In the southern canal city of Jiangnan, twilight usually brought the quiet clinking of wine cups, the sad plucking of riverboat zithers, and the occasional bloody street brawl between rival merchant escorts.
Tonight, however, the three-story taproom of the Drunken Willow Pavilion was shaking like a struck bronze temple bell.
More than four hundred men and women were packed onto cedar benches, perched on balcony railings, and sitting cross-legged atop overturned ale kegs. Mortal dockworkers in sweat-stained hemp shirts bumped shoulders with silken-robed outer sect students from the Azure Cloud Sect. Retired royal cavalry sergeants shared pickled radish bowls with wandering rogue archers whose clans had spent the last century trading blood feuds in the border marshes.
Nobody was drawing daggers. Nobody was demanding reparations for spilled wine.
Every single eye in the vast taproom was glued to the huge, five-arm-length-wide polished water-mirror suspended from the central ceiling rafters by heavy gold-trimmed chains.
The surface of the mirror, kept by condensed water qi formations engineered by Xiao Long and distributed by the Hundred Treasures Pavilion, didn’t display blurry reflections. It radiated crystal-clear, full-color projections of the trial rooms deep within the Thousand-Floor Pagoda, hundreds of leagues to the north.
Right now, the mirror showed the moss-draped arena of Floor 10.
