A little over a week had passed since the alchemy pavilion incident had attempted to paint the sky cerulean. The memory of the billowing blue smoke had faded, but its consequences had not. The air inside the pavilion now smelled of soap, vinegar, and the faint, persistent metallic tang of the strange residue.

  As punishment, Kai had sentenced his three disciples to the arduous task of restoring the space to its former glory. For days, they had toiled under watchful eyes, their muscles aching from a different kind of labor than they were used to. Scrubbing brushes scraped against polished stone, and buckets of specially prepared solvent were hauled in and out. The blue gunk was tenacious, staining the intricate jade inlays and clinging to the cauldron in stubborn patches. They were only now, after days of relentless effort, beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the pristine black and jade surfaces finally emerging from beneath the azure disaster.

  But Kai intended to really pound this lesson into his disciples' heads. Cleaning was merely the first step of their penitence. Already, he was meticulously planning the next play: a brutal physical training regimen designed to burn the folly of overambition out of their bones. This would not be the usual conditioning; this would be a Spartan trial of endurance and humility.

  Especially for Chen Gong.

  As the chief architect of the catastrophe, his training would be the most severe. Kai envisioned long hours under weighted packs, running laps around Titan's Reach until his lungs burned. He pictured endless repetitions of foundational stances, each one held until muscle tremors became a constant companion. It was to be a punishment not of malice, just a forceful reminder not reckless to attempt reckless actions.

  Far away, up to his elbows in blue-tinged scrub water, Chen Gong felt a sudden, inexplicable shiver trace a cold finger down his spine. He paused, looking around the pavilion as if expecting to see the source of his sudden dread. He saw only Lu Bu diligently scouring the base of the cauldron and Zhang Liao carefully wiping down the smaller pill furnaces. The air was still. Yet, the feeling was unmistakable—a primal sense of impending exertion, a shadow of the suffering to come. He swallowed hard, the taste of soap and regret sharp on his tongue, and redoubled his cleaning efforts, savoring these last moments of mere tedious labor before the true atonement began.

  While the disciples scrubbed away their shame, Gin had taken up a quiet, focused residence in a far corner of the alchemy pavilion. Surrounded by the gentle bubble of simmering concoctions and the sharp, clean scent of distilled spirits, he was a picture of intense, if slightly inebriated, concentration. His mission: to crack the code of creating simple, viable cultivation medicine using only the mundane, herbs and roots they could forage from Zan.

  He worked with a methodical patience that was the complete opposite of his usual boisterousness.

  Crucially, he had commandeered one of the smaller, secondary cauldrons for his experiments—a sensible precaution that highlighted the gulf between his instinctual understanding and the disciples' reckless ambition. If a reaction went awry, the result would be a manageable puddle of failure, not a sky-darkening cataclysm.

  And there were failures. The evidence was often a pot of foul-smelling, inert black sludge that he would unceremoniously scrape out and discard. But each batch of sludge was a lesson. He’d mutter to himself, take a thoughtful pull from his ever-present gourd, and adjust his ratios, his heat, or his preparation methods with the skill of a master craftsman tuning a delicate instrument.

  Kai, checking in on the progress, was informed that a viable product was still some way off, but Gin was steadily closing in on something stable and useful for trade. It was a slow, meticulous science, and Gin was its unlikely, dedicated pioneer.

  Seizing the opportunity, Kai had also encouraged—or more accurately, insisted—that Gin offer some basic alchemy lessons to the cleaning crew. The hope was to channel their misdirected curiosity into proper supervised learning.

  The result was a brief, dismal experiment that ended in mutual relief. Gin, a man profoundly unsuited to teaching, found his attempts to explain intuitive processes met with blank stares and clumsy mistakes. The disciples, for their part, discovered that alchemy required a patience and precision entirely foreign to their temperaments. Lu Bu’s strength was useless here, Zhang Liao’s agility irrelevant, and Chen Gong’s scholarly nature was overwhelmed by the practical, hands-on finesse the art demanded. Their inherent talent for it was nonexistent.

