Inside the fifty-mile pocket vault of Floating White-Lotus City, the sound of chopping echoed like a machine gun.
CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP!
A blur of purple Half-Step Rank 9 light flashed over a mile-long wooden cutting board.
Alchemy Sovereign Yao—wearing his bright yellow Debtor vest over his crane-feather robe and a pair of brass kitchen goggles over his regrown eyebrows—was swinging two heavy iron cleavers with all the skill of his four thousand years of cultivation!
Every second, ten tons of Ten-Thousand-Year Star-Onions, Centennial Blood-Ginseng, and Golden Void-Lotus Roots were sliced into paper-thin, completely uniform rings and swept straight into the glowing wormhole hoppers leading to the Pulsar Reactor!
Even though onion juice was spraying everywhere, Sovereign Yao had a radiant, blissful smile on his face.
“Teacher Sun! Chef Guo! Look at my onion rings!” Sovereign Yao called out proudly, wiping a tear of onion steam from his cheek. “By infusing a trace of my Half-Step Rank 9 Fire-Qi into the edge of the cleaver while slicing, the star-onion’s pungent essence stays locked inside the cells until it hits the broth! My understanding of the Dao of Ingredient Preparation just went up another level!”
Beside the hopper, Old Guo gave Sovereign Yao a big thumbs-up while stirring a vat of thousand-year soy sauce. “Good job, Little Yao! Your knife work is almost as steady as Hong Ling’s now! Keep chopping—we have three hundred planets’ worth of hoarded herbs to boil before midnight!”
