The three ear-splitting chimes of the Pill-Dao Resonance Bell died away, leaving the underground hall in choking, scared silence.
Nineteen elite potion-made prodigies remained frozen on their knees across the damp flat stone slabs. He stared at the row of mirror-polished green pills resting on Frank’s stone slab. The sweet, clean scent of sky life-force hung thick in the air, overpowering the acrid sulfur fumes that normally choked the guild’s lower levels.
Up in the watching gallery, Deacon Yan’s manicured fingers gripped the dark wood railing until his knuckles turned bloodless white.
His mind was screaming in silent panic. If this peasant received an official 1-Star Potion-maker badge, Grandmaster Ouyang’s five-million-stone execution writ would be instantly frozen under royal commercial arbitration laws. The extortion scheme that had taken his faction six months to orchestrate would dissolve into an office nightmare before their eyes.
“Fraud!” Deacon Yan shrieked, his voice tearing like rusted sheet metal. “A wicked, demonic trick!”
Yan vaulted over the gallery stone railing, landing heavily on the flat stone slabs below. His crimson robes billowed with furious spiritual energy as he pointed a shaking, manicured finger at Frank’s cast-iron travel kettle.
“Guild Statute Section Twelve!” Yan roared, spit spraying from his lips in a fine mist. “All official sign-off trials must be conducted within a consecrated, three-legged bronze vessel bearing the royal crest! Brewing healing concoctions in an unhallowed kitchen teapot is witchcraft, desecration, and town vandalism! Chief Proctor Cui, invalidate this score right away!”
Elder Cui dropped the spiral stairs slowly, his eyes wide and vacant. He looked like a man who had seen the heavens open and swallowed his own tongue.
“Deacon Yan,” Elder Cui stammered, his fingers trembling as he adjusted his round brass glasses. “The pills... They’re one hundred percent pure. There’s not a single grain of waste scum, nor a microgram of unburned carbon. In five thousand years of guild history, no mortal has ever achieved flawless extraction on a Grade-1 batch. The Pill-Dao Resonance Bell can’t lie.”
“I don’t care if they grant eternal youth!” Yan bellowed, stamping his stitched boot against the stone floor. “He broke the rules! He defiled our old family testing ground with peasant cookware! Guards! Arrest this unlisted scoundrel! Clap the soul-shackling collars upon his neck and throw him into the sulfur dungeons!”
From the shadows of the underground hall, eight heavily armored guild guards stepped forward in timed together formation.
Their armor was forged from black cold-iron, inscribed with blood-red crushing weight magic charms that drank the surrounding light. Each guard drew a heavy five-foot headsman’s dao-sword. The razor-sharp steel was humming with lethal, bone-chilling spiritual intent.
They formed a tight iron ring around Frank’s testing station, cutting off every angle of retreat.
Behind Frank, the heavy oak double doors rattled wildly on their iron hinges.
Shen Shitou, having heard the shouting from the courtyard above, stepped through the entryway like a moving castle of solid iron. His twenty-pound forged hard dark metal-steel sledgehammer rested across his broad shoulder. His dark eyes swept over the guards’ blades with complete emotional calm distance.
Beside him, Princess Jiang Ling’er marched forward, adjusting her yellow builder hard hat, her brass valve-wrench clicking rhythmically against her leather tool belt. Niu Mang followed closely. It held his five-foot hard dark metal-iron trench shovel upright like a royal battle standard.
“Master,” Ling’er said, her voice cool, clipped, and devoid of fear. “Permit me to vent their pressure. Three seconds of overload steam will strip their armor plates down to bare bone.”
“Nobody is venting anything,” Frank said mildly, wiping his fingers on a grease rag. “We don’t waste energy on bad code.”
Frank reached into his faded denim overalls, pulled out his silver 1-Star Master Teacher Medallion. Then he pinned it directly over his left breast.
The silver medallion caught the flickering gaslight. It projected the shimmering, three-tiered glyph of the Continental Master Teacher Pavilion into the damp air.
The eight guards froze in mid-stride. Their headsman swords faltered, their eyes darting between the silver crest and Deacon Yan in mounting terror.
Under Land-wide Royal Treaty, Master Teachers possessed sovereign diplomatic immunity and independent jurisdictional oversight across all backup craft guilds. Striking a licensed Master Teacher without a royal warrant signed by the Emperor himself was high treason punishable by the extermination of nine ages.
“A 1-Star Master Teacher badge?” Deacon Yan sneered, though his right eye began to twitch with clear nervousness. “A backwater village token from Tianxuan Principality! Do you think a scrap of country silver shields you from the Royal Potion-maker Guild on our own private grounds?!”
“No,” Frank said. He stepped past the guards’ lowered blades without a single glance at their steel edges. “The badge doesn’t shield me. The International Building and Safety Code shields me. And you have far bigger problems than my teapot.”
Frank turned around, pointed his index finger straight up at the vaulted ceiling of the underground cave, and looked Deacon Yan dead in the eye.
“You want to talk about violations, clipboard? Let’s talk about your central HVAC line.”
Deacon Yan blinked, his sneer freezing in place. “What... What nonsensical babble are you barking now?!”
“Your exhaust air-flow system,” Frank said flatly. He pulled his red carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and using it as a care pointer. “Look at that thirty-inch main copper chimney pipe crossing your ceiling. It gathers the toxic burning exhaust from all twenty testing stations and routes it up to the central chimney stack, correct?”
