Black-Flame Canyon.

Scorching heat. Fire roaring skyward in continuous columns.

For most living things, this place was a forbidden zone. For the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady — currently wearing the Energy-Draining Bracelet — it was manageable. Setting aside her own cultivation level and elemental mastery, setting aside Yueyang’s proximity, setting aside even the bracelet itself with its reputation as an elemental calamity in artifact form — the fire-ring protection alone from her contracted war beast, the Gold-Body Blazing Lion King Simba, would have been enough for her to walk through Black-Flame Canyon with reasonable comfort.

Niunu hadn’t come. But Simba had, with his mate alongside him.

The Gold-Body Blazing Lion King had reached Sky-rank tier three, and was fully capable of holding his own in a fight. If not for Yueyang’s insistence on moving carefully, advancing one confirmed step at a time, the Imperial Lady could have pushed forward at speed under Simba and his mate’s protection. His caution had basis. The heavenly realm punished the inattentive. Strange and lethal things lurked everywhere — even in terrain that seemed stable. Confident warriors ended up dead in places that should have been easy, and the people who survived the heavenly realm for any length of time were the ones who never stopped treating it as dangerous.

Yueyang was also the kind of fighter who routinely turned terrain and timing against his enemies. He wasn’t going to hand either of those advantages to someone else through carelessness.

Particularly not after watching Leiqie and Blood-Fang emerge from inside with their parties destroyed.

He signaled for silence.

“Simba.” The Imperial Lady touched her lion’s shoulder, then gestured forward.

The Gold-Body Blazing Lion King understood his role. He and his mate vanished into the fire, moving with the slow patience of predators working toward prey — closing the distance to the three combatants ahead in complete silence.

The Black-Flame Lord was a giant of a figure, black fire burning at every breath in columns that rose a hundred meters. His power clearly exceeded both of the attackers. But he wasn’t pressing the engagement. He looked irritated rather than threatened.

“Leiqie, you bag of bones — I let you walk away once already. Why are you still here? Get out of my canyon. Whatever old grudge you’re carrying, this lord doesn’t care. My sights are set above — the upper heavenly realm. Ancient history with the Skeletal Clan means nothing to me anymore.” His gaze shifted. “And Blood-Fang — I have no history with your Vampire Clan at all. Leave. Now. If you force my hand, I won’t hold back a second time. You think that tier three strength of yours survives the next round? The only reason you’re standing there is because I chose to let you stand.”

“Pretty speech,” Leiqie said coolly.

“You have a tier five peak build — yes, under normal circumstances that ends me in seconds.” Blood-Fang kept his distance, harassing from range, voice steady despite the gap between them. “But you’ve poured nine-tenths of your fire energy into tempering your Black-Flame Soul Crystal. You’re an empty shell right now. You can’t defend yourself properly, let alone threaten us.”

“You think this harassment changes anything? You think you can stop me from reaching tier six?” The giant threw his head back and laughed, a sound that suggested he had a card he hadn’t played yet.

“We’d like to find out,” Leiqie said, and his blade started moving.

The two of them maintained their distance — nothing within a hundred meters of the giant — and Yueyang noticed why. Within that radius, the ground was perforated with openings of varying size, scattered in every direction.

The Imperial Lady touched his arm, asking the question without words.

Yueyang brought his Heavenly Eye of Wisdom to full power and swept the space. What came back hit him like a physical impact.

“Ground-origin Yin Flame,” he said, keeping his voice at the threshold of audibility.

Something stirred in her memory. She’d heard the name before. She couldn’t place it immediately.

Yueyang knew exactly where else it appeared. The Ruins of the Gods — according to the knowledge he’d inherited from his Elder Sister — contained a sea of fire composed entirely of Ground-origin Yin Flame. The substance behaved unlike any other fire. It rested. Still as a lake, patient, unmoving. Without an external force to disturb it, it could sit in silence for centuries.

Ancient warriors called it the Silent Burn.

The Silent Burn’s strange property was this: if someone could move within it without disturbing it — without triggering its reactive fury — they could cultivate inside it indefinitely, using its energy to temper their body without being killed by it. Even in the ancient age, almost no one had managed this. The more common application was for forging divine weapons: a blade thrown into the Silent Burn and carefully retrieved after tempering could gain properties nothing else could impart. Looked simple. Wasn’t. Disturbing the Silent Burn at the wrong moment caused it to erupt at temperatures millions of times beyond what it displayed at rest — enough to destroy an unfinished divine weapon completely.

