The young apprentice potion-maker slipped down the switchback trail like a thief fleeing a headsman.
He was nineteen years old, his white silk robes stained with soot and yellow sulfur streaks around the cuffs, his eyes red-rimmed from three days of sleepless terror. In his trembling hands, he carried a heavy pigskin satchel wrapped in oiled canvas.
Tie Shan stepped out from behind a boulder at the base of the trail, his iron pry-bar blocking the path.
“Who?” Tie Shan grunted.
The youth flinched, clutching the pigskin satchel to his chest as if shielding his own heart. “Please! I’m Apprentice Fang from the Seventh Hearth of the Sky-Fire Pavilion! I have come to speak with the master who refined the drossless nectar!”
Lin Tao walked out from the stone hut, wiping his hands on a clean scrap of hemp. “I’m no master, Apprentice Fang. I’m a scrap handler. State your business.”
Fang stared at Lin Tao, his mouth opening and closing in confusion. He had expected to find an ancient, reclusive grandmaster hiding in the volcano bowl to cultivate the esoteric arts of herbal purification. Instead, he saw a seventeen-year-old youth in a patched linen tunic, with a calm, unrushed manner and eyes that looked through him like polished glass.
Fang fell to his knees in the dirt, the pride of an Upper Sect student fully broken by desperation.
“Help me, brother,” Fang choked out, tears cutting clean tracks through the soot on his cheeks. “If you don’t help me, my master will break my training and sell me to the sulfur pits by tomorrow evening!”
Lin Tao gestured toward the stone hut. “Step inside. Speak clearly.”
Inside the shelter, Fang unrolled his pigskin satchel on the rough slate table.
Inside lay three shattered shards of a high-grade red stone cooking pot, crusted with a thick, blackened paste that smelled faintly of scorched sandalwood and bitter copper. Beside them lay two ancient bamboo scrolls bound in silver wire. Precursor potion-made treatises stolen from the Seventh Hearth’s private archive.
“Three days ago,” Fang stammered, his fingers digging into his thighs, “my master, Pill Master Lu, ordered me to oversee the final ninety-day simmering of a batch of Foundation-Cleansing Pills. The fire pressure spiked... The backup exhaust jammed... And the cooking pot cracked down its main heating array.”
Fang buried his face in his hands, trembling wildly.
“The batch was ruined. More than four thousand silver bits worth of spiritual ingredients scorched into toxic waste scum. Master Lu gave me until tomorrow sunset to produce thirty pounds of pure, unburned Dragon-Bone essence to salvage the cooking pot. Or he will report me to the Disciplinary Bureau for sabotage!”
Lin Tao picked up one of the blackened cooking pot shards, examining it under the yellow lamplight.
Through his left eye, the reality screen hummed:
The cooking pot was not ruined. The apprentice had simply over-stoked the sulfur heat, causing the volatile carrier oils to turn to steam. Meanwhile, the heavy, active healing compounds remained locked inside the tiny pores of the star-iron alloy.
“Your master is an unfit stoker,” Lin Tao said quietly, setting the shard down.
Fang gasped, looking around in terror as if Master Lu might appear from the stone walls. “Brother! That’s Pill Master Lu of the Upper Sect! He has refined pills for forty years!”
“A man who burns four thousand silver bits because an exhaust pipe jammed isn’t a potion-maker,” Lin Tao replied evenly. “He’s an amateur who doesn’t understand how heat dissipates across an iron boundary.”
Lin Tao looked down at the two ancient bamboo scrolls Fang had brought.
The bamboo was dark brown with age, the characters inscribed in the ancient, sharp-angled script of the Precursor dynasties. The titles read: Foundational Heat-flow Flux of the Central Smelter and The Nine-Layered Register of Array Boundaries.
“Where did you get these?” Lin Tao asked, his fingers tracing the silver binding wire.
“They were discarded in the archive cellar,” Fang said eagerly. “No one in the Upper Sect can read them. The grammar is too strange, filled with odd numbers and diagrams of pipes. I brought them as an offering! If you can salvage the thirty pounds of Dragon-Bone essence from these shards, the scrolls are yours!”
Lin Tao tapped the four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen against the table.
“Deal,” Lin Tao said.
Lin Tao took the blackened cooking pot shards, placed them inside their clockwork straining rig. Then they lined up his steel metal pen with the star-iron fracture.
He tapped the metal three times at a split second intervals.
Ting. Ting. Ting.
The orphaned memory buffer unlocked. With a soft, musical hiss, pure, rainbow-bright white Dragon-Bone marrow vented from the metal. He condensed into two large baked-clay jars on the table.
Fang stared in total, jaw-dropping silence. In less than twenty breaths, thirty-five pounds of flawless, drossless Dragon-Bone marrow—purer than anything Master Lu had ever produced in his life—sat gleaming in the jars.
Fang snatched the jars. She grabbed them like divine magic charms, bowing until his forehead cracked against the slate floor.
“Thank you, Master Lin!” Fang sobbed. “You have saved my life! If you ever need materials from the Upper Pavilion, send word through Deacon Chen!”
Fang turned and sprinted into the night, desperate to replace the ruined batch before his master awakened.
Lin Tao sat down by the oil lamp, opening the first Precursor bamboo scroll.
His left eye scanned the ancient sharp-angled characters. Then, a slow, cold realization crystal-hardened in his mind.
The entire volcano bowl was not a natural fiery valley. It was a massive, decaying Precursor cooling basin. The central smelting fire operated by Overseer Meng was currently running on an unpatched heat loop that was five degrees away from a total meltdown.
Lin Tao carefully rolled the ancient bamboo scroll, securing the silver wire with a deft twist of his fingers.
Beside him, Tie Shan threw another handful of dry charcoal into their small stone fire bowl. He watched the white sparks dance in the draft. The giant looked at the second scroll on the table, his dark eyes filled with quiet curiosity.
“Old writing?” Tie Shan asked.
“Very old,” Lin Tao replied softly. “Written by builders who understood how heat moves through stone. Modern alchemists look at these diagrams and see mystical dragon veins. They don’t realize that every dragon vein has a valve, and every valve can be turned.”
Lin Tao looked out through the open doorway of the hut. In the far distance, the five-story ziggurat of the Central Smelting Pavilion was pulsing with an uneven crimson light, like a diseased heart beating too fast inside a dying chest. The danger was no longer a theoretical math. It was a physical countdown ticking in the stone beneath their feet.