Three days later, dawn broke over the Red-Sand Wastes on the first morning of the New Year.
Only four months ago, this patch of the desert had been Dry-Well Village—thirty-five crumbling mud huts baking under scorching sandstorms, a hundred starving villagers with cracked lips, and a single crooked mud pit that yielded three buckets of salty yellow mud-water a day.
Now, as the golden New Year sun rose above the horizon, it shone upon Red-Sand Oasis City.
Fifty-foot-high walls of gleaming black-iron stone stretched for five miles in every direction, surrounded by lush belts of weeping willows and ten thousand acres of golden wheat fields fed by a mirror-smooth mountain canal. Inside the walls, heated stone houses sat along wide ten-lane avenues, crystal-clear water splashed in marble street channels, and the rich, mouthwatering aroma of festive mutton buns, roasted snow-sheep, and sweet well tea drifted from every kitchen chimney.
High atop the central watchtower of the Lord’s Keep, Pei Xuan sat cross-legged on a woven reed mat facing the rising sun.
Arranged in a neat circle around his knees were all five hundred Low-Grade Spirit Stones looted from Envoy Lin’s Spatial Storage Bag. In his lap rested the golden-bronze tome of the [Furnace-Blood Immortal Scripture].
Over the past three days and nights, Pei Xuan had used his Rank 3 Peak Dragon-Blood marrow to weave all one hundred and eight of his martial blood-meridians together at the base of his spine. Even though his innate Spirit Root had been destroyed by his stepmother’s poison before he was born, a brand-new, pulsing Man-Made Dragon-Furnace Spirit Root—forged from his own unyielding blood, iron bones, and Ao Ming’s dragon essence—now glowed like red-hot steel inside his lower back!
“It’s time,” Pei Xuan whispered, opening his eyes as the first ray of New Year sunlight touched the tower roof. “Ignite the furnace!”
BOOOOOOOOM!
Inside Pei Xuan’s chest, his heart beat with the thunderous roar of a giant blacksmith’s bellows!
Instantly, all five hundred Low-Grade Spirit Stones arranged around him lit up with blinding white light. Under the terrifying suction of his Man-Made Dragon-Furnace Spirit Root, five hundred streams of pure, concentrated Heaven-and-Earth Spirit Qi poured straight through the pores of Pei Xuan’s bronze skin—not as cold, fragile gas, but mixed directly with his boiling golden-red martial blood!
Inside his lower abdomen, the dark, scarred wall of his childhood-crippled dantian trembled under the assault of five hundred Spirit Stones’ worth of blazing Blood-Spirit Qi.
CRACK! KRA-KOOOOOM!
With a roar that echoed deep inside his soul, ninety-nine percent of the childhood poison crust around his dantian burned away into nothingness!
Right outside his congenital dantian gate, a dazzling, three-inch-wide Golden-Iron Marrow-Furnace Seed condensed at the base of his spine! Swirling streams of golden-red Half-Step Rank 4 Spirit Qi roared through his 108 meridians, pumping volcanic vitality through his bones, tendons, and muscles until his whole body shone like a miniature rising sun—leaving only the final inner dantian lock waiting to be smashed open with Envoy Lin’s Fireball Qi Art tomorrow morning!
Outside on the tower balcony, all five hundred depleted Spirit Stones crumbled into neat piles of white dust at the exact same second and blew away on the morning breeze.
Pei Xuan stood up from the reed mat and held out his right palm.
WHOOSH!
A three-foot-long blade of condensed, golden-red Rank 4 Immortal Furnace-Fire—ten times hotter and denser than Envoy Lin’s Crimson Cloud flames—sprang from his palm without needing a single word of incantation! With a casual flick of his wrist, he scattered the flame into a shower of warm golden sparks and let out a long, joyful laugh.
“So this is the Half-Step Rank 4 Marrow-Furnace stage!” Pei Xuan smiled, clenching his fist as immortal power and martial blood flowed together in perfect harmony. “Lady Wang, Marquis Pei Zhan... when you poisoned my dantian and threw me into Dry-Well Village, did you ever think you were helping me build a foundation ten times stronger than any Spirit Root?”
Down below the Keep, the great bronze New Year bell rang twelve times across the city!
DONG! DONG! DONG!
With the arrival of the four thousand border residents from the six newly annexed counties—plus another sixteen hundred wandering desert herders who had followed the smell of New Year hot-pot into town yesterday—the central plaza and the four main avenues were packed shoulder-to-shoulder with fifty thousand cheerful citizens wearing brand-new cotton winter coats!
Pei Xuan didn’t take the stairs down.
Testing his new Half-Step Rank 4 Marrow-Furnace lightness, he stepped straight off the hundred-foot balcony of the Lord’s Keep!
A cushion of golden-red Furnace Qi flared beneath his boots, carrying him floating smoothly down through the morning air like a descending war god before landing feather-light on the high stone platform beside the Sweet-Spring Well!
