Early summer arrived in the Red-Sand Wastes with a blazing golden sun, yet inside Dry-Well City, the air was cool, moist, and smelled of blooming willow trees and fresh bread.
Along the newly extended Red-Sand Iron Railway, armor-plated Scorpion Kings pulled twenty-car passenger trains back and forth between Black-Rock City, Dry-Well City, and Green-Jade Vocational College every thirty minutes.
Over the past three days alone, another sixty thousand drought refugees from the inner provinces of the Great Yan Kingdom had arrived at the border welcome camps, pushing the total registered population of Pei Xuan’s territory to a staggering 350,000 citizens!
Inside the newly built Dry-Well Municipal City Hall, however, Abacus Su was pacing back and forth in front of a giant wall-chart with a deep frown on his face.
Sitting around the long conference table were General Tie Zhan, Old Wei, Hong Ling (who was busy counting a jar of shiny Spirit Stones while munching on a candied hawthorn stick), Master Bricklayer Wang, and Chief Tractor Pilot Zhao Kuang—who now wore five rows of Little Red Paper Flowers pinned across his yellow Debtor Vest like a four-star general’s medals.
When Pei Xuan walked into the hall and took his seat at the head of the table, Abacus Su immediately bowed and tapped his bamboo pointer against three red warning circles on the wall chart.
“Lord Pei, I have both wonderful news and an urgent supply-chain warning,” Abacus Su reported briskly. “First, the wonderful news: thanks to Teacher Zhao’s Flying-Sword Tractor and our new Green-Jade Vocational College, our food, water, salt, and coal supplies are booming! Even with 350,000 mouths to feed three times a day, our granaries have a forty-day surplus of Meat-Potatoes!”
“Here! Here!” Senior Brother Zhao puffed out his yellow vest proudly from the end of the table. “Yesterday I modified the tractor’s fifth sword-gear to dig potato trenches and harvest at the same time! Wait until we fuse two more tractors next week!”
“Don’t celebrate too soon, Debtor #002,” Abacus Su pushed his spectacles up his nose and tapped the three red warning circles. “While we have plenty of food, water, and desert coal, our construction department has hit a massive bottleneck! With sixty thousand new citizens arriving in three days, we have run completely out of three critical resources: One: Heavy Pine & Cedar Timber for house rafters, railway sleepers, and furniture! Two: High-Grade Raw Iron Ore to feed our Spirit-Rifle and train-track factories! Three: Cotton and Hemp Cloth to make summer clothes and bedsheets for sixty thousand ragged refugees!”
Master Bricklayer Wang nodded heavily, rubbing his calloused hands. “Director Su is right, My Lord. My masons can bake mud-iron bricks all day long, but without wooden roof beams, we can’t put roofs on the new houses in Ward 6! Right now, thirty thousand new refugees are still sleeping in canvas tents, and my carpenters are down to their last two hundred logs!”
Pei Xuan looked at the giant relief map on the wall.
To the west and north of Dry-Well City lay endless sand dunes and salt flats. To the east, just a hundred miles past the rocky hills of the border, flowed a wide, surging blue waterway that cut across the southern half of the Great Yan Kingdom like a silver dragon:
The Silver River.
“Along the banks of the Silver River lie the largest cedar forests, iron mines, and cotton mills in the southern provinces,” Pei Xuan said, resting his chin on his hand. “Why haven’t the timber and cloth merchants from the Silver River come west to trade with us? Our snow-fine desert salt and Meat-Potatoes are worth gold right now during the drought.”
“They want to come, My Lord—their mouths are watering for our cheap salt and grain!” Abacus Su slammed his bamboo pointer against a fortified port city drawn at the western bend of the Silver River. “The problem is this man right here: Guild Master Qian Wanli of the Southern Canal Guild!”
At the mention of “Guild Master Qian,” even Senior Brother Zhao and Envoy Lin gasped.
“Lord Pei, I know that fat snake Qian Wanli!” Senior Brother Zhao raised his hand eagerly. “He’s a Rank 4 Mid (Qi Gathering Stage 5) cultivator who got kicked out of a water-attribute sect twenty years ago for stealing sect funds! He used his stolen money to build five hundred armed river barges and took over three hundred miles of the Silver River! Everyone calls him the River Python!”
“He is worse than a python,” Abacus Su said coldly, picking up an intelligence report brought in by the border merchants. “Ever since the Great Spring Drought hit the kingdom, all the small roads dried up, making the Silver River the only way to move heavy timber, iron, and grain. Guild Master Qian immediately locked down Silver-Fork Port—the closest river port to our border—and raised his river transit tax to eighty percent!”
“Eighty percent?!” Hong Ling nearly bit her candied hawthorn stick in half, her eyes flashing with fury as she clutched her coin pouch. “If a merchant carries ten carts of wood down the river, that fat pig takes eight carts just for sailing past his dock?! That’s even greedier than my Young Master’s stepmother!”
