CRASH!
Inside the grand Golden-Dragon Throne Room of the Imperial Palace, a priceless jade wine goblet shattered into a hundred pieces against the marble pillar!
“Traitors! Every last one of them is a traitor!”
The Old Yan King stood trembling atop the nine-step golden dais, his yellow dragon robe stained with vomit from the afternoon and his bald head shining with cold, feverish sweat. Because he had eaten Master Pill-Fire’s red-lead and mercury “Longevity Elixirs” every month for twenty years, the heavy-metal poison had long since eaten holes into his nerves—leaving his eyeballs bulging and webbed with burst red blood vessels.
Through the tall open windows of the throne room, the midnight sky to the west wasn’t dark at all.
Three hundred yards outside the West Gate, the hundred-foot solar floodlights of Pei Xuan’s Capital West Grand Train Station & Civic Service Plaza lit up the night like a miniature sun! Even three miles away inside the palace, the warm, cheerful sound of steam-train whistles, movie-theater music, and thousands of laughing citizens echoed on the night breeze.
Down at the bottom of the throne steps knelt a terrified Imperial Palace Eunuch, his forehead bleeding against the floor tiles as he read the latest watchtower report with a shaking voice:
