Elder Mu slid to a halt on his knees, carving two smoking streaks of friction-burned hemp straight across the clean obsidian flagstones.
A heartbeat later, his three-legged bronze cauldron dropped out of the upper stratosphere. The six-ton vessel crashed just past the perimeter wire with a ground-shaking *THOOM*, punching its thick bronze feet four feet deep into the granite shelf. Dirt and needle-fine quartz shards sprayed thirty feet in every direction.
The old alchemist ignored the heirloom bronze. He ignored his smoking kneecaps. Small orange sparks were actively chewing through the frayed bristles of his white beard, ignited by atmospheric drag on the way down, but he didn't even bother patting them out.
His eyes were locked on the basalt dome.
More specifically, on the youth squatting beside the flue with a pair of split-bamboo tongs.
Austin had a golden, plump roasted radish halfway to his mouth. Amber syrup dripped from the scorched tip, shimmering with a soft violet heat.
He stared at the lunatic who had just used his hardscaped courtyard as an emergency brake run-off. The old man was drenched in sulfur soot, missing half his left eyebrow, and wheezing like a blown head gasket while staring at the radish platter with pupils shrunk to pinheads.
Austin let out a slow, gravelly breath through his nose. The kind of breath a site supervisor takes when an unlicensed drywaller drives a forklift through fresh-poured footings.
"Another one," Austin grumbled. His left eyelid gave an involuntary twitch as he tracked the black skid marks scuffed into the mirror finish of the stone. "First I get a rookie NPC who won't stop headbutting my coordinates. Then three griefers try to hurdle live security wire. Now a wandering transient in burnt pajamas crash-lands through the skybox to eyeball my lunch. Doesn't anyone on this server respect a union meal period? It is twelve-fifteen. Bothering a man on his thirty-minute break is a Class A grievance in any civilized county."
He pulled the earthenware platter an inch closer to his chest, shoulders hitching defensively.
"Look here, gramps," Austin said, voice flat as an unplaned two-by-four. "I don't know what kind of begging script you're running, but the kitchen is closed. I spent an hour digging these roots out of the briars, laid up the masonry myself, and pulled the draft by hand. Go back down the hill and hit the general store for rations."
Elder Mu froze. The ragged air trapped in his windpipe locked solid.
*Gramps?!*
*Begging script?!*
For two hundred years, sect patriarchs, grand marshals, and crown princes had knelt in the driving snow outside the Medicine Pavilion for weeks on end, offering carts of raw spirit jade just for permission to breathe the exhaust fumes from his third-grade waste furnace. No living creature had spoken to him with such casual, dismissive contempt since the reign of the previous dynasty!
Then his spiritual sense swept across the youth's abdomen.
All alchemical pride, all three centuries of accumulated arrogance, shriveled like dry leaves tossed into an open blast furnace.
Behind the patched hemp tunic burned a pure, unblemished, self-contained miniature star. No mundane wood-flame. No lightning-born spark scraped from the clouds. This was the ancient root of all cosmic heat and atomic motion, churning with raw gravitational torque so immense that Elder Mu's own internal Earth-Core flame whined like a beaten cur, shrinking into a shivering speck of cold ash at the bottom of his dantian.
*An ancient Dao Lord...* Elder Mu's mind shrieked in silent hysteria. *A true ancestor from the First Epoch, cloaking his supreme presence in rags, playing the role of an earthly farmer to temper his Dao Heart in the dust of the mortal world! And that scent...*
His trembling gaze dropped to the stone platter in Austin's lap.
Those were no wild mountain parsnips.
To three hundred years of refined alchemical expertise, the tubers were unmistakably **Sun-Refined Nirvana Marrow Roots**. That golden syrup beading along the score marks was the legendary *Nine-Solar Grand Dao Nectar*—a celestial restorative mentioned only on pre-diluvian bronze tablets, capable of rebuilding shattered meridians from dust and adding ten thousand years to a fading immortal's lifespan!
"Senior... Grand Ancestor..." Elder Mu choked, tears cutting pale, crooked tracks through the soot on his cheeks. He threw himself forward until his scorched forehead smacked the obsidian stones with a hollow *thwack*. "This blind, crawling worm of the furnace Dao begs for a single crumb of ancestral mercy! I have been trapped at Early Golden Core for a hundred and twenty years! My core is choked with toxic heavy metal dross... my lifespan fire is guttering in the wind! I have less than thirty winters before my bones rot! Bestow a single breath of your holy flame upon this wretched junior!"
Austin blinked down at the groveling elder.
"A single breath?" Austin muttered, shaking his head in disgust. "Listen to this dialogue tree. Is this one of those high-tier consumable hand-ins? Am I supposed to give up my quest rations to unlock an NPC vendor tab?"
He looked at the platter. Three of the radishes were roasted to golden perfection—swollen, glistening, smelling sweet enough to draw bees from three peaks over.
The fourth radish was a different story.
It had rolled into the back corner of the dome, right against the intake baffle where the plasma draft had blown too hot. The outer skin was completely torched. Brittle, pitch-black flakes of charred crust had cracked open and peeled off against the stone plate like scrapings off an old barbecue grate.
Austin used the tips of his bamboo chopsticks to lift a three-inch curl of the burnt skin.
"Garbage item," Austin grumbled. He clicked the bamboo chopsticks together in annoyance. "Uneven thermal distribution on the rear wall. The draft baffle is pulling too hard on the left flank. I need to tear down that flue and lay up another layer of firebrick before the next batch."
