Inside the main courtyard of the Dry-Well City Lord’s Mansion, a fat, bald camel was chewing on a bunch of pickled radish leaves while watching his master turn red in the face.
Pei Xuan sat cross-legged on a black-iron stone bench. On his lap lay a thin blue booklet with gold edges. The cover had four fancy words written on it: Fireball Qi Art.
This was the prized cultivation manual he had looted yesterday after knocking Envoy Lin of the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect out of the sky with a fused black-iron brick.
“Breathe in the morning mist... guide the heaven and earth Qi down through the twelve meridians... and let it knock gently on the gate of the dantian,” Pei Xuan muttered, reading the instructions out loud.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Because he stood right next to the Level 3 Sweet-Spring Spirit Well, the air in the courtyard was thick with cool, sweet spiritual mist. Thin white threads of Qi entered his nose and mouth, sliding down his throat and into his chest.
Pei Xuan was already a Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmaster. His muscles were as tough as braided iron wire, his bones rang like bronze bells when tapped, and his blood ran through his veins like boiling soup. Moving those thin threads of spirit Qi down to his lower belly was easy.
Thump.
The thread of spirit Qi reached his lower belly and tapped against his dantian.
Nothing happened.
It was like throwing a wet noodle at a locked iron vault door. The spirit Qi bounced off his closed dantian, broke into tiny sparks, and leaked right out through the pores of his skin with a soft hiss.
Pei Xuan opened one eye and frowned. He tried again, pulling in three times as much spirit mist.
Thump! Pffft.
The Qi leaked out again. Not a single drop stayed inside.
Across the courtyard, near the kitchen wash-tubs, a tall young man wearing a bright yellow Debtor Vest over torn red sect robes let out a muffled snort.
It was Envoy Lin, the proud Rank 4 Qi Gathering disciple from the Crimson Cloud Sect. Yesterday he had flown over Dry-Well City on a shining sword demanding ninety percent of the town’s wealth. Today, his hands were red and wrinkly from scrubbing three hundred greasy iron soup pots.
Next to Envoy Lin knelt a middle-aged man with a square jaw and gray-streaked hair, also wearing a yellow Debtor Vest. That was Marquis Pei Zhan—Pei Xuan’s biased biological father, who had kicked Pei Xuan out to this desert ten months ago.
Pei Xuan glanced at the floating blue text above their heads and raised an eyebrow.
“Envoy Lin,” Pei Xuan called out lazily. “Your hands stopped moving. Did that big iron wok wash itself?”
Envoy Lin jumped as the black-iron collar around his neck gave a tiny zap of warning static. He quickly scrubbed the bottom of the wok with a bundle of wire grass, though he couldn’t stop his mouth from running.
“I am washing, City Lord Pei!” Envoy Lin said through gritted teeth. Then he put on a fake, pitying sigh. “I was just feeling sorry for you. That Fireball Qi Art is an authentic Immortal manual from my Crimson Cloud Sect. Even if you lock me up for ten years, you can never learn a single page of it.”
“Oh? And why is that?” Pei Xuan asked, picking up a cup of cold Spirit Well water.
“Because Immortals and mortals are separated by heaven’s ditch!” Envoy Lin raised his chin proudly, even though there was a smudge of black pot-grease on his nose. “One out of ten thousand mortals is born with a Spirit Root inside their dantian. A Spirit Root acts like a straw that sucks Qi through the dantian wall. Without that straw, your dantian is a solid rock! Your martial blood can be as strong as an ox, and your fists can crack boulders, but you will die a mortal at age hundred!”
Beside the wash-tub, Marquis Pei Zhan let out a heavy sigh and shook his head.
“Xuan’er, listen to the Immortal Envoy,” Marquis Pei Zhan said in his deep, bossy father-voice, forgetting for a second that he was holding a dirty wooden rag. “When you were three years old, I paid fifty taels of silver for a wandering priest to test your bones. You have zero Spirit Root. Your eldest brother, Pei Heng, has a Grade-9 Tiny Fire Root, which is why the family spent all its silver on him. Give this manual back to Envoy Lin, apologize to the Crimson Cloud Sect, and maybe—”
CLANG!
A heavy kitchen cleaver flew across the courtyard and stuck two inches deep into the wooden wash-board right between Marquis Pei Zhan’s knees.
