The northern plateau of the Floating Mountain looked less like a sacred fighter safe hall and more like a sky county fair that had suddenly swelled to absorb the population of an entire royal province.
Patriarch Lu Feng stood upon a heavy cedar check platform. He waved a gold-trimmed silk ledger in one hand while barking rapid orders to fifty junior clerks from the Hundred Treasures Pavilion.
“Channel four is lagging!” Lu Feng bellowed, his round, normally jovial merchant face slick with sweat. “Direct the wandering martial artists into Lane Seven! And keep the Frost Mist maidens separate from the Iron Cauldron brats—I don’t care if they signed the non-aggression pact, their fire qi will melt the ice students’ ritual hairpins! Move, boys, move! Every minute an idle fighter stands in the sun is five hundred copper coins lost in concession sales!”
Across the three-hundred-mu flat stone slab plaza, thirty parallel queues snaked between polished cedar support posts strung with braided golden hemp.
Fifty thousand men and women stood in line, clutching stamped wooden registry chits. There were haughty inner-sect prodigies wearing stitched silk tunics that shone with protective ward-threads. Grizzled rogue hired blades clad in boiled boar-leather armor scarred by beast claws. And wide-eyed mortal martial masters carrying heirloom iron sabers wrapped in oiled linen.
