By the time the moon rose over the Silver River, the ten Ironclad Paddle-Wheel Steam-Spirit Ships had pulled back two hundred yards from the piers and dropped their heavy iron anchors in the middle of the wide river channel.
Along the stone riverbanks of Silver-Fork Port, Reed-Bank City, and Iron-Dock Town, over a hundred thousand townspeople who had just cooked their first full supper of fragrant one-copper Dry-Well Spirit-Rice refused to go to sleep. They stood along the waterfront holding paper lanterns, staring anxiously out at the dark water.
“Look downstream! And upstream too!” Carpenter Chen pointed a trembling finger toward the dark river bends. “It’s the Southern Canal Guild’s main fleet! Guild Master Qian has called back all three hundred of his Armed River Galleys!”
Sure enough, the sound of three hundred heavy war drums—BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!—echoed across the dark water from both north and south.
Three hundred wooden river galleys, each eighty feet long and bristling with iron-tipped rams and catapults, closed in like a pack of water wolves to trap Pei Xuan’s ten steamships in the middle of the river.
In the front line of the Guild fleet floated fifty old wooden cargo barges piled high with dry pine firewood, straw bundles, sulfur bricks, and open barrels of black lamp oil!
Standing on a raised wooden command tower at the rear of the formation, Guild Master Qian wore a suit of gleaming Rank 4 Black-Gold Turtle Armor over his fat belly and waved a brass command flag with bloodshot eyes.
“Pei Xuan! You ruined my fifty-copper rice market in a single afternoon!” Guild Master Qian’s voice boomed across the river, amplified by his Rank 4 Mid Qi. “You think hiding inside ten iron shells makes you safe on my Silver River?! Iron conducts heat, you desert idiot! Once my fifty oil-soaked Fire-Boats chain themselves to your iron hulls and burn at three thousand degrees, your ships will turn into ten floating red-hot ironwoks! Everyone inside will be roasted into crispy pork cracklings!”
On the riverbank, thousands of townspeople gasped in terror.
“Oh no! Lord Pei’s ships are made of iron! If fifty oil-boats burn around them, the soldiers inside will be cooked alive!”
“Run, Lord Pei! Sail back into the Grand Desert Canal before they close the net!”
Up on the illuminated bridge of Dry-Well No. 1, however, nobody was panicking.
In fact, Old Guo was just finishing wiping down the top-deck barbecue grills with a bucket of bubbly yellow kitchen soap, while General Tie Zhan, Hong Ling, and Boom-Pot Sun stood around the foredeck watching the three hundred enemy galleys row closer.
“Three hundred wooden boats carrying open barrels of oil and sulfur?” Boom-Pot Sun adjusted his quartz goggles and shook his head in pity. “That fat man clearly never took my Basic Alchemy Lab Safety Class at the Vocational College! Still, My Lord, if fifty burning oil-boats bump against our hulls, they’ll ruin the fresh silver-gray paint job we put on this morning!”
“We certainly can’t let them scratch our paint,” Pei Xuan smiled calmly. “More importantly, those three hundred wooden galleys are made of seasoned hundred-year-old river pine. Do you know how many new school desks, house roof-beams, and cargo barges Abacus Su can build out of three hundred intact wooden galleys if we capture them without burning them down?”
Abacus Su’s spectacles flashed like two small suns in the moonlight. “At least one hundred and eighty thousand silver taels worth of prime timber, My Lord! Please do not let those prodigal fools burn my future lumber inventory!”
“Don’t worry, Abacus Su. Not a single plank of your lumber is going to burn tonight,” Pei Xuan chuckled.
He walked over to the cargo hatch, where three big clay jars of thick, shimmering blue liquid sat beside ten sets of Water-Pumping Windmill Gears and twenty wooden barrels of Old Guo’s Lemon-Oil Dish Soap.
The three blue clay jars contained Ao Ming’s Fireproof Dragon Spit—which Hong Ling had carefully scooped up with a ladle from the marble well steps after the old dragon drooled over the twenty roasted sheep the night before!
