By two o’clock in the afternoon, the wide brass highway leading up Joyous-Gold Mountain looked like a river of boiling oil.
Word had traveled across the Central Continent faster than a thunderbolt:
First, Dry-Well Kingdom’s new Spirit-Battery Recharge Grid and Grain-Notes made raw mined Spirit Stones obsolete!
Second, Pei Xuan’s camel cleaned out all eighty million Spirit Stones from the five casinos in Golden-Lotus City!
Third—and worst of all—when Sect Master Jin Wancai hired Gold-Shadow Seven to kill Pei Xuan at noon, he was so flat broke that he stuffed ninety percent of the assassin’s paycheck with painted grey lead rocks!
For three hundred years, Joyous-Gold Mountain had served as the “Unbreakable Central Vault” for the richest clans, retired sect elders, alchemy guilds, and royal nobles of forty neighboring duchies. Because Sect Master Jin promised a 3% yearly dividend and boasted that his mountain sat on top of an endless Spirit Stone mine, thousands of wealthy families had stored their entire clan treasuries inside Joyous-Gold Bank’s mountain vaults, holding only golden paper Joyous-Gold Deposit Certificates in their hands.
Now, ten thousand terrified depositors—from white-bearded Rank 5 clan patriarchs to fat silk-robed chamberlains of western Central Continent dukes—were charging up the mountain steps on horses, flying swords, and carriages, waving their golden deposit slips in the air!
