By 11:45 AM, the vast open plaza of South Ward Square was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with over five thousand working-class residents, canal dockworkers, merchant guild scouts. Curious inner-city nobles who had rushed over after hearing that Chief Royal Alchemist Master Dan-Chen was dueling the mysterious Patriarch of the Gu Family Peace Pharmacy.
In the center of the square, two raised wooden platforms had been erected twenty paces apart.
On the eastern platform—draped in purple silk banners and guarded by twenty Royal Alchemist Guild enforcers—stood a gleaming. Six-foot-tall Royal Gold-Inlaid Pill Tripod surrounded by velvet trays of hundred-year purple ginseng, blood-coral powder, fiery scorpion-venom crystals. Spirit-jade lotus seeds worth a full 1,000 silver taels.
Sitting cross-legged beside the eastern platform in a cushioned armchair, Herb-Tycoon Boss Sun fanned himself with a gold-leaf folding fan and sneered loudly at the crowd of dockworkers and orphans below:.
“Open your eyes wide, you South Ward mud-legs! Today, Chief Royal Alchemist Master Dan-Chen is personally refining an Ancient Purple-Blood Qi Pill using a secret formula bestowed by His Highness Second Prince Qian Ye! One single pill requires one thousand silvers of my Hundred-Grass Hall’s finest spirit herbs!
Meanwhile, look at what your ‘Miracle Physician Gu’ brought to the western stage—a rusted iron soup cauldron, five sacks of coarse grain, a cartload of butcher-shop lamb bones, and three hundred white winter radishes! Bwahaha! Is he competing in an Immortal Alchemy Duel or opening a roadside noodle stall?!”
