The mouth-watering aroma drifting over the western stone wall grew thicker with every passing second.
It was an unholy, packed fusion of aromas that baffled the senses.
On one hand, it smelled like the royal treasury’s most sacred, transcendent spiritual medicine pavilion, rich with five hundred years of packed floral essence.
On the other hand, it smelled uncannily like a commercial Dim Sum kitchen running thirty bamboo steamers at maximum capacity during the Sunday brunch rush.
Frank followed the herbal steam to the base of the twenty-foot-tall, white-washed outer edge wall dividing the Master Teacher Pavilion from the next-door sovereign grounds.
Above the heavy bronze gate hung a massive, vermilion-lacquered sign carved with four characters of blazing gold calligraphy:
Royal Potion-maker GUILD: SACRED BOTANICAL RESERVE.
Below the sign was a dark brass plaque:
RESTRICTED Royal TERRITORY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE REFINED INTO PILL FUEL BY ROYAL DECREE.
Frank didn’t care about the plaque.
He walked over to a three-foot pile of displaced stonework, stepped up onto the rubble, grabbed the top coping stone of the outer edge wall with both hands. Then he hoisted his chin over the ledge.
He looked down into the royal enclosure.
And then, Frank winced.
“Yikes,” Frank muttered, sucking in a sharp breath through his teeth. “Oh man. That’s a total backflow failure.”
Spread out across three acres of carefully terraced, jade-bordered garden beds was the crown jewel of the Tianxuan Empire’s pharmaceutical heritage. The Five-Hundred-Year-Old Nine-Yin Spirit Herb Garden.
Or rather, what used to be the Nine-Yin Spirit Herb Garden.
Under normal conditions, this sacred botanical safe hall was a calm, sub-zero winter paradise.
It was irrigated around the clock by the legendary Nine-Yin Cold Spring. A natural underground spring fed directly by the ancient, freezing waters of the underground water bed.
The cold spring water flowed through a fine, detailed network of hollowed jade water chutes. It maintained an unending layer of shimmering frost over the leaves of ten thousand rare, cold-weather spiritual herbs.
Unfortunately, that underground water bed had just met Frank’s forty-five-thousand-BTU white dwarf heat exhaust.
The Nine-Yin Cold Spring was no longer a cold spring.
It was an open-loop, earth-heat blast fire!
HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS—!
From the carved stone dragon heads mounted along the terrace walls, what emerged was not gentle, frost-chilled mountain water.
It was roaring, high-pressure, two-hundred-and-twenty-degree boiling stone water mixed with clouds of white-hot steam!
The boiling water had fully flooded the terraced garden beds.
The entire three-acre enclosure looked like a huge, bubbling, outdoor hot-pot restaurant!
Ten thousand rare, priceless spiritual herbs—herbs that took hundreds of years to mature, herbs that needed five layers of frost-preserving magic charms just to harvest—were currently being flash-steamed at two hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit!
Frank’s system screen flickered in his vision, executing an automatic botanical damage audit:
Frank leaned further over the wall, squinting through the dense white vapor with deep builder sympathy.
“Look at those roots,” Frank muttered, pointing with his pencil. “Total cellular rupture. The pectinate bonds in the plant cell walls have fully broken down from heat shock. You don’t have medicine anymore. You’ve got vegetable soup.”
He wasn’t exaggerating.
In the first terrace bed, three hundred stalks of Thousand-Year Snow-Ginseng—legendary spiritual roots capable of extending an emperor’s lifespan by thirty years—lay bloated and limp in four inches of boiling broth, their semi-clear white skins split open like over-boiled russet potatoes!
In the second terrace, a thousand Nine-Petaled Frost Orchids—sacred azure blossoms that only bloomed in sub-zero blizzards—had lost all their petals, their vibrant blue leaves turned into soggy, wilted green mush that looked impossible to tell apart from overcooked baby spinach!
In the third terrace, five hundred Golden-Core Fire Peaches—whose flesh was supposed to be firm as polished amber—had dropped from their branches into the scalding water, bobbing on the surface like soggy dumplings in chicken noodle soup!
Behind Frank, Grand Elder Yan, Chief Judge Wu, and thirty master teachers scrambled up onto the rubble. He peeked over the wall.
The moment their eyes landed on the steaming, boiling disaster below, every elder froze stiff.
Grand Elder Yan’s scepter slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly down the stonework heap.
His knees went weak, his face draining of all color until he looked like a walking corpse.
“The... The Imperial Herb Garden...” Yan croaked, his voice barely a dry rattle in his throat. “The sacred botanical reserve of the Royal Potion-maker Guild...”
“THE NINE-YIN COLD ORCHIDS!” Chief Judge Wu screamed in pure, pure horror, clutching his head with both hands. “THE EMPEROR’S LONGEVITY PEACHES! THEY ARE... THEY ARE BOILED!”
“NOT MERELY BOILED!” an apothecary judge shrieked, tearing at his hair. “THEY ARE COOKED SOFT ENOUGH TO MASH WITH A WOODEN SPOON! BY THE ANCESTRAL GODS! THIS IS THE CAPITAL’S STRATEGIC MEDICINE RESERVE! IT IS WORTH MORE THAN THREE COMMANDERIES OF Country TAX REVENUE!”
“Who did this?!” another elder wailed, trembling so wildly his teeth clicked. “If the Potion-maker Guild discovers the spring was boiled from beneath the Master Teacher Pavilion... They will demand the execution of our entire council!”
