Ten minutes after the blast in the central plaza, Sun Baolu was sitting on a heated stone bench inside Old Guo’s flagship Mutton Hot-Pot Hall, eating as if he had three empty stomachs tied together.
With his scorched boots kicked off under the table so his cold toes could soak up the cozy seventy-five-degree warmth of Ao Ming’s underground dragon-breath pipes, the sixty-year-old alchemist used a pair of long bamboo chopsticks to fish tender, paper-thin slices of Frost-Mane snow-lamb out of a bubbling copper pot of red chili broth. He stuffed the steaming meat into a warm, buttered Golden-Blood Wheat roll, took a huge bite that sent meat juice running down his chin, and chased it with a ladle of Sweet-Spring herbal bone soup.
“Sweet Pill King in heaven...” Sun Baolu groaned, closing his eyes as a wave of warm, pure blood-Qi spread from his belly into his tired limbs. “For six days on the desert road, my donkey and I chewed dry salt-bush bark because those three stingy Oasis Town Lords locked their gates and charged five coppers for a bowl of muddy water! Even the Head Guildmaster in the Royal Capital doesn’t eat wheat bread packed with this much natural spirit energy!”
Outside the open window of the hot-pot hall, his scrawny gray donkey had buried its entire muzzle inside a wooden tub of crunchy, bright-red greenhouse carrots and sweet cabbage leaves. Standing beside the donkey was Old Yellow, Pei Xuan’s elephant-sized mutated pack-camel. Old Yellow lazily nudged an extra-large Meat-Potato over to the donkey with his hoof, and the two animals chewed together like old war buddies.
“Eat slowly, Master Sun! Nobody is going to snatch the pot away from you!” Old Guo laughed, his fat belly jiggling under his white chef’s apron as he set down a fresh platter of sliced Meat-Potatoes and crispy deep-fried red scorpion tails. “Wait—what should we do with this walnut-sized black Yellow-Ox Pill you blasted into the cliff earlier? Our Lord said it’s too strong for one person to swallow whole, so he asked if we can melt it into the morning workers’ soup!”
Sun Baolu swallowed his mouthful of lamb roll and clapped his hands. “Your Lord has the eyes of an Immortal! Because I compressed thirty stalks of Fire-Nettle and ten pounds of Blood-Ginseng into that single black pill core, its density is ten times too rich for one mortal stomach. Drop it into your biggest hundred-gallon iron soup boiler, stir it with three ladles of wine, and let it dissolve!”
Old Guo walked over to the massive hundred-gallon iron cauldron bubbling at the front of the hall—where five hundred off-duty night-shift miners and town guards were lining up with their wooden bowls—and dropped the walnut-sized black pill inside.
FZZZZZZZZ—GLUG!
The moment the super-compressed black pill touched the boiling lamb-bone broth, it didn’t sink like a stone. Instead, it spun like a whirlpool, dissolving in ten seconds flat and turning the entire hundred-gallon cauldron of soup a shimmering, translucent amber-gold!
A rich, invigorating herbal fragrance rolled out of the hall and drifted three blocks down the street.
The first miner in line—a burly Rank 1 Peak stone-cutter who had spent six hours hauling iron-mud bricks—took one big gulp of the golden broth.
Instantly, the miner’s eyes went wide. A flush of healthy crimson heat rose from his collarbones up to his ears, and with a crisp POP-POP-POP from his shoulder joints, the sour ache in his muscles vanished completely, pushing his stagnant cultivation straight across the threshold into Rank 2 Early Martial (Iron-Bone Stage) right there in the soup line!
“My bones! My arm bones just hardened into Rank 2 Iron-Bone from one bowl of soup!” the miner roared, flexing his thick forearm and accidentally denting his own heavy iron pickaxe handle with his grip. “Master Sun’s black cannonball pill is divine medicine!”
“Leave a bowl for me! Don’t scrape the bottom of the pot!”
Five hundred miners, bricklayers, and barbarian guards crowded around the cauldron, cheering and toasting Sun Baolu with their soup bowls.
Sitting by his window, Sun Baolu’s chest swelled so wide his scorched robe buttons nearly popped off. In the Royal Capital, whenever his cauldron blew up, people chased him down the street with brooms and demanded compensation. Here in Dry-Well Town, five hundred muscular warriors were cheering his name and calling him Grandmaster Sun!
***
Meanwhile, three blocks away in the quiet, high-walled courtyard behind the Municipal Smithy, Pei Xuan stood in front of a massive stone anvil-table with General Tie Zhan, Old Wei, Hong Ling, and Abacus Su guarding the doors.
