The morning gong of the Nine-Cauldron Crucible Tower boomed across the Great Da-Qi Royal Capital like rolling thunder.
GONG————!
One hundred thousand spectators packed the tiered stone tiered arena surrounding the Imperial Pill Plaza. everyone could feel the electric excitement. He smelled of ozone, expensive incense. The collective sweat of five hundred elite potion-made prodigies who had qualified for Round One.
In the center of the arena floor, five hundred isolated stone testing stations had been erected overnight.
Above each station hovered a swirling, pitch-black spiritual fog barrier, designed by the guild’s formation masters to fully sever divine sense, spiritual probes, and telepathic signal. Within each misty nook sat twenty sealed dark wood sample drawers containing ten thousand rare, ancient, and toxic spirit botanicals.
The rules were brutally simple. Contestants had fifteen minutes to blind-identify species, age, purity, and healing properties. Any tester who misidentified more than three herbs would be disqualified and permanently barred from alchemy.
Up in the Grand Arbiter Box, Chief Arbiter Pill King Dan Kui sat upon an ivory throne. He was flanked by Grandmaster Ouyang.
Ouyang’s scorched, hairless chin was smeared with glistening white burn salve, his eyes bloodshot with murderous hatred as he glared down at Station #01.
“The blindfolded ten-thousand-herb blitz,” Ouyang whispered to Dan Kui, his voice dripping with venom. “Even 3-Star masters take twelve minutes and make at least twenty errors. Lu Zhen signed a royal blood contract. When he fails to take First Place, I’ll personally strip his students’ marrow in the sulfur pits.”
Pill King Dan Kui stroked his long, snow-white beard, frowning slightly. “A blood contract over botanical theory is irregular, Vice-Chairman Ouyang. Let the heavens judge his knowledge.”
Down at Station #01, Frank stood before his testing desk in his denim overalls and steel-toed boots.
Beside him, nineteen-year-old prodigies from noble clans were clutching jade tweezers with shaking, sweaty fingers. Some were applying cooling herbal eye-drops to sharpen their vision. Others were desperately reciting mnemonic rhyming poems about the sixty-four root variations of the Nether Orchid.
Frank unclipped a twelve-inch stainless steel shop ruler from his tool belt.
He wiped the metal edge on his canvas apron. He pulled a freshly sharpened red carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear. Then he rolled up his denim sleeves.
The head judge stepped onto the central podium, raising a brass signal flag.
“Round One of the Tri-Kingdom Grand Prix has began! You have fifteen minutes! Unseal the drawers!”
WHIRRRRRR!
The black fog barriers dropped around each station, isolating the contestants in pitch-black sense silence.
Around the arena, five hundred contestants wildly reached into the drawers with jade tweezers, gingerly lifting single leaves, sniffing them with trembling nostrils, and sweating blood as they tried to distinguish between twenty varieties of lookalike ginseng.
At Station #01, Frank didn’t touch the jade tweezers. He didn’t lean in to sniff anything.
He took the twelve-inch stainless steel ruler in his right hand, rested the metal edge against the top row of sample drawers. Then he simply walked from left to right along the table at a brisk, unrushed pace.
Clack-clack-clack.
The steel ruler rattled across the brass pull-rings of the twenty wooden drawers like a stick dragged along a picket fence.
As the metal shook against the wood, Frank’s internal DAO-QA engine fired its sight cache-scraping subroutine at maximum hardware clock speed.
A massive, alphabetical spreadsheet unfolded behind Frank’s eyes, glowing with crisp, clean tabular data.
Frank pulled the official thirty-foot royal submission scroll toward him.
He didn’t bother using the delicate wolf-hair calligraphy brush or the official red stone inkstone provided by the exam guards. He held his red carpenter’s pencil in a heavy-duty fist-grip and began writing with the ferocious speed of a self-running receipt printer.
Scritch-scritch.
Frank didn’t just write the names. He audited the guild’s entire procurement history:
‘Drawer 14, Item 88: Seven-Leaf Ginseng. Claimed age: 50 years. Actual age: 41 years. Severe spider-mite infestation in main root hair. Fungal rot present in lower crown due to storage at 85% moisture in the air.’
Scritch-scritch.
‘Drawer 22, Item 304: Dragon-Bone Grass. Counterfeit. Common ditch clover dyed with commercial turmeric paste and soaked in man-made sulfur salt water. Wholesale fraud value: 4 copper coins.’
Scritch-scritch.
‘Drawer 89, Item 1,204: Nine-Curse Orchid. Harvested four days late. Volatile terpene oils rusted by 34.2%. Storage drawer has active termite frass in the rear dovetail joint.’
While other prodigies were still crying over Question Three, Frank’s red pencil was a blur of graphite and wood shavings.
Pages rolled off his desk like ticker tape. He turned five feet of scroll every fifteen seconds, writing down exact Latin-equivalent genus classifications, moisture percentages, active alkaloid purities, and health-code violations for every single botanical entity.
At the sixty-second mark, Frank had filled twenty-five feet of paper.
At the one-hundred-and-ten-second mark, he reached Item 10,000:
‘Item 10,000: Heavenly Sun-Grown Core Lotus. Purity: 99.4%. Genuine 200-year sample. However, the sample jar has a cracked cork seal ring. It allowed surrounding humidity to leach volatile cold air compounds. Replace seal right away.’
Frank slashed a final red period onto the parchment.
TAP.
He tossed his pencil onto the desk, picked up his twelve-inch ruler, tucked it into his tool belt, and raised both arms above his head in a wide, luxurious yawn.
