Across the wide-open limestone expanse where the Thousand-Gravity Illusion Labyrinth had stood only moments before, three thousand spectators in the grandstands sat in pin-drop silence.
The autumn breeze carried the rich, sweet scent of star-anise and black-sugar licorice across the arena. On the lonely stone pedestal in the center, Little Marquis Qian Hu tried to pull his silk boots out of the ankle-deep licorice taffy. Only to step right out of both shoes and hop away bare-footed toward the locker rooms while covering his face with his sleeves.
Back on the dry flagstone circle that had been shielded by Ye Xiao’s oil-paper umbrella, the twenty teenaged commoner scholarship students slowly lowered their arms and looked around in dazed wonder.
Then, right in the middle of the quiet arena, a loud, hollow GURRRRRGLE echoed from thirteen-year-old Lin Shu’s stomach.
Lin Shu’s thin face instantly turned the color of a boiled beet. He clutched his patched gray robe over his ribs and bowed his head in embarrassment. Like most of the twenty outer-ward scholarship candidates, he had woken up at four in the morning to walk ten miles to the Royal Academy.
The only two dry millet buns he had brought for the entire day had been ground into the dirt at the gate by Qian Hu’s boots. After surviving the morning spirit-pillar pressure, the written exam panic, and the brief tenfold gravity crush that had bruised their knees and ankles, all twenty commoner kids were trembling with exhaustion and hunger.
