The morning sun had barely climbed over the eastern dunes of the Red-Sand Wastes, but the six-lane salt road outside Dry-Well Town was already busy.
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
A thirty-foot-long Armored Scorpion Bus skittered down the smooth stone pavement at forty miles per hour. Its twelve shiny black legs moved like well-oiled pistons, and its giant curved stinger was neatly tied up with a bright red ribbon that read: BUS #3 — MIND THE PINCHERS.
Inside the open-top wooden passenger box bolted to the scorpion’s flat back, thirty miners in clean gray cotton shirts were singing at the top of their lungs while chewing on roasted meat-potatoes.
At the town’s newly built South Gate, Pei Xuan stood on the twenty-foot-high parapet of the Elastic Iron-Mud City Wall, sipping a warm mug of sweet-spring tea. After upgrading the village to Level 3: Red-Sand Oasis Town the night before, a cool, moist breeze was blowing constantly from the town center. Little patches of bright green grass and young willow shoots had sprouted overnight along the drainage ditches, turning the once-dead desert pit into a lively oasis.
Pei Xuan tapped a glowing blue icon in the corner of his vision, pulling up his morning RTS Territory Screen.
“Fifteen thousand points a day,” Pei Xuan murmured with a satisfied grin. “Not bad for a place my father thought would bury me in a week.”
Down below the gatehouse, a plump fifteen-year-old girl wearing a floral apron marched out of the tax booth. Hong Ling had two heavy iron kitchen cleavers tucked into her belt and a thick wooden ledger under her arm.
“Young Master!” Hong Ling shouted up at the wall, her round face scrunched up in worry. “We have a big problem! Our population just hit four thousand five hundred, and my head is spinning! Yesterday, One-Eyed Jack’s bricklayers ate nine hundred catties of meat-potatoes, Batu’s wolf-riders took forty pairs of leather boots, and Captain Hu asked for three hundred straw hats for the salt miners! Old Wei can’t count past fifty without taking off his shoes, and I stayed up until three in the morning trying to balance the salt books!”
Beside Pei Xuan on the wall, Old Wei coughed loudly, his face turning red. His new Rank 2 Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm gave a little metallic whir as he scratched his gray beard.
“Girl, don’t slander this old soldier!” Old Wei grumbled. “I can count to a hundred just fine! It’s just that the salt bags come in fifty-pound sacks and thirty-pound sacks, and when you mix them together with copper coins, the numbers start jumping around on the paper like sand fleas!”
From the open window of the gatehouse kitchen below, fat Old Guo stuck his flour-covered head out, waving a giant iron ladle.
“And don’t look at me, Little Ling!” Old Guo laughed, his triple chin jiggling. “I know how many spoons of chili oil go into a cauldron of scorpion stew, and I know how to smash a bandit’s head with a wok! If you ask me to write down tax receipts, I’ll accidentally use the ledger paper to light the stove!”
Pei Xuan chuckled and rubbed his chin. Hong Ling had a point. Back when Dry-Well Village only had a hundred starving farmers and thirty bandit prisoners, Hong Ling could track every grain of millet in her head. Now they had a booming salt mine fifteen miles north, twelve Scorpion Buses running day and night, four hundred former smugglers digging ice-cellars, and sixteen nomad tribes herding sheep outside the walls.
Furthermore, his guards were growing fast in strength, but they lacked real military formations. Old Wei was a fierce bodyguard and Captain Hu was a street-brawling mercenary, neither of them knew how to drill a real army of thousands to march and fight as one.
“We need two kinds of specialists,” Pei Xuan said, leaning against the battlements and looking out at the desert horizon. “First, a real military commander who knows how to train an army. Second, a top-tier bookkeeper who can run a town hall without losing a single copper coin.”
“Where are we going to find people like that in the middle of the Red-Sand Wastes?” Hong Ling sighed, patting her ledger. “Real generals only serve in the Marquis’s border forts, and smart bookkeepers all work for rich merchants in the big cities.”
Before Pei Xuan could answer, a loud DING echoed inside his head.
