Night fell over the fiery volcano bowl like a choking shroud of purple velvet.
The heat plummeted rapidly, but the ground remained scalding hot, venting thick plumes of sulfur steam that drifted through the melted rock waste heaps like wandering specters. In the distance, the furnaces of the Upper Sect continued to rumble. He cast an eerie, flickering crimson glow against the low-hanging chemical clouds.
Inside the roofless stone hut at the edge of Pit Seven, Tie Shan sat cross-legged on a bed of dry mountain reeds, chewing on a strip of dried beef.
Beside him, Lin Tao sat fully motionless on a slab of slate. His left eye glowed with an intense, glowing-green soft glow that lit up the rough stone walls. In his hands, he held the four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen, its needle-sharp point hovering three tiny fractions of an inch above the cracked bronze crucible he had dragged from the ash pile.
The bronze was cold to the touch, roughly fractured along its main runic seam.
Lin Tao analyzed the formation array carved into the bronze.
In traditional Xianxia alchemy, a pill cooking pot was not simply a cooking pot. It was a complex runic holding matrix designed to compress chaotic herbal spiritual energy into a solid, bio-compatible pellet. To maintain energetic holding, the cooking pot’s array allocated a dedicated memory buffer for each herb introduced during the firing process.
This crucible had cracked under too much fire pressure. Then, the potion-maker had panic-sealed the emergency exhaust and fled to avoid being burned up by back-firing spiritual flames.
The firing cycle had ended abnormally without executing the standard cool-down routine. Because of that, the cooking pot’s holding buffer had never been de-allocated.
The refined spiritual essence of a seven-hundred-year-old Dragon-Marrow Root was still suspended inside the tiny crystal-clear lattice of the bronze, trapped in an orphaned memory share-out.
An uncollected heap pointer, Lin Tao thought, his mind working with cold test clarity. The potion-maker wrote the data to the buffer, crashed the system. Then he left the memory locked.
Lin Tao placed the tip of his iron metal pen against the broken gold trace running through the bronze fracture.
He didn’t channel Qi. His dantian was a zero-byte void. Instead, he used the metal pen as a passive living grounding probe. By aligning his body’s micro-electric-shock potential with the 12.0 MHz hum of the cooking pot’s runic bus, he simulated a hardware reset signal.
One... Two... Three.
He tapped the gold trace twice in rapid row. He struck at an interval of exactly a split second to sync with the a deep hum refresh rate of the mountain’s surrounding physics.
Ting. Ting.
A tiny, azure spark leaped from the bronze into the steel needle.
Inside the shattered crucible, the orphaned memory buffer cleared.
The ancient star-copper alloy, forged three thousand years ago during the zenith of the Precursor dynasties, rang with a pure, bell-like chime. These vessels had never been designed to burn spirit herbs with crude charcoal. They had been engineered as care cold-fusion squeezing chambers, capable of harmonizing organic compounds at the atom-deep level. Modern fighters, lacking the coded firmware to operate the internal guidance arrays, simply blasted the outside with brute spiritual fire until the metal warped and cracked under heat stress.
With a soft, melodic hiss like steam escaping an ancient brass valve, a warm, glowing vapor began to vent from the hairline cracks in the bronze. It wasn’t the acrid, choking smoke of burning melted rock waste. It was a fragrant, intoxicating mist that smelled of wild mountain honey, crushed pine needles, and sweet almond milk. The dense, choking sulfur smog inside the stone hut was displaced instantly by the expanding cloud of healing medicine. It filled every crevice with a clean, invigorating alpine freshness.
The vapor coiled upward, glowing with a soft, rainbow-bright pearl-white light in the dark hut.
Tie Shan stopped chewing, his dark eyes widening in disbelief as he inhaled the fragrant air. The deep keloid whip scars across his shoulders began to tingle with a soothing, cooling sensation.
“Smells sweet,” Tie Shan rumbled softly. “Like mountain spring.”
“Dragon-Marrow essence,” Lin Tao said quietly, tilting a clean clay pot bowl beneath the venting fissure.
The vapor contacted the cold baked-clay surface of the bowl. Then, it condensed instantly into a thick, semi-clear amber syrup. It glowed with faint gold flecks. In less than ten breaths, the crucible had yielded nearly three ounces of packed, purified herbal extract. More healing essence than an apprentice potion-maker could extract from fifty pounds of raw roots.
Lin Tao dipped the tip of his finger into the amber syrup and smoothed it over the healing fracture of his left collar bone.
The effect was instant and deep.
A cool, invigorating wave of cellular restoration washed through his shoulder. The dull, persistent ache that had plagued his collarbone since the quarry collapse vanished fully. Deep beneath the muscle, he could feel the micro-fissures in the bone sealing shut, the calcium matrix hardening with the load-bearing thickness of hardened iron.
Lin Tao raised his left arm, rotating his shoulder in a full, smooth circle.
There was no grinding. There was no pain. For the first time in nearly a month, his upper torso was fully functional, restored to body perfection without relying on a single pill fire.
Before he could seal the clay pot bowl, a sound came from outside the stone hut.
It was the faint, cautious crunch of leather sandals stepping on loose melted rock waste.
Tie Shan moved instantly. With the silent speed of an apex hunting beast, the giant lunged to the doorway, his twelve-pound iron pry-bar raised in a crushing downward guard.
“Who’s there?” Tie Shan growled into the dark, his voice low and lethal.
“Mercy! Don’t strike, brother!” a nervous, wheezing voice squeaked from the shadows of the melted rock waste heap. “I’m no thief! I’m Deacon Chen from the sorting yard!”