Down at the intersection of East Willow Boulevard and the Central Market Plaza, Marquis Pei Zhan was still staring in a daze at a blacksmith shop where four bare-chested Rank 2 Peak apprentices were hammering red-hot meteorite iron with their bare fists because they found iron hammers “too slow.”
While his father was distracted, Pei Heng—whose forehead was throbbing from headbutting the stone lion and whose stomach was cramping with hunger—suddenly spotted a familiar figure standing in front of a colorful silk-and-ribbon stall thirty paces away.
It was a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a neat emerald-green tunic, with two thick braids tied with red bells and two heavy black-iron kitchen cleavers hanging from her leather waist-belt.
And standing obediently behind the girl, carrying four big wicker shopping baskets filled with fresh watermelons, bolts of silk, and bags of candied red dates on its back, was a nine-foot-tall golden camel with two stubby dragon-horns on its head!
“Hong Ling?! And that ugly old pack-camel from Pei Xuan’s courtyard?!”
Pei Heng’s eyes lit up with twisted joy!
All morning long, every person he had met in this crazy city—from the Black-Wind Bandit King at the toll booth to the old grandma sweeping the street—had been a terrifying stranger he didn’t dare mess with.
But Hong Ling?!
In Pei Heng’s memory from a year ago back at the Iron-Wolf Marquisate, Hong Ling was just the skinny, malnourished fourteen-year-old kitchen maid who served Pei Xuan and his sick mother in the leaky back woodshed! Back then, whenever Pei Heng walked past the woodshed and kicked over their charcoal brazier, little Hong Ling could only glare at him with tears in her eyes while hugging a bag of moldy brown rice!
“Haha! Finally someone I know!” Pei Heng laughed out loud, all his fear vanishing as his old noble arrogance rushed back into his head. “She’s just Pei Xuan’s slave maid! Her slave contract is still registered under our Pei Clan name! If she’s buying silk ribbons and watermelons here, that means that coward Pei Xuan really is the one running this city!”
Without even waiting for his father, Pei Heng swaggered across the marble street with his chin held high, followed by four of his Rank 2 personal guards.
At the silk stall, Hong Ling was carefully counting out twelve copper coins from her embroidered coin purse to pay the stall owner for a spool of gold thread.
Suddenly, a rough hand smelling of horse sweat reached out to grab her green sleeve!
“Little slave girl Hong Ling! How dare you spend our Pei Clan’s money to buy silk thread?!” Pei Heng barked, baring his teeth in a cruel sneer. “Get on your knees and hand over that coin purse and those four baskets of food right now!”
To anyone in Red-Sand Oasis City, touching Hong Ling’s twin cleavers was dangerous—but touching her coin purse was pure suicide!
Before Pei Heng’s sweaty fingers could get within three inches of her sleeve, Hong Ling didn’t even bother drawing the two heavy black-iron kitchen cleavers at her waist.
She simply turned around on her heel, her big bright eyes flashing cold as ice, and swung her small, fair right hand in a crisp backhand slap!
WHAAAACK!
The sound was like an iron frying pan smashing into a ripe watermelon!
Because Hong Ling had been practicing the [Rank 3 Dragon-Blood Anvil Manual] every morning and eating Ao Ming’s Dragon-Marrow buns for weeks, her small hand carried four thousand five hundred pounds of pure Rank 2 Peak Bone-Tempering force—twice as strong as Pei Heng’s uninjured state, let alone now when he was hungry and tired!
Pei Heng didn’t even see her little hand move.
All he saw was a tiny white palm fill his entire vision, followed by what felt like a galloping iron carriage slamming squarely across the left side of his jaw!
CRACK-POP-POP!
Three of Pei Heng’s white teeth—two molars and one front incisor—shot out of his mouth in a spray of blood and saliva!
“Mmph—AAAAH!”
His arrogant speech was cut short as his feet flew completely off the ground! Spinning through the air like a purple silk top—one turn, two turns, three full turns—the proud eldest son of the Iron-Wolf Marquis crashed headfirst into a giant wooden barrel full of live desert-carp outside the fishmonger’s stall twenty feet away!
SPLAAAASH—CRUNCH!
Dirty fish-water and flopping three-pound carp exploded ten feet into the air!
Pei Heng’s upper body was wedged upside-down inside the broken wooden barrel, while his legs in their silk boots kicked wildly in the air!
“Young Master Long!”
The four family guards who had walked over with Pei Heng screamed in horror and rushed over to pull him out of the fish barrel.
