“One hundred and ninety-eight! One hundred and ninety-nine! Two hundred!”
Under the blazing noon sun of the Red-Sand Wastes, two thousand five hundred voices roared together inside the expanded Village Martial Yard. The sound shook the dust off the gray stone roofs of Dry-Well Village.
In the center of the packed-earth square, two thousand five hundred men, women, and even white-haired grandmothers stood in neat rows. Every single one of them held two heavy gray Cool-Breeze Stone Bricks on their shoulders while dropping into deep, steady squats. Each time they breathed in through their noses and puffed out their chests according to the Iron-Anvil Body Art, a faint bronze sheen rippled across their sun-darkened skin.
Even along the outer drainage ditch, two hundred former Black-Arrow Mercenaries in bright yellow canvas vests—each printed with the big black word DEBTOR on the chest and back—were doing squats while balancing wooden water buckets on their heads.
At the very end of the ditch, a fat man in a stained silk undershirt and a yellow Debtor Vest was scrubbing the stone latrine tiles with a long-handled bristle brush.
“Scrub harder, Deputy Toilet-Scrubber Number Four!” One-Eyed Jack barked, strutting past in a neat leather foreman’s vest while tapping a wooden measuring rod against his palm. “You missed a spot on the third brick from the left! If Lord Pei sees a single speck of mud before lunch, you lose your afternoon meat-potato!”
Boss Qian, the former richest water baron of Salt-Pool Town, trembled as sweat poured down his triple chin. “Foreman Jack, have mercy! My arms are shaking! I have scrubbed forty toilets since sunrise! Even a donkey gets a pinch of salt in its mash when it pulls a millstone!”
Floating right above Boss Qian’s shiny bald head, a translucent blue RTS tooltip flickered in Pei Xuan’s vision as Pei Xuan walked down the steps of the gatehouse:
Pei Xuan paused at the bottom of the stairs and narrowed his eyes at the [Mild Salt Depletion] tag on Boss Qian’s status bar.
Before he could look closer, a heavy thud echoed from the front row of the Martial Yard.
“Argh! My calf!”
Batu, the burly six-foot-tall nomad hunter who had reached Rank 2 Early Martial just four days ago, suddenly dropped his two stone bricks into the dirt. He fell onto his backside, clutching his thick right leg with both hands as the corded muscles under his bronze skin knotted up like a ball of angry snakes.
“Chief Batu!”
“What happened?!”
Before the nomads around him could help him up, another dozen shouts rang out across the hot training square.
Thud! Clang! Thump!
Scarface Wolf, who had been showing off by squatting with four bricks stacked on his shoulders, yelped like a stepped-on dog as both of his thighs locked up at the same time. Across the square, Captain Hu of the former mercenary squad, thirty bricklayers, and over a hundred new settlers from Salt-Pool Town all tumbled onto the ground, groaning and rubbing their cramping legs and arms.
“Stand back! Give them air and bring buckets of Sweet-Spring Water!” Pei Xuan ordered at once, striding into the middle of the yard as his blue RTS Territory interface flashed a row of bright yellow warning icons across his vision.
“Lord Pei!” Old Wei hurried over, his Rank 2 Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm clicking softly as he supported Batu’s shoulders and helped the big nomad sit in the shade of the stone barracks. “It isn’t heatstroke. The Sweet-Spring Water keeps everyone’s heads cool, but we’ve been sweating buckets for ten days straight while building houses for the twelve hundred people from Salt-Pool Town. The men’s muscles are drying out from the inside!”
Batu gritted his teeth as Old Wei pressed a thumb into the pressure point behind his knee to loosen the cramp. “My Lord... Old Wei is right,” Batu panted, his forehead covered in thin, watery sweat that didn’t even taste salty anymore. “In the desert tribes, when hunters sweat like this without licking salt rocks, they get the ‘soft-bone shakes.’ Even a Rank 2 fighter can’t pull a bowstring when the salt leaves his blood!”
Just then, quick footsteps clattered from the direction of the village kitchen.
Fifteen-year-old Hong Ling ran into the square carrying a large brown clay jar upside down in one hand and her heavy kitchen cleaver tucked into her apron belt. Behind her trotted fat Old Guo, waving his big iron ladle with a worried frown on his round face.
“Young Master! Look!” Hong Ling shook the upside-down clay jar. Not a single white grain fell out. “I just scraped the very bottom of the kitchen salt crock with my fingernail! With two thousand five hundred mouths eating three hot meals a day, plus sixty camels and two hundred guard wolves, we went through forty pounds of salt in a single week! We are completely out!”
