Ten miles east of Dry-Well City, a pink silk carriage rolled smoothly down the newly paved four-lane cement highway.
Inside the carriage sat a woman dressed in a flowing red gauze dress. Her skin was pale, her waist was thin as a willow branch, and a tiny red beauty mark sat right below the corner of her left eye. Even though she was actually a hundred and forty years old, her Rank 5 Mid Foundation Establishment cultivation kept her looking like a charming lady of twenty-eight.
She was Madame Red-Silk, the Second Immortal Advisor of the Great Yan Kingdom and an elite outer elder of the Joyous-Gold Sect.
Right now, however, Madame Red-Silk was frowning as she looked out the carriage window at the flat, rock-hard gray road beneath their wheels.
“What kind of black magic is this road made of?” Madame Red-Silk murmured, tapping her long red fingernails against the window frame. “We have been riding for forty miles since crossing the border of Sand-Bell Province, and my teacup hasn’t spilled a single drop!”
Up front, her driver—Waiter Liu, a spy from the Royal Court disguised as a fat cloth-merchant’s coachman—shivered and whispered back through the curtain.
“Milady, be careful! That gray stone on the ground is the spirit-cement mixed by Daoist Rotten-Bone himself! I heard from our border scouts that the old bag of bones is locked inside a giant iron wheel at the Dry-Well Cement Plant right now, running twelve hours a day to pay off a…
