Boss Ma stared at the two fifty-pound canvas sacks of Snow-Crystal Refined Salt sitting on the wooden counter. Under the bright desert sun, the salt crystals sparkled like crushed diamonds.
He licked his thick lips again, tasting the clean, crisp saltiness on his fingertip. There wasn’t even a hint of the bitter yellow alum that plagued all the rock salt in the northwest borderlands. If he took these two hundred-pound sacks to the rich merchants in Green-Willow Oasis or sold them to the noble estates in Iron-Sand City, he could easily walk away with a thousand silver taels!
And what was this foolish young lord asking in return?
Eighty half-dead, heat-stroked prisoners who could barely stand up, one crippled old general whose legs were rotting off with Frost-Viper poison, and one nearsighted bookworm who couldn’t lift a bucket of water!
If I don’t close this deal right now before his old butler wakes up and stops him, I’m the biggest idiot in the Red-Sand Wastes! Boss Ma thought frantically.
“Done! It’s a deal, Young Master!” Boss Ma slammed his meaty palm down on the counter so fast he nearly bruised his wrist. Without waiting another second, he yanked a big iron key-ring off his belt and threw it into Hong Ling’s hands. “Here are the keys to all six cages and the ankle shackles! No refunds, no trade-backs! Once the iron doors open, whether they live or die is none of my business!”
“Wait a minute!” Hong Ling frowned, clutching the keys while glaring at the two snow-white salt bags as if someone were cutting off pieces of her own flesh. “Young Master, that’s a hundred pounds of our top-grade Snow-Crystal Salt! Even if we buy eighty healthy donkeys, it wouldn’t cost that much—”
“Hong Ling,” Pei Xuan interrupted gently, tapping her forehead with his closed fan. “Open the cages and write Boss Ma a receipt. In Dry-Well Town, people are worth far more than salt.”
“Yes, Young Master...” Hong Ling pouted, though her Loyalty bar stayed firmly locked at 98/100. She pulled a pre-printed slip of rough mulberry paper from her belt, stamped it with red ink, and slapped it onto Boss Ma’s chest. “Here is your bill of sale! Now get your four barrels of water, load your salt, and move your mules before they drop dung on our highway!”
Boss Ma didn’t care how rude the little maid was. Moving faster than he had in ten years, he barked at his forty guards:
“Quick! Unlock the cages, dump the prisoners on the roadside, and keep the iron wagons! Throw these two salt bags onto my lead horse!”
Within three minutes, the heavy iron doors of all six prison wagons swung open with loud, rusty screeches.
The slave guards roughly shoved the eighty starving prisoners out onto the smooth stone road. Most of them were poor border farmers who couldn’t pay the Marquisate’s brutal war taxes, or small-time caravan guards who had offended local officials. Weak from days of thirst, they tumbled onto the warm stone pavement in a heap of clinking chains.
When they came to Wagon #2, a burly guard grabbed Su Suanpan by the collar of his torn scholar’s robe and tossed him out like a sack of dry straw.
“Whoa—watch the spectacles!” Abacus Su yelped as he hit the pavement on his backside. He didn’t even rub his bruised tailbone; his skinny hands immediately patted the dirt around his feet until he found his cracked glass spectacles, tying the red string back around his ears with a loud sigh of relief.
Finally, four guards unlocked the thick black-iron door of Wagon #1. None of them dared to step inside—even with his legs crippled, General Tie Zhan had bitten off a guard’s thumb three days ago when the man tried to steal his wooden water bowl. Instead, the four guards used long iron poles to hook the chains on Tie Zhan’s fifty-pound ankle balls and dragged the giant man out of the wagon.
THUD!
Tie Zhan hit the stone road hard, biting his lip until blood ran down his chin so he wouldn’t let out a single groan in front of the slavers. Dark, purple-black blood seeped through the dirty rags wrapped around his shattered knees, staining the gray road bricks.
Boss Ma climbed back onto his tall horse, hugging one of the fifty-pound snow-salt bags against his fat belly like a newborn baby. He looked down at Tie Zhan lying in the dirt and let out a loud, mocking laugh.
