Empress Luo Qingxue accepted the Frost-Pine cedar pen from her husband’s hand, her fingers cool and steady as carved jade.
Thirteen-year-old Su Nuannuan crowded in close beside her mother’s right elbow, her gap-toothed smile shining like a little sun as she held open her pink herb pouch. Meanwhile, Auntie Qin stood on Luo Qingxue’s left side with three golden Peace Pharmacy acupuncture needles poised between her fingers to calibrate the medical dosage of the new law.
“For ten billion years, the old sky behaved like the worst kind of quack doctor,” Auntie Qin huffed, gesturing with her chin toward the dark purple Heavenly Tribulation Thunderclouds rumbling beyond the wisteria railings of Floor Nine.
“A cultivator spends forty years working honestly, strengthens their meridians, and reaches a realm breakthrough. And instead of giving them a physical checkup and a bowl of tonic soup to stabilize their foundation, the sky blasts them with nine rounds of high-voltage lightning! Half the honest folks in the lower realms ended up with charred hair and chronic joint pain just from advancing a single rank!”
“And the thunder always wakes up babies who are trying to take their afternoon nap, and scorches the clean bedsheets drying on the clothesline!” Su Nuannuan added, puffing out her cheeks in righteous indignation.
