WHOOOOO-WHOOOOOOO! CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA!
Seven days after the fall of Golden-Abacus Island, the hundred-mile Grand Desert Canal and the wide channel of the Silver River had transformed into the busiest, liveliest shipping highway in the entire northwest of the Great Yan Kingdom!
Even at eight o’clock in the evening, when rivers in other provinces were pitch-black and haunted by water bandits, the entire length of the Grand Desert Canal and the Silver River glowed like a ribbon of fallen stars.
Every fifty yards along the smooth granite embankments stood a tall iron streetlamp powered by fused Glow-Stone Batteries (with the original one outside the Dry-Well bathhouse still brightly lit by Elder Huo’s captured spirit-projection!).
Down the center of the glowing waterway chugged Dry-Well No. 1, towing a long train of twenty heavy wooden barges piled high with seasoned pine logs, pig-iron ingots, and southern silk toward Dry-Well City’s roaring factories. Passing it in the opposite lane was Dry-Well No. 6, blowing two friendly blasts on its brass steam-whistle as it hauled ten thousand sacks of one-copper Spirit-Rice, Snow-Salt, Meat-Potatoes, and smokeless desert coal east toward the six river counties!
“Stay in the right-hand lane, Captain Zhang! Speed limit inside the port zone is fifteen knots!”
Standing on a floating wooden watch-platform in the middle of the canal junction was none other than Shark-Tooth Zhang, the former Rank 4 Early Qi Gathering mercenary leader of the Three River Sharks!
Over his shark-skin vest, Shark-Tooth Zhang now wore a bright red Dry-Well Waterway Traffic & Lifeguard Captain sash, a polished copper whistle around his neck, and a huge smile on his face.
“Looking good, Captain Liu!” Shark-Tooth Zhang saluted the passing steamship and blew two crisp tweets on his copper whistle. “Next 24-Hour Municipal River Rest Stop is half a mile ahead on the starboard bank! Hot showers are at full pressure, and the night-shift kitchen just took fifty trays of steamed mutton buns out of the oven!”
Half a mile down the bank stood Municipal River Rest Stop #1, one of twenty identical rest stations that Pei Xuan had spent 400,000 Loyalty Points fusing along the canal and river over the past week using [Granite Dock Quays] + [Dragon-Fire Hot Water Pipes] + [24-Hour Canteen Stoves] + [10,000 Cork-Wood Buoyancy Vests].
Pei Xuan stood on the second-floor observation balcony of Rest Stop #1 alongside Hong Ling, Abacus Su, Old Wei, and Ye Guhan, looking down at the bustling stone plaza below.
Fifty cargo barges and merchant boats from six neighboring counties were moored neatly along the rubber-bumpered stone pier.
On the left side of the plaza stood the Boatmen’s Public Bath & Hot Shower Hall. Hundreds of tired boatmen and dockworkers who had spent their whole lives sleeping in cold, wet river mud walked in carrying five copper coins and came out thirty minutes later dressed in clean cotton clothes, their hair steaming and their faces glowing red!
“Heavens! Five coppers for an unlimited hot spirit-water shower and a dry towel!” an old merchant captain from Willow-Creek County marveled, flexing his knees in amazement as he walked out of the bathhouse. “Both of my knees used to ache like needles every time it rained on the river! One twenty-minute soak in Lord Pei’s hot spring pipe-water, and my legs feel thirty years younger!”
On the right side of the plaza stood the 24-Hour Lantern-Lit Noodle & Bun Stall, overseen tonight by Old Guo himself.
“Hot spicy fish-ball noodles—two coppers a bowl! Braised pork belly over Spirit-Rice—three coppers! Free hot ginger soup with every meal to drive away the night river chill!”
Hundreds of sailors, night-shift barge pilots, and traveling merchants sat at clean wooden tables under bright glowing lanterns, slurping down steaming bowls of white noodles bobbing with bouncy silver-carp fish balls and chopped green onions.
And right at the entrance of the pier stood a row of bright orange wooden racks holding thousands of fused Never-Sink Cork Life-Jackets. Every child, passenger, and deckhand stepping onto a boat was handed a bright orange vest for free—which automatically puffed up like a fat pufferfish and floated anyone who fell overboard right back to the surface!
“Look over at the dry-dock corner, Young Master!” Hong Ling giggled, pointing her finger toward the shallow maintenance slip at the end of the rest stop.
There, standing waist-deep in water under a bright work-lamp, was the former tyrant of the Silver River, Guild Master Qian Baifa!
Wearing his triple-wide yellow Debtor Vest and a pair of rubber waterproof trousers, Guild Master Qian was sweating buckets as he scrubbed green river-moss and white barnacles off the iron hull of Dry-Well No. 3 with a heavy wire brush!
Wait—had Guild Master Qian lost weight?
After seven straight days of scrubbing boat bottoms for eight hours a day and eating simple, healthy meals of cabbage, tofu, and coarse brown rice instead of greasy bird’s-nest and lard, Guild Master Qian had already lost thirty pounds off his giant belly!
“Hey! Qian Baifa! You missed a spot of barnacles under the left paddle-wheel!” shouted Master Lu, the former enslaved shipwright who was now the Chief Shipyard Supervisor walking past with a clipboard. “Finish scrubbing that hull before nine o’clock, or you don’t get your late-night bowl of tofu-and-fish-head soup!”
“Coming, Supervisor Lu! I’m scrubbing as fast as I can!” Guild Master Qian shouted back, scrubbing furiously with his wire brush until the iron hull shone like a mirror.