On top of the stone table lay three items that Pei Xuan had ordered his servants to lay out side by side:
1. Slot 1 Material: The two jagged, soot-blackened halves of [Sun Baolu’s Ancestral Bronze Cauldron]. Even though the cheap mortal bronze had cracked under pressure, its metal pores had been soaked in forty years of high-grade medicinal herbs and Rank 3 fire-Qi. 2. Slot 2 Material: A three-hundred-pound unrefined block of [Rank 3 Star-Fall Meteorite Iron], gleaming with dark purple starlight. The tamed Frost-Crystal Sandworm had chewed this rare metal boulder out of the deep bedrock five hundred feet beneath Dry-Well Town while boring the winter subway tunnels. 3. Slot 3 Material: A large sheet of tough sheepskin parchment on which Pei Xuan had carefully drawn a [Dual-Mode Industrial Pressure-Cooker & Mortar Blueprint] using charcoal ink.
General Tie Zhan leaned over the sheepskin drawing, scratching his armored chin in confusion. “My Lord, I understand why you drew eight heavy dragon-jaw clamps around the lid to keep the steam from blowing the top off... and I understand that little whistling brass valve on top to let extra steam out gently like a tea kettle. Why did you draw a three-inch-thick rifled iron cannon barrel sticking out of the lower side of the soup pot?”
“Because throwing away a perfectly good explosion is a sin against thrifty town management,” Pei Xuan said seriously.
Abacus Su’s spectacles flashed as he nodded vigorously. “Think about it, General Tie! Master Sun’s talent naturally compresses ten times normal pressure into a pot. When we want to stew five hundred stamina pills or cook dinner for the army, we lock the side cannon barrel shut and use the top tea-kettle whistle so the pot never explodes! And when bandits attack our town wall, we lock the top whistle shut, point the side barrel toward the enemy, and let Master Sun do what he does best—blow things sky-high!”
“A soup pot that cooks lunch at noon and shells enemy cavalry at one o’clock...” Old Wei muttered, shaking his head in awe. “If the Imperial Ministry of War saw this blueprint, their grandmasters would weep into their beards.”
Pei Xuan smiled, stepped up to the stone table, and placed his right palm over the three items, calling up his mental Fusion Cube.
“Fuse!” Pei Xuan commanded silently.
HUMMMMMMMMMM!
Thirty thousand Loyalty Points vanished from his reserve, and a dazzling cube of golden-white light enclosed the entire stone workbench.
Inside the rotating golden cube, the three-hundred-pound boulder of purple meteorite iron liquefied in midair without a single spark of fire, swirling together with the green ancestral bronze shards like two ribbons of silk. As the impurities were vaporized into nothingness, the liquid purple-gold metal poured itself along every line and measurement of Pei Xuan’s blueprint!
Five seconds later, the golden light faded, and a heavy THUD shook the stone floor of the smithy courtyard.
Sitting on the workbench was a magnificent, three-foot-tall alchemical cauldron cast from dark purple-gold metal that gleamed like dragon scales in the sun.
Nine lifelike relief carvings of coiling flood dragons wrapped around its round belly. Around the thick rim of the lid sat eight heavy meteorite-iron Dragon-Jaw Locking Clamps fitted with heat-proof quartz gaskets. On the center of the lid stood a polished brass dragon-head pressure gauge and steam whistle with a three-position dial: [1. Simmer Soup], [2. High-Pressure Pill Condense], and [3. Full Artillery Lock].
And jutting out at an adjustable angle from the lower right side of the cauldron—mounted on a heavy geared turntable with an elevation hand-crank—was a three-foot-long, rifled purple-iron mortar barrel!
General Tie Zhan stepped forward and rapped his iron-hard Rank 3 knuckles against the purple-gold belly of the cauldron.
DOOOOOOOOONG!
A clear, deep dragon-hum echoed across the courtyard, vibrating so purely that the swords hanging on the smithy wall hummed in harmony.
“Not a single seam or weld mark!” General Tie gasped, running his rough palm over the precision gears of the aiming crank and the thick quartz gasket under the lid. “Even a Peak Grandmaster swinging a warhammer couldn’t put a scratch on this purple-gold shell!”
“Bring a flatbed cart,” Pei Xuan grinned. “Let’s roll it out to the north artillery range. Master Sun just finished his sixth lamb roll.”
***
Twenty minutes later, half a mile outside the north gate of Dry-Well Town on the open sandy training range.
When the black-cloth cover was pulled off the [Nine-Dragon High-Pressure Alchemy Pot], Sun Baolu froze mid-stride, dropping the toothpick from his mouth.
