The first rays of morning sun pierced through the frosted glass of the Head Manager’s office, casting a golden hue over the chaotic aftermath of the night.
The Inverse-Wave Array Lin Tian had set up had quietly dissipated, its spirit crystals turned to dust after burning through their energy.
Lin Tian sat cross-legged on the edge of the mahogany desk, his bare, scarred torso glistening with a faint sheen of sweat. His breathing followed a slow, ancient cadence.
Having broken through to Qi Gathering Level 9 the night before, his Dantian no longer felt like a small, violent furnace — it had opened into a vast ocean. The Primordial Yang Qi inside him had condensed from wild fire into thick, golden liquid, flowing heavy and steady through his widened meridians.
A clean breakthrough, Lin Tian assessed, feeling the raw power packed into his muscles. Physical density, reaction speed, Qi reserves — all multiplied. The Yin energy harvested from a Level 9 Matriarch made the perfect catalyst. At this strength, nothing in the Qi Gathering Realm can touch me.
He opened his eyes, a sharp light flashing in their stellar depths. His gaze drifted to the woman sleeping on the velvet couch nearby.
Madam Shen stirred, the silk blanket slipping to reveal her curves in the morning light.
When she opened her eyes, the exhaustion that had haunted her for weeks was simply gone. The dark circles beneath her eyes had vanished. Her skin, usually pale and cold, now held a warm, lustrous glow that shaved years off her face.
She sat up, a deep blush spreading across her cheeks as the memory of the night flooded back.
"Master..." she whispered, her voice soft and sated.
Lin Tian hopped off the desk, his tall frame carrying the weight of his new Level 9 cultivation. He crossed to her and gently tilted her chin toward the light.
Insight Eye.
[Ding! Scanning Target 1: Madam Shen]
[Obsession Level: 100% (Extreme Devotion)]
[Physical Status: Mental fatigue fully cleared. Cerebral meridians expanded, operating at 200% capacity due to Primordial Synergy.]
"You look radiant, my Queen," he said, his voice sending a shiver through her. "How does your mind feel?"
She closed her eyes, channeling Qi toward her own thoughts, then snapped them open in shock. "It’s incredible. Usually parsing logistics reports feels like wading through mud. Now everything is clear as glass. My calculation speed has doubled — even the bottlenecks in my own cultivation feel loosened, like a chain fell off my soul."
"That’s the reward of full submission," Lin Tian said, trailing a thumb over her lip. "Get dressed. Deacon Liu’s spies will be prowling the corridors soon. Time for the Head Manager to return — we have an arsenal to forge."
Her expression shifted instantly. The flushed woman disappeared, replaced by the icy Matriarch of the Resource Hall. She rose without hesitation and reached for her crimson robes on the floor.
But instead of turning straight to her desk, she walked to Lin Tian first. With the quiet care of a devoted partner, she lifted his obsidian robes and helped him into them, smoothing the shoulders, adjusting the collar, tying the belt.
"Master," she said softly as she worked, her tone equal parts professional and private. "With my mind this clear, I’ve already worked out how to mask the iron consumption from the sect registry. No one will interrupt your forging."
"Excellent," Lin Tian said, pleased. "Let’s go to the workshop."
The heavy iron doors of the Tier-2 restricted workshop slid open a short while later.
Heat, the smell of molten metal, and the rhythmic clang of hammers greeted them. The twenty apprentices Madam Shen had chosen were already at work, pouring molten profound iron into molds to cast the crossbows’ outer casings.
Lin Tian stepped onto the floor, his eyes narrowing as he watched the process.
This won’t do. Their rhythm is scattered, his mind noted immediately. Every apprentice here was trained to trust his own hands — to pour by feel, to judge cooling by instinct. That instinct is exactly what breaks a Wind-Compression Array. If even one casing hardens a breath too fast, its inner density shifts, and the runes I lay inside it later will misfire under pressure.
"Stop!" His voice, amplified by Level 9 Qi, halted the hammering instantly.
The apprentices froze, staring at him in fear. Madam Shen stood silently by the door, ceding the floor to him entirely.
Lin Tian walked to an apprentice holding a freshly pulled, glowing red casing. He wrapped a layer of Yang Qi around his bare hand and lifted the scorching metal without a tool.
Insight Eye.
[Scanning Component: Outer Casing. Structural Density: 82%. Flaw: Micro-fractures near trigger housing from uneven cooling.]
"Trash," he said flatly, tossing the casing into the scrap bin with a clatter.
