THUMP-THUMP! HUMMMMMM!
When Abacus Su tapped the brass rim of the Thunder-Conch Megaphone on top of Scorpion Bus #1, the sound amplified tenfold, rolling across the five-hundred-yard sand plain and echoing off every single mud-brick wall inside Green-Willow Oasis!
“Good evening, hardworking neighbors, blacksmiths, weavers, and gate guards of Green-Willow Oasis!”
Abacus Su’s crisp, polite accountant voice boomed through the night air like a friendly thundercloud, reaching all the way to the back alleys of the town.
“I am Su Suanpan, Chief Auditor of Dry-Well Town! By order of our benevolent Lord Pei Xuan, the Dry-Well Town Discount Night Market is now officially open five hundred yards outside your North Gate! Allow me to read tonight’s audited price comparison for your household budgets!”
Inside Green-Willow Oasis, doors and windows flew open down every dark alley. Three thousand seven hundred hungry, thirsty townsfolk stepped out into their courtyards, craning their necks toward the glowing neon sky in the north while breathing in the rich, dizzying scent of braised lamb fat and roasted garlic.
Abacus Su clicked his golden abacus right next to the megaphone cone—CLACK-CLACK-TING!
“Item One: Inside Green-Willow Oasis, Lord Zhao charges you twenty copper coins for one bucket of yellow, bitter mud-water! Out here at Stall #1 through Stall #20, one giant bowl of ice-cold, sickness-healing Sweet-Spring Spirit Water—or sweet-and-sour Chilled Plum Soup with real ice floating in it—costs ONE COPPER COIN!”
“Item Two: Inside Green-Willow Oasis, Lord Zhao charges you eighteen copper coins for a dry, four-ounce bran pancake mixed with thirty percent desert sand that cracks your back teeth! Out here at Old Guo’s Steamer Stalls, a two-fist-sized Lamb-Pork & Meat-Potato Steamed Bun dripping with hot meat juice costs ONE COPPER COIN!”
“And wait—before anyone says this is a trick, please listen to a voice you all know!”
Pei Xuan smiled and handed the brass megaphone cone to seventeen-year-old Little Hammer, whose whipped shoulder was now completely healed and wrapped in a clean white cotton shirt. Little Hammer held a half-eaten giant meat bun in one hand and shouted into the conch shell with all his might:
“Master Lu! Auntie Chen! Neighbors of Blacksmith Alley! It’s me, Little Hammer!”
Inside the dark blacksmith quarter of Green-Willow Oasis, fifty-year-old Master Lu dropped his iron tongs with a loud clang and ran out into the street, tears springing to his old eyes.
“That’s Little Hammer’s voice! The boy didn’t die in the desert!”
Little Hammer’s voice echoed across the rooftops: “Master Lu, don’t worry about me! Lord Pei Xuan saved me from the patrol guards! Look—he washed my whip wound with Sweet-Spring Spirit Water, and the cut closed up in ten minutes without even hurting! And I’m eating my third giant lamb-and-pork bun right now! The meat filling is thicker than my fist! Lord Pei says any blacksmith, weaver, or farmer who walks out the North Gate gets a free stone house in Dry-Well Town, free water forever, and twenty copper coins a day in wages!”
BOOM!
Little Hammer’s words landed inside the starving town like a spark dropped into a barrel of dry gunpowder.
In the weaving sheds, three hundred exhausted women threw down their shuttles. In the blacksmith row, a hundred and twenty brawny smiths grabbed their hammers and empty water jars.
“One copper for a giant meat bun! And free sweet water!”
“Little Hammer wouldn’t lie to us! Let’s go to the North Gate and buy food for the children!”
Within ten minutes, over two thousand hungry townspeople surged through the streets toward the North Gate plaza, holding copper coins in their hands and crying out for the gate to be opened.
Up on the North Gate wall, Captain Meng was sweating buckets.
Even though he was a Rank 2 Peak martial artist, the concentrated scent from Old Guo’s Tactical Aroma Cannons had been blowing straight into his face for half an hour. His stomach was cramping so badly he had to hold onto the stone battlement with one hand while waving his iron whip with the other.
“Back! Get back to your houses!” Captain Meng yelled down at the crowd of two thousand townspeople in the plaza, though his voice lacked half its usual fierceness because he kept swallowing his own drool. “Lord Zhao gave strict orders—the gates stay locked day and night! Nobody goes out to that rebel market!”