“LOOK! LORD PEI WAS FLYING THROUGH THE AIR!”
“Golden-red Immortal Qi! Our Young Lord has become an Immortal too!”
Fifty thousand citizens cheered until the banners on the walls flapped like sails!
Standing on the platform beside Pei Xuan were Old Wei, General Tie Zhan, and Chief Hulun—all three of whom had already forged their Half-Step Rank 4 Spirit-Seed Foundations over the past three days—along with Hong Ling and Old Guo (now at Rank 3 Peak Grandmaster, half a step from opening their own Furnace Dantians!), Boom-Pot Sun, Abacus Su, and Ye Guhan.
Over at the side of the platform, twenty burly guards stood beside ten massive, thirty-foot-tall rectangular stone-iron slabs covered in red silk cloths.
Even down in the outdoor kitchen pavilion of Old Guo’s newly rebuilt Number One Central Noodle Palace, a tall figure wearing a bright yellow `[DEBTOR #216]` vest and a white cloth chef’s hairnet over his frizzy afro stopped wiping the counter and stared up at Pei Xuan in shock.
It was Envoy Lin Cang!
“He... he really forged a Half-Step Rank 4 Spirit-Seed body in three days without a natural Spirit Root?!” Envoy Lin muttered, his jaw trembling as he clutched a wet dishcloth.
Then Envoy Lin’s eyes shifted greedily toward the ten red-silk-covered slabs on the platform, and he scoffed under his breath:
Hmph! So what if he created a freak manual that lets mortals cultivate? Now that he’s an Immortal himself, he’ll act just like every sect master in the world! Those stone slabs must be a monument to his own greatness, and he’ll lock that priceless Dual-Path Scripture inside a ten-foot-thick iron vault so nobody outside his inner circle can ever touch it!
Even Ye Guhan, standing beside the well with his dantian crack already fifty percent healed by three days of Furnace-Blood breathing, looked curiously at the ten covered stone monuments.
“Lord Pei,” Ye Guhan asked softly, “are those the New Year city laws?”
“Better than laws,” Pei Xuan grinned, stepping up to the Fused Loudspeaker Conch Shell at the front of the platform.
He looked out across the sea of fifty thousand smiling faces—farmers who had once eaten bitter sand-roots, bandits who had once robbed travelers for a mouthful of muddy water, crippled soldiers who had been sold for two bags of salt, and orphans who had frozen in the desert wind.
Every single one of them was his point-printing treasure—and his family.
“Citizens of Red-Sand Oasis City! Happy New Year!” Pei Xuan’s warm, resonant Grandmaster voice carried clearly into every ear across the city.
“Three days ago, a deacon from an Immortal Sect flew over our heads and called us mortal ants! Why? Because for ten thousand years, the Immortal Sects have hoarded cultivation manuals behind high mountain gates and told common people that without a rare Spirit Root, we are only fit to dig mud and die old!”
Pei Xuan grabbed the thick golden rope attached to the red silk cloths covering the ten thirty-foot-tall stone-iron monuments—and yanked it down with one pull!
WHOOOOOOSH!
Ten giant red silk curtains fluttered to the ground!
Carved deeply into the gleaming black-iron stone of the ten thirty-foot monuments—in huge, crystal-clear characters alongside lively, step-by-step stick-figure illustrations drawn by Hong Ling—was the entire, unabridged text and meridian chart of the `[Furnace-Blood Spirit-Seed Primer (Rank 1 to Half-Step Rank 4)]`!
“From today onward,” Pei Xuan’s voice boomed across the silent, stunned plaza, “there is no difference between mortals and Immortals in Red-Sand Oasis City! These ten monuments—which will be placed permanently outside the Public School, the Salt Mine, the Brick Kilns, and the Greenhouses—contain the Furnace-Blood Spirit-Seed Primer! It requires ZERO natural Spirit Root! Whether you are a farmer plowing wheat, a mason laying bricks, a blacksmith swinging a hammer, or a grandma kneading dough—every drop of sweat you shed building our city will forge your own Man-Made Spirit Root and open your Immortal Dantian!”
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
Right beside Pei Xuan, Abacus Su stepped up to the second loudspeaker conch, his spectacles flashing like twin suns as he held up a stack of red reward posters!
“Furthermore, by order of Lord Pei, the City Treasury hereby announces the New Year Universal Cultivation Subsidy!” Abacus Su shouted excitedly. “Every citizen who practices the monument exercises during their work shift and reaches Rank 2 Iron-Bone gets a ten-pound bag of Golden-Blood Flour! Every citizen who reaches Rank 3 Grandmaster gets a private two-story heated courtyard house! And any citizen who opens their Furnace Dantian to forge their Half-Step Rank 4 Spirit-Seed gets ten Big Red Flowers on the Municipal Honor Board, fifty silver taels a month, and a Lifetime VIP Free-Refill Pass to Old Guo’s Mutton Hot-Pot Hall!”
