The scream echoing across the boiling terraces of the Imperial Herb Garden was so full of agony, grief, and murderous fury that it shook the roof tiles of the next-door palace.
Grandmaster Ge Hong stood on the marble porch, his long white beard quivering like an over-taut bowstring.
His scarlet potion-made robes billowed wildly around him as waves of crimson, late-stage Foundation Qi crackled across his skin.
Behind him, thirty senior apothecary masters were wailing in the boiling mist, beating their chests and clawing at the stone railings.
“Five hundred years...” Ge Hong howled, clutching his chest with both hands, his fingernails tearing through his stitched silk vest. “Five hundred years of careful heat regulation! Nine ages of potion-made lineage! We gathered dew at midnight! We buried spirit stones by the thousands beneath the roots!”
He stepped down onto the first terrace, his leather boots sinking into four inches of scalding, fragrant green broth.
He bent down and picked up a limp, steaming clump of Nine-Petaled Frost Orchid leaves.
The leaves draped over his fingers like overcooked seaweed. It were supposed to be rigid as sapphire blades.
Drip. Drip.
Warm, green liquid dripped from the leaves into the mud.
“MY ORCHIDS!” Ge Hong shrieked, his voice climbing to an ear-splitting falsetto. “THE EMPEROR’S LONGEVITY ROOTS! THE Starry SNOW-GINSENG!”
He threw the soggy leaves into the air and spun around toward his trembling apothecaries, his bloodshot eyes bulging with manic, terrifying madness.
“WHO DID THIS?!” Ge Hong roared, spit flying from his lips like spray from a punctured hose. “WHO BOILED THE NINE-YIN COLD SPRING?! WHO TURNED THE SACRED HERB GARDEN OF THE EMPIRE INTO A HOT-POT BROTH?!”
The thirty apothecaries cowered, pointing trembling fingers toward the eastern outer edge wall.
“Grandmaster!” one elder stammered, his teeth chattering in terror. “The steam... The heat didn’t originate from our furnaces! It erupted from the underground leylines beneath the Master Teacher Pavilion!”
Ge Hong’s head snapped toward the twenty-foot stone wall.
His crimson Qi flared, and he took three thunderous strides across the soggy terrace. His fists clenched was tight enough to crush solid iron.
Up on the wall, Grand Elder Yan, Chief Judge Wu, and thirty pavilion mentors dropped to their bellies like scared groundhogs, trying to merge their bodies into the stone coping.
“We’re doomed,” Yan whispered, shivering in pure despair. “Grandmaster Ge Hong has refined pills for the Emperor for forty years. A single word from him. The Imperial Dragon Guard will raze our Pavilion to the ground!”
“Stay down! Don’t let him see your robes!” Wu pleaded, pulling his collar over his head.
Frank, however, didn’t drop to his belly.
He stood up straight on the top of the wall, dusted off his denim knees. Then he looked down at the furious potion-maker with calm, skilled test.
He reached down to the stonework pile, swung his legs over the low roof wall, and hopped lightly down to the garden path with a soft crunch of his work boots.
Thump.
Frank casually patted the dust from his denim jacket, adjusted his tool belt. Then he walked toward the raging grandmaster with hands tucked comfortably into his front pockets.
Behind Frank, the thud of three heavy impacts echoed across the garden path.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Shen Shitou hopped down from the outer edge wall, his five-foot iron sledgehammer resting casually across his broad shoulder, his massive, stone-like presence casting a long shadow over the cowering apothecaries.
Princess Jiang Ling’er glided down with graceful poise, her silk robes untouched by mud, her arms folded across her chest as her cold, royal gaze swept over Grandmaster Ge Hong with quiet disdain.
Niu Mang landed with his shovel in hand. It wiped a smudge of dried dirt from his chin, standing firmly at Frank’s flank.
“Five million spirit stones?” Shen Shitou muttered, his deep voice rumbling like distant thunder. “That’s enough to purchase twelve thousand loads of load-bearing star-iron and pave every road in the Northern Ridge with granite. This old man wants five million for a patch of soggy cabbage?”
“He’s exaggerating damages to hide working incompetence,” Ling’er observed coolly, her chin raised. “Under the Commercial Code of the Northern Provinces, an uninsured agricultural loss resulting from uninspected public works can’t be passed to external third parties. His claim is legally fraudulent.”
“Master Lu! NO!” Grand Elder Yan hissed from the top of the wall in total horror, his face pale as chalk. “Come back! That’s Grandmaster Ge Hong! He will burn up your soul with true Samadhi potion-made fire!”
Frank ignored the wild whispers.
He walked right through the swirling herbal steam, stopping three paces in front of the crimson-roared grandmaster.
Ge Hong looked down at Frank.
He saw an unkempt young man in faded blue denim overalls, a cotton flannel shirt, and heavy, scuffed leather work boots.
There was no sword at his hip. There were no defensive magic charms pinned to his chest.
There was only a twenty-five-foot steel tape measure and a yellow carpenter’s pencil tucked behind his ear.
“You...” Ge Hong hissed, his voice trembling with a fury so deep it sounded like grinding earth-shaking plates. “Who are you, peasant? Did you witness the demonic scoundrel who sabotaged the underground spring?”
