A warm desert breeze blew across the central plaza, carrying the rich, heartbreaking smell of fifty gallons of spilled twelve-hour beef broth before it vanished completely down the storm drain.
Next to the stone horse-trough, Pei Heng saw Ye Guhan standing frozen in front of the wrecked noodle counter in his patched white robes, holding a bamboo broom in one hand and a burnt scallion leaf in the other.
Thinking Ye Guhan was just a dumb street-sweeper who had been scared silly by Envoy Lin’s fireball, Pei Heng pointed at him and laughed through his missing front teeth.
“Hahaha! Look at that idiot street-sweeper in the patched shirt!” Pei Heng jeered, wiping bloody drool from his swollen chin. “He’s crying over a pot of dirty peasant cow-water! Hey, broom-boy! Why are you standing there like a wooden log? Get on your knees and thank my Uncle Lin for cleaning up that filthy beggar stall! In another minute, Uncle Lin is going to burn that fat cook and his whole kitchen into pig charcoal!”
“Filthy... beggar stall?”
Ye Guhan’s head tilted up an inch.
Under his neat black hair, his dark eyes—usually as calm and cold as an icy mountain lake—were bloodshot.
For the past month and a half, ever since he had wandered into Dry-Well Town half-dead with a cracked dantian and accidentally broken three road bricks because he couldn’t pay fifty copper coins for ten bowls of noodles, Ye Guhan had told himself the same lie every single night before going to sleep:
I am Ye Guhan, the lone sword prodigy of the Northern Snow Peaks! I am only staying in this noisy desert town to pay off my brick debt so my Pure Heart Sword Dao stays unstained! I do NOT like these people!
When Pei Xuan gave him a quiet stone room with dragon-heated floors that kept his injured meridians from aching at night, Ye Guhan told himself: I am only sleeping here so I have strength to dig the canal faster!
When Hong Ling mended the torn cuffs of his white robe with soft cotton thread and left two extra pickled duck eggs by his window, Ye Guhan told himself: I will sweep two extra miles of highway tomorrow so we are even!
And every single morning at dawn, when fat Old Guo opened the kitchen window, waved his big iron ladle with a warm, fatherly grin, and shouted, “Little Brother Ye! Come drink a hot bowl of bone soup before you start work, I saved the biggest piece of tendon at the bottom of the pot just for you!”—Ye Guhan had hidden his face behind his big porcelain bowl so nobody would see the corners of his mouth curving up.
In the ruthless cultivation world outside, when his dantian had been cracked by enemies, his own sect brothers had tried to rob his sword manual, and old friends had slammed their doors in his face.
Only in this noisy, ridiculous desert city—where bandits wore yellow vests to dig toilets, giant scorpions worked as buses, and an exiled ninth young master treated every street-sweeper like family—had anyone ever saved the best piece of beef tendon at the bottom of the pot for him.
And now, this red-robed clown in the sky had smashed Old Guo’s sign, made Old Guo cry on the dusty stones, and spilled the twelve-hour broth that Ye Guhan had swept three streets to earn!
“I swept ten miles of granite canal for that soup...” Ye Guhan’s voice trembled as his knuckles turned white around the bamboo broomstick. “I rolled six highways flat for that extra piece of ox tendon... Old Guo woke up at midnight to skim the bone foam... and you spilled it?!”
“Huh? What is this crazy sweeper muttering about?” Pei Heng blinked and turned to Marquis Pei Zhan. “Father, I think the shockwave cooked his brains!”
Ye Guhan didn’t look at Pei Heng. He threw the bamboo broom onto the counter, stepped in front of the crying Old Guo, and pointed one trembling finger straight up at Envoy Lin three hundred feet in the sky!
“Listen to me, you noisy red bug on a scrap-copper sword!” Ye Guhan roared, his voice cracking with pure, unfiltered fury as he shouted his true feelings out loud for the whole city to hear. “This is NOT a filthy beggar stall! This is Chef Guo’s Number One Central Noodle Shop! And Red-Sand Oasis City is MY HOME! Nobody—not even the Heavenly Emperor himself—gets to spill my home’s beef broth before I eat lunch!”
