“A DINE-AND-DASHER AT TABLE FOUR?!”
Hong Ling’s shout echoed down Main Street like a thunderclap.
In less than three seconds, two hundred burly bricklayers, salt miners, and town guards dropped their chopsticks, grabbed their wooden benches and iron shovels, and formed a tight three-layer circle around Table Four!
At the front of the crowd, Old Guo stepped out from behind the stove holding his fifty-pound [Lv.1 Red-Hot Chef Wok] in one hand and a giant iron ladle in the other.
“Young man,” Old Guo said, his round face looking deeply hurt. “I gave you the thickest slices of ox brisket from the bottom of the pot! I even threw in four extra spoonfuls of bone marrow! Eating eighteen bowls of noodles without a single copper coin in your pocket... isn’t that bullying an honest old cook?”
“I am NOT bullying you!”
Ye Guhan’s ears burned so hot they felt like two red-hot coals.
In all nineteen years of his life, he had been praised as the number one sword prodigy of the Northern Sky. Sect Elders smiled upon him, fairy maidens gave him embroidered sword tassels, and whenever he walked into a big city restaurant, rich young masters fought for the honor of paying his bill.
He had never actually carried copper coins himself! Who would have thought that after losing his storage pouch in the quicksand while fighting the Shadow-Bat Sect, he would get trapped over sixty-six measly copper coins in a tiny desert town?!
Standing ten paces away under the willow tree, Pei Xuan read the floating blue window and poked Abacus Su in the ribs with his elbow.
“Old Su,” Pei Xuan whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Get your abacus and magnifying glass ready. Our big fish is about to do something very expensive.”
Abacus Su’s eyes lit up behind his thick brass spectacles like two greedy gold coins.
“Understood, My Lord!” Abacus Su whispered back, already licking his thumb and flipping his leather-bound fine ledger to a fresh blank page. “Nobody eats eighteen bowls of Dry-Well Town beef noodles for free!”
Back at Table Four, Ye Guhan took a deep breath, tucked his left hand behind his back, and lifted his chin until he was looking down his nose at Hong Ling and Old Guo.
“Quiet down, mortals,” Ye Guhan said, using a deep, echoing voice infused with a tiny trace of Foundation Spirit Qi so every person on the street could hear him clearly. “Do you know who stands before you today? I am Ye Guhan, a Sword Cultivator of the Foundation Establishment Realm! How could a Sword Immortal like me possibly cheat your humble stall out of sixty-six copper coins?”
Hong Ling blinked her big eyes, not impressed at all. She tapped the wooden table with the back of her cleaver.
“I don’t care if you are the Foundation Emperor or the Kitchen God,” Hong Ling said bluntly. “If you can’t pull sixty-six copper coins out of your sleeve right now, you are a dine-and-dasher! Show me the money!”
“Stubborn mortal girl! You have eyes yet fail to see Mount Tai!”
Stung by Hong Ling’s words, Ye Guhan decided to give these ignorant desert townsfolk a tiny demonstration of real Immortal power.
He didn’t even reach for the cloth-wrapped spirit sword on his back. Instead, he raised his right hand and pointed two fingers toward the ground beside his boot.
HUMMM!
A tiny, one-inch thread of silver-white Sword Qi condensed at his fingertip, shining as bright and cold as a winter star.
“Watch closely,” Ye Guhan said coolly. “A single strand of my Sword Qi is worth ten thousand pieces of mortal gold. If I leave my sword mark upon your street as a pledge—”
SWISH!
He flicked his finger downward.
The silver thread of Sword Qi flashed through the air and struck the paved gray road right between Table Four and the drainage gutter.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
With a crisp, ringing sound like slicing through dry tofu, three interlocking gray Cool-Breeze Stone Bricks split cleanly down the middle! The hair-thin sword cut went six inches deep into the packed sand-and-lime roadbed underneath, sending up a tiny puff of white stone dust.
Ye Guhan slowly lowered his hand, tucked both sleeves behind his back again, and waited.
In his mind, the surrounding mortals would gasp in terror, drop their shovels, and fall to their knees shouting “Forgive us, Immortal Master!” Then he would nod graciously, promise to send them a bag of gold next month, and walk out of the town gate with his head held high.
For two full seconds, the entire street was dead silent.
Every single bricklayer stared down at the three cracked gray stones on the ground.
Then—
“AAAAAAHHHHHH!!”
A blood-curdling shriek of pure heartbreak tore through the morning air!
Ye Guhan jumped half a foot off the ground, thinking he had accidentally stepped on someone’s foot.
To his utter confusion, a burly, one-eyed man wearing a yellow mason’s apron—One-Eyed Jack, Chief Foreman of the First Construction Brigade—threw down his noodle bowl, dropped to his knees on the street, and cradled the three split road bricks with both hands as if someone had just murdered his baby!
“MY BRICKS! MY BEAUTIFUL, FLAT ROAD BRICKS!!” One-Eyed Jack howled, real tears spurting out of his single good eye. “My squad spent four hours yesterday morning leveling that section of Main Street with a water-tube! The gap between those bricks was less than the thickness of a fingernail! Even when twelve Scorpion Dump Trucks rolled over them, they didn’t sink a fraction of an inch! Who cut my bricks?! WHO CUT MY BRICKS?!”
“He did! The white-robed noodle thief cut them!” Scarface Wolf roared, pointing an angry finger right at Ye Guhan’s nose. “Me and the boys carried those stone slabs all the way from the Cool-Breeze Kiln on our shoulders! Because he cracked three bricks, our squad’s ‘Perfect Road Maintenance Red Flower’ for this week is ruined!!”
“What?! He ruined our weekly Red Flower bonus?!”
Two hundred bricklayers went completely berserk!
In Dry-Well Town, losing a Red Flower meant losing priority access to the front row of the public bathhouse and missing out on Sunday’s extra roasted lamb leg! To these reformed bandits and nomads, cracking their newly laid road bricks was ten times worse than insulting their ancestors!
“Wait—what red flower? What road bonus?” Ye Guhan took half a step back, his cold immortal aura completely thrown into chaos by two hundred grown men crying over three pieces of gray rock. “They are just three ordinary stones! Why are you crying like I burned down your ancestral temple?!”
“ORDINARY STONES?!”
A sharp, shrill voice cut through the crowd like a rusty saw.
WHOOSH!
A skinny figure in a neat blue scholar’s robe vaulted straight over the noodle counter, his thick brass spectacles flashing with blinding white light in the sun!
It was Abacus Su, Chief Tax and Property Damage Assessor of Dry-Well Town!
Before Ye Guhan could even blink, Abacus Su dropped into a deep squat beside the three cracked bricks, whipped a brass magnifying glass out of his left pocket, pulled a silk measuring tape out of his right pocket, and slapped a golden abacus onto his knee.
“Clear the crime scene! Nobody touch the evidence!” Abacus Su barked like an imperial detective inspecting a murder victim.
He pressed his magnifying glass two inches from the sword cut, gasped in horror, and measured the length and depth with his silk tape.
“Three inches wide... six inches deep... forty-seven degrees of structural shear across three interlocking units!” Abacus Su muttered furiously, his right hand flying across the beads of his golden abacus so fast they sounded like fat rain hitting a tin roof.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
Ye Guhan stared down at the skinny accountant squatting by his boots, feeling as if he had accidentally walked into a madhouse.
“Hey, mortal bookkeeper,” Ye Guhan said, his eyebrow twitching. “Three road bricks cost at most ten copper coins. Add that to the sixty-six coppers for the noodles, and write me a bill for seventy-six copper coins. I will send someone to pay you tenfold within half a month.”
Abacus Su slowly stood up.
He pushed his brass spectacles up the bridge of his nose with his middle finger, pulled a long sheet of official white paper from his folder, brushed red ink across the bottom, and held the paper six inches from Ye Guhan’s face.
“Seventy-six copper coins?” Abacus Su sneered coldly. “Young man, let me read you the official Dry-Well Town Municipal Property Damage & Public Safety Assessment!”
Abacus Su cleared his throat and read at top volume:
“Item One: Eighteen bowls of Rank 2 Braised Scorpion-Beef Noodles, plus six extra scoops of braised brisket and four heads of pickled garlic. Subtotal: 66 copper coins!”
