Thirty miles south of Dry-Well Town lay Green-Willow Oasis, the largest walled market town on the southern edge of the Red-Sand Wastes.
Unlike Dry-Well Town, where green grass and clear water were shared freely by every citizen, Green-Willow Oasis was divided in two by an inner stone wall.
Inside the inner wall stood the Zhao Family Manor, surrounded by lush gardens, shade trees, and a private fresh-water pond. Outside the inner wall, crammed into muddy alleys of baking-hot adobe shacks, lived nearly four thousand poor townsfolk—blacksmiths, cotton weavers, wheelwrights, and desert farmers who worked fourteen hours a day just to afford a ladle of brackish yellow water.
Inside the cool pavilion of the Zhao Family Manor, Lord Zhao Kuan—a bloated man in his forties wearing a purple silk robe embroidered with gold coins—was dipping a piece of roast mutton into a porcelain dish of snow-white salt.
Sitting across from him, slave-trader Boss Ma was bowing and scraping with a greasy smile as servants carried chests of silver taels out to his wagon.
“Good! Truly top-grade palace salt!” Lord Zhao smacked his oily lips, his small eyes gleaming with greed as he looked at the two fifty-pound canvas sacks of Snow-Crystal Refined Salt sitting on the carpet. “Boss Ma, you are quite sure that little bastard Pei Xuan produced this salt himself in Dry-Well Village?”
“With my own two eyes, Lord Zhao!” Boss Ma swore, holding up three stubby fingers. “That boy has no brains for business at all! He traded me a hundred pounds of this thousand-silver snow salt for eighty half-dead prisoners and that crippled General Tie! If you ask me, he must have stumbled across a natural vein of pure crystal salt in the northern gullies, plus an underground spring!”
Lord Zhao sneered and pulled a scented pink letter from his sleeve. The wax seal on the envelope bore the mark of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate—specifically, the private seal of his cousin, Madam Zhao, Pei Xuan’s vicious stepmother.
“Three months ago, my cousin Madam Zhao wrote to me when that ninth bastard was exiled to Dry-Well Village,” Lord Zhao chuckled coldly, tapping the pink letter against his teacup. “She told me to block all grain caravans heading north so he would die of thirst before autumn. Who would have thought that trash boy not only survived, but actually dug up a sweet spring and a snow-salt mine right under my nose?!”
Boss Ma leaned forward eagerly. “Lord Zhao, a hundred pounds of this snow-salt is worth a thousand silver taels! If Dry-Well Village has a whole mine of it, that’s hundreds of thousands of silver taels sitting in the sand! Why don’t you lead your garrison north and take it from him?”
“Hmph, I am not as stupid as Boss Qian of Salt-Pool Town,” Lord Zhao squinted. “I heard Boss Qian sent two hundred mercenaries north two weeks ago and never came back. That boy Pei Xuan has a few thousand desperate refugees and some strange mud walls. Why should I risk my own soldiers’ necks attacking his walls when I control the only trade crossroads to the south?”
Lord Zhao stood up, pacing around the two bags of snow-salt with a sinister grin.
“Dry-Well Village is deep in the barren desert! They might have salt, water, and those weird red potatoes, but winter is only two months away! Do they have cotton cloth for winter coats? No! Do they have raw pig-iron to forge tools and nails? No! Do they have timber, lamp oil, or grain seeds? All of those have to pass through Green-Willow Oasis!”
Lord Zhao turned to his captain of the guard—a scarred Rank 2 Peak martial artist named Captain Meng, who carried a pair of heavy iron whips at his waist.
“Captain Meng!” Lord Zhao barked. “Lock all four gates of Green-Willow Oasis immediately! Post my decree on every street corner: from today on, Dry-Well Village is declared a rebel bandit den! Anyone caught carrying a single needle, a single thread of cotton, or a single grain of rice north toward Dry-Well Village will have their legs broken and their whole family sold to Boss Ma’s slave carts!”
“Yes, My Lord!” Captain Meng bowed with a cruel grin.
“Wait, there’s more!” Lord Zhao stroked his fat chin, his greedy eyes darting toward the outer town where four thousand commoners lived. “To make sure we have enough funds to hire five hundred heavy cavalry from Iron-Sand City next month to go harvest Pei Xuan’s salt mine, raise the town’s daily Water Tax and Bran-Bread Tax by three hundred percent starting today!”
Even Boss Ma gasped slightly. “Three hundred percent? Lord Zhao, a dry bran pancake in the outer town already costs five copper coins, and a bucket of muddy well water costs six coppers! If you triple it to twenty coppers, the weavers and blacksmiths won’t be able to afford food!”
