Zhang dropped the crucible he was holding and didn't notice.
It hit the workshop floor with a ceramic crack that would normally send the old alchemist into a three-minute lecture on the cost of laboratory equipment. He didn't look at it. He was looking at the containment vessel in Shen's hands, and his wild white eyebrows were climbing so high they threatened to leave his face entirely.
"Open it," he said.
Shen opened the vessel. The Origin Grass seed sat at the bottom, a pale green pearl the size of a small pea, radiating god-grade spiritual energy that made the air around it taste like copper and rain.
Zhang put on his magnification spectacles. Leaned in. His eight-fingered hands hovered over the vessel, not touching it, the way a man hovers his hands over a fire to test the heat.
"Origin Grass. Viable seed. Spiritual signature consistent with Dr. Liao Suyin's cultivation strain." He straightened up. Took off the spectacles. Put them on again. Took them off. "Where."
"Fourteen Crane Alley. Under a warehouse. The old garden site."
"The garden I told you about."
"You told me about the garden. I found the seed."
Zhang sat down on his workshop stool. The crucible pieces crunched under his shoes. He didn't notice that either. "Sixty years in the ground. The preservation pocket must have been extraordinary. Liao Suyin's concentration arrays were the best in the region when she was alive. Even dead, they kept this seed viable for six decades."
"Can you grow it?"
"Can I— " Zhang stopped. Rubbed his face with both hands. The missing fingers on his left made the gesture asymmetric, and for once the asymmetry bothered him. "Yes. In theory. Origin Grass has been cultivated before, obviously, by Liao herself. The growth protocol is documented in her published papers, which I've been reading since you sent me to the archives. The problem is equipment."
"I know. Grade-5 spiritual concentration. Specific soil compounds. Daily treatments."
"The concentration chamber alone would require — HAND ME THAT NOTEPAD — would require a closed-loop spiritual recycling system, a formation array tuned to the Origin Grass's specific resonance frequency, temperature control rated for god-grade plant biology, and a containment field that prevents energy bleed into the surrounding environment."
"How much?"
Zhang did the math on his notepad. His handwriting was the small, cramped script of a man who had been taking notes for fifty years and had never once used more paper than necessary. "Fifteen million stones. Approximately. The formation array is the expensive part. It needs to be custom-built by someone who understands god-grade cultivation specifications."
"I'll fund it. How long to grow?"
"Seven years at natural pace. With accelerated techniques — alchemical growth solutions, increased formation output, daily spiritual infusions — I can bring it down to four, possibly five months." He set the notepad down. His hands had stopped shaking. Professional focus replaced personal shock, the way it always did when Zhang shifted from grandfather to alchemist. "Five months is tight. No margin for disease, for energy fluctuation, for any of the hundred things that can kill a god-grade seedling in an artificial environment. If the formation array fluctuates by more than two percent, the plant dies. If the soil pH shifts outside a window of point-three, the plant dies. If I miss a daily treatment, the plant—"
"Dies. I understand."
"I do not think you do. A god-grade herb is not a basil plant in your father's garden. It is the most demanding living thing I will ever care for. It will require my full attention, every day, for five months. My other research stops. My other patients stop. The pill furnace practice continues because I'll need the furnace ready when the grass matures, but everything else goes on hold."
Zhang looked at Shen over his spectacles. The wild eyebrows settled. Beneath them, the bright, sharp eyes of a man who was calculating whether he could do the thing he was about to agree to do.
"I'll grow your grass, my boy. But you need to understand what it costs. Five months of my life. Not just my time. My professional reputation, if I fail. My relationship with every patient I'll have to defer. And the near certainty that I will lose sleep, meals, and what remains of my temper."
"I understand."
"Good. Now get out of my workshop and let me start drawing the formation specifications. And buy me more peaches. I'm going to need the sugar."
---
The cultivation chamber was installed in Zhang's workshop three weeks later. A sealed glass enclosure the size of a wardrobe, connected to a formation array that filled half the room. The array's nodes pulsed with concentrated spiritual energy, feeding it into the chamber through copper conduits that hummed at a frequency just below human hearing. Inside the chamber, a bed of specially formulated soil sat under artificial lighting that mimicked the spectral qualities of high-altitude sunlight.
Zhang planted the seed himself. Gloves on, breath held, hands steady despite the missing fingers. He pressed the Origin Grass seed one centimeter into the soil, covered it, and activated the formation array. The chamber filled with golden light. The soil darkened as moisture and spiritual energy saturated it.
