The golden harvest of the ten thousand acres of wheat had barely been locked inside the stone granaries when the sky above Dry-Well Town turned the color of an old iron wok.
At noon, the sun was still shining warmly over the paved streets, where five captured Rank 3 Shadow-Bat assassins in yellow debtor vests were sweating buckets as they pulled heavy stone rollers to flatten the new plaza outside the public bathhouse. Beside the noodle stall, the aloof Rank 5 Foundation Establishment sword genius, Ye Guhan, was sitting on a low wooden stool with his sleeves neatly tucked up, blowing gently on his fourth bowl of crispy roast-duck noodles while a stubborn [Loyalty: 59/100] bar floated above his head.
By three in the afternoon, the warm desert breeze died down completely.
“Young Master!” Batu, the burly former nomad chief who now served as the captain of the town’s outer camel scouts, came riding into the main street on the back of a giant Golden-Hump Camel. His thick leather cloak was stiff with white rime, and his eyebrows were crusted with tiny icicles. “Something bad is rolling down from the northern wastes! The wild antelopes and sand-foxes are running south in a giant herd without even trying to bite each other!”
Pei Xuan stepped out of the town hall wrapping a thick wool coat around his shoulders. Behind him walked one-armed Old Wei with his heavy black-iron saber, little maid Hong Ling clutching three brass hand-warmers and an account book, and skinny Abacus Su pushing his thick spectacles up his nose.
Before Pei Xuan could answer Batu, a low whistling sound echoed across the northern horizon.
It did not sound like ordinary wind. It sounded like ten thousand iron saws scraping across glass.
Across the flat desert plains beyond the Elastic Iron-Mud City Wall, a towering wall of pitch-black snow and frozen black sand was rushing south at the speed of a galloping warhorse. Everywhere that black cloud touched the ground, the yellow sand turned gray-white and cracked with loud pop-pop noises like dry firewood in a stove.
“Close the north gate! Sound the brass gongs!” General Tie Zhan roared from the top of the watchtower, his Rank 3 Internal Qi carrying his voice across every street of Dry-Well Town. “All field hands, bricklayers, and debtor crews—get the sheep, ducks, and camels into the stone barns right now!”
“What is that black wall?” Hong Ling gasped, her small breath turning into a puff of white mist before her nose even though the wind had not reached the wall yet. “I grew up in the Iron-Wolf Marquisate, and I have never seen black snow!”
“It is the Hundred-Year Black Frost!” Batu’s face went pale under his tan skin as he jumped off his camel. “My grandfather told stories about it when I was a boy. Once every hundred winters, the cold poison from the Deep North Ice-Abyss mixes with the heavy iron sand of the desert and blows south. It drops the air forty degrees below zero in a single hour! In the old days, nine out of ten nomad tribes froze into statues inside their felt tents before dawn!”
As if to prove Batu right, a crimson warning box flashed urgently in the center of Pei Xuan’s vision:
WHOOOOSH!
The front edge of the black blizzard slammed into the twenty-foot-high Elastic Iron-Mud City Wall.
Even with the wall blocking the worst of the gale, the temperature inside Dry-Well Town plunged like a rock thrown down a cliff. Outside the noodle stall, a wooden bucket of dishwater froze into a solid block of gray ice with a loud CRACK that split the wooden staves apart.
Over by the road-paving site, the five Rank 3 Shadow-Bat assassins shivered so hard in their thin yellow debtor vests that their teeth sounded like castanets.
“B-b-boss!” the lead assassin, Shadow-One, yelled at Abacus Su while hugging his frozen iron shovel for warmth. “We are Rank 3 Peak martial artists, and even our blood Qi is freezing sluggish! Can we go inside the stone prison dorms now? If we freeze to death out here, nobody will finish rolling your road!”
Abacus Su pulled a thick wool earmuff over his ears, clicked his brass beads with gloved fingers, and peered at the five assassins’ Loyalty bars—which Pei Xuan had told him were hovering around 64.
“Go inside right now!” Abacus Su shouted over the howling black wind. “Put down your rollers, run to the central supply shed, and each of you carry ten sacks of coal-wood to the elderly widows’ street on the east side! Every sack delivered on time knocks five silver taels off your highway repair debt and earns one bowl of Old Guo’s hot ginger-mutton soup!”
