The dawn broke over the gorge with the dull, metal clang of the front door knocker.
It was an urgent, impatient rhythm—three heavy iron thuds followed by two rapid raps. In the underground slums of Red Mist Valley, nobody knocked with that rhythm unless blood had already been spilled.
Wu Xiao scrambled to pull back the heavy oak crossbar.
The door creaked inward, admitting a gust of freezing, sulfur-laden fog and a tall, broad-shouldered man clad in stiff boiled marsh-crocodile hide. His face was weathered like dried animal fat, a jagged scar running from his left temple down to the corner of his bearded jaw. Across his back hung a heavy iron recurve bow and a quiver of barbed steel arrows.
He was Yan Ba, the leader of the Iron-Toothed Dredgers. A veteran hunting band that scavenged the deep poisonous foul fog swamps for Tier-1 beast carcasses.
“Old Gui!” Yan Ba shouted, his voice gravelly and harsh. He stepped into the workshop, his heavy boots leaving greasy red mud across the clean flat stone slabs. “Wake up, you old bat! I need twelve Vital-Replenishing Pills before the evening bell, or five of my boys will lose their legs to corpse-rot!”
