Sizzle! Crackle! Hissss!
Golden drops of rendered mutton fat dripped onto glowing red-hot desert coal, sending clouds of mouth-watering cumin and chili smoke drifting across the central plaza of Dry-Well City.
Right beside the original Sweet-Spring Spirit Well—which had been expanded from a small mud hole into a hundred-foot-wide octagonal white marble reservoir connected to the starting gate of the new Grand Desert Canal—twenty massive iron roasting spits were turning slowly over open fire pits.
On each spit turned a whole, three-hundred-pound fat-tailed desert sheep.
Old Guo and the village’s chief alchemist-chef, Sun Baolu—“Boom-Pot Sun”—ran back and forth along the line of roasting sheep wearing thick asbestos aprons. While Old Guo brushed the crispy, bubbling golden skin of the sheep with a three-foot basting brush dipped in garlic-honey oil, Boom-Pot Sun stood on a wooden stool shaking a giant copper pepper-pot over the meat.
“More chili! More cumin! Don’t be stingy with the peppercorn powder, Brother Guo!” Boom-Pot Sun cackled, his soot-stained face beaming as his eyebrows twitched with excitement. “If a pill doesn’t make smoke come out of your ears, it’s not a good pill! And if roast lamb doesn’t make an ancient dragon sneeze his scales loose, it’s not good barbecue!”
“Careful with that pepper-pot, Old Sun!” Hong Ling called out from the marble railing of the well, holding a clothes-pin over her nose so she wouldn’t sneeze. “If you drop your iron cauldron into the fire again, I’m docking three silver coins from your spice budget!”
Pei Xuan walked up the marble steps to the edge of the well reservoir, followed by Old Wei, General Tie Zhan, Abacus Su, and Ye Guhan—who was picking his teeth with a clean bamboo splinter after demolishing four catties of braised beef tendon.
Around the central plaza, more than fifty thousand citizens and newly arrived eastern refugees stood on their tiptoes, craning their necks toward the empty, twenty-foot-deep granite canal trench that stretched east out of the city like a silver highway.
“My Lord,” General Tie Zhan swallowed a mouthful of drool as he stared at the twenty golden-brown roasted sheep. “I know Lord Ao Ming down in the well breathed fire into our heating pipes all winter and gave us dragon scales for the No-Fly Array... but a hundred miles of canal, fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep, takes millions of tons of water! Can one old dragon really spit out a whole river in a single night?”
“Normally, even a Flood Dragon would get a dry throat trying to spit that much water,” Pei Xuan smiled, opening the Fusion Cube in his mind. “That’s why we aren’t asking him to spit. We’re going to help him open the underground Planetary Water Vein with a super-charged sneeze!”
Pei Xuan pointed at the twenty roasting sheep and a sack of white desert herbs sitting beside Boom-Pot Sun’s stove.
“System! Fuse [20 Roasted Fat-Tailed Sheep] + [100 Pounds of Red-Flame Chili Peppers] + [10 Pounds of Tickle-Nose Sneeze-Root] + [Pure Spirit-Spring Dew]. Spend 200,000 Loyalty Points!”
HUMMMMM—DING!
The moment the golden fusion light flashed across the twenty roasting spits, the skin of the sheep turned a dazzling ruby-gold. A rich, spicy aroma ten times stronger than before exploded across the plaza. Even Ye Guhan stopped picking his teeth and sniffed the air, while General Tie Zhan’s stomach let out a rumble like distant thunder.
Down in the deep, crystal-clear water of the octagonal marble well, giant bubbles suddenly erupted to the surface.
BLUB! BLUB! WHOOOOSH!
The water in the reservoir surged ten feet high, and a massive azure head covered in shimmering blue-green scales poked up out of the well!
It had two branching coral-gold horns, whiskers as thick as ship ropes, and a pair of lantern-sized golden eyes. It was Ao Ming, the ancient Rank 7 Flood Dragon who had been pinned beneath Dry-Well Village for three thousand years by the Upper-Realm Spirit-Draining Nail!
Because Pei Xuan had upgraded Dry-Well City into a bustling desert metropolis and loosened the top layer of the nail’s seal earlier this month, Ao Ming’s usable power had already recovered from Rank 3 Peak up to Rank 4 Peak (Half-Step Foundation Establishment).
As soon as the giant dragon head rose above the marble parapet, the newly arrived eastern refugees shrieked in terror and fell flat on their backsides.
“A d-dragon! A living Flood Dragon in the middle of the desert!”