“Five silver off AND hot mutton soup?!” All five former cold-blooded killers cheered at the top of their lungs, fought each other to grab the biggest wheelbarrows, and sprinted toward the coal shed faster than they had ever run on an assassination mission.
Beside the noodle stall, Ye Guhan looked down at his fourth bowl of roast-duck noodles. In the blink of an eye, the rich golden soup had congealed into a layer of white tallow fat, and a thin sheet of ice had formed around his chopsticks.
Ye Guhan’s proud eyebrows twitched. A faint glow of Rank 5 Foundation Sword Qi flickered around his fingers, melting the ice in his bowl, before he let out a cold hmph and stood up with his ancient sword hugged to his chest.
“Hey! Kitchen boy!” Ye Guhan marched up to Old Guo, who was hurriedly sliding heavy wooden shutters over the noodle stall window. “Where do you keep those two hundred fat Iron-Belly Ducks? The wind is blowing through the roof tiles of the west coop!”
“Aiya, Immortal Ye, I was just about to ask General Tie for ten strong men to carry firewood to the duck barn!” Old Guo wiped the frost off his fat cheeks with a floury apron. “Those ducks ate ten million iron locusts last week and lay golden spirit eggs every night! If their webbed feet get frostbite, they won’t lay an egg all winter!”
“Hmph. Mere firewood smoke will ruin the flavor of the eggs,” Ye Guhan said stiffly, turning his nose up toward the black sky while his ears turned slightly pink under his frost-dusted hair. “As a practitioner of the Pure Heart Sword Dao, I cannot bear to see spirit creatures suffer. Show me the duck barn. I shall sit on a hay bale and release a small wisp of my Yang-Edge Sword Intent to keep the wind off their feathers. Do not misunderstand—I am only calibrating my Qi control against the winter frost!”
“Thank you, Immortal Ye! I’ll bring you a midnight pot of braised duck feet with pickled peppers!” Old Guo beamed.
Ye Guhan’s step faltered for half a second before he glided off toward the duck barn like a white crane, his Loyalty bar trembling violently between 59 and 59.9 before stubbornly snapping back to 59/100.
Pei Xuan rubbed his forehead and sighed. One day, I am going to find out what it takes to get that guy over sixty.
Before he could laugh, however, a heavy, hollow THUMP-THUMP-THUMP vibrated right through the soles of his leather boots.
The sound did not come from the howling black blizzard outside the wall. It came from straight underneath the stone paving slabs of the central town square.
“Young Master! Look at the well!” Old Wei pointed his mechanical left arm toward the center of the square.
There stood the pride and core of Dry-Well Town: the [Sweet-Spring Spirit Well], now upgraded with a carved white-stone rim and four heavy iron winches that pumped endless sweet water into the town’s bathhouses, kitchens, and irrigation tanks.
Every day since Night One, the well water had been crystal clear, bubbling up close to the stone rim with a faint, sweet mist that smelled like morning dew.
Right now, the water level had dropped thirty feet down the shaft.
Even worse, the water that remained was no longer bubbling. A thick crust of blue-black frost was creeping up the inside of the stone well shaft, freezing the iron winch chains so stiff they groaned like dying oxen. And from deep, deep down at the bottom of the dark hole came a rhythmic, earth-shaking sound:
Grrrrr-SNORT... HUUUUUUU-PFFFFF!
Every time the Grrrr-SNORT happened, the remaining water in the well sucked downward by three feet. Every time the HUUUUU-PFFFF blew back up, a blast of freezing, fishy-smelling white frost shot out of the well mouth, turning the stone ground around the square into a skating rink!
“What in the world is down there?!” Hong Ling shrieked, slipping on the ice and grabbing onto Old Wei’s broad belt to stay upright. “Did a giant snow-toad fall into our well?!”
“No snow-toad snores loud enough to rattle my iron arm,” Old Wei said grimly, drawing his Rank 2 Heavy Mountain-Cleaver Saber an inch from its scabbard. “Young Master, stand back. Whatever is down at the bottom of the water vein has been woken up by the Hundred-Year Black Frost—and it is sucking the heat right out of our spring!”
Pei Xuan stepped carefully to the edge of the stone well rim and looked down into the pitch-black shaft. He focused his eyes, activating his RTS Territory Inspection screen directly on the well’s underground foundation.
