The next morning, the sun had barely touched the edge of the upper leaves when Zhì Yuǎn finished tying a dark traveling cloak over his clean tunic.
Only two months remained until the Terrace of Ascension opened, and he had no intention of sitting idly in his room waiting for Lī'ya to place the Stone of the Law of Nature in his hands. According to the rules that had come down from the dome, however, no unaffiliated cultivator could step onto the qualifying arenas. Everyone needed to carry the representation seal of a registered power—and the last thing he would do was ask Lī'ya for help and let her discover that he would take part in that bloodbath. Since no beast or half-human lineage would give a spot to a human outsider, the only discreet path lay in the cities of the Human Alliance.
He removed the wild-maple mask from his face and tucked it into the inner fold of his cloak. Within the Sky-Tree, that wood served as a political shield by bearing the mark of the Patriarch's daughter, but using it in human lands would draw far too much attention.
And to conceal his condition, the mask was no longer necessary.
Zhì Yuǎn passed a hand before his face. A thin thread of Qi rose from the reconstructed Dantian around the singularity, drawing on his comprehension of the Law of Illusion mixed with the balance of the Law of Nature. Even without accessing his Inner Universe, the mastery he possessed over the Laws was more than enough to create a veil over his features and aura capable of deceiving any cultivator in the late Immortal Establishment Realm, including Lī'ya herself.
The reed door slid aside the instant Hāi'na arrived with the morning tray.
The two short ears atop the maid's head perked up at once upon seeing him in a cloak, boots laced, and face covered by the shadow of the hood—where the illusion prevented her eyes from focusing on his true features.
"Are you leaving so early, sir?" Hāi'na asked, stopping the tray in the air beside her.
"I'm going down from the tree for a few days, Hāi'na," Zhì Yuǎn answered, adjusting the clasp of the cloak at his neck. "No need to prepare today's lunch."
The tray tilted in the air before Hāi'na steadied her control.
"Down from the tree?!" Her voice rose half a pitch, her eyes widening at once. "But the Young Lady said clearly that it is dangerous for you to step outside the clan territory while the Tiger contingent is roaming the plains! What are you going to do out there alone, sir?!"
"Just see a bit of the human border cities and buy a few things," Zhì Yuǎn said, his tone as calm as if he were only going to the library in the neighboring sector. "Staying cooped up for so long grows tiring."
The maid's small face lost all color.
"B-but if you disappear while she is shut away in the workshop with Elder Vhōl, I will be the one who has to explain!" Hāi'na pleaded in despair, taking half a step to try to block the doorway with her own body. "At least wait until the end of the week to ask her, sir!"
"When she leaves the workshop at the end of the week, I should already be back," Zhì Yuǎn answered, letting a faint smile touch his lips as he drew from his sleeve the leaf-carved dark jade plaque Lī'ya had left him and walked past her toward the corridor. "If I am a little late, tell her not to worry."
"W-wait, sir! My Lady will skin me alive if I let you leave like this! Sir!"
When Hāi'na spun around in the corridor, however, Zhì Yuǎn had already rounded the curve of the internal bridge toward the sector's teleportation platform.
Inside a colossal structure like the Sky-Tree, Lī'ya's personal plaque granted free access to the internal displacement arrays. Presenting the jade to the guards at the base of the trunk, Zhì Yuǎn used the clan's great ancestral array to cross tens of millions of li in a single spatial fold, emerging beyond the red forests, in the first great city on the human border.
As soon as he stepped outside the domains of the Red Leaf, he tucked Lī'ya's plaque deep inside his cloak so as not to leave traces and made his way like any ordinary traveler through the lines of the interprovincial arrays—using only a touch of the Law of Illusion on the guards to blend into the boarding caravans, taking advantage of the activation paid for by the other passengers without spending spiritual stones he did not have.
On the third crossing, when the pillar of white light dissipated beneath his boots, Zhì Yuǎn emerged onto the suspended plaza of Red River City.
