The [Dragon-Steam Public Bathhouse] sat just two blocks east of the Sweet-Spring Well, occupying a massive four-wing stone building that One-Eyed Jack’s mason crews had expanded twice over the past month.
Even so, fitting five thousand half-frozen northern barbarians inside at once required an immediate town-mayor upgrade.
Standing outside the bathhouse courtyard as Chief Hulun and his frost-crusted tribespeople marched up the warm street, Pei Xuan opened his 3-Slot Fusion Cube and tapped the Bathhouse icon on his RTS Territory Screen:
RUMBLE-SHIIIIING!
Under the wide eyes of the arriving Frost-Mane Barbarians, the stone walls of the bathhouse stretched outward fifty yards in each direction!
Inside the Men’s Hall on the left and the Women’s and Children’s Hall on the right, ten enormous sunken pools of polished white quartz-stone filled up with steaming, jade-green mineral water that smelled of fresh ginger, mint, and warm dragon vitality.
“Men on the left with General Tie and Batu! Women and children on the right with Hong Ling and Grandma Zhang!” Pei Xuan stood at the front entrance with a megaphone, directing traffic like a seasoned bathhouse boss. “Leave your dirty wolf-skin coats and frozen boots in the sterilization baskets outside! Everyone scrubs with the green Jade-Clear Soap in the warm shower stalls first, then gets into the big mineral pools!”
Chief Hulun led the first wave of fifteen hundred seven-foot-tall barbarian warriors into the Men’s Hall.
To tell the truth, even though Chief Hulun had kneeled outside the gate to save his people, a tiny part of his tough northern warrior heart was still on guard.
Out on the freezing northern steppes, water in winter meant instant death! If a man got his skin wet when the wind was blowing forty below zero, his flesh would freeze solid and peel off with his clothes! Most Frost-Mane warriors hadn’t taken a full bath since the short summer river-thaw six months ago.
“Chief...” Torba stood in the warm changing room clutching his lice-ridden wolf-skin vest to his hairy chest, looking nervously at the rows of brass hot-water shower pipes spraying warm mist along the wall. “Why is General Tie telling us to take off all our clothes and weapons? Once we’re naked in the water, what if archers jump out from the roof?!”
General Tie Zhan—who had already stripped down to a pair of red cotton bath shorts, showing off a broad chest covered in old battle scars and gleaming Rank 3 bronze muscles—walked past carrying a wooden bucket of Jade-Clear Soap and smacked Torba on the shoulder.
“If our Young Master wanted to shoot you, would he spend five thousand points of town magic just to heat your bathwater?!” General Tie laughed, pointing at the purple, frostbitten toes sticking out of Torba’s cracked leather boots. “Look at your feet, boy! Another two hours in those wet boots and a doctor would have to saw six of your toes off! Stop acting like a shy bride and get under the hot water!”
Giving an example himself, General Tie grabbed a wooden ladle of warm ginger-soap, scrubbed his shoulders under the brass shower pipe, and jumped with a huge SPLASH straight into the sixty-foot-wide Pool #1!
“Ahhhhh! That hits the spot!” General Tie leaned back against the warm white quartz rim, where a submerged red-copper dragon-breath pipe kept the flowing mineral water at a constant, soothing hundred and eight degrees.
Seeing that General Tie was right inside the same pool, Chief Hulun gritted his teeth, unbuckled his frozen leather armor and wolf-skins, scrubbed off six months of steppe dust and dried blood under the warm shower, and stepped gingerly down the quartz steps into the steaming jade-green pool.
The moment the hundred-and-eight-degree [Frost-Bane Mineral Water] closed over Chief Hulun’s frostbitten calves, knees, and waist—
ZZZZZZ-HUMMMMM!
It felt as if ten thousand tiny, warm golden needles were gently massaging every frozen blood vessel and cracked bone in his body!
