CLANG—BOOM!
The heavy iron double-doors of Warehouse Barge Two flew wide open, rattling the wooden pilings of Silver-Fork Port.
Out of the glowing golden mist inside the barge hopped a creature that made twenty thousand southern refugees and ten thousand dockworkers freeze in their tracks.
It was a frog—but no ordinary river frog had ever grown to the size of a full-grown water buffalo!
Its skin was the bright, glossy green of fresh jade-peppermint leaves, patterned with silver-white stripes along its back. Its round belly was white and bouncy like a giant steamed bun, and on either side of its wide mouth sat two brass-rimmed breathing vents shaped like blacksmith bellows. Even sitting still, a cool, misty aura of sweet menthol and fresh spring water radiated five feet around its body.
BOING! BOING! BOING!
One after another, one hundred giant green bullfrogs hopped out of the warehouse barge in two neat military columns. Each hop shook the heavy oak dock planks with a dull THUD, yet their webbed feet landed with surprising grace, never stepping on a single refugee’s toe or knocking over a single wheelbarrow.
Pei Xuan looked at the floating system tooltip above the lead bullfrog’s head and grinned.
“What... what in the heavens are those?!” Bailiff Du screamed from the mud of the bridge, his yellow Debtor Vest twisted around his neck as he stared at the line of buffalo-sized green frogs hopping past him. “Did Duke Wu’s swamp toads mutate?! No—Duke Wu’s toads are covered in black warts and smell like dead fish! Why do these frogs smell like a candy shop?!”
“Make way for the Port Sanitation Frog Squad!” Hong Ling shouted into her brass megaphone, waving a small red flag to guide the frogs along the southern river railing. “Keep your hands and snacks inside the safety line! Do not feed the frogs spicy shrimp pancakes—they are on a strict poison-gas diet today!”
Right at that moment, the thirty-foot-high wall of dark green Rot-Lung Miasma Fog roared across the last hundred yards of the Silver River.
The river water beneath the cloud hissed and bubbled, turning the color of rotten plums. Dead carp floated belly-up in the wake of the poison wind. The sun vanished behind the thick, greasy green curtain, plunging the southern end of the bridge into a foul-smelling twilight.
“It’s here! Hold your breath!” the old farmer from Willow-Mist County yelled, squeezing his eyes shut and burying his granddaughter’s face against his chest.
Even the captured lizard riders buried their heads under their saddles, whimpering as the edge of the Rank 4 poison fog brushed against the wooden bridge posts, making the dry pine wood sizzle with green foam.
Standing on the elevated deck of Dry-Well Number One, Pei Xuan raised his right hand and snapped his fingers.
“Frog Squad! Deep breath in!”
CROOOOOOAK!
All one hundred Mint-Breath Giant Bullfrogs planted their wide webbed feet along the southern dock railing. The brass bellows-vents on their cheeks clicked open like iron furnace doors.
In unison, a hundred white bellies puffed out to the size of haystacks—and then the hundred bullfrogs opened their three-foot-wide mouths!
SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—!
A sound like a hundred industrial vacuum cleaners roaring at full power echoed across the Silver River.
Ten mini-whirlwinds spun into existence right in front of the dock!
The advancing wall of dark green Rot-Lung Miasma didn’t hit the refugees. Instead, the moment the poison cloud came within three hundred yards of the bridge, it stretched forward like pulled green taffy and got sucked straight into the gaping mouths of the hundred giant bullfrogs!
“Huh?!”
Bailiff Du cracked one eye open and nearly bit his own tongue off.
The terrifying Rank 4 poison cloud—the nightmare that had choked five hundred thousand people across five counties every summer for thirty years—was being slurped up like green noodle soup!
The hundred frogs’ white bellies swelled rounder and rounder, glowing with a faint green light as the fused spirit-well water and blacksmith bellows inside their stomachs churned at high speed.
One mile of fog vanished into their mouths. Three miles of fog vanished. Five miles of fog was sucked backwards right off the southern wheat fields!
Even the purple poison film floating on top of the Silver River was vacuumed right off the water’s surface, leaving the river water sparkling clear again!
Up on the southern hill three miles away, Duke Wu was standing on his skull-shaped watchtower with his hands on his hips, waiting to hear the screams of twenty thousand dying peasants from the harbor.
