The political board was set. The decree was planned. But Mingzhi didn't step away from Qingyu. He leaned back against the rough wall of Hut 404, crossing his arms.

  "We have handled the politics," Mingzhi said, his voice shifting from conspiratorial to critical. "But a Sect Master cannot rule with decrees alone. A leader needs strength. If Elder Zhang brings up your cultivation level is too low, no amount of clever lies will save you."

  He looked at her intently. "Spirit, scan her status."

  “Very well.” The Spirit’s voice echoed in his mind. “Lin Qingyu. Cultivation is at Cloud Gathering Level 4. Her Foundation is critically unstable. Meridians are exhibiting signs of calcification due to impurity buildup. Physical vessel is B-Grade, lagging behind her Qi density. She is a powerful engine inside a fragile frame.”

  Mingzhi frowned. "It’s worse than I thought. You’re unstable, Qingyu."

  Qingyu stiffened. "I advanced quickly to Level 4. My father said my talent was explosive."

  "Explosive is the right word," Mingzhi said dryly. "If you try to reach Level 5 like this, you won't breakthrough. You'll detonate."

  He paced the small room. "We need to fix this. We need to scour the impurities, reinforce your body, and stabilize your foundation before you even think about advancing."

  “Spirit,” Mingzhi thought. “I need to make her pills. High-grade cleansing pills and cultivation pills. But I have zero experience. I have the knowledge, but not the hands. How do we learn Alchemy fast without wasting resources?”

  “We can use The Void Eye,” the Spirit replied. “We can utilize the Eye Space for Mental Simulation. I can project the variables of alchemy—heat, timing, mixture—into a virtual environment. You can practice refining a hundred pills in your mind while only some time passes in reality.”

  “The Side Effect is,” the Spirit warned. “This consumes immense mental energy. It will strain your Spirit and your undeveloped Divine Sense. It will be exhausting, but will have a strengthening effect.”

  “How long to master basic refinement?”

  “Approximately one week of nightly sessions.”

  "Good enough," Mingzhi murmured.

  He turned to Qingyu. "Do you have a cultivation pill on you? The kind the Sect provides?"

  Qingyu reached into her sash and pulled out a small porcelain bottle. She shook out a single, crimson pill. It glowed with a warm light and smelled faintly of sulfur and spice.

  "This is the Greater Yang Pill," she said proudly. "Allocated only to Core Disciples. It accelerates Fire Qi absorption."

  Mingzhi took it. He held it up to the moonlight.

  “Observe it,” he commanded.

  “It has primitive composition,” the Spirit scoffed. “Main ingredient is Fire-Scale Root. Catalyst is Sulfur. The Flaw is that they failed to neutralize the Fire-Scale toxin. They used dry heat instead of a water-bath method. Result: 55% Medicinal efficacy, 45% Ash Toxin. It is garbage.”

  Mingzhi tossed the pill back to her. "It's poison."

  Qingyu caught it, looking offended. "Poison? This is worth fifty Spirit Stones!"

  "It’s unbalanced," Mingzhi stated flatly. "They used Fire-Scale Root to boost the energy, right? But look at the surface texture. It's rough. That means they didn't use a neutralizing agent—like Moon-Dew—to dissolve the root's shell. You aren't just eating Qi, Qingyu. You're eating the ash of the root."

  Qingyu stared at the pill. "Moon-Dew... neutralize the shell..." She looked up at him, her eyes wide. "How do you know alchemy theory?"

  "It’s just chemistry," Mingzhi shrugged. "Balancing equations. Can I make better ones? Yes. It's not hard."

  He gestured for her to put it away.

  "Cultivation isn't just about cramming more Qi into your stomach," Mingzhi lectured. "Think of your body as a Tree. The Qi is the sap. The Body is the Trunk. If you pump too much sap into a thin trunk, the bark splits."

  "Circulating Qi in your body has a natural strengthening effect, but there are other ways."

  "You need Body Cultivation," he continued. "You need to spend 10% of your daily Qi not on gathering, but on nourishing. Feed the branches. Use the Qi to widen your meridians before you fill them."

  "But that will slow down my leveling," she argued.

  "It will slow you down for a month," Mingzhi agreed. "But then you will have wide, steel pipes while everyone else is using straw. Who do you think will flow faster in the end?"

  He leaned in close.

  "I will provide the Cleansing Pills to fix the damage that junk pill caused. I can extract the secondary essences from the Slag Pit down here. But I need you to get the Main Herbs. Can you access the Treasury for raw ingredients without suspicion?"

  Qingyu nodded slowly, her mind reeling from the sudden influx of theory. "I... I can claim I need them for Father's recovery. Or for my own practice."

