"The stage is yours, Martial Uncle Lin. Please, go ahead and do enlighten us."
Ji’an casually strolled down the stone steps of the amphitheater.
She didn’t manifest glowing Qi-needles or didn’t take deep, meditative breaths to steady her heart rate.
She walked up to the obsidian prep table. She looked down at the massive, pulsing, lethal amphibian.
’It’s like a pufferfish,’ Ji’an’s culinary brain instantly translated the threat. ’It’s literally just a high-fantasy, terrestrial fugu fish. The neurotoxin sac is embedded in the connective tissue. If you puncture the sac, the meat is ruined.
’If you stress the animal, the adrenaline spikes the poison yield.’
She didn’t reach for the delicate, obsidian surgical scalpels Kui had used.
She reached down to her calf, unbuckled the leather straps, and drew her massive, heavy, blunt Black Iron Spatula.
With her other hand, she pulled a completely mundane, sharp, and slightly curved Chef’s Paring Knife from her spatial ring.
The local disciples burst into incredulous laughter.
"He’s using cooking utensils!" Kui mocked loudly, crossing his arms. "He is going to mash the toad into paste! Prepare the shielding arrays; the fool is going to kill us all!"
Ji’an ignored the laughter.
She didn’t channel a protective shield of Qi. She utilized the cornerstone of her culinary cultivation: Temperature Control and Texture Manipulation.
"The trick to extracting a volatile organ," Ji’an lectured loudly, slipping into her Head Chef persona, addressing the amphitheater as if they were a classroom of struggling culinary freshmen, "is not to fight the connective tissue. You don’t perform surgery on a live, tense muscle. You shock the system into absolute relaxation."
Ji’an didn’t slice.
She raised the flat, heavy bottom of her Black Iron Spatula and brought it down with a sharp, incredibly fast THWACK directly onto the precise pressure point at the base of the toad’s skull.
It wasn’t a lethal blow. It was a concussive stun.
The toad didn’t explode. It went completely limp, its bioluminescent warts dimming as its nervous system underwent a massive, systemic reboot. The muscular tension gripping the venom gland completely dissolved.
Before the crowd could even process the concussive strike, Ji’an’s left hand holding the mundane paring knife moved.
It was not the slow, twelve-minute crawl of Senior Brother Kui.
It was the blinding, fluid, terrifyingly fast muscle memory of a Chef who had de-veined ten thousand shrimp during a holiday dinner rush.
Flash.
Flick.
Scoop.
It took four seconds.
Ji’an executed a perfect chiffonade slice down the cervical spine, slipped the curved tip of the paring knife under the relaxed connective tissue, and effortlessly popped the glowing purple venom gland out of the toad’s back like she was popping a pit out of a cherry.
She caught the pulsing gland in her palm, entirely unharmed.
The toad, still alive and blissfully unconscious, remained perfectly intact on the table.
Ji’an casually tossed the highly lethal, explosive venom gland up in the air, caught it with a playful smack, and dropped it into a glass stasis vial, popping the cork on top with her thumb.
She looked up at the silent amphitheater.
"Twelve minutes?" Ji’an sneered, pointing her spatula directly at Senior Brother Kui’s pale face. "If it took you twelve minutes to prep a single ingredient in my kitchen, I would fire you before the lunch service even started. Your knife skills are atrocious, your situational awareness is zero, and you overcomplicate the basics to look cool."
She turned to Elder Viper, handing him the vial.
"The extraction is clean, Elder. No necrotic bruising. Though, honestly, if you roast the gland whole over a slow charcoal fire, the heat completely denatures the explosive properties and leaves a rich, earthy umami flavor that pairs perfectly with a heavy soy glaze."
Elder Viper stared at the perfectly extracted gland in his hand. He looked at the unconscious, un-exploded toad, then at the four-second timer on the arena’s magical clock.
The ancient, terrifying poison master of the Azure Dragon Sect slowly raised a trembling hand, removed his hood, and wiped a single, genuine tear of absolute awe from his slitted yellow eye.
"It is poetry," Elder Viper whispered, his voice shaking. "It is poetry."
