Ten minutes after the last wisp of green smog was sucked out of the sky, the northern highway of Sweet-Water Port looked like the busiest harvest festival in the history of the Central Continent.
Fifty thousand wooden barrels brimming with warm, honey-scented Rank 4 Golden Liquid Crop Fertilizer were loaded onto two thousand heavy flatbed carts pulled by fused Scorpion Trucks and driven straight out to the northern border fields.
In those fields, five million green sprouts of Iron-Shell Spirit Cabbage were poking just two inches out of the damp canal soil.
Old Guo, wearing his tall white chef’s hat and carrying a giant brass soup ladle that had been upgraded to Rank 5 Early, stood on top of an overturned water barrel and waved his ladle like a general’s sword.
“Listen up, Kitchen Brigade and Canal Crew!” Old Guo boomed, his round belly jiggling with excitement. “Lord Pei promised the army pickled spirit-cabbage before we march up Myriad-Pill Mountain at three o’clock! Open every barrel tap and pour Pavilion Master Yao’s eight-hundred-year fertilizer straight into the irrigation trenches! Don’t spill a single drop on your boots, or your toenails will grow three inches long!”
“Yes, Chef Guo!”
Three thousand yellow-vested former Azure-Sword disciples—led by Foreman Jian Wuchen—and ten thousand local Dry-Well farmers popped the wooden plugs off the fifty thousand barrels.
