Three hundred miles east of the Red-Sand Wastes, the sky above Iron-Wolf City looked like a dirty brass pan. Not a single drop of rain had fallen since the winter frost ended.
Inside the grand hall of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate, Marquis Pei Zhan slammed his heavy iron teacup down onto the rosewood table. CRACK! The cup split in half, and hot tea splashed over a stack of empty grain ledgers.
“What do you mean the south granary is empty?!” Marquis Pei Zhan roared. His tall frame shook with anger, and the Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmaster Qi inside his body made the roof tiles rattle overhead. “Last month you told me we had ten thousand bags of brown millet left! Where did it go?!”
On the cold stone floor below the steps, three fat warehouse stewards were knocking their foreheads against the bricks until skin broke.
“My Lord, have mercy!” the chief steward cried out, his voice shaking like dry leaves. “The Hundred-Year Black Frost froze half the winter wheat in the ground! Then this spring drought dried up the Wolf-Tooth River! The earth is cracked three feet deep! And the rats—the desert rats chewed through the south floorboards and ate four thousand bags before we smelled the rot! Right now, the whole city only has enough coarse bran to feed the garrison for six days!”
“Six days?!”
Standing beside the Marquis’s tiger-skin chair, a young man in gold-trimmed purple robes kicked the chief steward square in the chest. It was Pei Heng, the eldest son of the Marquis and a Rank 2 Peak Bone-Tempering martial artist. The kick sent the fat steward rolling across the hall into a bronze pillar.
“Useless dogs!” Pei Heng spat, wiping the toe of his silk boot on the carpet. “Father is feeding ten thousand soldiers across our border forts, and two thousand elite Iron-Wolf Heavy Riders right here in the main camp! If the soldiers don’t get meat and salt, how am I supposed to lead the vanguard during the royal autumn inspection?”
Before the bruised steward could crawl back, the side doors of the hall flew open. Lady Wang, the Marquis’s favored wife and Pei Heng’s mother, hurried in wearing a jade hairpin and a dark red dress. Her face was pale, and she was twisting a silk handkerchief in her fingers.
“My Lord!” Lady Wang cried, putting on a pitiful look as she dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “My personal kitchen just served lunch, and the cook dared to put salted turnip peelings on Heng’er’s plate! Even the well in the inner courtyard is only pulling up yellow mud! Furthermore, the salt merchants from Green-Willow Oasis haven’t sent a single cart in two months!”
Marquis Pei Zhan frowned deeply, rubbing his thick gray eyebrows. “Wait. What about the Black-Wind Bandits? Didn’t you tell me last month that your brother’s merchant caravan paid the Black-Wind Bandit King to clear the western desert roads?”
Lady Wang’s heart skipped a beat. She certainly could not tell her husband that she had secretly taken fifty thousand silver taels from the Marquisate treasury and ten crates of military crossbows to pay the Black-Wind Bandit King to murder Pei Xuan—the ninth son whom the Marquis had kicked out to Dry-Well Village a year ago.
She quickly forced a smile and bowed her head. “My Lord, that is the strange thing! My scouts rode to the edge of the Red-Sand Wastes yesterday. For three whole weeks, not a single Black-Wind rider has come out of the desert to rob the border towns! Even their watchtowers at the edge of the sand dunes are totally empty!”
“Empty?” Pei Heng’s eyes lit up with sudden greed. He stepped forward and slapped his thigh. “Father! I know what happened! That trash ninth brother of mine, Pei Xuan, was sent to Dry-Well Village right below Black-Wind Mountain. Wait—didn’t the winter storm bury that whole area in six feet of black ice?”
“What of it?” Marquis Pei Zhan asked coldly. Whenever someone mentioned Pei Xuan, the son of a lowly wash-maid with a broken dantian, the Marquis only felt annoyance that the boy had embarrassed the family name.
“Think about it, Father!” Pei Heng grinned, walking around the table with his chest puffed out. “The Black-Wind Bandit King had three thousand riders and mountains of stolen grain, salt, and silver stored inside Black-Wind Fortress! During the Hundred-Year Black Frost, the bandits must have run out of firewood or frozen in the mountain passes, or maybe they fought another desert tribe over water and wiped each other out! As for Pei Xuan and those hundred starving villagers in Dry-Well Village, their bones have probably been picked clean by red scorpions months ago!”
Lady Wang quickly chimed in, eager to cover up her missing fifty thousand silver taels. “Heng’er is so sharp, My Lord! I heard the Black-Wind Bandit King stored at least two hundred thousand catties of dried mutton, ten thousand bags of wheat, and hills of white salt inside his mountain caves! Since Dry-Well Village is legally part of our Iron-Wolf Marquisate, everything on that land—including the dead bandits’ fort and Pei Xuan’s wasteland deed—belongs to you!”
Marquis Pei Zhan stood up slowly. His cold eyes narrowed as he looked at the military map hanging on the wall.
With the spring drought roasting the eastern plains, a single bag of coarse grain in Iron-Wolf City had already jumped from fifty copper coins to three silver taels. If he did not find grain and salt within ten days, his border soldiers would start deserting, and the neighboring Duke of Silver-Stream would laugh him out of the royal court.
“Two hundred thousand catties of meat and grain,” Marquis Pei Zhan muttered, his rough hand slapping the wooden map right on top of the Red-Sand Wastes. “And if that unfilial ninth boy is already dead in the sand, I should at least bring back his skull and bury it behind the horse stables so the court censors cannot say I threw my own son to the wolves without checking on him.”
“Father is wise and merciful!” Pei Heng laughed loudly, his hand resting on the gold hilt of his broadsword. “Let me lead the vanguard! We will take our two thousand elite Iron-Wolf Heavy Riders and eight thousand infantry warehouse porters with empty carts! Ten thousand men marching into the desert—even if a few half-dead bandits are still hiding in the ruins of Dry-Well Village, our horses will trample them into flat mud in one breath!”
“Good!” Marquis Pei Zhan barked. “Beat the war drums! Tell the quartermaster to pack three days of dry rations and all five hundred heavy ox-carts! We ride west into the Red-Sand Wastes at dawn! Anything we find in Dry-Well Village or Black-Wind Fortress—down to the last iron nail and the last grain of salt—comes back to Iron-Wolf City!”
Pei Heng grinned from ear to ear and turned toward the hall doors, shouting to his personal guards waiting on the courtyard steps. “Did you hear my father?! Polish my silver-plated saddle and bring out my blood-red war cape! Also, pack twenty empty iron cages on the rear wagons!”
Marquis Pei Zhan paused, squinting at his eldest son. “Why are you bringing twenty empty iron cages? Didn’t you just say the bandits and Pei Xuan are already dead?”
“Just in case, Father!” Pei Heng laughed coldly, tapping the flat of his sword against his palm. “What if that trash ninth brother of mine somehow survived by eating desert rats and sand roots? If he’s still breathing, I’ll lock him inside an iron cage with Old Wei and that fierce little maid Hong Ling, and parade them down the main street of Iron-Wolf City as captured desert beggars! That way, everyone in the Marquisate will see what happens to useless trash who don’t have the Iron-Wolf bloodline!”
Lady Wang covered her mouth with her silk sleeve and giggled. “Oh, Heng’er, don’t be too rough on your little brother if he is still alive. Leave him at least one bowl of sour gruel so he can scrub the horse stables for you when we get back!”
Within an hour, the heavy war drums atop the walls of Iron-Wolf City began to pound.
However, down in the dusty outer barracks where the eight thousand infantry porters were being whipped out of their bunks by the camp sergeants, the mood was completely different.
“Marching into the Red-Sand Wastes?!” a skinny young foot soldier named Zhao San groaned, clutching his flat, rumbling stomach as he tied ragged straw sandals onto his blistered feet. “Brother Liu, the kitchen only gave us half a bowl of watery millet hulls for breakfast! My legs are already shaking, and now the Marquis wants us to push five hundred heavy ox-carts across two hundred miles of burning sand?”
Beside him, an older veteran with a gray beard spat out a mouthful of dry chaff and kept his voice low so the sergeants wouldn’t hear.
“Shut your mouth and grab the cart rope, Kid,” the old veteran whispered bitterly. “You know how the Marquis and Young Master Pei Heng run things. During the winter frost, the inner manor burned three thousand catties of charcoal a day to keep Lady Wang’s flower garden warm, while thirty men in our third battalion lost their toes to frostbite! Now they gave the two thousand heavy riders all the dried beef, while we foot soldiers get two moldy bran cakes a day to haul their loot carts!”
“If we march into the desert with two bran cakes a day, half of us will die of thirst before we even see Black-Wind Mountain!” Zhao San whimpered, tears stinging his dry eyes.
“Just pray we find a mud puddle out there,” the old veteran sighed, leaning his lean shoulder against the wooden shaft of an empty ox-cart as the iron city gates creaked open.
