The cancellation of the five-million-stone debt scroll echoed across the Imperial Pill Plaza like a thunderclap that refused to fade.
In the Grand Judge Box, Chief Arbiter Pill King Dan Kui remained standing before the white jade table. His long sleeves shook as he stared down at Frank’s thirty-foot submission scroll. The four-hundred-year-old 4-Star Potion-maker Grandmaster felt as though the very earth beneath his stitched slippers had melted into quicksand.
Beside him, Grandmaster Ouyang sat slumped against the carved stone railing. He grabbed his burnt, hairless chin, his breath rattling like dry leaves in winter.
“Chief Arbiter Dan Kui,” a senior judge whispered, bowing with a bead of cold sweat running down his temple. “The Heavenly Truth Array has checked all ten thousand entries. But... There’s a grave strange flaw on Item Five Thousand Four Hundred and Twelve.”
Dan Kui’s snow-white eyebrows knitted together in deep confusion. “A strange flaw? Did the tester misidentify the sample?”
“No, Grandmaster,” the judge stammered, holding up the parchment with trembling hands. “The tester identified Item Five Thousand Four Hundred and Twelve... But his annotation directly contradicts your own published canonical scripture, The Nine-Cauldron Compendium of Ten Thousand Herbs.”
A murmur of shock rippled through the twelve senior judges seated in the trial box.
Dan Kui’s Compendium was the undisputed bible of botanical alchemy across three mortal empires. For three hundred years, every school, sect, and royal physician hall had treated its five volumes as infallible divine discovery. Thousands of royal scholars had spent decades memorizing every footnote.
Dan Kui snatched the scroll, his sharp eyes scanning the red graphite strokes:
‘Item 5,412: Cataloged by Guild as “Thousand-Year Azure Soul Vine” per Dan Kui’s Compendium (Vol. 3, Page 114). Test: Gross Classification Error. This sample is not Soul Vine. It’s common Bitter Nightshade Parasite. When heated above 80°C, its ester bonds hydrolyze into volatile muscarine neurotoxins, causing breathing failure and heart arrest. You have been prescribing a lethal paralytic as a life-force tonic for three hundred years. Retract this textbook right away and fire your peer-review committee.’
Dan Kui’s breath caught in his throat. His ancient heart skipped two full beats.
“Blasphemy!” Grandmaster Ouyang croaked, scrambling up from the floor, his eyes wild with desperate fury. “He dares insult the Pill King’s sacred scripture?! That text was ratified by the Royal Academy! This is open defamation of a royal grandmaster! Disqualify him! Burn the scroll and execute the impudent peasant!”
“Silence, Ouyang!” Dan Kui roared, his voice laced with the crushing spiritual power of a peak 4-Star Master.
The entire trial box went dead silent.
Dan Kui looked down at the arena floor. There, Frank was calmly wiping his folding ruler with an oily rag, utterly indifferent to the uproar in the high pavilion.
“Bring me the sample from Drawer Five Thousand Four Hundred and Twelve,” Dan Kui ordered, his voice suddenly cracked and frail. “And bring a live Silver-Spotted Spirit Hare from the medical testing pens.”
Within two minutes, an apprentice brought a sealed wooden box containing a dry, azure-colored twisting vine, alongside an iron cage holding a healthy, white-furred spiritual rabbit.
Dan Kui’s hands shook as he snapped a two-inch section of the azure vine. He placed it into a silver bowl, poured in boiling mountain water. Then he watched the clear liquid turn a faint, fragrant blue.
“For three hundred years,” Dan Kui murmured to himself, his voice thick with rock-steady conviction, “I have taught that the Azure Soul Vine soothes the restless spirit and strengthens the lung spirit veins. It was the crowning formula of my youth. It can’t be toxic. It’s impossible.”
Dan Kui tipped three drops of the warm blue tea into the rabbit’s mouth.
For three seconds, the rabbit chewed placidly.
Then, its pupils wildly tightened into tiny pinpricks.
THUMP.
The rabbit stiffened like a block of frozen wood. Its hind legs kicked once in a violent muscular burst. Its breathing halted fully. And a line of dark, clotted blood trickled from its tiny nostrils.
Dead. Instant neuromuscular breathing arrest.
The twelve senior judges backed away from the table in sheer, pure horror. He grabbed their throats as if the air itself had turned to poison.
Grandmaster Ouyang’s jaw dropped so low his lower lip brushed his collar.
Pill King Dan Kui stared at the dead rabbit, then down at the silver bowl, and finally at his own wrinkled, liver-spotted hands.
A terrifying, choking realization crashed down upon the old man’s soul like a collapsed mountain peak.
Three hundred years.
Twelve thousand royal patients.
Countless noble generals, royal princes, and heroic sect elders who had died of “sudden acute spirit-fire tiredness” following their recovery from lung wounds.
They hadn’t died of spirit-fire tiredness.
They had died because their chief physician had fed them a lethal neurotoxin out of an unchecked, dogmatic textbook.
“I... I killed them,” Dan Kui whispered, the color draining from his face until he looked like a walking corpse. “Thirty ages of students... Five thousand academies... All taught by a blind charlatan who couldn’t distinguish nightshade from vine.”
