BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!
The eastern sky turned as dark as midnight.
A swirling black cloud three miles wide and five hundred feet tall roared across the dry riverbed separating Red-River County from Red-Sand Prefecture.
These were not ordinary field grasshoppers. Every single bug in the swarm was the size of a grown man’s thumb, with a dark metallic-brown shell andsaw-toothed mandibles that clicked like iron scissors!
Down in the ten Refugee Welcome Camps, complete panic broke out among the thirty thousand newly arrived families.
Wait—not only had these refugees just escaped from the Great Yan Kingdom, where the locusts had stripped every green leaf off the ground in twenty minutes, many of the older villagers had been brainwashed by superstitious local priests into believing the bugs were sent by an angry “Locust God”!
“It’s the Locust God’s army! They followed us across the border!”
“Everyone kneel and kowtow! Don’t swat them with your shoes, or the Locust God will get angry and send ten times more bugs next year!”
“Oh heavens! Just when we found a kind lord like Lord Pei, these demon bugs are going to eat all of his Meat-Potato fields right behind the camp!”
Thousands of terrified refugees dropped to their knees in the dirt, banging their heads on the ground and crying in despair.
However, the tall blacksmith Zhao Dahu—who had just eaten two big bowls of Old Guo’s lamb-potato porridge—didn’t kneel to the bugs. Instead, he jumped up, grabbed a heavy iron fire-poker from a stove cart, and ran toward the lush green Meat-Belly Potato Fields just behind the welcome camp!
“What Locust God?! If those bugs eat Lord Pei’s potato fields, my little daughter goes back to starving!” Zhao Dahu roared, waving his iron poker at the sky. “Brothers who have strength in their arms! Stand in front of the fields and beat these bugs out of the sky with our shirts!”
Two thousand brave young refugees jumped up to join Zhao Dahu, pulling off their patched jackets to swing at the incoming black cloud.
Over by the water barrels, Eldest Brother Pei Heng (#889) and Lady Wang (#888)—still wearing their yellow Debtor Vests—looked up at the sky and burst into malicious, gloating laughter.
“Hahaha! Heaven has eyes!” Lady Wang cackled, waving her water dipper in glee. “Even the Locust God hates that little bastard Pei Xuan! Look at that swarm—there are ten million Iron-Jaw Locusts! In half an hour, every single potato leaf between Black-Rock City and Dry-Well City will be chewed DOWN TO BARE DIRT! Let’s see how Pei Xuan feeds a hundred and sixty thousand people when his farms are gone!”
“And wait until Uncle Wang hears that Pei Xuan’s crops were eaten by locusts!” Pei Heng sneered. “All these refugees will riot when the food runs out!”
Up on the wooden watchtower of Camp #1, General Tie Zhan pulled out his heavy saber, while Old Wei and Old Guo raised their hands, ready to blast the sky with Rank 4 fireballs.
“My Lord!” General Tie Zhan shouted. “Let Uncle Wei, Uncle Guo, and our Night School soldiers shoot fireballs into the cloud!”
“Hold your fireballs!” Pei Xuan laughed, leaning against the watchtower railing without a trace of worry on his face. “If you blast them with raw fireballs in midair, you’ll burn them into black charcoal ash that falls into the dirt and goes to waste!”
Old Guo blinked his round eyes. “Goes to waste? Young Master... you don’t mean...”
Pei Xuan pointed at the floating system tooltip that only he could see: [High-Protein Meat: 10 locusts equal 1 lb of beef for body-tempering!]
“Do you know what I see flying toward us right now, Uncle Guo?” Pei Xuan grinned from ear to ear. “I don’t see a locust plague. I see sixty thousand pounds of free, flying, high-protein meat snacks delivering themselves straight to our dinner tables!”
“Sixty thousand pounds of flying meat snacks?!” Old Guo’s fat cheeks trembled with excitement, and he licked his lips. “Young Master, when you put it that way... deep-fried grasshoppers with chili powder and cumin salt go great with cold beer and porridge! Wait—how do we catch ten million of them before they land on the potato leaves?!”
“Watch and learn,” Pei Xuan said.
He looked along the high earth ridge that ran for two miles along the eastern border right in front of the welcome camps.
On that ridge stood twenty tall Wooden Grain-Grinding Windmills that used to belong to Black-Rock City’s outer farms.
