The bronze gong’s deep vibration still hung in the air as Grandmaster Dan Chen sprang into action.
On the left stone platform, Dan Chen performed an elaborate, theatrical dance of ancient hand seals.
He waved his three-foot alchemical scepter, chanting in archaic, high-pitched dialect that sounded like chanting monks. Sweat beaded along his temples as he fed thirty-two bundles of dried purple herbs into the roaring maw of his Violet-Cloud Dragon Cauldron.
“Ignite the Core-Fire!” Dan Chen roared, his face glowing purple under the heat.
Thirty junior disciples rushed forward with bellows, pumping pressurized air into the coal braziers. A foul, sulfurous purple flame rose twenty feet high, wrapping around Dan Chen’s furnace with crackling fury.
The thick smoke drifting from Dan Chen’s furnace was so harsh that the front rows of the crowd coughed into their sleeves.
“Pah! That smoke smells like burning sulfur and dead snakes!” a beast-hunter complained, covering his nose. “For three hundred years, we thought that terrible smell was the sign of great medicine!”
“He has to burn charcoal because his spiritual flame is too weak to melt the roots,” another cultivator noted, shaking his head. “Look at the strain on his face.”
