Cinnabar Coil

Nine chambers stacked inside a brass censer, a sleeping dragon at the crown, and one breath that decides everything. You drop essences into the fire bowl at the bottom and the heat carries them upward: resin crawls one chamber per tick, citrus rind climbs four, smoke settles wherever it lands. When the dragon inhales it tastes only the top three chambers at that exact instant, so the puzzle is traffic and timing rather than a recipe. Brass gates clamped to the coil make it worse. The ash gate cools whatever stops inside it, the kiln gate drives it faster, the jade choke turns away anything too loud, and the vent fissure simply takes the essence away from you. Twelve dragons sleep across twelve regions, from the kiln steps to the coil itself. Each one you wake leaves a sealed flacon in the vault and grants a boon: hold an essence through a redraw, undo a ruined tick, light the bowl twice in a single turn. Forty essences, eight families, no timers, no ads, nothing to buy.