By the time Pei Xuan, Abacus Su, Old Wei, and Batu rode their Sand-Wolves back through the South Gate of Dry-Well Town, the afternoon sun was dipping toward the western dunes.
Waiting in the central square were Commander Tie Zhan, Old Guo, Hong Ling, and five hundred fully armored town guards standing in neat battle formations. Hearing that Lord Zhao of Green-Willow Oasis had beaten Dry-Well Town’s merchants and whipped young Little Hammer for trying to escape, the whole town was spoiling for a fight.
“My Lord!” Tie Zhan strode forward, his hundred-and-twenty-pound iron halberd slung over his shoulder and a half-eaten pork bun in his left hand. “The troops are ready! Give the order, and we’ll ride down to Green-Willow Oasis tonight! With my Rank 3 Internal Qi, I can smash their North Gate off its hinges in three swings!”
“Wait, Commander Tie,” Pei Xuan laughed, jumping down from his Sand-Wolf and helping the injured blacksmith apprentice Little Hammer down so the kitchen aunties could feed him hot soup. “If we charge in with five hundred soldiers and smash down the gates at night, what will happen?”
Tie Zhan blinked. “We chop off Lord Zhao’s head and take the town!”
“And while we’re fighting Lord Zhao’s two hundred guards in the dark streets, a stray arrow might hit an innocent weaver, or a fire might burn down Master Lu’s blacksmith shops,” Pei Xuan said, shaking his head. “Even worse, the three thousand seven hundred townspeople inside don’t know us yet. If we break in with swords drawn, they’ll think we’re just another gang of desert bandits coming to rob them.”
Behind Pei Xuan, Abacus Su pushed up his Crystal-Clear Spectacles and clicked his golden abacus with a sharp TING!
“Commander Tie,” Abacus Su said with a scholarly smile, “why fight a bloody siege when we can bankrupt Lord Zhao and make his entire town defect to us in forty-eight hours?”
Tie Zhan scratched his stubbly chin. “Make a locked town of four thousand people defect in forty-eight hours without swinging a blade? How do you do that?”
“With economics, physics, and Grandpa Guo’s cooking!”
Pei Xuan walked over to the wide parking lot beside the Town Hall, where ten of the twelve giant Armored Scorpion Buses were resting in neat rows, munching on baskets of mineral-rich salt rocks.
Each Rank 2 Armored Scorpion King was twelve feet long and eight feet wide, with a flat wooden passenger box bolted onto its shiny black shell. They could carry ten thousand pounds across soft sand at forty miles per hour without breaking a sweat.
“Right now, inside Green-Willow Oasis, Lord Zhao has locked four thousand people in a hot oven,” Pei Xuan explained as his core retainers gathered around him. “He raised the price of a bucket of muddy water to twenty copper coins, and a dry bran pancake to eighteen coppers. Even his own two hundred gate guards are starving and have to pay ten coppers for a bowl of water!”
Pei Xuan pointed south down the highway.
“Five hundred yards outside the North Gate of Green-Willow Oasis sits the Imperial County Boundary Stone. North of that stone is unowned desert wasteland—which means legally, Lord Zhao has zero jurisdiction over anyone standing one inch north of that rock.”
Pei Xuan opened his 3-Slot Fusion Cube interface in his mind.
“Hong Ling, bring out those twenty Desert Echo-Conch Shells we looted from the Sand-Viper Smugglers, plus ten iron blacksmith bellows and forty boxes of Multi-Color Glow-Stones from the salt caves!”
“Right here, Young Master!” Hong Ling snapped her fingers, and twenty burly bricklayers carried the heavy wooden crates over to the Scorpion Buses, along with stacks of folding wooden tables, iron woks, and Cold-Frost Saltpetre ice chests.
Pei Xuan placed his palm against the armored shell of Lead Scorpion Bus #1 and dragged all three groups of items into his 3-Slot Fusion Cube:
Fuse!
HUMMMMM—CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
A dazzling wave of golden-blue light swept across all ten giant scorpions and the piles of crates beside them!
Before the astonished eyes of General Tie Zhan, Abacus Su, and Little Hammer, the wooden passenger boxes on the backs of the ten giant scorpions reshaped and expanded like giant mechanical puzzle boxes!
Each Scorpion Bus now carried a sleek, two-story Fold-Out Pavilion Box painted in festive red and gold lacquer. * Along the sides were hinged wooden shutters that could fold down in three seconds to form fifty connected street-food stalls, complete with built-in smokeless charcoal stoves, Lv.1 Red-Hot Woks, and Frost-Saltpetre Ice Counters! * Mounted on the roof of every Scorpion Bus was a ten-foot-tall Glowing Jade-And-Ruby Signboard made of fused multi-color glow-stones that shone brighter than a hundred lanterns in the dark! * Best of all, at the front of each bus sat a five-foot-wide Directional Scent-Blowing Iron Fan and a brass-rimmed Echo-Conch Megaphone that could project a person’s voice—and the smell of sizzling meat—two miles straight ahead against the wind!
Little Hammer, the seventeen-year-old blacksmith apprentice from Green-Willow Oasis, stared at the ten glowing, transformer-like Scorpion Buses until his wooden soup bowl nearly slipped out of his hands.
“Am... am I dreaming?” Little Hammer whispered, pinching his own thigh. “Giant armored scorpions carrying glowing restaurants on their backs?!”
Even General Tie Zhan blinked his tiger eyes three times. “My Lord... I have seen siege towers, catapult carts, and armored war wagons on the northern border, but I have never seen a siege weapon that shoots the smell of roasted lamb!”
“On the battlefield of the stomach, Commander Tie, this hits harder than a hundred catapults!” Pei Xuan laughed and clapped his hands. “Old Guo! Load up the fleet!”
“Leave it to me, Young Master!”
Old Guo waved his big iron ladle like a general’s baton, and fifty burly kitchen aunties led by Grandma Zhang marched out of the town kitchens in crisp white aprons!
Onto the ten Night-Market Scorpion Buses went: * Two hundred giant barrels of ice-cold Lv.2 Sweet-Spring Spirit Water, chilled with Cold-Frost Saltpetre until white mist rolled off the lids! * Fifty tubs of Chilled Sweet-Plum Soup! * Ten thousand fist-sized Lamb-Pork & Meat-Potato Steamed Buns, ready to be steamed fresh on the mobile stoves! * Five hundred baskets of live, de-venomed Red-Tail Scorpions and vats of fragrant rapeseed oil for deep-frying on the spot! * One thousand one-pound jars of glittering white Snow-Crystal Refined Salt!
“All units, board the buses!” Pei Xuan ordered, vaulting onto the roof of Lead Bus #1 alongside Tie Zhan, Abacus Su, and Old Wei, while two hundred Rank 2 town guards climbed onto the running boards. “Destination: Green-Willow Oasis North Boundary Stone! Full speed ahead!”
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
All ten giant Rank 2 Scorpion Kings let out an excited hiss, tapped their pincers together, and sprinted south down the paved stone highway at forty miles per hour!
Thirty miles of desert road—which normally took a merchant ox-cart two full days of hard trekking—flew past under the scorpions’ twelve legs in just forty-five minutes!
Just as dusk fell over the Red-Sand Wastes and the sky turned deep purple, the ten giant Scorpion Buses skidded to a smooth halt in the flat sandy plain north of Green-Willow Oasis.
Right in front of Lead Bus #1 stood a mossy white granite stone carved with red letters: [BOUNDARY OF GREEN-WILLOW TOWN — 500 YARDS TO NORTH GATE]
“Not an inch over the line!” Abacus Su leaned down with his Crystal-Clear Spectacles and a bamboo measuring ruler, checking the front pincers of the ten Scorpion Buses. “Back up two inches, Bus #4! Good! Every single scorpion toe is strictly on unowned Imperial Wasteland! Even if the Prefect himself came here with the Great Yan Law Code, we are one hundred percent legal!”
Five hundred yards away, up on the thirty-foot-high battlements of Green-Willow Oasis’s North Gate, fifty hungry town guards in black leather vests were leaning on their spears, swatting mosquitoes and grumbling with dry, parched throats.
“Damn it,” a young guard named Zhao Er spat a mouthful of sticky white foam over the wall, rubbing his empty, cramping stomach. “Captain Meng didn’t even give us evening gruel today, and the well master wanted ten coppers just to fill my water skin! My tongue feels like dry sandpaper!”