***
At that exact same moment, three hundred miles to the west, the midday sun was shining brightly over Dry-Well Town.
Except it did not look or feel like a desert wasteland at all.
Cool, crystal-clear water from the Ten-Mile Stone Canal rushed through white marble channels along the streets, making a pleasant splashing sound. Rows of thick green desert willows cast wide shadows over the smooth cement sidewalks, and a gentle breeze carried the mouth-watering smell of roasted cumin lamb, freshly baked Golden-Blood Wheat bread, and sweet melon juice across three districts.
Inside the newly built courtyard of the [Lv.4 Dragon-Blood Martial Academy], a thousand burly town guards were standing in neat rows with their shirts off, shouting in unison as they punched heavy iron sandbags.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Every time five hundred pairs of fists struck the iron sandbags at the same time, a dull wave of crimson blood-heat rolled across the stone training ground.
Sitting under a shaded pavilion at the front of the yard, Pei Xuan took a slow sip of iced plum juice from a porcelain cup and looked at the glowing blue RTS screen floating in the air before his eyes.
“Three hundred and eighty-five thousand points in the bank,” Pei Xuan whispered with a wide smile. He remembered Day 1, when he had arrived at this broken mud pit with only Old Wei, Hong Ling, Old Guo, and thirty measly points to his name. Now, every time the clock struck midnight, a quarter of a million Loyalty Points poured into his account like a roaring river!
Just then, a loud CLANG echoed from the eastern corner of the training yard.
A seven-foot-tall man with a thick black beard, wearing a bright yellow canvas vest with the words [HIGHWAY DEBTOR #001 — PAYING OFF 3 OUTHOUSES] painted across his chest in red ink, was swinging a two-hundred-pound iron tamper to flatten a new patch of road bricks.
It was Hei Feng, the formerly terrifying Black-Wind Bandit King—a Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmaster who used to make mothers across three counties hide their children just by whispering his name.
Right now, however, Hei Feng had a white towel tied around his forehead and a big honest grin on his scarred face as he wiped his sweat.
“Lord Pei!” Hei Feng called out cheerfully, waving his giant hand while his floating bar showed `[Loyalty: 78/100 — Loves the heated floors and Old Guo's braised pork trotters]`. “My crew just finished tamping the last three hundred yards of the eastern square! Can my brothers get an extra ladle of spicy chili oil on our noodles at lunch today?”
Before Pei Xuan could answer, fifteen-year-old Hong Ling marched out of the side kitchen carrying a heavy wooden ledger under one arm and two gleaming Rank 2 black-iron kitchen cleavers on her belt. Thanks to eating Dragon-Marrow buns every morning, the once-skinny little maid now had rosy cheeks, bright eyes, and Rank 2 Peak Bone-Tempering strength hiding inside her slender arms.
“Hei Feng, stop yelling across the yard!” Hong Ling scolded, tapping her ledger with a bamboo brush. “Abacus Su checked your squad’s work at sunrise! Yesterday you stepped on a wet curbstone near the bathhouse and left a toe-print! That’s fifty copper coins deducted from your chili-oil bonus unless you polish the stone gate steps before noon!”
“Yes, yes, Miss Hong Ling! I’ll go polish those steps until you can see your pretty face in them right now!”
The fierce Rank 3 Peak Bandit King bowed his head like a scolded schoolboy, slung the two-hundred-pound iron tamper over his shoulder like a toy rattle, and jogged off whistling a tune.
Across the yard, General Tie Zhan—holding a basket of steaming pork buns the size of his own fists—walked over with Chief Hulun of the Frost-Mane Tribe. Both men were wearing crisp black town-guard armor, and their Rank 3 Grandmaster auras were thick and steady.
“My Lord,” General Tie Zhan said after swallowing half a pork bun in one bite. “Our Scorpion Bus patrol scouts just rode back from the eastern border stone. And Old Wei’s falcon squad saw the same thing.”
Pei Xuan raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Did more refugees come from the eastern counties?”
At the same time, the corner of Pei Xuan’s RTS screen flashed bright red with an automatic border alert!
Pei Xuan stared at the floating red tooltip for three seconds, then burst out laughing so hard he nearly spilled his plum juice.
“Ten thousand men and five hundred empty ox-carts?” Pei Xuan grinned, shaking his head. “Look at my dear father and my dear eldest brother. For a whole year after kicking me out with one crippled camel and three servants, they never sent a single letter or a single copper coin. Now that a drought hits Iron-Wolf City, they bring five hundred empty carts to ‘collect my bones’ and rob my grain?”