“Even worse,” Abacus Su continued grimly, “Guild Master Qian has bought up all the white rice in the six river counties and locked it inside his floating river warehouses, raising the price of rice to fifty copper coins a pound! Thousands of poor boatmen and river families are starving on the docks right outside his full granaries. And yesterday, when he heard that Dry-Well City was giving out free food to refugees, he issued an order banning any timber or iron boats from trading with us—claiming that ‘desert bumpkins don’t deserve river wood’!”
General Tie Zhan stood up with a loud CLANG of his armor, his hand gripping his heavy saber. “My Lord! Give me the 5,000-Man Peasant Rifle Brigade! I will march to Silver-Fork Port tomorrow morning and shoot that fat pig Qian into a sieve!”
Pei Xuan raised a hand to calm his fiery general and smiled thoughtfully.
“General Tie, marching five thousand infantry across a hundred miles of dry, rocky hills to fight five hundred riverboats on deep water is playing right into Guild Master Qian’s hands,” Pei Xuan said calmly. “If we attack his port on foot, he will just untie his barges, float into the middle of the two-mile-wide Silver River, and laugh at us from the water.”
Pei Xuan stood up and walked over to the sand-table map.
“If we want to crush the Southern Canal Guild, free the six river counties, and ship ten million tons of timber and iron straight back to Dry-Well City, we don’t march on foot,” Pei Xuan’s eyes gleamed. “We bring the river to us—and we build an Ironclad Navy that makes his wooden barges look like paper toys!”
Before launching a campaign against a Rank 4 Mid river warlord with five hundred ships, however, Pei Xuan looked at his own status panel.
Ever since he had smashed open his dantian at the start of the month to reach Rank 4 Early (Qi Gathering Stage 1), he had been busy upgrading city buildings, roads, and factories. Meanwhile, his daily income had grown all the way to 4,350,000 LP/day, and he had over 3.6 million LP sitting in his pocket!
“Before we dig a river and sail east, a City Lord shouldn’t let his own cultivation fall behind his bricklayers,” Pei Xuan chuckled. “Abacus Su, send a peaceful ten-wagon salt caravan to Silver-Fork Port tomorrow morning to officially ask Guild Master Qian for a trade permit. Make sure every wagon has a clear price list attached so when he robs us, your audit bill will be watertight. Everyone else—dismissed until evening! I’m going into the back chamber to digest a pill!”
***
Thirty minutes later, inside the quiet, spirit-mist-filled cultivation chamber behind City Hall, Pei Xuan sat cross-legged on a warm jade mat.
Outside the open window in the courtyard, his lazy, bald pack-camel Old Yellow was lying in the shade, happily chewing on a basket of leftover spirit-herb stems from the Green-Jade Valley treasury.
Pei Xuan laid three items on the mat in front of him: 1. One hundred low-grade Spirit Stones from Elder Huo’s vault. 2. A jade bottle of Boom-Pot Sun’s Nine-Spice Red-Scorpion King Essence. 3. A small porcelain vial containing three drops of Old Dragon Ao Ming’s Golden Dragon-Spit (which Pei Xuan had collected from the bottom of the well in exchange for two extra barrels of spicy lamb ribs).
Pei Xuan opened the [Fusion Cube] interface in his mind.
[ Spend 350,000 LP? -> CONFIRMED! ]
[ Remaining Balance: 3,300,000 LP ]
HUMMMMM—DING!
The hundred Spirit Stones, the scorpion essence, and the dragon spit vanished in a swirl of golden-red light.
In Pei Xuan’s palm appeared a single thumb-sized, glowing red-gold pill stamped with a tiny coiling dragon pattern, smelling deliciously of roasted cinnamon and sweet spring water! Beside it lay a handful of warm, golden-crusted herb stems.
“Here you go, Old Yellow—don’t say I ever forget your snack,” Pei Xuan laughed and tossed the handful of golden dragon-herb slag out the window into Old Yellow’s feed trough.
CHOMP. CHOMP. GULP.
Out in the courtyard, the lazy, bald pack-camel swallowed the golden dragon-herb slag in one gulp, burped out a ring of golden fire that turned a stone flowerpot into molten glass, and suddenly sprouted two long, shimmering golden dragon-whiskers on either side of his camel nose!
[ Pet Mutation Progress: Old Yellow (Pack-Camel -> 15% Golden Dragon-Camel) | Spit Range: 50 Feet (Armor-Piercing Acid-Fire!) ]
Inside the room, Pei Xuan popped the warm Supreme Dragon-Blood Furnace Pill into his mouth.
BOOOOOOOOOM!
The moment the pill touched his tongue, it melted into a roaring river of liquid golden fire that plunged straight down into his dantian!
