The Blood Sun Fruit! A Mysterious Object!
The sun gave way to the moon, and the moon to the sun again.
It took Zhang Lingxiao seven full days and nights to finish refining the Glazed Karmic Fire.
For all seven days, none of the three of them closed their eyes, holding their focus at a pitch that drained their spiritual reserves steadily lower with every hour. Zhang Lingxiao bore the worst of it, the fire tempering him from the inside out, a torment that reached past his body and into his mind.
But the instant the refining finished, every trace of exhaustion simply vanished. More than that, his divine sense had sharpened, grown clearer, stronger than it had ever been.
He turned the sensation over in his mind and confirmed it: his divine sense had leveled up considerably.
There wasn't time to sit and study it properly, though not with the Glazed Karmic Fire's power still untested and Zhang Lingxiao itching to see what it could actually do.
Elder Su read the look on his face easily enough, stroking his white beard with a hearty laugh.
"Let's put it through its paces, then. Show your master exactly what this Glazed Karmic Fire is capable of."
"Show your Sixth Senior Brother too, while you're at it," Han Tianlai added.
Zhang Lingxiao nodded, solemn, and the three of them headed outside together.
The summit of Alchemy Peak leveled out into gentle terrain, blessed with unusually rich spiritual soil. Elder Su had used the ground to cultivate a small garden of rare spirit herbs, but nothing in it drew the eye like the single spirit tree standing at its center.
Seven or eight blood-red fruits hung from its branches, each one giving off a fragrance rich enough to clear the head just standing near it.
Zhang Lingxiao didn't recognize the fruit, but its value was obvious at a glance.
He asked Gu Yue Ningbing about it, and her reply came back edged with surprise. "I didn't expect to find Blood Sun Fruit somewhere this out of the way."
"Blood Sun Fruit? Rare, is it?" Zhang Lingxiao asked.
"Rare doesn't begin to cover it. Its potency only grows with age. The elderly can extend what's left of their lives by eating it; the young can strengthen their bloodline. Either way, it's about as nourishing as a spiritual substance gets."
"A high-quality Blood Sun Fruit is the kind of thing even Venerables and Emperors would want. Longer life means purer bloodline, and purer bloodline means more room and more time to break through whatever bottleneck stands in the way."
Zhang Lingxiao understood well enough from that alone that this fruit sat leagues above any ordinary pill or medicine.
And judging by what it could do, it wasn't hard to guess what it was really for: a safety net Elder Su had grown for himself.
A martial artist's bloodline strengthened as their cultivation climbed, and lifespan climbed right along with it. But for all of Elder Su's gifts in alchemy, his own talent for cultivation had never matched it; he'd only reached Xuanwu Realm at all by forcing the climb with pills of his own making.
A fruit like this could change that math. Purer bloodline, more years to work with, maybe enough, eventually, to break through to a higher realm, or simply to buy the time needed to climb further as an alchemist.
"What are you two brats staring at? Eyes off. I've got plans for those, so don't even think about it."
Elder Su cracked open one droopy eyelid and gave Zhang Lingxiao and Han Tianlai a warning look.
Zhang Lingxiao just laughed it off. His opinion of Elder Su had only gone up since the man handed him a wisp of earth fire as a welcome gift; there was no part of him eyeing that fruit tree.
Elder Su reached into his storage ring and pulled out a block of ice, roughly waist-high, crystal-clear and radiating a cold sharp enough to bite. He set it down in front of Zhang Lingxiao.
"Millennium Mystic Ice. Turned up alongside the Glazed Fire itself, so you can guess how valuable it is. Let's see if you can melt it."
He waved Han Tianlai back a few paces, giving Zhang Lingxiao room to work without anyone getting hurt.
Zhang Lingxiao nodded and prepared to call on the Glazed Fire.
Most living beings across the Nine Provinces Continent carried three dantians: upper, middle, and lower. In human cultivators, the upper sat between the eyebrows, the middle at the heart, and the lower below the navel.
The upper dantian, also called the sea of consciousness, held a cultivator's divine sense, the seat of a powerful soul.
The middle dantian was where Zhang Lingxiao kept the already-refined Nine Netherworld Demon Palace, the seat of his physical body.
The lower dantian now held the freshly refined Glazed Karmic Fire, the primary wellspring for storing the spiritual energy drawn from heaven and earth.
The moment he called on it, the fire surged out of his lower dantian and answered.
He turned his palm over, and a ball of flame bloomed there, mostly sky blue, threaded through with crimson. His spiritual power fed steadily into it, and the flame pulsed and flickered like something with a will of its own.
Stranger still, the fire felt almost familiar to him, warm in a way that reminded him of an old friend he hadn't seen in years.
"Don't hold back. Something's sealed inside that ice, and I suspect only the Glazed Karmic Fire is capable of melting through to it," Elder Su said.
Zhang Lingxiao's interest sharpened at once; a secret hidden inside the ice was more than he'd expected.
He fed his spiritual power into the fire, and it surged and swelled before rushing forward to swallow the Millennium Mystic Ice whole.
Poof.
The Glazed Karmic Fire carried both extremes at once, a strange balance of searing heat and killing cold, capable of freezing a person to death as easily as burning them alive.
It closed around the ice, and with a soft burst, the whole block collapsed into a puddle of water.
Zhang Lingxiao pulled the flame back the instant it was done and found the spiritual power he'd spent already restored, and then some.
He frowned at that, curious, but there wasn't time to chase the mystery.
The spot where the Millennium Mystic Ice had sat erupted with a blinding flash of light, forcing all three of them to shield their eyes.
When the glare faded, something strange hovered where the ice had been, indistinct, almost alive-looking, and it bolted down the mountainside before anyone could react.
"Quick, follow me, we can still catch it!"
Elder Su summoned his flying artifact without a second's hesitation and shot off after it.
Zhang Lingxiao and Han Tianlai scrambled to summon their own and gave chase, unwilling to fall behind.
"Don't let it get away! Whatever that thing is, it's an opportunity we can't afford to lose!"
The mysterious object moved faster than anything they'd seen. Even Elder Su, for all his Xuanwu Realm strength, couldn't close the gap; it stayed a good distance ahead no matter how hard he pushed.
Hearing that, Zhang Lingxiao understood exactly how much this mattered.
Whether it was the Glazed Fire or whatever had been sealed inside that Millennium Mystic Ice, both had once belonged to the Glazed Fire Emperor. Getting either one into their hands was the kind of chance that didn't come twice.
"Master, leave this to your disciple!" Zhang Lingxiao called out, confident.
He fell into the Nine Netherworld Star-Stepping Step, each footfall landing like he was walking across the stars themselves, his body blurring into something closer to a phantom, closing the distance like the whole mountain had shrunk beneath his feet.