“Hahaha!” Duke Wu cackled, stroking the green vipers coiled around his wrists. “By now, that little desert rat Pei Xuan must be rolling on the deck clawing at his throat! Prepare a messenger bird! Tell him that if he wants the antidote formula for my Rot-Lung Miasma, he has to hand over all ten of his iron boats and five million taels of—”
“Y-Your Grace!”
The twitching old alchemist beside the cauldrons—Pill-Crazy Sun’s former apprentice cousin, Herbalist Wu-Er—was staring through the brass spyglass with his jaw hanging down to his collarbone. “The... the fog is gone!”
“Gone? What do you mean gone?!” Duke Wu snapped, shoving the herbalist aside and jamming his own eye against the brass spyglass. “Did the wind change direction?!”
Through the glass lens, Duke Wu saw the last wisp of his ten-mile poison cloud get slurped like a strand of green spaghetti into the mouth of a buffalo-sized jade-green frog sitting on the Silver-Fork dock!
“What kind of demonic beast is that?!” Duke Wu shrieked, his voice cracking as he rubbed his eyes and looked again. “A hundred giant green frogs just ate twelve cauldrons of my Rank 4 Rot-Lung Miasma?! That took me six months of boiling rotten toad-guts and three thousand Spirit Stones worth of corpse-grass to brew!”
Down on the docks of Silver-Fork Port, the last trace of green smoke disappeared into the frogs’ mouths. The noon sun shone brightly over the river once more.
The hundred Mint-Breath Giant Bullfrogs snapped their wide mouths shut. For three seconds, their huge white bellies gurgled and rumbled like washing machines:
GLUG-GLUG-GLUG-FIZZZZZZ!
Inside their alchemical stomachs, the Rank 4 poison was crushed by the blacksmith bellows, washed clean by Sweet-Spring Spirit Water, and fused with the fifty sacks of cool peppermint herbs.
“Everyone open your mouths and take a deep breath!” Pei Xuan called out through his megaphone, grinning from ear to ear. “Here comes the second part!”
The hundred giant bullfrogs patted their round white bellies with their front webbed paws, tilted their heads toward the crowded port, and let out a synchronized, earth-shaking burp:
“RIIIIIIIBBIIIIIT—BURRRRRRP!”
WHOOOOOOSH!
A shimmering, emerald-green breeze burst out of the hundred frogs’ mouths and swept across the entire harbor, the bridge, and three miles deep into Willow-Mist County!
There was no foul smell, no burning acid, and no choking smoke.
Instead, the entire port was instantly filled with the crisp, icy-cool scent of fresh wild peppermint, sweet spearmint, and mountain spring water!
As the cool green breeze washed over the twenty thousand coughing refugees on the bridge, a miracle happened right before their eyes.
The old farmer from Willow-Mist County took a huge breath of the minty wind. A cool, tingling sensation rushed down his windpipe, straight into the deepest corners of his lungs where ten years of Duke Wu’s chronic swamp-rot had been hiding.
“Cough—ptui!”
The old man spat out a tiny black pellet of dead toxin onto a waste-paper tray, and then straightened his back with a loud CRACK. The gray-green sickly color vanished from his cheeks, replaced by a healthy, rosy glow! His cloudy eyes turned bright and clear, and even the aching rheumatism in his knees from years of wading in poison mud disappeared!
“My lungs! My lungs feel like they were washed with ice-snow water!” the old man shouted, jumping three feet into the air and waving his straw hat. “I can breathe! For the first time in twenty years, my chest doesn’t whistle when I breathe! Look at my hands—they stopped shaking!”
All around the bridge and the docks, twenty thousand refugees were laughing, crying, and hugging each other as they breathed in the cool peppermint wind. Crying babies stopped coughing and giggled as they tried to catch the glowing green mint-bubbles floating in the air. Even the tired dockworkers who had been hauling iron ore all morning felt their sore muscles relax and their heads turn crystal clear, as if they had just slept for ten hours and chewed a mouthful of sweet mint leaves!
Even Bailiff Du and his three hundred captured lizard riders lying on the bridge couldn’t help breathing in the cool peppermint breeze.
Bailiff Du’s eyes rolled back in pure bliss as the chronic burning pain in his own throat—caused by years of working near Duke Wu’s poison pits—vanished completely. Even his six-legged swamp lizard stopped hissing, rolled onto its back with all six legs in the air, and wagged its scaly tail like a puppy while soaking in the minty air!
[Prisoner Tooltip: Tax Bailiff Du]
[Loyalty: 18 -> 55/100 (Wavering!)]
[Current Thought: "My chronic sinus rot is cured! Even my breath smells like sweet mint! Duke Wu made me wear a stinky moss mask for ten years and gave me fake pills... Maybe shoveling manure in a yellow vest for Lord Pei isn't such a bad career move!"]
And that wasn’t the end of it.
Because the hundred Mint-Breath Bullfrogs had exhaled toward the south, the cool, fragrant peppermint wind blew three miles past the bridge, sweeping right through the towns and villages of Willow-Mist County and Mud-Carp County!
Inside those villages, fifty thousand terrified farmers who had been hiding under wet blankets inside their mud huts—waiting for Duke Wu’s summer poison tax to choke them half to death—suddenly smelled sweet, icy peppermint seeping through their window cracks.
When they poked their heads outside, they saw the terrifying green poison sky completely gone. In its place was crystal-clear blue sky, and a refreshing green breeze that cured their coughing children with a single breath!
Then, Pei Xuan’s fused Ten-Mile Megaphone Array boomed across the southern plains from the top of the flagship:
“Attention all residents of the Five Southern Counties! This is Pei Xuan, Lord of Dry-Well City and Silver-Fork Port! Duke Wu’s poison fog has just been eaten by our Port Sanitation Frog Squad! Anyone who is tired of paying Miasma Tax or eating mud-pills, pack your bags and walk across the Silver-Fork Bridge! Free Sweet-Spring Water, free Mint Air, one-copper white rice, and twenty acres of tax-free farmland for every family that registers before sunset!”
For three seconds, the southern basin was dead silent.
Then, from fifty different villages across Willow-Mist and Mud-Carp Counties, a roar went up that shook the willow trees!
“Lord Pei ate the Duke’s poison fog!” “My old mother stopped coughing just from smelling the wind from the north!” “What are we waiting for?! Smash Duke Wu’s tax buckets! Grab the ox-carts and the pigs! We’re moving to Silver-Fork Port right now!”
Within half an hour, the southern roads turned into a river of cheering humanity. Fifty thousand farmers—pushing wheelbarrows, carrying grain sacks, driving ducks and water buffaloes, and even carrying their village ancestral tablets—poured across the Silver-Fork Bridge while Duke Wu’s local village bailiffs threw off their crocodile-skin hats and ran right along with them!
At the north end of the bridge, Abacus Su had set up fifty registration tables manned by fast-writing clerks from the Dry-Well Vocational College.
“Name, age, and trade!” Abacus Su shouted happily, his golden abacus flying so fast it left afterimages. “Take your wooden Citizen Tag, drink a bowl of ginger-spring water, and head to Steamboat Barge Six for your free shrimp pancake and work assignment! If you know how to plant wet-paddy rice, step to the VIP line on the left—Lord Pei is paying double wages for experienced rice farmers!”
Up on the flagship deck, Pei Xuan’s RTS System chimed non-stop like a slot machine hitting the jackpot:
[Ding! 12,000 Willow-Mist Villagers have registered! Loyalty: 82/100!]
[Ding! 18,000 Mud-Carp Villagers have registered! Loyalty: 85/100!]
[Ding! 20,000 Green-Reed Villagers have crossed the river! Loyalty: 80/100!]
[Total Territory Population: 770,000 -> 820,000!]
[Daily Income Increased: +600,000 LP/day!]
[Current Daily Income: 10,000,000 LP/day!]
“Ten million Loyalty Points a day!” Pei Xuan let out a long breath, feeling the massive surge of golden civic energy warming his dantian. With ten million points rolling in every midnight, he could fuse a Rank 4 cultivation breakthrough or an entire army’s worth of high-grade spirit equipment every single day!
Down by the dock railing, Old Guo walked down the line of one hundred Mint-Breath Giant Bullfrogs, tossing each giant frog a crispy, deep-fried river crab coated in garlic butter as a reward.
