Lan Jin finishes merging the purple mist into his soul with half an hour of focused effort. Then, after standing up to stretch he turns to his clothes and, finding them dry, he pulls them off of the stone oven before dropping a sliding metal sheet in front of the chamber holding the burning wood to smother the fire within. Finally, he shakes out his clothes and smacks them against the oven a few times to loosen up the fabric before putting them on.
After finally dressing and putting on his unfortunately still-damp shoes, Lan Jin wonders if it is time for him to look into body cultivation. Unfortunately, his stomach answers his question with loud rumbles, and Lan Jin decides he will figure out breakfast before he does anything else.
“I wonder if there are any restaurants nearby,” Lan Jin mutters while he heads to his room to grab his pouch full of coins.
Unfortunately, for all the amenities the Great Physician provided him, a kitchen full of food was not something he received. He can’t really complain about it because he is probably already in much better shape than if he had to buy his own house, but it is something that he’s going to have to take care of sooner rather than later.
Arriving in his room, he tosses his spirit stone into his dresser and puts his pouch full of coins into his pants pocket. Noting the bare wooden bed against the wall, he wonders if he should look for bedding when he goes out, but without a mattress, he feels as though any bedding he buys would slip around on the smooth surface of the wooden bed and he’d end up struggling to cover himself with any sheets he buys because of it.
“Eh, I’ll wait for a while before I think about buying any bedding. Hopefully, I can figure out a more permanent housing situation before long, and buying bedding twice seems like such a hassle.”
Finished getting ready, Lan Jin heads out of his house and exits the wooden gate before taking a look at the grounds of the main compound.
Though it’s light out now, it’s still fairly early and the sun has only just started burning away the mist covering the ground. It’s also very silent, with the only noises being some soft shuffling coming from one of the rectangular buildings alongside the wall on the left side of the compound. Because of that, everything seems surreal to Lan Jin and he can’t help but be fascinated as the mist surges like waves with every movement he makes.
He takes a moment to appreciate the atmosphere before turning toward the gate leading out onto the road. But before he can take a step, he is stopped as he hears someone clearing their throat from a distance.
Turning around, Lan Jin notices the Great Physician standing in the doorway of the main house looking toward him with one hand holding his cane and the other held behind his back. Though Lan Jin has no idea when he got there because he had just looked and there was no one else around, it isn’t hard for him to realize that the Great Physician showed up because he had left his house.
Not wanting to be rude, and realizing that the Great Physician is waiting for him, Lan Jin approaches him and says, “Thank you for giving me a place to stay. I was planning on going out to find some breakfast. Would you like me to bring you back anything?”
Shaking his head slightly, the Great Physician says, “There’s no need for that. So long as you are my guest, I will provide for your meals. I will not force you to join me, but breakfast will be served an hour after sunrise, and dinner will be served an hour before sunset. If you don’t mind a conversation, my servants should finish preparing breakfast soon, and we can speak while we wait.”
Lan Jin begins slowly nodding his head. He appreciates not having to go out to get breakfast himself, especially since he doesn’t know where anything is yet, but the fact that he is receiving so much care without having done anything to deserve it makes him feel uncomfortable and even a little guilty. However, not wanting to be a bad guest, he still chooses to agree with the Great Physician.
“That sounds great to me. Is there something specific you wanted to talk about? I know you mentioned something about being curious how the purple mist would work with pill refining.”
After a moment, the Great Physician responds, “That is one topic I would like to discuss, yes. But, let us continue speaking inside over tea.”
With that, the Great Physician turns around and walks through the doorway of his home while Lan Jin follows closely behind him.
Lan Jin is uncomfortable from the first moment he enters the Great Physician’s home. There is one reason for it, and it’s that he doesn’t know how he is expected to act.
At his parents' house, he would be expected to take off his shoes and then wash his hands and face before doing anything else. But here, the Great Physician doesn’t even ask him to take off his shoes when he enters the house. What makes it worse is that the Great Physician is wearing a pair of soft shoes that could be indoor or outdoor shoes, so Lan Jin can’t base his own actions on him.
