Behind Roadside Array Tower #7, five captured Heavenly-Lock guards were sitting in a row wearing brand-new yellow Debtor Vests, while their commander—a fat, red-faced Rank 5 Early deacon named Captain Zhao—was pressing an ice pack to his bruised backside where Ye Guhan’s shovel had smacked him.
Yet none of them were looking at Pei Xuan’s soldiers. Instead, Captain Zhao had his hands clapped tightly over his ears, groaning in misery as a skinny young man tied to a wooden whipping post in the middle of the courtyard shouted non-stop at the top of his lungs.
“Look at the third circuit ring on that stone fog pillar, Captain Zhao!” the skinny young man yelled, his messy black hair sticking up like a bird’s nest and three brass rulers poking out of his torn collar. Even with his wrists bound to the post by spirit-locking rope, he was furiously kicking his bare right big toe in the dirt to draw complex geometric triangles. “I told you three times yesterday! If you carve the Wind-Scattering Rune at a forty-two-degree angle on porous limestone, ninety-five percent of the Spirit Qi leaks straight into the weeds! You’re burning five thousand mid-grade Spirit Stones an hour just to warm up the earthworms!”
