Under the pale silver light of the desert moon, five black-cloaked figures glided across the sand dunes south of Dry-Well Town without making a single sound.
Each of the five men wore a tight black leather suit stitched with bat-wing patterns under his cloak, a fierce iron bat-mask over his face, and a pair of curved, blue-poisoned iron claws strapped to his wrists.
Every time their toes touched the top of a sand dune, dark-red Internal Qi puffed softly beneath their soles, propelling them thirty feet forward like giant vampire bats skimming the night wind.
All five of them were Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmasters—the elite Night-Killer Elders of the Shadow-Bat Sect!
At the front of the group ran Elder Blood-Claw, a tall, hawk-nosed killer whose eyes burned with pure hatred as he stared at a glowing copper compass in his palm. The needle of the compass pointed straight past the southern wall of Dry-Well Town.
“That little bastard Ye Guhan is right inside this mortal town!” Elder Blood-Claw hissed in a voice like grinding bones. “Nine days ago in the Dead-Sand Quicksand Pit, seven of us ambushed him. He killed two of my sworn brothers and crippled three others before his Foundation Qi ran dry! Luckily, my final strike cracked his third left rib meridian and knocked his money pouch into the quicksand!”
Beside him, the second assassin—Elder Poison-Fang—licked the blue venom on his iron claws and chuckled darkly.
“A Foundation Establishment Sword Cultivator with a cracked chest meridian, zero Spirit Stones, and no healing pills is nothing more than a toothless tiger!” Elder Poison-Fang whispered. “In this barren desert where Spirit Qi is thinner than beggar’s soup, it would take him at least three months of meditation just to recover ten percent of his power! Look at this tiny mud town—he must be hiding in a dirty barn chewing dry straw to stay alive!”
“Stay sharp anyway,” Elder Blood-Claw warned, narrowing his eyes as the twenty-foot-high walls of Dry-Well Town loomed ahead. “Once we hop over the south wall, go straight for the compass signal! Cut off Ye Guhan’s head before he can summon his flying sword, loot his Rank 5 Spirit Sword Frost-Star and his Nine-Heavens Starlight Manual, and vanish into the night! If any mortal dogs see us, slit their throats!”
“Understood!”
The four other Rank 3 Peak Grandmasters nodded coldly.
Reaching the shadowed base of the southern wall—right where Pei Xuan had quietly ordered the night-watch guards and wolf patrols to step back behind the corner five minutes earlier—Elder Blood-Claw channeled his Rank 3 Peak Internal Qi into his legs.
“Shadow-Bat Sky-Vault!”
WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!
Without touching the wall bricks at all, the five black-cloaked Grandmasters leaped twenty-five feet straight into the air, cleared the top of the southern wall like five silent black crows, and dropped lightly down toward the wide street inside!
Now, thirty minutes before the five assassins arrived, a historic construction project had just been completed on this exact street—South Bathhouse Boulevard.
Because thousands of citizens walked to the Town Public Bathhouse every evening, Pei Xuan had spent 2,000 LP in the Fusion Cube earlier that afternoon to combine [500 Cartloads of Crushed Limestone], [Black-Stone Granite Powder], and [10 Barrels of Sticky Rank 2 Scorpion Resin].
The result was two hundred tons of `[Rank 2 Quick-Set Iron-Grip Municipal Cement]`!
Once poured and smoothed, this fused cement dried in two hours into a glossy, seamless dark-gray stone highway ten times harder than granite. However, during the final thirty minutes before it hardened, the wet cement had the sticky holding power of ten thousand mouse-traps!
For the past four hours, Chief Foreman One-Eyed Jack, Scarface Wolf, Captain Hu, and fifty Rank 2 Iron-Bone bricklayers had been down on their hands and knees with wooden smoothing-boards and spirit-levels, polishing a hundred-foot stretch of wet cement right in front of the bathhouse doors.
They had smoothed that wet cement until it was flatter than a bronze mirror! Not a single bump! Not a single bubble!
Just two minutes ago, One-Eyed Jack and his fifty bricklayers had finally finished, taken a quick five-minute rinse in the bathhouse, and stepped out onto the wooden sidewalk wearing nothing but fluffy white bath towels wrapped around their waists—admiring their drying road under the moonlight while eating hot roasted sweet potatoes.
Right at the edge of the sidewalk stood a huge wooden warning sign painted in glowing red letters:
> [ FRESH WET SPIRIT-CEMENT! ] > [ DO NOT STEP ON THE ROAD FOR 30 MORE MINUTES! ] > [ ANYONE WHO LEAVES A FOOTPRINT WILL BE BEATEN INTO PART OF THE ROADBED! ]
One-Eyed Jack took a bite of his sweet potato and sighed with deep artistic pride.