“Should I take off my shoes?” Lan Jin asks.
Glancing at him, the Great Physician gives the worst possible response he could give.
“If you’d like.”
All of a sudden, Lan Jin begins to feel a little anxious. If this was just some random person’s house or the house of one of his friends, he wouldn’t care so much. But this is a person who even the children of the most powerful families in the city respect, and Lan Jin doesn’t know how he’s supposed to behave in order to avoid offending him.
In the end, he decides to play it safe and takes off his shoes before placing them off to the side of the doorway.
Then, after rushing to catch up to the Great Physician, Lan Jin arrives in a room that he considers to be a sitting room located on the backside of the house. In general, the room is fairly simple, but the quality of everything within it seems remarkable.
There are only three walls to the room as well as an open screen partition leading out to a large garden containing hundreds or even thousands of natural treasures. The walls, though unpainted and undecorated, are made of a golden hardwood that has been polished to the point where they are nearly reflective, and they seem to glow as some of the early morning light shines through the opened partition and onto them.
In the middle of the room, there is a small square table with a grated recess in the middle of it designed to hold a small fire, and suspended over it is a metal teapot hanging from a chain connected to the ceiling. Surrounding the recess are three overturned metal tea cups, two on one side and one on the opposite, and a small ceramic jar.
The Great Physician doesn’t hesitate to take a seat on the left cushion on the side with two teacups, and Lan Jin waits for a second before asking, “Should I sit somewhere in particular?”
Nodding his head once, the Great Physician says, “Sit opposite of me.”
Lan Jin does so immediately.
After waiting for several seconds, the Great Physician asks, “Do you know how to prepare and serve tea?”
Lan Jin responds, “Sort of. I’ve made tea at my parent’s house, but that was always either with tea bags or using a different setup than this. We used a kettle and a teapot with a strainer inside of it for loose-leaf tea. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with just a teapot and some cups.”
“I see,” the Great Physician says. Then he reaches forward and takes the lid off of the ceramic container before pulling out three small tea leaves. “This is a simple tea with a mild flavor but a strong aroma. Before being served, it should be steeped long enough for the fragrance to escape the teapot. But because it has such a mild flavor, it is more forgiving if you let it steep for a bit longer.”
Lan Jin nods his head along with the Great Physician’s explanation. In truth, if all he has to do is throw the tea leaves into the pot, it does seem pretty simple. However, he does notice one rather important flaw with the whole process.
“But… What about the fire?” Lan Jin asks, noticing the absence of flame with which to heat up the water and the lack of wood or anything else to ignite in the table’s recess.
“Don’t you have a spiritual flame?” The Great Physician asks with a smile. “Before I have you help me run some experiments, I would like to see how much control you have over it.”
“Uh…” Lan Jin lifts up one hand and scratches his head. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but… Well, you see, my spiritual flame doesn’t actually produce heat. At least, not as far as I can tell.”
The Great Physician’s eyes widen slightly and he asks, “Really?”
Lan Jin nods his head.
“Well then, that is interesting. Would you mind showing me?”
Shrugging his shoulders, Lan Jin says, “Sure.” He then summons the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame from the Omega Browser’s Space and coats his entire palm with its purple flame.
Compared to when he first got it, it is already much larger. Granted, in this case, much larger only meant that it could cover his entire hand if he let it rather than looking like a pitiful little spark. But even still, Lan Jin is happy with how much it has progressed.
The Great Physician, on the other hand, seems confused from the moment Lan Jin summons it into his hand.
“How odd,” he says while rubbing his chin in a manner that makes Lan Jin wonder if he used to have a beard.
“What’s odd?” Lan Jin asks him.
Staring at Lan Jin’s flame, the Great Physician responds with a question, “Do you know what your flame is using as a fuel source?”
