So Li Mei was actually a disciple of the Morning Glory Alchemy Sect.

Wang Chen's thoughts moved with quiet satisfaction as his gaze rested on the towering sculpture of the woman before him. The corner of his lips curled upward almost imperceptibly. From the very beginning, he had known that Li Mei was from the upper realm, but her exact identity had remained unclear to him. Now that the truth had been revealed, the scattered fragments in his mind finally clicked into place, and a number of previously unanswered questions found their answers.

No wonder her attainments in alchemy were so extraordinary.

No wonder the Peak Master had taken such interest in him.

Following the Peak Master's instructions, Wang Chen first bowed toward the heavens — or rather, he pretended to. His expression remained calm, but there was a faint trace of wry amusement in his heart. He wasn't sure whether the heavens still knew how to answer such a gesture, given that the world had long since been replaced by something else entirely. In the end, there was no point overthinking the ceremony.

If the ritual was still expected, he would simply do it.

A cup to the heavens.

Then a cup to the master.

And finally, a cup beneath Li Mei's statue.

Only after completing these three bows did he fully accept that he had become, in the formal sense, the official disciple of one of the three peaks of the Morning Glory Sect.

While Wang Chen was thinking, the Research and Development Peak Master looked at him with a thoughtful expression. His gaze lingered for a long time, as though he were weighing something far beyond the surface.

"My Research and Development Peak doesn't have too many rules," the old man said at last. "You can do things as you deem fit. Hmm, although the last pill was refined perfectly, you still didn't use your inherent alchemy flame to control the pill. If you had used it, it might have taken even less time..."

As he spoke, the Peak Master seemed to pause mid-thought. Something in Wang Chen's situation had apparently struck him, and the realization came so suddenly that his eyes widened for the briefest instant before he quickly composed himself again.

Thankfully, no other Peak Master was present to witness that reaction.

Otherwise, they would have certainly been surprised.

The Research and Development Peak Master was not someone who could be easily shaken. His understanding of alchemy ran deep, and he had seen the rise and fall of countless geniuses over the years. Very few things in the world were capable of startling him anymore.

Yet just now, such a figure had been shocked.

That alone spoke volumes.

The Peak Master looked at Wang Chen again.

Then again. His gaze moved across the young man's figure with the slow, methodical sweep of someone conducting a search they are confident will eventually yield results — checking the obvious locations first, then the less obvious ones, then the ones that required a more deliberate redirection of attention to examine properly.

Nothing.

No alchemy flame. Not suppressed, not concealed within the body through some unusual cultivation method, not dormant in the way of someone who possessed the thing but had not yet learned to bring it fully to the surface. Simply absent — the space where an alchemist's inherent flame should have existed, in the way that bones exist beneath flesh and roots exist beneath soil, simply unoccupied.

The Peak Master looked a third time, because the conclusion the first two passes had delivered was not one he was prepared to accept on insufficient evidence.

The third pass confirmed the second.

A possibility surfaced in his mind — slow at first, the way truly unprecedented things surface, not arriving fully formed but assembling itself piece by piece from the available evidence with the reluctant, creaking quality of a framework being constructed around something that resists having a framework built around it.

How did this boy refine a pill without an inherent alchemy flame?

The question formed and sat in his awareness with the particular, unsettled quality of something that should not have needed to be asked — because the answer should have been obvious, because the answer had always been obvious, because in all the decades and centuries of his experience in the alchemy field, the answer had never once needed to be anything other than what it had always been.

Don't tell me he refined it without one.

He could not believe his own thoughts.

The comparison that came to him was the simplest one available, the kind of comparison that reduces a complex thing to its most foundational element. Learning to walk without legs. Not learning to walk with injured legs, or weakened legs, or legs that belonged to someone else's body and had been borrowed through some extraordinary means. Without them entirely. The legs were not the mechanism through which walking happened — they were the prerequisite without which the question of walking could not even be meaningfully asked.

An alchemy flame was not the tool through which pill refinement occurred. It was the condition upon which pill refinement's possibility rested. Remove it and the process did not become more difficult or more slow or more dangerous.

It became categorically impossible.

This was not contested knowledge. It was not the position of one school of thought against another, not a debate between competing theories of alchemy with different foundational assumptions. It was simply what alchemy was and what it required, as established and uncontroversial as the relationship between fire and heat.

And the young man standing before him — having just completed a Fate Reversal Pill in one hour, having done so in a way that was precise and controlled and had produced a result indistinguishable from the work of someone who had spent decades developing their craft — had done it without the one thing that made doing it possible.

The Peak Master stood in the shadow of the three mountains and looked at Wang Chen with the wide-eyed, rapidly reassembling expression of someone whose model of the world has just been handed a contradiction it cannot resolve by adjusting its parameters.

It needed to be rebuilt from a different foundation entirely.

Wang Chen stood quietly and waited, his expression carrying the mild, patient quality of someone who has grown accustomed to a certain kind of reaction and has learned to give it the space it requires.