He turned to the trembling apprentices. "You’re forging parts for the Spirit-Fire Repeating Crossbow — not a common sword. A blade forgives an artisan’s mood. This weapon does not. A hair’s difference in cooling, and the trapped tempest inside turns on the one holding it."
He pressed his palm to the furnace’s stone base. A ring of faint red runes bloomed around its edge, humming steadily. "A Fixed-Flame Array. It holds the fire at one unmoving temperature. Feed the flame, watch the rune, and your instincts stay out of it entirely."
He turned to the other apprentices, setting a small chiming talisman at each station. "Pour to this fill-mark. Open the mold the instant the talisman chimes — not a breath before, not a breath after."
"Yes, Supervisor Lin!" they answered as one, gripped as much by the shimmering array circling the furnace as by his pressure.
Once the casing line settled into its new, steady rhythm — furnace rune humming, timing talismans chiming in sequence — he gathered a batch of uniform, hollow firing chambers and moved past the loud foundry into the quiet room at the back of the workshop.
Aunt Lin sat at her bench, surrounded by dozens of empty chambers, a carving stylus in hand and her focus locked on the metal.
She looked up as the door opened, and her breath caught the moment her eyes found him. His Yang energy, no longer suppressed, now ran vast and scorching — and to a woman who had carried a decade of Qi stagnation in her chest, standing near it felt like a freezing traveler finding a bonfire.
A flush rose across her cheeks. She shifted slightly in her seat.
Insight Eye
[Ding! Target : Aunt Lin]
[Obsession Level: 20% (Deeply Attracted & Inspired)]
[Status: Qi stagnation in the heart meridian clearing rapidly due to sustained focus and proximity to Host’s Yang aura.]
"Supervisor Lin," she greeted, standing quickly to bow.
"How’s the progress?" he asked, his voice low as he set the new batch of chambers on her bench.
"Forty chambers since yesterday," she said, a note of pride in her voice she hadn’t heard from herself in years. "Without smelting or trigger-carving to worry about, all my stamina goes toward the micro-engraving. I can hold this pace."
"Let me see," he said, reaching for one of the finished pieces.
His hand brushed her fingers. A jolt of static ran up her arm, and she pulled back with a soft, startled breath, her face reddening further — though she didn’t look away.
Lin Tian gave no outward reaction, though the system quietly logged the spike in her pulse.
He examined the chamber’s interior with his Insight Eye. Hundreds of microscopic Wind-Gathering Runes formed a closed loop inside, linked without a single deviation. Twenty years of muscle memory, made visible.
"This is exactly what we need," he said, meeting her eyes. "You’re the core of this operation, Aunt Lin. Without your hands, this weapon is nothing but a drawing on a jade slip."
Her heart skipped at the weight of the praise. Years of being pushed into the dark by Deacon Liu’s faction, and now this man looked at her like she was irreplaceable.
"I won’t let you down, Supervisor Lin," she said quietly, eyes burning with a passion that had been dormant far too long.
"I’ll start final assembly and calibration now," he said, carrying the finished chambers to his own station across the room.
For the next two days, the workshop became its own sealed world of pure industry.
Madam Shen managed everything outside the walls, an unshakable shield against prying eyes. Aunt Lin engraved chambers without pause, driven by the quiet electricity of working across from him. And Lin Tian handled the final joining of every piece — casing, chamber, and trigger array — into a single, living weapon.
He took the uniform casings, seated Aunt Lin’s engraved chambers inside them, linked the trigger arrays, and sealed each circuit with a precise thread of his Yang Qi.
Click. Whirrr.
He dropped a low-grade spirit crystal into the base of a finished crossbow and tapped the trigger.
HMMMM!
A sharp hum erupted from the weapon as the Wind-Gathering Runes activated, pulling air from the room into the sealed chamber and compressing it into an invisible, violent tempest. The space around the crossbow visibly warped with pressure.
Compression successful, Lin Tian thought, releasing the trigger to power it down. No tendon to snap. No spring to fail. Just clean, unbreakable force, born the same way every single time.
He set the finished crossbow into a black canvas crate — the fiftieth one he’d assembled that day.
He looked at the growing stack of crates in the corner. The furnace rune still hummed steady behind him, the timing talismans still chimed in their patient rhythm, and every chamber Aunt Lin carved matched the one before it down to the last thread of spirit-energy.
With two days still remaining before the Weapon Exhibition, they wouldn’t just meet the quota of one hundred weapons.
They would blow past it.
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