At two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun hanging over the Red-Sand Wastes looked like a white-hot iron fireball. Heat waves shimmered above the sand dunes outside Dry-Well Village, pushing the outdoor temperature past one hundred and ten degrees.
Yet right beside the [Lv.2 Snow-Crystal Salt Refinery] in the center of the village, ten kitchen helpers were actually shivering and rubbing their arms to stay warm!
Stacked in a neat pyramid next to the refinery’s right-hand discharge chute sat fifty wooden barrels filled to the brim with frosty, blue-white crystals of [Cold-Frost Saltpetre]—the second byproduct separated out when refining raw Red-Rock salt. Thick white frost coated the outside of every wooden barrel, and the air within ten feet of the pile felt like a brisk autumn morning.
“Young Master, what should we do with all these cold-salt barrels?” Old Guo asked, walking over while wiping sweat from his round forehead with a towel. “The refinery has processed two hundred thousand catties of rock salt over the past three days. We already have thirty thousand catties of Cold-Frost Saltpetre and fifty thousand catties of Red Alkali Slag piled up in the yard! If we don’t find a place to put them, the whole square will be buried!”
“Throw away thirty thousand catties of natural refrigeration and fifty thousand catties of road-paving cement?” Pei Xuan shook his head with a smile. “Old Guo, in a thrifty town like ours, there is no such thing as industrial waste—only resources sitting in the wrong slot.”
Pei Xuan walked up to the pyramid of frost-covered barrels, called One-Eyed Jack’s construction crew over with a cartload of gray [Cool-Breeze Stone Bricks] and two barrels of [Sweet-Spring Water], and opened his Fusion Cube.
Confirm!
HUMMMMM—CRACKLE-FROST!
A wave of icy blue light swept over the five thousand gray stone bricks and the barrels of frost-salt.
With a crisp sound like a lake freezing over in winter, all five thousand gray bricks turned a smooth, translucent glacier-blue! Wisps of white cold mist curled continuously off the bricks, dropping the temperature in the yard by twenty degrees in three seconds flat.
“By the heavens! Touch this brick—it’s colder than winter river ice, and it doesn’t even melt under the desert sun!” One-Eyed Jack gasped, touching one of the glacier-blue bricks with his fingers before pulling his hand back with a grin.
“Jack, take fifty masons and line the three deep storage cellars behind Old Guo’s kitchen with these [Perpetual Frost-Ice Bricks] right away,” Pei Xuan ordered. “Fill the first cellar with fifty barrels of Sweet-Spring Water so we have an endless supply of clean Spirit-Ice blocks every hour!”
“Yes, My Lord! Consider it done before dinner!” One-Eyed Jack saluted and had his men load the blue ice-bricks onto carts at a run.
Next, Pei Xuan turned to Old Guo, who was staring at the new ice-bricks like a kid in a candy store.
“Old Guo, didn’t Batu’s nomad scouts pick twenty baskets of wild desert sour-plums and wild mint leaves from the rocky gullies near the south ridge yesterday?” Pei Xuan asked.
“They did, Young Master! They’re sitting right in the kitchen pantry, though raw desert sour-plums are so sour they make a man’s face pucker up like an old boot!” Old Guo chuckled.
“Bring out the twenty baskets of sour-plums, ten jars of brown rock sugar looted from Boss Qian’s warehouse, and the first ten blocks of shaved Spirit-Ice,” Pei Xuan said.
Ten minutes later, right in front of the village kitchen, Pei Xuan spent 200 LP to run a culinary batch fusion across ten massive wooden vats:
When Old Guo lifted the wooden lid off the first vat, a cloud of frosty white mist smelling of sweet dark plums, cool peppermint, and crystal spring ice drifted across the square. Floating on top of the deep ruby-red plum soup were sparkling shavings of crushed Spirit-Ice that clinked against the wooden ladle like tiny wind chimes!
Pei Xuan took a sip from a test bowl.
Ahhh!
A line of pure, bone-cooling refreshment slid from his tongue straight down to his toes, making every pore on his body breathe out a sigh of relief under the hot afternoon sun!
