Standing inside the glass-walled control room overlooking the five-mile Planetary Pressure-Cooker Alchemy Furnace, three captured former Alchemy Grandmasters from the old Four Great Sects of Canglan—who were now working as junior herb-washing assistants for Boom-Pot Sun—were trembling like leaves in an autumn wind.
The oldest of them, Elder Dan Huo, stared down into the yawning five-mile Void-Steel bowl below and grabbed Boom-Pot Sun’s white coat with shaking hands.
“Director Sun! You... you can’t be serious!” Elder Dan Huo’s white beard quivered in terror. “To refine Foundation Establishment Pills and Golden Core Breakthrough Pills, the ancient alchemy scriptures state that one must bathe for three days, burn sandalwood incense in a silent room, weigh every leaf to the hundredth of an ounce on a jade scale, and gently fan the flame with a swan-feather fan for seven days and seven nights! If the fire fluctuates by even half a degree, the cauldron turns to ash!”
“A swan-feather fan? Weighing leaves one by one?”
Boom-Pot Sun snorted, adjusting his soot-stained chef hat and pulling on a pair of thick rubber insulated gloves.
“Elder Dan, if I weighed fifty thousand tons of herbs one leaf at a time on a little jade scale, even Old Red-Nose’s great-great-grand-monkeys would die of old age before the first pot was ready!” Boom-Pot Sun grabbed the brass microphone on the control console and roared with the joy of a mad chef:
