That night, under a bright full moon hanging over the Red-Sand Wastes, not a single lantern went dark in Dry-Well Town.
In any other border settlement, the news that three thousand ruthless Black-Wind Heavy Riders and a Rank 3 Peak Bandit King were marching down the road would have sent women crying into cellars and old men burying their silver pots under the floorboards.
In Dry-Well Town, however, the entire population of twenty-four thousand citizens treated the incoming invasion like an autumn harvest fair where three thousand free warhorses and three thousand strong road-builders were about to drop out of the sky!
Out in the wide two-mile valley stretching north from the town’s Elastic Iron-Mud Wall, glow-stone floodlights mounted on tall wooden poles lit up the desert road as bright as high noon.
RUMBLE-RUMBLE-CLACK-CLACK!
Twenty giant Armored Scorpion Dump Trucks came marching down the six-lane salt-mine highway in two neat columns. Their twelve-foot-wide wooden cargo beds were piled high with fifty tons of glistening, sticky black [Black-Pit Desert Tar-Mud] freshly scooped from the bottom of the salt-marsh tar pits.
Walking right behind the twenty giant scorpions—each man pulling a three-thousand-pound cylindrical granite road-roller by thick iron chains—were five lean figures dressed in black night-suits covered by bright yellow “Municipal Debtor” vests.
Pinned proudly over the left chest of each man’s yellow vest were three Little Red Paper Flowers.
These five road-roller pullers were none other than the five Rank 3 Shadow-Bat Sect Assassins who had tried to sneak into town two weeks ago to assassinate Ye Guhan, only to step in wet cement and get pinned to the wall by Ye Guhan’s wooden chopsticks!
As the lead assassin—former Shadow-Bat Elder Hei Ying—hauled his three-ton granite roller up to Pei Xuan’s command tent, he wiped his brow with a clean white towel and bowed respectfully.
“Lord Pei! General Tie! All five stone rollers are oiled and ready!” Elder Hei Ying reported loudly, glancing eagerly toward Abacus Su’s clipboard. “Bookkeeper Su, if our five-man crew rolls this entire two-mile valley flat before three in the morning without leaving a single bump, do we still get the ‘Midnight Model Worker’ bonus tomorrow?”
“Of course you do!” Abacus Su clicked his brass abacus and held up five shiny gold-foil stars. “Finish rolling the two-mile trap before 3:00 AM, and each of you gets one Gold Star (= five Red Flowers) plus an extra half-duck at breakfast!”
“Hear that, brothers?! Half a roast duck and a Gold Star!” Elder Hei Ying roared, his Rank 3 Internal Qi surging through his legs as the other four former assassins cheered and tightened their pulling harnesses like championship racehorses.
Pei Xuan laughed and walked over to the massive stone mixing trough set up at the head of the valley road.
The twenty Armored Scorpion Dump Trucks backed their tail-gates up to the trough and tilted their wooden cargo boxes, dumping fifty tons of thick black tar-mud into the basin along with ten barrels of dry yellow surface sand.
However, raw desert tar-mud had two big problems: first, it smelled strongly of rotten oil, which warhorses would smell from half a mile away; and second, while natural tar was sticky, a strong warhorse could still pull its hooves out after a few seconds of struggling.
To turn ordinary tar-mud into an inescapable cavalry trap, Pei Xuan needed a special biological catalyst.
“Old Yellow! Over here, boy!” Pei Xuan called out, whistling two sharp notes.
THUMP... THUMP... THUMP...
From the side of the supply tent ambled Old Yellow, Pei Xuan’s mutated pack-camel—accompanied by Sun Baolu’s scrawny gray donkey, which was trotting loyally under Old Yellow’s belly like a little squire.
Ever since Day One in Dry-Well Village, Old Yellow had been fed every leftover fusion scrap, Sweet-Spring lotus root, Golden-Blood Wheat husk, and even bathwater infused with Ao Ming’s dragon scales. Now the formerly bald, lazy camel stood nine feet tall at the shoulder with a coat of shimmering golden-brown fur, two small dragon-like horn-bumps budding on his forehead, and a stomach that could digest iron nails.
Pei Xuan held up a ten-pound Meat-Belly Giant Potato that Old Guo had roasted over charcoal and brushed with three layers of wild desert honey.
“Here you go, Old Yellow,” Pei Xuan chuckled, scratching the giant camel under his chin. “Eat this honey potato and give me your biggest, stickiest spit right into the middle of that trough. Pretend the Black-Wind Bandit King is trying to steal your dinner.”
Old Yellow sniffed the caramelized honey potato, opened his mouth to swallow it whole, and chewed three times with a blissful expression on his long camel face.
Then Old Yellow turned toward the fifty-ton mixing trough, sucked in a deep breath that expanded his chest like a giant blacksmith’s bellows, chewed his cud for five seconds, and let loose:
HUUUUUUCK—PTOOOOOOOOOOEY!
A shimmering, golden blob of mutated Dragon-Camel Saliva—nearly fifty gallons in volume and glowing with dense, elastic bio-Qi—shot out of Old Yellow’s mouth like a golden water cannon and splashed squarely across the fifty tons of black tar-mud!
