Fifty miles west of Golden-Crow Capital, two towering black cliffs pinched the royal road into a narrow, rocky throat known as Tiger-Jaw Pass.
For three hundred years, this hundred-foot-high fortress wall had guarded the western entrance to the Royal Plains. Today, however, the ancient stone battlements didn’t look like a military fort at all—they looked like a giant, bubbling witch’s kitchen.
Thirty massive bronze alchemy furnaces, each twelve feet tall and carved with crooked fire-toads, stood in a row along the top of the pass wall.
Underneath every furnace burned piles of foul-smelling sulfur coal and dried red-scorpion shells. Thick clouds of purplish-red smoke belched out of the thirty bronze chimneys, rolling down the western slope of the valley like a heavy, poisonous fog bank. Wherever the purple-red mist touched a roadside pine tree or a patch of wild grass, the leaves hissed, turned black, and melted into sticky yellow slime within seconds.
At the center of the pass wall, sitting on a tall chair woven from thousand-year-old fire-rattan, was Immortal Advisor #3: Master Pill-Fire.
He was a skinny old man with a hooked nose, sunken cheeks, and a long goatee dyed bright crimson to look like a flame. He wore an extravagant robe sewn from scarlet crane feathers and had twelve jade pill-gourds hanging around his waist, clinking whenever he moved. Around his body swirled the scorching, tyrannical pressure of a Rank 5 Foundation Establishment Alchemist!
