The next day.
Morning light glimmered faintly, and the market began to stir.
Several square tables, gleaming from being soaked in tung oil, were already more than half occupied by diners.
There were laborers up early to rush off to work, and leisurely old men carrying birdcages out for a stroll.
Everyone sat around their tables with a large coarse porcelain bowl before them. The mutton soup inside was white as milk, bright green garlic shoots floating atop it and rolling up and down with the steam.
A man dressed in short work clothes, unafraid of the heat, lifted his bowl and slurped down a huge mouthful, satisfaction spreading across his face.
He set down the bowl, wiped the grease from his mouth, then mysteriously swept his gaze across the others at the table.
"Did you see it yesterday?"
The man lowered his voice, gesturing twice through the air with his chopsticks. "Good heavens... that spectacle. I'd lived this many years, and it was the first time I'd ever seen anything like it with my own eyes..."
The people at the table all stopped their chopsticks at his words.
An old man tearing apart a flatbread had a glint flash through his cloudy eyes. He chuckled. "You mean up in the sky?"
"Exactly!"
The man grew animated, spittle flying. "I was delivering goods in the street at the time. I saw it myself—a black mass of them, like the heavens were about to collapse."
"I heard those outsiders were joining forces to level Chang'an."
A scholarly-looking young man beside them gave a disdainful snort and set down his spoon.
"What immortals? They were nothing more than a pack of bullying foreign hooligans."
"They strutted through the streets every day, never watching where they walked, eating without paying. Did they really