The entire city had been built upon arches of black stone spanning a bottomless gorge, through which ran a colossal river of boiling, blood-colored water heated by the spiritual fire veins beneath the earth. Reddish steam rising from the rapids below illuminated the bronze towers of the alchemy houses, while scaled-hull flying ships anchored at the aerial piers and thousands of cultivators elbowed one another around the teleportation obelisks.
Instead of heading straight for the line at the next platform, Zhì Yuǎn noticed that an unusual number of armed groups were leaving the obelisks and hurrying toward the northern piers, ignoring the commercial routes in the center.
To probe what was stirring up the region and learn which local families were recruiting, he walked to the shadow of a jade column beside the largest wine pavilion in the plaza, letting his sharpened hearing sweep the chatter on the upper verandas.
On the open second floor, three men with broadswords strapped to their backs drank near the balustrade.
From within the column's shadow, Zhì Yuǎn extended a filament of perception from the Sea of Consciousness between his brows—a tiny fraction compared to the Divine Sense that had once covered an entire Realm. Although his main soul remained sealed within the singularity, his mastery of the Law of the Soul after weeks of absorbing the millennial roots in Lī'ya's room was already enough to effortlessly read the Qi fluctuations of their bodies and confirm that all three were in the late stage of the Nascent Soul Realm.
"…leave the trip to the capital for next month," the oldest of the trio was saying, striking his cup against the parapet. "The rift of that Secret Realm of the Ancient Furnaces just tore open thirty thousand li north of here, in the Burned Iron Range. If we leave now, we'll arrive before nightfall."
"But didn't that domain fall into the hands of the Chén Family?" the second man asked, frowning. "I heard that two of their elders at the Fourth Stage of Immortal Establishment tried to force their way in yesterday and nearly had their bodies crushed by the recoil of the spatial barrier."
"And that is precisely why they are opening the passage to outside cultivators," the first answered, lowering his tone with a greedy gleam in his eyes. "The rift is still unstable and rejects anyone above the Third Stage of Immortal Establishment. The Chén Family does not have enough people in the Nascent Soul and early Immortal Establishment to clear a ruin of that size before the space closes again. So they surrounded the crater and are letting anyone enter, as long as they hand over twenty percent of what they harvest on the way out."
"Twenty percent? They must not be sure when the rift will close to be so generous," the third agreed, tossing a handful of crystals onto the table to pay the bill. "With the Terrace of Ascension tournament knocking at the door in two months, any thousand-year herb is worth a fortune. Let's go before the larger clans send their juniors to strip the place clean."
The three leaped from the high veranda and shot through the sky between the anchored ships toward the northern gate.
Leaning against the jade column, Zhì Yuǎn looked in the direction they had gone.
If the limit of that rift barred anyone above the Third Stage of Immortal Establishment, there was no one inside capable of seriously threatening him. Although his reconstructed Dantian had only recently formed its Sea of Qi, the mutated structure he had created with the Primordial Qi of his own body to support thousands of different flows, combined with his brutal physical strength, already allowed him to face Immortal Establishment cultivators head-on.
To expand this mutated Dantian before the qualifiers, however, he needed to swallow pure resources in large quantities. He had not recreated the Primordial Mill precisely because the Mill required the fuel of dual cultivation, and a faint chill rose up his spine merely imagining the reaction of his wives if he appeared with a new sister pulled out of nowhere.
There is no reason to waste an opportunity like this, he thought, turning away from the path to the obelisks and following the flow toward the great city exit.
Before leaving the plaza, however, he glanced at his own empty hands beneath the cloak. Since he had fallen into the forest of the Sky-Tree with his Inner Universe sealed, he had nowhere to carry what he could not absorb on the spot—and appearing before the Chén Family to harvest herbs without even a storage ring on his finger would draw attention for the wrong reasons.
Following the avenue that led to the northern piers, Zhì Yuǎn passed beside a stall selling secondhand spoils where mercenaries elbowed one another to buy cheap equipment. Without breaking stride amid the jostling crowd, he extended an invisible thread of the Law of Space combined with the Law of Illusion. The moment the merchant turned to weigh a sack of pills, a worn jade ring from the simplest corner of the display—where an illusory projection continued filling the void over the cloth—vanished from inside the shallow array of the counter without triggering the alarm and slid onto Zhì Yuǎn's right index finger.