“What about the supplies we looted from Boss Qian’s warehouse in Salt-Pool Town two days ago?” Pei Xuan asked, looking toward the storehouse. “Didn’t we haul back twenty ox-carts of grain and goods?”
Old Guo let out a bitter sigh and reached into his apron pocket, pulling out a fist-sized lump of crusty, brownish-yellow rock covered in gritty red sand.
“Young Master, this is what Boss Qian had in his salt bins,” Old Guo said, holding the ugly lump out in the sunlight. “The folks in Salt-Pool Town call it ‘Yellow Bitter-Crust.’ They scrape it off the edge of the dry mud flats east of their town. I tried boiling two pounds of it in a small pot this morning to season the noon potato stew. Take a look at what happened to the pot!”
One of the kitchen helpers carried over a small iron pot. Inside the pot, a thick layer of smelly yellow foam floated on top of murky red mud, and the bottom of the iron pot was already pitted with black rust spots.
“Bah! That’s not cooking salt, that’s ditch poison!” Scarface Wolf spat, massaging his sore thigh on the ground. “When my brothers and I used to raid around Salt-Pool Town, anyone who ate that yellow mud-salt for more than a month got yellow teeth, swollen bellies, and kidney stones the size of sheep droppings! Boss Qian only sold that garbage to poor folks because he bought clean white salt for himself from the Marquisate caravans!”
Every pair of eyes in the square instantly swiveled toward the drainage ditch.
Boss Qian shrank back behind his toilet brush, waving his pudgy hands frantically. “Don’t look at me like that! I didn’t make the mud flats bitter! Clean white salt is controlled by the Iron-Wolf Marquisate’s Salt Bureau! Even I had to pay fifty copper coins per catty to buy clean salt from the caravans sent by... by...”
Boss Qian caught himself and swallowed hard, glancing nervously at Pei Xuan.
“Sent by whom?” Pei Xuan walked over to the edge of the ditch, his calm dark eyes locking onto the fat merchant. “Speak up, Deputy Scrubber Number Four. If you tell the truth, I’ll take ten silver off your debt bill. If you lie, Old Yellow just finished eating a bucket of garlic skins and needs somewhere to spit.”
Beside the gatehouse, the eight-foot-tall golden-furred camel raised his long neck, worked his jaws with a loud crunch-slurp, and aimed his lips directly at Boss Qian’s bald head.
“I’ll talk! I’ll talk!” Boss Qian dropped to his knees in the ditch, holding his bucket over his head like a helmet. “It’s your third brother, Lord Pei! Third Young Master Pei Lie! Two years ago, your stepmother Madam Wang put Third Young Master Pei Lie in charge of the Marquisate’s Western Salt & Iron Tax Bureau! He cut off all cheap salt shipments to the Red-Sand Wastes and raised the price of clean white salt ten times over! He said... he said that if the desert towns want clean salt, they must pay fifty copper coins a catty in silver, or trade one healthy young girl or strong boy as a manor servant for every ten bags of salt!”
A low, angry growl rumbled through the crowd of two thousand five hundred villagers. Many of the refugees from Salt-Pool Town clenched their fists, remembering neighbors who had been forced to sell their children just to keep their families from dying of the salt-shakes in summer.
“Fifty copper coins a catty?” Hong Ling gasped, her fingers flying across the imaginary abacus in her head. “Young Master! A normal working man needs half a tael of salt a day under this desert sun! For two thousand five hundred people, that’s eighty catties of salt every single day—four thousand copper coins, or four silver taels a day just to season the soup! That’s nearly one thousand five hundred silver taels a year going straight into Third Young Master Pei Lie’s pocket!”
“Not a single copper coin of Dry-Well Village’s silver is going into Pei Lie’s pocket,” Pei Xuan said coldly.
He remembered his third brother well. Pei Lie was Madam Wang’s nephew-in-law who had been adopted into the main branch—a greedy, narrow-eyed young noble who loved wearing white fox-fur cloaks and whipping servants who walked too slowly. When Pei Xuan was framed and thrown out of the Marquisate with a crippled dantian, it was Pei Lie who had laughed at the city gate and bet ten gold pieces that Pei Xuan would die of thirst within seven days.
“Young Master, if we don’t buy from the Marquisate caravans, where can we get clean salt in forty-eight hours?” Old Wei asked in a low voice. “Even if we send fast wolf-riders to the southern border towns, it’s a five-day round trip.”
“Who said we need to go south?”