Pei Xuan closed his eyes and circulated the Furnace-Blood Scripture at full speed.
Inside his body, his blood—already tempered as heavy as mercury—began to boil and sing like a thousand war drums! Driven by the ancient vitality of Ao Ming’s dragon spit, the golden torrent of pure Qi slammed against the internal meridian gates of Qi Gathering Stage 2!
CRACK!
The Stage 2 gate shattered like dry paper!
Without losing a single drop of momentum, the golden dragon-fire river surged ten times wider, sweeping through his thirty-six primary meridians, washing his bones in a faint layer of indestructible dark-gold luster, and crashing straight through the barrier of Qi Gathering Stage 3—all the way to the very peak of Rank 4 Early-Peak (Stage 3 Peak)!
When Pei Xuan opened his eyes an hour later and exhaled a long breath, a three-foot beam of condensed golden-red Furnace-Blood Qi shot out of his lips and sliced a clean hole right through an inch-thick iron training plate across the room!
He clenched his right fist. The air in his palm popped like a firecracker under a sheer physical grip strength of twenty thousand pounds!
“Stage 3 Peak—just half a step away from Rank 4 Mid,” Pei Xuan stood up, feeling lighter, faster, and ten times stronger than before. “Even if that River Python Qian Wanli is at Qi Gathering Stage 5, my Furnace-Blood Qi is three times denser than any normal cultivator’s!”
***
As twilight fell and the spinning neon pickle-jar head of Elder Huo lit up the night sky with its cheerful “Rub-a-dub-dub” song, Pei Xuan walked back into the Strategic War Room of City Hall.
Around the sand-table map, General Tie Zhan, Abacus Su, and Sword Genius Ye Guhan were waiting for him.
“Lord Pei, the ten-wagon salt trade caravan has been prepared,” Abacus Su reported. “Clerk Fang will lead it to Silver-Fork Port at dawn tomorrow, while a RTS Scout Hawk follows overhead.”
“Good,” Pei Xuan nodded, picking up a thick brush dipped in bright red cinnabar ink.
He walked up to the giant relief map, placed the tip of his red brush right on the Eastern Desert Station a hundred miles east of Dry-Well City, and drew a circle around Silver-Fork Port on the banks of the mighty Silver River.
Everyone in the war room leaned forward to study the eastern border hills and the winding river beyond them.
“My Lord,” General Tie Zhan said, resting his scarred fist on the edge of the map table, “the Scorpion-Track Iron Railway has already reached the eastern border station at the edge of the granite hills. Once our trade wagons cross the last twenty miles of hill road into Silver-Fork Port tomorrow, our snow-white desert salt and cast-iron tools will reach the richest river markets in Great Yan!”
“If Guild Master Qian Wanli trades fairly, everyone along the Silver River will eat cheap salt and use sturdy iron plows,” Pei Xuan set the brush down and smiled calmly at the officers in the room. “But if the Silver-River Canal Guild thinks desert people don’t understand water and tries to choke our trade wagons at his river toll-gates, we won’t beg to use his docks. We have fifty thousand tons of steel, Old Dragon Ao Ming’s underground floodwaters beneath our feet, and Sword Genius Ye Guhan’s unmatched blade right here in our hall!”
Beside the table, Rank 5 Sword Genius Ye Guhan rested a hand on the hilt of his dark-iron sword, his cold eyes glinting at the thirty miles of granite hills separating the desert from the Silver River.
Before Ye Guhan could speak, Senior Brother Zhao Kuang raised his hand from the corner of the map table.
“Lord Pei! What about my Flying-Sword Tractor #1?” Senior Brother Zhao asked eagerly, patting the rows of Little Red Paper Flowers pinned to his yellow Debtor Vest. “Can I drive my tractor out to the eastern border station tomorrow too? Our agricultural brigade just finished plowing another ten thousand mu of sweet-potato fields!”
“Keep your tractor tuned and ready, Teacher Zhao,” Pei Xuan chuckled warmly. “Once we open the eastern river corridor, we will need every single Flying-Sword Tractor and road crew working full speed to link the desert and the river basin together!”
“Everything on the supply train is loaded and ready for departure at dawn, My Lord,” Abacus Su added, adjusting his spectacles and closing his thick ledger with a crisp snap. “Clerk Fang’s ten-wagon salt caravan will head down the hill road to Silver-Fork Port first thing in the morning, while you, General Tie, Hong Ling, and I inspect the new Eastern Border Station!”
“Good,” Pei Xuan nodded, looking out the high war-room window toward the moonlit rails stretching east across the desert. “Tonight, Chef Guo is roasting twenty whole spicy cumin sheep for the railway workers and the garrison. Eat well and get a full night’s rest—tomorrow morning, Dry-Well City marches east to meet the Silver River!”