Pei Xuan opened the Fusion Cube inside his mind and selected all three stacks of materials.
“System! Fuse [3 Jars of Ao Ming's Fireproof Dragon Spit] + [10 High-Speed Water-Pumping Windmills] + [20 Barrels of Lemon-Oil Dish Soap]. Spend 600,000 Loyalty Points!”
HUMMMMM—DING!
In a flash of golden light, two thick, gleaming brass swivel-cannons with wide nozzle barrels and spun-copper pressure tanks materialized on the bow and stern decks of each of the ten Ironclad Steamships! Thick iron intake pipes dropped automatically from the bottoms of the cannons straight down into the river water.
Just as the twenty brass cannons locked into place, Guild Master Qian slashed his command flag downward.
“Light the oil! Release the fifty Fire-Boats! Three hundred galleys—ram them from all sides and hook their decks!”
WHOOOOOOSH! BOOM!
All fifty wooden Fire-Boats burst into towering thirty-foot flames as the Guild crewmen lit the pine-tar and lamp oil before diving off the sterns! Driven by wind sails and long poles from the three hundred Armed River Galleys right behind them, a blazing ring of fire roared across the black water straight toward the ten steamships!
On the decks of the three hundred Armed River Galleys, three thousand shirtless Canal Guild river-pirates waved heavy boarding hooks and iron cutlasses, howling like wild beasts:
“Burn the desert rats! Roast them in their iron pots! First man to bring back Pei Xuan’s head gets a thousand silver taels!”
Fifty yards! Forty yards! Thirty yards!
The heat from the fifty blazing oil-boats was so intense that people standing on the distant riverbanks had to shield their faces.
Pei Xuan stood calmly by the bridge railing of Dry-Well No. 1 and raised two fingers.
“All ships—turn on the bath taps! Give Guild Master Qian’s boys a full shampoo and rinse!”
“FIRE THE FOAM CANNONS!” roared General Tie Zhan, gripping the twin brass handles of the flagship’s front swivel-cannon and squeezing the trigger lever!
FSHHHHHHHHHH—SPLAAAAAAAAASH!
From the bows and sterns of all ten Ironclad Steamships, twenty massive, milk-white jets of ultra-pressurized Dragon-Spit Bubble-Foam—each stream as thick as an ancient oak tree—erupted a hundred and fifty yards across the river with the roar of twenty waterfalls!
The first ten foam jets slammed straight into the fifty blazing oil Fire-Boats!
POOF! FIZZZZZ!
Normally, spraying plain water onto burning lamp oil only spreads the fire.
But this wasn’t plain water—it was high-pressure soap-foam infused with a Rank 7 Flood Dragon’s fireproof spit!
The instant the thick, snowy white blanket of lemon-scented foam hit the thirty-foot oil flames, the fire didn’t even get a chance to flicker! In less than ten seconds, all fifty roaring Fire-Boats were buried under a six-foot-deep mountain of snowy white soap bubbles! Every single flame went out with a pathetic little pfft, leaving only a cloud of refreshing lemon fragrance drifting across the Silver River!
“W-what?!”
Guild Master Qian’s jaw dropped so hard he bit his own tongue. “My fifty Fire-Boats! Five thousand barrels of lamp oil! Put out in ten seconds by... bath bubbles?!”
Before the three hundred Armed River Galleys rowing right behind the Fire-Boats could even brake their oars, General Tie Zhan and the nineteen other cannon gunners laughed uproariously and swung the brass nozzles left and right in a full 360-degree sweep!
“Wash behind their ears, boys! Don’t miss a single boat!”
FSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Twenty screaming jets of 500-PSI soapy foam swept across all three hundred wooden galleys like giant firehoses!
“Augh—blub-blub-blub!”
In the lead galley, a scarred Rank 3 pirate captain opened his mouth to yell “Charge!”—and took a full-pressure blast of lemon soap-foam straight down his throat!
