The moment Jun Li began to fall, she executed the same technique she had used to defend herself against the verminous insects she encountered on the first day.

  'Ice Lotus Scripture - Pale Shell…!' Faster than ever before, ice began to form over Jun Li's skin, thickening at a rate that surpassed the melting heat of the flames around her.

  Yet, that only held true for a moment. As Jun Li fell further, closer to the source of those flowing streams of flame, the heat increased exponentially, the intensity of the heat cutting into the thinnest part of Jun Li's shell of ice.

  As the thinnest segments melted, Jun Li gained an untimely inspiration into how to improve this technique. 'The back of the knee, the hollow of the elbow, the wrists and fingers… the thinnest edges are melting away and… articulating?'

  With her unwillingly obtained range of motion, Jun Li curled her body into a lump and intensified her technique's output, quickly sealing the gaps where streaks of severely burnt flesh had now bloomed across her body.

  'Just a moment longer, hold out…!' Placing her faith in some reprieve known only to herself, Jun Li endured the pain of her burns and the fatigue of her plummeting reserve of Qi, all while unable to take a single breath of air from beneath her shell of ice.

  Both the depth of the cauldron and the height of the flames were beyond what any outside observer could have assumed, and Jun Li fell silently for a dozen breathless seconds.

  On the thirteenth second, the blur of painfully bright color Jun Li saw from within her shell suddenly vanished, before appearing once more as her frozen body continuously spun around in her freefall. 'I was right…!'

  With the strength of her back and neck, Jun Li pulled heavily against her cocoon of ice, and a single breath passed with the sound of creaking ice before it fully ruptured.

  Foul-tasting lukewarm air rushed into Jun Li's lungs as the haze of her vision cleared.

  Above, flames capped the cauldron like a flowing ceiling of fabric, twisting and fluctuating as it rose up and away, fed by some indeterminate source.

  Below, a dark and glistening ocean of black and silver covered the base of the cauldron, a great lump of half-rotten flesh folded in on itself in the center.

  Regaining control over her body, Jun Li moved to correct herself for a landing, hissing in pain as burnt streaks of flesh were exposed to the warm air.

  Landing heavily into the blackened sludge below, Jun Li's lungs heaved for breath, and she shuddered at the vile taste that every moment of recovery brought.

  'I knew there was something below… but this is…' Raising her head, she looked towards the center of the cauldron, towards the small hill of rotting flesh that had stood there for unknown years.

  'The heart…?' Looking up, Jun Li remembered the layout of the Grave, and how the Earth Dragon's skeleton trailed above. 'If it's anything like a serpent, then above is… exactly where the heart would have rested…'

  Letting out a sigh, Jun Li lacked even the energy to freeze a platform for herself and simply sat in the rotting sludge. "Damn… I can't keep going like this…"

  Even as she fell, Jun Li had formulated countless complaints about her performance against Guan Heng.

  'I used my old sword out of comfort, despite the gap in strength between it and my new saber, I used a soft, agile style against an opponent who specialized in bare-handed combat, I struck with the intent to kill in a single move, despite fighting above my realm…'

  Jun Li slowly sat up, cursing internally. Despite her well-refined skills, Jun Li remained at the Initial stage of the Crimson Palace realm.

  She had been taught well regarding the nature of breakthroughs in the Crimson Palace realm, and as a consequence, she had a strong aversion towards forcefully progressing her Cultivation, despite the significant increase in power even a single stage could offer.

  The Crimson Palace realm was separated into five stages, each delineated by the four aspects of bodily refinement. Muscle Refining, Bone Forging, Viscera Tempering, and Nerve Purification.

  One could say that, when refined to completion, the foundations of these four aspects were comprised by an even split of effort and resources.

  For Jun Li, the 'effort' has been completed. That is, with regard to Viscera Tempering.

  The long years of physical training atop that brutally frozen mountain, and Cultivation beneath the force of its unrestrained chill, had led to her organs adapting to the reinforcement, conduction, and protection of her own Qi.

  Jun Li's body was ready for her final push into the completion of Viscera Tempering. But that was only half of the story.

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  With regards to that sort of bodily refinement, one could imagine it as a weapon, permanently equipped to the body, its quality defined by the level of effort and resources invested.

  With only effort, that refinement was merely half-baked.

  If Jun Li pushed through to completion at this stage, she would obtain a great increase in power, as if unarmed and picking up a sword… However, that power, that sword, would be half broken.

  Although it could be refined and repaired in time, the effort and resources required to do so would be ten times greater than if she were to simply forge her sword correctly the first time.

  Both Jun Li and her master, Zhu Enlai, had been waiting for an opportunity to obtain a sufficiently high-grade resource to reinforce her completion of Viscera Tempering to a 'perfect' level, where the quality of the resources available mirrored the quality of Jun Li's effort.