“Look at that pavement, boys,” One-Eyed Jack said, wiping a tear of joy from his single eye. “Smooth as a rich girl’s cheek! Not a single dust speck on it! Tomorrow morning when the cement finishes curing, Master Su is definitely going to award our First Construction Brigade the Golden Trowel Medal and ten big Red Flowers—”
Before One-Eyed Jack could finish his sentence, five dark shadows dropped silently out of the night sky from the top of the south wall and landed right in the dead center of the wet cement plaza!
SQUELCH! SQUELCH! SQUELCH! SQUELCH! SQUELCH!
Five loud, wet, sucking sounds echoed across the quiet street!
Elder Blood-Claw and his four fellow Rank 3 Peak Grandmasters froze stiff as ten black leather assassin boots sank six inches deep into the mirror-smooth, half-cured Rank 2 Scorpion-Resin Cement!
Even worse, because the quinta-assassin at the back—Elder Night-Wing—landed slightly off-balance on one foot, his ankle twisted in the sticky gray paste!
“Whoa—!”
Elder Night-Wing pitched forward face-first and threw out both hands to catch himself!
SPLAT! SQUELCH!
Both of his iron-clawed hands, both of his knees, and the entire front of his iron bat-mask sank four inches deep into the wet cement! When he jerked his head back up in panic, a crisp, three-inch-deep mold of his bat-mask nose and mouth was left stamped right in the middle of the road, while gray wet cement dripped from his chin!
For three full seconds, time seemed to stop on South Bathhouse Boulevard.
Fifty burly Rank 2 bricklayers standing on the sidewalk in white bath towels stopped chewing their sweet potatoes.
One-Eyed Jack’s half-eaten sweet potato slipped from his fingers and fell to the wooden boardwalk with a soft plop.
Slowly, One-Eyed Jack’s single eye moved down to the ten deep boot-holes, the two knee-craters, the two handprints, and the ugly bat-face imprint gouged right into the middle of his four-hour masterpiece.
And what made it ten times worse?
Because the [Rank 2 Quick-Set Iron-Grip Cement] was in its final ten minutes of chemical curing, the disturbed cement around the assassins’ boots was rapidly hardening into solid stone ripples!
Elder Blood-Claw looked down at the gray paste clinging to his ankles, frowned behind his bat-mask, and tried to lift his right foot to step onto the sidewalk.
SCHLUCK—THUD!
His foot didn’t budge!
The sticky Rank 2 Scorpion-Resin Cement gripped his leather boots like ten iron vices, and the moment air hit the stirred cement, it began locking around his shins like solid black granite!
“What kind of cursed mud is this?!” Elder Blood-Claw hissed in alarm, channeling his Rank 3 Peak Internal Qi into his legs. “Why is it hardening around my ankles like iron?!”
Before he could use his iron claws to dig his own boots out, a terrifying, inhuman roar exploded from the wooden sidewalk ten feet away:
“MY ROOOOOOOAD!!”
One-Eyed Jack’s single eye turned blood-red! The veins on his bald head and muscular neck bulged out like earthworms as he grabbed a forty-pound Rank 2 Heavy Iron Smoothing-Trowel with both hands!
“FIFTY MEN ON OUR HANDS AND KNEES FOR FOUR HOURS!!” One-Eyed Jack screamed at the top of his lungs, spitting fury as his white bath towel flapped around his waist. “WE LEVELED THAT CEMENT FOURTEEN TIMES!! NOT EVEN A MOSQUITO DARED TO LAND ON IT!! AND YOU FIVE UGLY BAT-FACED BASTARDS JUMPED OFF THE WALL AND PUT FOOTPRINTS AND A FACE-PRINT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY PLAZA?!! BOYS! BEAT THEM FLAT!!”
“KILL THE ROAD-STOMPERS!!”
“THEY RUINED OUR GOLDEN TROWEL MEDAL!!”
“SMASH THEIR KNEECAPS WITH THE TROWELS!!”
Fifty half-naked Rank 2 Iron-Bone bricklayers—every single one of them pumped full of Golden-Blood Wheat Rolls and Golden Duck Eggs—went completely crazy!
Brandishing forty-pound iron trowels, six-foot wooden leveling beams, and heavy iron tamper-hammers, the fifty bath-towel-wearing masons charged around the edges of the cement patch!
“Courting death! A bunch of half-naked mortal masons dare to bark at the Shadow-Bat Sect?!”
