The Price of Clean Fire

About this book

Clear Dust Pavilion has survived. Its twenty-two members, counting one thieving grey ferret, now live on waste contracts, careful sorting and the restored balance of Ashfall Basin. Survival is not a livelihood, though. Shen Qingchen is still an Early Foundation Establishment cultivator with a strained foundation. He wants his sect to stand on its own, so he looks at the medicinal herbs growing strangely silver on the basin's terraces. He also looks at a cracked bronze cauldron that a great sect threw away decades ago. Restoring it will take borrowed skill, risky contracts and an alchemist who smells opportunity. Shen can draw filth out of metal. He cannot mend a crack, and he cannot see everything. The basin made these herbs, this mud and this fuel for its own reasons. Shen is about to learn what happens when their gifts are carried beyond the valley that made them.