“Spicy beef tripe hotpot?”
At the foot of the porch steps, eighty-year-old Grandmaster Pill-King Huo blinked behind his crystal monocle, certain his old ears had misheard.
“Immortal Master Gu,” Grandmaster Huo said nervously, pointing a trembling finger at the fist-sized sphere of purple fire purring in Gu Changsheng’s left palm. “That is the ancient [Nine-Nether Lotus Strange Fire Seed]
born from the planetary core of our Blazing-Flame World! Even though the little miss washed the corpse-poison out of its outer petals, its inner core temperature still exceeds eight thousand degrees! If you put an iron cooking pot over it, the pot will melt into liquid slag in half a breath!”
Up in the VIP box, Patriarch Nalan Hong nodded rapidly. “Master Gu, our Blazing-Flame Empire sits on top of twelve active magma veins! For three centuries, that Strange Fire Seed acted as the pressure valve in the Thousand-Fathom Magma Trench.
Now that Xiao Huo ripped it out and lost control of it, the underground fire pressure under ten major cities is already rising! Unless a Rank 7 fire cultivator spends fifty years refining it in a sealed cave, the volcanoes will erupt before nightfall!”
As if to prove Patriarch Nalan Hong’s words, a low, rumbling tremor rolled beneath the granite floor of the Imperial Colosseum.
