By noon on the second day of the All-You-Can-Eat City-Wall Barbecue Festival, the five-mile expanse of the Outer South Wall and the broad avenues of the South, West, East. North Wards no longer resembled a besieged capital at all.
It was the grandest, happiest, most mouthwatering open-air folk festival in three hundred years of Great Qian history!
Along the wide boulevard behind the southern ramparts, one thousand long pine banquet tables stretched for miles beneath red-and-gold festive bunting. At every table sat dockworkers in patched vests, silk-robed scholars from the Royal Academy, off-duty Capital Garrison soldiers, washerwomen holding rosy-cheeked toddlers. White-haired grandparents—all passing platters of sizzling Golden-Crispy Cumin Roast Boar Belly, dipping translucent petals of Chilled Crystal Flood-Crocodile Sashimi into wasabi soy sauce.
Fishing fist-sized, super-elastic Thunder-Horn Beef Tendon Meatballs out of bubbling two-copper copper hotpots!
Up on the central carving stage atop the South Gate watchtower, Gu Changsheng , at Rank 4 Late, flipped fifty-pound racks of honey-glazed boar ribs with his black [Iron Wok Spatula]. Chubby Grandpa Yao’s twelve-armed emerald [Living Wood-Lotus Chef Avatar] carved whole roast pigs at lightning speed. Master Dan-Chen—wearing his yellow [Head Dish-Washer & Clinic Pharmacist Apron] with a look of supreme alchemical bliss—ladled medicinal bone-marrow broth into ten thousand waiting bowls.
