The morning breeze blowing across Silver-Fork Port smelled like fresh peppermint and steamed purple rice.
South of the port, where the dreaded Hundred-Mile Poison Swamp used to bubble with green rot-gas, three hundred thousand acres of rich black-soil paddies now stretched to the horizon. Six-lane stone highways cut straight through the fields. Along the ditches, giant Mint-Breath Bullfrogs the size of water buffaloes sat on flat stones, happily puffing their white bellies and burping out cool minty air whenever a mosquito dared to buzz past.
Down in the mud beside Highway Ditch #4, the former terror of the south—Duke Wu of the Poison Swamp—was wearing a bright yellow canvas vest with the words DEBTOR #088: DO NOT FEED SPICY MEAT painted in black ink across his back.
“Scoop faster, old man!” Hong Ling called out from the top of the stone road. The sixteen-year-old girl wore a neat red manager’s coat, a pair of kitchen cleavers strapped to her belt, and a golden abacus hanging from her wrist. “You still owe nine million, nine hundred and ninety-eight thousand silver taels for fifty years of swamp pollution! If you don’t fill three more carts of frog manure before lunch, Old Guo won’t put a single drop of sesame oil in your cabbage soup!”
