The underground testing hall of the Great Da-Qi Potion-maker Guild was designed to evoke existential dread and holy submission.
Carved two hundred feet beneath the bronze pagoda into the living solid mountain stone, the chamber was vast, damp, and lit by the eerie flickering of underground spirit gas burners. Twenty circular stone alcoves were spaced evenly around the outer edge, each equipped with an official three-legged bronze cooking pot inscribed with ancient protective magic charms.
At nineteen of the stations, elite testers were engaged in solemn religious preparation.
One prodigy knelt on a silk prayer rug, bowing three times toward the ceiling before lighting a stick of thousand-year spirit sandalwood. Another tester was performing the “Nine-Fold Flowing Cloud Hand Mudra,” fingers blurring as he chanted sacred mantras to coax a tiny, shivering azure flame beneath his fire.
At Test Station Seven, Frank dropped his canvas tool bag onto the flat stone slabs with a dull metal clang.
Up in the heavy watching gallery above the iron railing, Deacon Yan leaned forward, his hands resting on the stone railing, a poisonous smirk curling his lips. Beside him stood Chief Proctor Elder Cui and four senior test judges clutching their check ledgers.
“Tester Lu Zhen,” Deacon Yan’s voice rang through the sound chamber via spiritual amplification. “You have been provided with one standard portion of Grade-1 Qi-Nourishing ingredients: three stalks of Sun-Grown Wheat Grass, two dried Crimson Ginseng roots. A flask of purified mountain spring water. You have one hour to refine a pill of at least thirty percent purity!”
Deacon Yan’s grin widened with sadistic excitement.
Test Station Seven’s official cooking pot—the “Nine-Cloud Bronze Vessel #07”—had been deliberately altered by Yan’s loyal apprentices earlier that morning. Its upper safety exhaust channel had been sealed with molten lead, and tiny stress-fractures had been etched along its lower pipe rim using acid-burning acid.
Internal pressure reached twenty pounds of pressure. Then, the bronze vessel would wildly detonate, showering the insolent builder in two hundred degrees of boiling herbal sludge and razor-sharp metal shrapnel.
Frank stepped up to the stone platform. He didn’t light incense. He didn’t bow to the statue of the Pill Saint.
He reached out his right hand and tapped the bronze cooking pot’s belly with his index finger.
CLINK.
His DAO-QA screen instantly flashed bright crimson in his vision.
Frank withdrew his finger and let out a loud, contemptuous snort that echoed across the quiet testing hall.
“I wouldn’t boil a potato in this piece of garbage,” Frank said. His voice carried clearly to the watching gallery. “Who cast this pot, a blind apprentice with a tin can? The wall thickness varies by a tiny fraction of an inch from top to bottom, the metal is full of air holes, and someone shoved a lead slug into the exhaust pipe.”
Frank drew his steel-toed right boot back and kicked the sacred old family bronze cooking pot squarely in its front leg.
CLANG! SKRRRRRRT—THUD!
The four-hundred-pound bronze cooking pot skidded twelve feet across the stone floor, crashed into the corner wall, and tipped over. It rolled pathetically in the dust like an empty paint can.
A collective gasp of sheer, pure horror erupted from nineteen testing stations.
Prodigies dropped their sandalwood incense. The tester performing the Flowing Cloud Mudra bit his own tongue in shock, snuffing out his spiritual flame.
Up in the gallery, Deacon Yan’s smirk shattered into bug-eyed fury.
“Sacrilege!” Deacon Yan screamed, slamming both fists onto the iron railing. “Blasphemy against the Pill Saint! That cooking pot was cast by the Third Ancestor two hundred years ago! Guards, execute him where he stands!”
“Hold your horses, clipboard,” Frank called up, fully calm. “Your sacred old family pot is an unlicensed shrapnel hazard. If I fired that junk with two pints of water, it would have fragged your gallery and taken out the front row of test judges. You should be thanking me for saving you a wrongful death lawsuit.”
“You... You destroyed the testing rig!” Yan sputtered, veins bulging along his neck. “Without an official cooking pot, you can’t refine a pill! You’re disqualified!”
“Who said I don’t have a vessel?”
Frank unzipped his canvas duffel bag.
He didn’t pull out a dragon-carved jade cooking pot. He didn’t pull out a three-thousand-year-old fiery crucible.
With a casual clink of metal, Frank pulled out a heavy, two-liter, flat-bottomed cast-iron travel tea kettle.
The kettle had a sturdy coiled-wire handle, a matte black pre-seasoned finish. A polished brass whistle cap spring-loaded over the spout. It was the exact kettle Frank had used for four years in his last life to brew instant coffee on freezing job sites.
Frank set the cast-iron kettle firmly onto the spirit burner’s iron trivet.
CLANK.
The hall was so quiet you could hear an apprentice’s hair hit the floor.
“A... A tea kettle?” Elder Cui whispered from the gallery, his hand trembling as he adjusted his glasses. “He brought a kitchen teapot to the Royal Potion-maker Guild?!”
