By Saturday noon, twelve pillars of black wolf-dung beacon smoke rose along the northern horizon of the Great Qian Kingdom. The heavy iron warning bells atop the Outer Walls of Sky-Crown City tolled in slow, ominous triples.
Across the sprawling streets of the South, West, and East Outer Wards—where two million commoner artisans, dockworkers, washerwomen. Night-school families made their homes—a wave of cold panic threatened to break out as news of the approaching One-Hundred-Thousand Iron-Hide Flood Beast Tide spread from alley to alley.
And right at the height of that noon panic. The towering forty-foot vermilion gates of the Inner Imperial Palace City—where the Royal Clan. The three hundred wealthiest aristocratic families lived behind a separate ring of Rank 4 defensive formations—slammed shut with a deafening metallic BOOM!
Standing atop the high marble parapet of the locked Inner Palace Gate was Second Prince Qian Ye. Having just slipped back into the palace through a secret postern tunnel after uncorking the Flood-Dragon Pheromones at the northern gorge!
Through a bronze amplifying horn, Qian Ye’s bandaged, venomous voice echoed out over the two million commoners of the Outer City:.
“Hear this, subjects of the Outer Wards! A once-in-a-century tide of one hundred thousand ferocious Flood Beasts has broken through the northern gorge and will strike the Outer South Wall tomorrow at dawn! Because the Inner Palace’s ancestral defensive array only has enough spirit-stones to shield the Royal Clan and the court nobility, the Inner Palace Gates are hereby sealed until the beast…