"Now we wait," Zhang said. "And we hope I'm half as good as I think I am."
---
Qing Bay University continued to be a place where Shen's money exceeded his cultivation and his cultivation lagged behind his reputation. Six weeks into the semester, the prodigy class had settled into a hierarchy that Shen occupied oddly. He was the weakest fighter in the room and the best tactician. He couldn't beat anyone in sparring, but his team won every simulation exercise. He sat at the bottom of the cultivation rankings and the top of the academic ones.
His cultivation was Mortal Eight now. The island's concentrated spiritual energy, combined with the Emperor's Art's third-stage compression techniques (the scroll was at eighty percent, the remaining twenty percent still locked behind damage he was slowly restoring), had pushed him past another two thresholds. At Mortal Eight with third-stage compression, his effective energy density matched a standard Nirvana Three. Still below the class average, but the gap was closing.
The bounty had been dismissed. Mei Zhen's legal team had demolished the Gu family's fabricated inventory manifests with documentation so thorough that the Commerce Bureau investigator had used the word "embarrassing" in his official report. The bounty notice was removed from the Alliance boards. Shen's file was clean.
The Gu family had not responded. No new assassins, no new legal attacks, no new political maneuvers. The silence was worse than the action. On the front lines, when the enemy went quiet, it meant they were planning.
Ingredients: twelve of eighteen. Tianke's procurement team had sourced three more from specialty suppliers. Phoenix Tear Amber (ingredient #11), Jade Bone Powder (#12), and Deep Sea Spiritual Coral (#13). Expensive, rare, but obtainable through the right channels. Total ingredient expenditure: one hundred and forty million stones.
Six ingredients remaining. Three were dungeon-specific drops that Shen would need to farm from Hard and Hell dungeons. Two required specialty suppliers that Mei Zhen was still negotiating with. The last was the Origin Grass, growing under Zhang's care, five months from maturity.
The timeline was tight. Eleven months minus the six weeks since the diagnosis, minus the five months for the grass to grow. That left about three months of margin for Zhang to refine the pill, for Shen to gather the remaining six ingredients, and for anything that went wrong.
Margin was a luxury Shen couldn't afford to spend, and couldn't afford to be without.
---
The reject vault was in the basement of the university's materials science building, behind a door that required prodigy class clearance and a physical key that the department head kept in his desk drawer. Nobody used either. The vault was where damaged, degraded, and unidentifiable spiritual artifacts went to die. Professors who couldn't be bothered to catalog broken equipment dumped it here. Lab technicians who broke expensive items during practicals hid the evidence here. The accumulation of decades of academic negligence, piled on metal shelving in a room that hadn't been cleaned since the building was constructed.
Shen got the clearance through a facilities request form that Nira Hale processed for him as class president. She stamped the form without comment, but her eyes tracked him as he left the administrative office, and the pen in her hand tapped twice against the desk.
He went down to the basement that evening. Alone. The vault door opened with a groan of disused hinges, and the smell hit him first. Dust, old metal, degraded spiritual compounds that had been off-gassing for years. The room was twice the size of the Tianke write-off vault, and the shelving was less organized. Items were piled on top of each other, stuffed into boxes, thrown on surfaces without labels or categorization.
Shen activated Blueprint Sight and the room lit up like a bonfire.
Overlays blazed from every direction. Broken swords showing heaven-tier cores. Cracked formation plates with Grade-5 circuitry. Shattered alchemical equipment that the blueprints revealed as top-tier laboratory gear. Degraded cultivation manuals with technique notation dense enough to be saint-tier. A box of crushed beast cores in the corner, fifteen or twenty of them, each one hiding Grade-4 or 5 quality under their damaged shells.
The university had been throwing away fortunes for years. Broken equipment that professors had replaced with new purchases instead of repairing. Failed experiments that had been written off as losses. Artifacts recovered from dungeon practicals that the students had damaged and the staff had discarded.
Shen walked the aisles. The overlay kept screaming. Every shelf held something worth restoring. His three daily charges would take months to work through this room, but the yield per item was higher than the Tianke vault because the university's discards were higher-grade to begin with.
He was cataloging the fourth shelf when the door opened behind him.
"I thought you'd come here eventually."
