At one o’clock in the morning, the Ten-Mile Border Job Fair Plaza was packed shoulder to shoulder with more than a hundred thousand newly arrived Outer Disciples.
Old Guo and his five hundred cooks—now helped by three thousand enthusiastic volunteer Fire Boys and junior alchemists—had fired up every single rotary oven and soup cauldron at maximum blast. Every newcomer who walked through the golden archway got a steaming bowl of Golden Mutton Soup, two giant pork buns, a pair of fused Iron-Toe Safety Boots, and a brass bathhouse token.
Yet once their bellies were full of warm soup, the Bone-Chilling Night Wind of the Central Continent began to blow down from the snowy mountains.
The hundred thousand Outer Disciples didn’t complain for a second. Used to being treated like dirt in the Four Sects, thousands of miners simply unrolled their thin, patched blankets right on the flagstones next to the dining tables, planning to curl up against each other on the ground to survive the night.
“Don’t bother Lord Pei for tents,” Zhou Tie told his twenty roommates from the Azure-Sword iron mine as he tucked his boots under his head as a pillow. “There are a hundred thousand of us! Even an immortal dynasty couldn’t build houses for a hundred thousand people in the middle of the night. Sleeping on Lord Pei’s clean stones with a full stomach is already ten times better than our leaky shed on the mountain!”