For three seconds, fifty thousand people stared at the giant illustrated monuments in total disbelief.
In the outside world, selling a single torn page of a Rank 4 Immortal manual to mortals was punishable by having nine generations of your family executed by the Immortal Sects!
Yet here in Red-Sand Oasis City, their Lord had carved a supreme scripture that didn’t even need a Spirit Root onto thirty-foot billboards in the street—and was bribing them with free flour and hot-pot passes to become Immortals!
“A LIFETIME FREE HOT-POT PASS FOR FORGING A SPIRIT-SEED?!”
“Look at Drawing #3 on the monument! You can practice the first breathing cycle just by doing squats while carrying two buckets of water!”
“Get out of my way! Grandma Zhang is going to be the first Spirit-Seed Grandmaster on West Willow Street!”
ROOOOOOOOAR!
Fifty thousand citizens went completely wild!
Right there in the middle of the New Year plaza, forty thousand farmers, bricklayers, weavers, and soldiers dropped into deep horse-stances, tensed their backs, and began breathing like roaring blacksmith bellows while following Hong Ling’s stick-figure drawings on the monuments!
HUFF—HAH! HUFF—HAH!
Fifty thousand people breathing the [Furnace-Blood Immortal Scripture] in unison created a visible, mile-wide golden-red heat wave of Blood-Spirit Qi that rose above Red-Sand Oasis City like a rising dragon!
In the front row of the City Guard formation, the former Black-Wind Bandit King, Captain Hu, Batu, One-Eyed Jack, and eighteen other Rank 3 Peak squad captains—who had been stuck at the peak of mortal martial arts—felt the shared resonance of fifty thousand blood-furnaces!
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
One after another, twelve Rank 3 Peak captains ignited their Man-Made Furnace Roots on the spot, blasting open their dantians and stepping into Half-Step Rank 4 (Spirit-Seed Grandmaster) right in the middle of the square!
Over in the noodle shop kitchen pavilion, Envoy Lin Cang (Debtor #216) dropped his wet dishcloth onto the floor, his legs trembling so hard his knees knocked together.
“Twelve... twelve new Half-Step Rank 4 Spirit-Seed Grandmasters born in five minutes from a bunch of former bandits and bricklayers?!” Envoy Lin clutched his white chef’s hairnet in existential horror. “In our Crimson Cloud Sect, we’re lucky if three outer disciples reach Rank 4 in a whole year! And he just printed the scripture on a public wall next to the toilet?!”
“Hey! Debtor #216! Stop daydreaming and get back to the cutting board!”
Old Guo’s booming voice snapped Envoy Lin out of his trance. Old Guo pointed his giant iron ladle at a stack of fifty frozen snow-sheep legs sitting next to fifty bubbling copper hot-pots. “The twelve captains who just forged their Spirit-Seeds are coming over to claim their VIP Hot-Pot meals! Turn on your flying sword and shave two hundred plates of paper-thin mutton rolls in three minutes, or Abacus Su will deduct your noon pickled egg!”
“I am an Outer Deacon of the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect! When my Sect Elders find out I am missing, they will send an army of flying swords to—wait, did you say you’ll deduct my noon pickled duck egg?!”
Envoy Lin gasped in panic, immediately pinching a one-handed sword seal!
Because Abacus Su had unlocked ten percent of his Spirit-Sealing Collar specifically for kitchen work, Envoy Lin’s straightened-out [Rank 4 Red-Copper Flying Sword] shot up three feet above the giant wooden cutting board!
SHING-SHING-SHING-SHING-SHING!
Sweating buckets under his yellow Debtor Vest, the proud Immortal Envoy used thirty years of Crimson Cloud Sword-Control Mastery to turn his flying sword into a high-speed meat-slicer—shaving frozen snow-sheep legs into translucent, paper-thin mutton curls that landed neatly on porcelain platters at fifty slices per second!
“Is this thin enough, Chef Guo?! Look how even the fat ribbons are!” Envoy Lin asked anxiously, wiping his forehead while a glowing green bar floated honestly above his white hairnet:
Meanwhile, fifty yards away beside the noodle-shop wash-tubs, a middle-aged nobleman in Yellow Debtor Vest #402—Pei Xuan’s biased father, Marquis Pei Zhan—was furiously scrubbing greasy porcelain bowls alongside former Water Baron Boss Qian.
“Scrub faster, Prisoner #402!” Boss Qian yelled competitively, checking the little red paper flower pinned to his yellow vest. “If these three hundred soup bowls aren’t sparkling before noon, Hong Ling won’t give us our New Year meat-potato porridge!”