“Of course!” Yan barked proudly. “The Grand Dragon Chimney pipe was designed by the Fourth Ancestor! It carries the sacred healing fumes to the heavens!”
“It carries raw soot to an early grave,” Frank countered.
His DAO-QA screen flared to life, scanning the overhead ductwork in an instant wireframe overlay.
Frank tapped his pencil against the stone pillar, pacing beneath the tarnished copper ductwork.
“First: you have three active spirit-gas leaks along the unbonded slip-joints of your main supply line,” Frank began, his voice ringing through the chamber like a town lecture. “That faint sweet smell in the air isn’t holy incense. It’s volatile methane ethers pooling along your ceiling vaults. Because you have zero positive air-flow, the heavy gases have nowhere to go. One errant spark from a spirit flint, and this basement becomes an underground fireball.”
Deacon Yan turned pale, but forced a contemptuous sneer: “Slander! Unsubstantiated slander!”
“Second: your Grand Dragon Chimney pipe has an eighty-two percent cross-sectional blocked path,” Frank continued, fully ignoring him. “You’ve been burning low-grade bituminous coal and oily bitter pine-resin pine in these furnaces for fifty years without running a chimney brush down the stack. You have a three-inch crust of oily, flammable creosote soot caked to the inside copper walls. The effective inner width of that thirty-inch duct has been choked down to barely six inches.”
Frank turned to Ling’er. “Ling’er. Backing-up pressure reading.”
Princess Ling’er stepped forward, pulled a light metal differential pressure gauge from her tool belt. Then she tapped the copper duct’s test port with her brass valve-wrench.
“Static backing-up pressure is eighty-five pascals over safe working limit, Master,” Ling’er reported crisply, clicking her pencil against her clipboard. “Negative chimney draft has fully collapsed due to heat inversion. Toxic burning fumes are actively back-drafting into the living quarters on the third floor right now.”
“Thank you, Checker,” Frank said. He looked back at Deacon Yan, whose smug expression was rapidly dissolving into sheer, cold terror.
“Every apprentice in this building wakes up with splitting headaches, bloodshot eyes, and chest tightness,” Frank said, addressing the room. “Your elders told you it was ‘spiritual tiredness from communion with the deep Dao.’ It isn’t communion. It’s chronic carbon monoxide poisoning. You’re slowly choking two hundred students because your work-yard management is too cheap to hire a chimney sweep.”
The nineteen testers and surrounding guards gasped in horror. Several apprentices instinctively touched their temples. They remembered the crushing morning migraines that had tormented them for years.
“And third,” Frank pointed toward the far corner of the chamber, where a massive twenty-foot iron boiler hummed with low, angry shakes. “Your emergency pressure relief valve is tied down with rusted baling wire.”
Frank’s voice turned icy.
“Some lazy upkeep worker tied down the release lever with wire because the valve was hissing and interrupting your quiet focus chants. You defeated the main safety bypass on a three-thousand-gallon high-pressure steam boiler running at eighty pounds of pressure. This entire nine-story pagoda is sitting on top of an unpermitted, class-one heat bomb.”
“Silence! Silence!” Deacon Yan screamed, his voice cracking into a panicked falsetto. “Guards, kill him! Cut his tongue out! He’s a madman sent to defame the sacred honor of our guild!”
The guards paused, their hands trembling on their sword handles. None of them dared move. They looked at the shaking boiler, then at the black crust of soot weeping from the ceiling joints, numbed by the horrific realization that they were standing in a death trap.
Before Deacon Yan could draw his personal sword, a clear, authoritative voice rang from the spiral stairs:
“Hold your hand, Deacon Yan!”
A dignified, white-haired elder clad in deep sapphire-blue scholar robes stepped into the hall. Around his neck hung a shimmering white-gold medallion adorned with two blazing silver stars and an open book.
Master Teacher Envoy Song—the senior head checker of the Regional Master Teacher Pavilion!
Behind Envoy Song walked six senior exam guards, their expressions as stern and unmoving as granite tablets.
Deacon Yan froze, his sword arm dropping limp at his side. “E-Envoy Song?! What brings the Master Teacher Pavilion to our private testing hall?!”
Envoy Song didn’t even acknowledge Yan. His sharp, piercing gaze locked onto the silver medallion pinned to Frank’s denim overalls, then traveled slowly to the soot-stained copper chimney pipe overhead.
“The three tolls of the Pill-Dao Resonance Bell shook the foundations of our pavilion across the square,” Envoy Song said, his voice ringing with total court power. “We came to witness the birth of a Flawless Pill. Instead, we find an armed guild attempting to slaughter a licensed Master Teacher while standing on an active powder keg.”
Envoy Song walked past the guards, stopped before Frank, clasped his hands in a formal academic greeting. Then they bowed at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Fellow Teacher,” Envoy Song said, his eyes gleaming with intense, philosophical curiosity. “I heard your dissertation on this chimney pipe from the stairs. You claim the physical soot choking that copper pipe mirrors the stall of the human vessel?”
Frank looked at the dignified old scholar, pocketed his red pencil, and shrugged.
“I didn’t say anything about human vessels,” Frank muttered. “I said clean your damn chimney before you blow the roof off the capital.”