Elder Blood-Claw was furious! Even though his boots were stuck six inches deep in the rapidly hardening cement, he was still a Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmaster!
With a cold snort, he slashed both of his blue-poisoned iron claws forward, firing two ten-foot-long crescents of dark-red Blood-Claw Internal Qi straight at One-Eyed Jack and Scarface Wolf!
“Watch out, Jack!”
BOOM!!
A towering seven-foot shadow dropped down from the bathhouse roof like a falling meteor!
General Tie Zhan—holding a half-eaten roast duck leg in his left mouth-corner—swung his ten-foot heavy black-iron saber with his right hand!
“Grandmaster Gale-Cleaver!”
CLANG-CRACK!!
Tie Zhan’s thick golden-red Rank 3 Mid Internal Qi—boosted by three days of spirit food until it was stronger than an ordinary Rank 3 Peak fighter’s—smashed Elder Blood-Claw’s two claw-waves into harmless sparks!
At the same time, Pei Xuan (Rank 2 Peak Blood-Boiling Stage) and Old Wei (with his Rank 2 Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm) charged in from the left and right flanks!
“Don’t kill them!” Pei Xuan shouted, his eyes shining as he looked at five priceless Rank 3 Peak labor units stuck in the floor. “Aim for their shoulders and ribs! Keep their legs intact so they can pull the ten-ton stone road-rollers tomorrow!”
“Yes, My Lord!”
Old Wei fired his mechanical iron fist forward on its chain—WHAM!—punching Elder Night-Wing (who still had wet cement stuck to his bat-mask) square in the solar plexus and knocking the wind out of his lungs!
Meanwhile, right behind the bathhouse counter, Abacus Su popped up wearing a nightcap and holding his brass magnifying glass and golden abacus.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
“Attention five bat-costume vandals!” Abacus Su shouted through a megaphone conch shell as the fifty bath-towel bricklayers hurled wet bags of lime powder and heavy wooden leveling boards at the trapped assassins. “You have destroyed one hundred and twenty square feet of Grade-2 Iron-Grip Municipal Bathhouse Plaza Cement! Including nighttime emergency jackhammer removal, resurfacing labor, bathhouse noise disturbance, and fifty counts of Severe Mason Heartbreak, your collective fine is 500,000 Silver Taels—or 100,000 Silver Taels per person!”
“Five hundred thousand silver taels for stepping in mud?!”
Elder Poison-Fang spat blood in rage as a forty-pound iron trowel thrown by Scarface Wolf grazed his helmet with a loud CLANG. “We are Elders of the Shadow-Bat Sect! Once we break our boots out of this stone, we will slaughter every man, woman, and chicken in this town!”
“Break your boots out? You still want to chip MORE of my road?!” One-Eyed Jack howled in fury.
Beside One-Eyed Jack, Captain Hu and Batu the Nomad Chief dragged over two heavy wooden wheelbarrows full of wet sand-lime mortar and began shoveling extra scoops of quick-setting cement straight onto the assassins’ shins!
“Bury them up to their knees, boys!” Captain Hu shouted gleefully, slapping a thirty-pound scoop of wet gray mortar right across Elder Iron-Bat’s left thigh with the flat of his shovel. “Master Su said every extra pound of cement we use on their trousers counts as ‘Emergency Structural Reinforcement’ at five hundred silver taels a scoop! Don’t let these five walking gold mines wiggle an inch!”
“Wait! Stop shoveling mortar on my pants!!” Elder Iron-Bat shrieked, slashing frantically at the flying gobs of wet cement with his poisoned iron claws—only for the sticky Rank 2 Scorpion-Resin mortar to glue his left wrist-guard directly to his right elbow! “Elder Blood-Claw! My claws are stuck together! Do something before these lunatic bricklayers turn us into municipal statues!!”
Seeing that the cement had now hardened completely around the five assassins’ ankles—turning their lower legs into solid granite pillars while fifty bath-towel-wearing masons closed in with heavy wooden leveling beams—Elder Blood-Claw finally panicked and pulled a black porcelain bottle from his chest pocket with his free hand!
“Brothers! Use the Rank 3 Corpse-Smoke Poison Bomb to blind these maniacs, cut off our own boot leather with our claws, and grab Ye Guhan as a hostage!”
SMASH!
Elder Blood-Claw crushed the black porcelain bottle in his palm!
A thick, foul-smelling cloud of purple-black poison smoke exploded outward, rolling up toward the open second-story window of the inn right next to the bathhouse—where a certain white-robed Sword Immortal was right in the middle of eating a midnight snack!