“I’m scrubbing! Don’t splash soap on my eyebrows!” Marquis Pei Zhan grumbled under his breath, scrubbing faster as his stomach rumbled at the aroma of braised lamb.
Just as the New Year feast reached its peak, the rhythmic thunder of giant wolf paws echoed from the eastern ten-lane highway!
Nomad Scout Commander Batu—riding a ten-foot-long Rank 2 Silver-Back Sand-Wolf—galloped through the East Gate and leaped off his saddle in front of the central platform, holding three urgent intelligence scrolls sealed with red wax.
“Report, My Lord!” Batu saluted with a fist to his chest. “Our long-range wolf scouts just returned from the eastern border passes beyond the Iron-Wolf Marquisate! The entire Kingdom of Great Yan is erupting into chaos!”
On the platform, Pei Xuan, General Tie Zhan, Ye Guhan, and Abacus Su gathered around as Pei Xuan unrolled the scout reports.
“First,” Batu reported, “the severe drought that hit the Marquisate has spread across all twelve provinces of the Great Yan Kingdom! Instead of opening the royal granaries, the corrupt King of Great Yan—backed by the Four Rank 5 Foundation Establishment ‘Immortal Advisors’ sent by the Crimson Cloud Sect—has doubled the ‘Immortal Tribute Tax,’ forcing millions of starving mortal farmers to flee west toward our Red-Sand Wastes!”
“Millions of starving farmers fleeing west toward our gates?”
Abacus Su’s spectacles gleamed so brightly you couldn’t even see his eyes, and he licked his lips as his fingers twitched on his golden abacus. “My Lord! Do you hear that? That’s not a refugee crisis—that’s five million future taxpayers and Rank 1 to Rank 4 point-printers walking straight into our arms!”
“And the second report?” Pei Xuan asked with a smile.
“Second,” Batu continued, “when your eldest brother Pei Heng ran back to Black-Rock City without Marquis Pei Zhan or half your family’s land, your stepmother Lady Wang went mad with greed and panic and sent a blood-hawk message straight to the Four Immortal Advisors in the Royal Capital and to the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect! They now know that Envoy Lin was captured in the Red-Sand Wastes—and the Royal Court is mobilizing a hundred-thousand-man border army led by Foundation Establishment cultivators to march west this spring!”
Hearing that the Four Foundation Establishment Immortal Advisors and a hundred-thousand-man royal army were preparing to march west, nobody on the platform looked scared at all.
Instead, General Tie Zhan cracked his knuckles as Rank 4 Furnace-Fire sparked around his heavy halberd. “A hundred thousand hungry royal soldiers? Tell Old Guo to build fifty more mobile soup carts—we won’t even need to fight half of them before they defect for our meat buns!”
Ye Guhan rested his hand calmly on the hilt of Frost-Snow, his dantian glowing with warm golden-red light as his Loyalty bar climbed steadily to `85 / 100`. “By the time they march across the border pass in two months, my dantian crack will be completely healed by the Furnace-Blood Scripture. If those four Foundation Establishment ‘Advisors’ dare step onto our ten-lane highway without paying the toll, I will personally introduce them to the quarry.”
And down at the bottom of the Sweet-Spring Spirit Well, a deep, rumbling dragon roar vibrated happily through the copper pipes:
CRACK—PING!
A thousand feet underground, loosened by the surging faith and Rank 4 Furnace-Blood Qi of fifty thousand cultivating citizens, the first rusty outer ring of the ancient Spirit-Draining Nail pinning Ao Ming’s tail cracked open by a full inch!
“ROOOOAR! Little Kid Pei! My sealed cultivation just jumped from Rank 3 Peak to Rank 4 Peak Flood-Dragon! Send those royal armies over faster—the more people join your city, the sooner this old dragon can stretch his wings!”
Standing at the highest point of the platform, Pei Xuan looked out past the gleaming fifty-foot black-iron city walls, past the green willow belts and the golden wheat fields, toward the vast eastern horizon where the Kingdom of Great Yan and the lofty Immortal Sects lay waiting.
In front of his eyes, his translucent blue RTS Territory Screen chimed with its grand New Year Midnight-to-Dawn update:
Pei Xuan took a sip of hot sweet well tea, felt the warm desert wind ruffle his dark-blue silk sleeves, and patted the thin blue booklet of Envoy Lin’s Fireball Qi Art tucked inside his robe.
“From thirty points a day in a dry mud pit to half a million points a day—and tomorrow morning, we smash open the final gate of the dantian and enter true Rank 4 Qi Gathering!”
Pei Xuan turned to Abacus Su and One-Eyed Jack with a bright laugh:
“Keep the cauldrons boiling, warm up the stone rollers, and print fresh stacks of Yellow Debtor Vests and Citizenship Cards! Starting tomorrow, Dry-Well City is going to show the Kingdom of Great Yan how a real mayor runs an Immortal country!”