By mid-afternoon, the gates of Willow-Mist County Seat—the largest walled town in the five southern basin counties—stood wide open.
There were no soldiers left on the county walls to fight Pei Xuan’s army. Word had already spread faster than wildfire that General Centipede’s five million Corpse Mosquitoes had been fried with bamboo tennis rackets, his three hundred six-foot Iron-Back Centipedes had been boiled into Mala Garlic-Chili Hotpot, and General Centipede himself was currently riding on the back of Hotpot Wagon Number Three wearing a yellow Probation Vest and licking out the bottom of the cauldron!
As Pei Xuan rode into the main square of Willow-Mist Town on the back of Old Yellow (whose golden-scaled camel hump gleamed under a silk canopy), followed by ninety-six hopping Mint-Breath Giant Bullfrogs and two thousand Furnace-Blood soldiers, the streets were packed from wall to wall with townspeople.
Not just Willow-Mist County—tens of thousands of families from neighboring Mud-Carp, Green-Reed, Toad-Hollow, and Black-Water Counties had limped, hobbled, or pushed each other in wooden handcarts to the central county square.
In total, nearly 400,000 southern peasants remained across the five counties who had been too weak, too old, or too sick to walk all the way north to the Silver-Fork Bridge that morning.