  The alchemy lessons were promptly abandoned, a fact that filled Gin with immense private satisfaction.

  However, this return to the status quo came with an unexpected, bitter aftertaste. For a fleeting moment, in the wake of the blue smoke incident, he had been seen. There had been a flicker of awe in the disciples' eyes, a hint of respect that had nothing to do with his capacity for drink. Now, that fleeting elevation had vanished. He was no longer "Gin, the secret alchemy savant"; he was once again just "Gin, the drunk," the background fixture they politely stepped around.

  They never said a word, but he could feel the shift in their demeanor, the subtle drop in regard. The brief glimpse of a different identity had made the return to his old one feel strangely hollow.

  The familiar craving for numbness returned with a vengeance. In response, he turned back to his first and most reliable art: brewing. Gin would brew spirits while he worked on his assigned alchemy project. The alchemical distillers, now cleaned and gleaming, began to hum with a new purpose, for crafting a stronger, more potent escape. He dove into his work with a renewed fervor, seeking in the fermentation vats and spirit stills the same satisfaction and validation that he'd so briefly had.

  While Gin wrestled with his demons and his distillates, Kai turned his attention to the vast, silent farmland that sprawled beyond the city's eastern edge.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  After Kuro had conjured the entire landscape into existence, Kai had been too overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all to inspect it closely. The presence of planted fields was a blessing he’d accepted without question. Now, he decided it was time to fix that oversight.

  He walked slowly along the perfectly straight, spiritually reinforced fences, his boots kicking up small puffs of dark, rich soil. His gaze swept over the endless, neat rows of emerging greenery, but instead of feeling relief, a knot of uncertainty tightened in his stomach. He understood, now, the hidden complication of Kuro’s gift. The man had taken the jumbled collection of seed packets Kai had left out and had sown them with god-like efficiency. The work of days and weeks had been completed in an instant.

  The problem was one of context. Kuro, for all his world-shattering power, clearly wasn't a farmer. He had approached planting with the mindset of an architect, not an agriculturist. A proficient grower would have known to keep a meticulous record, a map of the field denoting what was planted where. Different crops—root vegetables, leafy greens, grains—all had unique needs. They required specific levels of water, different types of fertilizer, and careful rotation to avoid depleting the soil.

  Now, Kai was left with a mystery. He was the caretaker of a vast garden where he couldn't tell a carrot from a cabbage until it decided to reveal itself. He couldn't properly tend to them; he could only wait and react, a passive observer to a process he was supposed to be managing.

  As Kai stood amidst the bewildering expanse of his anonymous farmland, lost in a silent debate over how to manage a harvest he couldn't plan for, a movement at the edge of his vision caught his attention.

  There, moving with an ethereal grace that seemed to calm the very air around him, was Cres. The moon-horned stag, his antlers gleaming like polished bone under the sun, walked serenely along the perimeter of the field. His intelligent, luminous eyes scanned the rows of sprouting green not with hunger, but with a placid, almost proprietary curiosity.

  Thankfully, every spirit beast in his menagerie understood the fields' purpose instinctively, sticking to the wide, hard-packed paths Kuro had woven between the plots for exactly this reason. Cres paused, turning his majestic head towards Kai. Their eyes met, and the stag gave a slow, deliberate nod—a gesture of deep understanding and silent communication—before turning with effortless elegance and prancing off, his white form disappearing like a wisp of cloud into the dappled shadows of the caldera's ancient forest.

  “Thankfully, the beastkin seem to be liking their new home,” Kai mumbled to himself, a genuine smile touching his lips as he watched Cres vanish into the trees.

  The reunion of his scattered family had been a tumultuous joy, but the subsequent settling-in period had been a quiet triumph. The beastkin had taken to Titan’s Reach with a contentment that warmed Kai’s heart. In the days since, they had thoroughly explored every waterfall, grove, and sunlit meadow within the caldera’s walls, their excited calls and playful chases echoing through the once-silent valley.