Dan Kui’s internal Sea of Qi wildly churned.
The grand, crystal-clear Potion-maker Dao Heart that had sustained his training for four hundred years developed a jagged, gaping hairline fracture. He felt the terrifying, nauseating pull of an impending Qi deviation threatening to shatter his Golden Core into dust!
Down in the arena, Frank looked up toward the judge box, casually cupping his hands around his mouth.
“Hey, old man!” Frank’s flat, nasal voice cut through the ear-splitting silence of the stadium. “Don’t have a stroke on company time! It’s just a clerical error in type-list! The two plants share ninety-two percent visual morphology. Whoever dried the original herb samples in your ancient museum didn’t conduct a chemical test! Issue a product recall, publish an errata sheet, and tell your doctors to administer charcoal slurry as an antidote! Stop being dramatic and update your documentation!”
The words rang across the three-square-mile stadium like a heavy-duty safety alarm.
Issue a product recall.
Publish an errata sheet.
Update your documentation.
To the fifty thousand listening fighters, it sounded like the bizarre dialect of a foreign madman.
But to Pill King Dan Kui, whose mind was spiraling into the dark deep pit of self-destruction, those three deadpan sentences struck like a bolt of golden lightning!
The old master froze.
He didn’t need to commit suicide in shame. He didn’t need to shatter his training to atone for old family arrogance.
True mastery lay not in pretending to be infallible, but in ruthlessly auditing defects, patching the source code of reality, and correcting errors with unbending, objective truth!
Crack-snap!
The hairline fracture across Dan Kui’s Dao Heart didn’t shatter—it re-crystal-hardened!
The murky, stale clouds of three hundred years of unearned academic pride were wildly swept away, replaced by an awe-inspiring, diamond-pure clarity of true scientific hearing!
Dan Kui took a long, deep, painless breath.
He reached up to his chest, unpinned the heavy, four-starred gold medallion of the Chief Judge of the Imperial Grand Prix. Then he placed it flat upon the arbitration table.
Then, before one hundred thousand stunned spectators, Pill King Dan Kui walked to the edge of the balcony, gathered his grandmaster robes, and bowed deeply from the waist toward Station #01!
“Master Lu!” Dan Kui’s voice, amplified by his training, rolled across the royal metropolis like thunder. “This old fool Dan Kui has dwelled in dogmatic darkness for four hundred years! Today, your red pencil pierced the veil of my ignorance and saved ten thousand future lives! I, Dan Kui, hereby disqualify myself from the title of Pill King, retract all five volumes of the Compendium, and ask only for the honor of studying at your side!”
The entire stadium erupted into total pandemonium!
Fighters leaped from their stone benches, screaming in disbelief:
“The Pill King... Disqualified himself?!”
“He bowed to a 1-Star tester in denim overalls?!”
“He asked to study at his side?!”
Beside the kneeling Dan Kui, Grandmaster Ouyang looked like he was about to vomit blood. His entire legal and political network was collapsing in real time.
An Royal Court Guard arrived at Ouyang’s side. He held the second half of the midnight bet contract.
“Vice-Chairman Ouyang,” the court guard said, his face cold as iron. “Under the binding blood contract, Tester Lu Zhen has secured First Place in Round One. You have thirty minutes to deliver five hundred sacks of high-grade high-pressure lime, sixty tons of load-bearing steel iron rods, and fifty spools of copper wire to his ox-cart, or face royal asset seizure.”
Ouyang’s hands shook so wildly he nearly bit his own tongue off.
“I... I’ll deliver them!” Ouyang hissed through clenched teeth, his eyes burning with pure, murderous hatred as he stared down at Frank. “Bring the wagons! Dump the lime at his cart!”
Outside the arena gates, eight heavy freight wagons rolled up to Classroom 404’s flatbed cart.
Shen Shitou stood beside the wagons, his twenty-pound sledgehammer resting against his thigh. As Ouyang’s disgruntled apprentices unloaded the heavy burlap sacks, Shitou inspected every single bundle. He tapped each bag with his calloused knuckles to check for water damage and moisture caking.
“Stack them on the cedar dunnage,” Shitou rumbled, his voice like grinding stone. “Keep the high-pressure lime off the damp soil. If one sack cures before Master inspects it, I’ll tamp your carriage into road gravel.”
The apprentices swallowed hard, wildly hauling the heavy sacks with trembling arms.
Back on the balcony, Grandmaster Ouyang leaned over the stone railing, his voice cracking into a shrill screech:
“Lu Zhen! You won Round One on book-learning! But Round Two is Pill Concoction! The true trial of a potion-maker! You have no cooking pot! You have no spiritual altar! Let’s see you refine a Grade-4 Five-Elemental Pill with your bare hands!”
Down on the arena floor, Frank packed his red pencil, picked up his twelve-inch ruler. Then he looked up at Ouyang with a faint, tired smirk.
“Don’t worry about my pots, baldy,” Frank muttered, unzipping his canvas duffel bag. “Just make sure that high-pressure lime is dry. If it got wet during shipping, I’m rejecting the whole shipment.”