The smell of roasted venison and sweet plum wine couldn’t hide the metal tang of dry solder.
Inside the Azure Cloud Sect’s Grand Banquet Hall, ninety carved cedar tables groaned under the weight of silver platters. Three hundred sect masters, clan patriarchs, and reclusive rogue elders from across seven provinces were laughing with tears streaming down their weathered cheeks.
“Ten thousand years,” old Patriarch Han of the Verdant Bamboo Clan cried, raising a jade cup until wine slopped over his trembling fingers. “Ten thousand years our ancestors rotted in the dirt, unable to touch the Golden Gate. And now—heaven opens its gates to our generation!”
“To the benevolence of the Ministry!” shouted another elder, slamming his fist onto the table in drunken euphoria. “To the true road of Immortality!”
Lin Ke sat in the shadows of the ninth pillar, near the drafty service hall where the kitchen boys hauled greasy iron pots.
He didn’t drink. In front of him sat a single bowl of boiled mountain tea, cold and bitter, with a film of gray scum floating on the surface.
On the raised royal dais at the front of the hall, Envoy Chu Rong reclined upon a chair carved from imported white sandalwood. A silk canopy stitched with golden clouds hovered above his head, shielding him from the mortal draft.
