TWEEEEEEEEEEET!
The sharp blast of Pei Xuan’s brass whistle echoed off the three-hundred-foot red cliffs of Red-Rock Salt Valley.
Out on the canyon road, fifty yards from the gate, Viper-Boss Diao grinned savagely as his black stallion galloped at full speed toward the red-and-white striped wooden drop-gate. Behind him, four hundred Sand-Viper Smugglers and Steward Jia’s twenty elite Marquisate Tax Guards waved their curved sabers and iron spears, roaring for blood and white salt.
“Blowing a little copper whistle?!” Viper-Boss Diao laughed over the thunder of hooves. “Even if you whistle for your mother, fifty men can’t stop four hundred desert wolves! Captain Hu, get out of the way or die under my horse’s hooves!”
Down at the wooden toll booth, Captain Hu didn’t draw his sword. He didn’t even flinch.
Instead, Captain Hu calmly stepped inside the toll booth, pulled a rope lever that swung the wide wooden gates completely open to both sides, and shouted back toward the yard:
“Clear the center lane! Heavy municipal traffic coming through!”
“Heavy traffic?” Steward Jia sneered from atop his white horse behind the front rank of smugglers. “What traffic could there be inside a dead-end salt canyon—”
Steward Jia’s voice suddenly died in his throat.
Beneath the hooves of all four hundred and twenty horses, the red gravel road began to jump and dance like peas on a hot iron drum!
RUMBLE—THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!
It didn’t sound like human footsteps, and it didn’t sound like horse hooves. It sounded like a hundred iron blacksmith hammers pounding the canyon floor at forty miles an hour!
From the dark, echoing mouths of the six deep salt caverns at the back of the valley, twenty-four glowing red headlight-like eyes—no, ninety-six shining black cluster-eyes—flashed in the shadows!
SKREEEEEEE—CHIRP!
Bursting out of the six dark tunnels into the blinding desert sunlight came all twelve colossal Rank 2 Armored Scorpion Buses and Dump Trucks, running side by side in a terrifying, twelve-abreast armored wall at a full forty miles per hour!
Their twelve-foot-long, black-red iron shells gleamed like polished siege tanks. Their twenty-four anvil-sized front pincers clicked and snapped in unison three feet off the ground, and on their broad backs rode Old Wei, Batu, Scarface Wolf, and the forty newly promoted Rank 2 Early Martial fighters of Dry-Well Village!
“S-Scorpion Kings?!”
“Twelve Giant Armored Scorpion Kings! And there are wooden forts and men riding on their backs!”
At the sight of twelve Rank 2 Apex Desert Beasts charging out of the tunnels like a line of runaway iron locomotives, the four hundred horses of the Sand-Viper Smugglers lost their minds with terror!
NEIGHHHHHH!
Wild beast aura from twelve Rank 2 Scorpion Kings hit the ordinary horses like a physical wall. In the front three rows, over a hundred smuggler horses reared straight up on their hind legs, whinnying in blind panic and dumping dozens of bare-chested bandits onto the hard gravel before crashing backward into the riders behind them!
“Steady! Hold your horses!” Viper-Boss Diao roared, his scarred face draining of blood as he pulled violently on his black stallion’s reins. “Light the sulfur smoke barrels! Throw the bug-repellent torches—”
“Too late for smoke! Eat Dry-Well Refinery’s Number One Byproduct!”
Standing in the front cab of Scorpion Bus #1, Old Wei braced his boots against the iron guardrail. With his right hand and his [Rank 2 Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm], he lifted two fifty-pound hemp sacks stuffed with [Bitter Red Alkali & Slag Dust]—the concentrated sneezing and eye-stinging waste filtered out by the Snow-Crystal Salt Refinery!
Behind Old Wei on the six buses and six dump trucks, forty Rank 2 fighters each lifted a fifty-pound sack of the fine red alkali powder at the exact same moment.
“Wait for the canyon breeze... THROW!” Old Wei bellowed.
Forty-two Rank 2 fighters hurled forty-two heavy sacks high into the air directly ahead of the charging Scorpion Fleet.
Midway through the air, Batu and ten wolf-riders fired blunt whistling arrows that tore the forty-two hemp sacks wide open right over the heads of the four hundred smugglers!
POOOOOOF—WHOOOOSH!
A strong canyon tailwind caught the two thousand pounds of microscopic [Bitter Red Alkali Salt-Dust] and blew it straight into the faces of the four hundred Sand-Viper Smugglers and Steward Jia’s twenty Marquisate guards like a thick red sandstorm!
“Keep your mouths shut—ACK! COUGH! MY EYES!”
“AHHH! It burns! What kind of poison powder is this?! ACHOO! ACHOOOO!”
