That evening, as the sun dipped below the western dunes of the Red-Sand Wastes, a million glowing spirit-lanterns lit up simultaneously from Dry-Well City all the way along the hundred-mile canal to Silver-Fork Port and the Five Black-Soil Counties.
It was the opening night of the Dry-Well Mid-Year Harvest & Currency Festival.
Less than six months ago, when Pei Xuan had been kicked out of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate on the back of a bald camel, Dry-Well Village was nothing more than thirty-five crumbling mud huts, a hundred starving villagers with twenty-five Loyalty, and one dry hole in the sand that gave three buckets of yellow mud-water a day.
Tonight, looking out from the top balcony of the Dry-Well Grand Civic Hall, Pei Xuan could see a bustling, brightly lit metropolitan network stretching as far as the eye could see: Along the Red-Sand Iron Railway, armor-plated Scorpion Kings pulled passenger and freight trains at sixty miles an hour, their brass whistles tooting happily as they delivered desert salt and coal. Along the Grand Desert Canal—sliced through solid granite by Sword Genius Ye Guhan and flooded by Old Dragon Ao Ming—ten Ironclad Paddle-Wheel Steamships cruised between lantern-lit docks, carrying thousands of laughing families and merchants. Down on the six-lane paved stone avenues, eleven gold-plated Double-Decker Public Buses rolled smoothly from stop to stop. At the front door of Bus #1, Eunuch Cao wore his bright yellow DEBTOR #089 vest, ringing his little brass bell and shouting “Next stop, Festival Lantern Square! Seniors…
