The five-million-stone royal debt writ thrust into Frank’s face crackled with crimson court Qi.
Grandmaster Ge Hong held the heavy gold-rimmed scroll with trembling, white-knuckled fury, his breath coming in ragged, steaming gasps.
Before Frank could even glance at the document, the heavy bronze doors of the garden swung open once more.
An arrogant, gloating entourage marched onto the flooded porch, led by four dozen armored Imperial Dragon Guards holding axe-spears adorned with yellow dragon pennants.
And walking right in the center, flanked by two elderly royal judges, was Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao.
The Prince had changed into fresh, clean royal dragon-robes of deep crimson silk, heavily stitched with gold thread.
His stance was rigid, his chest puffed out with vindictive high-born triumph.
However, despite his grand attire, he couldn’t hide the smooth, fully hairless skin above his eyes.
Both of his royal dragon-shaped eyebrows were fully missing. That left his brow smooth and shiny beneath the afternoon sun, giving him the startled, comical expression of a plucked chicken.
“Hahaha!” Tianxiao sneered, his voice dripping with poisonous, petty malice as he looked down at Frank from the porch steps. “Lu Zhen! How the mighty have fallen in a single afternoon!”
He drew an official royal warrant from his sleeve. He held it aloft with a dramatic flourish.
“The Imperial Court of Court Check has already co-signed Grandmaster Ge Hong’s emergency petition!” Tianxiao announced, his shrill voice echoing across the flooded garden. “Five million high-grade spirit stones! Even if you sold the entire North Ridge, mortgaged your ancestors’ tombs, and worked as a slave in the northern salt mines for ten thousand years, you couldn’t repay a fraction of this debt!”
The Prince bared his teeth, stepping forward with cruel satisfaction.
“Kneel before me, charlatan!” Tianxiao demanded, pointing his royal warrant at Frank. “Surrender your teaching badge! Sign over the contracts of your three students to the royal household! And command that Viridian Dragon-Hound to submit to the Royal Bloodline. Or I shall have you thrown into the deepest dungeon of the Royal Iron Prison to rot for eternity!”
Grand Elder Yan stood pale and motionless beside Frank, staring at the seal in hollow despair.
“Five million stones...” Yan muttered, his voice barely heard. “Not even the Pavilion’s country treasury holds such wealth.”
Frank looked at the shrieking Crown Prince.
Then he looked at the purple-faced Grandmaster Ge Hong.
Finally, he looked down at the five-million-stone debt scroll held in Ge Hong’s trembling hand.
Frank reached out two fingers, plucked the royal lawsuit from the grandmaster’s grasp. Then he brought it to eye level.
He glanced at the red wax seals. He glanced at the golden dragon calligraphy.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t drop to his knees. He didn’t offer a plea of mitigating circumstances.
Instead, with calm, deliberate, sharp-angled care, Frank folded the five-million-stone royal writ in half lengthwise.
He creased the heavy parchment with the back of his thumbnail.
He folded the top corners down into two sharp, neat forty-five-degree triangles.
He folded the wings back, tucking the nose into a sleek, wind-cutting dart.
A clean, six-inch paper airplane.
Frank held the paper airplane between his thumb and forefinger, drew his arm back. Then he gave it a gentle, easy flick.
Swoosh.
The five-million-stone royal lawsuit glided gracefully through the afternoon steam, banking gently over a patch of wilted frost orchids before nose-diving into a pool of muddy, boiling water right at Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao’s boots.
Splat.
Silence fell over the garden.
A heavy, choking, reality-shattering silence.
Tianxiao stared down at the soggy paper airplane in the mud, his eyes bulging so wildly that the veins on his hairless brow turned purple.
Grandmaster Ge Hong choked on his own breath, his beard shaking with sheer, blank shock.
“You... You folded the Royal Decree...” Ge Hong stammered, his voice rising to an apoplectic squeak. “You folded a royal writ into a toy and threw it in the dirt?!”
Frank didn’t even look at him.
He turned on his heel and walked over to the nearest terrace bed. There, a massive heap of flash-steamed, wilted Five-Element Frost Orchids lay tangled in the warm water.
He bent down, plucked a handful of the soggy, limp blue leaves. Then he brought them to his nose, sniffing the aroma with deep, cold and exact test.
He rubbed the leaf between his calloused fingers, testing the leftover cellular moisture.
“Five million spirit stones for this junk?” Frank scoffed, turning back to the stunned grandmaster with a look of pure, pure builder disdain. “Are you serious right now?”
Ge Hong’s face turned a blazing bright, blood-red hue. “JUNK?! Those are sacred Nine-Petaled Frost Orchids! Cultivated with five hundred years of lunar frost dew! They were meant to refine the Emperor’s Tier-3 Longevity Core!”
“And you don’t have the slightest clue how to cook them,” Frank replied flatly, tossing the soggy leaf back into the mud.
The thirty apothecary masters gasped in stunned outrage.
“Cook them?!” Ge Hong roared, spit flying from his beard. “POTION-MADE REFINEMENT IS THE SACRED ART OF PURIFYING HEAVENLY ESSENCE! IT IS NOT COOKING, YOU UNCULTURED MUD-EATER!”