Pei Xuan reached into his robe and pulled out an old, oil-stained sheepskin map—the secret map he had looted from Scarface Wolf’s treasure chest two weeks ago. He unrolled the sheepskin across a flat stone table in the center of the yard.
Drawn in faded red ink at the top of the map, fifteen miles straight north of Dry-Well Village, was a jagged canyon marked with a skull and three crossed pickaxes: Red-Rock Salt Valley.
“Scarface, Batu, Captain Hu—come look at this,” Pei Xuan called out.
The three former desert bosses limped over to the table. The moment their eyes fell on the red canyon drawn on the sheepskin, all three of them sucked in a sharp breath.
“Red-Rock Salt Valley!” Scarface Wolf’s scarred face twitched. “Lord Pei, I found that map on the skeleton of an old salt prospector three years ago! There’s a mountain of solid rock salt inside that canyon—millions of catties of it sticking right out of the cliff walls! After I found the map, I took twenty of my fastest riders north to dig some up...”
“And why didn’t you bring any back?” Hong Ling asked, squinting at him.
“Because the salt rocks weren’t the only things in that canyon!” Scarface Wolf shuddered, holding his hands out wide. “The inner valley is a giant natural heat-sink where red crystal salt grows, and it’s the nesting ground of Giant Armored Scorpions! I’m not talking about the fist-sized red scorpions Old Guo fries in his wok! Every single one of the big bosses in that valley is twelve feet long, taller than a warhorse, and covered in black-red iron shells that bounce steel arrows right off! One of them snapped two of my riders’ horses in half with a single snip of its pincers!”
“It’s worse than that, My Lord,” Captain Hu added grimly, pointing to the narrow canyon entrance on the map. “Not only is the inner valley full of Rank 2 Armored Scorpion Kings during the hot months, but the outer canyon road is claimed by the Sand-Viper Smuggler Gang—four hundred ruthless salt bandits led by a Rank 2 Peak killer named Viper-Boss Diao! Rumor in Salt-Pool Town is that Viper-Boss Diao secretly works for your third brother, Pei Lie! Every winter when the giant scorpions hibernate underground, the Sand-Viper Gang mines the valley salt for free, mixes it with cheap sand, and sells it through Pei Lie’s tax stations for ten times the price!”
Down in the drainage ditch, Boss Qian couldn’t hold back a smug little snicker behind his toilet brush.
“Heh... Captain Hu knows his stuff,” Boss Qian muttered under his breath, though in a yard full of Rank 1 and Rank 2 martial artists, everyone heard him clearly. “Those Giant Armored Scorpions in Red-Rock Valley are fierce Rank 2 beasts with earth-poison stingers as thick as a man’s arm! Even Third Young Master Pei Lie’s army guards don’t dare go near that canyon before winter frost! And even if you somehow got a few chunks of rock salt out of those caves, the raw rock salt in Red-Rock Valley is half red poison-alkali! Without the Salt Bureau’s secret washing vats, eating it will twist your guts into knots! If you ask me, Lord Pei, you should just write a polite letter to your third brother and beg him to sell you twenty bags of salt on credit—”
“Hong Ling,” Pei Xuan interrupted without even turning his head.
“Here, Young Master!” Hong Ling slapped her little leather notebook open and licked the tip of her charcoal pencil.
“Deputy Toilet-Scrubber Number Four just stopped brushing for forty-five seconds to disturb public morale and advertise illegal smuggler salt,” Pei Xuan said calmly. “Add a five-hundred-silver ‘Unsolicited Bad Advice & Loafing Fine’ to his tab, and put him on night-soil cart duty for the next three days.”
“Five hundred silver added! Current balance: fifty thousand three hundred and eighty silver taels!” Hong Ling wrote it down with a loud, cheerful flourish.
“No! My mouth slipped! I was just worried about everyone’s legs!” Boss Qian wailed, slapping his own fat cheeks before scrubbing the stone ditch so fast sparks nearly flew off the bristles.
Around the yard, the villagers burst into laughter, the tense mood vanishing at once.
Pei Xuan looked back down at the sheepskin map, then raised his head and opened his RTS Territory Map. Because Dry-Well Village had upgraded to Level 2 last week, the clear map fog extended ten miles north, while the edges of Red-Rock Salt Valley fifteen miles away glowed with a pulsing golden resource marker and twelve moving red beast icons:
Pei Xuan’s eyes lit up like two lanterns.
Scarface Wolf saw twelve terrifying man-eating monsters. Captain Hu saw a deadly canyon guarded by four hundred salt smugglers.
But when Pei Xuan looked at those twelve giant red dots on his RTS map, he didn’t see monsters at all.
