The sound that erupted from Station One was not the ghostly, delicate chime of classical spiritual alchemy.
It was the violent, glorious, ear-splitting sizzle of ten pounds of raw, cold vegetables hitting a smoking pool of two-hundred-degree peanut oil.
SHHHHHHHKKKKKKKKLLLLLLL!
A towering geyser of fragrant white steam shot twelve feet straight into the autumn sky.
Across the Imperial Pill Plaza, forty-nine master alchemists were currently sitting in deathly stillness. He held their breath, regulating their heartbeats to thirty beats per minute as they delicately nurtured fragile embers beneath their three-ton furnaces.
Frank’s wok erupted with that huge roar. Then, three venerable grandmasters flinched so wildly they sneezed, instantly extinguishing their spiritual embers and ruining forty minutes of preheating.
“Madman!” an elder from Dayue screamed, clutching his chest in horror. “He dumped all five opposing elemental roots into the vessel at once! Water and fire will clash! The wood will burn to cinder! It will detonate!”
In classical potion-made doctrine, the Five-Elemental Core Pill needed seventy-two distinct stages of sequential addition. Wood was introduced first, gently coaxed into ember over fifteen minutes. It was followed by water drop by drop, then earth, then metal, and finally fire.
Dumping all five ancient elements into a single open pan at the same time was considered suicidal madness.
Frank didn’t look like a suicidal madman. He looked like a seasoned short-order line cook working the Friday night dinner rush at an overcrowded diner.
He planted his steel-toed boots shoulder-width apart, gripped the long wooden helper-handle of the wok with his left hand. Then he slipped his right hand under the rosewood grip of the flat stainless-steel spatula.
Then, Frank snapped his left wrist upward with crisp, heavy-duty torque.
FLIP.
The entire ten-pound mass of sliced roots—Azure Wood Dragon Root, Golden Tiger Herb, Vermilion Phoenix Flower, Black Water Ginseng. Yellow Earth Lichen—soared into the air in a perfect, rotating arc!
Toss. Sizzle. Clack.
The stainless spatula blurred through the air. That turned the falling ingredients with easy, rhythmic smooth speed. Every slice was tossed into the cooler surrounding air for half a second before slapping back down onto the scorching, oil-glazed iron with a sharp crack-sizzle!
In Frank’s eyes, the DAO-QA screen flickered with dense, cascading chemical tracking data.
Frank reached into his pocket, pulled out a small pinch of coarse white sea salt from his wooden cellar. Then he casually flicked it across the soaring herbs.
Tss.
“Lowers the surface water activity,” Frank muttered, flipping the wok again with a smooth snap of his wrist. “Breaks down cell walls, draws out moisture, and cuts the bitter tannins of the Vermilion Flower. Basic kitchen chemistry.”
The stone salt dissolved into the boiling oil. Then, the arena erupted into gasps of sheer, pure terror!
The white steam rising from the sixteen-inch wok didn’t scatter into the wind.
Instead, as Frank flipped the ingredients through the air, the five distinct elemental vapors wildly condensed, manifesting into five huge, glowing, ghostly phantoms that circled the wok like sky guardians!
To the east, an amazing Azure Dragon woven from pure wooden life-force roared as it coiled through the steam. To the west, a fierce White Tiger of liquid golden metal lunged through the air. Above them, a Vermilion Bird of pure solar fire spread its blazing bright wings, while below, a Black Tortoise of deep-sea water and a Golden Qilin of ancient earth circled in flawless ringing orbit!
Five sky beasts of the First Epoch, dancing in total, zero-drag harmony above an open frying pan!
Every time Frank flipped the wok, the five beasts revolved in perfect exact symmetry!
Flip. Toss. Sizzle.
The one hundred thousand spectators in the tiered arena rose to their feet in collective shock. They watched the glowing beasts circle the open pan.
“The... The Five Ancient Beasts of Creation!” an ancient elder howled, clawing at his beard. “He’s not cooking medicine... He’s juggling the Five Deepest Pillars of the Universe in the palm of his hand!”
“Look at the sky scepter in his right hand!” another master screamed, pointing at Frank’s twelve-inch stainless spatula. “With a flick of that divine silver blade, he commands the Azure Dragon to yield to the Vermilion Bird! He has attained the Supreme Dao of Pan-Cosmic Harmony!”
Up in the Grand Judge Box, Pill King Dan Kui was trembling so wildly he had to hold onto the marble pillar with both arms.
“He doesn’t suppress the elements with heavy bronze walls,” Dan Kui said in awe. “He lets them breathe! He tosses them into the open sky so their conflicting spiritual energies cancel out through sky evaporation! It’s the Dao of Smooth Liberation!”
Over by Classroom 404’s flatbed cart, Princess Ling’er smiled serenely. Her amber eyes reflected the golden light of the sky beasts.
“Watch the steam spreading, Shitou,” Ling’er whispered, tapping her clipboard. “Master is forcing the white-hot moisture inside the plant fibers to flash into steam at air pressure. The opposing yin and yang forces can’t detonate because there are no enclosed walls to build pressure. It’s pure moving freedom.”
