The testing basin turned black, and Blackstone Sect wrote Jian Yu down as dead-rooted. Trash. They priced him at three coppers a month and the use of his back, and sent him down to the quarry to break stone for people who would never learn his name.
The basin was wrong.
Something is buried under that mountain. A golden phoenix, pinned to the rock by six black nails, and its fire runs through the yellow ore Jian hauls every day. What it leaves in his blood doesn't match anything the sects teach.
Every cultivator in the kingdom stops at the ninth layer. That's the summit. That's what the manuals say.
Jian is already past it.
Someone struck the last three layers out of the old texts on purpose, and went to a great deal of trouble to keep them buried. So Jian hides. He shows the sect a weak, forgettable disciple, while an overseer starts looking too closely and a three-root genius decides he'd rather see him dead than above him.
Blackstone only values the gifts it can measure.
Jian's is the one it can't.