For the first time since he had reached Level 3 Territory (Red-Sand Oasis Town) and Rank 2 Peak Martial, the underground fog-of-war beneath the well shaft flickered and peeled back a thousand feet into the earth.
Drop Citizen Loyalty by thirty points?!
Pei Xuan’s eyes narrowed dangerously. You could attack his walls, you could insult his family name, and you could send three thousand bandits after him—all of those just meant free labor and extra points.
But messing with his town’s water supply and threatening his 70,000 LP/day income? That was crossing the bottom line!
“Abacus Su! General Tie!” Pei Xuan turned around and snapped orders like a seasoned commander. “Take five hundred Rank 2 guards and distribute all the spare cotton quilts and coal braziers from the warehouse to the outer streets, especially where the new farm families live. Have Old Guo keep ten cauldrons of ginger-pepper broth boiling at the central square so nobody gets frostbite.”
“Yes, My Lord!” Abacus Su and General Tie saluted together. “Wait—My Lord, what are you going to do about the well?”
“I am going down there to have a polite talk with our downstairs neighbor,” Pei Xuan said, tapping the glowing [Fusion Cube] icon in the corner of his vision. “Old Wei, bring me two hundred fathoms of our thickest iron winch chain, three basket-cages of glow-stones, and fifty pounds of red chili powder and lamb tallow from Old Guo’s pantry.”
“My Lord, you can’t go down a thousand-foot ice hole alone!” General Tie Zhan stepped forward, his bull-like chest puffing out. “Let me go! My Rank 3 Grandmaster blood is hot enough to melt ice! If there is a monster at the bottom, I will punch its teeth in!”
“And if you punch the bottom of the well too hard and collapse the water vein, all fifteen thousand of us will be eating dry sand tomorrow,” Pei Xuan replied dryly. “Don’t worry. According to my eyes, whatever is down there is chained up and half-starved. You stay on the surface with Old Wei and man the main iron winch. If I tug the chain three times, haul me up at full speed. If I tug twice, send down whatever I shout for.”
To make sure he was completely safe against the subterranean cold and any sudden attacks, Pei Xuan walked over to the supply cart and opened the 3-Slot Fusion Cube (unlocked at Territory Level 3).
He currently had 145,000 Loyalty Points saved up in his balance from the past two days of wheat-harvest income.
He grabbed three items from the cart:
1. [A Thick Sheepskin Winter Coat]
2. [A Set of Rank 2 Scorpion-King Carapace Armor]
3. [Ten Pounds of Fiery Red-Sun Charcoal]
Spend 2,000 LP. Fuse!
A flash of warm golden light covered the coat in Pei Xuan’s hands. The rough sheepskin and dark red scorpion plates melted together into a sleek, handsome dark-crimson winter cloak lined with soft golden fur, while faint red runes of constant heat wove themselves through the inner lining.
Next, Pei Xuan pulled out three [Glow-Stone Lanterns], a [Coiled 1,500-Foot Iron Winch Cable], and [A Jar of Scorpion-Oil Grease], spending another 500 LP to fuse them into an [Unbreakable Heated Climbing Cable & Searchlight Basket].
When Pei Xuan buckled on the crimson Flame-Shell Cloak and stepped into the iron searchlight basket suspended over the well mouth, the biting minus-forty wind immediately bounced off an invisible layer of warm air two inches from his nose.
“Warm as a spring bath,” Pei Xuan smiled, patting the fur collar. He looked at Old Wei and General Tie, who were holding the massive iron gear-handles of the winch with four burly Rank 2 blacksmiths backing them up. “Lower away! Slow and steady!”
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG...
The greased iron cable unspooled smoothly over the stone pulley.
As the iron basket dropped past the thirty-foot mark where the water usually stood, Pei Xuan shone the fused glow-stone searchlight against the circular walls of the well shaft.
The upper hundred feet had been lined with neat stone bricks by One-Eyed Jack’s mason crew a month ago. Below that, the shaft narrowed into a natural jagged fissure of glittering white quartz—the exact spot where the Fusion Cube had created the Sweet-Spring Spirit Well on Night One.
Right now, thick icicles the size of spears hung from the quartz walls, choking the water channels down to a trickle.
