“A Sovereign Mortgage under the Heavenly Plunder Bank’s master deed!” General Huo (Goodness: -62/100) laughed hoarsely from his golden bungee-cord cocoon on the stone pavement.
Hog-tied right beside him, former Toll-Gate Overseer Lord Wuji (Goodness: -48/100) and Young Master Ba (Goodness: -55/100) joined in with spiteful, wheezing cackles.
“You can feed those mud-legged conscripts all the braised beef noodles you want, Lin Mo!” Wuji sneered. He spat out a fleck of dust, glaring up at the towering black-iron walls of the First Supreme Heaven’s Border Fortress. “That fortress spans the entire dimensional pass! It isn’t owned by our garrison. It is leased directly from the Heavenly Plunder Bank’s Outer Branch under an ironclad Sovereign Commercial Deed!”
“That is right!” Young Master Ba chimed in smugly, squirming inside his ropes. “Touch a single brick without the Plunder Bank’s master sub-ledger, and the fortress’s automated Quasi-Rank 10 debt-enforcement arrays will vaporize your entire highway! Even if you beat us, you are still locked out of the First Supreme Heaven!”
Across the highway, twenty thousand newly hired vanguard soldiers paused with their porcelain noodle bowls in hand. They looked anxiously toward the dark, spike-studded ramparts of the Border Fortress.
Indeed, a thick curtain of blood-red banking runes shimmered across the fortress’s hundred-foot-tall iron gates, radiating a suffocating financial-suppression pressure.