Because the smugglers had been shouting battle cries with their mouths wide open and their eyes glaring forward, every single man and horse inhaled a lungful of the ultra-concentrated bitter red alkali dust!
It wasn’t deadly poison—Pei Xuan never wasted good future laborers—but it was ten times more irritating than raw chili powder mixed with soap! Instantly, tears and snot poured like rivers down four hundred and twenty-one faces. Men dropped their reins to claw at their stinging, watering eyes, while sneezing fits so violent they nearly threw men out of their saddles echoed across the canyon:
ACHOO! COUGH! ACHOO!
Even Steward Jia on his white horse sneezed six times in a row, sneezing his official feathered hat right off his head while his eyes swelled shut like two ripe peaches. “My eyes! Ninth Young Master used blinding lime poison! Guards, protect me—ACHOO!”
“Remember the Young Master’s rule!” Old Wei’s voice boomed out from the front of the red dust cloud as the twelve forty-mile-an-hour Scorpion Buses and Dump Trucks plowed straight into the blinded, tangled mass of smugglers. “Don’t kill the men, and don’t break their shoveling arms! Number One through Number Twelve—snip their weapons and dump them out of their saddles!”
Chirp-SQUEAK!
To the twelve giant Rank 2 Armored Scorpion Kings, plowing through four hundred blinded Rank 1 bandits was easier than walking through a patch of dry weeds.
BOOM! CLANG! SNIP-SNIP-SNIP!
Scorpion Bus #1 lowered its massive armored head like a snowplow and rammed straight through the center of the front line at thirty miles an hour! Six panicked horses were bumped harmlessly to the side of the road onto soft sand, while the giant scorpion’s two anvil-sized pincers flashed left and right like giant garden shears!
SNIP! CRACK! SNIP!
Three smugglers who tried to slash blindly at Scorpion #1’s shell felt a light tug on their wrists. When they squinted through their watery eyes at their hands, their thick steel broadswords had been snipped clean in half two inches above the hilt—leaving them holding useless iron handles!
On the left flank, Scorpion Dump Truck #7 and #8 spun their twelve-foot bodies around in a synchronized drift, using the flat sides of their long armored tails like giant sweeping brooms!
SWEEP—THUD-THUD-THUD!
Fifty coughing smugglers were swept right off their horses’ backs in a single pass, flying ten feet through the air before landing in a groaning, sneezing heap inside the sandy ditch beside the road!
Meanwhile, Steward Jia’s twenty elite Marquisate Salt-Tax Guards—all at Rank 1 Peak Martial—tried to form a tight shield wall around Steward Jia’s white horse, holding up their official silver-wolf banner and long iron spears.
“We are official soldiers of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate! No beast dares—” the guard captain shouted through his tears.
CLACK!
Scorpion Bus #3 scuttled up to the shield wall, reached out with its massive right pincer, and snipped the thick hardwood pole of the Marquisate’s silver-wolf tax banner into three neat pieces! At the same time, four Rank 2 Dry-Well fighters leaning over the guardrail of Bus #3 swung long wooden poles tipped with fused rubber-vine pads, smacking all twenty elite guards squarely on their helmets like whack-a-mole targets!
BONK! BONK! BONK!
“Ow! Why are the men on top of the scorpions all Rank 2 Iron-Bone fighters?!” the guard captain groaned as his helmet dented inward and he slid unconscious off his saddle.
Only one man in the entire smuggler army managed to break out of the blinding red dust cloud.
“Pei Xuan! Die for me!”
With a furious roar that blew the red alkali dust away from his face, Viper-Boss Diao—the sole Rank 2 Peak expert among the enemies—kicked his boots hard against his rearing stallion’s saddle!
Using his horse’s back as a springboard, the one-eared smuggler boss launched himself twenty-five feet into the air straight over the wooden fence, gripping his jagged fifty-poundghost-head saber with both hands as his Rank 2 Peak blood-qi flared dark red!
His target was clear: capture or kill Pei Xuan sitting up in the wooden watchtower, and force this terrifying army of giant scorpions to stop!
“Capture the thief, capture the king first! Kneel, you crippled brat!” Viper-Boss Diao howled in mid-air, bringing his heavy ghost-head saber whistling down toward the roof of the watchtower!
Up under the watchtower canopy, Pei Xuan didn’t dodge backward an inch.
In fact, he had been waiting all morning to test his own Rank 2 Early Martial (Iron-Bone Stage) body—strengthened by Spirit Well water, the perfect Iron-Anvil Body Art, and Snow-Crystal Spirit Salt—against a real desert veteran!
“Old Wei, take his lower half! His blade is mine!”
BOOM!
Pei Xuan stomped one foot against the watchtower floorboards and vaulted straight out through the open front railing into mid-air!