As he walked, he sent a filament of perception down from his Sea of Consciousness to invade the rustic arrays carved into the stone, sweeping away the former owner's residual mark and opening an internal gray space two zhang across.
As soon as he crossed the outer arches of Red River City and moved beyond the reach of the watchtowers overlooking the abyss, Zhì Yuǎn drove his boots against a rock.
The granite sank beneath his feet. Combining the physical strength of his legs with the pressure of hundreds of drops of Qi from his mutated Dantian and a touch of the Law of Space, he tore northward through the bank of red clouds at breakneck speed, crossing thousands of li in the span of a few breaths and shooting like an invisible blur past the groups flying the same route.
Thirty thousand li north, the fertile earth died out before the black immensity of the Burned Iron Range.
There, entire mountains of vitrified ore rose like twisted lances against the gray sky. Through the fissures of the dark slopes, exposed veins of earth fire ran like rivers of molten gold, illuminating colossal chains of oxidized bronze—links as thick as houses that had hung between the peaks since the era when an ancient sect of forgers tried to bind the world's own fire to feed their furnaces.
In the center of a crater surrounded by three of those iron peaks, the air itself was split in half.
A vertical tear ten zhang high pulsed above a cracked stone altar, sending out waves of hot air laden with golden sparks and the dense perfume of millennial herbs that grew in the hidden world on the other side.
High on the bronze chains that crossed the crater, floating silk pavilions displayed the crests of the wealthy families of the region. On the black slag ground below, hundreds of wandering cultivators and disciples of lesser sects formed three lines before a long table of cast iron, where officials in gray robes bearing the emblem of a silver furnace collected blood impressions on jade tablets.
Zhì Yuǎn descended without a sound to the edge of the crater and joined the central line.
The line moved forward until only one person remained between him and the registration table.
Before the Chén Family collector stood a young girl wearing a simple blue tunic whose sleeves showed old stains of furnace soot. She had black hair tied back with an ordinary wooden hairpin, but on her right index finger she bore an ancient relic that clashed with her worn clothes—a thin ring of cinnabar-red jade without a single impurity, whose polished surface reflected the light of the flames beneath minute silver carvings.
"Sū Wǎn, of the Cinnabar Valley Sū Clan," the Chén Family official read, raising an eyebrow as he looked at the identification slip she had placed on the iron. "Early Nascent Soul Realm. Entering alone?"
"The two guards my family hired have already passed through the line on the right, sir," the girl answered, her voice soft and polite as she pricked the tip of her index finger to drip blood onto the agreement tablet. "Does the twenty-percent fee remain the same for medicinal herbs?"
Before the official could answer, the heavy thud of scaled paws parted the crowd at the foot of the eastern slope.
A group of six cultivators wearing light golden-scale armor advanced without regard for the lines. At their head walked a tall, sharp-chinned man in a white robe embroidered with gold thread, a long spear strapped to his back. The wave of heat and Qi that struck against Zhì Yuǎn's skin immediately betrayed the newcomer's foundation at the threshold of Immortal Establishment, making the nearest wandering cultivators quickly retreat to clear a path.
The young master halted near the table, ignoring the men of the Chén Family, and fixed his eyes on Sū Wǎn's back.
"I thought you had come to your senses and given up on coming, Wǎn'er," the man in the white robe said, breaking into a wide smile as he rested a hand on his waist. "This Secret Realm is no place for an apothecary who has barely formed her Nascent Soul."
Sū Wǎn's small shoulders stiffened.
She gathered her identification slip, made it vanish in a ruby flash of her ring, and turned just enough to offer a brief, distant greeting, her thumb already spinning the jade band at the base of her finger out of pure reflex.
"I thank Young Master Zhào Kūn for his concern," she said, keeping her eyes fixed on the dark stone ground between them. "But my clan still knows the safe paths along the outer edge. I will not hinder the Golden Spear Pavilion's search."
