Across the night sky of Sky-Crown City, the three-hundred-foot Sky-Wide Truth-Projection Screen shone brighter than the autumn full moon. Its crystal-clear, four-thousand-line image reflected off the warm, steaming waters of all nine city canals from the South Gate to the northern ramparts.
Down on the central white-jade stage of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Second Prince Qian Ye [Regressor Halo: 10%] pressed both hands desperately over his own mouth. His silk-clad body trembled like a dead leaf in a typhoon as he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to force his thoughts to go completely blank.
Yet anyone who has ever been told “Do not think of a white elephant” knows a fundamental law of human nature: the harder a panicked mind tries to bury a guilty secret. The brighter that secret blazes at the very front of the brain!
That law was ten times more ruthless when the brain in question was swimming in a full pint of Su Nuannuan’s and Grandpa Yao’s Rank 4 Truth-Serum Peppermint Cider. Leaking unshielded soul-static from a fractured 10% Regressor Halo.
Ding—whirrrrr!
Inside the glowing crystal sugar-peach atop the fifth tier of the ten-foot cake. The Rank 4 Memory-Reading Truth Mirror locked effortlessly onto the first three blazing memory clusters at the surface of Qian Ye’s panicked mind.
