The red hardened rubber suction cup hovered three inches above Hall Master Lu’s distended chest bone.
From behind the linked tortoiseshell shield wall, Elder Gu’s eyes bulged with dramatic anger. He thrust a trembling finger over the rim of his jade barrier, his voice screeching with high-born outrage.
“Insolent madman!” Gu roared, spraying spit across his own guards’ helmets. “What crude peasant atrocity is that?! You dare defile an 8-Star Hall Master of the Sages’ Sanctum with a night-soil utensil?! That’s an instrument for clearing latrines!”
Frank didn’t even look over his shoulder.
“It’s a heavy-duty toilet pipe rim plunger,” Frank said, his voice as flat as a freshly screeded concrete slab. “Two-way high-pressure seal, heavy neck, and oil-resistant vulcanized man-made rubber. And it isn’t for latrines today. It’s for an unvented pressure vessel. Shut your mouth, you’re crowding the workspace.”
Frank adjusted his grip on the four-foot bamboo handle, shifting his weight onto the balls of his steel-toed work boots.
Hall Master Lu’s chest was now swollen to the size of a beer keg. The skin was so semi-clear that the jagged, writhing black ink tentacles could be seen thrashing against his ribs from the inside. The air around him screamed with the friction of four thousand pounds of pressure of overload high-pressure back-pressure.
