The Fair Lady

A hundred-year aged wine, delicacies from land and sea served together.

Ying Qin's banquet, like this Warm Jade Pavilion, was luxurious and extravagant to the extreme.

The wine had been aged for at least a hundred and fifty years beneath thousand-year-old osmanthus trees; the dishes consisted entirely of rare treasures from heaven and earth, mountain and sea. The wine vessels and tableware were all made of fine jade, inlaid with gems of every color. Even the wine cups in Lin Qi's and Ying Qin's hands had been meticulously carved from fist-sized night-luminous pearls.

No one knew what miraculous technique the craftsman had used, but once amber-colored wine was poured into these cups carved from fist-sized pearls, nine lifelike flood dragons appeared upon them, coiling and flying as though alive. And after passing through the cups, the wine acquired a faint, soul-soothing chill fragrance, making its flavor mellower, richer, and ever more layered.

A pair of cups like these would likely be impossible to find even if one searched the entire Western Continent, much less have Western Continent craftsmen carve such exquisite scenes of flood dragons frolicking in the sea within wine cups.

The craftsmen of the Western Continent were certainly masters of their trade, while dwarven and goblin craftsmen possessed skill so ingenious it seemed to steal the work of Heaven itself, capable of creating all manner of intricate and exquisite instruments of death. But dwarven and goblin craftsmen devoted themselves to magical devices and large-scale weapons of war; they did not possess the same inclination as the master craftsmen of the Blood Qin Empire to pour their efforts into such ingenious little contrivances for pleasure.

Only when a civilization had developed to a certain height could such lavish extravagance emerge.

Looking at the wine cup, Lin Qi's heart opened