Inside VIP Room #1 of the Sweet-Spring Public Bathhouse, thick white steam rose toward the high stone ceiling.
The room was built entirely out of Cool-Breeze Bricks and paved with smooth white salt-stone tiles that kept the floor warm and dry. In the center of the room stood a massive circular bath barrel carved from iron-wood, six feet wide and four feet deep, with a brass firebox burning red-hot coal underneath it.
General Tie Zhan sat on a wide wooden bench beside the barrel. The four town guards had already helped him strip off his filthy, blood-crusted prisoner rags and washed the desert dust from his upper body with Jade-Clear Healing Soap.
Without his shirt, Tie Zhan’s torso looked like a bronze statue hammered out on a blacksmith’s anvil. Every inch of his broad chest and back was criss-crossed with old battlefield scars—spear holes, saber slashes, and arrow burns from twenty years of fighting the Northern Barbarians. Yet below his waist, his two legs were a horrifying sight.
From his mid-thighs down to his ankles, the skin was swollen, shiny, and bluish-black, covered in a web of frozen purple veins. Even though the bathhouse room was steaming hot, a faint layer of white frost kept forming over his kneecaps, giving off a rotten, icy smell.
When Pei Xuan walked in with Old Wei, Tie Zhan looked down at his ruined legs and shook his head with a heavy sigh.
“Lord Pei,” Tie Zhan said, his deep voice echoing against the stone tiles. “Just washing off the desert filth with this strange soap of yours has already made me feel like a human being again. Let me die clean on a straw mat. Please don’t waste any precious herbs on these dead legs.”
“Who said your legs are dead?” Pei Xuan walked over to the big iron-wood barrel, testing the steaming Sweet-Spring Spirit Water with his hand.
“My Lord, I know my own body better than anyone,” Tie Zhan said bitterly, tapping his fist against his right knee. It made a dull, hollow thud, and he didn’t even blink—because he couldn’t feel a thing below his thighs. “When Minister Zhao’s hound, the Rank 3 Peak executioner ‘Frost-Viper’ Yan, hit my knees with his spiked ice-hammer, he didn’t just crack the kneecaps. He drove thirty-six threads of Rank 3 Frost-Viper Internal Qi straight into my twelve main leg meridians. The meridians are shattered like broken glass, and the frost poison has turned the bone marrow black.”
Tie Zhan looked up at Pei Xuan seriously. “In the martial world, a broken bone can be set with splints, and a cut muscle can be sewn with thread. But shattered meridians soaked in Rank 3 frost poison? Unless you have a Rank 4 Immortal Sect’s Dragon-Bone Rebirth Pill, dipping me in hot herb water is just boiling a piece of dead pork. Save your medicine for the young soldiers outside who still have working legs.”
Beside Pei Xuan, Old Wei snorted loudly and held up his left arm—the gleaming black Rank 2 Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm forged by Pei Xuan’s Fusion Cube.
CLACK-CLACK!
Old Wei flexed the five iron fingers, then casually punched the solid stone pillar next to the door. Stone dust sprayed out as his iron fist left a two-inch dent in the rock without making Old Wei flinch at all.
“General Tie, you talk too much for a northern soldier!” Old Wei grinned, thumping his own chest with his iron hand. “Twenty days ago, this old stump of mine had been rotting with cold wind-poison for twelve years! I couldn’t even sleep through a rainy night without biting a wooden stick! Look at me now! Our Young Master said you’ll walk out of this room in half an hour, which means in thirty-one minutes you’ll be jogging around the square! Stop acting like a shy bride and get ready to jump in the pot!”
Tie Zhan stared at Old Wei’s mechanical arm in shock. Earlier at the gate, he had thought it was just a heavy iron hook strapped onto a stump. Now, up close, he could actually sense Old Wei’s hot Rank 2 blood-Qi flowing smoothly from his shoulder meridians right into the black iron fingers, as if the metal were living bone and flesh!
“That... how is that possible?!” Tie Zhan breathed. “Even the Master Artisans of the Imperial Forge can’t link iron to living meridians!”
“In Dry-Well Town, nothing is impossible,” Pei Xuan smiled.
He turned toward the steaming wooden barrel and opened two wooden boxes that Old Wei had carried in from the town vault.
Inside the first box lay three thick, glowing-red bone tubes harvested from the giant scorpions during the salt-valley battle: `[Rank 2 Armored Scorpion King Marrow]`, still pulsing with fierce desert fire-energy.
Inside the second box—taken from Boss Qian’s secret treasure chest during the Salt-Pool Town raid—lay a twisted, golden root shaped like a tiny bearded man: a `[100-Year Desert Sun-Ginseng]`.
