Three miles behind Cloud-Mist Town sat Hundred-Furnace Valley, the massive pill-refining compound where all the medicine for Elder Dan’s fifty border halls was baked.
Even though Myriad-Pill Hall looked shiny and luxurious on the outside, Hundred-Furnace Valley looked like the eighteenth level of hell.
Underneath a low, suffocating roof of black tile, two thousand low-ranking Outer-Disciple “Fire Boys” and junior alchemists knelt on scorched gravel in front of two thousand glowing bronze tripods.
The air inside the sheds was over a hundred and twenty degrees, thick with poisonous black sulfur smoke, mercury fumes, and the bitter stench of boiling toad-gall. Every Fire Boy had painful red burn-blisters covering his hands and forearms, because the sect refused to issue fireproof gloves—saying that “bare skin feels the cauldron’s temper better.”
CRACK!
A leather whip lashed across the narrow back of a sixteen-year-old Fire Boy named Xiao Huo, knocking him face-first into the hot coal ash.
“Lazy trash! Keep blowing the bellows!” roared Deacon Qian, the compound’s chief furnace overseer, waving his barbed iron whip. “Vice-Pavilion Master Elder Dan is furious because our fifty border shops haven’t sold a single pill in three days! Elder Dan says the reason our pills aren’t selling is because you lazy Fire Boys aren’t fanning the fires hard enough! Not only are your back wages for the last six months confiscated, starting today even your monthly allowance of two copper coins is canceled, your dinner gruel is cut in half, and everyone works an eighteen-hour shift without…