As Pei Xuan rose to meet the descending smuggler chief, every bone in Pei Xuan’s right arm hummed like a struck iron anvil, a faint bronze-and-silver luster shining across his leather battle-glove. Instead of using a weapon, Pei Xuan punched straight upward into the flat side of Viper-Boss Diao’s descending fifty-pound saber!
CLANGGGGG!
A shockwave of pure brute force exploded twenty feet above the toll booth!
Viper-Boss Diao’s watery eyes nearly popped out of his skull. What kind of monster strength is this?! Wasn’t Ninth Young Master Pei Xuan born with a crippled dantian and weak bones?! He’s only at the Early Iron-Bone stage, yet his single punch feels heavier than a thousand-pound iron boulder!
Before Viper-Boss Diao could recover from the numbing shock running up both of his arms, a dark shadow leaped fifteen feet straight up from the roof of Scorpion Bus #1 right below him!
“Get down here and put on your vest!”
Old Wei swung his [Rank 2 Heavy Mountain-Cleaver Saber]—not with the sharp edge, which would have cut Viper-Boss Diao in two, but with the four-inch-wide flat of the hundred-pound black-iron blade—while his [Rank 2 Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm] grabbed Viper-Boss Diao’s ankle in mid-air!
WHAMMMMM!
Hit from above by Pei Xuan’s Iron-Anvil punch and smacked from below by the flat of Old Wei’s heavy saber, Viper-Boss Diao shot downward like a spiked volleyball!
CRASH-THUD!
He flew straight into the open iron-wood hopper of Scorpion Dump Truck #8, burying himself headfirst in a pile of loose pink salt gravel with only his two twitching boots sticking up in the air!
“Boss Diao!”
Seeing their invincible Rank 2 Peak chief swatted out of the sky into a dump truck bed by Pei Xuan and Old Wei in a single exchange, the remaining Sand-Viper Smugglers completely lost the will to fight.
“Surrender! Don’t let the big scorpions pinch my pants off! We surrender!”
“My eyes are burning! Give me water, I’ll sign whatever paper you want!”
Within ten minutes from the moment Pei Xuan blew his brass whistle, the battle of Red-Rock Salt Valley was completely over.
Not a single Dry-Well Village fighter had suffered so much as a scratch.
Out on the canyon road, four hundred Sand-Viper Smugglers, twenty elite Marquisate Tax Guards, and a sobbing Steward Jia had their eyes washed out with buckets of water by Captain Hu’s patrol squad—only to open their blurry eyes and find that every single one of them was now wearing a bright yellow canvas vest printed with the big black characters [DEBTOR], complete with a fused [Yellow Debtor Collar] around their necks!
Up at the wooden toll booth, Hong Ling slammed her red ink-stamp down onto forty pages of prisoner registration forms with a loud THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.
“Four hundred and twenty-one prisoners counted and registered!” Hong Ling announced cheerfully, holding up the ledger toward Pei Xuan. “Including road-wear, breathing tax, horn noise, and gate-charging penalties, each ordinary smuggler owes two hundred silver taels, Viper-Boss Diao owes ten thousand silver taels, and Steward Jia of Third Young Master Pei Lie’s office owes twenty thousand silver taels! At a wage credit of two silver taels per day of hard labor, they are officially sentenced to mine salt and pave roads for Dry-Well Village!”
Loaded twenty-five men to a box inside the six Scorpion Dump Trucks, Steward Jia clutched the iron bars of the truck bed and wailed: “Ninth Young Master! I am an official tax envoy of your third brother, Pei Lie! You cannot put a Marquisate tax official in a yellow vest to dig rock salt!”
Pei Xuan walked past Scorpion Dump Truck #9, looking up at Steward Jia’s tooltip ([Special Skill: Intermediate Bookkeeping & Tax Skimming | Loyalty: 12/100]).
“An experienced tax accountant who knows how to calculate fees?” Pei Xuan smiled warmly and patted the side of the scorpion truck. “Don’t worry, Steward Jia. Once you spend three days swinging a pickaxe to understand the dignity of labor and drink a few bowls of Old Guo’s soup, I have a very special promotion waiting for you at our Highway Toll Office. Move out—take the new miners to the deep shafts, and haul the next sixty thousand pounds of salt back to the village!”
As the Scorpion Dump Trucks carried the four hundred and twenty-one stunned new debtors into the salt caves to begin their shift, Pei Xuan climbed aboard Scorpion Bus #1 to head back to Dry-Well Village.
In his hand, he held a frosty blue-white crystal from the refinery’s second byproduct chute—[Cold-Frost Saltpetre]—and a grin spread across his face as he thought of the scorching midday desert sun.
“With four hundred new road-builders working under the hundred-degree sun,” Pei Xuan murmured, “it’s time to show these smugglers what Dry-Well Village’s summer cooling benefits look like!”