Shen Shitou climbed up beside Frank. His sledgehammer was balanced on his shoulder as he looked down at the steaming garden with curious, honest eyes.
“Smells mighty good, Master,” Shitou noted innocently, sniffing the fragrant air. “Reminds me of the winter lamb stew my mother makes during the New Year festival. Throw in a handful of salt and some wild garlic. You could feed half the district.”
Niu Mang hopped up onto the wall, wiping his spade against the stones. “Look at those ginseng roots, Shitou! Soft as boiled parsnips! Back on the farm, when the turnips get soft like that, we just mash ’em with pig fat and spread ’em on barley bread.”
Princess Jiang Ling’er peered over Frank’s shoulder, her dark eyes scanning the steaming terraces with clean, steady care.
“Pectinate hydrolysis,” Ling’er observed calmly, taking notes in her ledger. “When high-plant fiber botanicals are subjected to heat levels exceeding ninety-five degrees without preliminary blanching, the intracellular polysaccharides dissolve. The plants have lost solid strength, but their volatile organic alkaloids remain suspended in the aqueous broth.”
Frank nodded in agreement, adjusting his tool belt.
“Exactly,” Frank said. “The plumbing layout was fully illegal. Whoever installed that irrigation line connected a cold-water gravity feed directly into a high-pressure underground water bed without a double-check backflow preventer or a sky empty pocket breaker. The underground water bed pressure spiked to eight hundred psi. Then, the boiling steam back-siphoned straight up the irrigation pipes and flash-cooked the whole garden. It’s a classic cross-connection rule-break.”
The elders of the Pavilion stared at Frank with bulging, blank eyes.
Cross-connection rule-break?
Backflow preventer?
The sacred 500-year-old Imperial Garden had been reduced to hot-pot soup. This young man was discussing plumbing codes!
Before Grand Elder Yan could utter another word, the massive, three-story bronze double doors on the opposite side of the garden blew open with the force of an artillery shell!
KABOOOOOOOOOM!
A blast wave of crimson potion-made Qi tore through the steam.
Through the shattered doorway burst a terrifying figure clad in ornate, nine-dragon scarlet apothecary robes stitched with silver potion-made cooking pots.
His long white hair was wild and disheveled, flying around his shoulders like the mane of an enraged lion.
His eyes burned with blinding, murderous crimson fire.
Spit flew from his foaming lips as he clutched his chest in apoplectic, realm-shattering fury.
Behind him marched thirty high-tier apothecary elders and a hundred elite potion-made guards carrying steaming, gold-inlaid pill furnaces!
It was the most feared, most ruthless, and most powerful healing sovereign in the entire kingdom:
Royal Grandmaster Potion-maker Ge Hong.
The 2-Star Peak Potion-maker stepped out onto the marble porch of his garden.
He looked at the boiling, frothing soup covering his five-hundred-year legacy.
He looked at his Thousand-Year Snow-Ginseng bobbing like boiled potatoes.
He looked at his Nine-Petaled Frost Orchids floating like limp spinach.
Ge Hong’s entire body began to tremble with a rage so violent, so world-ending, that the crimson Qi streaming from his skin ignited the surrounding steam into crackling sparks of fire.
Several elderly apothecaries rushed forward onto the underwater terraces with long-handled silver tongs, wildly trying to salvage the sacred floating roots.
“The Emperor’s Heavenly Longevity Peaches!” one apothecary wailed, reaching into the scalding water with his tongs to clamp onto a floating peach.
The silver prongs pinched the delicate fruit. Then, the mushy, flash-steamed peach collapsed like soft custard. It dissolved into a cloudy swirl of golden juice and peach pulp!
Squelch.
“IT DISSOLVED!” the apothecary shrieked, dropping his silver tongs into the mud. “THE ACTIVE Healing MATRIX HAS Melted INTO WATER! SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS OF PURIFICATION LOST IN THREE MINUTES!”
Another elder tried to hoist a prize-winning Snow-Ginseng root from the mud, only for the delicate bifurcated root legs to pull apart like shredded chicken breast. He splashed hot herbal broth onto his ritual silk boots!
Behind Frank on the outer edge wall, Grand Elder Yan and the thirty master teachers shrank backward. Their faces were pale as bleached linen, desperately trying to crouch behind the stone low roof wall so Ge Hong wouldn’t spot their pavilion robes.
“We’re dead men...” Yan whimpered, his teeth chattering in mortal dread. “Grandmaster Ge Hong supplies the Royal Household with all Tier-3 Training Elixirs! The Emperor listens to his counsel above that of Prime Ministers! If he accuses our Pavilion of sabotaging the royal longevity reserves, the Northern Garrison will hang us from the city gates by dawn!”
Chief Judge Wu squeezed his eyes shut, reciting the death scriptures of his old family clan under his breath. “Five hundred years of botanical training... Boiled into cabbage soup. Even the heavens can’t pardon such a sin!”
“MY GARDEN!” Ge Hong shrieked, his voice climbing to an ear-splitting, glass-shattering roar that shook the very foundations of the city. “WHO BOILED MY FIVE-HUNDRED-YEAR NINE-YIN GARDEN INTO A HOT-POT BROTH?!”
Frank casually leaned against the wall coping. He crossed his arms over his denim chest. He watched the screaming apothecary elders with the calm distance of a building checker surveying a total plumbing blowout.
“Told you so,” Frank muttered quietly to himself, shaking his head. “Always install an air gap and an approved backflow preventer on main irrigation lines. Skipping code rule-following always catches up with you in the end.”