Beside Old Yellow, Sun Baolu’s little gray donkey tried to imitate its big boss and spat a tiny ptoo of carrot juice into the trough too, wagging its tail proudly.
Pei Xuan stepped up to the edge of the stone mixing trough, rested both palms on the rim, and opened his 3-Slot Fusion Cube.
Just as the Fusion interface popped open, the clock on the top corner of his RTS screen struck 12:00 Midnight, and a golden shower of notifications chimed in his ears:
With nearly three hundred thousand Loyalty Points in his pocket, Pei Xuan didn’t hesitate for a second. He locked the three materials in the trough into the Fusion Cube:
“Execute Fusion!” Pei Xuan ordered silently.
WUUUUUUUUUUM!
A vast, silent sheet of golden-white light spread across the stone mixing trough. Under the moonlight, the foul black tar-mud, the golden camel saliva, and the yellow sand melted into a uniform, odorless silver-gray putty covered by a natural-looking crust of dry golden sand crystals.
“Load the dump trucks and pave the valley!” Pei Xuan waved his hand.
For the next two hours, the twenty Armored Scorpion Dump Trucks shuttled back and forth down the two-mile approach valley, spreading an even one-foot layer of the fused compound from ridge to ridge, while the five Rank 3 former Shadow-Bat assassins sprinted behind them pulling the heavy granite rollers.
Because the five assassins moved at steady, smooth footsteps without slamming down like galloping horses, the rollers glided across the top crust and pressed the yellow sand crystals until the entire two-mile valley looked completely indistinguishable from natural, untouched desert ground!
At 2:30 in the morning, General Tie Zhan and Chief Hulun walked out to the edge of the finished belt to test it.
First, skinny Abacus Su (weighing 125 pounds including his brass abacus) walked fifty yards out onto the middle of the valley road, jumped up and down three times, and even poked the ground with an iron rod.
“Hard as a stone threshing floor!” Abacus Su called back happily. “Not a single footprint deeper than a quarter-inch, and zero smell!”
“Now let’s test a charging warhorse’s weight!” Chief Hulun grinned, hefting a four-hundred-pound granite boulder onto his shoulder. Taking a three-step run-up outside the belt, the seven-foot barbarian chief hurled the four-hundred-pound boulder forward at thirty miles per hour so it slammed down right in the center of the road!
SCHLUUUUUUCK—CLACK!
The moment the heavy boulder hit the sand at high speed, there was no loud crash or flying rock chips. Instead, the sand liquefied for a split second like soft dough, swallowed the bottom six inches of the boulder to cushion the impact, and then locked solid with a dull metallic click!
General Tie Zhan trotted calmly out across the firm surface, grabbed the top of the half-buried boulder with both hands, planted his boots, and pulled upward with two thousand pounds of Rank 2 martial strength.
The veins on General Tie’s thick neck bulged—and the boulder didn’t move a hair!
“By the God of War!” General Tie gasped, letting go of the rock and wiping his palms. “It’s like the boulder grew iron roots straight into the center of the earth! If a warhorse steps into this at a gallop, all four iron shoes will be welded to the valley floor—and because the first six inches cushioned the landing like a feather pillow, the horse won’t even sprain a tendon!”
Then Hong Ling trotted out carrying a wooden watering can filled with warm Sweet-Spring water mixed with two spoons of kitchen vinegar. She poured a cupful around the base of the boulder.
Fzzzzz!
In three seconds flat, the silver-gray glue around the rock melted back into ordinary wet sand, and Hong Ling casually kicked the four-hundred-pound boulder out of the hole with the toe of her Rank 2 boot!
“Test passed, a hundred out of a hundred!” Pei Xuan clapped his hands. “Give Elder Hei Ying and his four road-rollers their Gold Stars and two whole roast ducks! Now let’s go up to the north wall and inspect Master Sun’s kitchen!”
***
Up on the wide battlements of the north Elastic Iron-Mud Wall, a sight that looked like a cross between a mad scientist’s laboratory and an imperial artillery battery greeted Pei Xuan’s eyes.
In the center of the wall stood Sun Baolu’s purple-gold [Nine-Dragon High-Pressure Alchemy Pot], bolted onto a heavy iron turntable. Running out from its secondary steam-ports were twenty thick, flexible red-copper pressure hoses that connected to twenty three-inch rifled iron mortar tubes spaced ten yards apart along the battlements!
Every single blacksmith, apprentice, and guard working on the north wall was wearing a thick white cotton face-mask soaked in cool Sweet-Spring peppermint water, along with wrap-around quartz sand-goggles.
Even with the peppermint masks on, the air within thirty yards of the mixing vats smelled so fiercely of roasted Mutated Ghost-Chili Peppers that General Tie Zhan’s eyes immediately watered!
“Careful, General Tie! Don’t touch your eyes after touching the railing!” Sun Baolu called out cheerfully through three layers of mint masks as he used wooden tongs to pack glossy, sugar-coated red clay spheres into fifty wooden ammunition crates. “One drop of this compressed Ghost-Chili & Skunk-Root oil on your fingers, and anything you touch later will burn like a soldering iron!”