Zhào Kūn stepped forward, closing the distance until his shadow covered the girl entirely.
"You know very well that I am not speaking of hindering, Wǎn'er." His voice dropped, laden with a false pity that was still loud enough for the entire line to hear. "Old Sū Hè can barely get out of bed without coughing up blood, and your family has already sold even its last bronze furnaces to pay last year's debts. Why risk that pretty skin amid beasts and filthy cultivators for the sake of an herb you might not even find?"
He reached out to touch her chin.
Sū Wǎn recoiled sharply, her back colliding with the cloaked chest of Zhì Yuǎn, who stood right behind her in the line.
Upon impact, amid the stench of sweat, iron, and sulfur in the crater, a clean, warm scent enveloped Sū Wǎn's face. Raised from childhood to distinguish tens of thousands of herbs by smell alone, the young apothecary breathed it in without meaning to, her heart suddenly racing before she realized where she was and stepped aside.
"F-forgive me, sir!" Sū Wǎn whispered, turning her face—flushed to the very tips of her ears—toward Zhì Yuǎn as she cupped her hands before her chest, her fingers closed over the jade ring.
Zhào Kūn's smile cooled upon seeing his hand stop in empty air. His eyes narrowed, passing over Zhì Yuǎn's dark hood without lingering, before returning to the girl.
"My offer still stands until the passage closes," Zhào Kūn said, his voice losing its friendly tone. "My Pavilion's quota is already full, but if your grandfather hands the Sū Clan's representation seal over to us so we can put more men on the Terrace of Ascension—and if you climb into my carriage tonight—I will personally have three stalks of Solar Blood Grass delivered to the gate of your house before dawn."
Beneath the shadow of the hood, Zhì Yuǎn's gaze lingered for the first time on the girl in front of him at the mention of the representation seal.
Sū Wǎn gripped the inherited ring on her finger so tightly that her fingertips turned white against the hard stone, yet when she raised her face, her eyes were steady.
"The representation seal of the Sū Clan was left by my parents, Young Master Zhào," she answered, her voice low yet clear. "And I will harvest my grandfather's medicine myself. With your leave."
Without waiting for a reply, she offered one last quick bow to the official at the table and hurried toward the line on the right, where two burly cultivators with scars on their necks awaited her near the cracked altar.
Following her path with his eyes, Zhì Yuǎn saw Zhào Kūn turn his face toward the altar—and exchange a brief glance with the older of the two guards hired by Sū Wǎn, who answered with an almost imperceptible dip of his chin before following the girl into the rift.
Zhào Kūn released a dry laugh through his nose, adjusted his gold-embroidered collar, and walked with his six followers straight into the luminous tear without even passing through registration.
"Next!" the Chén Family collector shouted, rapping a blank tablet against the iron.
Zhì Yuǎn approached the table.
"Name, origin, and place your palm on the measuring stone," the official said, without raising his head from his ledger.
"Lín Mò. Wandering cultivator," Zhì Yuǎn answered, slightly altering the timbre of his voice as he placed his right hand on the round crystal fixed to the edge of the table and let the Law of Illusion release only the superficial fluctuation of his Sea of Qi.
The crystal lit up with a faint white glow, filling only the first mark at the base.
The official raised his eyes for the first time, staring at the hooded man with open contempt.
"First Stage of the Transcendent Realm?" The man let out a short snort, pushing the agreement tablet toward him. "Another desperate fool thinking he will get rich picking leftovers off the ground. Drip your blood there. Twenty percent of everything you bring back stays on this table, and if you end up as beast fodder inside, the Chén Family won't bury your bones."
Zhì Yuǎn pressed the tip of his thumb against the tablet's needle. The instant the red drop formed, he enveloped the blood in an invisible thread of the Law of Karma mixed with Earth and Wood Qi, completely falsifying the vital essence and karmic origin of the sample before it sealed the pact in the jade. Then he took the entry slip and walked unhurriedly toward the golden sparks of the passage.