On the floating RTS Mini-Map in the top right of his vision, a cluster of yellow neutral dots—along with two blindingly bright Golden Star Icons—had just crossed the fifteen-mile Fog of War border from the north!
Pei Xuan’s eyes lit up. “Speak of the devil. Old Wei, tell Batu to hold the wolf patrol back. Hong Ling, open the roadside water stall. Our new general and our new head accountant just arrived by express delivery.”
“Huh?” Hong Ling and Old Wei blinked in confusion, staring out at the empty sand road.
Ten minutes later, the sound of cracking leather whips and rattling iron chains drifted over the dunes.
Six heavy wooden prison wagons, pulled by sweaty, foam-mouthed desert mules, rolled slowly down the paved salt highway. Riding alongside the wagons were forty burly guards wearing black leather vests stamped with the badge of the Crimson-Chain Slave Guild.
At the head of the column rode a fat, scar-necked man with a gold ring through his nose and a braided bullwhip hanging from his saddle. This was Boss Ma, a notorious imperial slave trader who bought condemned prisoners from the northern jails and sold them as disposable miners to the southern copper and sulfur pits.
As the caravan hit the smooth stone pavement half a mile outside Dry-Well Town, Boss Ma pulled his horse to a halt and stared in shock.
“What the hell is this?” Boss Ma spat out a mouthful of dry sand, wiping his squinting eyes. “Six months ago, this spot was Dry-Well Village—thirty mud huts and a pit full of dead scorpions! Where did this twenty-foot stone wall come from? And why are there green willow trees growing in the middle of the Red Wastes?!”
His deputy, a skinny one-eared rider, pointed a shaking finger toward the roadside just outside the South Gate.
“Boss! Look over there! There’s a giant wooden sign that says DRY-WELL TOWN MUNICIPAL SERVICE STATION — CLEAN SPRING WATER & ICE-COLD PLUM SOUP! And look at those troughs! That’s clear water! Not yellow mud, real clear water!”
Inside the six iron-barred wagons, eighty ragged, sunburned prisoners pressed their cracked lips against the bars, groaning weakly at the smell of cool water and damp grass.
“Water... give us a drop of water...” a gray-haired prisoner whispered from Wagon #4.
CRACK!
Boss Ma lashed his bullwhip against the iron bars of the wagon, making sparks fly. “Shut your mouths, you lazy dogs! Clean water in the desert costs silver! You think I’m buying sweet water for a bunch of half-dead mine rats?”
Still, Boss Ma’s own throat was smoking like a dry chimney. They had lost two water barrels to a rockslide three days ago, and if his mules and guards didn’t drink soon, half his cargo would die before reaching Green-Willow Oasis thirty miles south. Dead prisoners couldn’t be sold to the mines.
“Halt the wagons by the roadside ditch!” Boss Ma barked to his forty guards. “Nobody unchains the cargo! Come with me to buy two barrels of cheap well water for the mules!”
As the six iron wagons rolled to a stop near the town gate, Pei Xuan walked casually down the steps of the wall, flanked by Old Wei and Hong Ling.
Pei Xuan didn’t even look at Boss Ma. His eyes went straight to the first two iron cages at the front of the caravan.
Wagon #1 wasn’t a shared cage—it was a reinforced black-iron box made of bars as thick as a man’s wrist. Sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor inside was a giant of a man, easily six-foot-six, with shoulders like a stone gateway and a square jaw covered in iron-gray stubble. Even sitting down in tattered prisoner rags, he looked like a sleeping mountain tiger. However, two fifty-pound iron balls were riveted to his ankles, and both of his knees were swollen and purple, oozing dark, foul-smelling blood through dirty bandages.
Pei Xuan focused his gaze on the giant, and a golden RTS Tooltip popped open above the cage.
Pei Xuan’s heart gave a happy thump. A real Rank 3 Martial Grandmaster!
According to the system rules, a loyal Rank 1 citizen gave 10 LP a day, a Rank 2 citizen gave 100 LP a day, and a Rank 3 Martial Grandmaster gave a whopping 1,000 LP a day—plus a 10x jackpot if he hit 100 Die-Hard Loyalty! Even better, his [Iron-Blood Drillmaster] trait was exactly what Dry-Well Town needed to turn its burly farmers into an unstoppable army.