DING-DING-DING-DING-DING!
The exact instant the words “MY HOME” left Ye Guhan’s mouth, the stubborn green bar floating over his head—which had been welded shut at `59 / 100` for six straight weeks—exploded into a blinding pillar of golden light that only Pei Xuan could see!
Standing by the well, Pei Xuan nearly jumped three feet in the air and pumped his fist!
“Sixty-eight! He finally passed sixty!” Pei Xuan laughed out loud, his eyes shining brighter than two gold ingots as the slot-machine chimes rang inside his head and his Loyalty Point balance shot past six hundred thousand! “I spent six weeks feeding him duck eggs and silk socks, and all it took was Envoy Lin tipping over his lunch pot! Envoy Lin, you really are my lucky star!”
Up in the sky, however, Envoy Lin wasn’t feeling like a lucky star at all.
When Ye Guhan shouted at him and called him a “noisy red bug,” Envoy Lin’s face twisted with murderous rage. “A mere street-sweeper dares point a finger at this Immortal?! Die!”
Before Envoy Lin could even flick his wrist to throw a fire-bolt, Ye Guhan’s right hand dropped from the sky and gripped the worn wooden hilt of the ancient sword hanging at his waist—Frost-Snow.
SHING!
Ye Guhan didn’t even pull the blade all the way out of its scabbard.
He only pushed the guard up by three inches with his thumb!
Yet in that split second, the temperature across the entire central plaza dropped thirty degrees! Frost crystals bloomed across the wet cobblestones, and a terrifying, razor-sharp aura that belonged only to the Rank 5 Foundation Establishment Realm—where gaseous Spirit Qi condenses into liquid immortal power—erupted from Ye Guhan’s thin shoulders like a volcanic tsunami!
Down on the ground, Marquis Pei Zhan felt as if a bucket of freezing glacier water had been dumped directly over his skull. His knees buckled, and he slammed face-first into the mud without even knowing why!
Three hundred feet up in the sky, the smug sneer on Envoy Lin’s face vanished. His pupils shrank to the size of pinholes, and every hair on his neck stood straight up!
“Liquid Spirit Qi?! Sword Intent?!” Envoy Lin’s voice cracked into a high-pitched scream that sounded like a stepped-on rooster. “F-Foundation Establishment?! You’re a Rank 5 Foundation Establishment Sword Cultivator?!”
In the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect, Rank 4 Qi Gathering disciples like Envoy Lin were merely outer deacons who ran errands in the mortal world. Only Rank 5 Foundation Establishment masters were honored as Inner Sect Elders and true Immortals who could live for two hundred years!
Why in the name of the ancestors was a Rank 5 Foundation Establishment Sword Elder wearing a patched shirt, holding a bamboo broom, and crying over a spilled pot of mortal beef noodles in this godforsaken desert?!
“Pay for the soup!” Ye Guhan growled coldly, and pushed his thumb forward another inch before snapping the sword back into its sheath.
CLANG!
A crescent of pure, translucent white Rank 5 Foundation Sword Qi—twenty feet long and thin as a sheet of winter ice—shot straight up from the ground at ten times the speed of sound!
Three hundred feet of altitude, which was an unreachable heaven to Rank 3 mortal martial artists, was crossed in the blink of an eye by Ye Guhan’s Sword Intent!
“AHHHHH! JADE SHIELD, SAVE ME!”
Envoy Lin wet his silk trousers on the spot. He didn’t care about his Immortal dignity anymore—he threw himself sideways across his flying sword like a rolling sack of flour, kicking his prized Rank 3 Peak Red-Crested Wind Crane squarely in the belly to push himself six inches out of the way!
ZIIIIING—SLICE!