As soon as Master Lu walked away, Guild Master Qian wiped his sweaty forehead and glanced hungrily toward the canteen kitchen window.
“Fifty-eight Loyalty already?” Pei Xuan laughed softly on the balcony, shaking his head. “Give him two more days of Old Guo’s fish-head soup and he’ll be giving me ten thousand Loyalty Points every midnight too!”
“My Lord,” Abacus Su stepped up beside Pei Xuan, his face practically glowing with pride as he opened his thick leather-bound Weekly Municipal Balance Sheet. “Thanks to the eighty thousand tons of timber and pig-iron from Golden-Abacus Island, our factories back in Dry-Well City and Black-Rock City have been running at three hundred percent capacity all week!”
Abacus Su ticked off the items on his fingers:
“First, we have completed thirty thousand new tiled-roof brick houses for the incoming river refugees! Second, the Vocational College assembly line has produced another ten thousand Type-1 Dry-Well Spirit-Rifles, bringing our Peasant Rifle Brigade up to fifteen thousand strong! And third, fifty thousand more starved river-folk from the six eastern counties moved into our river towns this week!”
Just as Abacus Su finished his report, the big brass clock on the roof of the River Rest Stop chimed twelve times for midnight.
BONG! BONG! BONG! DING!
Inside Pei Xuan’s mind, his RTS Territory Screen unfolded in dazzling gold light, updating his full realm statistics after conquering and integrating the entire Silver River basin:
Nine million Loyalty Points every single day!
Pei Xuan looked at the twenty-eight million points sitting in his current balance and felt a rush of warm confidence. Just a few weeks ago, he was only making five hundred thousand points a day. Now, in less than a month, his daily income had multiplied eighteen times over!
With this kind of point income, even if a Rank 5 Foundation Establishment monster walked out of the capital tomorrow, Pei Xuan could bury him under a mountain of fused magic weapons!
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Suddenly, the urgent brass alarm bell on the southern watchtower of Silver Lake—five miles south of Rest Stop #1—began clanging wildly through the night!
“Warning from the Southern Lake Pier!” a scout soldier with a red armband came sprinting up the stairs of the observation balcony. “My Lord! Steamship Dry-Well No. 10 just docked from the southern shore of Silver Lake carrying three thousand coughing refugees from Misty-Reed County! And right behind the ship—something terrible is rolling across the water from the south!”
Pei Xuan’s eyes narrowed. He stepped to the southern railing of the balcony and channeled a trace of Furnace-Blood Qi into his eyes.
Five miles to the south, beyond the moonlit waters of Silver Lake where the fertile Five Southern Basin Counties bordered the Hundred-Mile Poison Swamp, a thick, sinister haze of dark-green miasma mist was gathering along the southern horizon!
Even from five miles away, the night breeze blowing off the southern basin carried a faint whiff of rotten swamp mud, dead reeds, and sweet, sickly toad venom!
Down at the pier of Rest Stop #1, Dry-Well No. 10 dropped its iron ramp, and three hundred pale, coughing scouts and advance villagers from the southern shore stumbled off the boat, supported by Dry-Well medics. Every villager had dark greenish-purple lips and wheezed painfully with every breath—until Old Guo’s helpers poured cups of warm Sweet-Spring Spirit-Well Water down their throats, washing away the surface toxins and stopping their coughing fits.
“Thank heaven for Lord Pei’s Spirit Water!” an old village headman from the south gasped, clutching Pei Xuan’s hand as Pei Xuan hurried down to the pier. “My Lord! Save the five hundred thousand people of the five southern basin counties! Duke Wu Duxing of the Hundred-Mile Poison Swamp has mobilized his Green-Scale Tax Guard to block the southern road!”
“Duke Wu Duxing?” Pei Xuan frowned, helping the old man sit on a wooden bench while a red warning indicator pulsed along the southern edge of his RTS map.
“Yes, My Lord!” the old headman cried. “Every summer, Duke Wu releases Rot-Lung Miasma Fog from his Hundred-Mile Poison Swamp into our five counties so we get sick and have to give him all our grain and daughters to buy his ten-tael Antidote Mud-Pills! When the farmers heard that your steamships brought free sweet water and one-copper rice to Silver-Fork Port, twenty thousand coughing villagers packed their carts tonight to flee north toward your South Ferry Bridge—and Duke Wu’s lizard-riding bailiffs are chasing right behind them to collect a five-tael ‘Breathing & Road-Leaving Tax’!”
Along the pier, the merchants and river boatmen murmured in anger and alarm. Everyone along the Silver River had heard terrible rumors about Duke Wu Duxing—a cruel Rank 4 Late Qi Gathering poison cultivator who treated five hundred thousand southern farmers like captive livestock.
“My Lord! Twenty thousand refugees are heading straight for the South Ferry Bridge right now!” General Tie Zhan gripped the hilt of his heavy broadsword, his eyes flashing fiercely. “Shall I lead a regiment of Spirit-Riflemen to the southern bridge at dawn to welcome the refugees and guard the crossing?”
“Go,” Pei Xuan said calmly, his gaze sweeping across the dark southern waters where green swamp frogs croaked among the canal reeds. “Set up hot soup cauldrons and Spirit-Well water barrels at the South Ferry Bridge before sunrise, and bring Old Wei and Boom-Pot Sun with you. If Duke Wu Duxing dares to send his poison bailiffs—or his swamp fog—across our river tomorrow morning, Dry-Well City will teach him how expensive it is to pollute our air!”