Hong Ling, Pei Xuan’s sixteen-year-old head maid and chief treasurer, marched out of the accounting room holding an abacus in one hand and a second kitchen cleaver in the other.
“Prisoner Number 402!” Hong Ling barked, glaring at the Marquis. “Talking without raising your hand costs two copper coins! Giving unsolicited bad advice to the City Lord costs five copper coins! And slowing down your dish-scrubbing speed costs one whole bowl of noon meat-porridge!”
Marquis Pei Zhan turned pale and clamped his mouth shut. He had starved for three days during the desert march before getting captured. The thought of losing his noon bowl of Old Guo’s braised lamb-and-potato porridge made his stomach twist in terror. He lowered his head and scrubbed a porcelain plate until it squeaked.
Old Wei, the one-armed guard captain, walked over and pulled Hong Ling’s cleaver out of the wood, chuckling. “Young Master, don’t listen to their nonsense. Even without fancy Immortal tricks, our city has fifty thousand people and six-barrel cannons. Who cares about a little fireball?”
“I care, Uncle Wei,” Pei Xuan said with a grin, tapping the blue manual on his knee. “Do you know why I care?”
Because of the Loyalty Point Table in his head!
Pei Xuan pulled up his main RTS Territory Screen, which floated in the air where only he could see it.
Pei Xuan looked at the numbers. Right now, a Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmaster gave 1,000 LP/day.
But according to the system rules, a Rank 4 Qi Gathering Cultivator gave 10,000 LP/day!
If only one person in ten thousand had a Spirit Root, then out of his fifty thousand citizens, only five people could ever reach Rank 4. That was way too slow! How was he supposed to buy high-level fusion recipes costing millions of points if his farmers couldn’t level up past Rank 3?
“A Spirit Root is just a little straw through the dantian door,” Pei Xuan whispered to himself, his eyes shining. “If I don’t have a straw to sip through the keyhole... why don’t I just kick the whole door down?”
He summoned the Fusion Cube inside his mind.
A spinning golden cube appeared above his Territory Screen, with three empty slots glowing softly.
Pei Xuan reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a thick, dog-eared leather notebook. It was the [Iron-Anvil Body Art], the zero-flaw martial arts manual he had fused back when Dry-Well Village was just a mud pit. It trained a person’s skin, muscles, bones, and blood until their whole body was like a red-hot blacksmith’s forge.
He placed the [Iron-Anvil Body Art (Rank 3 Peak Martial)] into Slot 1 of the Fusion Cube.
Then he placed Envoy Lin’s [Fireball Qi Art (Rank 4 Early Immortal)] into Slot 2.
“One hundred thousand points. Cheap!” Pei Xuan thought, tapping [YES] without blinking.
HUMMMMM!
A golden flash burst inside his mind. His LP balance dropped from 640,000 to 540,000.
In his hands, the leather martial notebook and the blue silk sect manual melted into liquid gold light, swirling together before hardening into a brand-new book bound in dark red dragon-scale leather.
As soon as Pei Xuan touched the dark red cover, every word and diagram of the Furnace-Blood Scripture stamped itself directly into his brain.
“So that’s how it works!” Pei Xuan laughed out loud. “Who needs a tiny straw when you have a sledgehammer?”
Over by the wash-tubs, Envoy Lin heard Pei Xuan laughing and rolled his eyes. “Look at him, Marquis Pei. Your son went crazy from failing to sense Qi. Next he will start barking like a dog.”
“Don’t talk to me! I don’t want to lose my porridge!” Marquis Pei Zhan whispered furiously, scrubbing faster.
On the stone bench, Pei Xuan didn’t bother breathing in thin morning mist anymore.
Instead, he slammed both palms onto his knees and started the Furnace-Blood Scripture!
THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP!
His heart beat like a giant war drum inside his chest. All the thick, hot Rank 3 Grandmaster blood in his body rushed together, spinning faster and faster through his iron veins until his skin turned bright red and white steam hissed out from the top of his head!
“What is that sound?!” Old Wei stepped back in shock. “Is that a horse galloping underground, or is that the Young Master’s heartbeat?!”
From the kitchen doorway, Old Guo—the fat, smiling head chef—poked his head out holding a giant iron soup ladle. “Good heavens! The Young Master smells like a pressure-cooker full of spiced beef!”
