Bright morning sunlight shone through the carved sandalwood windows of Cloud-Crest Peak, the luxury residential summit of the Azure-Sword Sect.
Inside Courtyard #7, Lin Feng—a spoiled twenty-year-old Rank 4 Peak Inner Disciple and nephew of the Third Elder—yawned under his silk brocade blanket and stuck one bare white foot out the side of his canopy bed.
He didn’t open his eyes. For the past six years, every morning at seven o’clock sharp, his assigned Outer Disciple servant, Xiao Wu, would be kneeling on the cold floor beside the bed holding a pair of warmed velvet slippers, a basin of hot rose-water for his face, and a porcelain tray of steamed bird’s-nest porridge.
Lin Feng wiggled his toes in the air for ten seconds.
No warm slipper touched his foot. Instead, a freezing draft blew under the bedroom door and gave his ankle goosebumps.
“Xiao Wu!” Lin Feng snapped, kicking his leg irritably with his eyes still shut. “Are you dead?! My foot has been in the air for ten breaths! If the rose-water is one degree too cold today, I’ll have the Whip Hall take three Spirit Stones off your yearly credit and make you scrub my chamber pot with your toothbrush!”