“Let them tighten their belts and work harder!” Lord Zhao spat dismissively. “Every blacksmith must forge ten extra iron arrowheads a day, and every weaver must spin two extra bolts of cotton cloth a night if they want water! Where else are they going to go? Outside the walls is thirty miles of dry sand! Without my water wells, they’ll dry up into mummies before they walk ten miles!”
An hour later, the heavy iron-bound gates of Green-Willow Oasis slammed shut with a deafening BOOM, and thick iron chains were padlocked across the wooden bars.
In the dusty central market of the outer town, two hundred armed guards in black leather armor marched up to the public water well and the grain stalls, nailing Lord Zhao’s new tax board to the wooden posts.
Around the well, hundreds of thin, sun-baked townsfolk—blacksmiths with soot-stained aprons, gray-haired women carrying empty clay water jars, and hungry children—crowded around to read the notice.
“Twenty copper coins for one bucket of muddy water?!”
“Eighteen coppers for a single dry bran cake with sand in it?!”
At the front of the crowd, Master Lu, the town’s fifty-year-old master blacksmith whose hands were covered in burn scars from forging farm tools for thirty years, trembled with rage.
“Captain Meng!” Master Lu stepped forward, holding up a handful of sweat-stained copper coins. “A smith’s furnace burns hot all day! My six apprentices and I need at least three buckets of water a day just so we don’t faint at the anvil! That’s sixty copper coins a day just for water, plus another hundred coppers for coarse bran cakes! Even if we hammer iron until our fingers bleed, we only earn eighty coppers a day! How are we supposed to live?!”
Behind Master Lu, a middle-aged widow named Auntie Chen, who led thirty women in the weaving sheds, held her crying six-year-old granddaughter and pleaded:
“Sir, please have mercy! Yesterday the merchant carts that came back from the north said that thirty miles away at Dry-Well Town, the benevolent Young Lord Pei gives away sweet spring water for free and sells snow-white salt for two coppers a jar! If Lord Zhao won’t let us buy cheap food from Dry-Well Town, at least open the North Gate and let us poor folk leave!”
“Leave?!”
Captain Meng’s face twisted viciously. He yanked his braided iron whip from his belt and lashed it through the air!
CRACK!
The iron whip struck Master Lu’s seventeen-year-old apprentice—a skinny boy named Little Hammer who had stepped forward to shield Auntie Chen—tearing open the boy’s shoulder and knocking him into the dirt!
“Nobody leaves Green-Willow Oasis!” Captain Meng roared, pointing his bloody whip at the terrified crowd of thousands. “Lord Zhao paid for the walls over your heads, which means your bones belong to the Zhao Family! Who dares mention that rebel hole Dry-Well Village again?! Anyone who goes near the North Gate will be whipped fifty times and hung from the battlements! Now get back to your forges and weaving looms, or I’ll double the water tax again tomorrow!”
The four thousand townspeople of Green-Willow Oasis stood in dead silence, clutching their empty water jars as tears of despair and fury rolled down their dusty cheeks.
Up on a rocky sand ridge half a mile north of Green-Willow Oasis, hidden behind a cluster of wild desert tamarisk bushes, four riders sitting on giant gray Desert Sand-Wolves watched the entire scene through a brass telescope.
Wait—only Batu and Old Wei needed a brass telescope.
Pei Xuan had his RTS Map Inspection View, and beside him, Abacus Su was peering through his fused Crystal-Clear Spectacles, which let him see the faces and numbers on the tax board half a mile away as clearly as if he were standing ten feet in front of it!
Pei Xuan lowered his hand and couldn’t help laughing out loud.
“Look at that tooltip,” Pei Xuan shook his head in amazement. “Lord Zhao is such a stingy skinflint that he even charges his own two hundred gate guards ten coppers a bowl for dirty well water! Their Loyalty to him is thirty-eight out of a hundred, and the townspeople’s Loyalty is at six!”
Beside him on the back of a tame Sand-Wolf, Abacus Su was clicking his Nine-Ring Gold-Iron Abacus so fast his fingers looked like a blur of white lightning.
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
“Outrageous! Economically suicidal!” Abacus Su hissed, his glasses glinting coldly. “My Lord, I just read the tax notice nailed to their well! Twenty copper coins for one bucket of muddy alkaline water, and eighteen coppers for a four-ounce bran cake mixed with thirty percent chaff and sand! Yet inside that town are one hundred and twenty skilled blacksmiths and three hundred cotton weavers—the exact two industries Dry-Well Town is currently missing!”