  Although Jun Li had lost contact with her master, she intended to use the drop of Earth Dragon Blood here to serve as the cornerstone of her Viscera Tempering breakthrough.

  As things stood, however, Jun Li was standing in the middle of a battlefield, bereft of arms and armor, fighting those who stood with equipment both chipped and dented, too proud and stubborn to wield anything she saw as beneath her, even if it disadvantaged her.

  Against weaklings without skill, she could manage. But against true warriors, those who are not merely skilled, but equipped with arms refined beyond their peers…

  Jun Li had seen how she fared against Guan Heng.

  At the level of theory, patiently waiting for resources to fall into her lap was ideal, but the reality of competition in the Jianghu could not be ignored.

  For the short term, she needed to sacrifice the long term, even if it was anathema to a Cultivator of any ambition.

  "Resources…" To Jun Li, the word cultivated only malice in her heart. The disciples above had plenty of opportunity for such things, over a lifetime spent in their cushy Sects.

  For five years, Jun Li had worked with nothing but incidental fodder, most of which was poured into alchemical training. A far cry even from the resources available in a backwater like the Glass Cloud Sect.

  Turning to the rotten heart that seeped with blackened sludge, Jun Li murmured to herself. "...are you anything of worth…?"

  Slowly finding her footing, Jun Li walked closer to the oddly folded lump of flesh. Flowing from the folds and apertures, dark, glistening liquid covered the uneven surface, interrupted by streaks of bright silver.

  Those streaks of silver drew Jun Li's gaze, and she looked out over the sludgy lake. '...What is this stuff?'

  The dark sludge she understood, rotten blood and flesh, having fermented in this 'cauldron' for unknown years. But the silver was an unknown.

  'It doesn't look natural…' Pulling an empty glass bottle from her Spatial Ring, Jun Li stepped closer to a rivulet of silver and scooped up some of the substance, along with a consequentially large portion of sludge.

  The silver was unnaturally bright, and even after Jun Li swirled the sludgy mass around in her bottle, it still shone brightly, the sludge separating readily, unable to mix with, stain, or even coat the silver.

  'Hmm…' Now interested beyond practicality, Jun Li pulled some water, a spoon, and an additional bottle from her Spatial Ring, readily spending multiple minutes carefully isolating the silver.

  Eventually, she was left with a mostly-clean bottle filled with some of this liquid silver substance.

  Pouring a dollop of the liquid into her right hand, she felt it more intimately. 'It's a sort of metal, but…' Saturating the drop of metal with Qi, Jun Li's senses suddenly expanded, feeling both the silver on her skin and her skin on the silver. 'I can feel from it…?'

  Jun Li tilted her hand slightly, fascinated by the two-sided sensation of the silver on her hand.

  The moment it reached the center of her palm, however, a sharp pain shot through her hand, as the silver sank into the bloody bandage, tearing a space for itself between the flesh and skin that had been parted when she touched the Earth Dragon's claw.

  Grabbing her own wrist tightly, Jun Li quietly endured the pain, trying to command the silver out of her body through whatever connection she had created with it using her Qi.

  But after a few seconds, the pain died down. No silver had left her body, and after sweeping through her hand with a thin emission of Qi, Jun Li felt clearly that it had settled between the skin of her palm and the fleshy mound near the base of her ring finger.

  Feeling the space with her other hand, Jun Li initially found no abnormality. Yet, the moment she attempted to 'move' that lump of silver like a muscle, it hardened greatly beneath her skin, as if it were a metal plate that had been implanted in her palm.

  Within a few moments, she had gained control and figured out how to harden and liquify that mercurial silver, alternating it between solid and liquid, each alternation leaving a numb, fuzzy sensation beneath the skin.

  Despite figuring that out, Jun Li still lacked any method of removing it from her body, save for tearing herself open and manually removing it from beneath her skin, something she wasn't eager to do at this point.

  'Someone made this… It's not natural, nor is it some sort of accidental manifestation.' As Jun Li contemplated the nature of the silver, her mind was drawn back to who she assumed must have been its 'original owner,' the Earth Dragon.

  'Is it… armor? Designed for a Magical Beast?' Jun Li hadn't entirely convinced herself, knowing just how many unknowns there were regarding the nature of the silver. Even so, she believed it could be useful to her.

  'Even that little bit was incredibly painful, but…' Jun Li looked about, over the lake of sludge. The streams of silver were thin, but plentiful to the point she was unsure if she could carry all of it in her Spatial Ring.

  Jun Li let out a deep sigh, realizing that no amount of hesitation would stop her from attempting to take advantage of this apparent 'armor,' regardless of what horrid pain she might inflict upon herself in the process.

  As she sighed, she looked up, towards the flowing ceiling of fire that sealed this fetid pit.

  Noxious gases rose from the rotting flesh, clinging to the walls and pillars, condensing and accumulating along the surfaces into condensed streams of flammable effluvium, feeding the flames above.

  'How do I even get out of here…?'