The old alchemist rushed forward and dropped to his knees beside the purple-gold cauldron, pressing his ear against its warm meteorite-bronze belly and running his trembling fingers over the eight airtight dragon-jaw clamps and the calibrated brass pressure gauge on top.
“Star-Fall Meteorite Iron fused seamlessly with forty-year medicinal bronze... a seamless interior mirror finish with zero pores to trap burnt slag... eight screw-locked pressure clamps... and a self-venting brass dragon whistle!” Sun Baolu’s voice climbed higher and higher until he let out a joyful howl and hugged the belly of the pot like a long-lost son. “Lord Pei! Even the Imperial Pill Furnace inside the Emperor’s palace is just a hollow copper bucket compared to this divine treasure! With this Nine-Dragon Pot, I could compress a hundred stalks of Fire-Nettle at once and the walls wouldn’t even sweat!”
“Don’t just hug it, Master Sun—fire it up!” Pei Xuan laughed, pointing to ten large wicker baskets sitting beside the testing platform. “Since the Three Oasis Towns to the north think they can choke us with a blockade, we’re going to need portable rations for our army and a surprise for their walls. Let’s test Mode 1: High-Pressure Pill Refining first!”
Inside the ten wicker baskets weren’t rare, thousand-year snow lotuses that cost ten thousand silver taels. Instead, they held Dry-Well Town’s own mass-produced specialties: - Fifty pounds of peeled [Meat-Belly Giant Potatoes] - Thirty pounds of [Rank 2 Golden-Blood Wheat Flour] and [Snow-Crystal Salt] - Twenty bundles of greenhouse [Blood-Clover & Red Chili Peppers] - Ten gallons of [Sweet-Spring Spirit Well Water] mixed with crushed [Rank 2 Red-Scorpion Shell Powder]
“Using everyday food crops and scorpion powder to refine martial stamina pills?” Sun Baolu’s eyes sparkled with mad excitement as he rolled up his sleeves. “In a normal open cauldron, potato starch and wheat flour would just boil into thick glue and burn at the bottom. Inside a twenty-atmosphere sealed pressure chamber, however, the high-pressure steam will hydrolyze the starch and force every drop of blood-energy straight into the core! Watch this!”
Sun Baolu spun the heavy lid open, dumped all hundred pounds of ingredients and water inside, slammed the lid down, and twisted all eight Dragon-Jaw Clamps until they locked with eight heavy CLACK-CLACK sounds. He turned the top brass dial to [Mode 1: High-Pressure Pill Condense] and made sure the side cannon barrel was locked shut.
“Dragon Fire—RISE!”
Standing behind the cauldron, Sun Baolu dropped into a deep martial horse-stance and slapped both palms against the bronze fire-intake vents at the base of the pot!
WHOOOOOOOOSH!
A roaring torrent of crimson Rank 3 Peak Internal Qi surged out of the old man’s palms, igniting the smokeless coal in the firebox underneath into a blinding white-hot vortex!
One minute passed. Two minutes. Five minutes!
On top of the lid, the needle on the brass pressure gauge climbed steadily past five atmospheres, past ten atmospheres, and straight up to twenty atmospheres of internal pressure!
Behind the sandbag line twenty yards back, fifty watching town guards instinctively flinched and held their helmets, waiting for the familiar KABOOM.
Inside the purple-gold cauldron, a deep, rhythmic THUMP-THUMP-THUMP sounded like a slumbering dragon’s heart beating inside an iron mountain. Under twenty times normal air pressure and three hundred degrees of superheated medicinal steam, the Meat-Potatoes, Golden-Blood Wheat, and Scorpion Marrow melted into a spinning golden cyclone—yet the purple-gold meteorite walls of the Nine-Dragon Pot remained completely cool and rock-steady!
At the twelve-minute mark—
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
The little brass dragon head on top of the lid opened its jaws and let out a cheerful, musical tea-kettle whistle! A column of harmless, sweet-smelling white steam shot ten feet into the air as the automatic pressure valve vented the excess vapor right on schedule!
“It vented! It vented by itself without blowing the lid off!” Sun Baolu jumped three feet into the air, kicking his heels together and laughing like a ten-year-old boy. “Forty years! This is the first time in forty years my eyebrows are still attached to my face after finishing a batch!”
He twisted the pressure-release wheel, waited five seconds for the gauge needle to drop to zero, and lifted the heavy purple-gold lid.
WHOOSH!
