Three thousand feet above Valve Station Delta, the physical world of the Azure Cloud Sect was experiencing an office and culinary earthquake.
In the huge outer sect kitchens behind the Grand Dining Pavilion, three hundred mortal cooks and apprentice turners were in the midst of the morning breakfast preparation. Just then, the copper delivery pipes suddenly began to scream.
Along the high mountain paths connecting the outer dormitories to the lecture halls, thousands of students stopped in their tracks as the stone flags beneath their straw sandals hummed with a deep, soothing shaking. The dry, dusty mountain streams that had trickled through the gullies since mid-summer suddenly swelled into clear, rushing torrents of sparkling water, tumbling over gray boulders and splashing into the irrigation channels of the lower orchards with joyous, musical clatter.
Old Cook Zhang, a veteran of thirty-five years of boiling millet porridge, was standing before the seventh cooking pot. A ten-foot bronze vessel that had not produced a decent bowl of broth in two months due to low water pressure.
Without warning, the bronze spigot above the cooking pot exploded with an ear-splitting POP, shooting its lead valve-plug across the kitchen into a sack of dried beans.
