Fifty miles east of Dry-Well City, at the edge of the Red-Sand Wastes, stood Black-Rock Border City—the ancestral seat of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate.
Normally, the city streets went quiet after dark. Tonight, however, the whole city sounded like a hornet’s nest that had been kicked into a bonfire.
Outside the locked iron gates of the Marquis’s Mansion, thousands of skinny, hollow-cheeked townspeople stood in the cold spring wind holding empty cloth sacks and wooden bowls.
“Open the granary! Lady Wang, you promised to sell emergency millet today!”
“My little grandson hasn’t eaten a grain of rice in four days! We paid our autumn grain tax on time—where is the relief food?!”
“Is it true what the desert merchants said?! Did Marquis Pei Zhan really get captured in Dry-Well Village?! They say he is wearing a yellow vest and scrubbing soup pots for the Ninth Young Master!”
Inside the mansion’s inner courtyard, torches burned brightly as dozens of household guards carried heavy iron-bound wooden chests out of the underground vault and loaded them onto thirty two-horse carriages.
On the stone porch stood a woman in her late thirties wearing a fox-fur cloak and eight gold hairpins that jingled every time she shook her finger.
She was Lady Wang, Pei Xuan’s stepmother.
Next to her stood two young men in silk robes: Pei Heng, the twenty-year-old eldest son who had been spoiled rotten since birth because of his tiny Grade-9 Fire Spirit Root, and Pei Bao, the eighteen-year-old second brother who was currently stuffing gold candlesticks into his own riding boots.
“Move faster, you lazy dogs!” Lady Wang screeched at the sweating guards, slapping her silk handkerchief against a porch pillar. “Skip the copper coins! Only pack the gold ingots, silver bars, jade ornaments, and the family land deeds! If we aren’t out the East Gate before midnight, I’ll have your skins peeled!”
“Mother, why are we running away in such a hurry?” Second Brother Pei Bao complained, waddling slightly because of the two gold candlesticks jammed inside his boots. “Father only lost five hundred guards in the desert. Even if that little bastard Pei Xuan got lucky and trapped Father with some desert trick, can’t we just ask Uncle Wang in Red-River County to send troops?”
“Shut your mouth, you pig-brained idiot!” Eldest Brother Pei Heng snapped, his face pale as he clutched a low-grade spirit-dagger at his waist. “Didn’t you hear the scout who escaped back this morning?! Even Envoy Lin from the Crimson Cloud Sect got knocked out of the sky by Pei Xuan’s cannons! Right now, Father is washing dishes in a yellow vest, and Envoy Lin is scrubbing toilets right next to him!”
Pei Heng swallowed hard and looked toward the western sky in fear.
“Even worse, Mother and I secretly sold all forty thousand sacks of the city’s emergency war grain to the southern grain merchants last month so we could buy my Spirit-Gathering Pills! Once the townspeople outside find out the public granaries are completely empty, they’ll tear down the mansion walls and eat us alive!”
“Heng’er is right,” Lady Wang hissed, her painted eyes flashing with greed and malice. “Your father is useless now, and this rotten border city is finished! With the four hundred thousand taels of silver we saved up—plus the money from selling the emergency grain—we can buy a grand estate in the Great Yan Royal Capital! Once Heng’er enters an Immortal Sect in the capital, who cares about a bunch of starving border peasants?”
Just then, a household steward came running from the front gate, his hat crooked and his forehead bleeding from a thrown pebble.
“Madam! First Young Master! Bad news!” the steward cried out. “The hungry crowd at the front gate just pried open the side window of the West Granary! They saw that the grain bins are full of rat droppings and empty straw sacks! Tens of thousands of citizens are rioting in the streets, and the regular city guards are refusing to draw their swords because their own families are starving too!”
Lady Wang’s face twisted. “Refusing to draw their swords?! Bunch of ungrateful mutts! Where is Commander Scar-Face and the Blood-Blade Mercenary Corps I paid twenty thousand taels to hire this afternoon?!”
“Right here, Madam Wang!”
A harsh, grating laugh rang out from the side barracks.
A tall, bald man with a jagged knife-scar running from his forehead down to his chin strode into the courtyard. He was Commander Scar-Face, a ruthless Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmaster notorious along the border for slaughtering whole villages for gold. Behind him marched three thousand heavily armed Blood-Blade Mercenaries wearing spiked leather armor and carrying dark red broadswords.