Next to the camp supply depot sat fifty bundles of fine-mesh Hemp Fishing Nets (confiscated from Marquis Pei Zhan’s lake house), three crates of Crackling Lightning-Spark Ore mined from the desert salt flats, and fifty huge barrels of Soybean Cooking Oil and Spiced Chili-Cumin Salt sitting beside Old Guo’s stoves!
Pei Xuan opened his Fusion Cube inside his mind!
Into Slot 1, he placed the [20 Border Windmills + 50 Hemp Fishing Nets].
Into Slot 2, he placed the [3 Crates of Lightning-Spark Ore].
Into Slot 3, he placed the [50 Barrels of Cooking Oil + Giant Iron Cauldrons + Chili-Cumin Salt].
“Two hundred thousand points to turn a natural disaster into an all-you-can-eat buffet? Fuse!”
Pei Xuan tapped [YES]!
HUMMMMM—CRACKLE!
His LP balance dropped from 1,220,000 to 1,020,000.
Across the two-mile border ridge, a blinding golden beam of light flashed over all twenty windmills!
In front of thirty thousand stunned refugees, the twenty old wooden windmills expanded to three times their original size. Their four sails turned into eight wide, spinning Copper-Mesh Funnel Blades flashing with blue arcs of static electricity. Beneath each windmill tower, a massive self-heating iron wok-trough filled with bubbling golden oil and a spinning spice-shaker drum locked into place with a heavy CLANG!
Down on the ground, blacksmith Zhao Dahu and the thirty thousand refugees stared at the twenty giant, crackling windmills on the ridge with their mouths wide open.
“What... what did Lord Pei just do?!”
“Those twenty old windmills turned into copper-and-iron towers with blue lightning on the blades!”
At that exact moment, the leading edge of the ten-million-strong Iron-Jaw Locust Swarm crossed the dry riverbed and charged straight toward the ridge!
“Start the windmills!” Pei Xuan waved his hand from the watchtower.
WHOOOOOOOSH—ZZZZZT!
All twenty Locust-Zapping Windmills spun into high gear at the same time!
The eight-bladed copper rotors whirled so fast they blurred into glowing silver circles, creating twenty massive horizontal tornadoes of suction!
The ten million Iron-Jaw Locusts—which had been flying toward the green potato fields behind the camp—suddenly found the wind pulling them sideways like an invisible giant vacuum cleaner!
BZZZZ—SQUEAK!
Millions of thumb-sized locusts tried to flap their wings backward, but they couldn’t fight the Rank 3 Cyclone Suction!
Like a black river getting sucked down twenty giant bathtub drains, the entire three-mile-wide locust cloud was yanked straight into the spinning copper-mesh funnels of the twenty windmills!
ZAP-ZAP-CRACKLE-ZAP!
Thousands of tiny blue lightning arcs danced across the copper mesh!
Every single locust that touched the spinning net got instantly zapped clean of dust and bacteria, its outer wings neatly singed off in a tenth of a second, before sliding down a slick brass chute straight into the twenty gigantic cauldrons of three-hundred-degree boiling soybean oil below!
SSSSSSSHHHHHH—CRACKLE!
A deafening, heavenly sizzle echoed across the entire border!
Within three seconds, the locusts turned from ugly brown pests into golden-red, crispy-crunchy prawns of the sky!
A rotating slotted paddle scooped the golden-fried locusts out of the bubbling oil, tossed them through a spinning drum of Red-Sand Chili Pepper, Roasted Cumin, Garlic Powder, and Fine White Salt, and dumped them by the cartload down long wooden slides into twenty cleanest-scrubbed twenty-foot snack troughs right inside the welcome camps!
The dark, terrifying locust cloud in the sky vanished completely in less than five minutes.
The bright morning sun shone back down over the border.
And replacing the terrifying buzz of ten million bugs was an aroma so mouth-watering, nutty, spicy, and crispy that every single person within five miles started drooling on their shoes!
Sniff, sniff.
Down on the ground, blacksmith Zhao Dahu slowly lowered his iron fire-poker. He walked over to the nearest twenty-foot wooden trough under Windmill #1, where a steaming, golden-red mountain of chili-salted fried locusts was piled four feet high.
