By 7:00 PM on Monday evening, news of Corrupt Censor Ge’s public confession—and how a single ladle of Grandpa Yao’s Three-Year Fermented. Stinky Tofu Brine had resurrected a “poisoned corpse” on top of Table #14—spread across all nine districts of Sky-Crown City like a wildfire!
Outside the five-story flagship granary of the Wan Family Grain Consortium, fifty thousand furious citizens pelted the shuttered iron gates with rotten cabbage leaves and snowballs. Roaring for Grain-Tycoon Wan and the Four Noble Grain Consortia (the Wan, Sun, Cui, and Liu Clans) to open their hoarded warehouses.
Inside the heavily fortified upper hall of the Wan Granary, however, Grain-Tycoon Wan and the other three consortium patriarchs (Herb-Tycoon Boss Sun, Jade-Master Cui. Timber-Boss Liu) sat around a brazier with twisted, desperate faces.
“Second Prince Qian Ye’s frost-worms failed, our five hundred Black-Tiger thugs are outside peeling garlic in green aprons. Now that idiot Censor Ge confessed in front of Lord Han!” Boss Sun trembled, clutching his sable coat.
“Boss Wan, our four families borrowed eight hundred thousand silver taels from the Royal Treasury to hoard 800,000 sacks of autumn rice inside our four iron-vaulted granaries!
Now that Gu Changsheng is selling five-grain spirit-rice for five coppers and all-you-can-eat hotpot for two coppers, nobody is buying a single grain from us! What do we do?!”