At two hundred feet down, the air grew so cold that ordinary iron would have snapped like a dry carrot, yet Pei Xuan’s fused cable stayed warm and supple.
At five hundred feet down, the narrow quartz fissure suddenly opened out like the neck of a bottle.
Pei Xuan’s basket swung free in midair.
He pointed the high-powered glow-stone searchlight downward and all around him, and even though he had seen the RTS scan, he couldn’t help sucking in a sharp breath.
He was hanging from the roof of an underground cavern so vast it could have swallowed the entire Iron-Wolf Marquis’s palace complex with room to spare!
The ceiling of the cavern was studded with glowing blue ice-crystals that looked like a frozen starry sky. Beneath him lay an underground lake of dark, mirror-still spirit water, now frozen over with three feet of blue ice except for a swirling whirlpool right in the center.
And rising out of that central whirlpool stood a colossal, six-sided black metal spike the size of a ten-story pagoda.
The black spike was covered in strange, cruel purple runes that didn’t look like anything from the Great Yan Kingdom—or even from the mortal world. Every few seconds, the purple runes on the spike pulsed weakly, sucking a thin thread of golden earth-energy up from the deep core of the planet and venting out dry, scorching waste-heat through diagonal exhaust vents aimed toward the upper desert!
Wait a second, Pei Xuan thought, his heart pounding as a huge piece of the world’s puzzle clicked into place in his head. No wonder the Red-Sand Wastes is a barren desert on top, while Dry-Well Village had a dead well right above this spot! This giant black spike is sucking the planet’s spirit veins dry and blowing the waste heat into the sand above!
Before he could inspect the spike closer, the ice around the base of the black pagoda-spike cracked with a deafening BOOM!
Two hundred feet of gleaming, dinner-plate-sized silver scales uncoiled from around the black metal pillar.
Four massive five-toed claws—each toe tipped with a curved silver horn longer than Old Wei’s broadsword—scraped across the blue ice, bound tight to the black spike by thick chains of dark purple lightning-iron that pierced right through the creature’s collarbones.
A horned dragon head the size of a two-story stone house lifted slowly out of the freezing mist. Long silver whiskers hung down like frozen waterfalls, and two enormous golden eyes—each wider than a millstone—swiveled in the dark and locked directly onto Pei Xuan’s tiny iron basket dangling twenty feet above its nose.
“# Who dares shine a lantern into this Seat’s bedroom?!”
The dragon tried to let out a world-shaking roar that would turn the mortal intruder into blood mist.
Instead, because its throat was parched from three thousand years without a drop of oil and frozen stiff by the cavern draft, the roar cracked halfway through into a dry, hacking wheeze:
“ROOOOA— cough, cough, hack, wheeze! —Ouch, my throat! Guh... Little mortal ant in the red coat... did you climb down here to jump into this Old Dragon’s mouth before I freeze to death?”
right after the dragon finished coughing, a massive golden RTS Boss Tooltip popped open above its horned head—followed immediately by a brutally honest thought bubble that ruined every shred of its ancient majesty:
Pei Xuan stared at the two-hundred-foot silver Flood Dragon, then stared at the [Loyalty: 35/100] bar and the crying thought bubble about lamb potatoes and roast duck.
Slowly, a wide, sunny town-mayor smile spread across Pei Xuan’s face.
He reached into the cloth bag hanging from his belt, pulled out a still-warm, oil-paper-wrapped [Rank 2 Spicy Braised Lamb & Meat-Potato Bun] that Old Guo had stuffed into his pocket before he climbed down, and peeled back the paper.
In the freezing, silent underground cavern, the rich aroma of melted mutton fat, toasted cumin seeds, roasted garlic, and sizzling red chili oil drifted straight into the Flood Dragon’s giant nostrils.
GULP.
The sound of Ao Ming swallowing his own dragon saliva echoed off the cavern walls like a boulder dropping into a pond. His two millstone-sized golden eyes crossed as they stared fixedly at the fist-sized meat bun in Pei Xuan’s palm.
“Ahem,” Pei Xuan cleared his throat politely, holding the steaming meat bun out over the edge of the iron basket. “Senior Ao Ming, right? I am Pei Xuan, the Mayor of Dry-Well Town directly above your ceiling. We seem to be having a small plumbing and heating dispute—would you care to discuss it over a hot snack?”