“Shoot! Shoot them all with arrows! Didn’t you hear this Immortal’s order?!”
Standing in the smoking crater of his exploded Nine-Dragon Purple-Copper Cauldron, Master Pill-Fire stomped his charred cloth boots on the blackened rock, his three-foot-wide black-soot afro bouncing like a giant burnt dandelion every time he jumped.
Tiny orange sparks were still crackling in the singed ends of his red goatee, and the bottom half of his shredded crane-feather robe smelled horribly from his lost battle with Boom-Pot Sun’s sour-plum laxative.
Up on the hundred-foot stone battlements of Tiger-Jaw Pass, not a single bowstring was drawn.
In fact, not a single soldier was even holding a bow!
All along the pass wall, one hundred thousand Royal Guards were sitting cross-legged on the warm stone floor, holding their upturned iron helmets in their laps and happily licking the last drops of golden honey-glaze and savory nine-herb mutton gravy off their fingers!
Everywhere across the wall, the crisp CRACK-POP of advancing bones and meridians echoed like firecrackers on New Year’s Eve:
“Haha! Brothers, look at my fist—my skin just hardened from Rank 1 Early to Rank 1 Mid!”
