Outside the front gate of Willow-Breeze Courtyard at 12:00 PM noon, the autumn sun glinted off a forest of drawn cold steel.
One hundred elite Blood-Surgeon Executioners—each one a ferocious Rank 2 Peak or Rank 3 Early martial butcher wearing heavy black chainmail over crimson robes and carrying a four-foot. Forty-pound Ghost-Head Broadsword—stood in ten neat, murderous ranks across the full width of the street.
At their head stood a burly, bald giant with a jagged scar running from his left ear to his chin and a heavy crimson brocade cape draped over his shoulders:.
Blood-Surgeon Guild Master Xue—a Half-Step Rank 4 , at Half-Step Qi Gathering, slaughter-cultivator whose hands were stained dark purple from thirty years of dissecting prisoners and refining blood-pills for the royal clan!
In front of the courtyard gate, Big-Hammer Tie and over two thousand South Ward dockworkers, vegetable hawkers. Neighborhood mothers stood blocking the lane with cargo hooks and rolling pins, their faces red with anger.
“What plague-carrier?! You lying royal butchers!” Big-Hammer Tie bellowed, planting his six-foot iron sledgehammer on the cobblestones in front of the gate.
“Physician Gu gave twenty-five thousand of us free ginger congee yesterday and cured half the street!
There’s no plague in Willow-Breeze Courtyard!”
