Twenty minutes later, inside the Royal Forge and Alchemy Courtyard in the center of Dry-Well Capital City.
The courtyard was as big as four football fields paved with thick black fire-stone. Right in the middle of the yard sat a massive, thirty-foot-wide stone wellhead bound with heavy brass pipes and iron valves.
This was the central heating hub connected directly to the Sweet-Spring Spirit Well, where Ao Ming, the ancient three-hundred-foot Flood Dragon, lived deep underground.
Around the wellhead, twenty young apprentice alchemists in soot-stained gray robes were kneeling in front of tiny, three-legged bronze tripods. Each apprentice was sweating buckets, holding a feather fan in one hand and pinching a fire-spell with the other, staring nervously at the little flames underneath their pots.
POOF!
One apprentice sneezed from the smoke. His flame jumped two inches too high, and a smell like burned hair and scorched mud puffed out of the bronze lid.
“Aiya! My sixth batch today is ruined again!” the young apprentice cried, dumping seven blackened, cracked mud balls out onto a tin tray. “Five hours of work, and only two pills didn’t turn into charcoal! Even those two are full of black erysipelas ash!”
Pei Xuan walked into the courtyard with Boom-Pot Sun, Old Guo, Hong Ling, and Abacus Su right behind him.