Old Wei, whose scarred left shoulder had been completely purged of its old frost-poison thanks to the Sweet-Spring Well and Dragon-Marrow soup, stepped forward with his empty left sleeve pinned neatly to his shoulder and gripped the hilt of his Rank 3 Heavy Black-Iron Saber in his single right hand. His eyes flashed cold.
“Young Master,” Old Wei growled, “when you and your late mother lived in the back woodshed of the Marquisate, Pei Heng used to pour cold water on your blankets in winter, and the Marquis didn’t even come see your mother when she died of fever. Now they dare march into our land with soldiers? Give the word! General Tie and I will take three thousand guards and smash their vanguard before they cross the first sand dune!”
“Smash them? Why would we smash ten thousand perfectly good road-builders and five hundred free ox-carts?”
Right behind the pavilion pillar, Abacus Su popped his head out like a groundhog. His round spectacles flashed white in the desert sun, and his fingers were already clicking his brass abacus so fast it sounded like sizzling bacon.
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
“My Lord! Do not let General Tie hit them too hard!” Abacus Su cried out, his eyes shining like gold coins. “We just planned the new fifty-mile irrigation canal to the southern salt flats, and I was worried we were short by eight thousand shovel-workers! If the Marquis is personally delivering two thousand warhorses, five hundred ox-carts, and ten thousand strong men right to our front gate, we shouldn’t even charge them a delivery fee!”
“Wait a second,” Pei Xuan chuckled, standing up and dusting off his sleeves. “My father is a proud Marquis, and Pei Heng always brags that Iron-Wolf City is the grandest fortress in the northwest. If they ride all this way expecting to see thirty-five broken mud huts and white bones, how can I let them down?”
Pei Xuan turned toward the center of town and tapped the glowing [UPGRADE TERRITORY] button hovering on his RTS screen.
“Before our honored guests arrive,” Pei Xuan said with a wicked grin, “let’s spend two hundred thousand Loyalty Points and show the Iron-Wolf Marquis what a real city looks like!”
“Abacus Su! Get the yellow Debtor Vests ready—make sure you sew an extra-large one with gold trim for my brother, and a super-deluxe VIP vest for my father!”
“Old Guo! Bring out the twenty giant iron cauldrons! Tonight, we prepare psychological warfare stew!”
“And somebody go down the well and wake up Ao Ming—tell him if he wants ten roasted whole lambs for dinner, I need him to practice coughing up a raincloud!”
Right beside the stone horse-trough at the edge of the yard, Old Yellow—Pei Xuan’s formerly bald, lazy pack-camel—slowly lifted his head from a bucket of Sweet-Spring spirit oats.
After eating fusion scraps, scorpion shells, and drops of Dragon-Marrow broth for months, Old Yellow was no longer bald or skinny. He was now nine feet tall at the shoulder, covered in thick, gleaming golden fur that shone like spun brass, with two stubby little dragon-horn bumps sprouting between his ears and a pair of humps as hard as granite boulders!
HUUUU-PTOOEY!
To show his enthusiasm, Old Yellow sucked in his cheeks and hawked a fist-sized wad of golden, sticky camel-spit fifty feet across the courtyard. It hit a three-inch-thick iron training target with a loud CLANG, denting the iron plate and gluing a falling willow leaf straight to the metal!
“Good boy, Old Yellow!” Pei Xuan laughed, walking over and scratching the giant golden camel under his chin. “Save that second stomach of yours for my eldest brother’s purple silk robes. Tell you what—if you hit him square between the eyes, I’ll have Old Guo bake you a fifty-pound pan of honeyed corn-cakes!”
Old Yellow let out a proud, trumpet-like bray that sounded half like a camel and half like a roaring dragon, stamping his wide hooves on the flagstones.
Around the courtyard, the entire leadership of Dry-Well Town burst into laughter. Not a single person was afraid of the approaching ten-thousand-man army. To them, Marquis Pei Zhan wasn’t an invading warlord—he was just a wealthy courier bringing ten thousand new pairs of hands to dig ditches and build their city!
At the edge of the twenty-five-mile map, ten thousand dusty, parched soldiers of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate were marching under the scorching sun toward what they thought was a graveyard. They had no idea they were walking straight into the biggest trap in the history of the Red-Sand Wastes!