Inside Pei Xuan’s body, his boiling martial blood soaked up the sweet spiritual energy from the Spirit Well water he had drunk all morning. Instead of politely knocking on his dantian with a thin thread of air, Pei Xuan gathered ten pounds of roaring, red-hot Blood-Qi into a single pointed spear inside his belly.
“Open up for me!” Pei Xuan shouted inside his mind.
BOOM!
Inside his lower belly, a muffled thunderclap rang out—loud enough that everyone in the courtyard heard a dull CRACK like an iron vault door getting blown off its hinges!
The thick, dead wall of his mortal dantian shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.
Instantly, his dantian opened into a wide, glowing red furnace-chamber! The broken bits of the dantian wall didn’t go to waste—they melted into the roaring blood-fire, turning his dantian walls as thick and tough as cast iron.
WHOOSH!
A vortex spun inside his open dantian. The cool spiritual mist floating around the Sweet-Spring Well didn’t trickle into his nose anymore—it rushed toward Pei Xuan like water going down a drain!
A miniature funnel of white mist formed right over Pei Xuan’s head. Within three breaths, he swallowed every drop of free Spirit Qi in the courtyard, mixed it with his boiling martial blood, and refined it into thick, golden-red Furnace-Blood True Qi!
Pei Xuan opened his eyes. Two bright sparks of golden-red flame flashed across his pupils.
He felt ten times lighter and ten times stronger than a moment ago. Without even turning his head, his brand-new Divine Sense spread out across the entire Lord’s Mansion—he could clearly see every ant crawling under the bricks, count the 1,422 copper coins in Hong Ling’s pocket, and even see the tiny hole in the toe of Marquis Pei Zhan’s left boot!
“Impossible!”
By the wash-tubs, Envoy Lin dropped his iron wok with a loud CLANG, splashing soapy dishwater all over Marquis Pei Zhan’s face.
Envoy Lin stared at Pei Xuan with his eyeballs nearly popping out of his skull. Even with his own cultivation sealed by the shock-collar, he could clearly feel the terrifying wave of Rank 4 Qi Gathering pressure rolling off Pei Xuan’s body!
Wait—it wasn’t just normal Qi Gathering pressure. Normal Rank 4 early cultivators felt like a gentle breeze or a small campfire. Pei Xuan felt like a roaring iron blast-furnace that could melt a horse in three seconds!
“You—you opened your dantian?!” Envoy Lin stammered, his voice cracking like a rooster’s. “How?! You didn’t even burn incense! You didn’t take a Spirit-Opening Pill! And what was that loud BANG inside your stomach?! Did you just punch a hole in your own dantian with your blood?!”
“More or less,” Pei Xuan said cheerfully, standing up and stretching his arms. His spine popped with a crisp sound like firecrackers. “Your Crimson Cloud Sect’s manual was full of typos and backwards pathways, so I edited it a little. Let’s test out this fireball spell.”
Pei Xuan raised his right hand, curled his fingers into a loose fist, and circulated a tiny drop of golden-red Qi from his dantian to his knuckles.
“Fireball!”
He flicked his wrist toward an empty stone flowerbed across the yard.
FOOM!
A fist-sized ball of compressed, golden-red fire shot out from his knuckles at the speed of a crossbow bolt!
However, right at that exact second, Old Yellow the camel lazily swung his fat hindquarters around to scratch his rump against the stone flowerbed.
SIZZLE-POP!
The fireball grazed the very tip of Old Yellow’s tail!
A puff of black smoke rose into the air along with the smell of burned camel hair, followed by a blast that blew the stone flowerbed into neat gravel.
“AWOOOOO-BAAAAH!”
Old Yellow let out a sound somewhere between a wolf howl and a sheep bleat. The lazy camel jumped six feet straight up into the air—faster than he had ever moved in his entire life—and galloped three circles around the courtyard while flapping his smoking tail!
Old Yellow finally dove backside-first into Envoy Lin’s tub of soapy dishwater with a massive SPLASH, extinguishing his bald, smoking tail-tip while sending Envoy Lin and Marquis Pei Zhan flying backward onto their backsides in the mud!
