At dawn on Heavenly-Lock Summit, the sound of crashing porcelain echoed through the Grand Astrolabe Hall as Grandmaster Zhen swept an entire row of jade abacuses off his desk.
CRASH! CLATTER!
“Zero?!” Grandmaster Zhen’s voice cracked so high that three bats hanging from the temple rafters fell straight to the floor. His beard was trembling violently as he glared at the thirty-six blank teleportation ledgers lying at his feet. “Yesterday our thirty-six Continental Teleportation Halls brought in three million Spirit Stones in daily tolls! How can all thirty-six halls report zero customers and zero copper coins in the same afternoon?!”
Kneeling on the cold stone floor with his silver hat in his hands, Elder Feng—who had fled back from Cloud-Ferry City by riding a fast horse all night because he was too embarrassed to take Pei Xuan’s two-copper bus—shivered and bowed his forehead to the carpet.
“Sect Master! It’s that traitor Mo Xiaoliu!” Elder Feng cried out tearfully. “Wait—he calls himself Dry-Well’s Chief Array Architect now! He teamed up with Pei Xuan to build giant yellow-and-green iron boxes called Public Teleport Buses right across the street from every single one of our halls! They charge one copper coin for two hundred miles and two copper coins for five hundred miles! Even Auntie Zhang from Three-Forks Village rode to Cloud-Ferry City with three live hens in her basket and didn’t even spill her tea! Nobody wants to pay our one-thousand-stone fee anymore!”