Looking down at the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame, Lan Jin realizes that he had never considered it before. He knows it isn’t spiritual energy because the flame never seems to affect his purple star. It also shouldn’t be Qi because he tried to fuse some of the purple mist with it before and the fire didn’t seem to care for it. He knows it gets stronger when he exposes it to the video in the jade, and it got much larger when it consumed the corpse of the vicious beast. But, as far as Lan Jin can tell, the only thing it uses as a fuel source is itself.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Before long, the Great Physician interrupts Lan Jin’s thoughts with a monologue that Lan Jin isn’t entirely sure is meant for him. Instead, it sounds as though he is reciting something for himself, but Lan Jin’s fire is the topic.
“Fire consumes, that much is a constant. Whether it is air, Qi, spiritual energy, or something else, fire always consumes. Yet, when I look at your spiritual flame, I cannot see what it is consuming. As a matter of fact, I cannot see if it is consuming anything at all. It is purifying the air around it, and remarkably quickly for that matter, but, as for what it is consuming… How odd. The flames seem to become marginally weaker as they purify the air, but they don’t actually disappear. Instead, the energy within the fire lessens in potency, but the fire itself seems to be a constant.”
Lan Jin doesn’t know what to say. The only things he really knows about the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame are that it produces providence when it purifies something, it grew rapidly when it consumed a vicious beast, and it can be strengthened over time by exposing it to the video in the Omega Browser’s Space. But as for how everything fits together, he just assumed it was magic. But hearing the Great Physician’s rambling, Lan Jin feels as though ‘magic’ isn’t an acceptable answer anymore.
Trying to come up with anything that might help explain the situation, Lan Jin says, “I’m not really sure what it uses as a fuel source, but I do know that the one time I used it on a vicious beast’s corpse it got much larger.”
Raising his head toward the ceiling, the Great Physician lets out a hum before turning back to Lan Jin. “Do you know what kind of vicious beast it was?”
Lan Jin shakes his head and describes his encounter with the monster echidna as well as its features to the Great Physician.
After he’s done, the Great Physician folds his hands together as his eyes drift downward. “That should just be a human-level vicious beast,” he mutters thoughtfully. “It should have nothing to do with fire… mutated? No, if that were the case, a Qi Gathering cultivator couldn’t survive it, much less kill it.”
The Great Physician looks more and more confused as time passes and, with nothing to add, Lan Jin stays silent and lets him ruminate alone.
After a few minutes pass, the Great Physician asks, “Have you tried using your spiritual flame on anything else?”
Lan Jin’s first instinct is to shake his head, but then he thinks about it and nods. “I have used it on plants, but I haven’t tried using it on any other animals or any people.”
“Why is that?”
Shrugging, Lan Jin says, “Lack of opportunity, mostly. But also because I’m not sure what will happen if I use it on something living. I plan on testing it, but I’m not sure how I should go about doing that because I feel as though it would be a little fu— er… I don’t think it would be ethical.”
“Ethical?” The Great Physician chuckles while shaking his head slightly. “Ethics are something only dying old men and powerful existences have the right to worry about. For those who cannot take care of themselves, they only need two words. The first is conviction. You have to be willing to do whatever you can to ensure your own safety and the safety of your loved ones. The second is deceit. When conviction is not enough to ensure your future and the future of your loved ones, you must be willing to plan ahead and ensure that you have safety nets in place for every eventuality while outwardly appearing to fall in line. Failing that, you must make sure that anyone who wishes to harm you will suffer a greater price than they are willing to pay to do so. For a Qi Gathering cultivator like yourself, you should not care about whether something is right or wrong, you should care about making yourself powerful, and not getting caught during the process.”
The Great Physician pauses for a while before continuing, “That being said, you should know what your bottom line is. You are young. You can afford to forgive minor injustices so long as they only harm your face— you have the time to correct those injustices in the future. What you cannot afford is someone harming your life. And since you cannot afford someone harming your life, you should invest in yourself during this time of peace to be prepared for times of adversity.”
