Chapter 8: Cauldrons and Clashing Palms
Spring trials turned the alchemy hall into a battlefield of steam. Elders watched from a dais. Among them, a narrow-eyed man in white trimmed with blue—Elder Bai He of the Sword Hall—sat like a sheathed saber.
Li Cangfeng lingered near, honey words dripping. "What a day for talent to explode," he told a pair of senior alchemists.
At the gong, cauldrons flared alive. Tang Yurou danced her flame with swagger; Qin Mo's fire lapped like a tide that knew every stone. Lauders murmured, then a ripple: a talisman—thin as a moth's wing—fluttered from nowhere into Qin Mo's cauldron, saboteur's blessing disguised as dust.
The brew bucked. A howling bubble formed—detonation imminent.
Qin Mo did not flinch. He palmed the cauldron ring like a swordsman catching a blade. "Breathe," he told the mix, and bled off heat through three copper points. The bubble shuddered. It wanted to be born a bomb. He taught it to be rain.
He kicked the lid up, struck it with two fingers, sending it spinning like a moon. The released vapor—rain-scented, azure—fanned across a set of cauldrons where nervous novices were about to blow. The mist kissed them into calm.
Applause spattered. On the dais, Elder Bai He's gaze sharpened.
A shout: a saboteur—face masked, shoulder bearing the crescent stitch—leapt from the crowd at Qin Mo, dagger blinking with poison light. Qin twisted the ladle; steel rang off iron. The attacker turned the strike into a rake for Tang Yurou.
She laughed and threw her cauldron. It hit the attacker's chest with a mother's mercy and a blacksmith's love. The dagger clattered. Qin grabbed the man's wrist, dove under a slash, and hammered three Rain Needles—liquid lines hardened by qi—into shoulder, elbow, knee. The limb went dead.
The hall erupted in shouts. Elders stood; Bai He did not. He merely watched as Qin Mo planted the attacker face-first into tile.
"Keep brewing," Tang Yurou puffed, cheeks flushed, hair wild, eyes fierce.
Qin nodded, flipped the pot lid back onto his cauldron with a toe, and returned to the simmer.