Frank took a slow breath, looked around at the flooded terraces. Then he shook his head with weary disappointment.
“Nobody sabotaged your spring, buddy,” Frank said, his voice flat and cold and exact. “Your plumbing layout is fully illegal.”
Ge Hong froze.
His jaw went slack. The crimson fire crackling across his robes stuttered.
“My... What?” Ge Hong croaked.
“Your hydronic piping,” Frank stated. He pointed his thumb toward the stone dragon-head fountain spewing boiling water into the terrace bed. “You ran a four-inch gravity feed line directly into an underground karst underground water bed without a double-check backflow preventer, a spreading loop. Or a sky empty pocket breaker. In any approved town turf on earth, this entire installation would be red-tagged and unsafe on sight.”
Ge Hong stared at Frank for three long, painful seconds, his brain fully unable to parse the words coming out of the young man’s mouth.
“Plumbing... Layout?” Ge Hong whispered, his eye twitching wildly. “Backflow... What?!”
“A backflow preventer,” Frank explained with the measured patience he used on first-year apprentices. “When you connect an open-loop irrigation system to an underground water table that sits over a dynamic earth-heat boundary, heat swelling is certain. When the water table heated up, the fluid swelled, pressure hit eight hundred psi. The scalding steam siphoned right up your gravity lines into your flowerbeds. You flash-cooked your own garden because your plumber skipped code rule-following.”
The screen in Frank’s eye updated with a crisp, official rule-book fine ticket:
Frank pulled a blank yellow delivery slip from his tool pouch, jotted down three lines with his carpenter’s pencil. Then he held it out toward Ge Hong.
“Here’s your formal non-rule-following fine ticket,” Frank said plainly. “Clear the ponding, replace the rotted soil with coarse sand, and install an approved check valve before you replant. And next time, don’t pipe raw groundwater directly into sensitive root structures without a heat tempering valve.”
Up on the outer edge wall, Grand Elder Yan gripped the stone coping, his knuckles bloodless.
“He issued a fine ticket...” Yan murmured in disbelief. “To the Chief Potion-maker of the Empire. He told the Master of the Nine Cauldrons his sacred spring was an illegal plumbing job.”
“He handed him a ticket,” a Pavilion judge whispered in horror.
Ge Hong looked down at the yellow paper slip in Frank’s hand.
His face turned from crimson red, to sickly purple, to a blazing bright, apoplectic white.
The veins in his temples bulged like twisting vipers.
His hands shook with a rage so consuming, so total, that the flat stone slabs beneath his boots cracked under the sheer pressure of his aura!
“A fine ticket...?” Ge Hong choked out, his voice a ragged, choking hiss. “You... A wandering, arrogant, mud-stained peasant carpenter... Dare lecture ME on the flow of the Sacred Spring?!”
Ge Hong ripped the yellow paper slip from Frank’s fingers, tearing it into confetti and stomping it into the boiling mud with his heel!
“I AM GRANDMASTER GE HONG!” the old man roared, his voice shaking the garden walls. “SUPREME KEEPER OF THE NINE CAULDRONS! PHYSICIAN TO THE Royal DRAGON THRONE! I HAVE MASTERED THE DAO OF MEDICINE FOR SIXTY YEARS!”
He reached into his voluminous scarlet sleeve and whipped out a huge, gold-rimmed royal scroll tied with crimson dragon silk.
With a violent flick of his wrist, Ge Hong unrolled the heavy parchment.
The royal dragon crest of the Tianxuan Empire blazed with blinding golden light. He was stamped with the supreme seal of the Royal Court of Court Check!
“You claim my garden was an illegal installation?!” Ge Hong shrieked, thrusting the scroll directly into Frank’s face with trembling, murderous fury. “THIS GARDEN WAS ASSESSED BY THE Royal TREASURY! THE SNOW-GINSENG ALONE WAS PLEDGED TO THE EMPEROR’S NINETY-NINTH JUBILEE!”
Grand Elder Yan scrambled down the stonework pile, hurrying into the flooded garden to step between them.
“Grandmaster Ge, wait!” Yan urged, raising his hands. “Senior Master Lu has just received his 1-Star Master Teacher sign-off! He’s a master builder of remarkable insight. Surely a settlement can be brokered through the Pavilion council!”
“COMPROMISE?!” Ge Hong screamed, kicking a puddle of boiling water that splashed across Yan’s robes. “A compromise for five hundred years of royal medicine?! Not even your Pavilion Founder could pardon this disaster! Five million spirit stones in thirty days. Or I shall petition the Emperor to strip the Master Teacher Pavilion of its royal charter forever!”
Ge Hong bared his teeth in an ugly, bloodthirsty grin. He pointed a finger trembling with killing intent straight between Frank’s eyes:
“THIS DISASTER REPRESENTS A TOTAL LOSS OF FIVE MILLION HIGH-GRADE SPIRIT STONES! I AM FILING AN IMMEDIATE Royal TREASON WRIT! PAY THE FIVE MILLION STONES WITHIN THIRTY DAYS. Or I SHALL STRIP YOUR FLESH FROM YOUR BONES AND FEED YOUR SOUL INTO MY PILL Fire TO BURN FOR A THOUSAND YEARS!”