Lan Jin lets out a heavy sigh as he puts away the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame and listens to the Great Physician’s words. Though he doesn’t want to agree with what he’s being told, Lan Jin feels as though the Great Physician is correct. Whether it is noble hierarchies, social standing, jobs, or even just being in the wrong place, anything in this strange new world can issue him a new set of challenges that he doesn’t understand.
In less than a week, he had already been the victim of four situations where someone abused their power or authority and caused him to suffer for it. First was with Moxian who tried and, arguably, succeeded at making him her pet. Then there was Qingshui who actually attempted to murder him just because he was in her territory. After that, it was the City Lord who screwed not only him over, but Hu Qiuping, Hu Shentian, and Hu Gongniu as well. Finally, there were the noble brats who stopped just short of physically forcing him to do a bunch of random tests just to sate their own curiosity.
No matter how he looks at it, Lan Jin realizes that this world plain sucks for people like him who are weak. And though rules might exist to prevent things from sucking as much, they are heavily dependent on who somebody is as well as how powerful they are. He’s willing to bet that, even if the City Lord was more than happy to smack him upside the head, he probably wouldn’t dare do the same thing to the Great Physician.
While Lan Jin struggles with his thoughts, two male servants wearing plain purple robes show up and begin placing various dishes on the table. Distracted by their arrival, Lan Jin stops wondering about the state of the world and looks over the food instead. Though there isn’t too much variety on the table, everything looks delicious. From a pot of soup to a platter of fish, bowls of rice, and even pieces of fried bread that look like churros, Lan Jin had never seen a breakfast assortment like this.
There were no greasy, fatty foods like bacon or sausage, and let alone sugary cereals, Lan Jin doesn’t think anything on the table has any sugar at all. Instead, everything looks very healthy but they all smell absolutely delicious. There are only two things that ruin it. The first is an extra plate and a bowl sitting next to the Great Physician— Lan Jin had thought he was the only guest here, but with the extra dishes and the extra teacup, he wonders if they are expecting someone else and if he should wait to start eating.
The second thing comes about when the Great Physician turns to one of the servants and says, “One of you bring me some wood for the tea. As for the other, head to the market and buy a chicken. Make sure you bring it back alive and deliver it immediately when you return.”
The servants look confused by the second order, but they don’t say anything as they bow deeply once and back out of the room to carry out the Great Physician’s instructions. For his part, Lan Jin feels a little faint as he realizes why the Great Physician asked for a live chicken to be delivered. Though he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t say anything because he realizes that this is something he needs to figure out now rather than if he is in danger later.
Sighing again, Lan Jin turns to the food and begins serving himself some food as he notices the Great Physician doing the same. Other than a bowl of rice, which he simply pulls in front of his plate, everything is served using the back end of a pair of chopsticks he was given along with his dishes. And though he quickly finds that the food is as delicious as it smells, he can’t help but struggle forcing it down his throat as he considers the inevitable testing to come.
Eventually, Lan Jin can’t help but bring attention to the extra dishes. Though, he doesn’t do so because he really cares about them. Rather, he just wants an excuse not to be stuck inside his own head while he eats.
“Are we waiting for someone?” He asks while looking at the extra dishes on the table.
Nodding once, the Great Physician says, “Yes. But, I do not know when she will arrive. In fact, she is already later than I expected.”
“Is she that companion you mentioned last night?”
The Great Physician’s chopsticks pause midair and the older man can’t help but let out a single, loud peal of laughter. “Oh heavens, no. And I suggest you don’t say anything like that around her, or even I will have a hard time protecting you.”
Lan Jin doesn’t know what else to say, so instead of saying anything, he just nods his head and returns to eating. Unfortunately for him, he finds that the Great Physician’s servants are incredibly diligent when it comes to their work as, not only does one of them return to start the fire for the tea within minutes of being ordered to do so, but the other one also comes running back with a live chicken struggling loudly in his hand moments later.
As soon as he sees the chicken, Lan Jin lays his chopsticks down on the table next to his plate, his appetite ruined. Seeing this, the Great Physician lays down his own chopsticks and retrieves the chicken from the servant before dismissing him. Then, with a tap of his finger on the chicken’s head, the chicken goes limp and Lan Jin’s eyes widen.
