Down in the newly opened market street of Iron-Gate Canyon, five hundred human merchants and four hundred thousand newly arrived Demon-Beast customers were shouting at the top of their lungs—and nobody had the slightest clue what the person across the counter was saying!
While the major Wolf-Kin and Boar-Tribe armies spoke the common Southern Steppe dialect that Mo Xiaoliu had already programmed into the loudspeaker horns, the smaller tribes who had just walked up the two-hundred-mile heated highway from the deep valleys and salt marshes spoke twelve completely different beast languages!
At Stall #8, a six-foot-tall Iron-Shell Rock-Turtle warrior with a heavy green shell on his back was banging a basket of glowing purple mushrooms on the wooden counter while making slow, deep booming noises:
“Grrr-bonk! Bonk-gloop! Tock-tock!”
Behind the counter, a fat human cloth merchant from Great Yan was sweating buckets, holding up three fingers and pointing at a paper sign written in human characters.
“Three bolts of cotton cloth! Not thirty, big turtle brother!” the merchant yelled, waving his hands frantically. “Look at the sign! One basket of mushrooms gets three bolts of cotton cloth and one iron kettle! Why are you trying to bite my wooden counter?!”
