The morning after Xiao Long’s skull evolution, the Clear Stream River Valley awoke to an entirely transformed air.
Where last dawns had brought biting mountain chills and stale ground fog that clung to the damp hollows, this morning was wrapped in a glowing, silver-blue veil of gentle spiritual mist. The air smelled of crushed mint, wild mountain honey, and the crisp, invigorating ozone of high-sky rain.
Down in the center of the river bend. There, the current broadened into a calm, five-foot-deep pool over smooth quartz sand, the water was dancing.
Lin Xiao floated right in the middle of the pool, fully surrendering his floating blue mass to the swirling eddies. He had swelled his non-Newtonian body into a slightly flattened, floating sapphire melon roughly fifty inches wide, bobbing upon the surface like a delighted rubber buoy.
SWOOOSH!
Beneath him, a huge shadow of lapis-lazuli and burnished gold glided effortlessly through the crystal depths.
With a flick of his pearl-scaled tail, Xiao Long sent a rhythmic, spiraling current surging upward from the riverbed. The high-pressure water column caught Lin Xiao’s underside. He lifted the azure slime eight feet into the air atop a dancing, semi-clear water fountain!
Lin Xiao spun three times in the air, his white eye crescents crinkling with boundless joy, before landing back in the pool with a soft, elastic:
GLOOP.
“Again, Xiao Long! Add a little backspin on the left!” Lin Xiao laughed through the Primordial Soul Circuit.
A joyful dragon purr echoed through the riverbed.
Xiao Long poked his amazing head above the surface, his thirty-foot silver whiskers fluttering merrily in the spray. His newly awakened Azure Coral Antlers caught the morning sun, glistening like crowns of sapphire jade. Opening his snout slightly, the hundred-foot river drake sent a gentle, spiraling wave rolling across the pool, creating a tiny lazy river that swept Lin Xiao around the bamboo arbor in smooth, lazy loops.
She stood on the newly planed cedar porch of the Willow-Bank Pavilion. Su Ling’er leaned against the railing, her three white tails swaying in rhythmic delight. She watched the spectacle.
In the royal records of the human dynasties and beast courts, flood dragons were described as terrifying, world-ending calamities. Ancient beasts of wrath that summoned tidal waves, flooded cities, and drowned entire armies in bursts of draconic arrogance. Yet here, a thirty-meter Horned Azure Flood Dragon, endowed with the supreme water power of the nine heavens, was spending his morning using his divine powers to give a blue slime water-park rides.
“He’s like a giant puppy,” Su Ling’er laughed softly, her voice chiming like silver bells across the water.
Old Ba, who was basking on a flat sun-warmed flat stone slab beside the water chute, gave a slow, satisfied nod of his ancient head, his amber eyes blinking with deep, philosophical contentment.
“Power without peace is merely madness, Lady Su,” Old Ba rumbled in his gravelly voice. “The dragon was born from the kindness of the Azure Master’s belly. It knows nothing of human greed or demonic slaughter. To play in the current and bring rain to the earth... That’s the true, uncorrupted Dao of the Waters.”
Xiao Long’s playful currents, however, were far more than mere entertainment.
As the morning progressed, Lin Xiao and Xiao Long turned their attention to the serious work of safe hall ecology.
Hovering above the central irrigation water gate, Xiao Long bent his branching azure antlers. With a low, musical hum that shook through the leylines of the valley, the great dragon began to weave the safe hall’s micro-climate.
From his nostrils billowed clouds of pearl-white morning mist. Instead of scattering randomly in the mountain wind, the mist drifted in dense, protective ribbons directly across the twelve southern agricultural terraces. The humid vapor settled over the fourteen hundred newly sprouted sweet potato slips, shielding the tender emerald leaves from the scorching midday sun while keeping the fiery loam at the optimal moisture level.
Next, Xiao Long turned toward the river water chutes.
Swimming through the stone aqueducts and intake channels carved by Tie Shan and Lin Xiao, Xiao Long used his micro-hydrokinesis to create a nonstop, pulsating vortex along the water chute bottoms. The swirling current swept away any settling silt, dead leaves, or river debris, flushing the gravel beds clean and polishing the quartz stones until the water flowing into the communal basins was as pure as distilled ice-slow dew.
Up at the western workshop terrace, Tie Shan was hard at work beside the riverbank.
The nine-foot titan bear was assembling the massive, linked timbers of a water-powered trip-hammer. A huge twelve-foot cedar beam fitted with an iron-heavy pestle on one end and a hollowed wooden water trough on the other, designed to automate the laborious task of pounding dried tubers, hulling grains, and pulverizing stone ores.
“Ho, Xiao Long!” Tie Shan bellowed, waving his golden titan arm toward the race water chute above his water wheel. “Give this old bear a steady head of water! Let’s see if this cedar wheel will spin!”
Xiao Long purred, coiling his long body along the northern stone aqueduct.