“Wait—My Lord!” Tie Zhan’s eyes widened as he recognized the two treasures. “Scorpion King Marrow and Hundred-Year Sun-Ginseng?! No, My Lord, you must not mix those two together! Scorpion King Marrow is violent desert fire-poison, and Sun-Ginseng is pure blazing Yang energy! Without a Rank 3 Alchemist to refine them over seven days, throwing them raw into bathwater will make the fire-poison explode and burn a man’s heart into charcoal!”
[Tie Zhan | Loyalty: 28 -> 42/100]
[Current Thought: Lord Pei is actually taking out a Hundred-Year Sun-Ginseng for a cripple he bought for two bags of salt?! He means well, but if he throws those two violent herbs together, it's going to blow up the whole bathhouse!]
“If an ordinary doctor mixed them, it would definitely blow up,” Pei Xuan chuckled, placing his palms on the rim of the big wooden bath barrel. “Good thing I’m not an ordinary doctor.”
In his mind, Pei Xuan opened the newly unlocked 3-Slot Fusion Cube.
He dragged the entire barrel of `[Boiling Lv.2 Sweet-Spring Spirit Water]` into Slot 1, the three tubes of `[Rank 2 Scorpion King Marrow]` into Slot 2, and the `[100-Year Desert Sun-Ginseng]` into Slot 3.
Fuse! Pei Xuan silently commanded.
HUMMMMMM!
A flash of warm golden light rippled across the surface of the bathwater as 2,000 Loyalty Points vanished from Pei Xuan’s balance (Current Balance: 26,250 LP).
Inside the six-foot wooden barrel, the Scorpion King Marrow and the Hundred-Year Sun-Ginseng melted instantly without leaving a single shred of dregs. The clear spring water turned into a thick, glowing ruby-gold liquid that looked like melted amber.
Instead of the choking, poisonous smell Tie Zhan had feared, a rich, mouth-watering aroma—half like ancient pine forest after a spring rain, and half like slow-simmered dragon-bone broth—filled the entire bathhouse!
Even standing three feet away, Old Wei took one deep breath of the golden steam and felt the blood in his veins surge warmly.
Tie Zhan’s jaw dropped so low he could have swallowed a goose egg.
He had served as a Rank 3 General in the Northern Army for ten years and had once seen a precious Grade-2 Marrow-Washing Pill gifted by the Emperor himself. That pill had smelled half as good as this six-foot barrel of glowing golden soup!
“How... how did the ginseng and bone marrow melt into the water in one breath?!” Tie Zhan stammered, his eyes nearly bulging out of their sockets. “And where did the violent fire-poison go?! This medicinal scent... it’s pure life-force without a single flaw!”
“Don’t let the soup get cold, General Tie,” Pei Xuan grinned, stepping back and nodding to Old Wei. “Old Wei, help the General into the barrel!”
“Wait, My Lord, this soup is worth ten thousand gold pieces, let me at least—”
Before Tie Zhan could finish his polite refusal, Old Wei grabbed the giant general under his left armpit with his Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm, while Pei Xuan grabbed his right arm with his Rank 2 Iron-Bone strength.
“One, two, three—in you go!”
SPLASH!
The two-hundred-and-fifty-pound northern general was lifted off the bench and dunked straight into the steaming barrel of Rank 3 Blood-Rebirth Medicinal Soup up to his chin!
“Gah—!”
The moment Tie Zhan’s swollen, frost-poisoned legs touched the ruby-gold liquid, his entire body went stiff as a board.
It didn’t feel like hot water scalding his skin. Instead, it felt as if ten thousand tiny, warm golden needles had pierced straight through the dead skin of his thighs and knees, diving directly into his frozen, shattered leg meridians!
SIZZLE! HISS!
Right before Pei Xuan and Old Wei’s eyes, the white frost covering Tie Zhan’s kneecaps melted into black smoke. Deep inside the barrel, the thirty-six threads of vicious Frost-Viper Internal Qi that had been eating Tie Zhan’s bone marrow for six months let out a silent screech as the overbearing Rank 3 golden medicinal power surrounded them and burned them into nothingness!
“Arghhhhhh!”
Tie Zhan threw his head back and roared, his huge hands gripping the thick iron-wood rim of the barrel so hard the wood groaned and cracked.
For six long months, he hadn’t felt anything below his waist—not pain, not heat, not even when prison rats bit his toes. Now, a volcano of blazing, itching, tearing heat erupted inside his knees and calves!
Crack! Pop! Snap-crack!
From inside the golden water came the loud, crisp sounds of broken bone fragments shifting back into place and shriveled, dead meridian pathways snapping back together like iron chains being reforged in a furnace!