Grandmaster Ouyang sat frozen in his chair, his bald, salve-smeared chin twitching in manic denial.
“No... No! It can’t be!” Ouyang shrieked under his breath. “Where is the rough churning?! Where is the cooking pot rupture?! Why aren’t the elements exploding?!”
Right as Ouyang uttered those words, a terrifying, ear-splitting crack tore through the stadium like a lightning strike.
KRAAAACK-BOOOOOM!
The explosion didn’t come from Frank’s wok.
It came from Station Two.
Young Master Han Yun of the Thunder Fire Sect had become so transfixed by the sky beasts dancing above Frank’s pan that his spiritual crushing weight of the Eight-Dragon Violet Gold Fire had wavered for barely a tenth of a second.
Inside the three-ton bronze vessel, the locked, unvented steam pressure had instantly spiked past eight hundred pounds of pressure!
The massive, two-hundred-pound purple bronze lid blew off its seating with the force of an artillery shell!
SHRRRRRRRRR!
Shrouded in purple lightning and jagged shrapnel, the heavy two-hundred-pound bronze lid spun through the air like a huge, razor-sharp circular saw blade, flying horizontally across the arena directly toward Frank’s head at faster-than-sound speed!
“Look out!”
“The cooking pot exploded! The lid is flying toward Station One!”
The exam guards and guards scrambled in blind panic, diving behind stone pillars to save their own lives.
The lethal two-hundred-pound bronze projectile crossed the thirty paces in a split second, howling with enough moving driving force to cleave an armored war elephant in two.
Frank didn’t even look up from his pan.
He gave the wok another smooth wrist flip. He watched the Azure Dragon and White Tiger coalesce into golden vapor. Then he called out in a calm, bored builder rhythm:
“Shitou. Flyaway scrap in Sector Two. Clear the work zone.”
“Yes, Master!”
A dark iron dark shape blurred through the air with the speed of a falling meteor.
Shen Shitou leaped onto the raised stone platform.
His work trousers snapped in the wind. The forty-tiny silver-steel-heavy dark metal channels beneath his skin flared with deep, blinding starlight. His boots slammed into the flat stone slabs with the unmoving weight of a land-wide foundation pile.
Shitou gripped the hickory handle of his twenty-pound forged hard dark metal-steel sledgehammer with both hands, brought it behind his right shoulder in a compact forty-five-degree hip rotation. Then it swung forward with the full, unbending force of his Ancient Star-Forged Iron Body!
THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The sound of the impact was like a mountain collapsing into an iron mine.
The flat face of Shitou’s twenty-pound hammer met the spinning two-hundred-pound bronze projectile dead-center in mid-air!
The faster-than-sound blasting blast wave was instantly absorbed into Shitou’s silver-steel channels and discharged straight down through his legs into the bedrock, cracking the granite platform with a deep, echoing thump.
The flying bronze lid didn’t bounce away. It didn’t shatter into dangerous fragments.
Under forty thousand pounds of heavy-duty high-pressure impact, the two-hundred-pound curved bronze lid was instantly tightly packed, squashed. Then it flattened into a neat, perfectly square, three-inch-thick metal coaster!
TINK.
The flattened bronze coaster dropped out of the air, landing harmlessly on Frank’s tool table right beside his bottle of peanut oil.
Shitou lowered his hammer, wiped a speck of soot from his sleeve, and nodded: “Scrap cleared, Master.”
“Good job,” Frank said, tossing the herbs once more. “Nice clean hit. Keep the table clear.”
The one hundred thousand spectators in the stadium stared at Shen Shitou. Their souls nearly left their bodies.
A student... Swatted a faster-than-sound flying cooking pot lid out of the sky with a sledgehammer... And flattened it into a drink coaster?!
Before anyone could scream, Frank pulled his stainless spatula back, grabbed the sixteen-inch domed metal lid of the wok with a rag. Then he slapped it firmly down over the sizzling iron pan.
CLANG-SEAL.
Frank cut the spirit-gas burner off fully.
The arena went dead silent.
Then, from beneath the sealed metal lid of Frank’s black wok, a sound began to echo across the quiet plaza.
POP!
The spectators blinked.
POP! POP!
It was a crisp, dry, rhythmic bursting sound. It echoed through the thin metal of the lid like fireworks in a tin can.
POP! POP-POP! POP-POP-POP!
Within five seconds, hundreds of rapid-fire popping sounds exploded inside the dark pan, rattling the lid against the rim with frenzied, machine-gun driving force!
Young Master Han Yun, who was sitting in the debris of his ruined fire with singed eyebrows, stared across the arena in sheer, unhinged confusion.
“What... What’s that sound?!” Han Yun screamed, clutching his head. “Are his herbs dying?! Are they crumbling into ash?!”
Grandmaster Ouyang leaned over the balcony, laughing hysterically: “He burned the medicine! Those are the death-spasms of burst spiritual cells! He has produced a pot of charred popcorn!”
Down on the platform, Frank pulled a blue shop rag from his pocket, wiped his forehead. Then he checked his pocket watch.
“Five minutes and twelve seconds,” Frank muttered. He tapped the shaking lid with the flat of his pencil. “Popcorn alchemy. Works every time.”