With a delicate wave of his pearl-scaled talon, Xiao Long diverted a smooth, smooth-flowing hydro-jet from the main karst stream directly onto the curved paddles of Tie Shan’s cedar water wheel:
CREAK... SPLASH... RUMBLE!
The massive, eight-foot wooden wheel began to turn with easy, majestic driving force. As the cams engaged, the twelve-foot trip-hammer rose into the air before crashing down onto the dark rock mortar block with a thunderous, rhythmic boom:
THUMP.
THUMP.
THUMP.
Tie Shan tossed his head back, his booming laughter echoing across the canyon.
“It works! It works like a charm!” Tie Shan roared with relish, wiping sweat from his gray brow. “Three hundred strokes a minute, smooth as silk! With this water-hammer, Auntie Bai can hull fifty sacks of grain before breakfast without breaking a single sweat! And I can crush iron-melted rock waste into fine powder in half an hour!”
The titan bear turned toward the river pool, giving Xiao Long a respectful, knuckle-bumping salute with his golden titan fist. “Good work, dragon boy! You’re the finest watermaster in the five provinces!”
Xiao Long preened with pride, blowing three neat water rings that floated across the terrace before popping in rainbow sparkles over Tie Shan’s ears.
By late afternoon, the valley had settled into a state of spotless, calm order.
Down on the open terrace beneath the Primordial Spirit Willow, Tie Shan was finishing the final touches on an amazing piece of furniture. A long, waist-high registration desk planed from mountain cedar, its surface polished with beeswax until it glowed like warm amber. Beside the desk stood low cedar benches for weary travelers and a large wooden signboard carved with the clean characters of the Myriad Spirit Safe hall.
Su Ling’er spent the afternoon arranging her office materials atop the desk.
With neat, orderly grace, the three-tailed fox maiden laid out dozens of smoothed bamboo registration slips, small baked-clay pots of dark squid-ink, badger-hair brushes. A lacquered chest filled with box-shaped wooden food tokens, each stamped with Lin Xiao’s azure spiral insignia.
“Everything is prepared,” Su Ling’er reported. She walked over to the central irrigation water gate where Lin Xiao had settled atop a smooth, sun-warmed granite boulder.
Beside Lin Xiao, resting upon a flat cedar plank, sat a shallow glazed baked-clay bowl filled with chilled spirit dew and crisp, sweet mountain water chestnuts that Xiao Long had harvested from the deep river shoals. Lin Xiao extended a slender azure slime arm, spearing a crunchy chestnut and drawing it smoothly into his semi-clear mantle, letting out a contented fluid shudder.
Crisp, sweet, and perfectly chilled, Lin Xiao thought. No alarms, no logistics emergencies, and no wild phone calls. Just good food, clean water, and honest companions.
At that moment, a massive black shadow swept across the edge of the bamboo grove.
Xiao Hei emerged from the western outer edge pass, trotting into the clearing in his sleek, tightly packed hound form. The black hound’s ruby eyes were alert, his velvet ears twitching with intelligence. Trotting up to Lin Xiao’s boulder, Xiao Hei sat down on his haunches, his deep echoing directly across the Primordial Soul Circuit:
“Master. Scout report.”
Lin Xiao nudged a piece of sweet chestnut toward the hound. “What did you find on the western ridges, Xiao Hei?”
Xiao Hei accepted the chestnut with a delicate snap of his jaws, chewing happily before continuing:
“The outer ward of the Primordial Spirit Willow has done its work. The rogue fighter gangs thirty li to the west have abandoned their pursuit, scared of the sky starlight streaming from the high canopy. But dropping the western pass is a column of displaced woodland refugees. Over forty souls—badger stonecutters, deer foragers, and rabbit herbalists. They’re exhausted, their coats caked with mud, fleeing the destruction of their outer warrens. They’re following the scent of our clean river water. They will arrive at our boundary by tomorrow morning.”
Su Ling’er’s amethyst eyes flashed with quiet, decisive resolve.
“Elder Lu and the Grey-Rock badgers,” she murmured softly, her fingers lightly touching the bamboo registration slips upon the desk. “And the herbalist rabbit families. They have walked through fire to find us.”
Tie Shan strode over, resting a freshly hewn cedar baulk across his shoulder, his toothy grin broad and welcoming.
“Let them come,” Tie Shan rumbled, his voice warm with titan pride. “Our granaries hold dry yams. Our kiln burns silver charcoal. And tomorrow, those badger fellows can help me square sixty granite giant pillars for our outer boundary walls!”
A bronze chime chimed softly in Lin Xiao’s mindscape, with the Dao Spirit’s comprehensive check:
Lin Xiao looked up at the emerald boughs of the Primordial Spirit Willow swaying gently against the azure sky.
The valley was no longer an empty wilderness, nor was it a fragile campsite hiding in the shadows of the mountains. It was a true home. Carved with stone, watered with love, guarded by a dragon and a sky wolf. Then he governed with boundless wisdom.
“Eat well tonight, everyone,” Lin Xiao said with an elastic, peaceful bounce atop the boulder. “Tomorrow morning, we open our doors to the world.”