SHING! SHING! SHING!
Five beams of bright crimson light burst out of the storage pouches of Senior Brother Zhao and his four juniors. Within a single breath, five three-foot steel flying swords hovered in the middle of the lantern-lit street, humming like angry hornets.
“Up!” Senior Brother Zhao roared.
He tapped the toes of his embroidered boots against the street tiles and shot fifty feet straight up into the night air, landing squarely on the flat blade of his Red-Flame Sword. Behind him, Junior Sister Liu and the three other Rank 4 Early disciples leaped onto their own flying swords, rising into a neat five-pointed star formation above the rooftops of Ward 3.
Hot crimson Qi rolled out of their dantians like burning clouds, lighting up the whole square in an eerie red glow.
“Look at these arrogant ants!” Senior Brother Zhao looked down from fifty feet in the air, his hair whipping wildly in the hot wind as he pointed a finger down at the crowded street. “Because our Crimson Cloud Sect rarely walks the mortal world, you dirt-diggers have forgotten the terror of true Immortals! Junior Brothers! Junior Sister! Form the Five-Fire Ring Array! Burn this filthy food street and every mortal in it to cinders!”
“Yes, Senior Brother!” the four juniors shouted in unison.
Up in the night sky, the five cultivators pinched sword-seals with their fingers and chanted aloud. Five spinning rings of roaring orange fire—each one ten feet wide and hot enough to melt iron—rose above their heads, linking together into a giant flaming wheel that threatened to crash down on the noodle stalls!
Any ordinary mortal town in the Great Yan Kingdom would have fallen into total panic by now. People would be trampling each other, crying, and kowtowing in the dirt to beg the flying Immortals for mercy.
Down in Ward 3 of Dry-Well City, however, the reaction was completely different.
“Whoa, look up there! Five more red-robed fireworks!” shouted Blacksmith Zhang from the front row of the noodle stall. Instead of running away, he casually picked up his stool with one hand, held his bowl of spicy beef noodles in the other, and took three steps backward under the fireproof stone awning of the shop.
“Hey, nobody push! Don’t spill my soup!” an old bricklayer grumbled as he shuffled under the stone arcade with his grandson. He pointed a thumb up at the five glowing cultivators in the sky. “Little Stone, look closely! Remember what Teacher Su taught us in night school? When wild sect disciples fly into town without a permit and start glowing red, what does that mean?”
The eight-year-old boy chewed on a crunchy fried locust and answered brightly, “It means the Road Repair Department is about to get five free workers, Grandpa!”
“Good boy! Tell you what—I bet two copper coins the tall one in front lands on his face first!”
“You’re on, Grandpa! I bet one copper coin the skinny girl in pink lands in the pickle barrels!”
Down behind Old Guo’s iron noodle cart, Old Guo himself wasn’t scared at all. Now a Rank 4 Early Qi Gathering cultivator trained in the Furnace-Blood Scripture, the fat cook calmly slid a heavy iron lid over his giant pot of forty-year master beef broth so no dust would fall into it.
Behind him, Envoy Lin poked his head up in his yellow Debtor Vest and waved both arms frantically at the sky.
“Zhao Kuang! Have you gone completely mental?!” Envoy Lin screamed at the top of his lungs. “Don’t throw fireballs in Ward 3! Do you have any idea how expensive Lord Pei’s municipal crystal streetlamps are?! When I broke three gate bricks last month, Abacus Su charged me ten thousand Spirit Stones! If you burn down Old Guo’s noodle stall, the five of you won’t be able to pay off the interest even if you shovel manure until your next reincarnation!”
Up on his flying sword, Senior Brother Zhao heard the townspeople placing bets on his face and heard Envoy Lin worrying about the price of streetlamps. He was so furious that a mouthful of hot blood nearly spurted out of his throat.
“Still talking about money and manure?!” Senior Brother Zhao’s eyes turned bloodshot. He raised both hands above his head, pushing the spinning wheel of five fire rings downward. “Die, you brainwashed fool! Once I turn this city into a crater, let’s see who dares hand me a bill! Five-Fire Ring—FALL!”
At that exact moment, the double doors of the Grand Sweet-Spring Bathhouse swung open.
CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.
A pair of wooden bath slippers clicked calmly against the wide marble terrace on the second floor.
Pei Xuan stepped out into the warm night air wearing a loose, snow-white cotton bathrobe with a fluffy towel draped over one shoulder. His damp hair was still steaming slightly from the mineral spring pool. Beside him walked Old Wei with his heavy black-iron broadsword, Hong Ling with her twin kitchen cleavers, and Abacus Su holding a thick ledger book and three freshly dipped ink brushes.
Pei Xuan looked up at the five spinning fire rings descending toward his favorite night market, yawned slightly, and shook his head.
“Why do every single one of these Crimson Cloud Sect people have the exact same bad habit?” Pei Xuan sighed, scratching his ear. “They fly over other people’s houses in the middle of the night, shout at the top of their lungs, and try to set fire to the snack street. Do they not teach basic civic manners in Green-Jade Valley?”
“Lord Pei,” Abacus Su said solemnly, his abacus clicking like rain on a tin roof. “Our Level 1 Town No-Fly Array was built last month to handle a single Rank 4 Early cultivator. Right now, there are five of them linked together in a spell array, and the leader is at Rank 4 Mid—Qi Gathering Stage 5. If we just use the Level 1 array, they might slide sideways and crash into the new porcelain shop on Third Street. Those vases are worth three hundred taels a pair!”
“We definitely can’t let them break the porcelain shop,” Pei Xuan agreed immediately. “Wait a second while I upgrade the array.”
Pei Xuan opened his RTS Territory Screen and tapped the glowing blue [Fusion Cube] icon floating in the center of his vision.
“Automatically guides falling intruders toward the softest, cheapest landing pit to protect street tiles?” Pei Xuan’s eyes lit up with pure joy. “Now that is a civilized city-building feature! Fuse it right now!”
[ Spend 300,000 LP? -> CONFIRMED! ]
[ Remaining Balance: 1,120,000 LP ]
Deep beneath the center of Dry-Well City, at the bottom of the original Sweet-Spring Well, an enormous eighty-foot Flood Dragon with dark gold scales was curled around an underground thermal pipe, happily gnawing on a barrel of spicy cumin lamb ribs that Old Guo had lowered down an hour ago.
Suddenly, a warm golden beam from the Fusion Cube swept over three old, shed scales lying near the dragon’s tail and linked them to the city’s underground iron grid.
Old Dragon Ao Ming raised his massive horned head, sniffed the air, and felt five tiny, annoying fire-flies buzzing above his warm sleeping town.
“Hmph! Some little Qi Gathering bugs dare to make noise while this Dragon Lord is eating his midnight lamb ribs?” Ao Ming snorted through his nostrils, blowing out a thick puff of heavy, deep-sea dragon pressure straight into the brass array pipe above his head. “Go eat dirt, you noisy brats!”
BOOOOOOOM—HUMMMMM!
In an instant, the eight iron array towers around Ward 3 flashed with a deep, dark-gold light. Invisible lines of magnetic loadstone force and ancient Flood Dragon pressure wove together fifty feet above the rooftops, locking directly onto Senior Brother Zhao, his four juniors, and their spinning wheel of fire!
Up in the sky, Senior Brother Zhao was grinning savagely as the Five-Fire Ring Wheel dropped ten feet toward the noodle stall.
“Kneel and burn, you—”
He never finished the word “mortals.”
WHAM!
Out of nowhere, an invisible iron mountain weighing ten thousand pounds slammed straight down onto the backs of the five red-robed cultivators!
First, the terrifying Five-Fire Ring Wheel caught the full force of the tenfold gravity field. Instead of roaring down like a meteor, the five rings of fire were squashed completely flat in mid-air like five red pancakes hit by a giant fly-swatter! With a pathetic PFFT-FIZZLE, the compressed fire Qi collapsed in on itself and puffed out into five harmless smoke rings that smelled faintly of burnt matches.
“What?!” Senior Brother Zhao’s eyeballs nearly popped out of his sockets.
Before he could even check why his spell had fizzled out, the tenfold dragon-gravity slammed into his own body and his flying sword!