Down in the plaza, old Master Lu held up a dry, rock-hard bran pancake that he had bought that afternoon for eighteen copper coins. He smashed the pancake against a stone hitching post—CRACK!—and dry yellow sand and wheat husks spilled out onto the dirt.
“Look at what we’re eating for eighteen coppers!” Master Lu roared, his voice echoing through the square. “While five hundred yards outside that wooden door, Little Hammer is eating hot lamb buns for one copper! Captain Meng, you and your two hundred guards are local boys too—didn’t Lord Zhao dock your silver wages last month and charge your mothers twenty coppers for water?! Why are you guarding the cage door for a fat pig who starves us all?!”
Up on the wall, the fifty guards on night duty—and the hundred and fifty off-duty guards who had run out of their barracks just to sniff the lamb breeze—all lowered their heads and looked at their rusty spears.
Above their heads, in Pei Xuan’s long-range RTS view, the red enemy unit bars over the two hundred Green-Willow Oasis guards were plummeting like rocks dropped down a well:
All night long, nobody in Green-Willow Oasis slept a wink.
Every single hour on the hour, Old Guo and his fifty kitchen aunties switched the menu on the fifty sizzling stalls outside: * At midnight, they fried five hundred baskets of Spicy Cumin Red-Tail Scorpions, blowing a cloud of crispy, peppery aroma over the walls! * At three in the morning, they boiled thirty cauldrons of Mutton-Fat & Meat-Potato Noodle Soup! * And when the scorching desert sun rose on Day 2, sending the temperature inside the locked mud-brick alleys of Green-Willow Oasis climbing past a hundred degrees by late morning, Pei Xuan launched the final blow.
“Old Guo!” Pei Xuan called out from beneath a cool silk sun-umbrella on top of Bus #1. “Bring out the Whole Roasted Cumin Lambs and smash the Frost-Saltpetre Ice Blocks!”
“Right away, Young Master! Kitchen Corps, show them what a real desert feast looks like!”
Out in front of the fifty stalls, twenty whole fat desert sheep—basted in honey, sesame oil, crushed chili, and Snow-Crystal Salt—were turned slowly over glowing red charcoal pits until their golden-brown skin crackled and dripped sizzling fat onto the coals!
Next to the roasting sheep, twenty burly guards swung clean iron hammers and smashed giant blocks of Frost-Saltpetre Ice inside wooden tubs—CRACK-CLINK-CLINK!—pouring ruby-red Sweet-Plum Soup and crystal-clear Sweet-Spring Water over the ice cubes so that cold white mist billowed ten feet into the air!
Through the Thunder-Conch Megaphone, Abacus Su poured oil on the fire:
“Good noon, friends inside the oven! It is currently one hundred and four degrees inside Green-Willow Oasis! Listen to the sound of real ice cubes clinking in sweet plum soup! Watch Grandpa Guo slice off a whole crispy lamb leg dripping with juice! Remember: ONE COPPER COIN! And if you don’t even have one copper coin, just sign your name on our Dry-Well Town Citizenship Roll, and you eat for FREE!”
Inside Green-Willow Oasis, the North Gate plaza was now packed solid with all three thousand seven hundred townspeople!
Nobody went to the blacksmith forges. Nobody touched a weaving loom. Every man, woman, elder, and child stood in front of the locked North Gate under the blazing noon sun, sweating, parched, and staring at the locked iron chains with eyes as red as starving wolves.
Even the two hundred town guards standing between the crowd and the gate had stopped holding up their spears. Young guard Zhao Er was leaning against the gatepost, his lips cracked and bleeding from thirst, staring upward as a wisp of cool mint-and-plum-soup mist floated over the battlements.
Suddenly, the sound of horse hooves clattered from the inner manor street.
Lord Zhao Kuan rode into the plaza on his fat white horse, fanned by four personal servants holding peacock-feather fans and escorted by thirty personal house retainers.
Lord Zhao was wearing a cool ice-silk robe and lazily chewing on a juicy, chilled white peach from his private cellar. When he saw that all three thousand seven hundred townsfolk had abandoned their workshops and were crowding the North Gate, he spat the peach pit onto the ground in fury.
