Five days later, at the southern end of the three-hundred-mile Dry-Crack Plains, a crowd of over three hundred thousand gaunt, sun-browned farmers stood along the edge of a newly dug stone canal.
For three generations, the three million mortal villagers living across these central counties had been treated like dirt by the Azure-Sword Sect. Even though Mount Azure had dammed their river three hundred years ago, the sect’s tax deacons still flew down on the first day of every month to demand sixty percent of the farmers’ stunted wheat crop as “Sword-Protection Tribute.” Any village head who couldn’t pay was hung upside-down from the village tree and whipped until the neighbors sold their oxen to make up the difference.
Five days ago, when these farmers first saw three thousand men in bright yellow vests—led by none other than the terrifying First Elder Jian Wuchen himself—marching toward their villages with iron shovels, the farmers had almost fled into the hills!
Instead, the three thousand proud sword immortals of Mount Azure hadn’t asked for a single grain of wheat.
Under the watchful eyes of Ye Guhan and five thousand blue-uniformed shovel engineers, the three thousand yellow-vested sword disciples had worked like human windmills—scooping out ten million tons of dry yellow clay, lining the hundred-foot-wide channel with fused stone slabs, and paving two smooth spirit-asphalt service roads along both banks with twenty chugging yellow steamrollers!