Suddenly, Senior Brother Zhao felt as if his hundred-and-fifty-pound body weighed fifteen hundred pounds! His knees buckled with a loud CRACK. His leather boots crushed his own toes, his silk robes felt like lead armor, and beneath his feet, his proud Rank 4 Red-Flame Flying Sword let out a pitiful metallic whine—WHEEEEE-CLANG!—as its spiritual light went completely dark!
“My Qi! My flying sword won’t float!” Junior Sister Liu shrieked in terror as her pink ribbons stood straight up in the air. “Senior Brother! Why is the sky so heavy?! Help me—AAAAAH!”
“Pull up! Pour Qi into your swords!” Senior Brother Zhao screamed, his face twisting backward in the rushing wind as he frantically pumped every drop of Qi Gathering energy from his dantian into his blade.
It was completely useless. Against tenfold loadstone gravity backed by a Flood Dragon’s breath, five outer-sect Qi Gathering disciples were no different from five fat chickens tossed off a cliff!
Even worse, as they plummeted out of the sky at eighty miles an hour, the Level 2 Array’s [Municipal Tile Protection Protocol] kicked in automatically.
A gentle sideways magnetic breeze caught the five falling red robes and steered them twenty yards to the left—away from the expensive blue-stone pavement of the noodle street, away from the porcelain shop, and straight toward a small, square brick building at the back corner of the night market with a big wooden sign hanging over the door:
[ WARD 3 PUBLIC FERMENTATION LATRINE & FERTILIZER PIT ]
Up on the bathhouse terrace, Pei Xuan winced slightly and covered his nose with his white bath towel.
“Oh dear,” Pei Xuan murmured. “I forgot the night-soil carts don’t empty the Ward 3 fermentation pit until tomorrow morning.”
“Watch out below!” Envoy Lin yelled from behind the noodle cart, covering his eyes with both hands. “They’re going straight into the big pit!”
Down in the air, Senior Brother Zhao looked between his boots as the red-tiled roof of the public latrine rushed up to meet his face. He saw the wooden sign. He smelled the rich, fermented aroma of ten thousand potato-eaters wafting up through the roof vents.
His proud Dao heart shattered into a million pieces.
“NOOOOOOO! NOT THE TOILET—!”
CRAAAAAASH! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Five human-shaped holes punched straight through the wooden rafters and red clay tiles of the public latrine roof like five cannonballs!
For one brief second, there was dead silence across the entire Ward 3 Night Market.
Then, from inside the dark, broken brick building came five deep, echoing, liquid noises:
PLOP! SPLASH! GLUG-GLUG-SPLAT!
A thick brown fountain splashed three feet out of the holes in the roof before settling back down with a heavy bubble.
Across the square, twenty thousand townspeople, blacksmiths, bricklayers, and refugee families stared at the ruined latrine roof in stunned silence.
Then, the eight-year-old boy sitting on the bricklayer’s shoulders clapped his hands and cheered:
“Grandpa! Pay up! None of them hit the street tiles—they all went in the poop pit together!”
ROOOOOOOOAR!
The entire Ward 3 Night Market exploded into thunderous laughter! Blacksmiths banged their iron mugs on the tables, village women laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks, and even cold-faced General Tie Zhan, who had just jogged up the street with a squad of guards, stopped in his tracks and let out a booming belly laugh that shook his iron armor.
Behind the noodle cart, Envoy Lin slowly lowered his hands from his face, looked at the hole in the latrine roof, and patted the Little Red Flower on his yellow Debtor Vest with trembling relief.
“Thank goodness I surrendered last month,” Envoy Lin whispered, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. “When Lord Pei hit me with a brick, at least I landed on dry sand!”
Over at the corner of the square, the wooden door of the public latrine was pushed open with a shaky, creaking sound.
Five figures slowly crawled out onto the gravel path on their hands and knees.
Their fluttering crimson sect robes were no longer crimson—they were soaked heavy and brown from head to toe with top-grade fermented potato fertilizer. Pieces of yellow straw and cabbage leaves hung from Senior Brother Zhao’s proud jade hairpin. Junior Sister Liu took one look at her stained sleeves, smelled her own hair, let out a high-pitched squeal, and fainted flat on her back in the gravel.