“Oops! Sorry, Old Yellow!” Pei Xuan laughed, tossing a big chunk of crystal rock-salt and a steamed Meat-Potato over.
Old Yellow caught the potato in his mouth while still sitting inside the wash-tub, chewed happily, and spat a mouthful of soapy water right into Envoy Lin’s face.
Marquis Pei Zhan sat in the mud, wiping soap bubbles off his eyebrows as he stared at the blasted stone flowerbed. The tough desert granite had been melted into glowing red glass at the edges!
“A real spell... Fireball from an empty hand...” Marquis Pei Zhan whispered, his lips trembling. “That is the mark of a true Rank 4 Qi Gathering Immortal! Our Pei Clan has served the Great Yan Kingdom for six generations, and not a single ancestor ever stepped into the Immortal Gate... Yet the ninth son I threw into the desert became an Immortal in half a hour?!”
A sudden wave of deep regret—and fear—washed over Marquis Pei Zhan’s face.
Above his head, his floating tooltip flickered wildly:
[Marquis Pei Zhan — Loyalty: 31 -> 58 -> 64/100! Status: Terrified Father Who Realizes He Backed the Wrong Son!]
At the same time, thirty yards away in the outer barracks, twenty kitchen helpers and stable boys who had been peeking through the courtyard gate burst into wild cheers!
“The City Lord became an Immortal!”
“Did you see that fireball?! He didn’t even need a chant!”
“Long live Lord Pei! Our Dry-Well City is protected by a real Immortal now!”
Envoy Lin crawled out from under Old Yellow’s wet belly, grabbing the edge of the wooden tub as he stared at the dark red leather book in Pei Xuan’s hand.
“Wait a minute!” Envoy Lin yelled, forgetting all about his Immortal pride. “City Lord Pei! Earlier you said... you edited my manual so you didn’t need a Spirit Root?! Is that true, or were you born with a hidden Grade-1 Heavenly Fire Root?!”
“Me? My dantian was weaker than a sick chicken’s when I came to this village,” Pei Xuan said honestly, tossing the Furnace-Blood Scripture up and down in his hand. “This manual doesn’t care about Spirit Roots. Anyone who eats three bowls of Old Guo’s meat stew and trains their blood to Rank 1 or Rank 2 Martial can use this method to smash open their dantian.”
Silence fell over the courtyard.
Envoy Lin froze.
Old Wei froze.
Hong Ling stopped clicking her abacus, and Old Guo nearly dropped his iron ladle.
“Young... Young Master,” Old Wei swallowed hard, his single hand gripping the hilt of his broadsword so tightly his knuckles turned white. “Do you mean... a half-crippled old soldier like me, fifty-two years old with zero Spirit Root, can also open my dantian and shoot fireballs like an Immortal?”
“And me?!” Hong Ling’s eyes went as round as copper coins. “If I learn how to shoot fireballs, I won’t even need to buy firewood to melt silver ingots!”
“And I wouldn’t need coal for my twelve iron woks!” Old Guo clapped his greasy hands together in pure joy.
“Of course you can,” Pei Xuan grinned, looking at his three most loyal servants who had followed him since Day 1 when he only had 30 points a day.
Right now, Old Wei, Hong Ling, and Old Guo were all at Rank 3 Peak Martial, giving him 1,000 LP/day each.
If all three of them stepped into Rank 4 Qi Gathering, each one would give him 10,000 LP/day! And what if General Tie Zhan, his 380 elite soldiers, and his 3,500 town guards all reached Rank 4 too?!
His daily points wouldn’t just walk up—they would shoot straight into the tens of millions!
“Hong Ling!” Pei Xuan ordered briskly. “Go ring the town school bell! Tell General Tie Zhan to bring all off-duty officers and sergeants to the central drill ground tonight after dinner!”
“Yes, Young Master!” Hong Ling tucked her abacus under her arm and bolted out the gate like a rabbit.
“Uncle Guo, boil ten extra cauldrons of Scorpion-and-Lamb Blood-Boosting Soup tonight!” Pei Xuan added. “Starting tonight, Dry-Well City is opening its very first Public Immortal Night School! By next month, I want every farmer in my fields to know how to light a campfire with their bare fingers!”
Before Old Guo could even turn back to his kitchen, the heavy wooden doors of the courtyard banged open.