“Load five vats of [Chilled Sweet-Plum Spirit Soup] onto Scorpion Bus Number One and Number Two,” Pei Xuan instructed Hong Ling, “and send the remaining [Bitter Red Alkali Slag] to the Cool-Breeze Brick Kiln to be mixed with clay and baked into white [Salt-Slag Highway Bricks]. Let’s go check on our four hundred and twenty-one new road-builders out on the north highway!”
---
Meanwhile, seven miles north of Dry-Well Village, out in the middle of the scorching desert dunes between the village and Red-Rock Salt Valley, four hundred and twenty-one men in bright yellow [DEBTOR] vests were sweating like roasted pigs.
Under the watchful eyes of Captain Hu and Scarface Wolf, the four hundred captured Sand-Viper Smugglers, the twenty elite Marquisate Salt-Tax Guards, and Third Brother Pei Lie’s Steward Jia were laying a sixty-foot-wide, six-lane highway straight across the desert!
To their shock, they weren’t laying ordinary dirt or loose gravel.
Every twenty minutes, four Armored Scorpion Dump Trucks roared up from the village brick kiln and dumped thousands of newly baked, snow-white [Salt-Slag Highway Bricks] along the leveled sand bed. As soon as the prisoners laid the interlocking salt-bricks down in rows, two twelve-thousand-pound Scorpion Dump Trucks dragged a massive ten-ton iron roller back and forth over the bricks—crushing and fusing the salt-slag bricks into a road surface as white as marble and harder than granite!
At the side of the road bed, carrying two heavy salt-bricks in his soft, ink-stained hands, Steward Jia panted like an old bellows. His silk tax-official robe was gone, replaced by coarse hemp shorts and a bright yellow DEBTOR vest.
Right beside him, the ferocious Rank 2 Peak smuggler chief Viper-Boss Diao was hauling four salt-bricks at a time on his broad shoulders, his tattooed chest dripping with sweat.
“Steward Jia...” Viper-Boss Diao muttered out of the corner of his mouth as he set four bricks down into the road frame. “We’ve been laying bricks under this blazing sun for four hours straight! In the Marquisate’s black-iron prison mines, this is the hour when half the prisoners drop dead from heatstroke and the guards whip their corpses! My throat is smoking—if we don’t get water soon, should we risk the shock-collars and try to run for the dunes?”
“Run where?!” Steward Jia whimpered, his calves shaking as he dropped his two bricks into place. “Look behind you, Boss Diao! Those giant twelve-foot scorpions run forty miles an hour across soft sand! Even if you are a Rank 2 Peak fighter, can your two legs outrun an eight-legged monster truck?! We’re doomed! Ninth Young Master Pei Xuan knows I came on Third Young Master Pei Lie’s orders—he’s definitely going to starve us and let us bake to death under the sun!”
Just as Steward Jia closed his eyes in despair, the sound of a brass hand-bell rang out merrily from a newly arrived Armored Scorpion Bus parked under a wide white canvas shade-tent fifty yards ahead:
DING-DING-DING!
“Three o’clock Afternoon Shade Break!” Hong Ling’s crisp, cheerful voice echoed through a copper speaking-trumpet from the front of the tent. “All highway construction teams and mine debtors, put down your bricks! Wash your hands at the water trough and line up at the shade-tent for your fifteen-minute rest and one free bowl of [Chilled Sweet-Plum Spirit Soup]!”
All four hundred and twenty-one prisoners froze in their tracks.
Viper-Boss Diao blinked his one good eye, sure that he was hallucinating from sunstroke. “What did that little maid just say? Fifteen-minute afternoon shade break? And... chilled sweet-plum soup?! Out in the middle of the Red-Sand Wastes in the middle of summer?!”
“Keep moving! Don’t hold up the line, or I’ll drink your bowl myself!” Scarface Wolf barked, grinning as he herded the bewildered smugglers toward the big white canvas shade-tents where Old Guo and ten kitchen helpers were ladling ruby-red soup out of frosty wooden vats.
