How did this youngling get his hands on such a treasure?

The thought moved through the Peak Master's mind with the weight of genuine bewilderment — the particular confusion of someone who has spent enough time in the world to believe they have catalogued most of its surprises, and has just been proven wrong.

The next moment, his eyes rippled.

It was a subtle thing — barely visible, the kind of change that only another cultivator at a comparable level would have any hope of perceiving. But the space around him responded immediately, trembling as the auras of multiple authorities surged through his frame in quiet, overlapping waves. Ancient power moved through the old man's body the way deep water moves — with enormous force and almost no surface disturbance. The strongest of those authorities rose above the rest, carrying a weight that pressed against the fabric of the surrounding space with an almost intimate familiarity.

Sky-grade authority of fate.

The Peak Master of Research and Development was reaching into the threads of causality itself, pulling on the invisible lines that connected every living being to their past and future, trying to read Wang Chen's history the way one reads a scroll — from the beginning, forward to the end.

The threads did not cooperate.

As the moments passed, the expression on the old man's face underwent a slow, almost imperceptible transformation. The abstract, unfocused quality that had characterized it since his arrival — the look of a man whose mind lived in a different register from the world around him — gave way to something more grounded. More attentive. More genuinely unsettled.

Interesting.

The word formed in the back of his thoughts, quiet and unhurried.

Very interesting. Just what is the identity of this young man? 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

No matter how deeply he pressed — no matter how precisely he directed the sky-grade authority of fate toward the figure standing with that golden cauldron — he received nothing. Not fragments. Not distorted impressions. Not even the vague, indistinct outline that even heavily concealed cultivators tended to leave behind like footprints in soft ground. Wang Chen returned nothing at all. Past — blank. Future — blank. The young man refining a pill with the calm focus of someone who had done this a thousand times before appeared, through the lens of one of the most powerful authorities in existence, to be nothing more than an illusion that the Peak Master had somehow convinced himself to see.

For the first time in what was likely an enormous span of years, a look of genuine seriousness crossed the Peak Master's weathered face. The madness retreated. The carelessness vanished. What replaced them was the expression of someone who had just encountered a variable they had no category for.

A short distance away, Nong Li had maintained his ninety-degree bow with admirable discipline throughout. But he was not blind. Even in that posture, his peripheral awareness had tracked the subtle disturbances in the surrounding space — the tremor, the surge of authority, the barely perceptible shift in the atmosphere that accompanied the Peak Master's investigation. His gaze, carefully angled, had followed the invisible thread of attention to its target.

Wang Chen.

He studied the young man from that cautious, sideways angle.

There was nothing immediately striking about him. No blazing aura announcing extraordinary potential. No visible cultivation pressure that would cause bystanders to take a step back. If not for the Three Tripod Flame Cauldron floating beside him, golden and luminous and impossible to mistake, Nong Li might have looked past him entirely. The young man's existence had a quality of ordinariness that felt almost constructed — not the natural blending of someone unremarkable, but the deliberate invisibility of someone who had arranged things to appear that way.

The Absolute Concealment Formation was working. Not at its full capacity, perhaps — suppressed by the environment, by the density of authority saturating the upper realm test ground — but working nonetheless. Certain of its effects were diminished. Others remained entirely intact.

Wang Chen, for his part, noticed none of this scrutiny.

His entire focus was elsewhere — directed inward, toward the cauldron, toward the delicate, precise process currently unfolding within it. Nothing outside that radius registered as relevant.

And within the Three Tripod Flame Cauldron, something extraordinary was happening.

While the other participants were still wrestling with the fundamentals — still calibrating their flames, still coaxing their ingredients toward the baseline temperature required to begin extraction — Wang Chen's cauldron had moved several stages past them. The inherent flame had done its work without complaint or complication, the dual energies of extreme cold and extreme heat negotiating their perfect balance automatically, removing the single most difficult variable in early-stage refining from Wang Chen's concern entirely.

The Fate Reversal Pill was already taking shape.

Green. Verdant. Small and luminous and impossibly complete for the amount of time that had elapsed.

Not even one hour had passed since the trial began.

If the other participants had possessed even a fraction of their attention to spare, the sight within that cauldron would have stopped every one of them cold. It would have prompted accusations. Demands for explanation. The kind of outraged disbelief that erupts when someone violates an established ceiling so casually that the ceiling itself feels embarrassed.

Was this cheating? There was no other framework readily available to explain it.

But the participants were fully occupied with their own struggles, and so the quiet miracle happening inside the golden cauldron continued unwitnessed — except by two pairs of eyes that had already been watching.

Nong Li's composure broke first.

The sharp intake of breath was audible. His eyes went wide, the careful professional detachment cracking along its seam as he stared at the near-completed pill taking shape in a cauldron that had been lit less than an hour ago.

"This can't be real." The words came out half-strangled, half-incredulous. "The fastest record on record is one day. There is absolutely no way this young man can break that record—"

He stopped himself. Looked again.

Beside him, the Peak Master said nothing.

But his extraordinarily long beard trembled — a small, involuntary motion that communicated, to anyone who knew how to read it, everything that his silence was declining to say out loud.