General Tie Zhan—a bear of a man wearing black iron armor and holding two half-eaten pork buns in his left fist—charged into the yard with his eyes wide. Right behind him trotted Abacus Su, the thin, spectacle-wearing chief accountant, who had a ledger book tucked under one arm and a brass ruler in his hand.
“My Lord! Where is the assassin?!” General Tie Zhan roared, chewing his pork bun in one gulp and drawing his heavyghost-head saber. “I heard a thunderclap from the barracks and smelled roasted meat! Did another Crimson Cloud Sect bastard sneak into the mansion?!”
“Hold your blade, General Tie,” Pei Xuan chuckled, pointing at the smoking crater where the stone flowerbed used to be—and then at Old Yellow, who was still sitting inside Envoy Lin’s dish-washing tub with a bald, blackened tail-tip. “There’s no assassin. I just broke through to Rank 4 Qi Gathering and tested a small fireball.”
General Tie Zhan skidded to a halt. He looked at the melted granite crater, then looked at Pei Xuan, and then slowly lowered his heavy saber.
“Rank... Rank 4 Qi Gathering?!” General Tie Zhan’s deep voice rose three octaves. “My Lord, didn’t we just lock up Envoy Lin yesterday evening?! It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours! When I was a border commander in the Great Yan Army, the royal princes in the capital spent ten years burning rare spirit-grass just to feel a single thread of Qi!”
Meanwhile, Abacus Su didn’t even look at Pei Xuan’s aura. Instead, the skinny bookkeeper pushed his round spectacles up his nose, marched straight over to the smoking flowerbed, and knelt down with his brass ruler.
Click-clack, click-clack!
Abacus Su’s fingers flew across his small bamboo abacus at lightning speed.
“My Lord,” Abacus Su said solemnly, adjusting his glasses. “While I congratulate you on ascending to the Immortal path, my accounting office must still keep accurate books. One carved desert-granite flowerbed: twelve silver taels. Six ornamental thorn-lilies turned to ash: three silver taels. One wooden dish-tub cracked by Old Yellow’s backside: forty copper coins. Total property damage caused by the City Lord’s breakthrough: fifteen taels and forty copper coins.”
Pei Xuan’s smile stiffened. “Wait a second, Abacus Su. I am the City Lord! Are you going to put me in a yellow Debtor Vest too?”
“Of course not, My Lord!” Abacus Su bowed politely, then turned an icy, shark-like smile toward the mud where Envoy Lin and Marquis Pei Zhan were sitting. “According to Municipal Law Article 14, Section 3: All testing costs required to inspect confiscated enemy contraband shall be billed directly to the contraband’s original owner.”
Abacus Su pulled out his charcoal pencil and scribbled furiously in his ledger.
“Prisoner 401, Envoy Lin! Because your Fireball Qi Art did not come with a clear safety warning label, you are hereby fined fifteen taels and forty copper coins for the flowerbed test! At your current dish-washing wage of ten copper coins per day, your sentence has been extended by one hundred and fifty-four days!”
“WHAT?!” Envoy Lin screeched, jumping halfway out of the mud before his shock-collar gave a warning bzzzz. “He was the one who shot the fireball! He was the one who roasted his own camel’s ass! How is that my fault for not having a safety label?!”
“Immortal manuals without safety labels are a public hazard,” Abacus Su replied coldly, snapping his ledger shut. “Wait until tonight’s Night School class. If any of our soldiers singe their eyebrows while practicing your spell, I will put that on your tab too!”
Envoy Lin looked at Abacus Su’s terrifying smile, then looked at Pei Xuan, who was already walking toward the dining hall with General Tie Zhan and Old Wei to discuss the night school’s seating chart.
Down in the mud beside the camel, Envoy Lin sat with his mouth wide open as the hot desert wind blew through his messy hair.
“Every... every farmer shooting fireballs?” Envoy Lin whispered, shivering from head to toe. “And I have to pay for their burned pants?! If the Four Great Immortal Sects hear that a desert mayor is mass-producing Qi Gathering farmers like cabbages... the sky is going to fall!”
From inside the cracked wash-tub, Old Yellow let out a loud burp that smelled of pickled radish and spat one last mouthful of soapy water right onto the top of Envoy Lin’s head.