“General Tie! Look at you now!” Boss Ma sneered, spitting into the ditch. “Back when you commanded ten thousand iron cavalry at the Northern Pass, you wouldn’t even look at merchants like me! Now I just traded you and eighty other pieces of trash for two bags of table salt! Hahaha! Young Master, enjoy feeding that bottomless pit—if he doesn’t die of leg-rot by tomorrow morning, he’ll eat your little mud town out of house and home! Ride out, boys!”
CRACK!
Boss Ma snapped his whip, and the forty slave guards galloped south down the highway with their empty cages, laughing uproariously at the “stupid country lord” they had just swindled.
Watching the dust cloud of the departing slave caravan, Old Wei spat on the ground and rested his hand on his Heavy Mountain-Cleaver Saber.
“Young Master,” Old Wei growled in a low voice, “those forty scum have blood on their hands. Say the word, and I’ll take Batu’s wolf-riders five miles down the road, chop their heads off, and bring our two bags of salt back before lunch.”
“No rush,” Pei Xuan smiled faintly, watching the red dots on his mini-map head south toward Green-Willow Oasis. “Boss Ma is taking that snow-white salt straight to Green-Willow Oasis to show it off. Let him be our free advertising salesman first. When we clean up Green-Willow Oasis in a few days, those two bags of salt—and every coin in Boss Ma’s pocket—will come right back into our warehouse with interest.”
A system notification chimed in Pei Xuan’s ears.
On the stone road, the eighty freed prisoners huddled together in terror. They looked at the twenty-foot-high walls of Dry-Well Town, then at the twelve-foot-long Armored Scorpion Dump Truck parked by the ditch, and finally at Old Wei’s gleaming black-iron mechanical arm.
A skinny middle-aged carpenter among the prisoners trembled and knocked his forehead against the stone bricks.
“My Lord! Please spare us! Even if you bought us to dig salt in your mines, we swear we won’t run away! Just... just give us a sip of muddy water so my little brother doesn’t die of thirst!”
“Who said anything about muddy water?”
Pei Xuan stepped forward and nodded to Old Wei. “Old Wei, take your saber and cut off all their iron chains. Old Guo, roll out three barrels of chilled Sweet-Spring Water and ten baskets of hot Meat-Potato Steamed Buns!”
“Right away, Young Master!”
Old Wei drew his Rank 2 Heavy Mountain-Cleaver Saber. A faint bronze light flashed along the fifty-pound blade.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Old Wei walked down the line of prisoners, swinging the heavy saber with surgical precision. The thick iron chains that needed a blacksmith’s chisel to open were sliced apart like soft noodles, without scratching a single prisoner’s skin.
Last of all, Old Wei stepped up to Tie Zhan and swung his blade down between the crippled general’s ankles.
SHING!
The wrist-thick black-iron chain linking Tie Zhan’s fifty-pound ankle balls split cleanly in two, leaving a smooth, mirror-like cut across the iron links.
Tie Zhan’s thick eyebrows twitched. Even with his cultivation crippled, his eyes were still those of a Rank 3 Martial Grandmaster. He stared at the blade in Old Wei’s right hand, then at the mechanical iron arm attached to Old Wei’s left shoulder.
“A Rank 2 Peak forged heavy saber... and a meridian-linked mechanical arm?” Tie Zhan rasped in disbelief. “In a nameless desert town? Who is your master?”
Pei Xuan crouched down in front of Tie Zhan, not minding the foul smell of rotting blood coming from the general’s bandaged knees.
“My name is Pei Xuan, Lord of Dry-Well Town,” Pei Xuan said warmly. “General Tie, I heard about the battle of Broken-Wolf Valley two years ago. You held the pass for seven days with three thousand starving men against twenty thousand northern horse raiders, saving three border counties from being slaughtered.”
Tie Zhan’s huge frame stiffened. His fists clenched so hard his fingernails dug into his calloused palms, and a bitter laugh tore from his throat.
