The morning sun rose over the border wall of Dry-Well City, shining down on fifty freshly painted red signboards that read Dry-Well Public Clinic & Two-Copper Cafeteria. Just two days ago, those fifty luxury buildings had belonged to the Myriad-Pill Pavilion. Today, lines of happy border citizens and wandering cultivators stretched down the block, clinking copper coins into iron boxes and walking out with bags of crunchy lemon-flavored healing drops and bowls of steaming mutton soup.
Inside the command courtyard of the border fortress, Pei Xuan sat in his padded bamboo rocking chair under a grape trellis. On a low wooden table beside him sat a plate of chilled green grapes and a pot of sweet plum tea. Above his head, the translucent blue screen of his RTS Territory System floated in the morning breeze.
Thirty feet away in the open kitchen yard, a fat fifty-five-year-old man in a bright yellow vest with DEBTOR #0534 stitched across the chest in thick black thread was standing on a wooden crate. It was Elder Dan, the former Vice-Pavilion Master of the Myriad-Pill Pavilion. He was holding an iron ladle the size of a shovel and stirring a twelve-foot pressure cauldron while Boom-Pot Sun stood next to him, chewing on a roasted carrot and covered in black soot.
