Approaching the great doors, Xiao Yan found the entrance choked by a dozen or so guards whose faces were carved from the same stone as the walls — expressionless, unyielding, implacable. At the corner of the threshold sat an old man upon a wooden chair, a brush in one hand and a thick ledger in the other. Before him stretched a line of clan members, each presenting the cultivation technique they had claimed from the Dou Qi Pavilion for registration. Only after the old man had inscribed their names in the register would they be allowed to squeeze through the narrow gap left by the guards and pass beyond the doors.
This was standard procedure upon exiting the Dou Qi Pavilion. The clansmen had been briefed on it thoroughly before entering, so no one gave it a second thought.
The techniques housed in the Dou Qi Pavilion were the painstaking accumulation of more than a dozen generations. For the Xiao Clan they were the bedrock upon which the family's standing in Wutan City rested, and the elders took extraordinary measures to safeguard them. The scrolls themselves were fashioned from a special material known as Ink Bamboo — a plant that grew in two forms, a mother stalk no larger than the palm of a hand and a daughter body whose root system could spread across dozens of meters. When a cultivation scroll was forged from this bamboo, the mother stalk alone was sufficient to detect its position. So long as the Clan Patriarch held the mother, any scroll carried beyond the boundary of its monitoring field would trigger an alert.
The monitoring range of the mother Ink Bamboo held by the clan encompassed the entirety of the Xiao Clan's grounds. The moment any scroll left the compound, the breach would be discovered. Of course, nothing was absolute — cultivators of truly formidable strength could sever the link by brute force. But anyone at that level would hardly bother stealing a Yellow-grade technique.
Xiao Yan waited patiently in the queue until at last it was his turn. He stepped forward, drew the scroll from inside his robe, and handed it to the old man.
The elder took the dark crimson scroll, and for a flicker of a moment his flat gaze sharpened. He studied Xiao Yan with a brief, assessing look. *The protective barrier on this "Forging Blaze" has the intensity of nine-stage Dou Qi*, he thought. *This boy actually managed to retrieve it? He does have some foundation after all.*
Once the technique had been entered into the register, the old man returned it to Xiao Yan and delivered his reminder in a tone as dry as parchment: "You know the rules, I trust. No technique may be removed from the clan premises — violators will face severe punishment. Return the technique in one year's time, undamaged."
Xiao Yan nodded in passing and moved aside, leaning against the doorframe to wait for Xun'er.
Xun'er gave him a small smile, then extended her pale, porcelain wrist and presented her own scroll.
At the sight of her, something remarkable happened to the old man's face — the stony mask that never broke for patriarch or elder alike softened, just barely, into a trace of unmistakable respect. He accepted the scroll with both hands and processed the registration with unusual haste.
Xiao Yan, watching from the side, narrowed his eyes. His fingers curled by habit. The old man who could manage the Dou Qi Pavilion — a restricted zone of the highest order — clearly held a position within the clan no less exalted than that of the three Great Elders. Xiao Yan had heard the old man's name whispered among the clansmen: Cold-Face Xiao Han. This was a man who had never shown the slightest courtesy even to Xiao Zhan himself, his face frozen as though the muscles had long since petrified.
Yet this same Cold-Face Xiao Han, before whom even the Patriarch received no special treatment, now showed such deference to Xun'er that it bordered on reverence. The contradiction was striking, and it deepened the mystery that had long surrounded the girl's origins.
Xiao Yan rubbed his nose — a habit born of thinking too hard about things he could not resolve. Every time he had pressed Xun'er about her background, she had gone silent, and he had learned not to push further. He looked up to see her approaching with that gentle smile on her face, and he shrugged. Together they squeezed through the narrow gap in the guards and emerged from the Dou Qi Pavilion into open air.
Once outside, Xiao Yan drew several deep breaths. The air inside the pavilion had been suffocating — thick and stale with the weight of centuries.
"How did it go, Yan'er?"
The figure of Xiao Zhan materialized from the edges of the courtyard, drifting over with the unhurried stride of a man who had every reason to be anxious but refused to show it. His eyes flicked toward the doors behind them, but his voice was light, his tone carefully casual.
Xiao Yan turned his head and met his father's gaze with a grin. A dark crimson scroll peeked from beneath his sleeve, and he lifted it just enough for the color to show. "It's done."
At the sight of that crimson, the tension in Xiao Zhan's shoulders finally dissolved. His eyes crinkled with undisguised relief, and he chuckled under his breath. "Good. Good. So long as you have it."
Father and son exchanged a look — and in that shared glance, both felt the same flush of quiet triumph. They laughed at the same moment, each recognizing the other's pride.
Xiao Zhan extended his broad palm and patted Xiao Yan firmly on the shoulder. "Now that you have your technique, once you become a Dou Warrior, you will be able to cultivate Dou Qi in earnest."
Xiao Yan nodded with a smile, his hand still resting on the scroll hidden beneath his sleeve. His eyes narrowed slightly, and a thought drifted through his mind like smoke: *I wonder what Master Yao Lao's technique is really like. A cultivation method that can evolve — does such a thing truly exist?*
"Stranger than a Heaven-grade technique..." The memory of Yao Lao's boastful words from that day brought a wry smile to Xiao Yan's lips. Everything he had endured, all the trials and ordeals of the past months, had been to coax a single reassuring word from that old fox — and now, at last, he had it.
"Heh... you little fox, scheming against me again..." Yao Lao's voice stirred inside his mind, tinged with a mixture of exasperation and reluctant amusement. The old soul sighed. "Rest easy, boy. The matter of your technique is not yours to worry about. I will not let you go shabby. In the future, your accomplishments will be no less than that little girl beside you — and her family is only..."
The sentence trailed off into deliberate vagueness, and Xiao Yan felt a flicker of frustration at the unfinished thought. But he smiled all the same and nodded. A guarantee had been given, and that was enough. The matter of face — of pride — was settled at last.
What remained now was to train in peace and push toward the rank of Dou Warrior. Only by reaching that level would he earn the right to venture into the vast world beyond Wutan City — and to seek out the woman whose name still burned like an ember in his heart: Nalan Yanran.