“Commander Scar-Face!” Lady Wang let out a sigh of relief and pointed toward the noisy streets outside. “Take your three thousand men and lock all four city gates right now! Do not let a single peasant leave the city, and do not let anyone open the West Gate! Keep those starving dogs pinned in the streets until my family’s silver wagons exit through the private tunnel at the East Gate!”
“Consider it done, Madam,” Commander Scar-Face grinned, licking the edge of his broadsword. “For twenty thousand taels of silver, my boys will make sure not even a fly gets near the West Gate!”
***
Meanwhile, twenty miles west of Black-Rock Border City, the ground of the Red-Sand Wastes was shaking like a continuous earthquake.
RUMBLE-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
Under the bright moonlight, a terrifying and bizarre army was charging eastward along the wide, flat stone highway that Sword Genius Ye Guhan had paved across the desert the previous week.
At the very front rode Pei Xuan on the back of Old Yellow. The bald camel now wore a custom-fitted steel helmet and had a bandage wrapped around his singed tail-tip, trotting along at forty miles an hour without spilling a drop of Pei Xuan’s tea.
Right behind Pei Xuan thundered one thousand Scorpion Cavalrymen led by General Tie Zhan and Old Wei!
Each soldier rode atop a tamed, pony-sized Armored Red-Tail Scorpion whose pincers gleamed like iron shears.
And hitched behind the giant Scorpion Kings in the center of the column rolled fifty massive, eight-wheeled iron supply wagons. Built right into the bed of every wagon was a brick stove-pit where Old Guo’s kitchen team was actively steaming mountains of fist-sized Meat-Belly Giant Potatoes and boiling cauldrons of salted lamb soup on the move!
Thick clouds of white steam smelling of roasted lamb fat, garlic, and sweet potatoes trailed for two miles behind the marching army.
“My Lord! Look ahead at the ten-mile boundary marker!”
General Tie Zhan rode his giant Scorpion King up beside Old Yellow and pointed his heavy saber down the highway.
Half a mile ahead, where Pei Xuan’s smooth stone road ended and the bumpy dirt road of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate began, a ragged crowd of about two thousand villagers—men, women, elderly folks, and crying children—were huddled behind overturned wooden wheelbarrows.
Surrounding those two thousand villagers were two hundred horsemen wearing the black-and-red vests of the Blood-Blade Mercenaries.
A one-eared mercenary captain sat on a tall black warhorse, cracking a leather whip over the head of a white-haired village elder kneeling in the dirt.
“You bunch of dirt-eating runaways!” the one-eared mercenary captain barked, spitting on the old man’s head. “Lady Wang and First Young Master Pei Heng gave strict orders! Every village in the Marquisate must pay an extra ‘Spring Garrison Tax’ of three silver taels per person! Anyone caught sneaking west toward Dry-Well Village will have their legs broken and their daughters sold to the horse market!”
“Sir, please have mercy!” the white-haired village elder cried, blood trickling down his forehead. “The spring drought dried up our creek, and Lady Wang took all our seed grain last month! We don’t even have tree bark left to boil! We heard that the Ninth Young Master in Dry-Well City gives free water and meat-potatoes to anyone willing to work—just let us go live in the desert!”
“The Ninth Young Master?!” The one-eared captain threw his head back and laughed nastily. “That waste-of-space bastard born from a kitchen maid? Even if he has food, you think you’ll live to reach his gate? Brothers, grab their wagons and tie up the young men as porters!”
The two hundred Blood-Blade Mercenaries raised their broadswords with cruel grins.
Then one of the mercenaries sniffed the night air and froze.
“Wait... Captain... do you smell that?” the mercenary muttered, his stomach letting out a loud gurgle. “Why does the desert wind smell like roasted lamb and garlic?”
“Roasted lamb? Your mother’s head is roasted lamb—wait, why is the ground shaking?!”
The one-eared captain looked up toward the western ridge just as a thousand pairs of glowing red scorpion eyes crested the hill under the moonlight!
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
A thousand armored scorpions charged down the paved slope like an iron avalanche!
Before the two hundred Blood-Blade Mercenaries could even turn their horses around, their warhorses smelled the monstrous desert scorpions and went completely crazy—rearing up on their hind legs, neighing in terror, and dumping half the mercenaries straight onto their backsides in the dirt!
“What the hell are those monsters?!” the one-eared captain screamed as his horse bucked him into a dry ditch.
At the front of the scorpion charge, Old Wei didn’t even need to draw his broadsword.
Having broken through to Rank 4 Early Qi Gathering two hours ago, the one-armed old veteran simply raised his single hand and snapped his fingers as his scorpion mount rushed past the mercenary captain.
