Mo Fan sat on the bed with his fists pressed together.
His eyes carried the full weight of genuine respect as he looked at the cold-mannered woman in white before him.
She didn't respond immediately.
She took the empty medicine bowl back from him without ceremony. Those clear, penetrating eyes swept across his face once—twice—before she spoke, flat and unhurried:
"Hundred Forging Peak. Li Banxia."
Her voice was like jade fragments striking ice. Crisp. And carrying a chill that kept the world at arm's length.
Mo Fan filed the name away quietly.
At the same time, the street-sharpened instincts he'd honed across two lifetimes were already picking up on something deeply peculiar about the ecosystem inside this cramped stone room.
In the cultivation world, realm and seniority were supposed to be absolute authority.
And yet—Wu Kuan, the Foundation Establishment Eldest Senior Brother who'd been roaring about "pure flesh and blood" not an hour ago...
He was now standing with his shoulders hunched, hands plastered stiffly to his sides, looking for all the world like a husky that had just been caught demolishing the furniture and was waiting for the verdict.
He wasn't even breathing loudly.
Zhao Ziwei, meanwhile—perpetually loud, constitutionally incapable of sitting still—was attempting to physically merge with the wall, compressing his entire existence to the smallest possible footprint.
When his eyes accidentally landed on the empty medicine bowl in Li Banxia's hand, a flash of barely-concealed terror crossed his face.
This Senior Sister... is genuinely dangerous.
Mo Fan made a quiet mental note.
He only pieced together the full picture later—through Zhao Ziwei's traumatized half-sentences and frantic eye signals—and what he learned painted a rather vivid portrait.
Li Banxia had originally been the most celebrated pill-refining prodigy on the inner sect's Spirit Herb Peak.
But she had no interest whatsoever in the standard, balanced, foundation-building medicines that everyone else refined.
What she loved—what she was obsessed with—were the violent, edge-of-death concoctions.
The brutal medicines that walked the line between cure and catastrophe, and outright poisons.
Her exile to this forsaken back mountain had a direct cause.
One day, she had casually disposed of a failed batch of mutated toxic pills by dumping the residue into one of the main peak's most prized "Immortal Koi Spirit Ponds."
It was a carefully maintained pool of century-old spirit carp kept for the Supreme Elders' leisure and cultivation of temperament.
Within half an incense stick's time, every last priceless fish in that pond had gone belly-up.
The water itself had transformed into a bubbling cauldron of purple-green toxic sludge.
The upper echelon erupted. The "Poison Healer" was promptly kicked to the abandoned mine.
Fear was fear, though. Mo Fan had to admit—whatever her history, the medicine she'd given him had worked like a resurrection.
"Alright then! Everyone's here, Junior Brother Xiaoqi is alive and well—that's cause for celebration if I've ever heard one!"
Wu Kuan, desperate to bury the lingering awkwardness of having nearly punched a junior brother into the afterlife, rubbed his hands together.
He broke the silence with a wave of forced, towering enthusiasm.
"No time like the present! It's rare for our Hundred Forging Peak to get a newcomer—we're having a welcome feast right here in Junior Brother's new canyon home! My treat!"
"My treat" turned out to mean "right here, right now."
The four of them relocated to the open courtyard without ceremony, coaxed the half-dead campfire back to life, and settled in.
Wu Kuan, true to his straightforward nature, produced a massive haunch of meat from his storage bag—peak Tier-2 Spirit Beast, clearly something he'd been saving.
He hacked it into thick chunks with his broadsword before propping it over the flames to sizzle.
Zhao Ziwei ran back and forth in cheerful servitude, playing cook, waiter, and general errand boy all at once.
"The meat's a bit gamey. Needs seasoning."
Li Banxia produced a handful of dried herbs from somewhere—their bizarre color deeply questionable—and scattered them over the roasting meat without a second thought.
"Wait—WAIT!" Wu Kuan nearly dropped his sword. "Junior Sister, is that—is that Bone-Corroding Grass?! Isn't that used for refining poisons?!"
"Be quiet." Li Banxia gave him a look of glacial contempt.
"A small amount enhances the Qi-blood essence in the beast meat and brings out the flavor. It's mildly toxic at this quantity. It won't kill someone with your thick hide."
Wu Kuan closed his mouth immediately, swallowed hard, and scratched the back of his head with an awkward grin. He did not dare to argue back.
Zhao Ziwei attempted to interject from the side to show off his own contributions to the day's events.
One wordless, temperature-less look from Li Banxia sent him retreating to the fireside to poke at the kindling in wounded silence.
The Boss Lady's authority in this group was, at this point, beyond question.
The meal was easy. Loud in places. Occasionally chaotic.
None of the suffocating scheming that plagued the main peaks. None of the hollow pleasantries that outer court disciples performed for each other over a handful of Spirit Stones.
Li Banxia deployed her razor tongue without mercy, systematically dismantling Wu Kuan—a muscle-brained brawler—and Zhao Ziwei—a professional disaster...
With the calm efficiency of someone who had done this many times before and found it mildly entertaining.
Then she turned to Mo Fan.
"I heard that scumbag Xiao Hai came sniffing around this morning."
A cold edge of malice entered her eyes.
"If he ever sets foot in this canyon again—tell me. I've been worrying about having nowhere to test my newly formulated 'Intestine-Piercing Belly-Rotting Powder'."
"I'll make sure he shits out every last bone fragment he has."
Mo Fan sat in his armchair, holding a bowl of rough but throat-scorching spirit wine.
He watched these three people—written off by the sect as garbage and freaks—bicker, undercut each other, and defend each other without a second thought.
Somewhere along the way, without him noticing exactly when, a genuine smile had found its way onto his face.
Well-fed and watered, the moon climbed above the treetops.