“What good is remembering Broken-Wolf Valley?” Tie Zhan spat, his eyes red. “The soldiers who bled with me never got their pension silver. When I rode to the prefecture capital to demand their winter grain from Minister Zhao’s nephew, they accused me of treason, drugged my wine, and shattered both my leg meridians with a Frost-Viper Hammer! Now I am just a useless sack of meat that costs two bags of salt. Young Master Pei, if you bought me hoping I still have some secret military manual hidden on me, I’ll tell you the Iron-Wall Spear Art right now, and then you can leave me in a ditch to feed the wolves.”
Above Tie Zhan’s head, his tooltip flickered:
[Tie Zhan | Loyalty: 28/100]
[Current Thought: At least this young lord remembers my brothers at Broken-Wolf Valley... It's a pity my legs are dead, or I would pay him back with my life for cutting off those slave chains.]
“I don’t want your spear manual, General Tie,” Pei Xuan said, standing up and waving over four strong Rank 2 town guards carrying a wide wooden stretcher lined with a soft cotton quilt. “I bought you because Dry-Well Town needs a Chief Military Commander to train five thousand guards. As for your Frost-Viper poison and shattered leg meridians—give me half an hour at the town bathhouse, and you’ll walk out on your own two feet.”
Tie Zhan stared at Pei Xuan as if the young lord were telling a fairy tale to a child. “Walk out in half an hour? Young Master, three Imperial Medical Pavilion doctors examined my knees. The meridian pathways are broken into twenty pieces and frozen dead! Even a Rank 4 Immortal Sect alchemist said nothing short of a thousand-year Dragon-Blood Pill could rebuild them!”
“Imperial doctors don’t have my bathwater,” Pei Xuan grinned. “Lift him gently, boys. Take him straight to VIP Room #1 at the Sweet-Spring Bathhouse and start boiling the big cedar tub!”
Before the four guards carried the stunned general through the town gate, Pei Xuan turned toward the skinny man still sitting on the road counting the stone bricks with his fingers.
“Su Suanpan,” Pei Xuan called out.
Abacus Su jumped like a startled rabbit, holding his cracked glasses with both hands as he scrambled to his feet and bowed awkwardly.
“Present! Prisoner Su Suanpan is here, My Lord!” Su said rapidly, his eyes darting from the gatehouse to the passing Scorpion Bus and then to the eighty freed prisoners gulping down cold Sweet-Spring water and stuffing hot lamb-potato buns into their mouths.
Around them, green numbers were already popping up like fireworks in Pei Xuan’s vision as the eighty prisoners tasted the sweet healing water and hot meat buns:
[Freed Prisoner: Zhang Daniu | Loyalty: 45 -> 66/100 (Loyal!)]
[Freed Prisoner: Li Er | Loyalty: 42 -> 64/100 (Loyal!)]
[Freed Prisoner: Wang Tie | Loyalty: 48 -> 71/100 (Loyal!)]
“My Lord!” Abacus Su couldn’t hold back the itch in his brain any longer. He pointed a trembling finger at the food baskets and then at the Scorpion Bus. “Forgive my boldness, My Lord, but your town’s accounting makes no sense to me! First, you traded one hundred pounds of palace-grade refined salt—worth at least eight hundred to one thousand silver taels at wholesale market rates—for eighty-two condemned prisoners whose market value is under three hundred and fifty silver taels! Second, you are feeding newly arrived laborers white-flour meat buns that cost at least four coppers each to make, without signing a single indentured labor contract! At this burn rate, how has your treasury not gone bankrupt in ten days?!”
Hong Ling put her hands on her hips and nodded vigorously. “See, Young Master?! Even this four-eyed stick-bug knows you spend too much!”
Pei Xuan laughed out loud. “Su Suanpan, why were you thrown into that slave wagon by the magistrate of Red-Plum Prefecture?”