“That’s right,” Pei Xuan nodded, his eyes shining. “We have endless Sweet-Spring water, mountains of Meat-Belly Potatoes, and thousands of tons of Snow-Crystal Salt. What we lack are skilled blacksmiths to forge armor and farm tools, and skilled weavers to make winter clothes and bedding for five thousand people. And Lord Zhao has locked three thousand seven hundred of them inside a pressure cooker for us.”
Suddenly, Batu pointed toward the base of Green-Willow Oasis’s northern mud-brick wall.
“My Lord, look! Someone just jumped down from a drainage culvert under the north wall!”
Down at the base of the wall, the seventeen-year-old blacksmith apprentice Little Hammer—whose shoulder had been whipped by Captain Meng—had squeezed through a narrow stone sewage grate at the risk of his life. Bleeding and limping, the boy was scrambling desperately across the hot sand toward the north, while three of Lord Zhao’s mounted patrol guards galloped out of a side postern gate with drawn sabers to hunt him down!
“Run, Little Hammer! Go find Lord Pei in Dry-Well Town and tell him Lord Zhao is starving us to death!” Master Lu’s muffled voice echoed faintly from behind the iron grate before guards inside beat the old smith back.
“Catch that little rat and chop off his feet!” the three mounted guards laughed cruelly, spurring their horses toward the bleeding boy.
“Old Wei, Batu,” Pei Xuan said coldly. “No noise. Bring the boy and those three guards up here.”
“Yes, Young Master!”
WHOOSH!
Old Wei and Batu didn’t even draw their blades. Riding their silent-pawed Rank 2 Desert Sand-Wolves, they shot down the backside of the dune like two gray ghosts.
Before the three mounted guards could raise their sabers above Little Hammer’s head, Old Wei leaped ten feet from his wolf’s saddle, his Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm swinging out in a wide arc!
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Three dull thuds sounded in the span of a single breath. All three mounted guards had their helmets—and their skulls underneath—smacked flat into unconsciousness before they could let out a single scream! Batu’s Sand-Wolves caught the three riderless horses by their reins so they wouldn’t run back to the gate, while Old Wei scooped Little Hammer onto his shoulder and sprinted back behind the sand ridge.
Two minutes later, on the hidden side of the ridge, Pei Xuan poured half a canteen of Lv.2 Sweet-Spring Spirit Water into Little Hammer’s cracked lips and sprinkled the rest over the deep whip wound on the boy’s shoulder.
Right before the boy’s wide, terrified eyes, the cool spirit water soaked into the bloody lash mark—and the burning pain vanished as the torn flesh began knitting together!
“Are... are you Immortal Pei Xuan of Dry-Well Town?!” Little Hammer gasped, clutching Pei Xuan’s sleeve as tears poured down his dirty face. “Please, My Lord! Save Master Lu and the four thousand people of Green-Willow Oasis! Lord Zhao locked the gates and raised the water tax to twenty coppers! Everyone inside is dying of thirst and hunger, and he’s planning to hire cavalry next month to attack your town!”
Pei Xuan handed the boy two fist-sized Meat-Potato Steamed Buns wrapped in clean oiled paper.
“Eat these first, Little Hammer,” Pei Xuan said gently. “Don’t worry. Lord Zhao won’t make it to next month. In fact, by tomorrow night, those locked gates won’t be able to keep a single person inside Green-Willow Oasis.”
Pei Xuan stood up on the sand ridge and looked down at the dusty open plain five hundred yards outside Green-Willow Oasis’s North Gate—right where the white boundary stone marked the end of Lord Zhao’s legal territory.
“Auditor Su,” Pei Xuan asked with a grin, “if we set up fifty food and water stalls right behind that white boundary stone—five hundred yards from Lord Zhao’s front gate—and sell a giant bowl of ice-cold Sweet-Spring Water, a pound of Snow-Crystal Salt, and a hot Lamb-Potato Steamed Bun for just one copper coin, how long do you think Lord Zhao’s embargo will last?”
Abacus Su’s eyes lit up behind his crystal spectacles like two bonfires.
“One copper coin?!” Abacus Su laughed softly, clicking his golden abacus. “My Lord, at five hundred yards away, with the southern evening breeze blowing toward the town walls... if we add big wind-fans and loudspeakers, even Lord Zhao’s own gate guards will break the locks off the gate to come buy dinner!”
“Let’s ride back to town,” Pei Xuan laughed, vaulting onto his wolf’s back. “Tonight, we fuse the Mobile Discount Night-Market Fleet!”