“What are you lazy dogs doing standing here at noon?!” Lord Zhao screamed, pointing his sticky, peach-juice-stained finger at Master Lu and the crowd. “Why aren’t the forges burning?! Why aren’t the looms clacking?! And Captain Meng—why haven’t you whipped these rebels back to work?!”
Captain Meng swallowed hard, his throat so dry it clicked. He stepped toward Lord Zhao’s horse and bowed hoarsely.
“My Lord... the sun is too hot today, and the public well in the outer town ran dry an hour ago,” Captain Meng rasped, pointing at his two hundred dizzy guards. “My brothers haven’t had a drop of water since yesterday evening, and that Pei Xuan outside is blowing the smell of roast lamb and ice water over the wall... My Lord, could you open your manor’s private pond and give the guards and blacksmiths just one barrel of water and a few bags of coarse grain to calm everyone down?”
“Open my private pond for these dirty mud-legs?!”
Lord Zhao glared at Captain Meng as if the captain had gone insane. He pulled a second chilled peach from a silver bowl held by his servant, took a loud, sloppy bite that sent sweet juice running down his fat chin, and threw the half-eaten peach core straight into the dirt at Captain Meng’s boots!
“That water in my pond is for watering my prize orchids and cooling my wine jars!” Lord Zhao barked arrogantly. “If your guards are thirsty, let them lick the sweat off their own arms! Captain Meng, I order you right now: take your archers up on the wall and shoot dead the first ten blacksmiths at the front of this crowd! Anyone who doesn’t run back to their shop in three breaths gets an arrow through the throat!”
Silence fell over the entire North Gate plaza.
Three thousand seven hundred townspeople looked at the half-eaten peach rolling in the dirt.
Two hundred starving, parched town guards looked at Lord Zhao’s fat, greasy face under his silk umbrella, and then remembered the voice booming from outside the wall: Free stone house, zero water tax forever, and hot lamb buns waiting!
Captain Meng slowly looked down at the dusty peach core by his boot.
Then he looked up at the thirty-foot wooden gate held shut by three iron chains.
In Pei Xuan’s RTS vision outside the wall, Captain Meng’s Loyalty bar to Lord Zhao flashed from 4/100 straight down to `0/100 [MUTINY!]`, and a green bar toward Pei Xuan popped up at `62/100`!
“Shoot the blacksmiths?”
Captain Meng let out a bark of laughter, unbuckled his black leather Zhao Family badge from his chest, and threw it straight into the mud under the horse’s hooves!
“I’ve guarded your gate for six years for three bowls of sandy gruel a day, you fat leech!” Captain Meng turned toward his two hundred guards and the three thousand seven hundred townsfolk, roaring at the top of his lungs:
“BROTHERS! MY OLD MOTHER IS IN THIS CROWD TOO! WHO WANTS TO DIE OF THIRST FOR THIS FAT PIG?! HELP MASTER LU BREAK THE CHAINS AND LIFT THE CITY GATES OFF THEIR HINGES! LAST ONE TO LORD PEI’S BUN STALL ONLY GETS SOUP!”
“BREAK THE GATES! GO TO DRY-WELL TOWN!”
CLANG! CRASH!
Instead of shooting the townsfolk, the two hundred gate guards swung their heavy iron war-hammers and axes straight at the padlocks on the North Gate! Master Lu and a hundred burly blacksmiths rushed forward to join them, grabbing the thick wooden gate beams with four hundred calloused hands at once!
“One! Two! THREE—HEAVE!”
CREEEEEAK—BOOOOOOM!
With the combined strength of two hundred guards and a hundred angry blacksmiths, both massive, three-ton iron-bound wooden doors of Green-Willow Oasis were lifted clean off their iron hinges and thrown flat onto the sand outside with an earth-shaking crash that sent dust flying fifty feet into the air!
“Stop! Come back here! I’m your Lord! Arrest them!” Lord Zhao shrieked from his horse as the crowd surged past him, nearly knocking his fat horse into the ditch.
Nobody even looked back at him!
Over the fallen city gates poured a human tidal wave of three thousand seven hundred cheering townspeople and two hundred former gate guards—waving single copper coins in the air, carrying their children and toolboxes on their shoulders, and sprinting across the five-hundred-yard sand plain straight toward Pei Xuan’s fifty glowing stalls in the greatest Meat-Bun Stampede the Red-Sand Wastes had ever seen!