The Heavenfall Pool lay at the bottom of Flame-Dragon Peak, behind three iron doors and a corridor so hot that the walls sweated.
"Ye’s family paid for this room once a year," Elder Lie said, leading Adam through the last door with his scarlet hair floating in the heat. "Never more than six hours at a time. The boy couldn’t take more."
"I’m not the boy."
"No," Lie admitted. "You’re not."
The cavern opened before them, and Adam stopped for a moment.
It was a pool of liquid light. Starlight, in fact: a thousand years of fallen meteors had melted into a basin of molten star-iron the color of white gold, its surface rippling with slow silver tides. Veins of heavenly Qi coiled through it like dragons. The heat that rolled off it could have cooked a Foundation Establishment cultivator where he stood.
"Your fee," Lie said, holding out his palm.
Adam placed ten Supreme-Grade Foundation-Building Pills in it, each with its Triple Halo spinning clean and bright.
Elder Lie stared at them. His fingers closed around the pills very slowly, as if they might burn.
"These are real," he muttered. "Not the painted garbage the Crow’s been selling." He glanced up. "Whoever supplies the Void-Star Pavilion is a better alchemist than my entire Alchemist Peak."
"I’ll tell him you said so," Adam said.
Lie looked at him for a long moment, snorted, and turned toward the door. "Three days. If you scream, I won’t come in."
"I don’t scream."
"Everyone screams," Lie said, and the iron door shut behind him.
Adam stripped to the waist, folded his robe, and stepped to the edge of the pool.
[Nine-Turn Immortal Body: 2nd Turn Requirements. Star-Iron tempering bath: available. Foundation consolidation: complete.]
He stepped in.
The first sensation was not pain. It was weight, as if the whole mountain had settled onto his skin. The second was pain.
Molten star-iron poured into his pores like liquid knives, searing through the silvery sheen of his First Turn and into the muscle beneath. The Nine-Dragon Flame Furnace roared awake in his soul. The Chaos-Devouring Fire Seed flared black and drank the heat, and the Nine-Turn Scroll’s golden runes flooded his mind in a river of dragons, mapping the path the iron had to take.
His teeth ground together. He did not scream. He sank deeper.
On the first day, the iron tempered his muscle. It tore and knit it again, tore and knit it again, until each fiber rang like a drawn bowstring.
On the second day, it reached his bones. Elder Lie had been right. Everyone screamed, and Adam found out that he was no exception. For a long, ugly hour the sound echoed off the dark stone, and he let it. There was no one to hear.
On the third day, the pain thinned into something quiet and bright. His eyes opened. The pool had gone dark around him, a pale gray pond of cooled metal, because he had drunk all of its heavenly Qi.
He stood. The cooled iron slid off his skin like water off a duck’s back.
His skin was no longer silver. It was dark bronze, and it shone when the light touched it. He clenched his fist and felt the bones in his hand ring, a single deep note like a temple bell.
[Nine-Turn Immortal Body: 2nd Turn complete!]
’A Foundation Establishment artifact wouldn’t mark me now,’ Adam evaluated, rolling his shoulder. ’A Golden Core blade still would. Seven turns to go.’
Then he checked his dantian, and his satisfaction cooled.
The pool had taken more than iron. His Qi reserves sat at just over half of what they should be, burned away by three days of tempering with nothing to refill them. His core pulsed slowly, like a drum played with tired hands.
’Roughly six breaths of full Dominion,’ he calculated. ’Not ten.’
He could wait a day. He could sit in a safe cavern, drink pills, and refill his core before he crossed that bridge.
But Ye Zhen would learn it. The Law Enforcement array would come back online, and the old man would pick another place, another hour, another trap Adam hadn’t chosen. Tonight he knew where the knife was.
’Better to meet it with half a core than meet it blind.’
He dressed in the folded robe. The iron door swung open on the other side, and Elder Lie stood in the corridor with his arms crossed.
"You’re still alive," Lie said. "I’ll be damned."
"I’ll live."
Lie studied his bronze hands. "The old chain bridge to Ghost-Sword Peak is the quickest way back. I’ll walk you across."
"No." Adam bowed his head slightly. "You’ve done enough, Elder."
Lie frowned. For a moment, Adam thought the old man would argue. Then he stepped aside.
"Mind the bridge, then," he grunted. "The chains are older than the sect."
Dusk was falling when Adam reached the end of the iron chain bridge. It stretched across a gulf of black cloud, a single thread of rusted links between Flame-Dragon Peak and the broken spires of his own home.
The lanterns along its length were burning, one for every ten paces.
Adam stepped onto the first link.
Behind him, one by one, the lanterns began to go out.