For the past twelve hours out in the Hundred-Year Black Frost, Chief Hulun had pushed his Rank 3 Internal Qi to the brink of collapse to shield his tribe’s wagons. Deep inside his leg meridians and lungs, sharp shards of black frost-poison had already taken root. Under normal circumstances, that hidden frost-injury would have crippled his martial path for the rest of his life, dropping him back to Rank 2 in his old age!
Yet the water in this pool was no ordinary hot water.
First, it came from the [Sweet-Spring Spirit Well]. Second, it had been warmed by Ao Ming’s Rank 7 (Sealed) True Dragon Yang-Breath. And third, Pei Xuan had just fused five hundred jars of ginger-pepper healing essence directly into the bathhouse spring!
Within thirty seconds of sitting down in the pool, the black frost-poison inside Chief Hulun’s knees and lungs melted like snow thrown into a furnace!
Dark, icy-black sweat oozed out of his pores and was immediately washed away by the self-cleaning circulation drains at the bottom of the pool, while pure, fiery Dragon-Spring vitality poured into his exhausted dantian and meridians!
“Uuuuugh...”
Chief Hulun—a seven-foot-two-inch Barbarian Grandmaster who hadn’t shed a single tear when a steppe bear clawed three ribs out of his chest at age sixteen—suddenly buried his giant scarred face in both hands right in the middle of the bath pool.
His broad shoulders shook, and loud, booming sobs echoed off the tiled ceiling!
All around him inside the ten giant quartz pools, fifteen hundred ferocious, tattooed Frost-Mane warriors were doing the exact same thing!
“Waaaaah! My toes! I can feel my little toes again!”
Torba sat in the hot water holding both of his giant feet in his hands, bawling like a three-year-old boy as the dead purple frostbite faded away into healthy pink skin!
“Brother Torba, look at my left knee!” An older barbarian hunter named Bardo slapped his thigh in the water, tears streaming down his gray beard. “Ten years ago I fell into an ice crevasse hunting snow-wolves, and my left leg couldn’t bend on cold days! The hot green water just washed the ten-year cold ache right out of my bone marrow!”
Next door in the Women’s and Children’s Hall, the sound was much happier—hundreds of barbarian mothers were laughing through their tears as their babies splashed in the shallow warm children’s pools, eating sweet red watermelon slices that Hong Ling and the village women handed out on wooden trays!
“Slow down, little ones, there’s plenty of watermelon for everyone!” Grandma Zhang laughed, her bronze Rank 1 Martial arms effortlessly carrying a hundred-pound wooden tub of sliced greenhouse watermelon around the edge of the shallow pool.
A seventy-year-old Frost-Mane tribal elder named Granny Wu—who had been carried into the town on a stretcher because her legs were stiff with winter rheumatism—sat soaking up to her shoulders in the warm green ginger-mineral water while holding a bright red wedge of watermelon in her trembling hands.
“Sister...” Granny Wu looked at Grandma Zhang’s ruddy cheeks and strong arms in amazement. “How old are you this year? How can an old woman your age carry a hundred-pound wooden tub on wet tiles without even breathing hard? And how does your town have fresh red watermelon in the middle of the Hundred-Year Black Frost?!”
“Me? I turned seventy-two last autumn!” Grandma Zhang beamed proudly, flexing her forearm with a dull thud like seasoned oak. “Two months ago when the Young Master first arrived, I couldn’t even walk without a crooked stick! Then the Young Master opened the Sweet-Spring Well, fed us Meat-Potatoes and fried scorpions, and taught the whole village the [Iron-Anvil Body Art]! Two weeks ago I sneezed while rolling noodle dough and punched a hole right through my kitchen table! Just soak in this Dragon-Spring water for twenty minutes and do two hundred squats with our Old Ladies’ Morning Exercise Squad tomorrow—your rheumatism will be gone before the snow stops!”
Granny Wu took a big bite of the sweet, crisp greenhouse watermelon, feeling the warm vitality of the fruit and the hot mineral bathwater flowing together into her stiff knees. To her shock, she was already able to wiggle her toes and stand up in the waist-deep pool all by herself!
