Golden-Lotus City sat in a valley at the foot of Joyous-Gold Mountain, paved with yellow brass bricks and lit day and night by ten thousand glowing spirit-lanterns.
For five hundred years, Sect Master Jin Wancai and his ancestors had advertised Golden-Lotus City as a “Neutral Paradise of Fortune,” where sect elders, rich merchants, and mortal dukes from across the Central Continent could gamble without anyone asking where their money came from.
In truth, nobody ever walked out of Golden-Lotus City rich.
Every single morning, dozens of ruined nobles and broke loose cultivators were thrown out the back doors of the city’s Five Great Golden Casinos in their underwear, having gambled away their family estates, their flying swords, and even their own freedom into Joyous-Gold Sect’s debtor mines.
At nine o’clock that morning, a strange little group strolled through the golden archway of the city’s main street.
In front walked a handsome young man in simple dark robes, waving a folding fan and sipping iced plum juice through a bamboo straw. Beside him skipped a fierce-eyed sixteen-year-old girl with twin braids, wearing a red apron over her dress and carrying a small cloth purse that jingled with ten silver coins.
Right behind them ambled Old Yellow—a fat, golden-furred camel with a pair of stubby dragon-antlers on his head, wearing smoky-quartz sunglasses and chewing lazily on a pickled radish—while a scarred, one-armed old guard pushed an empty ten-ton spatial flatbed handcart behind the camel.
