By noon, a cheer loud enough to shake the sand dunes rose from the eastern gate of Dry-Well Village.
Standing along the top of the twenty-foot [Lv.2 Elastic Iron-Mud City Wall], five hundred villagers waved red cloths and beat bronze gongs as Pei Xuan’s fifty heavily loaded wagons, sixty pack-camels, and one hundred wolf-riding scouts rolled triumphantly back home—followed closely by a joyful parade of one thousand two hundred and twenty new residents from Salt-Pool Town!
Even the two hundred Black-Arrow mercenaries digging the outer irrigation canal stopped their shovels and stared in shock at the endless line of grain wagons and happy migrants.
“Hey! Look at the man in that wooden cage on the last cart!”
Lieutenant Ma (Debtor #188) wiped the sweat from his bald head and squinted at the fat, triple-chinned man sitting in red silk underpants and a bright yellow SUPER DEBTOR #000 vest inside the wooden cage.
“Wait a second—isn’t that Boss Qian of Salt-Pool Town?!” Lieutenant Ma gasped. “Yesterday morning he was sitting in his silk hall drinking fine wine and paying us five hundred silver to capture Lord Pei! Today he’s sitting in a cage wearing a yellow vest just like us?!”
Beside the canal, Steward Liu—who was currently pushing a wheelbarrow of donkey manure while wearing his red-striped REPEAT OFFENDER #001 vest—nearly dropped his wheelbarrow handles when he saw his former master roll past.
“M-Master Qian?!” Steward Liu trotted excitedly alongside the wooden cage cart. “Master Qian, they got you too?! Don’t worry, I saved a spot for you right next to the donkey barn! If you sing the village work song really loud at dinner, Little Miss Hong Ling gives you a whole braised duck egg!”
Inside the cage, Boss Qian nearly coughed up a mouthful of blood. “Get away from me, you traitorous rat! If you hadn’t let your horse poop on their bricks two days ago, how would I have provoked this demon village?!”
In the central square of Dry-Well Village, Old Guo had already set up twenty giant iron cauldrons bubbling with fragrant Meat-Belly Giant Potato & Mutton Stew, alongside mountains of freshly steamed white buns made from the twenty-two thousand catties of fine wheat flour looted from Boss Qian’s granary.
Meanwhile, One-Eyed Jack and his two hundred mason crews—having baked Cool-Breeze Stone Bricks non-stop at the [Lv.1 Cool-Breeze Brick Kiln] for the past week—already had a whole new neighborhood of one hundred and twenty spacious Cool-Breeze Stone Courtyard Houses waiting on the western side of the oasis!
As the twelve hundred exhausted, dusty migrants from Salt-Pool Town walked through the eastern gatehouse, they felt the temperature drop ten degrees beneath the shade of the willow trees and the [Level 2 Oasis Cool-Breeze Buff].
Old Blacksmith Tie and his ten-year-old grandson Little Hammer stood in the middle of the clean, flat stone-paved street, staring around in wonder.
To their left, crystal-clear water gushed endlessly from the stone channels of the [Lv.2 Sweet-Spring Spirit Well] into public marble washing basins where anyone could drink or wash their face for free.
To their right, neat rows of grey Cool-Breeze Stone Houses stood with clean tiled roofs, glassless stone-arched windows cooled by wet moss bricks, and zero desert flies.
And straight ahead at the registration tables, Hong Ling and ten literate village youths were handing out wooden house keys, clean cotton shirts, bars of [Jade-Clear Healing Soap], and big wooden bowls heaped with steaming lamb-potato stew!
“Step right up! First wash your hands at the soap tent, then pick up your stone house key and two bowls of hot meat stew!” Hong Ling announced through a brass megaphone. “All twenty-four blacksmiths from Salt-Pool Town get assigned to the new Eastern Forge Street with double meat rations! All eighty weavers get assigned to Southern Silk-Cotton Alley! And nobody in Dry-Well Village ever pays a single copper coin for water!”
Old Blacksmith Tie held his new brass house key in one hand and a giant wooden bowl overflowing with tender, lamb-flavored red potatoes and two fluffy white buns in the other.
When Little Hammer bit into a hot white bun dipped in rich mutton gravy, the ten-year-old boy’s eyes curved into crescent moons. “Grandpa! This bun is softer than a cloud, and the potato tastes just like roasted lamb! And look at our new stone house—the floor bricks are cool and smooth, and there’s a water tap right outside our door!”
Old Blacksmith Tie wiped his eyes with his rough sleeve, turned toward Pei Xuan standing on the central platform, and bowed all the way to the ground.
“Lord Pei! This old blacksmith has hammered iron for thirty years, and never once has a lord treated poor craftsmen like human beings! Give my twenty-four blacksmith brothers three days at the forge, and we will hammer all that scrap iron from Salt-Pool Town into the sharpest spears and plows in the desert!”
Around the square, over a thousand new migrants knelt and cheered with tears in their eyes, sending a golden tidal wave of notifications across Pei Xuan’s RTS screen:
Once the new citizens were happily eating lunch and moving their tools into their stone houses, Pei Xuan turned his attention to the wooden prisoner cage parked in the middle of the square.
