The Chief Judge of the Hall of Edicts did not strike the bell again, because his jaw had gone completely slack.
Around the rim of the obsidian dais, twenty thousand spectators erupted into a storm of confused shouting. Cultivators leaned over the quartz balustrades, pointing and shaking their fists at the sleeping youth.
“He actually went to sleep,” an elder from Moon Three sputtered, clutching his chest with both hands. “In the middle of an imperial life-and-death trial!”
“He is mocking the entire Pill-Moon lineage,” another voice roared from the upper balconies. “Disqualify him! Throw his cot off the cliff!”
The Chief Judge looked down at his golden scroll, frantically checking the trial clauses line by line. There was no clause against sleeping. The rules only required that an alchemist produce a finished pill before the seventy-two-hour hourglass ran dry.
On the other side of the stage, Grand Chief Alchemist Voran sneered through his braided beard.
“Let the fool rot in his slumber,” Voran muttered, turning his back on Kaelen. “The cold fire of heaven waits for no mortal.”
Voran drove both palms into the intake ports of his tiger-shaped furnace. A roaring blast of sapphire flame surged through the bronze belly, radiating waves of biting winter chill across the stage. His fingers moved with frantic precision, stripping the silver bark from millennium frost-roots.
