Inside the grand, gold-paneled halls of the Alchemical Pavilion, the air was suffocatingly thick with the rich scent of burning dicinal herbs and heavy spiritual charcoal. The Chief Master had just returned from his tense, freezing audience with the Grand Branch Leader at the supre summit, his mind already churning with a bitter, suppressed rage over the political deadlocks he had encountered.
But the mont he stepped into the central courtyard, his focus was completely shattered by a chorus of frantic, panicked screams.
The contingent of senior alchemists burst through the heavy vermilion gates, their faces pale as death and their hands covered in thick, smoking crimson. They were desperately channeling their internal qi into a floating stretcher, where the fragnted, mangled remains of the Vice Hall Master lay barely held together by a few shreds of charred orange silk and rapidly deteriorating muscle tissue.
"Chief Master! Help! The Vice Hall Master has been thoroughly destroyed!" the lead senior disciple shrieked, falling to his knees as the stretcher clattered against the jade floor tiles.
Looking down at his second-in-command—a man whose physical vessel was now brutally sliced completely in half at the waist, with a secondary, catastrophic laceration ruining his right shoulder—the Chief Master could no longer contain the absolute tempest of his fury.
*BOOM!*
A terrifying, apocalyptic shockwave of spiritual pressure violently erupted from the Chief Master’s ancient fra, shattering the surrounding decorative porcelain vases into millions of microscopic pieces. The sheer, unadulterated weight of a master at the absolute Peak of the Golden Core Realm flooded the grand hall, forcing the kneeling senior disciples to press their foreheads directly against the cold stone just to survive the suffocating gravity of his presence.
"State your nas and explain this absolute catastrophe imdiately!" the Chief Master roared, his eyes flashing with a volatile, burning crimson light that promised instant execution. "Who possessed the absolute, suicidal audacity to dismantle a supre executive of my guild within the borders of this very branch?!"
The lead senior disciple violently trembled, his voice cracking with a frantic, heavily exaggerated panic as he desperately scrambled to deflect any bla. "It... it was the Master of the Immortal Doctor’s Pavilion, Chief Master! We marched onto the comrcial plot to peacefully enforce our legal zoning regulations, but that arrogant frontier rat, Ethan Brightsword, completely insulted our pristine constitutions! He openly mocked our sacred alchemical lineage, calling our master a loud-mouthed corpse and claiming our entire guild was drowning in toxic impurities!"
The disciple took a sharp, gasping breath, deliberately twisting the narrative to stoke the old man’s flas. "And then, before we could even issue an official administrative warning, Elder Driz materialized out of the shadows like a demonic fiend! He didn’t show a single ounce of respect for your high na, Chief Master! He openly boasted that our entire pavilion was nothing more than a pathetic, greedy joke! He deliberately bypassed all legal protocols, brutally attacked our Vice Hall Master without a single word of warning, and scread that if our guild ever dared to cross his path again, he would personally march into these very halls and thoroughly decapitate you!"
Hearing that specific, unholy na, the Chief Master’s volatile, raging aura instantly froze, a look of profound, unadulterated disbelief crossing his ancient features.
"Driz...?" the Chief Master whispered, his knuckles turning a dangerous, bloodless shade of white inside his long sleeves. "Are you absolutely certain it was Elder Driz who drew the blade?"
The senior disciples frantically nodded their heads, weeping in terror.
The Chief Master stumbled back half a step, the furious crimson light in his eyes subtly replaced by a cold, deeply unsettling wave of political dread. Across the vast, cutthroat hierarchy of this frontier branch, there were countless elders and administrative directors navigating the factions—but there were only a select, terrifyingly few individuals who possessed an absolute, ironclad power of vote capable of overriding standard sect laws.
Elder Driz and the elusive master Ash were two of those supre, untouchable giants. To discover that Driz had not only aligned himself with the rising street doctor but had also willingly acted as his bloodthirsty, personal executioner ant the political chessboard was far more dangerous than the Alchemical Pavilion had ever anticipated.
"This situation has completely transcended your pathetic jurisdiction," the Chief Master whispered, his voice dropping into a dark, bone-chilling register that made the kneeling disciples shiver. "It appears I will have to personally pay a formal visit to this ’Immortal Doctor’ Ethan. If the currents of this mountain are truly shifting, the battle that approaches our doorstep will be a thoroughly bloody and cataclysmic one."
He turned his sharp, burning gaze back toward the mangled, bloody halves of his Vice Hall Master, whose lifeforce was rapidly slipping through the cracks of the jade floor.
"Go to my private treasury imdiately," the Chief Master commanded smoothly. "Bring forth my Double-Fla Phoenix Pill and administer it to him at once."
The senior disciples let out a synchronized, collective gasp. The Double-Fla Phoenix Pill was a legendary, priceless asset within their guild’s vault. True to its magnificent na, its alchemical properties were fully capable of literally dragging an elite cultivator back from the absolute brink of the ashes, completely stitching their shattered physical vessel back together as long as a single, microscopic breath of vital life remained within their lungs. To expend such a treasure ant the Chief Master needed his second-in-command fully conscious to prepare for the coming storm.
As the attendants frantically rushed to execute the order, the Chief Master slowly stepped closer to the kneeling lead disciple, his towering figure casting a suffocating shadow over the youth’s trembling form.
"And rember this very carefully," the old man whispered, his words dripping with a sharp, lethal finality. "I sincerely hope you have told the absolute, unfiltered truth regarding what occurred at that pavilion today. If I discover that even a single syllable of your words was a fabricated lie to cover up your own incompetence... there will be absolutely no legal necessity for any of you to continue drawing breath on this mountain. Get out."
The disciples frantically scrambled backward, their faces completely drained of all color as they dragged the stabilized remains of the Vice Hall Master toward the inner dical chambers, leaving the Chief Master alone in the silent, ruined hall to plot his next move.
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