BUBBLE... GURGLE... BLORP!
Half a mile south of the main five-mile pressure cooker sat Crater #2, a smaller thousand-foot geothermal pit where Boom-Pot Sun and his junior alchemist team were staring down at five hundred tons of thick, bubbling black-green alchemy waste.
Every time a big bubble popped on the surface of the pit, a wave of sour, fermented steam rose up that made even the purple weeds on the crater rim curl up and play dead.
“Ugh! My eyes!”
Up on the hillside, Rank 7 Late Monkey King Old Red-Nose—whose golden nose was ten thousand times more sensitive than a human’s—clamped two furry hands over his nostrils, his eyes watering like leaky faucets as he rolled backward behind a giant rock.
Down at the edge of the pit, Boom-Pot Sun wore three layers of wet towels wrapped around his face while stirring the bubbling sludge with a fifty-foot iron pole.
“Let’s see...” Boom-Pot Sun muttered through the towels, reading his stained notebook. “Abacus Su said I’m not allowed to throw away a single pound of this five-hundred-ton batch of extracted Erysipelas Herb-Dregs. What if I neutralize the bitter herb-toxin by adding fifty barrels of Fermented Spirit-Soybean Brine that Old Guo left in the back of the pantry car, plus twenty barrels of Nine-Headed Magma-Eel Sichuan Chili Oil from Black-Iron Moon, and then aerate it with a tank of Compressed Thunder-Peak Gas?!”