Nira Hale stood in the doorway. She'd changed from her prodigy class uniform into practical clothes, dark pants and a fitted jacket, her red-tinted hair pulled back in a functional ponytail rather than the arranged style she wore during lectures. She was holding a folded campus map with notes in the margins.
"The facilities request form listed 'materials assessment' as the purpose of access," she said. "That was vague enough to be interesting."
"I'm assessing materials."
"In the reject vault. Where nobody has voluntarily gone in at least three years." She stepped inside. Looked at the shelving. At the piled, dusty, disorganized mess of broken equipment. "What exactly are you assessing?"
Shen considered. Nira Hale was the class president, the principal's daughter, and a woman who tracked information the way her father collected political assets. Telling her about the Remnant Eye was off the table. But telling her that the vault contained items worth restoring was something she'd figure out on her own once his restoration operation started producing results.
"This room is full of items that have been classified as broken. Most of them aren't. They're damaged, but the damage is repairable. The university has been discarding millions in potentially functional equipment because nobody took the time to assess the damage properly."
Nira's pen appeared. She was taking mental notes, the pen a physical habit that accompanied the process. "You can assess damage in artifacts."
"I can."
"The same way you assessed the simulation dungeon's tactical layout. You see things other people miss."
"Something like that."
She walked to the nearest shelf. Picked up a cracked formation disc that the overlay showed as a Grade-4 defensive training tool. "This has a crack in the primary circuit. Any formation specialist would call it irreparable because the circuit interruption prevents energy flow."
"The crack is surface-level. The primary circuit underneath is intact. The fracture follows a grain line in the material, not the circuit itself. A skilled restorer could bridge the gap in twenty minutes."
Nira turned the disc over. Her fire element cultivation gave her some affinity for sensing spiritual energy flows, and she concentrated on the disc for several seconds.
"You're right," she said. "The circuit is intact. The crack is cosmetic." She set the disc down. "First, that is interesting. Second, this is a university resource. You can't just take these items."
"I'm not taking them. I'm going to propose a restoration program to the materials science department. Prodigy class credit for artifact assessment and repair, using the reject vault as a training resource. The university gets its equipment back, the department gets a published study, and I get access."
The pen stopped tapping. Nira looked at him. The organized surface of her expression shifted by a fraction, the way a precise instrument adjusts when it encounters a measurement it didn't expect.
"You've thought about this."
"I think about everything. It's what I do."
"Third." She set the pen down. "I want to be listed as co-lead on the proposal. Formation assessment is my secondary specialization, and a published study on artifact restoration methodology would support my application for the junior teaching program."
Shen assessed. The request was practical, not political. Nira wanted to teach. She'd been aiming for a junior professor position since before Shen arrived. Co-leading a published study would advance her own goals independently of anything Shen needed. Her participation would also give the proposal academic credibility that his name alone, as a Mortal-Eight student, couldn't provide.
"Co-lead," he said. "You handle the academic framework and publication track. I handle the restoration methodology and item assessment."
"I'll have a draft proposal on your desk by Friday." She picked up her map, made a note in the margin, and walked to the door. She paused there, half-turned. "The simulation. Room three. You froze the floor before we entered. I've been trying to figure out how you knew the enemy positions before the door opened."
"I read the vibrations through the floor. Mortal-level technique. You learn it on the front—" He stopped. "You learn it with practice."
Her eyes narrowed. The analytical engine behind them was running, processing the slip, filing it alongside the other data points she'd collected about the prodigy class's strangest student. But she didn't push.
"Friday," she said, and left.
Shen stood in the reject vault. The Blueprint overlays pulsed from every surface, blue-white ghosts of functional equipment hiding inside broken shells. Hundreds of items. Months of work. A fortune in restoration value, available through a academic proposal that would cost him nothing but time and give him access to the university's discarded inventory.
He pulled out a notepad and started cataloging.
Shelf one, item one: cracked formation disc, Grade-4, surface damage only. Restoration cost: one charge. Estimated value: two million stones.
Shelf one, item two: shattered alchemical stirring rod, Grade-3, missing tip section. Restoration cost: one charge. Estimated value: five hundred thousand stones.
Shelf one, item three...
The list grew. The overlays burned. And outside the basement window, the campus of Qing Bay University sat on its artificial island, pumping concentrated spiritual energy into the ground, growing the next generation of cultivators who would look at broken things and see garbage.
Shen looked at broken things and saw a shopping list.