“Merciful heavens! Dry-Well City has a real Dragon God living in their town well!”
Ao Ming heard the gasps of the crowd and immediately puffed out his scaly chest, trying to look as ancient, terrifying, and majestic as possible. He cleared his throat with a sound like grinding millstones and spoke in a booming, hollow voice that echoed over the rooftops:
“WHO DARES DISTURB THIS SOVEREIGN KING OF THE NINE ABYSSAL SEAS?! MORTAL BOY PEI XUAN! DO YOU KNOW THAT THIS SEAT WAS MEDITATING ON THE SUPREME MYSTERIES OF HEAVEN AND EARTH—”
Drip. Splash.
A bucket-sized glob of clear dragon drool dripped from the corner of Ao Ming’s mouth and splashed right onto the marble steps as his lantern-like eyes locked onto the twenty ruby-gold roasted sheep.
Right above the giant dragon’s coral horns, Pei Xuan’s RTS System helpfully popped up a bright blue tooltip:
Pei Xuan bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing out loud. He stepped forward, cupped his hands politely toward the giant azure dragon head, and spoke in a loud, respectful voice so Ao Ming could save face in front of the forty thousand new refugees:
“Greetings, Great Dragon Lord Ao Ming! We have just finished cutting a one-hundred-mile stone canal from your sacred well all the way to the Silver River in the east. However, the canal is still dry. I have prepared twenty whole Dragon-Tickling Spicy Roast Sheep as a humble tribute, hoping the Great Dragon Lord might bestow a tiny drop of your divine spring water to fill our canal!”
Ao Ming raised one scaly eyebrow, desperately trying to keep his tail from wagging underwater and splashing water out of the well.
“HMPH! A MERE HUNDRED-MILE DITCH?” Ao Ming roared grandly, though his nostrils were flaring three inches wide every second to inhale the spicy cumin smoke. “SINCE YOU HAVE SHOWN SUCH SINCERE FILIAL PIETY WITH THESE... AHEM... BARELY ACCEPTABLE MORTAL SHEEP, THIS DRAGON KING SHALL RELUCTANTLY TASTE THEM AND GRANT YOUR WISH! TOSS THEM IN BEFORE THEY GET COLD!”
Ao Ming unhinged his massive jaws, opening a mouth big enough to park an ox-cart inside!
“Fire the sheep!” Pei Xuan waved his arm.
“One! Two! Three—HEAVE!”
General Tie Zhan, Old Wei, Old Guo, and Boom-Pot Sun grabbed the heavy iron handles of the roasting spits and launched all twenty sizzling, ruby-gold roasted sheep straight into the air like catapult boulders!
SWOOSH! SWOOSH! SWOOSH!
Ao Ming didn’t let a single drop of gravy hit the floor. His long azure neck snapped left and right like a lightning bolt—CHOMP! CHOMP! CHOMP! GULP!—catching all twenty three-hundred-pound sheep in midair and pulling the iron spits clean out of his teeth like toothpicks!
For five seconds, Ao Ming chewed with his eyes squeezed shut in pure, unadulterated heaven. Crunchy golden skin, juicy mutton fat, fragrant desert cumin, and the fiery warmth of the fused Rank 4 spices exploded across his giant dragon tongue.
“MMMMM! GOOD LAMB! CRISPY SKIN! EXTRA CUMIN!” Ao Ming rumbled happily, his Loyalty bar flashing gold as it ticked from 89/100 to 93/100!
And then, the ten pounds of fused Tickle-Nose Sneeze-Root and Red-Flame Chili Qi rushed straight up from his throat into his giant dragon sinuses!
FWOOSH!
Ao Ming’s eyes flew wide open. The scales on his nose turned bright pink. He let out a huge, rumbling burp that sent a mushroom cloud of red chili smoke fifty feet into the evening sky—and then his entire head reared back!
“Uh-oh,” Hong Ling yelled, grabbing Old Yellow’s bridle and ducking behind the marble wall. “Everybody hold onto your hats! He’s gonna blow!”
“AAAAAH... AAAAAH...”
Ao Ming’s giant chest sucked in half the air over the central plaza, while deep beneath the well, the ancient Underground Spirit-Water Vein vibrated like a plucked bowstring as the dragon drew ten million gallons of pressurized subterranean spring water up into his throat!
“Pei Xuan opens the sluice gate!”
With a single pull of the heavy iron lever, Pei Xuan raised the fifty-foot marble floodgate separating the well reservoir from the head of the Grand Desert Canal.