When they finally dragged Pei Heng upright onto the cobblestones, his left cheek was swollen to the size of a steamed bun, three bloody gaps showed in his gums when he whimpered, and a two-pound live carp was flapping its tail right inside the collar of his purple silk robe!
Wait—it wasn’t over yet!
Right beside the silk stall, nine-foot-tall Old Yellow—the Mutated Golden Dragon-Camel—lowered his long golden neck and stared right at Pei Heng with his big, round camel eyes.
Old Yellow remembered everything.
A year ago, on the cold morning when Pei Xuan, Old Wei, Hong Ling, and Old Guo were kicked out the back gate of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate, Pei Heng had stood on the gate steps laughing and whipped Old Yellow across the rump with a thorny riding crop until the poor camel bled!
For three hundred and sixty-five days, Old Yellow had been eating fused spirit oats and fermenting a special batch of Rank 2 Peak green stomach-cud just for this exact moment!
HUUUUU-GURGLE-GURGLE...
Old Yellow’s cheeks puffed out like two giant golden balloons as his second stomach contracted with Rank 2 Peak beast power!
“Wait—what is that camel doing with its mouth?!” Pei Heng whimpered through his swollen lips, trying to raise his arms to cover his face.
Too late!
PTOOOOOOOEY!
Old Yellow fired his signature [Armor-Piercing Sticky Acid Loogie] from twenty feet away!
A bucket-sized ball of warm, sticky, bright-green fermented camel cud—smelling like ten-year-old pickled garlic mixed with rotten desert turnips—blasted across the street at the speed of a crossbow bolt and hit Pei Heng square in the middle of his face!
SPLAT!
The force of the giant camel loogie knocked Pei Heng flat onto his back on the wet cobblestones! Worse still, because Old Yellow’s saliva had been used to fuse the [Super-Glue Quicksand Belt] that trapped three thousand warhorses last week, the green camel cud acted like instant industrial glue—gluing Pei Heng’s hair, eyebrows, and both hands straight to his own cheeks while the smell made everyone within ten yards pinch their noses!
“Mmph! Mmmph! Get it off! It’s in my nose! It’s in my mouth where my teeth fell out!” Pei Heng rolled around on the stones like a green-headed worm, kicking his legs and crying real tears!
Old Yellow let out a triumphant “BWA-HA-HA!” camel-bray, high-fived Hong Ling’s elbow with his front hoof, and happily chewed on a candied red date that Hong Ling tossed into his mouth.
“Good shot, Old Yellow! Right in the tooth-hole!” Hong Ling giggled, patting the golden camel’s neck before turning her cold gaze back toward Marquis Pei Zhan, who had just come running over from the blacksmith shop after hearing the crash.
Marquis Pei Zhan stopped ten paces away and stared down at the green-faced, toothless, carp-flopping mess rolling on the ground.
For three full seconds, the dignified Iron-Wolf Marquis didn’t even recognize that the crying creature with a live fish in its shirt and green camel spit glued to its face was his prized eldest son and heir, Pei Heng!
“F-Father! Theth... she knocked out my theeth!” Pei Heng lisped through the missing gaps in his mouth, pointing a sticky green finger up at Hong Ling. “Kill her! Thith little thlave maid hit me!”
“LONG’ER?!”
Marquis Pei Zhan’s eyeballs turned bloodshot!
In Iron-Wolf City, Pei Heng was his pride and joy—a twenty-year-old Rank 2 Peak genius who was already promised as a disciple to an Immortal Envoy of the Crimson Cloud Sect! Yet right here in the middle of the street, a fifteen-year-old kitchen maid had knocked out three of Pei Heng’s teeth with a single backhand slap, and a pack-camel had spat green glue all over his head?!
“You—you lowly wash-maid’s servant girl!” Marquis Pei Zhan roared, his Rank 3 Peak Grandmaster anger making the loose cobblestones under his boots vibrate. “How dare a slave of the Pei Clan raise a hand against my eldest son?! Guards! All twenty of you! Draw your blades, break this little girl’s arms, and chop that cursed camel into stew meat right now!”
“WAIT A SECOND! NOBODY MOVE!”
Before the twenty family guards could draw their swords halfway out of their scabbards, a thin man in a long scholar’s gown and round spectacles popped out from behind the fishmonger’s stall like a ghost, holding a brass abacus in one hand and a long paper scroll in the other!
It was Abacus Su!
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
Abacus Su didn’t even look at the twenty half-drawn swords. Instead, he kneeled beside the broken fish barrel with a magnifying glass, counted the wooden staves on the ground, and thrust a freshly written bill right in front of Marquis Pei Zhan’s nose!