The force of the water-cannon knocked him off his feet, sent him spinning like a top across the wooden deck, and blew twenty frothy soap bubbles out of his nose and ears!
Within thirty seconds, all three hundred Armed River Galleys of the Southern Canal Guild looked like three hundred giant floating bathtubs overflowing with snowy white suds!
And then came the real nightmare for the three thousand river pirates.
Because the fused Dragon-Foam reduced surface friction by ninety-five percent, the wooden planks of every single galley had instantly become ten times slicker than greased winter ice!
“Hold steady! Swing your boarding hooks—” a burly Guild pirate yelled, trying to take a step forward.
WHOOPS—SLIIIIIDE—BONK!
His wet straw sandals shot straight out from under him! His legs did a full 180-degree split in midair, his boarding hook flew backward and hooked his own captain’s trousers clean off, and both men went rocketing across the soapy deck on their backsides like greased bobsleds!
“Look out! Stop sliding! Grab the mast—WHOAAAA!”
“Get off my back! I can’t stop my feet!”
“Why does my mouth taste like lemons?! Help! The railing is too slippery to hold!”
BONK! CRASH! PLOP! PLOP! SPLASH!
Across all three hundred galleys, not a single Canal Guild pirate could stay standing for more than two seconds!
Every time a pirate tried to stand up, his feet Pedaled wildly in place like a cartoon duck before shooting out from under him. When the galleys rocked in the wake of the steamships’ paddle-wheels, hundreds of soapy, bubble-covered pirates slid straight across the tilted decks, shot through the side railings like wet bars of soap squeezed between two fingers, and plunged headfirst into the river!
PLOP! PLOP! PLOP! PLOP!
It sounded like three thousand giant dumplings being dumped into a pot of boiling water!
On the stone riverbanks of Silver-Fork Port, Reed-Bank City, and Iron-Dock Town, the hundred thousand watching citizens stared in stunned silence for five seconds—and then burst into the loudest, most side-splitting roar of laughter the Silver River had ever heard!
“Bahahaha! Look at the fierce Southern Canal Guild Navy! They’re sliding off their own boats like greased pigs!”
“And look how clean their faces are! That Scarface Wang on the third boat hasn’t washed his neck in ten years, and now he’s sparkling white and blowing lemon bubbles out of his nose!”
“Long live Lord Pei! He didn’t even kill them—he just gave three thousand river bandits a bath!”
“Scoop ’em up, boys!” shouted Old Boatman Liu from the wheelhouse of Dry-Well No. 1.
The ten Ironclad Steamships lowered huge woven bamboo cargo nets along their sides and chugged slowly through the middle of the bubbly fleet. Every thirty seconds, a crane arm lifted a cargo net packed with fifty shivering, squeaky-clean, lemon-scented Guild pirates out of the water and dumped them onto the steel deck, where Abacus Su’s clerks immediately handed each man a dry towel and a yellow Debtor Vest!
“Welcome aboard!” Abacus Su announced cheerfully, clicking his golden abacus. “Each of you owes Dry-Well City fifty copper coins for the Deluxe Lemon Bubble-Bath Service, plus two hundred silver taels for attempting to scratch our ships’ paint! Sign here with your thumbprint—your three-year canal-dredging internship starts tomorrow morning at six o’clock!”
Half a mile downstream, sitting on his command ship with soap suds stuck to his mustache, Guild Master Qian trembled with rage and terror as he watched his three hundred galleys get towed away in a single neat line by Pei Xuan’s steamships.
“My three hundred galleys... washed away by dish soap?!” Guild Master Qian shrieked, hammering his armoured fist against the railing. “Send the signal flare to Silver Lake! Call out my fifty Iron-Beak Ramming Warships, my Rank 3 Deep-Water Martial Divers, and my three Rank 4 Qi Gathering Mercenary Captains! If we can’t burn them from above, we’ll drill holes in the bottom of their hulls from underwater!”