“AAAAAH—CHOOOOOOOOOOO!”
KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOM!
Ao Ming sneezed straight into the mouth of the granite canal!
It wasn’t a normal sneeze. It was a Rank 4 Peak Flood Dragon’s full-power Tidal-Wave Spirit Sneeze!
A wall of glowing, crystal-clear blue spring water—fifty feet wide, eighteen feet high, and sparkling with rich Water-Spirit Qi—erupted out of Ao Ming’s jaws like a bursting dam and roared down the mirror-smooth granite trench of the Grand Desert Canal at eighty miles an hour!
“WHOAAAA!”
Along the stone embankments of Dry-Well City, fifty thousand citizens cheered at the top of their lungs as the foaming, sweet-smelling tidal wave thundered past them without spilling a single drop over Ye Guhan’s twenty-foot-high granite walls!
And that first sneeze wasn’t even the end.
“SNIFF! AH—AH—CHOOOOOO! AH—CHOOOOOO!”
Because the fused spicy lamb was so deliciously potent, Ao Ming sneezed seven times in a row! Each sneeze blasted another million tons of pressurized underground spirit-spring water into the canal, unlocking three dormant branch veins beneath the Red-Sand Wastes so that the water kept gushing up from the bottom of the reservoir like an endless geyser!
“Look at the banks! Look at the sand beside the canal!” a refugee woman cried out, pointing toward the dry red wasteland outside the east gate.
As the misty spray from Ao Ming’s spirit-water sneezes rained down over both sides of the hundred-mile canal, a breathtaking miracle occurred right before everyone’s eyes.
Dormant desert grass seeds, willow cuttings planted by the Engineering Corps that afternoon, and wild desert flowers drank in the diluted Spirit-Well mist and sprouted at visible speed! Within a single hour, a hundred-mile-long green ribbon of lush grass, weeping willow trees, and fragrant reed beds unfolded across the barren red desert on both banks of the sparkling blue canal!
Meanwhile, one hundred miles to the east, at the upper bend of the Silver River...
It was just past midnight. On the muddy western bank of the Silver River, fifteen miles upstream from Guild Master Qian’s toll-gates at Silver-Fork Port, nearly seventy thousand starving refugees and poor river-folk were huddled around tiny campfires, waiting for dawn so they could hike across the rocky hills toward Dry-Well City.
Suddenly, the ground beneath their feet began to hum.
RUMBLE-RUMBLE-RUMBLE!
“An earthquake?!” an old boatman gasped, clutching his grandson. “No! That sound is coming from inside the dry granite hills!”
Before anyone could run, the ten-foot-thick granite rock plug that Ye Guhan had left at the eastern end of the trench suddenly bulged outward.
BOOM-SPLAAAAAASH!
With a roar like ten thousand galloping silver horses, the rock plug shattered into pebbles, and a fifty-foot-wide river of crystal-clear, sweet-smelling blue spirit water burst out of the dry hills and poured straight into the muddy yellow waters of the Silver River!
Where the clear blue canal water met the murky yellow river, silver-scaled carp and fat river shrimp immediately leaped out of the mud and swam upstream into the new canal by the millions, drawn by the pure Spirit Qi in the water!
“A river! A new river just burst out of the desert hills!”
“Taste the water! It’s sweet! It’s cool! My back pain disappeared after one mouthful!”
“Look at the carved stone sign on the embankment—THE GRAND DESERT CANAL OF DRY-WELL CITY: FREE TOLLS, FREE DRINKING WATER FOR ALL COMMON FOLK!”
All seventy thousand starving refugees and river-folk dropped to their knees along the glowing green banks of the new canal, weeping and cheering as they scooped up the sweet water and marched west along the smooth granite towpaths toward Dry-Well City!
DING! DING! DING!
Back at the marble well reservoir—where Ao Ming was now happily snoring with his chin resting on the parapet and a giant bubble inflating and deflating from his nostril—Pei Xuan’s RTS System lit up the night sky inside his mind:
Pei Xuan looked down the shimmering, lantern-lit waters of the Grand Desert Canal, where fishes were already jumping in the moonlight and green willow branches swayed in the cool breeze.
“The road is cut, and the water is deep,” Pei Xuan said with a wide grin, turning toward the bright red furnaces of the Dry-Well Ironworks beside the canal dock. “General Tie, Boom-Pot Sun—bring out the ten iron ore barges and our pressure cauldrons! Tonight, we build the Dry-Well Navy!”