He glanced down at the old lunatic. Elder Mu was shaking so hard his yellowed teeth were clattering against the obsidian flagstones like loose gravel in a cement mixer.
"Look, I'm not giving you my lunch," Austin sighed, flicking his wrist. "Take the burnt scrap. Put it in your inventory or toss it in the brush, just quit slamming your head into my finished hardscaping. Sit in the corner and let a working man eat his carbs in peace."
The piece of blackened vegetable crust drifted off the chopstick tips, tumbling lazily through the cool air like a scrap of charred newspaper.
To Austin, it was waste heading for the compost heap.
To Elder Mu, the sky had just parted to reveal the throne room of the celestial emperors!
*THE ANCESTOR HAS BESTOWED A SACRED HEAVEN-DRAIN SLAG PEEL!*
The old alchemist moved with the manic speed of a cornered badger. He threw his torso flat against the stone, opened his jaws wide, and caught the flying flake of burnt charcoal squarely on his tongue before it could touch the ground.
He swallowed it whole with a wet, desperate gulp.
*BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
The atmospheric pressure across the Southern Cloud range dropped three inches in a millisecond.
The instant that speck of carbonized fiber hit Elder Mu's gastric acid, the microscopic traces of pure solar plasma clinging to the ash erupted.
No poison. No backlash.
Just pure, unadulterated cosmic heat.
For a hundred and twenty years, Elder Mu's Golden Core had been bogged down under centuries of toxic pill slag—hardened mercury salts, burnt cinnabar sludge, and heavy-metal dross that coated his energy conduits like three inches of crusted hard-water scale inside a fifty-year-old boiler pipe. It had choked his spiritual flow, ensuring that within three decades his dried-up meridians would snap like brittle twigs.
The moment the solar plasma met that hardened sludge, the crust didn't just dissolve. It vaporized into clean, harmless steam.
*CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!*
Deep within Elder Mu's torso, the sound of breaking iron chains echoed like a hydraulic press tearing through three-quarter-inch rebar.
His shriveled, paper-thin skin suddenly flushed pink, smoothing out under a rush of fresh blood. The deep wrinkles carved around his eyes vanished like ripples on a pond. From the roots of his scalp, coarse, raven-black hair surged outward, replacing his brittle white locks in a glossy wave that cascaded down his shoulders. His curved, arthritic spine snapped straight with a terrifying bone-pop, his hollow cheeks filled out with vigorous flesh, and his sunken chest expanded like a blacksmith's bellows!
Above Sunset Peak, the noon sun abruptly turned pale.
A massive spiritual vortex over two miles wide opened in the upper cloud layers, spinning downward like an upside-down typhoon. Forked violet lightning danced across the sky, grounding out against the nearby crags as spiritual qi from seven surrounding peaks was vacuumed toward the courtyard!
*KAA-BOOM!*
Inside the alchemist's chest, his Golden Core swelled from the size of a withered walnut to a glowing grapefruit of dazzling emerald fire!
**Middle Golden Core... SHATTERED!** **Late Golden Core... BROKEN!** **PEAK GOLDEN CORE REACHED!**
In three ragged breaths, an old man who had been knocking on the door of the grave broke through two massive cultivation realms, buying himself four centuries of fresh lifespan on the spot!
Elder Mu drifted six feet into the air, wreathed in a swirling storm of emerald furnace qi, hot tears of religious ecstasy washing the remaining soot from his smooth, newly youthful face.
Then he dropped back to the obsidian flagstones, planting his knees down and bowing until his forehead pressed against Austin's straw sandals:
"DISCIPLE MU CHEN OFFERS ETERNAL THANKS TO THE ANCESTRAL SOVEREIGN!" his voice roared across the mountain valleys, rich and resonant as a bronze temple bell. "THIS BODY, THIS LIFE, AND EVERY FURNACE OF THE MEDICINE PAVILION BELONG TO SUNSET PEAK FOR ALL GENERATIONS TO COME!"
A crisp chime chimed in Austin's ear:
Austin, who was halfway through chewing his second roasted root, slowly lowered his chopsticks.
He looked down at the muscular, black-haired middle-aged man groveling on the floor like a convert at a revival tent. Then he looked at the floating green text in his quest log.
"A hundred EXP and maxed faction standing?" Austin muttered, chewing slowly. "For throwing a piece of burnt scrap into the yard? What kind of Mickey Mouse quest economy is this? Who balanced these progression curves? A first-year intern?"
He shook his head, spear-tackling the third radish with his chopsticks.
"Whatever. Free XP is free XP. At least the reputation grind is knocked out. Now I can buy bulk timber without paying an NPC markup."
***
Down on the lower trail, behind the limestone boulders, Young Master Bai Chen and Senior Brother Shen were sprawled flat in the mud.
Shen had lost his grip on his saber entirely. His eyes were rolled back, his mouth slack, gasping for air like a carp hauled out onto a dry dock.
"Elder Mu..." Bai Chen wheezed, both hands clawing at his silk collar until the seams tore. "Elder Mu... ate a scrap of garbage from Chu Yuan's fingers... and broke through two full realms in three seconds..."
He stared at his own shaking, sweat-soaked hands.
Then he looked at the heavy Heaven-Suppressing Net tangled in the weeds beside him.
"Drop the gear," Bai Chen squeaked, his voice pitching into a pathetic, high-register whimper. "Drop the net. Drop the blades. Strip off the armor. WE ARE LEAVING! Crawl! Don't stand up! Don't make a sound! Belly-crawl down the scree like earthworms until we clear the tree line!"