“Hand over the Wireless Spirit-Wave Compass or I will break your remaining leg!”
A harsh, vicious shout echoed through the burning workshop at #44 Tinkers’ Alley.
Thick black smoke poured from the collapsed wooden rafters as orange flames clawed at the ceiling beams. Glass tubes, copper coils, and handwritten parchment schematics lay trampled across the muddy dirt floor.
Guild Elder Tang Hu stood over an overturned workbench, a heavy two-foot-long cold-iron pipe wrench raised in his grease-stained hands.
Tang Hu was a barrel-chested man wearing scorched silk overalls and a sneering grin. Above his greasy topknot, a dim, sickly grey light flickered in Lin Mo’s vision: [Guild Elder Tang Hu | Aristocratic Leyline Guild | Goodness: -42/100].
Cowering against a brick forge behind the bench was a pale, thin young man of twenty-two.
He wore frayed cotton work-clothes covered in burn holes. His round wire-rimmed glasses were held together at the bridge by a strip of dried resin. A splintered wooden crutch lay just out of reach on the floor.
The young scholar cradled a delicate, twelve-sided apparatus made of polished brass and luminescent quartz against his chest. Above his bruised forehead, a brilliant emerald halo shone with unyielding virtue: [Array Scholar Tang Feng | Goodness: 92/100].
