The early spring morning sun over Azure-Cloud Prefecture City rose bright, clear, and without a single cloud in the blue northern sky.
Inside the warm, cedar-beamed dining hall of the Gu Family Residence on East-Prosperity Avenue, the air was filled with the mouth-watering aroma of crispy golden scallion pancakes, freshly fried dough sticks. Steaming bowls of sweet soybean milk simmered in the [Rank 3 Nine-Flavor Earth-Fire Chef Wok].
Twenty-nine-year-old Gu Changsheng , at Rank 3 Early Martial Grandmaster, sat at the head of the broad oak table wearing a clean dark-blue cotton robe. Taking a relaxed sip of his hot soybean milk, he tapped his bamboo chopsticks lightly against his porcelain bowl and looked across the table at his nine-year-old son.
Nine-year-old Gu Nian , at Rank 2 Peak, was sitting up with textbook posture, chewing his crispy scallion pancake with calm, methodical care. Around his neck, hanging on a sturdy braided red silk cord tucked safely beneath his blue scholar’s tunic and yellow bunny apron, rested his mother’s newly upgraded [Frost-Phoenix Jade Hairpin & Soul-Resonance Compass].
Thanks to the 10,000-DP spatial-muffler upgrade Gu Changsheng had fused into the hairpin at midnight using the melted golden fragments of the [Heavenly Script Surveillance Eye]. The seven-inch jade phoenix no longer leaked a single wisp of Upper-Realm aura to the outside sky. Instead, it rested against the nine-year-old boy’s chest like a warm, reassuring mother’s palm.
“Dad,” nine-year-old Gu Nian said, swallowing his bite of scallion pancake and gently touching his chest over the hidden jade phoenix. “The hairpin doesn’t vibrate at all anymore, and even Grandpa Yao says nobody outside our family can sense it. Better yet, every time I breathe in, the warmth from Mom’s hairpin flows straight into my chest bone—it feels just like sitting beside our heated brick bed in winter.”
“That’s because your mother’s Rank 8 frost-phoenix origin essence is quietly nourishing your [Innate Chaos Demon Bone] while the golden celestial shell keeps the Upper-Realm snoopers blind,” Gu Changsheng smiled. Sliding three crispy golden fried dough sticks onto his son’s plate. “No more celestial spy-clocks poking their noses through our roof tiles.
Eat up—after we finish our morning trip to the Prefecture High Court Plaza, you promised to help Grandpa Fu and Tractor Unit #01 count the spring barley seed sacks.”
“Yes, Dad!” nine-year-old Gu Nian nodded happily, picking up a crispy dough stick with his chopsticks.
Right beside him, seven-year-old Su Nuannuan , at Rank 2 Peak, was having an intense philosophical debate with her porcelain bowl of sweet soybean milk. Blowing gentle little air-streams through a hollow bamboo straw until a cluster of white soy-milk bubbles rose above the rim.
Gurgle-POP!
A round white soy-milk bubble popped in midair, splashing a tiny warm droplet right onto the tip of the seven-year-old girl’s button nose!
Su Nuannuan blinked her big dark eyes, giggled until her twin braids bounced, and wiped her nose with a clean handkerchief. “Dad! Big Brother Nian!
Look—the sweet soy milk tried to put a white winter hat on Nuannuan’s nose!”
“Eat your scallion pancake before you turn yourself into a soy-milk snowman, little bubble-blower,” Gu Changsheng chuckled. Reaching across the table with a warm damp cloth to dab a speck of toasted sesame seed off his daughter’s cheek. “Otherwise your big brother and Grandpa Yao are going to finish the last fried dough stick on the platter.”
Su Nuannuan let out a tiny gasp and immediately clamped both small hands over the last golden dough stick on the central porcelain platter. “Aha! Nuannuan caught the last crunchy stick first!
Half for Nuannuan and half for Grandpa Yao!”
Sitting inside his miniature porcelain teacup seat beside the condiment tray. Three-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Grandpa Yao—riding inside his chubby two-foot [Jade-Turtle Plush Doll] with his miniature gold spectacles perched on his green velvet snout—beamed with grandfatherly delight. Nuannuan fed him a bite-sized piece of crispy dough stick:.
“Hehehe! Little Miss Nuannuan is the most filial apprentice in the Nine Provinces! This [Nine-Flavor Earth-Fire Chef Wok] dough stick is crisp on the outside, cloud-soft on the inside, and packed with pure five-grain vitality!
Even the [Rank 3 Early Grandmaster] internal qi in Doctor Qin’s wrists is humming just from pouring the soy milk!”
Sitting on Gu Changsheng’s left in her spotless emerald-trimmed physician’s robe, twenty-four-year-old Auntie Qin. At Rank 3 Early Martial Grandmaster, blushed faintly and refilled sixty-two-year-old Grandpa Fu’s bowl before looking toward the courtyard gate:.