“Item Two: Willful destruction of three Grade-3 Spirit-Kiln Fired Interlocking Frost-Resistant Municipal Highway Bricks! Each brick is baked with Sweet-Spring Spirit Mud, Cool-Moss Essence, and Sandstone Core. Replacement cost: 1,000 silver taels per brick, totaling 3,000 silver taels!”
Ye Guhan’s eyes bulged out of his head. “One thousand silver taels for a single road brick?! Is your road paved with pure silver?!”
“Do not interrupt the assessor!” Abacus Su snapped, rapping his abacus with a wooden ruler. “Item Three: Underground Sub-Base Sand-Bed Shockwave Damage! Your unauthorized Sword Qi penetrated six inches into our compacted lime-and-clay foundation layer, creating microscopic air pockets across a twenty-foot radius! If a ten-ton Armored Scorpion Bus drives over an air pocket, it could suffer a bumpy ride! Excavating, re-tamping, and re-leveling twenty square feet of main street foundation costs 8,000 silver taels!”
“Eight... eight thousand?!” Ye Guhan’s voice squeaked.
“Item Four!” Abacus Su kept reading without pausing for breath. “Severe Mental Distress and Loss of Red-Flower Bonus for Chief Foreman One-Eyed Jack and two hundred certified municipal masons! Look at Foreman Jack—he is still sobbing on the ground! Medical soup and emotional comfort compensation: 9,000 silver taels!”
On cue, One-Eyed Jack buried his face in his hands and let out a loud, fake wail: “Waaah! My road! My heart hurts so much I can’t lift my trowel without three bowls of lamb soup!”
“And Item Five!” Abacus Su’s spectacles flashed again. “Violation of Dry-Well Town Public Safety Code Article 14: Unauthorized Discharge of Lethal Sword Qi Within Thirty Feet of a Public Soup Pot! What if your Sword Qi had cracked Old Guo’s iron cauldron and spilled three hundred bowls of beef broth?! Statutory safety fine: 10,000 silver taels!”
CLACK!
Abacus Su flicked the final gold bead on his abacus and shoved the red-stamped paper straight into Ye Guhan’s chest.
“Adding Items One through Five, and kindly waving the sixty-six copper coins as a courtesy discount, your total fine comes to 30,000 Silver Taels—or 300 Low-Grade Spirit Stones! Would you like to pay in silver ingots, Spirit Stones, or bank draft?”
Silence fell over Main Street.
Even the wind seemed to stop blowing as Ye Guhan looked down at the huge black numbers written on the paper:
[ TOTAL DUE: 30,000 SILVER TAELS ]
Ye Guhan’s hand shook so hard the paper rustled like dry autumn leaves.
“Three... three hundred Spirit Stones...” Ye Guhan’s face went from bright red to ghostly white. His hand instinctively reached back and gripped the cloth-wrapped hilt of his ancient spirit sword. “What if... what if I leave my sect jade token as collateral—”
“We don’t take sect tokens! Who knows if you carved it out of a turnip?” Hong Ling interrupted, pointing her kitchen cleaver at a big wooden signboard nailed to the wall of the canteen. “Read Town Law Number Three!”
Ye Guhan slowly turned his stiff neck toward the wooden signboard.
Painted in big, neat black letters were the words:
> [ DRY-WELL TOWN LAW #3 ] > All diners and visitors who cannot pay their food bills or property damage fines in cash must put on a Yellow Debtor Vest* and perform manual labor (digging latrines, hauling salt, or mixing mud) at a credit rate of 3 Silver Taels per day until their debt is paid in full!*
Abacus Su clicked his abacus twice with a cheerful smile.
“Thirty thousand silver taels divided by three silver taels a day equals exactly 10,000 days of manual labor—which is twenty-seven years and four months! Foreman Jack, go fetch a size-medium Yellow Debtor Vest and a wooden poop-scoop for our new latrine digger!”
“Right away, Master Su!” One-Eyed Jack jumped up off the ground, his tears vanishing instantly as he pulled a bright yellow hemp vest with the huge black words [ DEBTOR #581 ] painted on the chest out of his tool cart.