  "Good," Mingzhi said. "Get me Fire-Scale Root, Ice-Heart Grass, and Spirit-Mercury. Bring them here in three days."

  "I'll teach you the Bone-Scouring Lotus Art then, it is a body strengthening and cleaning method," Mingzhi promised. "It will hurt. But it will make you unbreakable."

  Qingyu left the hut as silently as she had arrived, slipping into the pre-dawn mist with the body cultivation manual tucked into her sash.

  “The plan was set. Now came the cost.”

  Mingzhi didn't go back to sleep. He spent the remaining hours of the night reinforcing the door with the ironwood planks and meditating.

  When the sun rose, painting the toxic sky above the Waste Sector a bruised purple, Mingzhi was already up. He tied his sash tight, drank a cup of cold water, and walked out into the ravine.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It was time to work.

  The Slag Pit was a scar on the face of the mountain. Located at the northernmost edge of the sector, it was a massive, crater-like depression where the sect dumped everything it deemed useless.

  It was a chaotic, burning graveyard of cultivation resources.

  Carts from the Alchemy Hall above dumped smoking piles of black ash down wooden chutes. Wagons from the Smithy poured out twisted scraps of glowing metal. The heat radiating from the pit was intense, drying out the skin and stinging the eyes with acrid fumes.

  A dozen other Waste Disciples were already there. They moved with the slow, dragging gait of the defeated. They wrapped damp cloths around their faces, trying to filter out the toxic Qi, shoveling the debris toward the central incinerator array with minimal effort. To them, this was punishment.

  "New guy," a foreman grunted from the shade of a rock. "Fill the cart. Dump it. Try not to pass out from the fumes."

  Mingzhi grabbed a rusted shovel and walked into the haze.

  "Spirit," Mingzhi thought. "Analyze the environment. What am I looking at?"

  "You are looking at incompetence," the Spirit’s scholarly voice replied, sounding disdainful. "The disciples of this age are wasteful. Look at the texture of the debris."

  Mingzhi drove his shovel into a mound of alchemy sludge.

  "When a novice Alchemist fails to control the heat, the exterior of the herb carbonizes instantly," the Spirit lectured. "They see a black, burnt ball and throw it away. But in reality, that carbon shell creates a vacuum seal. The medicinal essence inside is not destroyed; it is merely trapped."

  Mingzhi paused. "So inside these burnt lumps..."

  "Is pure liquid essence," the Spirit finished. "And over there—the metal scraps from the Artifact Hall. Those aren't just rusted iron. Those are filings of Star-Steel and Spirit Copper that separated from the ore during the smelting process. They are too small for a smith to bother collecting, but for an Engineer? They are high-grade conductive materials."

  Mingzhi looked at the "trash" with new eyes. It wasn't waste; it was raw ore that had already been mined and processed for him.

  "Activate Divine Sense," Mingzhi whispered. "Highlight the salvageable nodes."

  A faint distortion rippled across his left eye. The piles of grey sludge lit up. Scattered amidst the ash were thousands of small, glowing points of light.

  Mingzhi began to work.

  He shoveled a load of sludge into his cart, positioning his body to block the foreman’s line of sight. As he pushed the shovel into the pile, his hand brushed against the glowing nodes.

  Store.

  The specific items—burnt pill nodes, twisted metal fragments, scraps of talisman paper soaked in beast blood—vanished instantly, sucked into the silent grey void of his Eye Space.

  He shoveled the remaining useless ash into the cart.

  Shovel. Store. Dump.

  He worked rhythmically, moving twice as fast as the other disciples. The others watched him with dull, confused eyes.

  "Look at him," one disciple muttered, leaning on his shovel to catch his breath. "Sweating like a pig. Does he think working hard will get him promoted?"

  "He's new," another sneered. "Give him a week. The fumes will rot his lungs and he'll slow down like the rest of us."

  Mingzhi ignored them. He was filling his inventory. He didn't sort the items yet—he just grabbed anything with a spiritual signature. Burnt herbs, metal shards, bone dust. He would categorize them later in the safety of his mind.

  By noon, his muscles ached, but his mental inventory was heavy with potential.

  "This isn't a punishment," Mingzhi thought, wiping soot from his forehead. "This is a treasury."

  While Mingzhi shoveled ash in the ravine, the fate of the Sect was being decided in the clouds.

  The Hall of Ascending Dragons—the central council chamber of the Inner Sect—was a masterpiece of intimidation designed to humble anyone who walked through its doors. Pillars of black obsidian rose fifty feet high, carved with coiling storm dragons that seemed to watch the proceedings with stone eyes. The floor was polished to a mirror sheen, reflecting the tense faces of the Elders like a dark lake.

  The atmosphere was suffocating. The air pressure in the room was physically heavy, weighed down by the clashing Auras of the gathered masters.