“Hold steady, General Tie!” Pei Xuan called out, watching the floating tooltip above Tie Zhan’s head. “Circulate your Northern Iron-Wall Internal Qi down from your dantian into your thighs! Push the dead blood out through your heels!”
Tie Zhan didn’t hesitate for a split second. As a veteran Rank 3 Grandmaster who had crawled out of piles of corpses, pain was nothing to him—feeling pain meant his legs were alive!
“HAAAAAH!”
Tie Zhan clenched his teeth, his neck veins bulging as thick as earthworms. He mobilized the dormant lake of Rank 3 Internal Qi in his lower dantian—which he hadn’t dared to circulate at full force since his legs were broken—and slammed it downward like a battering ram!
Previously, whenever his Internal Qi reached his hips, it would hit a dead wall of frozen, shattered meridians and bounce back, making him cough up blood.
This time, as his Internal Qi surged down toward his knees, the Rank 3 Blood-Rebirth Medicinal Soup wrapped around the Qi stream like liquid gold, rebuilding the twenty broken meridian bridges inches ahead of the rushing tide!
BOOM!
Inside Tie Zhan’s body, a sound like a burst river dam echoed through his bones.
From the soles of his feet and the skin around his kneecaps, thick streams of pitch-black, foul-smelling poison blood squirted out into the barrel! However, the fused Sweet-Spring water immediately neutralized and dissolved the black filth at the bottom of the tub, while the remaining golden essence poured straight into Tie Zhan’s newly reopened leg marrow!
One minute... three minutes... five minutes!
Above Tie Zhan’s head, his system status bar flashed wildly from gray to bright crimson, and then to blinding gold!
At the end of the fifth minute, every last drop of golden medicinal power in the six-foot barrel had been sucked completely dry into Tie Zhan’s legs, leaving only clear warm water behind.
Tie Zhan opened his eyes.
A terrifying gleam of golden-red light—the unmistakable sign of a Rank 3 Martial Grandmaster whose Internal Qi had reached full maturity—flashed across his pupils!
“ROOOOOAAAR!”
With an earth-shaking tiger roar that rattled every window tile in the bathhouse, Tie Zhan pushed down with both feet against the bottom of the wooden barrel!
BOOOM!
He didn’t climb out of the tub—he launched straight up out of the water like a human cannonball, soaring ten feet into the air until his head nearly brushed the high stone ceiling bricks!
In midair, Tie Zhan twisted his massive body with effortless grace, wrapped a large white bath towel around his waist with a flick of his hand, and landed squarely on both bare feet on the salt-stone floor!
THUD!
A visible ring of white Rank 3 Internal Qi rippled outward from the soles of his feet, blowing the steam across the room and leaving two quarter-inch-deep footprints pressed neatly into the hard stone tiles!
Silence fell over VIP Room #1 for three full seconds.
Only the sound of water dripping from Tie Zhan’s broad shoulders could be heard.
Tie Zhan stood frozen in place, staring down at his own two feet standing firmly on the stone floor. The purple swelling was gone. The rotting black sores were gone. His calves and thighs were thicker, harder, and more explosive with power than they had been even at his prime at the Northern Pass!
He lifted his right foot, bent his knee without a single twinge of pain, and stamped it down again.
BOOM!
The whole bathhouse floor trembled.
“My legs...” Tie Zhan’s voice, which had stayed cold and steady even when slavers whipped his cage, suddenly cracked and trembled like a child’s. He touched his warm, rock-solid kneecaps with shaking hands. “My legs are back... Frost-Viper Yan’s poison is gone... I can stand! I CAN STAND!”
Tears the size of soybeans rolled down the scarred cheeks of the six-foot-six Iron-Head General.
Just as Tie Zhan turned toward Pei Xuan to drop to his knees and kowtow—
GRUUUUUMBLE—ROOOOAAAR!
A sound even louder than his tiger roar just now erupted from the middle of Tie Zhan’s flat, muscular stomach.
Rebuilding twenty shattered meridians and regrowing bone marrow in five minutes had burned through every ounce of fat and energy in his body. In an instant, Tie Zhan’s face turned from glowing red to pale white, his knees wobbled from sheer emptiness, and his stomach contracted so hard it felt like it was trying to digest his own backbone!
Before Tie Zhan could be embarrassed by his thunderous belly growl, the wooden door of VIP Room #1 was kicked open from the outside.
Fat Old Guo waddled in grinning from ear to ear, carrying a three-foot-wide bamboo steamer basket stacked three layers high on his palms, followed by two kitchen helpers carrying a five-gallon wooden bucket of hot lamb-bone soup!
What was inside those steaming bamboo baskets that smelled good enough to make a Rank 3 War God drool on the floor?