“Did you kill it?” He wonders aloud.
“No,” the Great Physician says while standing up and walking through the open partition to the garden outside. “I merely knocked it unconscious so it doesn’t suffer during the test.”
“Oh! That’s good.” Lan Jin sighs, feeling relieved that, though they might be doing something he thinks is screwed up, at least the chicken won’t be awake to experience it.
Then, as the Great Physician places the chicken down on the ground, Lan Jin asks, “So, what are we going to be testing anyways? Just to see if my spiritual flame catches the chicken on fire? Or if it will get bigger because of it?”
The Great Physician replies, “This is primarily to see what will happen if you use that spiritual flame on a living creature without blood essence. From your explanation earlier, we already know that dead creatures with blood essence can be ignited by your spiritual flame. However, what I am most concerned with is what will happen if a living creature with no blood essence becomes exposed to your flame.”
Lan Jin doesn’t really understand why it matters, so he asks. “But, why specifically a living creature without blood essence?”
“Because, with the exception of the dead, the vast majority of people qualify as living creatures without blood essence. Therefore, if your spiritual flame can affect this chicken, it will likely be able to affect most people you come across.”
Lan Jin nods, satisfied with the explanation, and then approaches the Great Physician and the unconscious chicken.
“So, should I just try lighting it on fire?” He asks, already feeling repentant for what’s about to happen.
“Yes,” the Great Physician responds.
Looking down at the chicken, Lan Jin apologizes to it inside of his mind before summoning his flame and lowering it to touch it to the chicken’s feathers. And just like with the giant echidna, the moment the flame approaches the chicken, it jumps off of Lan Jin’s hand and onto the chicken’s body.
But, unlike the echidna, which had been dead when he was burning it, the chicken is still very much alive. And as the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame begins spreading on its body, the chicken wakes up and lets out a horrendous cry as it jumps up, starts flapping its wings, and begins running around the garden full of natural treasures.
Lan Jin and the Great Physician are both stunned by the chicken’s sudden outburst, especially the Great Physician whose eyes widen by a great deal. However, his surprise only lasts for a few seconds before he points his finger at the chicken and sends out a stream of red Qi that makes Lan Jin’s mouth pop open.
Unfortunately, rather than doing anything to the chicken, the stream of red Qi collides with the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame which acts as both armor and a purifier as it covers the entire chicken’s body. The stream of Qi the Great Physician sent out is then rapidly converted to a billowing cloud of purple mist that begins rising through the air. And like that, the chicken begins running through the garden full of expensive natural treasures while letting out ungodly sounds of pain. And every few steps, wisps of purple mist are released from the surrounding plants and begin floating in the air before dissipating.
Lan Jin and the Great Physician are both stunned into silence as they stand side-by-side and stare at the burning chicken rampaging through the garden. Lan Jin doesn’t know what to do at all and he doesn’t want to run through a field of natural treasures trying to catch a burning chicken, but the Great Physician seems more baffled by the fact that his Qi was instantly converted into a cloud of purple mist large enough to cast a shadow over his garden.
All of a sudden, an angry woman’s voice shouts from within the house, “You senile old fool! Have you finally gone mad? You actually allowed my little trinket to…”
The woman’s shouting is interrupted as she barrels into the room where Lan Jin and the Great Physician had just been eating breakfast. She is slightly taller than Lan Jin and has straight, long black hair that falls down to her thin waist. She has an attractive, well-proportioned figure that is hidden under a modest white dress, and her face is stunningly beautiful.
But as she rushes into the room and the first thing she sees is two men watching a burning chicken running through a garden while being sheltered beneath the shade of a growing purple cloud, everything that she had planned on saying escapes her. Then, she narrows her brown eyes at the two men before giving them an incredulous look full of scorn. Finally, with a swish of her hand, she picks up one of the Great Physician’s chopsticks and throws it through the air toward the chicken, killing it as it pierces through the chicken’s back and nails it to the ground.