“Speaking of our morning outing, Master Changsheng... Golem Units #01 through #30 and Guard Captain One-Ear Scar have already taken their positions around the perimeter of the Prefecture High Court Plaza with the morning soup-carts. Second Elder Gu Ba just arrived at the side courtyard with his prize pink piglet Little Flower and his livestock accounting clipboard.”
Just as Auntie Qin finished speaking, [Dad’s Plot-Spoiler Notebook] resting beside Gu Changsheng’s teacup gave a soft, rhythmic vibration.
Picking up the leather-bound notebook and flipping it open with his thumb, twenty-nine-year-old Gu Changsheng read the glowing golden status update with an amused quirk of his eyebrow:.
[ DING! PROTAGONIST LUCK HALO MONITOR — EXTREME CALAMITY ACTIVE! ]
* Target : Lin Fan (18, Rank 1 Late, Cracked Meridians)
* Current Halo : 5.0% (Extreme Karmic Inversion Phase Active!)
* World Law Rule : When a Plunder-Type Chosen One’s Halo drops to.
5%, all stolen fortune violently snaps back as.
24 Hours of Non-Stop Slapstick Calamity!
* Current Location: Western Public Well Alley, 2 Blocks from Court!
Extreme Karmic Inversion Phase, Gu Changsheng chuckled inwardly, taking another calm sip of his hot soybean milk. The world’s karma really does keep an itemized ledger. Let’s see what happens when our former Chosen One tries to walk two blocks across town with a five-percent Luck Halo.
*
Two miles west of the Gu Residence, in a narrow cobblestone alley behind the Western Market Public Well, eighteen-year-old Lin Fan was experiencing that itemized karmic ledger firsthand.
Having spent five hours between midnight and dawn crawling on his belly through the freezing. Rat-infested drainage pipes beneath the Azure-Cloud Prefecture High Court Plaza to bury his twelve forbidden [Thousand-Soul Blood-Sacrifice Array Stones]. Lin Fan had finally hauled himself out of a storm-drain grate just as the morning sun cleared the city walls.
His tattered clothes were stiff with dried sewer sludge, his hair was matted with rotten cabbage leaves, his nose was swollen purple from the sewer rat bite. His missing upper front tooth made a pathetic whistling sound every time he wheezed through his mouth.
Worse still, his throat was so parched from breathing sewer fumes all night that it felt as if he had swallowed a handful of hot gravel.
“Water... just one gulp of clean well-water...” eighteen-year-old Lin Fan croaked, dragging his bruised, splinted legs toward the stone public well at the center of the quiet alley.
“Once I wash this mud off my face and put on that stolen white scholar’s robe, I’ll climb the High Court steps and beat the Grievance Drum...”
Grabbing the hemp well-rope with his trembling right hand, Lin Fan hauled the heavy oak bucket up from the dark stone shaft.
Seeing the bucket brimming with clear, ice-cold spring water, the parched eighteen-year-old didn’t even wait to find a dipper—he plunged his entire bruised, swollen face straight into the wooden bucket and gulped greedily!
Gulp... gulp... GLURK-CHOKE!
Because Lin Fan’s [Protagonist Luck Halo] was locked at 5.0% (Extreme Karmic Bad-Luck Rebound), on his very third swallow, a fat. Three-inch-long black pond tadpole that had been peacefully hibernating at the bottom of the well shaft for. Two months was sucked straight up the bucket current and shot headfirst down Lin Fan’s open windpipe!
“HUUUUUURK—COUGH-GACK!”
Lin Fan’s single unswollen eye bugged out of his skull like a stepped-on frog’s!
In his panic, his slick fingers lost their grip on the heavy. Iron-hooped oak water bucket—which plummeted three feet straight down and slammed with a bone-cracking CRUNCH! squarely onto the big toe of his right foot!
“OWWWWW—HACK-WHEEZE!”
With a broken right big toe throbbing below and a live, wriggling three-inch tadpole tickling his windpipe above, eighteen-year-old Lin Fan tumbled backward onto the wet cobblestones. Clutching his throat with both muddy hands as his face turned the color of a pickled eggplant!
Only after rolling around on the gravel for two full minutes. Pounding his own sternum with his fist did Lin Fan finally hack up the slimy black tadpole—which landed with a cheerful plop! in a puddle.
Flicked its tail at him, and swam merrily down a street gutter!
Weeping and gasping for air on his hands and knees, Lin Fan stared at the puddle in utter, brain-melting disbelief:.
“A live tadpole... in a thirty-foot deep winter spring well?! I drank three mouthfuls of water and nearly choked to death on a frog-baby?!”
Trembling from head to foot, Lin Fan pushed himself up on his scraped elbows and looked up at the clear blue morning sky to catch his breath:.
“At least the sky is completely cloudless today... Nothing else can possibly fall on my head from a clear blue—”
Coo-coo-RUUUU!