“My robe! My thirty-silver-tael Crimson Cloud silk robe!” Junior Brother Chen sat in the dirt and sobbed like a three-year-old child, frantically trying to wipe his face with his sleeve—which only smeared more yellow mud across his nose. “I fell in with my mouth open! Senior Brother, I swallowed a mouthful! Why did a mortal town have a ten-times gravity array over a toilet?!”
“Don’t touch me! Stay away from me!” Junior Brother Ma gagged, dry-heaving against the brick wall of the latrine while holding his bruised backside. “My flying sword! My flying sword is still stuck at the bottom of the pit! I’m not reaching my hand back down there to get it!”
Right beside the broken latrine door, a sixty-year-old grandfather wearing a red armband that said [ WARD 3 SANITATION CAPTAIN ] walked over holding a long bamboo manure scoop and a lantern. Instead of looking scared of the five cultivators, Uncle Liu looked into the broken pit and stomped his foot in anger.
“Hey! Which one of you five maniacs jumped through my roof?!” Sanitation Captain Liu shouted, waving his bamboo scoop right in front of Senior Brother Zhao’s nose. “Do you know how long it took me to ferment that batch of Grade-A Night-Soil for the east potato fields?! We just added the lime and straw this afternoon! Now look what you did—you let all the warm air out, broke forty-two red roof tiles, and drank two mouthfuls of my public fertilizer without paying for it!”
“Drank your fertilizer without paying for it?!” Junior Brother Chen cried out in despair, clutching his stomach and rolling on the ground. “Who wants to drink your fertilizer?! I want to go home! I want my mother!”
Up on the bathhouse terrace, Abacus Su’s brush flew across his ledger page while his other hand worked his golden abacus so fast it threw off sparks.
“Write that down! Write that down!” Abacus Su called out gleefully. “Unauthorized consumption of two mouthfuls of municipal Grade-A agricultural fertilizer—ten silver taels! Spoiling the fermentation temperature of Pit #3—five hundred silver taels! Crushing forty-two red clay roof tiles and three pine rafters during night hours—two thousand silver taels! Plus the gravity array electricity fee of thirty thousand Spirit Stones!”
Down behind the noodle cart, Envoy Lin shook his head in deep sympathy as he finished his second free braised egg.
“Finished. They are totally finished,” Envoy Lin muttered to Old Guo. “Once Director Su starts charging for the array electricity fee, those five will be wearing yellow vests until their hair turns white. Hey, Chef Guo, when they get assigned to Ward 3 tomorrow, make sure I’m still the #001 Senior Foreman, okay? Don’t let Zhao Kuang take my job!”
“Don’t worry, Little Lin,” Old Guo chuckled, tossing a handful of chopped green onions onto a fresh bowl of noodles. “Those five don’t even know how to hold a shovel yet. You’ll be their supervisor!”
“Blergh—cough, cough!” Over by the latrine, Senior Brother Zhao spat out a mouthful of dirty mud, trembling violently from head to foot as the laughter of twenty thousand mortals and the clicking of Abacus Su’s abacus rang in his ears like demonic thunder.
Never in his twenty-four years of life—not since the day he was found to have a Middle-Grade Fire Spirit Root and entered the sacred gates of the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect—had he suffered such soul-crushing humiliation!
“You... you filthy mortal pigs!” Senior Brother Zhao staggered to his feet, his eyes glowing with mad, bloodshot fury as he reached into his soaked inner collar and pulled out a dark-red jade talisman carved with a coiling snake. “I don’t care what gravity trick you used! You made a disciple of the Crimson Cloud Sect eat night-soil! Today, I will burn this entire city to the ground with Elder Huo’s Rank 4 Peak Flame-Serpent Talisman! Everyone here dies!”
Up on the bathhouse terrace, Pei Xuan saw the dark-red talisman in Senior Brother Zhao’s muddy hand. Instead of calling Ye Guhan or drawing his own sword, Pei Xuan reached into his bathrobe pocket and pulled out a small copper whistle.
“He still thinks mortals can’t use fire spells?” Pei Xuan smiled and raised the whistle to his lips. “Let’s let our Ward 3 night-school bricklayers show him their homework.”