The campfire burned low, leaving only red embers pulsing in the night wind.
Wu Kuan patted his very round stomach with satisfaction, let out a wine-soaked belch, and then slapped his knee like a man who'd just remembered something important.
"Oh! Almost forgot the real business!"
He reached into his robe and produced two small, translucent jade slips. He handed one to Li Banxia and turned toward Mo Fan with the other.
"Junior Brother, we're family now. Out here in the back mountain, we look after each other."
He held the jade slip out warmly.
"Here—let's exchange soul-sense imprints. Voice transmission talismans. If you run into a Spirit Beast you can't handle out here, or Xiao Hai and his lot come looking for trouble again, just send a pulse through the slip and your Senior Brother will be there before you can blink."
Li Banxia, for once, didn't argue. She produced her own transmission jade slip and prepared to exchange imprints.
And then—
Wu Kuan's hand hung in the air. Mo Fan didn't reach for it.
The warmth in the courtyard went very still, very suddenly—like cold water poured over a fire.
The easy atmosphere solidified into something airless.
Wu Kuan seemed to realize it a half-second later. The smile on his face stiffened.
His hand stayed frozen mid-air, caught between extending further and pulling back.
Then it hit him.
Mo Fan had a waste Spirit Root.
No spiritual energy. Not a trace. He hadn't even touched the threshold of Spiritual Sense.
He couldn't activate a voice transmission jade slip—one of the most basic tools in the cultivation world. He couldn't leave a Spiritual Sense imprint at all.
The silence was excruciating.
Wu Kuan wanted to slap himself. He hadn't been showing warmth.
He'd just driven a knife directly into his junior brother's self-respect—the most brutal kind of reminder, in a cultivation world, that a body cultivator couldn't use what everyone else took for granted.
Mo Fan looked at the two frozen figures across from him and let out a quiet internal sigh.
He didn't actually care.
He was already opening his mouth to brush it off with a self-deprecating joke and move on—
A dark shape launched itself from beside the fire with startling speed.
"What do you need transmission tokens for?! Those things are so impersonal and distant! Plus, they easily get blocked by high-level arrays—completely unreliable!"
Zhao Ziwei shoved Wu Kuan's suspended hand aside—with an added eye-roll for good measure—then threw an arm around Mo Fan's shoulders and beat his own chest loud enough to echo off the canyon walls.
"Whatever happens to Brother Xiaoqi happens to me, Zhao Ziwei!"
He flashed his signature wall of white teeth and bellowed:
"Our canyons are right next to each other! I'll be Xiaoqi's exclusive messenger from now on!"
"I'm running around this back mountain blindly every day anyway, and I run fast. I'll stroll over here for a lap every day, guaranteed no news will be missed!"
"Right, right, exactly! Ziwei's absolutely right!"
Wu Kuan seized the lifeline with both hands, stuffing the jade slip back into his robe with barely-concealed relief. "A jade slip is just a dead object—nothing beats your brothers showing up in person!"
Li Banxia quietly pocketed her own slip. She glanced at Zhao Ziwei. For once, she said nothing cutting.
Mo Fan watched the three of them—their cover-up clumsy, their intentions transparent, their sincerity absolute—and didn't say a word.
He just tipped his bowl back and drank the last of the rough spirit wine in one go.
The feeling of having his dignity quietly, carefully protected—without anyone making a show of it—sent a warmth spreading through his chest that had nothing to do with the alcohol.
In the cold of early autumn, it burned.
"Oh, right—Ziwei."
Wu Kuan, committed to keeping the mood moving and dispelling the awkwardness, pivoted to a new topic.
"Didn't you say yesterday that once Xiaoqi got settled, tomorrow you were going to take him to the Heavenly Works Workshop on the outskirts? Show him around, earn some Contribution Points?"
"Yeah!" Zhao Ziwei's eyes lit up. "With Xiaoqi's brute strength, swinging a sledgehammer in there would absolutely—"
"Don't even think about it."
Li Banxia's icy voice cut him off like a blade.
She stood, brushed nonexistent dust from her robes, and looked down at Wu Kuan and Zhao Ziwei with the calm, absolute authority of a physician delivering a verdict that was not open to discussion.
"To take that punch head-on today, his Qi-blood and muscle fibers have been overdrawn to the absolute limit."
"The medicine I gave him is potent, but potency requires time—it needs at least several days to be thoroughly absorbed and fused."
She pointed at Mo Fan, still seated in his chair, issuing a final medical order:
"For the next half month, he rests quietly. In this canyon. No exceptions."
She paused.
"If anyone dares drag him off to do hard labor like swinging a sledgehammer, leaving behind a lifelong disability..."
A cold sneer. At some point, a small ceramic vial bubbling with purple bubbles had appeared in her hand.
"I'll use them to test my newly formulated 'Bone-Melting Powder'."
Gulp.
Wu Kuan and Zhao Ziwei swallowed in perfect unison, only feeling a chill down their spines. Their heads began shaking back and forth like rattle-drums.
"Not going, not going! Bed rest! Absolute rest!"
"Junior Brother, you take care of yourself—we'll talk about everything else once you're fully recovered!" Wu Kuan pledged this with great conviction.
The night had grown deep. The gathering wound down.
The three of them took their leave together and walked out of the canyon.
Mo Fan stood in the courtyard and watched their silhouettes disappear into the dark.
Only once he was certain they were gone did he walk slowly to the canyon's single narrow entrance.
He lifted the massive boulder waiting beside it, and sealed the opening shut—solid, seamless, complete.
"Phew..."
He turned around.
The courtyard was empty. The campfire had faded to dim, glowing embers.
Mo Fan exhaled—long and slow.
"Now..."
"Surely there's no one left to come bother me."