Directly above Lin Fan’s upturned face, perched in a neat row along the wooden third-story eaves of a closed grain-warehouse, sat thirty-two plump. Overfed city pigeons that had just finished gorging themselves on a spilled sack of fermented purge-hemp seeds and stale sesame buns!
At the exact second eighteen-year-old Lin Fan looked up with his mouth open, all thirty-two overfed city pigeons tilted their feathered tails over the edge of the roof eaves in flawless, military synchronization!
SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAAAAT!
A torrential, thirty-two-barrel barrage of warm, white-and-gray pigeon droppings plummeted from the third-story eaves like a concentrated hailstorm!
Not a single dropping hit the cobblestones two inches to the left. Not a single dropping hit the brick wall two inches to the right.
Guided by the unerring laws of [5% Extreme Karmic Bad-Luck Rebound], all thirty-two pigeon droppings landed exclusively, squarely, and dead-center on eighteen-year-old Lin Fan’s head, face, neck, and shoulders!
Within two seconds, Lin Fan’s matted hair was transformed into a steaming, three-inch-thick white helmet of foul bird manure!
Sitting frozen on the cobblestones as a warm streak of white pigeon droppings dribbled slowly over his eyebrow and plinked off the tip of his rat-bitten nose. Eighteen-year-old Lin Fan didn’t even have the strength to scream. He simply sat there in dead silence as his soul threatened to float out of his nostrils:.
“Why... Why did thirty-two pigeons all have diarrhea on my head at the exact same second...?”
Tap-tap-clack.
Just then, an old blind street-sweeper came tapping his bamboo cane around the corner of the alley after finishing his dawn shift. Whistling a folk tune and leaving a heavy iron-toothed garden rake leaning against the alley wall beside a horse-watering trough.
Seeing the water trough—and spotting three copper coins sitting on the ledge beside a bar of coarse lye soap—Lin Fan’s bloodshot eye flared with desperate, cornered greed:.
*“Once I wash this bird-manure off my head in that horse trough and take those three coppers, I’ll go straight to the High Court steps and—”
Scrambling to his feet, Lin Fan lunged three steps forward toward the horse trough!
He didn’t look down at his feet.
His right heel—the exact same foot with the newly broken big toe!—stomped down with all his weight squarely. Onto the upturned iron teeth of the heavy garden rake lying flat in the shadow of the wall!
STOMP—WHAM-CRACK!
Like a triggered siege catapult, the six-foot solid white-oak handle of the garden rake whipped upward at sixty miles an hour and smashed squarely into the bridge of eighteen-year-old Lin Fan’s already swollen nose!
“AAAAAAAAAGH!”
Blood sprayed in an curve as Lin Fan was knocked flat on his back into a pile of wet straw. Clutching his flattened, twice-broken nose while stars and little cartoon birds spun around his manure-coated head!
Staggering up out of the straw ten minutes later after rinsing the worst of the bird droppings off his face in the muddy horse trough and pulling a stolen. Torn white scholar’s robe over his filthy clothes. Eighteen-year-old Lin Fan limped toward the thirty-six marble steps of the Azure-Cloud Prefecture High Court with a look of rabid, frothing madness in his single open eye.
Clutching the unsealed [Thousand-Soul Blood-Sacrifice Array Scroll] inside his torn sleeve and a forged blood-petition in his other hand. Lin Fan stared up at the giant bronze Grievance Drum hanging outside the High Court gates and hissed through his missing front teeth:.
“Gu Changsheng... you and your cursed family stole my luck! Now I’ll beat the Imperial Grievance Drum to pack thirty thousand fools onto the High Court Plaza—and drain the entire city’s blood to make myself a Rank 3 Grandmaster!”
*
Back in the warm, sunlit dining hall of the Gu Residence, twenty-nine-year-old Gu Changsheng closed [Dad’s Plot-Spoiler Notebook] with a crisp snap as the distant. Echoing BOOOOOOM! of the bronze Grievance Drum rolled across the morning rooftops of Azure-Cloud Prefecture City.
Draining the last drop of his warm soybean milk, Gu Changsheng set his porcelain cup down and smiled calmly at his nine-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter.
“Nian’er, Nuannuan,” Gu Changsheng said, standing up and brushing a crumb from his dark-blue robe while strapping the [Rank 3 Nine-Flavor Earth-Fire Chef Wok] comfortably across his shoulders. “Put on your clean yellow bunny slippers and bring your little red flower stickers and your crayon drawing. Someone just rang the morning bell at the Prefecture High Court—let’s go make sure our thirty thousand neighbors enjoy the show.”
[ DING! 5% KARMIC CALAMITY & THE HIGH COURT GRIEVANCE DRUM! ]
* Lin Fan Slapstick : Choked on a live well-tadpole, bombarded by.
32 pigeons in a cloudless sky, & smashed in.
the nose by a stepped-on garden rake!
* High Court Plot : Lin Fan strikes the bronze Grievance Drum to.
lure 30,000 citizens onto the plaza!
* Daily Income : +280,000 DP/day -> +295,000 DP/day!