting the day’s pharmacy receipts on his black-iron abacus, sixty-two-year-old Grandpa Fu looked up with a twinkle in his single eye and stroked his gray goatee:.
“Young Master, this old servant has noticed that every morning after we leave a midnight platter in Mud-Ditch Alley, the red-chalk handwriting on Doctor Qin’s chalkboard grows bolder and happier. The stray dogs in the alley leave the porcelain platter licked clean without a single scratch on the rim.
Whoever that unseen elder is, he has the pride of an ancient grandmaster who is embarrassed to eat a younger generation’s food for free, so he repays every drumstick with a priceless pill correction!”
“That’s why we never rush an honest elder, Grandpa Fu,” Gu Changsheng smiled, pouring the old butler a cup of hot wolfberry tea and setting out a saucer of toasted pine nuts. “A heart that has been frozen and betrayed in a dark box takes a few warm meals to believe. That someone genuinely wants to set a seat at the table for him without demanding his life’s work in return.
Tomorrow night, we’ll roast a five-spice honey chicken and bring along that green turtle drawing Nuannuan made this afternoon.”
Neither Gu Changsheng nor Grandpa Fu had to wait long for the final push.
On the sixth afternoon, inside the locked second-floor room of the Mud-Ditch Alley boarding house. Eighteen-year-old Lin Fan slammed a stolen sack of dark-red [Blood-Wither Scorpion Grass]—which he had just ambushed. Robbed from a poor herb-gathering widow outside the south gate—onto the table alongside a cheap, cracked iron alchemy cauldron!
Not only had Lin Fan overturned the sixty-year-old widow’s wooden handcart into the snow ditch. Bruised her knee when she begged him to leave her two stalks of winter herbs to buy rice for her grandchildren. He had even spat on her patched coat before running back into town!
Watching that despicable robbery from inside the black ring, Master Yao Chen had trembled so violently with disgust that his spiritual aura nearly cracked the iron band on Lin Fan’s thumb.
“Old man! Wake up right now!” Lin Fan barked at the black-iron ring on his thumb, his eyes gleaming with malicious excitement as he lit a bundle of smoky pine wood under the iron cauldron.
“I heard in town today that Gu Changsheng’s eight-year-old brat Gu Nian goes out to sweep the snow in front of Peace Pharmacy every morning!
Guide my hand right now to refine these stalks of Blood-Wither Scorpion Grass into a colorless, odorless [Child-Crippling Bone-Rot Pill]! Tomorrow morning I’ll toss it into the snow by his broom so the fumes rot his leg bones and cripple him for life!”
Inside the black ring, Master Yao Chen’s white eyebrows shot straight up like drawn swords as a cold, volcanic fury erupted in his chest.
Poison the polite eight-year-old boy who stands on tiptoe in the snow every night to light three sticks of sandalwood incense for this old man?!
[ DING! LIN FAN HAS CROSSED GRANDPA YAO’S BOTTOM LINE! ]
* Target Spirit : Master Yao Chen (Fury Level: 1000%!)
* Kids’ Darkening: Gu Nian 10% | Su Nuannuan 14% -> 13%.
* Daily Income : +23,000 DP/day -> +26,000 DP/day!