Time in the cramped, gray alleys of Zone C did not march; it drifted, heavy and suffocating, like woodsmoke trapped between brick walls.
One full year had slipped away since the night Lux clawed his way out of his own charred shell.
In that span, the hound had firmly established himself in the 2nd Level of Qi Condensation.
Lux’s rapid advancement was not born of ordinary meditation; it was fueled by a dual engine.
Day and night, he absorbed the subtle, steady bleed of Airan’s refined fire-root energy.
Compounding that growth was a rare, latent trait hidden deep within the beast’s altered biology—a microscopic speck of low-grade earth-spirit elemental essence nestled in his marrow, pulling ambient Qi into his frame like a dry sponge.
Airan himself had not stood still.
At thirty years old, his Dantian hummed with a dense, pressurized heat.
Having thoroughly consolidated the middle stage of Level 4 Qi Condensation, he could feel the invisible barrier of the upper stage trembling just within reach. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
His daily routine had settled into an unyielding rhythm of discipline, dictated entirely by the encounter that had forced his hand a year prior.
Airan could still vividly recall walking back from Max’s hidden warehouse under the pale dusk, carrying a small, innocuous package, when a neighbor from three doors down had stepped out of the shadows.
The man had introduced himself with casual neighborly warmth as a low-grade spirit chef working at a local tavern, casually asking Airan what line of work kept him locked away behind wooden shutters.
Caught off guard, Airan had realized the fatal flaw in his isolation: a ghost who never leaves his courtyard invites suspicion.
It wasn’t the spirit wine itself that he had to worry about—alcohol was common enough in the slums—but the terrifying secret of how he continuously purified low-grade swill into potent, medium-grade elixir without a proper alchemy furnace or high-tier equipment.
If word leaked that a nameless rogue cultivator possessed a method to refine spiritual liquids effortlessly, every predatory gang in Zone C would breach his door within a week.
That very night, the cover identity of the low-grade talisman maker was born.
For the past twelve months, Airan had spent hours hunched over his scarred wooden desk, dipping a fine-hair brush into viscous vermilion ink and pressing minute fractions of his Qi onto sheets of cheap spiritual paper.
To the neighbors who occasionally caught a glimpse of him through a cracked window or smelled the faint, metallic tang of drying ink, Airan was simply a dull, struggling artisan—earning meager copper coins by crafting weak defensive charms and simple lighting talismans to sell to passing travelers through Max. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
It was a masterclass in misdirection.
The occasional clink of a low-grade spirit stone or the purchase of basic talisman paper was entirely accounted for by his fabricated trade.
More importantly, the grueling micro-control required to draft stable talisman scripts acted as a relentless whetstone for his meridians, tightening his internal Qi circulation without drawing a single glance from the Violet Sect’s enforcers.
And if the day ever came when a desperate street thug or a greedy neighbor decided to test the silence of Airan’s courtyard, they would find that the quiet artisan’s desk held more than just ink and paper.
Folded neatly beneath the inkstone were a dozen razor-thin, fire-charged talismans—waiting to turn a quiet room into a blazing furnace.
Author’s Note: Thanks for reading Chapter 15!
Airan’s journey from a penniless herb collector to a spirit distiller starts here.