FOOM! FOOM! FOOM!
Three fist-sized Furnace-Blood Fireballs shot out from Old Wei’s fingertips like glowing red cannonballs!
They didn’t hit the villagers—they struck the three mercenary war-banners and the captain’s iron shield with pinpoint accuracy!
BOOM!
The one-eared captain’s iron shield melted into cherry-red slag in half a second, and the shockwave sent the captain flying twenty feet through the air before he landed headfirst in a thorn bush with his pants on fire!
“IMMORTAL! HE SHOT FIRE FROM HIS HAND!”
“THE ONE-ARMED OLD MAN IS AN IMMORTAL!”
“DON’T KILL US! WE SURRENDER!”
Within ten seconds, all two hundred Blood-Blade Mercenaries threw their broadswords onto the ground and knelt in the dirt with their hands clasped over their heads, shaking like quails!
Not a single villager had been scratched.
The two thousand starving villagers stared in stunned silence as the terrifying army of giant red scorpions came to a neat, synchronized halt along the roadside.
Then, from the back of the bald camel in the center, Pei Xuan smiled warmly and waved his hand.
“Uncle Guo! Drop the wagon tailgates!” Pei Xuan called out.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Twenty iron wagon tailgates dropped down at once.
Old Guo stood on the first wagon wearing his white chef’s apron, using a giant wooden shovel to scoop out steaming-hot, golden-brown Meat-Belly Giant Potatoes that smelled exactly like slow-roasted mutton!
Wait—Old Guo didn’t even use a fire-poker to keep the soup cauldron hot. He simply tapped the bottom of the iron pot with his glowing red finger, sending a wave of Rank 4 Blood-Fire across the metal so the soup bubbled and fragrant white steam washed over the entire crowd of two thousand starving villagers!
Gulp.
Two thousand throats swallowed at the exact same time.
“Folks of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate!” Pei Xuan’s clear, warm voice echoed across the highway. “I am Pei Xuan, the ninth son of the Pei family and the Lord of Dry-Well City! While Lady Wang and Pei Heng stole your grain to line their own pockets, Dry-Well City never lets an honest worker go hungry! Everyone in line gets two hot Meat-Potatoes and a big bowl of lamb broth—free of charge!”
The white-haired village elder accepted a wooden bowl piled high with two steaming, fist-sized potatoes from Hong Ling. His trembling hands nearly dropped the bowl as he took a huge bite.
Crispy skin outside, fluffy golden mash inside, and juice that tasted like rich, salted roasted lamb!
Warm energy spread from the old man’s stomach straight out to his freezing fingers and toes.
“It’s real meat... It tastes like New Year’s lamb feast!” the old man sobbed, tears streaming down his wrinkled face as he dropped to his knees facing Pei Xuan. “The Ninth Young Master really came back to save us! Thank you, Young Master! Thank you, Living Bodhisattva!”
All two thousand villagers—eating hot potatoes and gulping down lamb broth—knelt down along the highway, kowtowing and crying with joy as their floating Loyalty bars shot up like green fireworks in Pei Xuan’s eyes!
Abacus Su hopped off a wagon with a bundle of bright yellow Debtor Vests and slapped one onto the one-eared mercenary captain, whose pants were still smoking.
“Prisoner Number 612!” Abacus Su clicked his abacus briskly. “Attempting to rob two thousand of Lord Pei’s new citizens, plus trampling three roadside bushes: your fine is one thousand silver taels! Put on this vest, pick up a shovel, and start paving the road toward Black-Rock City!”
The one-eared captain looked at Old Wei’s glowing red hand, swallowed hard, and pulled the yellow vest over his head in one second flat. “Yes, Sir Accountant! Wait—if I pave the road toward Black-Rock City, do I also get one of those meat-potatoes?!”
“Work two hours first, then you get half a potato!” Abacus Su sniffed.
Pei Xuan looked past the cheering villagers toward the dark, towering walls of Black-Rock Border City just ten miles down the road, where red torchlight flickered along the battlements.
“Lady Wang locked the city gates with three thousand mercenaries so the hundred thousand people inside can’t come out to eat?” Pei Xuan’s lips curved into a wicked grin.
“Uncle Guo, turn up the stove fires on all fifty wagons! We’re riding right up to the West Gate of Black-Rock City. Let’s see if Lady Wang’s mercenaries can block the smell of fifty thousand pounds of braised pork and roasted lamb!”