Twelve feet long? Flat backs? Ten-thousand-pound carrying capacity? Forty miles per hour across soft sand without needing gas or roads?
Pei Xuan grinned from ear to ear. “Why on earth would we kill them? Those aren’t monsters—those are twelve heavy-duty armored dump trucks and passenger buses waiting for a driver!”
Old Wei, Batu, and Captain Hu blinked in unison. “B-Buses, My Lord?”
“Get everyone into the shade to rest for the afternoon,” Pei Xuan ordered, rolling up the sheepskin map with a crisp snap. “Old Guo, boil the last of the pickled vegetable brine with Sweet-Spring Water so everyone can drink a cup of weak salt-broth to stop the cramps for tonight. Old Wei, pick two hundred of our strongest Rank 1 and Rank 2 fighters and have twenty sets of heavy iron chains ready by dawn.”
“Are we marching north to fight the Scorpion Kings tomorrow morning, Young Master?” Old Wei asked, his hand dropping to the hilt of his heavy black-iron saber.
“Fight them? No, breaking their shells would lower their resale and hauling value,” Pei Xuan said with a mysterious smile as the afternoon sun began to dip toward the western dunes. “Wait until midnight. Tonight, I’m going to make a batch of traffic-control chalk that will have all twelve Scorpion Kings lining up to carry our salt!”
Before the crowd broke up to rest in the cool stone barracks, Pei Xuan turned back to Hong Ling and One-Eyed Jack.
“One more thing,” Pei Xuan said, tapping his finger on the edge of the stone table. “Captain Hu just mentioned that the Sand-Viper Smugglers work for my third brother, Pei Lie, and think Red-Rock Salt Valley is their private winter piggy bank. If we move in and start hauling salt tomorrow, their scouts are bound to show up sooner or later waving my third brother’s tax tokens.”
“Should we dig spike pits across the outer canyon road, My Lord?” Captain Hu asked eagerly, rubbing his bruised chin. “Give me fifty archers and a hundred spears, and we can ambush those Sand-Viper dogs before they even see the salt caves!”
“Ambushing them in the dark is way too messy, and dead smugglers can’t swing pickaxes,” Pei Xuan replied, shaking his head in disapproval like a thrifty shopkeeper. “Do you know how many miles of road we need to pave between Dry-Well Village and Red-Rock Salt Valley? Fifteen miles! If my loyal villagers have to pave fifteen miles of desert road by hand while also mining salt and building houses, everyone will be exhausted.”
Pei Xuan pointed toward the two hundred former Black-Arrow Mercenaries who were happily drinking weak pickled-turnip broth in the shade. Their floating Loyalty bars were already glowing green between 65/100 and 78/100.
“Look at Captain Hu’s brothers,” Pei Xuan said warmly. “A week ago, they were trying to ram our front gate down. Today, they’ve dug three miles of irrigation ditches, learned the first three stances of the Iron-Anvil Body Art, and gained five pounds of solid muscle each! If four hundred strong Sand-Viper Smugglers march into Red-Rock Salt Valley tomorrow or the day after, we must welcome them with proper municipal paperwork.”
“Municipal paperwork, Young Master?” Hong Ling tilted her head, her twin braids bouncing.
“Tonight, before you go to sleep, take twenty sheets of coarse hemp paper and write up our new Dry-Well Mining & Highway Toll Schedule,” Pei Xuan instructed with a straight face. “Any unauthorized armed group that enters Red-Rock Salt Valley without a mining permit will be billed per horse hoof for gravel wear, per nostril for breathing clean valley air, and per shout for startling our municipal scorpions. When they can’t pay in silver, we’ll have four hundred fresh volunteers in yellow Debtor Vests to mine the deep shafts!”
Scarface Wolf and Batu looked at each other, then burst out laughing and slapped their thighs—before yelping again as their salt-starved leg muscles twitched.
“Hahaha! Lord Pei, I used to think I was a ruthless bandit when I charged five copper coins at a crossroads!” Scarface Wolf grinned, limping toward the shade tent on Old Wei’s arm. “Compared to your toll book, I was running a charity!”
Hours later, as the cool desert midnight finally arrived and the village bell rang twelve times, a warm golden chime echoed inside Pei Xuan’s mind:
Inside the stone workshop behind the gatehouse, Pei Xuan rubbed his hands together as the glowing blue Fusion Cube spun open in the air before him.
“Alright,” Pei Xuan whispered, looking at the jars of scorpion glands and white limestone stacked on his workbench. “Let’s see how much a Scorpion Emperor’s signature costs!”