“Hold everything! Let’s settle the property damage before you start another fight!” Abacus Su shouted indignantly, tapping his brass abacus with a bamboo brush. “Your son just crashed headfirst into Municipal Fish Stall #14’s Grade-2 Cedar Water-Barrel! Here is the itemized invoice: 1. One broken cedar barrel: 50 silver taels! 2. Emotional trauma to twelve live desert-carp (three of which lost scales during the impact): 120 silver taels! 3. Unauthorized swimming in a commercial fish container without a health permit: 30 silver taels! 4. Receiving an Emergency Dental Extraction from Chief Stewardess Hong Ling without an appointment: 100 silver taels! Total: Three hundred silver taels, payable immediately in cash, or Young Master Pei Heng puts on this yellow [VIP DEBTOR #8,888] vest right now!”
Marquis Pei Zhan stared at Abacus Su, then at the yellow vest reading [VIP DEBTOR #8,888 — YOUNG MASTER PEI LONG (ARROGANT BRAT DIVISION)] that Su was shaking in his face.
The Marquis laughed out of pure, boiling fury.
“Pay you three hundred silver taels because your maid knocked my son into a barrel?!” Marquis Pei Zhan drew his heavy wolf-head broadsword with a ringing SHING! “I am the Iron-Wolf Marquis! Today I’ll chop you and this little maid in half first, and then go drag that unfilial beast Pei Xuan off his throne! Guards—KILL THEM!”
At the Marquis’s roar, all twenty Rank 2 Peak family guards bit their tongues, forced down the fear they had felt from seeing Grandma Zhang and the kindergarteners earlier, and yanked their iron broadswords out of their scabbards!
“Protect the Marquis! Grab that girl and the bookkeeper!”
Deputy Captain Wu and nineteen guards lunged forward across the marble street toward Hong Ling and Abacus Su. In their minds, even if this city was weird, Hong Ling was just one fifteen-year-old girl and Abacus Su looked like a skinny scholar who would blow away in a stiff wind! If they took these two as hostages, they could force Pei Xuan to hand over the city!
However, neither Hong Ling nor Abacus Su took a single step back.
Instead, Hong Ling calmly put her embroidered coin purse back into her pocket, rested her small hands on the handles of her twin Rank 2 Black-Iron Kitchen Cleavers, and looked toward the carved wooden doors of the [Dragon-Blood Tavern & Roast Duck House] right behind the fish stall.
“Uncle Tie! Chief Hulun! Officer Hei!” Hong Ling called out in a clear, crisp voice. “These twenty guys are drawing weapons in the commercial market without a permit—and they’re trying to skip out on Abacus Su’s three-hundred-silver fish-barrel bill!”
Abacus Su pushed his spectacles up his nose and clicked his tongue.
“Drawing twenty uninspected iron blades in a crowded market plaza?” Abacus Su’s brass abacus rattled like a machine gun—clack-clack-clack-clack! “According to Red-Sand Oasis City Public Safety Law, Article 9, drawing a weapon within fifty feet of a food stall carries a mandatory sentence of Ninety Days in a Yellow Debtor Vest! And resisting arrest doubles the sentence!”
“Who cares about your dog-fart Public Safety Law?! Die!”
Deputy Captain Wu leaped ten feet through the air, his Rank 2 Peak broadsword slashing down toward Abacus Su’s spectacles—
When suddenly, right before the tavern doors even opened, a passing citizen who was buying a sack of sweet potatoes at the next stall—a burly Frost-Mane barbarian sheep-shearer at Rank 2 Mid—frowned and casually tossed a five-pound [Meat-Belly Giant Potato] like a shot-put ball!
THWACK!
The five-pound potato hit the flat of Deputy Captain Wu’s broadsword in midair, knocking the blade six inches off course so it sliced harmlessly through empty air!
“Hey! Watch where you’re swinging that rusty piece of iron, outsider!” the barbarian sheep-shearer barked angrily, holding two huge iron sheep-shears in his hands. “If you scratch Chief Accountant Su’s spectacles, who’s going to calculate our wool bonuses this Friday?!”
Around the Central Market Plaza, over three hundred ordinary citizens—blacksmiths, butchers, noodle cooks, and barbarian herders, almost every single one of them at Rank 1 Peak or Rank 2 Early—stopped shopping and glared at the Marquis’s twenty guards with their arms crossed!
Before Deputy Captain Wu could even recover from the shock of having his sword deflected by a flying potato, the heavy wooden swinging doors of the Dragon-Blood Tavern creaked open!