“It’s literally cooking,” Frank said. He walked toward his two-wheeled supply cart parked by the broken gate. “You’re taking plant matter, applying heat energy, and attempting to induce a chemical phase change to extract organic alkaloids. The problem is, your entire ancient methodology is built on medieval campfire logic.”
Frank reached into the back of their cart, pushing past several bags of Portland cement, a box of framing nails, and two spare shovel handles.
His hand emerged holding a massive, twenty-four-inch, hand-hammered, seasoned cast-iron kitchen wok.
The cast-iron wok was thick, black, seasoned with years of lard and high-heat bacon grease, with two sturdy steel handles riveted to the rim.
CLANG.
Frank set the heavy cast-iron wok down onto a flat granite boulder in the center of the terrace path with the loud, ringing chime of unbending heavy-duty iron.
He turned toward Niu Mang and pointed to the cart:
“Niu Mang. Grab me that half-bag of lump hardwood charcoal we bought for the forge fire bowl. And bring that steel spatula from the chuck box.”
“Right away, Master!” Niu Mang grinned, right away hauling out a heavy burlap sack of black charcoal and a flat steel spatula.
Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao stared at the black iron wok, his jaw hanging slack, his hairless brow twitching wildly.
“A... A stir-fry wok?” Tianxiao croaked, looking at Ge Hong in total confusion. “He brought a kitchen wok to a royal potion-made trial?!”
Ge Hong was trembling so wildly that the silver cooking pots stitched on his robes seemed to dance.
“Sacrilege...” Ge Hong whispered, his voice cracking with pure madness. “Blasphemy against the Pill Dao! To insult three thousand years of cooking pot refinement with a greasy kitchen pan!”
Frank ignored them entirely.
He scooped two handfuls of the soggy, flash-steamed Nine-Petaled Frost Orchids and three bruised, overcooked Snow-Ginseng roots directly into the black cast-iron wok.
Splat. Sizzle.
Frank looked up at Ge Hong, his voice steady, cold and exact, and devastatingly precise:
“You’ve been refining your longevity pills in sealed bronze cooking pots at one hundred degrees for forty-nine days. Because bronze has terrible heat diffusivity, your heating is fully uneven, resulting in hot spots that char thirty percent of the active ingredients while the rest sits in stale moisture.”
Ge Hong flinched, startled.
“Also,” Frank continued, tapping the cast-iron rim with his carpenter’s pencil, “the main active alkynes in Nine-Petaled Frost Orchids don’t decarboxylate at boiling water heat levels. They need a rapid, flash-heat spike of one hundred and eighty degrees under nonstop clockwork agitation to activate the healing esters without burning the sugars.”
He looked at the thirty gaping apothecary masters with a cool, deadpan smirk.
“Your herbs aren’t ruined, Ge Hong. You just don’t know how to stir-fry under pressure.”
Frank reached into his pocket, pulled out a brass striker. Then he struck a bright, shower of sparks against the charcoal beneath the wok.
FZZZZZZT—FWUMP!
A clean, roaring bed of blue-hot charcoal fire ignited beneath the black iron pan!
Frank gripped the steel spatula in his right hand and seized the wooden handle of the wok in his left, his denim work pants bracing against the boulder.
“You want five million stones?” Frank said, meeting Ge Hong’s bloodshot gaze with cold, total confidence. “Keep your lawsuit. In three weeks, the Tri-Kingdom Potion-maker Grand Prix convenes at the Imperial Nine-Cauldron Tower. I’ll enter your tournament. I’ll bring this twenty-dollar cast-iron wok. And I’ll refine a batch of Tier-3 Longevity Pills that will make your five-hundred-year bronze cooking pots look like leaky chamber pots.”
Behind Frank, his three students stood in a solid, unbending formation.
Shen Shitou rested his five-foot iron sledgehammer on his shoulder, streaming the unmoving weight of a mountain.
Princess Jiang Ling’er held her clockwork ledger, her royal presence daring any judge to step forward.
Niu Mang leaned on his shovel, grinning with pure, honest agrarian pride.
Grandmaster Ge Hong looked at the roaring blue flame beneath the wok.
He looked at the three students.
He looked at Frank’s unblinking, calm builder eyes.
And for the first time in sixty years of potion-made dominance, the supreme Grandmaster of the Nine Cauldrons felt a cold shiver of primal terror crawl up his spine.
The Heavenly Bug Tracker screen in Frank’s eye flashed with a massive, golden, season-ending pop-up alert:
Frank gave the cast-iron wok an easy, skilled toss. It sent the steaming herbs flipping through the blue flames in a perfect, sizzling arc.
TOSS. SIZZLE.
Grand Elder Yan clutched his scepter, his breath caught in his throat. He watched Frank flick the heavy cast-iron pan over the roaring charcoal flames.
“The Wok of Creation...” Yan murmured, watching the blue fire lick the cast iron in dazed awe. “He doesn’t refine pills through mortal quiet focus. He commands heat flux with open fire and seasoned iron. A master who treats the cooking pot arts like his own kitchen.”
“Class 404,” Frank said dryly, tossing his pencil behind his ear. “Time to learn how to cook.”