Pei Xuan shifted his gaze to Wagon #2 right behind it.
Huddled in the corner of Wagon #2, trying to shield himself from the sun with a torn straw hat, was a skinny, pale man in his late twenties. He wore a pair of thick, cracked glass spectacles tied to his ears with red string. Even inside a shaking prison cart, his right hand was twitching constantly in the air, his long fingers snapping up and down as if clicking invisible abacus beads.
Pei Xuan almost laughed out loud. A man sitting in a death-row slave cart who was more worried about the brick-to-mortar ratio of the highway than his own life!
At that moment, Boss Ma swaggered up to the water stall, slapping his dusty leather gloves against his fat belly. He glanced at Pei Xuan’s clean silk robe, then at Old Wei’s iron arm and Hong Ling’s small frame. Seeing no heavy armor or noble banners, Boss Ma figured Pei Xuan was just the rich son of some local desert landlord.
“Hey, boy!” Boss Ma tossed two tarnished copper coins onto Hong Ling’s wooden counter. “Fill four big barrels with well water for my mules, and give me a bucket of cold mud-water to splash over the cages in the back so the cargo doesn’t roast before noon. Make it quick!”
Hong Ling stared down at the two rusty copper coins, her eyebrows shooting up like two little swords.
“Two copper coins?” Hong Ling pointed at the painted price board behind her. “Are you blind, fatty? One barrel of Sweet-Spring Spirit Water for outsiders is ten copper coins! Four barrels is forty coppers! And if your mules poop on our paved stone road without a manure bag, that’s a five-silver-tael Municipal Sanitation Fine!”
Boss Ma’s face twisted, and his hand dropped to his bullwhip. “What did you call me, you little kitchen brat?! Do you know who backs the Crimson-Chain Guild? Even the magistrates of the border towns give me free water when I pass through! You want forty coppers for four barrels of desert ditch water?!”
CLANG!
Old Wei took half a step forward. He didn’t even draw his broadsword—he simply rested his left Blood-Iron Mechanical Hand on the corner of the oak counter and squeezed slightly. Five deep iron finger-marks sank half an inch into the seasoned hardwood with a loud crunch.
At the same time, fifty yards down the road, a twelve-foot-long Armored Scorpion Dump Truck crawled out of the ditch, its giant black pincers snapping the air with a metallic SHING as ten Rank 2 town guards on its back leveled heavy iron crossbows at the slave caravan.
Boss Ma’s hand froze on his whip. Cold sweat poured down his scarred neck.
Rank 2 Martial guards? And a tamed Rank 2 Armored Scorpion King being used to haul gravel?! What kind of monster village was this?!
Boss Ma swallowed hard and forced an ugly, greasy smile onto his face. “Haha! Look at me, getting heatstroke from the sun! Forty coppers! Of course, forty coppers is fair for such clear water! Hey, Little Six, bring forty coppers over here and put dung-bags under the mules’ tails right now!”
Pei Xuan waved his hand lightly, signaling Old Wei to relax. He walked past Boss Ma and stopped beside the iron bars of Wagon #1 and Wagon #2.
“Boss Ma,” Pei Xuan said calmly, pointing his folding fan at the crippled giant in Wagon #1 and the skinny man with glasses in Wagon #2. “You’re heading south to the copper mines, aren’t you? That’s another five days of hard travel through the dry dunes.”
“Yes, Young Master,” Boss Ma bowed his head respectfully now that he saw the crossbows. “Going straight past Green-Willow Oasis to the Black-Skull Pits.”
“That big fellow in the first cage won’t survive two more days,” Pei Xuan said, pointing at General Tie Zhan’s swollen, black-blooded knees. “The poison in his leg meridians is rotting his flesh under this sun. And that four-eyed scholar in the second cage has arms thinner than sugar cane—he’ll die the first time he swings a mining pickaxe.”
Boss Ma sighed and spat on the ground, kicking the wheel of Wagon #1 in annoyance.