Twenty-seven years of digging mortal latrines in a yellow vest?!
Ye Guhan felt the sky spinning above his head.
He was the proudest Sword Genius of the younger generation! If news ever reached the Immortal Sects that Ye Guhan of the Sky-Sword Sect had spent twenty-seven years shoveling poop in a desert town because he couldn’t pay for eighteen bowls of beef noodles, he might as well jump into a volcano and reincarnate!
Yet when he took half a step back to summon his flying sword and flee, a sharp stabbing pain shot through his chest! His [Pure Heart Sword Dao] hummed with a stern warning—if he ran away from a real debt after eating people’s food and smashing their road, a Heart Demon would immediately lock his cultivation forever!
Just as the proud Rank 5 Sword Genius stood frozen between a Heart Demon and a poop-scoop, a warm, gentle voice rang out from behind the crowd.
“Hold on, Master Su. Foreman Jack, put that yellow vest away.”
The crowd of bricklayers parted respectfully down the middle.
Pei Xuan walked forward with his hands clasped behind his back, dressed in a clean dark-blue robe, with General Tie Zhan and Old Wei following half a step behind him.
Pei Xuan looked at the pale, sweating young swordsman, then looked down at the six-inch-deep cut in the three stone bricks, and let out a loud gasp of pure admiration.
“What an extraordinary strike!” Pei Xuan exclaimed, clapping his hands together as his eyes shone with deep respect. “Smooth as a mirror! Straight as a plumb line! Even the hard sandstone core inside our Cool-Breeze Bricks was sliced without a single jagged chip! Master Su, how could you possibly ask a peerless Sword Immortal like Brother Ye to wear a debtor vest and dig latrines? That would be an insult to the Great Dao of the Sword!”
Hearing someone finally speak his language, Ye Guhan looked at Pei Xuan as if he were seeing a long-lost brother!
“You must be the Lord of this town,” Ye Guhan said, straightening his patched white robe and letting out a secret sigh of relief. “Your eyes are sharp. My name is Ye Guhan. Today I happened to lose my money pouch in the desert and accidentally tested my Sword Qi on your street. Since you understand the dignity of a Sword Cultivator—”
“I understand completely!” Pei Xuan nodded earnestly, stepping closer and patting Ye Guhan warmly on the shoulder. “A true practitioner of the Pure Heart Sword Dao would never accept charity or leave a debt unpaid, because taking free handouts would stain your spotless Sword Heart!”
Ye Guhan’s smile froze on his face.
“Wait... what?” Ye Guhan blinked.
“Think about it, Brother Ye!” Pei Xuan said with a deadly serious face, pointing at Ye Guhan’s chest. “If I simply tore up this 30,000-silver bill out of pity, every time you meditate in the future, a tiny voice in your heart would whisper: ‘You ate eighteen bowls of Old Guo’s beef noodles and broke three road bricks without paying a single copper!’ How could your sword ever reach the Golden Core Realm with a stain like that?”
Ye Guhan opened his mouth to say “Actually, my Sword Heart wouldn’t mind a discount,”—but the moment he thought about it, his stupidly honest [Pure Heart Sword Dao] trembled in agreement with Pei Xuan’s words!
Thump!
Because Pei Xuan had framed it as a test of his Dao, Ye Guhan’s own cultivation technique locked onto the logic! Now, if he didn’t pay off the full 30,000 silver taels fairly, his Sword Heart really WOULD feel stained!
“Then... then what do you propose, Lord Pei?” Ye Guhan asked, his voice trembling slightly as he glanced in horror at One-Eyed Jack’s wooden poop-scoop. “I cannot spend twenty-seven years digging latrines!”
Pei Xuan waved his hand grandly and turned toward the western horizon, pointing his finger at the jagged black mountain range ten miles away.
“Digging latrines is for ordinary debtors,” Pei Xuan said in a solemn, mysterious tone. “For a peerless sword genius like Brother Ye, there is only one job in Dry-Well Town worthy of paying off 30,000 silver taels in a single week—and it happens to be the legendary Supreme Earth-Splitting Sword Cultivation!”