Old Guo marched over wearing his white chef’s hat, picked up a handful of the hot, crispy locusts, and popped three into his own mouth.
CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!
The sound of that crunch was so crisp it echoed fifty yards away!
“Mmmm! Crispy on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside, with zero muddy smell and a kick of cumin and chili!” Old Guo gave a thumbs-up, his eyes squinting into happy slits. “Better than deep-fried river shrimp! Step right up, folks! Grab a bamboo scoop! Lord Pei invites everyone to eat the ‘Locust God’ for breakfast!”
“Eat... eat the Locust God?!”
An old granny who had been kowtowing on the ground a minute ago blinked at the golden-red mountain in the trough. Her stomach growled loudly.
Wait—if even the “Locust God” got sucked into a windmill, zapped by lightning, deep-fried in soybean oil, and sprinkled with cumin salt by Lord Pei in five minutes... then wasn’t Lord Pei Xuan a hundred times stronger than the Locust God?!
Zhao Dahu was the first to reach into the trough. He scooped up a wooden bowl full of hot, golden locusts and bit one in half.
CRUNCH!
Instantly, his eyes went as wide as saucers!
It didn’t taste like a bug at all—it tasted like crispy-fried chicken skin mixed with roasted peanuts and spicy cumin lamb! Even better, the moment he swallowed it, a warm current of Earth-Fire Blood Energy flowed into his tired muscles, making his sore arms bulge with fresh strength!
“Daddy, let me try one!” His six-year-old daughter ate one, giggled at the loud crunch, and stuffed three more into her cheeks like a little squirrel. “Yummy! It tastes like spicy crispy shrimp!”
“They’re delicious! And my back pain just disappeared after eating five of them!”
“What Locust God?! In front of Lord Pei, ten million locusts are just free breakfast snacks!”
Within three minutes, all thirty thousand refugees—plus another twenty thousand newly arriving refugees who had just run up the road chasing the smell—surrounded the twenty giant troughs, scooping up bowls of Cumin-Chili Crispy Locusts to eat alongside their hot lamb-potato porridge!
CRUNCH-CRUNCH-CRUNCH-CRUNCH!
Fifty thousand people crunching golden fried locusts at the exact same time sounded like a hailstorm hitting a tile roof!
Right next to Trough #3, General Tie Zhan didn’t even use a bowl. The hungry general grabbed a two-gallon wooden bucket, filled it to the top with hot, spicy fried locusts, and poured them straight into his mouth like peanuts!
Gulp-crunch-crunch!
General Tie Zhan had already been at 99% of Rank 3 Peak Martial for three days after reading the Comic-Strip Cultivation Primer. Now, as three pounds of concentrated Earth-Fire Blood Energy from the mutated locusts hit his stomach, his heart gave a thunderous THUMP!
“HAAAAAH!”
General Tie Zhan let out a roar of pure joy as his boiling blood smashed straight through his dantian gate!
BOOM!
A pillar of fiery red Rank 4 Qi Gathering aura erupted from the top of General Tie Zhan’s iron helmet, sending a ring of hot air whistling across the camp!
“Hahaha! My Lord!” General Tie Zhan laughed so hard tears came out of his eyes, punching a fist-sized fireball into the air like a celebratory firework. “Eating spicy fried bugs pushed me straight into Rank 4 Qi Gathering! Give me another bucket!”
Over by the water barrels, Lady Wang (#888) and Pei Heng (#889) stared at the scene with their jaws hanging down to their chests.
The ten-million-strong locust plague that they had prayed would ruin Pei Xuan’s farms... had just been turned into sixty thousand pounds of bar snacks in five minutes AND helped Pei Xuan’s general become an Immortal?!
Pei Heng swallowed hard, staring at the golden pile of fried locusts as his own stomach let out a pitiful squeak. “Mother... why does that smell so good? Can Debtors get a scoop of fried bugs too?”
Just as the fifty thousand refugees were cheering and licking chili salt off their fingers, a group of bruised, bleeding farmers came stumbling across the dry riverbed from the east, crying out in anger and pain:
“Lord Pei! Save our families! Behind us on the Red-River Highway, Count Wang has marched out with five thousand county soldiers! They built a wooden spike-wall across the main road and are whipping any refugee who tries to walk toward your welcome camps!”