“What?” When Yueyang whispered the details into her ear, the blood left her face.

“It’s still in a resting state. Nothing has disturbed it yet. At full eruption, tier five wouldn’t survive it. Neither would six or seven.” He scanned further. “The Black-Flame Lord is waiting for something — probably a specific timing condition or a trigger to control the break. He won’t use it prematurely. And at this depth of ground, we’re still a long way from the actual deposit. Those openings are dispersal vents — the main pocket is much deeper down.”

“So what do we do?”

“Find a large vent and go down through it.”

“You absolute lunatic.” She stared at him.

She had genuinely spent time trying to figure out how to categorize him. Cautious — yes, when it mattered, he was extremely careful. Reckless — also yes, when he decided something was worth the risk, he committed without flinching. Now he was looking at holes in the ground that vented one of the most dangerous substances in the known world and proposing to climb inside one of them. If the fight above triggered an eruption while they were in the channel—

She stopped reasoning about it.

This was the thing she had learned from watching Wuxia — and internalized over the past three days in the lab. When he made a decision on something that mattered, you committed to it. Wuxia understood this better than anyone, moved to support him faster than anyone, even ahead of Qianqian. Uncertainty in the field was its own kind of danger.

Simba and his mate took their positions above. Their job, if the Black-Flame Lord somehow got past Leiqie and Blood-Fang while Yueyang and the Imperial Lady were still underground, was to buy time.

Yueyang sketched out a spatial-transfer rune formation, his hand moving through the gestures with the precision of someone constructing something extremely delicate.

The Heart-Link connected their intent, and they transferred together.

One instant they were on the surface. The next they were inside the largest vent Yueyang had identified — close to the Black-Flame Lord’s position but below it, deep inside the ground.

Above them, completely unaware, the giant was still hurling fire-spears at his harassers.

The channel descended in a long, slightly curved bore. Two thousand meters down, then a further thousand — the Imperial Lady’s sense of the distance made her stomach tight. If the vent fired with them inside it, the Energy-Draining Bracelet would not save them. The sensation was approximately that of standing inside a volcano that was in the process of deciding whether or not to erupt.

She stayed with it.

The channel opened.

They stepped out into a cavern several kilometers across and three to four hundred meters high, and the first thing that registered was the fire.

A patch of black flame, perfectly still, sitting in the center of the cavern floor. Roughly fifty meters across, not quite circular. Nothing about it moved.

It was the most frightening thing she’d seen in a long time.

The energy stored in that small, silent, motionless pool — fully released, it would level Black-Flame Canyon from below. She could feel the potential of it the way one feels the potential of something very heavy held in very delicate balance. And yet it simply sat there, unhurried, around the perimeter of which ordinary lava churned and boiled while the black fire took no notice whatsoever.

“You’re going to take some back with you, aren’t you,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Obviously. But that’s not actually the main thing.” Yueyang was working to keep his voice level and not entirely succeeding. He swallowed once. “Look up.”

She looked.

The cavern ceiling — thirty or forty meters overhead — was covered entirely in ore deposits. Wall to wall, stalactites hanging down in formations that glowed with a deep black shot through with veins of violet-blue. Some of the stalactites had turned uniformly deep purple along their whole length. The density of it was extraordinary.

Drip-Flame ore. All of it, Drip-Flame ore.

A finger-sized piece of the crystal product at auction opened above ten million. This ceiling stretched for kilometers. She began doing the arithmetic, stopped when the numbers became too large to process cleanly, and felt a warm, somewhat vertiginous wave of something that was probably what falling into a mountain of treasure felt like.

She reined herself in.

“Tell me what you need from me. Mining isn’t exactly my specialty, but this is surface-exposed ore — I think I can manage.”

He shook his head and waved her off, gesturing for her to slow down.

He pointed.

“The Drip-Flame ore is fine. Ignore it for now. That—” His voice had dropped to something between a whisper and a vibration. “That is why we came. The Fire God Soul-Tempering Herb. Fully mature — it’s been sitting in Ground-origin Yin Flame heat for thousands of years. Getting that is equivalent to acquiring a divine artifact.” He paused, still staring. “I couldn’t have imagined this. The Black-Flame Lord has been trapped in this canyon, absorbing fire energy, refusing to move despite being attacked — because he was guarding this. One plant.”

The Imperial Lady’s eyes went as wide as they would go.

“Divine-tier?”