“Don’t even remind me, Young Master! I lost my shirt on these two!” Boss Ma complained bitterly. “The prison warden in Iron-Sand City forced me to buy the whole lot as a package deal. That big bastard used to be a Rank 3 General named Tie Zhan, so I had to use a special black-iron cage and feed him four bowls of gruel a day just to keep him breathing, even though his legs are smashed flatter than rotten tofu! And that bookworm Su Suanpan doesn’t do anything but mutter numbers all night and drive the other prisoners crazy!”
Inside Wagon #1, Tie Zhan slowly opened his bloodshot eyes. He looked through the thick iron bars at Pei Xuan, his voice like grinding gravel.
“Save your breath, young master,” Tie Zhan rasped, his face cold and proud despite the chains. “My leg meridians were shattered by a Peak Rank 3 Frost-Viper Hammer. The cold poison has already entered my bone marrow. Even if you buy me, I cannot stand, I cannot hold a spear, and I eat as much as five grown men. Let this old dog die on the road.”
Beside him in Wagon #2, Abacus Su pushed his cracked glasses up his nose and peered intently at Pei Xuan’s sleeves.
“Young Master,” Su Suanpan squeaked in a hoarse, dry voice, “before you talk to the slaver, may I ask one question? The stone road under our wheels—did you use a three-to-one lime-to-sand ratio or a four-to-one ratio? Because my calculations show that at forty miles per hour, those giant scorpions should be cracking the curbstones, yet the edge wear is zero point zero percent! How did you balance the load math?!”
Boss Ma rolled his eyes and smacked Wagon #2 with his palm. “See what I mean, Young Master? Complete lunatic! He’s dying of thirst and he’s asking about road bricks!”
Pei Xuan looked at Tie Zhan’s proud, unyielding eyes, then at Abacus Su’s frantic finger-counting, and a wide smile spread across his face.
“Boss Ma,” Pei Xuan said, turning back to the slave trader. “Since these two are dead weight eating your grain, and those eighty skinny prisoners in the back wagons look like they’re about to faint from heatstroke, why don’t you sell the whole caravan’s cargo to me right here?”
Boss Ma blinked his small pig-like eyes. “Sell the whole lot of eighty-two prisoners to you? Young Master, I won’t lie—the cripple and the bookworm are trash, I’d give them to you for the price of the iron chains on their necks. But the other eighty men still have working arms! At the southern mines, they fetch five silver taels a head! That’s four hundred silver taels total!”
“I don’t pay in silver,” Pei Xuan said softly. He snapped his fingers toward the gatehouse. “Old Wei, bring out two sacks from the north warehouse.”
Old Wei grinned, walked into the guardhouse, and came back out carrying two bulging fifty-pound canvas sacks on one shoulder. He dropped them onto the stone table with a heavy thud and untied the hemp strings on top.
Instantly, the morning sunlight hit the contents of the sacks, reflecting a blinding, dazzling snow-white sparkle that made Boss Ma shield his eyes!
“What... what is that?!” Boss Ma gasped, stumbling forward and sticking his stubby finger into the sack. He touched his tongue to his finger, and his eyes nearly popped out of his skull.
Pure, snow-white, fine-grained crystal salt! Not a single grain of red sand, not a trace of bitter desert poison—salt so pure that only Imperial Palace nobles and Immortal Sect elders could afford to eat it!
“Two fifty-pound bags of Snow-Crystal Refined Salt,” Pei Xuan said lightly, tapping the canvas sack with his fan. “In the southern cities, salt this pure sells for ten silver taels a pound. Two bags is a hundred pounds—worth a thousand silver taels anywhere south of the desert. Give me the keys to all six cages, including the cripple and the scholar, and these two bags of snow-salt are yours.”
Boss Ma’s breathing turned as heavy as a bellows. His greedy brain spun at top speed: A hundred pounds of palace-grade snow salt for eighty half-dead prisoners and two useless trash cans?! This rich desert boy must have had his brains baked by the sun!
What lay ahead for these eighty-two desperate souls once the iron cages opened? And how would the crippled War God of the North react when Pei Xuan threw him straight into a boiling cauldron of fused monster soup?