  The difference from their old life was profound. Their previous home had been a series of enclosures and stables—secure, but ultimately confining. Here, the entire caldera was their enclosure, a territory magnitudes larger, rich with varied terrain to explore and claim. The freedom was a palpable thing; Kai had watched younger beasts, like the elemental-fox kits and the horned hares, experience the simple joy of running without a barrier in sight for the first time in their lives.

  Furthermore, the environment was perfection. The microclimate of Titan’s Reach was universally ideal. It was consistently warm and sun-drenched for the sun-leopards and the fire-lizards who basked on rocky outcroppings, yet it was always cool and shaded in the forest depths for those like the ice-weasels or Cres himself, who preferred a milder clime. There were no bitter chills or scorching heats, just a perpetual, gentle spring that kept every member of the menagerie in peak condition and high spirits. Their new home wasn't just bigger; it was better in every conceivable way.

  Leaving the puzzle of the main fields for another day, Kai walked toward a newer, more personal project on the caldera's sunlit edge. This was a garden of a different sort. The soil beds here were raised and shaped by his own hands, the surrounding fencing woven from sturdy mountain branches—functional, but crude and uneven compared to the flawless, conjured perfection of Kuro's work. This roughness, however, lent it a sense of honest effort that Kai preferred.

  Here, Kai was not planting food. He was attempting the impossible: a garden of spirit herbs.

  Tucked safely within his spatial ring were precious remnants of his old life—seeds and cuttings from his time at the Ember Sword sect. In theory, they should wither and die in Zan. The ambient qi was too thin, the spiritual soil nonexistent. But Kai clung to a fragile theory, born from desperation and a single act of kindness. When Snow had been grievously ill, sharing his own qi had helped the great wolf recover. Could the same principle apply to a plant? Could he become a temporary sun for a seedling, sharing just enough of his own energy to coax it to life? If it worked, he could cultivate a small, personal cache of low-tier spirit herbs for emergencies. It was a foolish hope, likely to fail, but the idea that he might be the first to ever succeed in such a thing in this wasteland was a powerful motivator.

  With careful, tender movements, he dug small holes in the rich earth. He planted delicate Moonpetal flowers and the hard, glistening seeds from a Sapphire Berry bush, his touch gentle. As he covered each one with soil, he willed a single, precious drop of his own cultivated qi to flow from his fingertips, a tiny spark of energy transferred into the dormant potential beneath the earth.

  Once the last spiritual seedling was settled, he moved to a separate, larger bed he had prepared with ample space around it. A place for something significant to take root.

  From his ring, he produced a single seed. It was larger than a walnut, its shell a deep, ominous black that seemed to swallow the light, smooth and cold like a piece of polished obsidian. He held it up, and a complex swirl of emotions tightened in his chest—a feeling he couldn't easily describe.

  This small, dark object was the epicenter of his past troubles. This was a seed from the Meat Fruit Tree, his own creation. It was the reason his former sect had accused him of demonic cultivation, the reason he had been sentenced to execution. It was the primary catalyst that had forced him to abandon the Ember Sword sect during its hour of need, choosing exile over a futile defense.

  Yet, as he held the seed, he felt no hatred for the tree it would become. The trees themselves were innocent. Their strange, protein-rich fruit had been a miracle for nurturing his carnivorous spirit beasts, a sustainable food source he had crafted out of love and necessity. He could not bring himself to destroy its legacy.

  Taking a steadying breath, Kai closed his hand around the seed. He felt his qi surge, as he transferred a single, potent drop of his energy into the dormant life within the dark shell. He planted it deep in the center of the prepared bed, covering it with a reverence usually reserved for a burial. As he patted the earth flat, he offered a silent, hopeful prayer—a prayer that the things he planted here would grow under his care and, in turn, help nurture the strange, wonderful family he had built.

  His work done, he stood, brushed the soil from his hands, and turned his back on the garden, walking slowly toward the silent streets of the city, leaving his hopes to take root in the soil of Titan's Reach.

  Patreon! You can read chapters early by becoming a patron.