A golden cloud of rich, mouth-watering aroma—smelling like slow-braised beef brisket glazed with wild honey, toasted wheat, and mountain ginseng—drifted across the sandy testing field!
Pei Xuan, General Tie Zhan, and Chief Hulun walked up and looked inside the pot.
The interior walls of the cauldron were so clean they shone like a mirror, without a single speck of black burnt crust. And resting neatly at the bottom of the pot were five hundred plump, glossy golden-brown spheres the size of large marbles, each one stamped naturally with a faint nine-dragon swirl!
“Five hundred Rank 2 pills in twelve minutes from one pot of potatoes and wheat?!” Abacus Su nearly swallowed his own tongue as his brass abacus rattled frantically. “My Lord! Do you realize what this means?! In the outside world, an alchemist takes seven days to refine ten bitter pills that still have poison slag in them! With Master Sun and this pot, we can print fifteen thousand silver taels worth of military rations every quarter-hour!”
General Tie Zhan picked up one warm, glossy golden pill from the wooden cooling tray, tossed it into his mouth, and bit down.
Instead of crunching like a dry, bitter rock, the pill had the springy, savory chew of a honey-glazed beef tendon! Rich meat juice and warm golden Qi burst across his palate and slid down his throat, making his Rank 3 Grandmaster aura flare half a foot wider on the spot!
“Incredible!” General Tie roared, grabbing a handful of five more pills and stuffing them into his armor pouch. “One bite and my whole chest feels like a warm stove! If every soldier in Dry-Well Town carries twenty of these in a leather pouch, we can march across the entire desert without stopping once to boil water or cook rice!”
Even fifty yards away, sitting on top of an elastic mud turret with a bamboo broom in his hand, Ye Guhan (who had walked over from the canal pretending he was just “inspecting the northern wind currents for Sword Dao enlightenment”) couldn’t stop his nose from twitching at the honey-roasted beef smell.
Above the proud Rank 5 Sword Genius’s head, his tooltip flickered:
Pei Xuan pretended not to see as he casually flicked his finger, sending three warm golden Meat-Pills rolling across the stone parapet to land right beside Ye Guhan’s boot—where they vanished into a white robe sleeve in zero point one seconds.
Then Pei Xuan turned back to the purple-gold cauldron and pointed two thousand yards north across the empty desert dunes, toward a jagged, thirty-foot-tall hillock of weathered black sandstone.
“Now for the real show, Master Sun,” Pei Xuan said with a grin. “Let’s test Mode 2: High-Pressure Alchemical Mortar. Show us what happens when you don’t hold back your compression palm at all!”
“Hehehehe!” Sun Baolu rubbed his hands together, his eyes gleaming like a pyromaniac child given the keys to a firework factory. “My Lord, all my life those old fogies in the Royal Capital yelled at me: ‘Sun Baolu, lower your fire! Sun Baolu, don’t compress the sulfur!’ Today, I finally get to use one hundred percent of my Extreme Compression Palm!”
Moving with dazzling speed, Sun Baolu scooped twenty pounds of Dry-Well Ghost-Chili Powder, ten dried Red-Scorpion Venom Sacs, thirty bundles of Wild Fire-Nettle, and five scoops of Sulfur-Saltpetre Slag (left over from the salt refinery) into the cauldron. He added ten ladles of sticky cactus sap to bind the cores into round shells, clamped the heavy lid down with all eight dragon jaws, and twisted the top brass whistle dial all the way to [3. Full Artillery Lock].
Then he cranked the geared turntable on the side of the pot until the three-inch rifled iron barrel pointed at a forty-five-degree angle straight toward the black sandstone hillock two thousand yards away!
“Stand back five paces and watch this old man’s Ten-Fold Sky-Splitting Furnace Palm!”
Sun Baolu took a deep breath, his tattered gray robe billowing as every meridian in his Rank 3 Peak body lit up like red-hot copper wire. He slammed both palms against the firebox vents and poured his maximum fire-Qi straight into the sealed chamber!
HUMMMMMM—THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
Within five seconds, the needle on the brass pressure gauge shot past twenty atmospheres... thirty atmospheres... forty-five atmospheres!
Inside the superheated, airtight vortex of the Nine-Dragon Pot, the sulfur-saltpetre, fire-nettle, and chili oil didn’t burn—they were squeezed by forty-five atmospheres of pressure into twelve rock-hard, glowing crimson Blasting-Pill Cores the size of goose eggs!
“Target locked at two thousand yards—OPEN THE SIDE VALVE!” Sun Baolu yanked the long iron firing lever!
THOOM-THOOM-THOOM-THOOM-THOOM!