“He has lost his mind!” Deacon Yan cackled hysterically. “A kitchen teapot has no spiritual deep ring chambers! It has no dragon seals to capture pill qi! Let him burn his weeds! When he produces a clump of charred mud, I’ll personally strip his skin!”
Frank ignored the gallery entirely.
He pulled a three-inch folding work knife from his overalls pocket, sliced the Sun-Grown Wheat Grass into clean half-inch ribbons. Then he chopped the dried Crimson Ginseng into quarter-inch cubes.
Chop. Chop. Chop.
He dumped the chopped botanicals directly into the kettle. He poured in two cups of well water from his flask, checked the liquid level against the kettle’s internal fill-line. Then he slapped the heavy lid shut with a crisp metal snap.
Then, Frank reached down and turned the spirit burner’s brass valve wide open.
FWHSSSHHH!
A roaring blue flame erupted beneath the cast-iron base.
While the surrounding testers gently fanned their fires with feather fans, sweating blood as they controlled spiritual energy within a fraction of a degree, Frank simply stood with his arms crossed over his chest, watching his wrist watch.
“What’s he doing?!” a judge cried out. “He isn’t using spiritual crushing weight! The healing vapors will breach the vessel and fade into the void!”
Frank scoffed under his breath. “Fade? The lid has an airtight silicone-seal ring seal and a five-pound balance weight. Basic Boyle’s law. Heat increases. Pressure builds. Boiling point rises. High-pressure steam extraction accelerates cell wall breakdown by four hundred percent.”
Within three minutes, the cast-iron kettle reached full running heat.
The internal pressure climbed toward fifteen pounds of pressure. Trapped within the dark, sealed iron chamber, the coarse herbs were not burned. They were aggressively steam-pulled out under nonstop rough churning.
Then, a sound echoed through the ancient underground hall.
FEEEEEEEP—!
The brass whistle cap began to sing.
It wasn’t a sputtering, chaotic wheeze. It was a pure, piercing, laser-clear sound note shaking at exactly four hundred and forty Hertz—the international concert pitch of total harmony!
From the kettle’s brass spout, a pencil-thin jet of emerald-green healing steam shot eight feet into the air!
The steam didn’t scatter into gray smog. It coiled tightly upon itself. It glowed with rainbow-bright green light. It filled the entire underground cave with an overwhelming fragrance of fresh rain, sweet clover, and sky life-force.
The nineteen competing prodigies inhaled the mist and felt their exhausted dantians wildly surge with warmth. Two apprentices with minor spirit vein blockages gasped as their obstructions cleared instantly!
“The whistle...” Elder Cui whispered, gripping the rail. “Listen to the pitch. That’s not churning steam—it’s pure sound deep ring. The vessel is humming at concert pitch!”
“Singing?!” Deacon Yan screamed in a blind panic. “It’s boiling water! He’s making tea!”
Frank checked his watch. “Seven minutes at fifteen PSI. Heat cycle complete. Cut the heat.”
Frank reached out, turned the gas valve off, and grabbed a clean blue shop rag from his pocket.
Frank wrapped the rag around the kettle’s lid handle. He pulled the lid off.
PSSSSSSSH!
A clean plume of white steam vented toward the stone ceiling.
Frank tilted the kettle forward over the stone testing table.
Clack. Clack-clack. Clack.
Nine perfectly ball-shaped, mirror-polished, emerald-green pills rolled out of the spout, coming to rest in a neat row across the stone surface.
Each pill was the exact width of a marble: twelve tiny fractions of an inch, with zero surface pitting, zero discoloration, and a ghostly halo of green light swirling beneath a glass-like finish.
The silence in the testing hall was ear-splitting.
Elder Cui collapsed against the stone railing, his breath fully stolen. “Nine... Nine pills from a single portion of herbs? A standard cooking pots yields three with sixty percent purity! He produced nine... And they’re... Flawless?!”
Before Deacon Yan could utter another screech of denial, the ancient foundations of the nine-story pagoda began to vibrate.
From the highest tower of the guild, a sound that had not been heard in three hundred years echoed through the capital.
DONG————!
The Pill-Dao Deep hum Bell.
DONG————!
A second chime, deep and sonorous, rolling across the city like distant thunder.
DONG————!
A third ear-splitting strike shook the dust from the ceiling rafters, rattling every bronze cooking pot in the hall.
Three tolls of the sacred bell. The sign that a Flawless Pill of total perfection had been born under the heavens!
The nineteen testers stared at the whistling black tea kettle in stunned silence.
Frank picked up one of the warm green pills, tossed it in his palm. Then he popped it into his mouth like a breath mint.
He chewed twice, nodded approvingly. Then he looked up at the catatonic Deacon Yan in the gallery.
“Good chew,” Frank said deadpan. “A little heavy on the wheat grass, but the pressure extraction saved the vitamins. Now stop gawking, print my 1-Star badge, and let’s wrap this up. My ox is parked at a two-hour meter.”