Two weeks of relentless, transformative labor swept across the mountain valleys of western Sichuan.
During those fourteen days, Grand Demonic Elder Blood-Crow did not return to his cold cave once.
He did not sleep on ice. He did not eat a single cave-rat.
Instead, he and forty sect elders spent three hundred and thirty hours in waist-deep mud and gravel.
They dredged forty miles of silt from the Cloud-Mist River, laying reinforced stone revetments that protected twenty-four farming villages from future floods.
They completely rebuilt the Willow-Bend Elementary School, replacing collapsed timber with earthquake-resistant granite pillars and installing crystalline glass windows.
When he was not hauling twenty-ton boulders, Blood-Crow spent his evenings sitting on an upturned nail keg under a kerosene lamp, surrounded by eight-year-old village children.
Armed with two smooth bamboo chopsticks and a ball of coarse sheep wool, the terrifying demonic grandmaster had learned how to knit.