Twelve rapid-fire cannon thuds shook the sand like a giant beating a war drum!
Twelve glowing crimson Blasting-Pills shot out of the rifled purple-iron side barrel at twice the speed of sound, leaving twelve straight white vapor trails arcing high across the blue desert sky!
Because the Nine-Dragon Pot weighed over four hundred pounds and sat bolted to an iron tripod dug into the sand, the barrel barely twitched by a hair’s breadth between shots—giving all twelve shells pinpoint grouping!
Two thousand yards out in the dunes, the twelve supersonic Blasting-Pills slammed squarely into the center of the thirty-foot black sandstone hillock.
For half a heartbeat, there was only a red flash as the shells punched three feet deep into the rock crevices.
Then—
KA-BOOOOOOOOOM! BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOOOOOOOM!
Twelve overlapping fireballs erupted into a single towering mushroom cloud of crimson flame and black sandstone dust!
The shockwave rolled back across the two thousand yards of desert sand five seconds later, making the banners on Dry-Well Town’s north wall snap like whips! Boulders weighing half a ton were tossed forty feet into the air like pebbles, and when the rolling cloud of red chili-and-sulfur smoke finally drifted away on the wind—
Every single guard and barbarian warrior on the north wall sucked in a cold breath.
Two thousand yards away, the entire upper half of the thirty-foot sandstone hillock had been blown completely flat, leaving behind a smoking, glassed crater thirty yards wide!
“By the Eternal Sky...” Chief Hulun lowered his heavy warhammer, his jaw hanging down to his chest. “Two thousand yards away! That’s six times the range of the strongest military ballista in the Great Yan Kingdom, and twelve shots from one pot shaved the top off a stone hill!”
“And that was using cheap sulfur slag from the salt mine and weeds from the desert!” Sun Baolu cackled triumphantly, patting the warm purple-gold barrel of the Nine-Dragon Pot without burning his hand. “My Lord, if you let our blacksmiths bolt twenty heavy iron mortar tubes along the city wall and link them with high-pressure copper steam pipes to my Nine-Dragon Pot in the center, I can pressurize twenty barrels at once!”
Pei Xuan’s eyes shone as a system notification chimed in his mind:
Just as the soldiers on the wall erupted into thunderous cheers, a shrill, urgent whistle echoed from the northern sand ridge beyond the crater!
Streaking down the paved salt-mine highway at forty miles per hour came one of Dry-Well Town’s six-legged Rank 2 Armored Reconnaissance Scorpions. On its flat wooden saddle sat Scout Captain Lin, waving a bright red emergency dispatch pennant with one hand while holding a small wire birdcage with the other!
SKREEEEEEECH!
The giant red scorpion skidded to a halt twenty paces in front of Pei Xuan’s platform, lowering its armored head respectfully as Scout Captain Lin vaulted off and dropped to one knee.
“Urgent military report, My Lord!” Captain Lin shouted, holding up the wire cage containing a fat gray messenger pigeon with a tiny brass tube tied to its leg. “Thirty minutes ago, our forward lookout post at the fifteen-mile border spotted massive dust clouds rising south of Black-Wind Fortress! At the same time, our trained desert falcons intercepted this secret courier pigeon flying east from Sand-Ridge Oasis toward the Iron-Wolf Marquisate!”
General Tie Zhan and Chief Hulun immediately stepped forward, their faces turning grim.
Pei Xuan reached out, snapped the wax seal on the tiny brass pigeon-tube, and unrolled the thin strip of perfumed silk inside.
Written in neat, small characters was a progress report addressed directly to Lady Wang, First Madam of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate:
> “To Madam Liu: The fifty thousand silver taels and ten crates of military crossbows have been received by Great King Hei Feng of Black-Wind Fortress. All three thousand Black-Wind Heavy Cavalry have finished shoeing their warhorses and will march south at dawn tomorrow, accompanied by the Three Oasis Town Lords and fifty empty wagons to haul away the ruins. By sunset tomorrow, Dry-Well Town will be flat dirt, and the Ninth Young Master’s head will be on its way to the Marquisate in a box of salt.”
Pei Xuan finished reading the silk strip aloud, folded it neatly between two fingers, and let out a bright, cheerful laugh.
“My dear stepmother really is my lucky star,” Pei Xuan said, his eyes sparkling as he looked from General Tie Zhan to Boom-Pot Sun and Abacus Su. “Just when we needed three thousand warhorses to form a heavy cavalry division and three iron mines to feed our new furnaces, she paid fifty thousand silver taels out of her own dowry to have them delivered right to our front gate!”