Inside the cage, Boss Qian (Super Debtor #000) was trembling like a giant bowl of pork jelly as he watched Hong Ling walk up holding a five-foot-long scroll of yellow accounting paper.
“Debtor #000, Qian Wanguan!” Hong Ling read out in a clear, ringing voice so the entire square could hear. “Yesterday afternoon, you illegally hired two hundred Black-Arrow Mercenaries and four heavy siege rams to attack Dry-Well Village! Even though Captain Hu and his men are already working off their three-thousand-silver fine in the canal, as the Chief Instigator & Mastermind, you bear primary financial responsibility!”
Clack-clack-clack!
Hong Ling shook her brass abacus in front of the cage bars.
“Item One: Mastermind Surcharge for attempting to steal our Sweet-Spring Well—thirty thousand silver taels! Item Two: Mental distress caused to all one thousand and fifty residents and two hundred guard wolves of Dry-Well Village—ten thousand silver taels! Item Three: Ten years of illegally overcharging the poor folks of Salt-Pool Town for muddy water—fifteen thousand silver taels! Minus the five thousand four hundred silver we confiscated from your granary last night, your remaining fine is forty-nine thousand six hundred silver taels!”
Boss Qian’s eyes rolled back as he grabbed the wooden bars with his stubby, ringless fingers. “F-Forty-nine thousand six hundred silver?! I don’t have another copper coin left! Even if I work for a hundred years, how can I pay off fifty thousand silver?!”
“Don’t panic, Boss Qian,” Pei Xuan said with a kind, encouraging smile as he stepped up beside the cage. “In Dry-Well Village, we believe in reforming every lazy parasite through honest physical labor. Since our village population just doubled from one thousand two hundred to two thousand five hundred people today, our public sanitation department is facing a heavy workload.”
Pei Xuan gestured toward One-Eyed Jack, who stepped forward holding a brand-new, long-handled wooden toilet brush, two big wooden buckets, and a bamboo headband that read:
[ DEPUTY TOILET-SCRUBBER #4 ].
“One-Eyed Jack’s Sanitation Crew maintains twenty public Cool-Breeze Stone Latrines across the village,” Pei Xuan explained warmly. “Every latrine must be scrubbed sparkling clean with lime powder and water three times a day, and the night-soil must be fermented in the compost pits to fertilize our new fields. For every latrine you scrub clean without a single speck of dirt, Hong Ling will deduct one silver tael from your debt!”
Boss Qian stared at the long-handled toilet brush in horror. “One silver tael per toilet?! To pay off forty-nine thousand six hundred silver, I have to scrub forty-nine thousand six hundred toilets?!”
“Wait—if you scrub fifteen toilets a day, that’s only nine years!” Steward Liu called out encouragingly from beside his manure wheelbarrow, happy to finally have company at the bottom of the village ladder. “Come on, Master Qian! I haul the buckets, you scrub the holes! And if we scrub fast before sunset, Old Guo lets us eat the crispy potato crusts from the bottom of the stew pot!”
Boss Qian looked at Steward Liu’s earnest face, then looked at Old Wei’s five-foot black-iron saber gleaming coldly beside the cage, and finally looked at the bubbling cauldron of lamb-potato stew ten yards away. His stomach had been empty since midnight, and his triple chin was already shrinking.
With a broken sob, the former richest water baron of Salt-Pool Town reached out both chubby hands and took the wooden toilet brush from One-Eyed Jack.
“I... I’ll scrub! Please just give me half a bowl of potato soup before I start...”
[Prisoner: Qian Wanguan (Super Debtor #000) | Mortal | Loyalty: 5 -> 22/100]
[Current Thought: Wuuu... my life is over! Wait... why does that potato crust smell so good? Maybe if I scrub five toilets really clean this afternoon, the fat cook will give me a spoonful of lamb gravy...]
Everyone in the square burst into thunderous laughter as Steward Liu happily tied the [ DEPUTY TOILET-SCRUBBER #4 ] headband around Boss Qian’s fat forehead and led him off toward the eastern latrines.
That evening, as the five thousand four hundred silver taels and twenty-two thousand catties of grain were locked safely inside Dry-Well Village’s new stone treasury, a series of booming martial shouts echoed from the [Lv.1 Village Martial Yard] and the outer canal site!
Because Pei Xuan had spent 500 LP that afternoon to upgrade the [Village Martial Yard] to Level 2, and Old Guo had cooked a massive feast of Deep-Fried Red-Tail Scorpions mixed with Sweet-Spring Spirit Broth for the guards and canal workers, a wave of collective breakthroughs swept across the village!
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
At the Martial Yard, thirty elite village guards and nomad hunters—led by Scarface Wolf’s brother-in-law and Old Blacksmith Tie—felt their bones harden with a crisp metallic ring as they broke through simultaneously from Rank 1 Peak into Rank 2 Early Martial (Iron-Bone Stage)!