Trembling with suspicion, Viper-Boss Diao and Steward Jia washed their dusty hands in a trough of cool well water and stepped up to the counter.
Old Guo didn’t shortchange them by a single drop just because they were wearing yellow Debtor Vests. With two big scoops of his ladle, Old Guo handed both men a brimming wooden bowl of deep red sweet-plum soup with a solid heap of sparkling, shaved Sweet-Spring Spirit Ice floating on top, plus a clean cold towel to wipe their necks!
“Ice?! Real shaved ice in the middle of the desert?!”
Steward Jia stared at the frost forming on the outside of his wooden bowl. Even back in the Iron-Wolf Marquis’s manor, ice in the summer had to be hauled from winter mountain caves five hundred miles away and was reserved strictly for the Marquis, Madam Wang, and the favored young masters! A lowly third-rank steward like Jia wasn’t even allowed to touch the meltwater from the Marquis’s ice basin!
Unable to resist for another half-second, Steward Jia and Viper-Boss Diao raised their wooden bowls and gulped down a huge mouthful of [Chilled Sweet-Plum Spirit Soup] along with a crunch of shaved Spirit-Ice!
GULP—CRUNCH!
Both men went stiff as statues from head to toe.
The icy-cold, sweet-and-sour plum soup exploded across their parched tongues with the refreshing fragrance of wild mint and rock sugar. As the melted Spirit-Ice slid down into their burning stomachs, a wave of miraculous cooling spirit-energy swept outward through their overheated meridians!
In three seconds flat, the pounding sunstroke headache behind Steward Jia’s temples vanished without a trace.
And inside Viper-Boss Diao’s chest, the lingering internal bruise from taking Pei Xuan’s and Old Wei’s combined blow yesterday was washed clean by the cool spirit-water and mineral salt energy!
“Ahhhhh—!”
Four hundred and twenty-one Sand-Viper Smugglers and Marquisate Tax Guards let out a simultaneous, blissful groan under the shade-tents. Dozens of tough, scarred desert bandits actually had tears rolling down their cheeks as they licked the bottom of their wooden bowls clean.
“Wait—anyone who lays fifty extra highway bricks before sunset gets a second bowl of iced plum soup AND an extra scoop of Snow-Salt Roasted Lamb-Potato Stew at dinner?!” one of the Marquisate Tax Guards shouted, reading the wooden notice board beside the tent.
“Out of my way! Those bricks over there are mine!”
“Don’t touch my wheelbarrow, I’m going for two bowls of iced soup before five o’clock!”
Before the fifteen-minute break bell had even finished ringing to go back to work, four hundred formerly vicious salt smugglers bolted out of the shade-tent like starved wolves chasing a rabbit, fighting over wheelbarrows and laying [Salt-Slag Highway Bricks] twice as fast as before!
By the fifth evening, when the gleaming white six-lane Salt-Brick Highway was rolled completely smooth all the way from Dry-Well Village’s north gate to the mouth of Red-Rock Salt Valley, Viper-Boss Diao was bellowing work songs at the top of his lungs while carrying eight bricks at once, and Steward Jia was down on his knees with a ruler making sure every brick gap was less than a tenth of an inch wide!
Standing on the roof of Scorpion Bus #1 watching the road crew finish the final mile, Pei Xuan smiled as hundreds of green notifications cascaded down his RTS screen:
Just as the last white salt-brick clicked into place at the village’s north gate, a dusty jingling of camel bells echoed from the eastern desert trail.
Three small merchant caravans—travelling between the southern oasis towns and the northern border—stopped at the edge of the newly paved white highway, staring in shock at the sixty-foot-wide marble-like road and the giant wooden billboard Pei Xuan had just erected beside the gate:
[DRY-WELL VILLAGE SALT EXCHANGE — GRADE-2 SNOW-CRYSTAL SPIRIT SALT NOW OPEN FOR WHOLESALE: 5 COPPER COINS PER CATTY! FREE ICED PLUM SOUP FOR ALL REGISTERED MERCHANTS & SETTLERS!]