“Five thousand indentured Herb-Boy Apprentices locked inside the Underground Fire-Slag Pits with the earth-lava vents opened?!”
On the front steps of Gu Family Gummy-Bear Supermarket #1, the laughter of twenty thousand shoppers vanished in an instant, replaced by a collective gasp of horror and fury.
Down on his knees at the foot of the steps, the young defecting Myriad Pill Sect alchemist—Lin Xiao. A nineteen-year-old outer-hall fire-tender whose own ten-year-old younger brother was trapped in the pits—clawed at the marble flagstones with bleeding fingers as tears streamed down his soot-stained face.
“It’s true, Master Gu! I swear on my soul it’s true!” Lin Xiao sobbed breathlessly.
“For the past twenty years, those ‘Rank 5 Healing Pills’ our Myriad Pill Sect sold for hundreds of stones weren’t even refined from real spirit herbs!
Sect Master Dan Xuan hoarded eighty percent of the real spirit herbs in his private thousand-year vault to trade with the other three Righteous Sects. Forced five thousand indentured eight-to-twelve-year-old Herb-Boys down in the Underground Fire-Slag Pits to boil rotten herb roots with toxic red cinnabar and black lead so the pills would look heavy and dark!”
Lin Xiao pointed a trembling hand up toward the smoking, dark-red volcanic slopes of Myriad Pill Mountain three miles north of the city gates.
