The purple-green flood hit the digestive core of the continent-sized furnace with the force of a falling moon.
One hundred thousand gallons of Auntie Qin and Su Nuannuan’s boiling Laxative and Moral-Detox Broth vanished into the semi-biological stomach of the four-hundred-mile brass forge. Oily lilac steam exploded from the outer seam joints in whistling plumes. The massive brass hull shivered across its entire length, groaning like an overfed ox that had just swallowed a barrel of castor oil on market day.
Inside his glowing command array, Headmaster Hong froze. His fingers hovered inches above the soul-binding altar. The crimson script-rune between his eyebrows flickered violently between regal gold and sour spinach green.
“What did you pour down my rear intake pipe?!” Headmaster Hong shrieked. His voice cracked across three leagues of boiling magma.
“What is that ungodly stench?!”
“Ten-thousand-year astral rhubarb and senna leaves,” Gu Changsheng shouted back over the megaphone from behind Empress Luo Qingxue’s diamond-ice windbreak, wiping a speck of prune syrup off his thumb with a clean kitchen rag. “Plus ten thousand barrels of fermented mountain prunes and Nuannuan’s black-licorice dew. It’s great for clearing out five millennia of clogged greed.”
The Golden-Finger Smelting Furnace clearly agreed.
