The great revolt began over a basket of warm scallion buns.
Word had spread like wildfire across the eastern ridges of Cloud-Peak Valley. A junior luggage-carrier named A-Fu had slipped back into the servants’ quarters an hour earlier, clutching two of Grandma Chen’s ginseng buns and a clean employment flyer.
He showed his healed shoulder to the miners and scullions. He told them about the jade recruitment hall, the hundred-thousand-stone salaries, and the mortal chairman who shook hands with muddy laborers.
In the Iron-Palm coal pits, a young miner named A-Cheng stared at his bleeding palms.
For seven years, A-Cheng had dug raw spirit-coal twelve hours a day. When his elderly mother fell ill with lung rot, he had begged the sect elders for a single minor cleansing pill. They had laughed in his face and docked his rations.
A-Cheng looked at the rusty pickaxe in his hands. Then he looked at the wooden watchtower.
“I’m done,” A-Cheng muttered.
“What did you say?” the camp overseer shouted, cracking a barbed leather whip against the wooden fence. “Get back into the shaft, you dog!”
