The bronze start gong of the Nine-Cauldron Crucible Tower boomed across the royal capital with ear-splitting deep ring.
CLANG————!
“Round Two of the Tri-Kingdom Grand Prix has formally began!” the Chief Judge’s voice echoed across the three-square-mile plaza. “You have two hours to refine a Grade-4 Five-Elemental Revolving Core Pill! May the ancestors guide your sacred flames!”
Instantly, the arena transformed into an open-air temple of religious panic.
At forty-nine testing stations, master alchemists and prodigies began their elaborate, forty-five-minute cooking pot preheating rituals.
Young Master Han Yun of the Thunder Fire Sect sat cross-legged on his golden cushion, sweating heavily as his hands blurred through the seventy-two variations of the “Ancient Lightning Starting Mudra.” Beneath his three-ton Eight-Dragon Violet Gold Fire, a tiny, shivering spark of purple lightning began to crawl through the bronze channels, raising the massive vessel’s heat by barely one degree every ten seconds.
At Station Three, Fairy Bai poured three flasks of thousand-year spirit marrow into her levitating Moon-Mist Jade Cauldron, chanting ancient water-crushing weight hymns to keep the brittle jade from shattering under heat shock.
Further down the line, a venerable grandmaster from the Dayue Kingdom was carefully arranging twelve chunks of glowing fiery dragon-coal beneath his iron fire, using silver tongs and chanting protective incantations with every breath. Across the entire arena, the air grew heavy with the choking, bitter stench of scorched red stone, sulfur paste, and unburned healing charcoal.
Every textbook in the empire taught the exact same golden dogma. A pill cooking pot was a sleeping, temperamental dragon. It had to be awakened gently, coaxed with sacred incense, fed with spirit stones. Then it brought to heat over forty-five minutes of agonizingly delicate spiritual concentration.
At Station One, Frank turned his gas knob wide open.
FWHSSSHHH!
A roaring, three-foot cone of pure, blazing bright blue flame erupted from the three-ring burner, licking the underside of the sixteen-inch carbon-steel wok with heavy-duty fury.
Within four seconds, the flat bottom of the black iron pan began to glow with faint, cherry-red heat.
Frank didn’t sit on a silk cushion. He stood squarely on his steel-toed boots. He leaned over the platform with a clean linen shop rag in his left hand and a glass jar of rendered Spirit Beast Tallow in his right.
Surrounding contestants nearly choked on their spiritual energy as they saw what Frank was doing. He were treating their three-ton furnaces with the holy respect due to an emperor’s tomb.
“What’s that barbarian doing?!”
“He cranked his spirit fire to maximum before even purifying his herbs?!”
“Look at his vessel! It’s glowing red! He’s going to melt the pan into melted rock waste!”
Young Master Han Yun looked over from Station Two, a sneer twisting his sweaty face: “Fool! A vessel must be preheated with three-stage spiritual gradualism! If you blast cold metal with raw flame, the internal stress will crack the walls! In thirty breaths, his cheap iron basin will rip apart!”
Frank didn’t even glance at Han Yun.
He reached into the jar with a wooden spatula, scooped out a two-ounce dollop of white, semi-clear Spirit Beast Tallow. Then he dropped it squarely into the center of the smoking pan.
TSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
A cloud of fragrant, white vapor hissed into the air. It carried the rich, savory aroma of rendered fat across the VIP pavilions.
For five hundred years, the Imperial Pill Plaza had smelled only of bitter, choking herbal soot and burning stone ash. The sudden, mouth-watering aroma of hot sizzling animal fat drifted over the front rows of the audience, causing dozens of high-born stomachs to rumble loudly in unexpected hunger.
Frank grabbed the long wooden helper-handle of the wok with his calloused right hand. He lifted the pan an inch off the burner. Then he began swirling the molten fat in smooth, hypnotic nested circles.
Swirl. Swirl. Tilt.
With his left hand, he took the cotton shop rag and wiped the boiling animal fat up the curved sides of the pan, coating every square tiny fraction of an inch of the carbon steel in a micro-thin, glistening film.
In Frank’s eyes, the DAO-QA screen flared to life. He watched the atom-deep transformation of the iron surface in real-time.
Frank looked across at Young Master Han Yun, who was still trembling on his silk cushion, blowing on his tiny purple ember like a boy trying to keep a birthday candle lit in a hurricane.
“Hey, lightning boy,” Frank called out. His deadpan builder voice carried clearly through the heat shimmer. “Your physics are fully backwards. What they teach in your sect is total nonsense.”
Han Yun’s left eye twitched wildly. “You dare lecture a student of the Thunder Fire Sect on heat Dao?!”
“I’m not lecturing you on Dao. I’m lecturing you on elementary heat laws,” Frank said, casually wiping another layer of animal fat across the smoking iron. “Your three-ton bronze fire has a wall thickness of five inches. That means you have massive heat mass and total heat heavy rush. It takes you forty-five minutes to get the core hot. Once your medicine starts an exothermic reaction, you can’t shed the heat, which is why your cooking pots blow their lids like cheap fireworks.”
