Before the morning bell of the Great Qian Royal Academy had finished ringing its third bronze chime. Three hundred gilded carriages with vermilion wheels had already jammed the white marble avenue outside the Dragon-Leap Gate. Footmen in embroidered waistcoats shouted for right-of-way.
Plumed warhorses snorted clouds of white mist into the crisp autumn air. Noble matrons leaned out of silk-curtained windows, dabbing scented handkerchiefs against their noses whenever a commoner scholarship candidate hurried past in patched hemp shoes.
Right into the middle of that brocade-and-gold bottleneck rolled an enormous carriage built of gleaming dark ironwood, pulled by four plump white spirit-horses whose manes were braided with red ribbons. Behind the carriage trotted a twelve-foot, two-headed crimson hound carrying a wicker picnic basket in its left jaws and a spare brass teapot in its right.
Every plumed warhorse within fifty yards took one sniff of Hotpot’s Rank 4 Early flame-spirit aura, folded its ears flat, and backed politely into the nearest gutter with its tail tucked between its hocks.
Gu Changsheng stepped down from the driver’s box wearing his clean blue cotton jacket, his white chef’s apron folded neatly inside his coat pocket. His Seven-Wolves leather belt glinting dull bronze at his waist. He reached up to lift seven-year-old Su Nuannuan onto the marble curb, then steadied nine-year-old Gu Nian and ten-year-old Gu Ye Xiao as they hopped down side by side.
