"Lord Thousand-Householder, look at this tea-firing basket." Her fingertip brushed against the spiral grooves on the bronze basket wall. "This 'nine-turn green-shaking' tea-firing technique was refined when Cai Xiang wrote the *Record of Tea* during the Hongwu era. How could it be mixed with the Doria family's griffin etching?"
By the riverbank, the sound of tea pan-firing suddenly erupted. Thirty tea farmers with brown cloths tied around their heads rushed out from the foot of the mountain. The fish-scale forged patterns on the tea spatulas in their hands matched the breech-mechanism molds used by Yu Dayou during the Jiajing reign for making thunder-clap matchlocks with absolute precision. Shen Xitang's silver silk shredded a block of aged Laoshan tea brick, revealing a fallen fragment of the *Ligurian Sea Secret Ledger*—next to the official document reading "falsely reporting thirty thousand catties of tribute tea," a Sardinian annotation read "resold to Savona as gunpowder moisture-proofing filler"!
"Reporting to the Assistant Commissioner!" A personal guard pried open a jar of tea powder. "The interlayer of these fragments..."
Chapter 212