“Keep your voice down,” an older guard sighed, leaning against the stone battlement. “In the outer streets behind us, the weavers and blacksmiths didn’t even get water today. Listen—you can hear kids crying from thirst in every alley.”
Suddenly, the older guard froze and squinted into the dark desert five hundred yards north of the gate.
“Hey... Zhao Er... what the hell are those twenty red lanterns moving out by the boundary stone?”
Before Zhao Er could answer, Pei Xuan stood on the roof of Lead Scorpion Bus #1 and yelled:
“UNFOLD THE NIGHT MARKET! LIGHT THE BILLBOARDS!”
KA-CHUNK! KA-CHUNK! KA-CHUNK!
Along the five-hundred-foot semicircle of ten Scorpion Buses, wooden side-panels folded down in unison to form fifty connected street-food stalls!
Then—ZZZZT-FLASH!
All ten rooftop Glow-Stone Billboards lit up at the exact same second!
In the pitch-black desert night, the ten giant ten-foot-tall signs shone like ten colorful mini-suns of emerald green, ruby red, and golden yellow, illuminating the entire northern sky so brightly that every single guard on the city wall—and every townsman standing on their roof or looking out an upper window inside Green-Willow Oasis—could read the giant glowing words from a mile away:
Up on the North Gate wall of Green-Willow Oasis, fifty guards rubbed their eyes so hard their eyelids nearly came off.
“One... one copper coin for ice-cold sweet water?!” Zhao Er’s voice cracked into a high-pitched squeak. “One copper coin for a giant lamb-pork steamed bun?! And two coppers for a pound of snow-white salt?! Inside our town, Lord Zhao is charging twenty coppers for a bucket of yellow mud-water and eighteen coppers for a sandy bran cake!”
“Wait—it must be a trick!” Captain Meng, who had just walked up the wall steps with his iron whip, sneered angrily as he glared at the glowing signs five hundred yards away. “How could anyone sell meat buns and snow salt for one copper coin? Those buns are probably stuffed with sawdust and rotten donkey meat!”
At that exact moment, five hundred yards away at Stall #1, fat Old Guo grinned and shouted to his fifty kitchen aunties:
“Ladies! Uncover the fifty steamer baskets! Pour the chili oil and cumin into the fifty red-hot woks! Turn on the Tactical Aroma Cannons at maximum power!”
WHOOOOOOSH—SIZZLE!
Fifty bamboo steamer lids were lifted off at once, releasing a towering white cloud of rich lamb-and-scallion steam from five thousand hot, juicy buns! Simultaneously, fifty ladles of boiling rapeseed oil mixed with roasted garlic, desert cumin, and red chili peppers hit fifty sizzling iron woks full of crispy deep-fried scorpions!
HUMMMMMMM!
On top of the ten Scorpion Buses, the ten giant five-foot Iron Wind-Bellows Fans spun up like windmills!
They sucked in the concentrated, mouth-watering clouds of slow-braised lamb fat, sweet potato flour, sizzling garlic-chili oil, and cool minty spring water, compressed the scent into an invisible river of pure culinary temptation, and blasted it straight across the five-hundred-yard gap—right over the North Gate wall and down into every single street and alley of Green-Willow Oasis!
SNIFFFFF!
Up on the wall, Captain Meng was right in the middle of shouting “Those buns are stuffed with rotten donkey—” when the hot, fatty, cumin-spiced breeze hit him square in the nose.
Captain Meng froze with his mouth wide open.
A long, shiny string of clear drool dripped straight off his chin and landed with a plop on his black leather chestplate.
Beside him, all fifty gate guards went weak in the knees at the exact same time. Their stomachs let out a synchronized, agonizing GRUUUUUMBLE so loud it sounded like distant thunder!
“That’s... that’s not sawdust...” Zhao Er whimpered, tears of pure hunger springing to his eyes as he gripped his spear to keep from falling over. “That’s real braised lamb... and green scallions... and roasted pork fat... I haven’t smelled real meat in four months!”
And then, before the guards could even wipe their chins, Abacus Su stepped up to the giant brass Thunder-Conch Megaphone on top of Bus #1, tapped the cone twice, and cleared his throat!