The local disciples were completely devastated. Their egos were not just bruised; they were pulverized, run through a meat grinder, and set on fire.
Senior Brother Kui sank to his knees on the stage, staring at his own hands, experiencing a reality-breaking existential crisis.
Meanwhile, up in the front row of the bleachers, the Vanguard Retinue was experiencing a wildly complex mixture of emotions.
On one hand, they were incredibly, smugly proud. Their leader had just comprehensively humiliated the host sect’s greatest prodigy.
"Did you see that?!" Gu Zhiwei cheered loudly, abandoning his aristocratic decorum, jumping up and down. "Brother Lin is peerless! His spatula is an instrument of the Heavens!"
"He completely dismantled their doctrine in four seconds," Wen Shiru noted, pushing his glasses up his nose, calculating the terrifying market value of a man who could mass-produce Rank 6 venom extractions.
But on the other hand, the thirteen male protagonists were experiencing a deep sense of inadequacy.
’I am the Sword Lord,’ Lu Jianheng thought, his chest tight, staring at Ji’an’s relaxed, red-robed figure. ’I have practiced the art of the blade since I could walk. And I am certain that I could not execute a slice that clean even if I spent the next century meditating under a waterfall. He is... he is simply better than me.’
The realization didn’t fill him with the furious, violent jealousy it once had. It filled him with a strange sense of submission. He didn’t want to fight the Chef anymore. He just wanted to stand behind him and ensure no one interrupted his prep-work.
.
.
.
If the morning session in the Hall of Miasma had broken the host sect’s pride, the afternoon session completely shattered their entire academic curriculum.
Following a brief, tense lunch break,cwhere Ji’an refused the host sect’s food and instead cooked a spicy wok of fried noodles for her Retinue in the courtyard, causing the disciples to literally drool from the balconies, they were marched to the Plaza of the Heavens for their second mandated seminar.
This was the realm of Formation and Array Mastery.
The Azure Dragon Sect was not just famous for poison; they were the undisputed architects of the Northern Territories. Their defensive wards, spatial traps, and energy matrices were legendary.
The instructor for the afternoon was Elder Hex, a rigid woman who wore geometric robes of silver and black. She possessed a terrifying, no-nonsense aura and looked like a strict mathematics professor who took joy in failing her students.
The Plaza was a massive, flat expanse of white marble, currently overlaid with an incredibly complex, glowing three-dimensional holographic grid.
"Arrays are not magic. They are mathematics. They are spatial geometry. They are the flawless alignment of intent and elemental resonance," Elder Hex lectured, her voice sharp and echoing across the plaza.
She pointed her silver pointer-stick at the floating grid.
"Behold, the Nine-Palace Constriction Array. A pinnacle-tier spatial trap. It requires the simultaneous, perfect alignment of eighty-one distinct elemental nodes, Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, and Earth. Each node must be balanced against its opposing element. If a single node is out of alignment, the array collapses, and the resulting backlash will sever the caster’s meridians."
Elder Hex sneered, looking down at the Vanguard Retinue.
"We witnessed the Vanguard Leader’s... unorthodox knife skills this morning. But brutality and quick hands cannot solve an equation. Array mastery requires the mind of a scholar, not the blunt trauma of a cook."
She challenged the visitors. "Who among you possesses the intellect to balance the grid?"
Wen Shiru, the calculating Fox and heir to the greatest mercantile empire on the continent, immediately stood up.
"I shall attempt it, Elder," Shiru announced, his pride stung by the implication that the Celestial Sword Sect lacked scholars.
Shiru walked into the center of the grid. He didn’t draw a weapon. He pulled his solid-gold abacus from his robes.
He closed his eyes, his mind entering a state of overdrive. His fingers blurred over the abacus beads, performing thousands of complex spatial calculations per second.
He raised his free hand, channeling his Qi into the floating nodes.
Click. Click. Click.
The nodes began to align.
Fire matched Water. Wood balanced Earth. The array began to glow, the geometric lines solidifying.
Ten nodes. Twenty. Forty.