Both of them continued to watch.

And both of them, in their own way and in their own time, arrived at the same reluctant conclusion.

The record of one-day pill refining — a benchmark that had stood unchallenged for centuries, a standard that the entire alchemy world had quietly treated as a fixed point in an otherwise shifting landscape — was going to fall today.

Inside the cauldron, under the careful, unhurried guidance of Wang Chen's divine sense, the pill continued its formation. The second ring settled around the core with slow, deliberate precision, cooling by degrees, the green pill layer forming over the surface like a final coat of lacquer being applied to something that already knew it was finished.

The Fate Reversal Pill glowed softly in the light of the Three Tripod Flame's ancient fire.

Almost done.

Wang Chen's eyes were completely still.

Not the stillness of someone suppressing distraction, but the deeper stillness of someone who had found the precise frequency of focus required and was holding it without effort. His divine sense moved through the interior of the cauldron like a careful hand in darkness — feeling for anything that didn't belong, tracing the surface of the forming pill with a precision that left no corner unexamined. Not a single impurity would remain. He was certain of that before he was finished.

Kacha.

The sound was small and clean — the particular, satisfying crack of something completing itself. Then the cauldron released its breath.

A burst of ethereal, soul-calming scent rolled outward from the cauldron's opening in a single, unhurried wave — not sharp, not medicinal, but something older and quieter than both of those things. It moved through the air the way a chord moves through silence, touching everything it reached and changing the quality of it.

From above the cauldron, a single green pill rose.

It floated with the unhurried self-possession of something that had always known it was going to exist and had simply been waiting for the right conditions to arrive. Soft green light radiated from its surface in gentle, steady pulses — not dramatic, not blinding, just present. Quietly, unmistakably present.

Wang Chen stared at it.

A slightly awed expression crossed his face — involuntary, unguarded, the expression of someone who had calculated a high probability of success but had still not fully anticipated what success would actually feel like when it arrived. He had refined the pill on his first attempt. The Three Tripod Flame Cauldron had performed exactly as described, and his own formation-rooted understanding of energy control had filled the gaps his alchemy knowledge couldn't cover. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

He hadn't been aiming to break any records. He hadn't even known what the records were until Bai Xieting had mentioned them. But without intending to, without any particular awareness of what he was doing relative to the established benchmarks of this trial, he had done the impossible.

One hour.

The record had stood for centuries.

It no longer did.

As the scent of the completed pill spread outward through the trial ground in expanding, unhurried rings, it reached the other participants one by one — threading past the heat of their flames and the sharp chemical tang of their ongoing refinements, distinct enough to cut through everything else and demand recognition.

One by one, they surfaced.

Heads turned away from cauldrons. Eyes broke from the intense, tunnel-vision focus that the Fate Pill's complexity demanded. Attention redirected itself toward the secluded corner of the trial ground where a young man nobody had particularly noticed stood alone, with a softly glowing green pill floating above his open hand.

The young master of the Blue Dawn Clan was among the first to look.

He looked at Wang Chen. Then at the pill. Then his expression arranged itself into something between contempt and dismissal — the face of someone who has already decided on an explanation and is no longer accepting new information.

"To think someone would stoop to such low levels." His voice carried the practiced projection of someone accustomed to being heard. "Using a mere imitation. Did he bring that from outside and think no one would notice?"

He turned his gaze away with the finality of a man who considered the matter settled.

"Who even is this person? Someone remove him. He is disturbing my concentration and I cannot afford the disruption."

The sentiment spread with the ease of things that confirm what people already want to believe. Most of the participants latched onto it without examining it — of course, someone trying to cheat. Of course, a pill brought from outside and presented as freshly refined. There was no other reasonable explanation. They had barely heated their cauldrons.

But not everyone accepted the comfortable version.

A handful of participants — the quieter ones, the more observant ones, the ones whose first instinct was to look at the evidence before settling on a conclusion — had already noticed the details that the Blue Dawn young master had not bothered to examine.

The Three Tripod Flame Cauldron was still hot.

Not residually warm, not cooling down from a demonstration fire, but genuinely, actively hot — radiating heat in visible waves, its golden surface several degrees above ambient, green smoke still curling from the opening in thin, rising threads. And at the bottom of the cauldron, visible to anyone who looked closely enough, lay the impurities — extracted cleanly from the Fate Reversal Pill during refinement, still gently shimmering with the faint luminescence of materials that had been separated from something they had been part of moments ago.

The cauldron had been used.

Recently. Completely. And to a level of refinement that the impurity yield suggested was close to perfect.

The absurd thought arrived in their minds almost simultaneously — arriving not as a conclusion they had worked toward but as something that simply became undeniable once the evidence was allowed to speak.

This young man refined that pill while we were still warming our cauldrons.

None of them said it out loud. The statement felt too large to release into the open air without more support behind it.

Meanwhile, Wang Chen had only a brief moment to register the shift in the atmosphere around him before his attention was drawn forward by a more immediate development.

Nong Li had appeared in front of him.

Not gradually, not after crossing the distance in visible steps — simply there, having moved with a speed and purpose that suggested the sight of the completed pill had overridden whatever restraint normally governed his behavior during an active trial. His expression was caught somewhere between professional composure and the visible strain of someone trying to maintain professional composure while confronting something that made composure feel slightly absurd.

And he was not alone.

Directly behind him, unhurried and unannounced, came the white-bearded elder — the Peak Master of Research and Development, his impossibly long beard trailing behind him, his eyes carrying that newly sharpened clarity that had replaced his usual unfocused wandering the moment he had first fixed his gaze on the Three Tripod Cauldron.

Wang Chen's eyes widened slightly.

He had not expected company quite this quickly.