  Elder Zhang stood at the head of the left row, his red robes billowing slightly from his leaking spiritual pressure. Behind him stood six other Elders—his faction—arms crossed, faces grim.

  Across from him stood the Neutral Elders. They looked uneasy, shifting their feet, their eyes darting to the empty Golden Throne at the head of the hall.

  "The Seat cannot remain empty!" Elder Zhang bellowed, his voice amplified by Qi, echoing off the high vaulted ceiling. "It has been three months! The Sect Master is missing. The Blood Yin Sect is encroaching on our western mining borders. A Sect without a head is a corpse waiting to rot!"

  He turned to the High Elder of the Neutrals. "I propose an immediate Vote of No Confidence to dissolve the Regency. We must elect a new Master to secure our future!"

  The Neutral Elders murmured amongst themselves. Fear was taking root. Zhang was making sense. If Lin Tian was dead, clinging to his daughter was suicide.

  "I... I second the motion," one of the wavering Elders stammered.

  Elder Zhang grinned. Victory was inches away.

  BOOM.

  The heavy ironwood doors at the entrance were thrown open with enough force to shake the dust from the rafters.

  Lin Qingyu strode in.

  She did not look like a girl of fifteen. She wore the full, heavy ceremonial crimson robes of the Sect Master, embroidered with the Golden Phoenix. Her hair was pulled back tightly, revealing a face that was pale but carved from ice. She walked with a steady, rhythmic cadence—click, click, click—ignoring the pressure of the Elders' gazes.

  She walked straight to the dais. She didn't sit. She stood before the empty throne, turning to face the room.

  "You speak of securing our future, Elder Zhang," Qingyu said, her voice cool and steady, cutting through the murmurs. "Yet you try to usurp power while the Sect Master is fighting a war of life and death?"

  Zhang narrowed his eyes, stepping forward. "Fighting? You said he was merely in seclusion three months ago. Now you change your story? Is he dead, girl? Admit it!"

  Qingyu didn't flinch. She reached into her sash and pulled out the Red Jade Token.

  She held it up. The ambient light of the hall caught the blood-red surface, making the carved 'LIN' character glow.

  Gasps rippled through the room. The Elders recognized it instantly—the personal Command Token of Lin Tian. It was an object that never left his side.

  "My father gave this to me yesterday," Qingyu lied. She didn't blink. She projected the lie with absolute conviction.

  "He emerged briefly from his seclusion to give me his final orders before sealing the cave entrance permanently."

  She lowered the token, looking Zhang dead in the eye.

  "He was not just cultivating these past months. He was healing. Three months ago, while gathering resources near the border, he was ambushed by a Blood Yin Sect Elder."

  The room erupted into chaos.

  "Ambushed?"

  "The Blood Yin Sect dared to attack him?"

  "Is he injured?"

  "He managed to escape," Qingyu shouted over the noise, her voice sharp. "But he sustained a heavy injury to his meridian foundation. He has spent the last three months stabilizing his foundation."

  She paused, letting the silence settle.

  "However... in the crucible of that life-and-death battle, and through the healing process, he gained a profound insight. He told me that he has found the path to the Pearl Condensing Realm. He has entered Death Seclusion not just to heal, but to break through."

  The shock in the room was palpable. Even Zhang took a step back. A Pearl Condensing Master? If Lin Tian succeeded, he would be the strongest cultivator in a thousand miles.

  "Yesterday?" Zhang stammered, his momentum shattered. "You... you saw him yesterday?"

  "I did," Qingyu said coldly. "And he was displeased. He sensed the unrest. He was disappointed that while he fights for a breakthrough that will elevate this entire Sect, his Elders are bickering like children."

  She stepped down from the dais, walking toward Zhang.

  "Elder Zhang... since you are so concerned about the Blood Yin Sect, surely you will want to avenge the insult to my father?"

  Zhang stiffened. "I... of course."

  "Good." Qingyu smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Then I hereby issue the Sect Master's decree. You and your disciples will lead a long-range patrol to the western border. Find the rats who dared ambush him. Do not return until the border is secure."

  Zhang grit his teeth. His face turned a splotchy purple. She had cornered him. If he refused, he looked like a coward and a traitor. If he agreed, he would be sent away from the center of power for months.

  "I will... obey the command," Zhang choked out, bowing stiffly.

  "Excellent." Qingyu turned back to the throne. "The Regency stands. The Sect Master is in Death Seclusion. Anyone who disturbs his seclusion risks causing his Qi Deviation, and will be executed for treason."

  She looked out over the bowed heads of the Elders. Her hands were tucked into her sleeves to hide their trembling, but her head was high.

  It worked, she thought, her heart pounding against her ribs. Mingzhi... it worked.