Pei Xuan walked over to the stacked ammunition crates and inspected the rows of fist-sized red spheres:
“Wait a second, Master Sun,” Pei Xuan looked closely at the tooltip note and smiled in admiration. “You adjusted the specific gravity of the gas so it floats between four feet and nine feet off the ground—right at the height of a rider’s head in the saddle, while sinking past or floating above the warhorses’ noses?!”
“Of course, My Lord!” Sun Baolu puffed out his chest proudly. “Bookkeeper Su warned me five times tonight that if a single warhorse gets diarrhea and loses weight, he will deduct my carrot rations! So I blended light Wind-Grass ash into the powder—the pink mist hangs in a clean horizontal band between five and nine feet above the ground! A man sitting on a horse inhales a full lungful, while the horse’s nose four feet down breathes fresh air!”
“Genius! True alchemical genius!” Abacus Su applauded enthusiastically from behind his spectacles.
Then Pei Xuan walked over to the inner courtyard steps where Old Guo and thirty kitchen helpers were stirring ten massive hundred-gallon iron cauldrons over gentle charcoal fires. Inside the cauldrons bubbled a thick, fragrant golden porridge made from Golden-Blood Millet, Sweet-Spring Ginger Root, Roasted Meat-Potatoes, and Honey-Lotus Seeds.
“And lastly, My Lord, please inspect our crowning financial trap!” Abacus Su led Pei Xuan and the generals over to the eastern parapet of the north wall and pointed down to the fenced-off clearing outside the small side gate.
Under the bright glow-stone lamps stood four neat rows of fifty whitewashed stone outhouses—two hundred comfort stations in total—built by three hundred town masons in a single four-hour shift using pre-cast iron-mud slabs!
Running underneath all two hundred outhouses was a stone water-flushing channel fed by canal overflow water that carried all waste instantly into sealed underground fermentation tanks (which piped rich fertilizer straight to the fifty acres of winter greenhouses). Even better, a branch pipe from Ao Ming’s underground heating grid ran under the stone benches so the toilet seats were warm, clean, and completely odor-free!
Right in front of the single narrow turnstile gate leading into the outhouse rows stood a bright red wooden ticket booth, flanked by stacks of three thousand yellow “Municipal Debtor Vests,” five hundred rolls of soft fused Bamboo-Pulp Toilet Paper, fifty high-pressure vinegar-water hoses, and a twenty-foot-tall wooden billboard painted in glowing red ink:
> ======================================================== > [ DRY-WELL TOWN EMERGENCY COMFORT & TOILET STATION ] > * 1 Ticket = 1 Warhorse + 1 Suit of Armor + 60 Days Road Labor! > * Free With Every Ticket: > 1. Instant Boot-Ungluing Hose Service! > 2. One Roll of Extra-Soft Bamboo-Pulp Paper! > 3. Two Bowls of Old Guo’s Antidote Meat-Potato Porridge! > * STRICT WARNING: Any invader who soils his own armor on the public highway instead of purchasing a ticket will be fined 120 Days Labor and have his full name, hometown, and crime broadcast on the Town Megaphone Network three times a day for a month! > ========================================================
Chief Hulun stared down at the two hundred spotless white outhouses and the glowing billboard, then slowly turned to look at Pei Xuan and Abacus Su.
“My Lord... Bookkeeper Su...” the seven-foot barbarian warlord rumbled in awe, “if my Frost-Mane tribe had been hit with ten-second laxative gas and saw that sign, I would have traded my warhammer, my sheep herd, and my grandfather’s wolf-skin coat just to get past that turnstile first!”
“Wait until noon,” Pei Xuan chuckled, looking toward the eastern sky where the first pale pink light of dawn was beginning to tint the horizon. “Everyone get four hours of sleep and a big breakfast of Meat-Potato buns. At twelve o’clock sharp, the ticket booth opens for business!”
***
Four hours later, as the morning sun climbed high into the cloudless blue sky over the Red-Sand Wastes, a sudden vibration ran through the stone battlements of Dry-Well Town’s north wall.
Pei Xuan, dressed in a fresh black-and-gold brocade robe, walked calmly up the stone stairs of the gate tower and sat down in a cushioned rattan armchair placed right under a colorful silk sun-umbrella in the center of the battlements.
Hong Ling set a small rosewood side-table beside his chair with a crystal pitcher of iced sweet-plum soup and a plate of chilled greenhouse watermelon slices.
Behind Pei Xuan stood General Tie Zhan, Chief Hulun, and Old Wei—while ten yards to the left, Sun Baolu and twenty masked alchemy gunners stood beside the steaming purple-gold Nine-Dragon Pot and the twenty loaded mortar tubes.
Then, five miles to the north at the edge of the desert horizon, a black line of iron and dust rose like a storm cloud across the dunes!
THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!
Three thousand Black-Wind Heavy Riders in gleaming dark scale armor marched into view, their iron horseshoes beating the desert floor like three thousand war drums, with the monstrous seven-foot figure of Hei Feng, the Black-Wind Bandit King, riding at the point of the spear!