Meanwhile, out at the completed two-mile outer irrigation canal, Batu and Old Wei sparred for two hours against Captain Hu (Rank 2 Peak) using heavy wooden training blades—pushing both Old Wei and Batu straight into Rank 2 Mid Martial!
And among the two thousand five hundred residents and prisoners, another one hundred and eighty hardworking farmers, blacksmiths, and former mercenaries stepped into Rank 1 Early Martial!
When the midnight bell chimed inside Pei Xuan’s mind, his RTS Territory Screen lit up brighter than the midday sun:
“Six thousand Loyalty Points a day, and over ten thousand points in the bank!” Pei Xuan let out a long, satisfied breath as he stood on his balcony looking out over the hundreds of warm lantern lights glowing across his stone-built oasis village.
Just thirty days ago, this place had been a dying mud pit with a hundred starving villagers and thirty points a day. Now, he had an unbreakable elastic wall, two thousand five hundred loyal citizens, thirty-five Rank 2 Iron-Bone warriors, and over five hundred Rank 1 fighters!
Just as Pei Xuan was about to turn in for the night, however, Old Wei, Old Guo, and Batu hurried up the stairs into his courtyard with serious expressions on their faces.
“Young Master, we ran into a problem during evening martial training and dinner preparation,” Old Guo said, wiping his forehead with his apron and holding out an empty wooden salt jar.
“Our last jar of clean table salt just ran out tonight,” Old Guo reported anxiously. “Wait—didn’t we raid Salt-Pool Town last night? We checked all of Boss Qian’s storehouses, and there was plenty of grain and water, but zero refined white salt! The only salt left in Salt-Pool Town is raw yellow bitter-rock dug out of shallow mud pits—if people eat it for three days, it gives them terrible stomach cramps and makes their muscles go weak!”
Batu nodded grimly. “Lord Pei, with two thousand five hundred people doing heavy construction and practicing the Iron-Anvil Body Art under the hot desert sun every single day, our people are sweating buckets! Tonight at the Martial Yard, forty guards and masons got severe leg and arm cramps because their bodies are lacking clean salt. Without salt, within five days, our entire village workforce and army will lose half their strength!”
Pei Xuan’s eyes narrowed slightly.
Indeed, in a scorching desert, water kept you alive for three days, grain kept you alive for three weeks, but clean salt was the lifeblood of every martial artist and laborer! Without salt to replenish their sweat and blood-Qi, even a Rank 2 fighter would suffer muscle spasms and meridian weakness.
“Why didn’t Salt-Pool Town have any clean salt?” Pei Xuan asked.
“Because the shallow salt pools around Salt-Pool Town dried up into toxic bitter-mud two years ago,” Batu explained, pulling out the old, yellowed sheepskin map that Pei Xuan had looted from Scarface Wolf’s bandit camp two weeks ago.
Batu spread the sheepskin map across the stone table and pointed to a deep crimson valley fifteen miles north of Dry-Well Village, marked with a skull and a red scorpion symbol:
[ RED-ROCK SALT VALLEY ].
“Fifteen miles north of us sits Red-Rock Salt Valley,” Batu said in a low voice. “Underneath those red cliffs lies an endless vein of hundred-foot-thick mountain rock salt—enough salt to supply a whole kingdom for a hundred years! Even Boss Qian tried to send miners there last year, but not a single man came back alive.”
“Bandits?” Pei Xuan asked.
“Worse than bandits,” Old Wei said grimly. “Red-Rock Salt Valley is the ancestral nesting ground of Giant Armored Scorpions! The small ones are as big as wolves, and the Rank 2 Armored Scorpion Kings guarding the salt caves are twelve feet long—as big as heavy ox-carts—with black iron shells that arrows bounce right off and pincers that can snap a pine tree in half!”
Old Guo shuddered. “Twelve-foot scorpions the size of ox-carts?! Even my biggest iron wok isn’t big enough to fry one of those!”
Pei Xuan stared down at the red scorpion symbol on the map of Red-Rock Salt Valley.
Then he looked at his `[Current Balance: 10,920 LP]` and the golden Fusion Cube spinning quietly in his mind.
Twelve-foot-long Rank 2 Armored Scorpion Kings with shells harder than iron, twelve legs that never got tired walking on soft sand, and enough strength to carry ten thousand pounds on their flat backs?
Why did Batu and Old Wei look so worried?
To Pei Xuan, a valley full of ox-cart-sized armored scorpions sitting on top of a mountain of free salt didn’t sound like a monster disaster at all.
A slow, radiant smile spread across Pei Xuan’s face as he tapped the map with his folding fan.
“Twelve feet long, flat backs, armor thicker than iron plates, and they don’t even eat hay?” Pei Xuan chuckled, his eyes shining with the vision of an industrial mayor. “Old Wei, Batu, tell two hundred Rank 1 and Rank 2 fighters to pack their iron chains and pickaxes for tomorrow morning. We aren’t just going to Red-Rock Salt Valley to open our village salt factory—we are going to bring home twelve Armored Twelve-Legged Mining Dump Trucks and Desert Buses!”