Frank tapped the rim of his carbon-steel pan with his spatula.
CLINK.
“This pan is sixteen-gauge cold-rolled carbon steel,” Frank explained, speaking as if addressing a classroom of remedial vocational apprentices. “Wall thickness is one point five tiny fractions of an inch. Heat transfer from the flame to the cooking surface is practically instant. When I want heat, I have it in two seconds. When I cut the gas, the pan cools down right away. Perfect heat agility.”
Frank dipped his rag into the animal fat once more, giving the inside a final, sweeping polish.
“And this fat isn’t an offering to a fire spirit,” Frank added. He held up the glistening pan to the sunlight. “When fatty acid food fats are heated past their smoke point on bare carbon steel, they undergo free-radical polymerization. The oil molecules cross-link into a slick, hard, tiny plastic-like matrix that bonds directly with the iron crystal lattice. It fills the micro-fissures, eliminates surface roughness, and prevents organic herb sugars from adhering to the metal.”
Frank set the pan back onto the roaring burner with a crisp metal snap.
“If you don’t season your metal, your pill waste scum sticks, creates carbon hot-spots, and scorches your batch into charcoal,” Frank finished. “It isn’t a divine mystery. It’s a non-stick coating. You people have been spending fifty years meditating in caves when all you needed was ten cents worth of pig lard.”
The surrounding contestants sat numbed, their minds spinning in dizzying confusion.
Free-radical polymerization?
Fatty acid food fats?
Thermal agility?!
Over by Classroom 404’s flatbed cart at the outer edge fence, Niu Mang leaned over his hard dark metal-iron shovel, sniffing the air with a wide, joyful grin.
“Master’s cooking smells good,” Niu Mang rumbled earnestly. “Sister Ling’er, after Master wins the gold medal, do you think he will fry some sliced potatoes in that black basin?”
Princess Ling’er adjusted her yellow hard hat. She tapped her clipboard with a brass valve-wrench while checking her pressure gauge. “Niu Mang, that’s Master’s sacred potion-made vessel. But... Yes, I believe he promised to make crispy hash browns if we secured the lumber permits.”
Up in the Grand Judge Box, Pill King Dan Kui leaned over the marble railing. His eyes were wide with fascination.
“Listen to his discourse!” Dan Kui murmured to the surrounding judges. “He has stripped away three thousand years of flowery poetry and revealed the physical mechanics of the craft! ‘Free-radical polymerization’... Binding the heat directly into the iron! By using the humble animal fat of beasts, he has created an iron-hard, zero-drag boundary layer that defies the erosion of the elements!”
A senior judge swallowed dryly. “Grandmaster Dan Kui... You truly believe this is ancient First Epoch knowledge?”
“Look at the vessel!” Dan Kui roared, pointing a trembling hand toward Station One. “Look at the light streaming from that black basin!”
On the arena floor, the thin film of spirit animal fat had fully polymerized under the 185°C heat.
The dull gray steel had vanished entirely. In its place was a deep, lustrous, mirror-black glass patina. So smooth, so uniform, and so utterly devoid of friction that the midday sun reflected off the iron like light gleaming on polished black glass!
The pan radiated a faint, pure, ringing hum—the physical manifestation of zero heat pushback and perfect moving balance!
Grandmaster Ouyang, sitting in the corner of the judge box with his bald, salve-smeared chin, gritted his teeth until his gums bled.
“Rubbish!” Ouyang hissed, digging his fingernails into his palms. “Even if his pan is smooth, the Five-Elemental Core Pill needs balancing Five Ancient Roots at the same time! Without a sealed lid and a three-space-folding spiritual crushing weight matrix, the opposing elements will wildly detonate the moment they meet the oil!”
Down at Station One, Frank pulled out a small digital infrared heat gauge—disguised in a plain brass pen casing—and clicked the trigger against the wok’s center.
BEEP.
Reading: 185.2°C.
“Heat bed is steadied,” Frank muttered. “Oil is shimmering. Water’s skin is broken.”
Frank picked up his five enamel bowls containing the sliced medallions of Azure Wood Dragon Root, Golden Tiger Herb, Vermilion Phoenix Flower, Black Water Ginseng, and Yellow Earth Lichen.
Beside him, Shen Shitou stood at the edge of the platform with his twenty-pound sledgehammer resting on his steel-toed boot, his eyes scanning the surrounding contestants’ unstable furnaces with watchful, defensive care.
Princess Jiang Ling’er held her clipboard tightly, her amber eyes glowing with total faith: “Master’s heat bed is flawless. The phase shift will occur in three seconds.”
Frank gripped the rosewood handle of his stainless-steel spatula in his right hand. Then he held the wok’s wooden helper-handle with his left.
He took a slow breath, his denim overalls rustling in the autumn wind.
“Five elemental roots,” Frank murmured. He looked at the smoking black pan with a relaxed, confident smirk. “In commercial catering, that’s just a standard five-vegetable stir-fry.”
Frank tipped the five bowls forward at the same time, dumping all ten pounds of raw, wildly conflicting spiritual roots straight into the smoking pool of boiling oil!