Five days later, anyone who traveled south across the Silver-Fork Bridge rubbed their eyes and wondered if they had accidentally walked into the Immortal Realm’s private garden.
The dreaded Hundred-Mile Poison Swamp—the dark, rotting, green-fogged hellhole that had terrified the southern provinces of Great Yan for three hundred years—had completely vanished from the map.
In its place stretched 300,000 acres of terraced, gleaming Black-Soil Rice Paddies, divided into neat checkerboard squares by crystal-clear stone irrigation canals and connected by a sixty-foot-wide, six-lane stone highway!
Along the raised paths between the paddies, one hundred Mint-Breath Giant Bullfrogs hopped lazily on patrol, exhaling cool, gentle breezes of sweet peppermint air that kept the summer heat away from the farmers’ backs.
Even more magical was what was happening inside the ankle-deep water of the rice paddies.
Pei Xuan stood on the white-painted observation balcony of the newly remodeled Southern Agricultural Research & Hotpot Resort (formerly Duke Wu’s Black-Skull Swamp Palace, after Hong Ling’s masonry crew knocked off all the ugly stone skulls and painted the walls bright white with red roof tiles).
Beside Pei Xuan stood Abacus Su, Old Guo, Boom-Pot Sun (“Pill-Crazy Sun”), and General Wu-Gong (“General Centipede”)—who had officially passed his probation after turning over two thousand unhatched Iron-Back Centipede eggs and was now wearing a crisp green uniform embroidered with a golden lobster badge: Director of Special Crustacean Aquaculture.