“Good boys! Eat up!” Old Guo laughed, patting the lead bullfrog’s shiny green head. The buffalo-sized frog caught the fried crab on its sticky tongue, chewed twice with a happy CRUNCH, and let out a tiny, polite peppermint burp that cooled off Old Guo’s sweaty forehead. “Young Master, these big green fellows are better than kitchen exhaust fans! Can we keep two of them next to my wok stoves so the cooks never get hot in the summer?”
“Keep four of them,” Pei Xuan laughed. “We have ninety-six left to march south with the army!”
Beside the registration tables, Sword Genius Ye Guhan (Rank 5 Foundation Establishment, currently wearing a clean blue street-sweeper vest over his white robes) paused while leaning on his seven-foot bamboo broom. He took a deep breath of the cool peppermint air, and his cold eyebrows twitched slightly.
[Citizen Tooltip: Ye Guhan (Chief Highway & Canal Sword Engineer)]
[Realm: Rank 5 Foundation Establishment | Loyalty: 98/100]
[Current Thought: "Strange... This frog wind actually cools the fire-toxicity built up in my lung meridians from drinking too much millet wine last night. If I stand ten feet behind frog number seven while practicing my sword draws, my draw speed goes up by three percent. I must not let Pei Xuan notice, or he will charge me a breathing fee!"]
“Hey, Master Ye!” Hong Ling called out, trotting past with a basket of freshly steamed pork buns and tossing two big ones straight toward him. “Young Master said since you swept the north dock so flat this morning, you get two extra spicy pork buns and five minutes of free frog-breeze!”
Ye Guhan caught the two steaming buns on the handle of his bamboo broom without dropping a single crumb. His face remained stone-cold like an aloof sword immortal on a snowy peak, even as he took a huge bite out of the juicy pork bun in one gulp.
“Hmph,” Ye Guhan muttered around a mouthful of pork and green onions. “Tell your Young Master I am only standing behind this frog to inspect the flatness of the dock planks. If the southern warlord breaks any of the stone canal banks I sliced last week, I will cut his castle in half myself.”
Meanwhile, three miles south on the skull-shaped watchtower, Duke Wu smashed his brass spyglass against the stone railing until it bent into a pretzel.
“Seventy thousand peasants gone in one morning!” Duke Wu howled, the two green vipers on his wrists hissing wildly as green poison Qi flared from his pores. “And my twelve cauldrons of Rot-Lung Miasma got turned into free breath-mints for that bastard’s dockworkers!”
Behind Duke Wu, heavy iron boots clanked up the stone stairs of the watchtower.
A tall, hunched warrior wearing armor made from interlocking black centipede shells stepped onto the platform. His face was tattooed with five venomous insects—a centipede, a scorpion, a spider, a viper, and a toad—and strapped to his back was a six-foot-tall purple gourd that buzzed and vibrated like a beehive about to explode.
It was Duke Wu’s vanguard commander and sworn blood-brother: General Wu-Gong (“General Centipede”), a ferocious Rank 4 Early (Qi Gathering Stage 3) insect-cultivator!
“Big Brother,” General Centipede rasped, licking his black lips with a forked tongue. “Giant frogs only know how to swallow wind and mist. If you try to blow more smoke at them, you’re just feeding their bellies.”
“Then what do you suggest, Second Brother?!” Duke Wu snarled. “Pei Xuan’s soldiers are already setting up road-markers on our side of the bridge!”
General Centipede reached back and slapped his hand against the six-foot purple gourd on his back.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ—!
An ear-piercing, metallic buzzing sound echoed from inside the gourd, loud enough to make the teeth of every guard on the watchtower ache.
“I just finished feeding my Five-Million Blood-Sucking Corpse Mosquitoes with three barrels of mad-dog blood and swamp-fever venom,” General Centipede grinned darkly. “Each mosquito has a beak as hard as an iron sewing needle! If those fat green frogs dare open their mouths to suck in my mosquitoes, five million iron beaks will sting their tongues and stomachs into bloody sieves from the inside! And once my swarm reaches the port, every single peasant who ran away to Pei Xuan will be covered head-to-toe in burning fever boils within ten seconds!”
Duke Wu’s bloodshot eyes lit up with savage joy. “Good! Take two thousand Poison-Fang Infantry and march to the bridge right now! I want to see Pei Xuan and his seventy thousand runaway sheep scratching their own skin off before lunch!”