Outside in the courtyard, while the five thousand barbarians took turns soaking in two twenty-minute shifts, Pei Xuan looked at the mountains of lice-ridden, ripped wolf-skin rags piled in the sterilization baskets and shook his head.
“If they put those dirty rags back on after a medicinal bath, it’ll ruin our town’s hygiene rating,” Pei Xuan said to Abacus Su. “Did the shearers finish clipping the extra wool off those five thousand Snow-Sheep in the south barn?”
“Yes, My Lord!” Abacus Su pointed to ten Scorpion Dump Trucks pulling up outside the bathhouse, loaded high with fluffy white fleece sheared from the warm, happy White-Horn Snow-Sheep (who were currently munching sweet greenhouse cabbage stems in their heated barns). “Because the Snow-Sheep lived in the freezing north, their wool is three times thicker than ordinary sheep wool!”
Pei Xuan walked over to the ten truckloads of raw white wool, added fifty bolts of rough cotton cloth and twenty barrels of Jade-Clear Soap into his 3-Slot Fusion Cube, and spent 3,000 LP on the spot!
FLASH!
All ten truckloads of raw fleece spun, washed, wove, and stitched themselves in a single golden blink into 6,000 sets of [Lv.2 Snow-Cloud Thermal Fleece Robes & Felt Boots]—soft as goose down, spotless snowy white with neat blue trim, and warm enough to sleep in a snowbank!
When Chief Hulun and his fifteen hundred burly warriors climbed out of the steaming mineral pools—their skin scrubbed bronze and shiny, their hair smelling like mint soap, and their martial meridians humming with brand-new strength—every man was handed a fluffy white [Snow-Cloud Thermal Robe] and a pair of soft fleece-lined boots!
even more shocking, as the warm Dragon-Spring energy settled into their bones while they put on their robes, a chain reaction of martial breakthroughs erupted right inside the bathhouse dressing room!
CRACK-POP! CRACK-POP!
Over two hundred Rank 1 Peak barbarian hunters felt their bones harden into iron as they broke through on the spot to Rank 2 Early Martial (Bone-Tempering Stage)!
And Chief Hulun himself, after purging ten years of hidden northern frost-poison from his lungs, felt his Rank 3 Early Grandmaster Qi surge forward a full thirty percent toward Rank 3 Mid!
Twenty minutes later, wearing their matching fluffy white thermal robes, all five thousand members of the Frost-Mane Tribe marched out of the bathhouse and filled every single table along Hot-Pot Street!
Old Guo had already prepared five hundred bubbling two-flavor brass cauldrons and two thousand platters of sliced lamb, Meat-Potatoes, fried scorpions, and emerald greenhouse cabbage.
Sitting at the head table with Pei Xuan and General Tie Zhan, Chief Hulun picked up a pair of extra-long wooden chopsticks with his giant fingers, scooped half a pound of spicy boiled lamb and cabbage out of the red chili oil, and stuffed it into his mouth.
For five seconds, the seven-foot-two Barbarian Grandmaster chewed in stunned silence as the fiery chili oil, sweet cabbage, and rich mutton broth exploded across his tongue.
Then Chief Hulun swallowed, slammed his bowl down on the table, and dropped to one knee right beside his stool:
“My Lord Pei! Hulun is a rough man who doesn’t know fancy Great Yan words! From tonight until the day my bones turn to dust, my life, my mace, and the five thousand spears of the Frost-Mane Tribe belong to Dry-Well Town! Point your finger anywhere in this desert, and I will flatten it for you!”
DING!
Pei Xuan raised a cup of warm [Golden-Blood Wheat Wine] and clinked it against Chief Hulun’s wooden bowl with a laugh.
“Welcome home, Chief Hulun! Eat your fill tonight—because down at the bottom of the well, our Heating Totem is smelling this new northern Snow-Sheep mutton, and he’s already banging on the pipes for his midnight pot!”