Su Suanpan’s pale face flushed, and he straightened his skinny back proudly. “Because the Magistrate reported to the Imperial Court that three thousand stone of disaster-relief grain was ‘eaten by desert rats’! I weighed the granary floor dust, measured the rat holes around the walls, and calculated that unless Red-Plum Prefecture had rats the size of water buffaloes, each rat would have had to eat forty-two pounds of grain a day! I proved he stole two thousand eight hundred and sixty-four stone of grain down to the last ounce! So... so he smashed my abacus and threw me in the cage.”
“Good,” Pei Xuan nodded approvingly. “A man who calculates how much a rat eats down to the ounce is exactly who I need.”
While reaching into his wide sleeve, Pei Xuan silently opened his 3-Slot Fusion Cube in his mind.
He selected three items from his personal storage bag:
1. [Hong Ling's Spare Wooden Abacus]
2. [2x Clear Quartz Lenses]
3. [10 Taels of Pure Gold & Refined Black Iron]
Pei Xuan pulled his hand out of his sleeve, holding a gleaming, heavy black-iron frame strung with ninety solid gold beads that clinked with a crisp, musical ring, along with a pair of feather-light brass spectacles with crystal-clear lenses.
He handed both items to the dumbfounded Su Suanpan.
“Take off those broken glass pieces tied with red string,” Pei Xuan said with a smile. “From today on, you are the Chief Town Auditor and Director of the Work-Point Office of Dry-Well Town. Hong Ling is in charge of the vault lock and the treasury guards; you are in charge of every ledger, every work ticket, every road brick, and every prisoner’s debt sheet.”
Su Suanpan’s hands shook as he took the Nine-Ring Gold-Iron Abacus. His fingers brushed the warm, smooth gold beads—clack-clack-clack!—and a cool, refreshing wave of energy shot straight from his fingertips into his tired brain, washing away ten days of dizziness and heatstroke in an instant!
Then he put on the Crystal-Clear Spectacles.
“Heavens above!” Su Suanpan gasped, stumbling back half a step as the blurry world suddenly snapped into razor-sharp focus. He could see the tiny wood-grain lines on the gatehouse sign fifty yards away, and he could even see a single drop of lamb grease on Old Guo’s apron buttons!
“My Lord!” Abacus Su dropped to his knees on the stone road, hugging the golden abacus to his chest as tears fogged up his new lenses. “Su Suanpan swears by these ninety golden beads—if a single copper coin goes missing from Dry-Well Town’s books, or if a single bandit prisoner slacks off by one shovel-full of dirt, I will take my own head off and balance the ledger with it!”
“Keep your head on your neck, we have four thousand five hundred people waiting to be registered,” Pei Xuan laughed, helping the skinny accountant up. “Hong Ling, take Auditor Su to the Town Hall office, get him a clean blue robe and a pot of tea, and show him our salt and farm books. Let him see why two bags of salt is pocket change to us.”
“Follow me, Four-Eyes!” Hong Ling huffed, though she looked pleased to finally dump her tower of messy wooden tally-boards onto someone else. “If you can figure out why One-Eyed Jack’s brick crew used twelve extra barrels of lime mortar yesterday, I’ll ask Grandpa Guo to fry you a plate of spicy scorpions!”
“Twelve extra barrels of mortar?” Abacus Su’s eyes flashed behind his new glasses, his fingers already clicking the golden beads like lightning—clack-clack-clack-clack! “Unacceptable! Either they laid an unrecorded wall or someone is using town mortar to patch their doghouse! Take me to the books at once!”
Watching Abacus Su sprint into town faster than a rabbit while clicking his golden abacus, Pei Xuan chuckled and turned toward the bathhouse street, where thick white steam was rising from the chimney of VIP Room #1.
“Come on, Old Wei, Old Guo,” Pei Xuan said, rolling up his sleeves. “We got our bookkeeper working. Now let’s go boil a Rank 3 War God back to life—and Old Guo, you’d better start steaming at least twenty cages of giant meat buns, because when General Tie jumps out of that tub, he’s going to be hungry enough to eat a cow!”
Inside the bathhouse, Tie Zhan was already sitting beside a giant cedar tub, staring suspiciously as four guards poured buckets of glowing spring water inside. How could a bath cure meridian poison that baffled the Empire’s greatest doctors?