The bright midday sun shone over Dry-Well Capital City, gleaming down on a central plaza that still smelled faintly of spicy pickled radish juice and rich turtle broth.
Never in the three-thousand-year history of the Central Continent had such a crowd gathered in one place. Half a million citizens stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the edges of the white stone square, munching on roasted sunflower seeds and sipping hot soy milk from paper cups. Above their heads, four giant hundred-foot projection screens—wired by young Mo Xiaoliu directly into the Continental Spirit-Net—hummed with clear blue light, broadcasting every sight and sound live to over one hundred million Two-Copper Messaging Slates across a thousand cities.
From the red-brick worker apartments of the Western Desert to the newly paved tunnel of Mount Azure in the east, farmers put down their hoes, blacksmiths turned down their bellows, and schoolchildren leaned forward at their desks. Everyone wanted to see what King Pei Xuan was going to do with the four legendary Rank 6 Golden Core Ancestors who had secretly ruled the continent for five hundred years.
Right in the center of the plaza sat four heavy-duty iron shopping carts that Boom-Pot Sun had welded together out of scrap tank armor.