“Two minutes flat,” Frank muttered, cracking his knuckles with a series of sharp pops. “Ten thousand items and fifteen percent of the inventory is counterfeit ditch weeds. Your purchasing department is taking kickbacks.”
Frank reached out and slammed his hand down on the large brass submission buzzer in the center of his desk.
BZZZZZZZZZT!
An ear-splitting, echoing klaxon blared across the Imperial Pill Plaza!
The head judge in the central tower nearly swallowed his whistle. Up in the Grand Arbiter Box, Pill King Dan Kui choked on his tea, spraying spirit liquid across his lap.
“A-A submission?!” the head judge stammered, staring at the clock crystal. “Only one hundred and twenty seconds have elapsed! The black fog barrier at Station One has dropped!”
The swirling black mist around Frank’s station dissolved. It showed Frank sitting comfortably on his wooden stool, his legs crossed, casually peeling a small mandarin orange he had pulled from his overall pockets.
Across the vast arena, four hundred and ninety-nine contestants froze. He stared at him in utter, unhinged confusion.
Young Master Han Yun was currently on Herb Twelve, his face dripping with sweat, his fingers trembling around his jade tweezers. He stared at Frank across the arena floor, his eyes bulging: “Two minutes?! He submitted ten thousand answers in two minutes?! He must have given up and scribbled chicken tracks!”
Grandmaster Ouyang leaped to his feet in the judge box, his bald, salve-smeared chin quivering with triumphant glee.
“He forfeited!” Ouyang roared, his voice echoing through the stadium. “No mortal in history can inspect ten thousand herbs in one hundred and twenty seconds! He threw in the towel! Judge, inspect the scroll and declare his failure! Enforce the execution writ right away!”
Chief Arbiter Pill King Dan Kui raised his hand, his expression grave. “By royal decree, all submitted scrolls must be authenticated by the ancient Heavenly Truth Array. Bring the scroll to the dais!”
Four senior exam guards rushed into the arena, carrying Frank’s thirty-foot red-marked scroll up the marble steps of the Crucible Tower.
They unrolled the massive parchment across the grand jade arbitration table.
The moment the paper touched the jade, the ancient “Heavenly Truth Array”—a Grade-5 formation inscribed by the founding emperor to grade royal exams—pulsed with soft white light.
The array scanned the first answer.
DING.
A green glyph flashed: Correct.
The array scanned the next ten answers.
DING. DING. DING. DING. DING.
Ten green glyphs.
Then, the array met Frank’s annotations: ‘Counterfeit. Common ditch clover dyed with turmeric.’
The arbitration table wildly shuddered. The white light turned into a brilliant, pulsing violet!
The formation didn’t merely grade the answer—it projected a ghostly, three-space-folding hologram of the sample in Drawer 22 directly above the stadium!
Before one hundred thousand spectators, the light-projected plant dissolved. It exposed the tiny layers of yellow turmeric powder caked onto ordinary roadside clover!
The crowd gasped in collective horror!
“It... It really is fake?!”
“The Potion-maker Guild’s official testing supply contains counterfeit herbs?!”
DING-DING-DING!
The arbitration table’s deep ring bell began chiming at faster-than-sound speed!
Pages of text flashed through the spiritual formation.
Every single item—all ten thousand botanicals—were checked with one hundred percent, flawless, exact care!
Not only were all ten thousand herbs named correctly. But the array authenticated every single mold spore warning, every counterfeit dye report. Every moisture degradation alert Frank had jotted down in red graphite!
BOOOOOOOOOOM!
A blinding pillar of deep, royal purple light erupted from the arbitration table, shooting three hundred feet into the sky above the Crucible Tower!
The entire three-square-mile stadium plunged into catatonic, breathless shock.
One hundred thousand people sat in frozen silence. He stared at the purple pillar of light and the glowing numbers hovering above the arena.
Pill King Dan Kui rose slowly from his ivory throne. His hands were shaking with such violence that his jade bead necklace snapped. It scattered ninety-nine sky pearls across the marble floor.
“Ten thousand herbs... In one hundred and twenty seconds...” Dan Kui whispered, his voice cracking into a high-pitched rasp. “He... He didn’t just identify them. He conducted a full town health and quality-control audit of our old family storehouse in two minutes?!”
Dan Kui looked down at Frank, who was casually popping a slice of mandarin orange into his mouth on the arena floor.
Beside Dan Kui, Grandmaster Ouyang’s knees fully gave out.
The Vice-Chairman collapsed onto the marble floor like a puppet with cut strings. He grabbed his chest, his bald chin turning the color of curdled milk.
Before Ouyang could speak, a Royal Court Guard stepped out from the royal box, unrolling the blood contract signed the last midnight.
“By the decree of the Heavenly Dao and the Royal Trial!” the court guard’s voice boomed across the silent plaza. “Tester Lu Zhen has secured First Place in Round One! The five-million-stone outside indemnity writ against Classroom 404 is hereby VOIDED AND ANNULLED!”
THWACK.
The royal cancellation stamp came down on the scroll with ear-splitting finality.
Down on the arena floor, Frank wiped orange juice from his thumb, leaned back on his stool. Then he looked up at the trembling Grandmaster Ouyang in the judge box.
“That clears the fake debt,” Frank called out. His deadpan voice carried effortlessly across the silent stadium. “Now, where are my five hundred bags of high-pressure lime and fifty spools of copper wire? I have a foundation to pour.”