The morning sun crawled over the jagged teeth of the Sunset Mountain, casting long, pale shadows across the courtyard of the Ancestral Hall.
Li Fan sat cross-legged on a patch of dry earth, surrounded by what appeared to be a pile of garden refuse. Thistles with thorny stems, gray mountain-lichen, and a few withered stalks of wild-wheat that had failed to ripen.
Jing'er watched him from the kitchen doorway, a soot-stained rag clutched in her hand. She had seen him sit in silence for hours after Scar-Face Ma's departure, but this new obsession with "weeds" was more concerning than his previous stillness.
"Sect Leader," she ventured, her voice soft. "The Iron Fist Hall has not returned. Should we... should we not be using this peace to hide what little grain we have left?"
Li Fan didn't look up. He was carefully peeling the silver skin from a root of mountain-thistle. "Hiding is the strategy of the prey, Jing'er. We must learn to consume as the peak does."
"But those are just thistles," she whispered, stepping closer. "They have no Spirit Qi. Even the livestock in the valley will not eat them."
Li Fan paused, a small, knowing smile touching his lips. He looked at the thistle-root in his palm. In the Present, this was indeed "trash." It was coarse, bitter, and contained almost no essence.
But in the Year 10,000, when the world was a desert of fading Qi, the survivalists of the Age of Dust discovered a truth the masters of his era had long forgotten: the energy wasn't absent; it was simply locked in a form too dense for standard smelting.
"In our time, alchemists use Heavenly Flames to burn away the impurities of high-grade herbs," Li Fan said. "They seek the 10% of pure essence and discard the rest. It is a wasteful, arrogant path."
He picked up a small, blackened iron pot—the kind used for boiling soup.
"In the future... there are no high-grade herbs. There is only the residue. So they learned the path of Inverse Smelting."
He began to feed the thistles into the pot. He didn't use a furnace or Spirit Fire. Instead, he began to hum the same low-frequency resonance he had used to unlock the wine pit. The Stellar Depths technique didn't just seal his meridians; it allowed him to vibrate his very soul-force.
The pot didn't glow red. It didn't smoke.
Instead, the thistles within began to turn into a fine, black ash. But as the ash settled, a faint, crystalline condensation began to form on the inside of the lid—tiny droplets of a liquid that looked like liquid silver.
Jing'er gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. "That... that scent..."
It was the scent of the deep mountain after a thunderstorm—ozonous, sharp, and intensely clean.
"This is the Refined Marrow of the Earth," Li Fan explained, his voice strained by the effort of the vibration. "By using the future's Pillar of Reclaiming, I am not seeking the 'purity' of the herb. I am using resonance to shatter the shackles of the mundane dregs, forcing the coarse shell to release the primordial Qi trapped within its very marrow."
He scraped the silver condensation into a jade vial—the last whole one the sect owned.
"This single vial contains more usable essence than a dozen Low-Grade Spirit Stones," he said, handing it to her. "Put a single drop into your wash. Use it to temper your bone-marrow. You have the potential of the Hidden Dragon, Jing'er. You just need a master who knows how to feed you."
Jing'er took the vial as if it were a fragile egg. Her eyes were filled with a mixture of terror and awe. "Sect Leader... if the valley hears of this... if they know we can turn weeds into spirit-marrow..."
Li Fan stood up, his gaze turning toward the horizon where the Great Sects of the province sat in their ivory towers, wasting the world's remaining wealth.
"Then they will learn that the Sunset Sect is no longer a grave," he said. "It is a forge."
As he spoke, the ethereal scroll in his vision pulsed with a steady, azure light.
[RECURSIVE RESONANCE IN PROGRESS]
[DIVIDEND: THE LEGACY OF THE FORGE HATH TAKEN ROOT]
Li Fan felt a sudden surge of warmth in his chest. He looked at Jing'er and knew that every drop of spirit-marrow she consumed was a thread of fate he was weaving into the future. By strengthening her now, the "ruins" he would find in ten thousand years would not be empty.
The "Silent Ruin" was becoming a "Slumbering Fortress."