By 5:30 PM on Monday evening, the dinner rush inside Gu Family 2-Copper Hotpot & Peace Clinic #001 on Central Market Avenue was in full, glorious swing.
Over three hundred working-class families, off-duty artisans, and scholars sat packed around sixty steaming brass mini-hotpots inside the warm, Moonlight-Pearl-lit hall. Dipping fresh slices of highland mutton into bubbling ginger-bone broth spiced with the twenty thousand pounds. Of garlic that Black-Tiger Biao’s five hundred aproned thugs had just finished peeling outside on the curb.
At Table #14 right in the middle of the crowded dining hall. Corrupt Censor Ge—a fifty-year-old Fourth-Rank Imperial Censor who secretly owed thirty thousand silver taels to the Eastern Palace’s. Underground gambling houses—was staring down at his bubbling pot of mutton soup with cold sweat trickling down his neck.
An hour ago, Second Prince Qian Ye had summoned Censor Ge to a back alley, wiped out his thirty-thousand-silver gambling debt, handed him an extra 20,000 silver taels in bank notes. Given him a secret alchemical pellet called the [Rank 3 Turtle-Breath Fake-Death Pill].
“Listen carefully, Censor Ge,” Qian Ye had whispered with icy calculation. *“Since I cannot beat Gu Changsheng with force or frost-worms, I will crush his hundred hotpot clinics with Imperial Law! Swallow this Fake-Death Pill right after taking a bite of his hotpot during the evening rush!
