A scrawny, hunched figure stepped cautiously into the doorway of the stone hut, his hands raised in wild surrender.
It was Deacon Chen, the sorting scout of the Lower Slag Pavilion. Chen was an outer student in his late forties whose training had permanently stalled at the third stage of Qi Gathering thirty years ago. Dressed in grease-stained gray linen, with a pointed nose, narrow rat-like eyes. A patchy beard, he looked more like a sneaky alley rodent than an immortal fighter.
Tie Shan didn’t lower his iron bar. The giant loomed over the scrawny deacon like a bronze mountain, his dark eyes cold and steady.
“Speak,” Tie Shan grunted.
Chen swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he stared at the terrifying thickness of the iron pry-bar hovering three inches from his forehead. His eyes darted past Tie Shan into the inside of the hut. He locked onto the clay pot bowl resting beside Lin Tao.
The fragrant, pearl-white vapor was still curling faintly from the amber syrup, lighting up the dark stone walls with a clear spiritual aura.
“Dragon-Marrow nectar...” Chen whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and overwhelming greed. “You... You pulled out pure nectar from that exploded crucible? Without a fire? Without spirit charcoal?”
Lin Tao sat calmly on his slate slab. He held the four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen loosely between his fingers.
“You were watching the pit, Deacon Chen,” Lin Tao said, his voice flat and even. “Why?”
Chen dropped to his knees on the dirt floor, kowtowing with exaggerated humility.
“Little brother—no, Great Master! This lowly Chen was doing his night rounds to check the melted rock waste channels!” Chen stammered, his eyes darting wildly. “I saw the white light from the hut and smelled the honey scent. I swear by my ancestors, I’ve told no one! Not a single soul!”
“Stand up, Deacon,” Lin Tao commanded quietly. “In this pavilion, men don’t crawl on their knees unless they want to be stepped on.”
Chen scrambled up, dusting his knees with trembling hands, though his stance remained deeply hunched.
“You’re an outer sect scout,” Lin Tao continued, his left eye scanning Chen’s bio-electric profile. The deacon’s spirit veins were narrow, brittle. Then he clogged with heavy-metal residues from decades of breathing volcano bowl waste scum. “You skim copper and bronze scrap from the sorting yard to sell to outer sect blacksmiths for wine and cheap grain.”
Chen flinched as if struck by a whip. “You... How do you know that?”
“Your fingers are stained with lead-flux, and your sash carries the scent of fermented sorghum liquor,” Lin Tao replied calmly. “You’re not a guard. You’re an opportunist who knows that Overseer Meng’s ledgers are fraudulent.”
Chen let out a ragged sigh of relief, realizing that Lin Tao was not a traditional zealot seeking to report him to the Disciplinary Bureau. In the harsh underworld of the Azure Cloud Sect, shared criminality was the only reliable foundation for trust.
“Overseer Meng is a vulture,” Chen whispered. He stepped closer and lowering his voice to a conspiratorial murmur. “He skims thirty percent of the refined copper scrap, forges the metalworking purity reports, and sells the surplus to rogue fighters in the outer valleys. But that’s not all.”
Chen glanced nervously over his shoulder toward the dark volcano bowl before leaning in.
“Meng is preparing a massive shipment for the Black Market next full moon,” Chen said. “He has an apprentice in the Upper Pavilion who smuggles down defective pill cores—failed Core-Formation pills that contain lethal dirt. Meng grinds them up, presses them into cheap clay molds with yellow dye, and sells them as authentic Marrow-Tempering Pills to desperate outer students who can’t afford official sect elixirs.”
Tie Shan’s jaw tightened, his knuckles whitening on his iron bar. “Fake medicine. Murders the buyer.”
“Worse than murder,” Chen whispered. “The dirt rot their spirit veins within six months. But Meng doesn’t care. By the time the students die of spirit vein black rot, the silver is already in his spatial pouch.”
Lin Tao looked down at the clay pot bowl of amber syrup, then back at Deacon Chen.
“I have a proposition for you, Deacon Chen,” Lin Tao said.
“A... A proposition?” Chen asked cautiously.
“Overseer Meng has given us a quota of five hundred pounds of cleaned bronze and fifty pounds of reusable copper flux per week,” Lin Tao said. “You have access to the main scrap sorting chutes where the Upper Sect dumps their failed cooking pots.”
Lin Tao pointed to the shattered bronze crucible on the floor.
“You bring me the cracked cooking pots and crucible shards before they’re tossed into the smelting vats,” Lin Tao instructed. “I’ll extract the metal and return ninety percent of the cleaned copper to meet our official quota. You may keep the leftover ten percent to sell for your sorghum wine.”
Chen’s eyes lit up with feverish excitement. “And... And the leftover healing essence trapped inside the bronze?”
“That belongs to me,” Lin Tao said, his voice dropping into a cold, iron-hard boundary. “You don’t ask how it’s pulled out, and you don’t speak of it to Overseer Meng. If a single word leaks from your mouth, Tie Shan will test the pulling strength of your neck with his pry-bar.”
Tie Shan stepped forward, slapping the heavy iron bar into his left palm with a bone-shaking smack that made the deacon jump out of his sandals.
“Understood! Fully understood!” Chen gasped, bowing three times in rapid row. “Every broken cooking pot that comes down the chute will be delivered straight to Pit Seven! On my mother’s grave, I swear it!”
“Good,” Lin Tao said, gesturing toward the door. “Begin tonight. Bring me every vessel that contained bone-mending or marrow-tempering herbs.”
Chen nodded vigorously, turned. Then he scurried out into the purple sulfur fog like a frightened hare.
Lin Tao watched the deacon vanish into the gloom. He felt the steady, rhythmic thrum of his Sanity Anchor in his thumb callus.
The supply chain was secured. Now, it was time to manufacture an army.