The translucent white sword-crescent flashed right past the tip of Envoy Lin’s nose and sliced through the tail of his panicked Wind Crane!
For a full second, nothing seemed to happen in the sky.
Then, a neat clump of black hair drifted down on the breeze—Envoy Lin’s proud six-inch Daoist goatee had been shaved off so smoothly that his chin looked like a peeled boiled egg! Not only that, a deep red line appeared across the bridge of his nose, and the tall golden crown of his Immortal hat split symmetrically in two and fell off his head!
Right beside him, the giant thirty-foot Red-Crested Wind Crane let out an ear-splitting shriek:
SQUAAAAAWK!
All twenty of the crane’s long, majestic tail feathers had been sliced clean off at the root! Deprived of its tail rudder, the bald-butted giant bird spun around in midair like a punctured paper lantern while feathers rained down like snow over the plaza!
“Waaaaah! My beard! My Immortal crown!” Envoy Lin clutched his smooth, bleeding chin as heobbled violently on his bronze sword, nearly tumbling off into the air.
Down in the plaza, forty-four thousand citizens stared at the raining white crane feathers for two seconds—and then exploded into a roar of laughter and cheers that nearly blew the clouds away!
“Hahaha! Brother Ye shaved the Immortal’s goat-beard with one swing!”
“Look at his giant bird! Its butt is completely bald—just like Old Yellow used to be!”
Over by the camel hitching post, Old Yellow—now a glorious, shiny golden-furred Rank 2 Beast King—raised his head, looked at the bald-butted crane spinning in the sky, and let out a loud, mocking SNORT of superiority.
Marquis Pei Zhan and Pei Heng lay trembling in the mud by the horse-trough, their faces paler than white paper. A Rank 5 Foundation Establishment Sword Elder was working as a street-sweeper in Pei Xuan’s city?! What kind of monster den had Dry-Well Village turned into?!
Down in front of the noodle shop, Ye Guhan took a deep breath and reached for his sword hilt a second time, intending to leap onto a wisp of Sword Qi, fly up three hundred feet, and chop Envoy Lin’s flying sword into eight pieces.
“Hold on, Brother Ye!”
Before Ye Guhan could channel his liquid Foundation Qi into his legs to fly, his shoulders suddenly shuddered. His face turned white as snow, and a bright red trickle of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth onto his patched collar.
Cough! Cough!
Above his head, his citizen tooltip flashed with a yellow warning icon:
Three hundred feet up in the sky, Envoy Lin had already turned his flying sword around to flee for his life at top speed—when his sharp Rank 4 eyes spotted Ye Guhan coughing up dark red blood and leaning heavily against the noodle counter!
Envoy Lin slammed the brakes on his bronze flying sword. He hovered three hundred and fifty feet up—climbing fifty feet higher just to be safe—and stared closely at the chaotic Qi fluctuating around Ye Guhan’s lower belly.
After three seconds, Envoy Lin’s terror vanished, replaced by a wicked, hysterical laugh!
“Hahaha! Haha! You scared this Deacon half to death!” Envoy Lin wiped the drop of blood from his shaved chin and pointed down at Ye Guhan with a trembling, hateful finger. “I was wondering why a Rank 5 Foundation Establishment sword cultivator would be sweeping streets in a mortal town! Your dantian is cracked! Your Foundation core is leaking Qi like a broken sieve, and you can’t even fly off the ground without your meridians exploding!”
Down in the mud, Marquis Pei Zhan’s eyes lit up again. “What?! His dantian is crippled?! He can’t fly?!”
“That’s right!” Envoy Lin laughed loudly from three hundred and fifty feet in the air, patting his chest in relief as he pulled a green Qi-recovery pill from his pouch and popped it into his mouth. “A crippled tiger with no wings is still stuck on the ground! firing one three-hundred-foot sword slash was already your limit, wasn’t it? If you swing that sword one more time at this distance, your dantian will shatter on the spot and you’ll die before you even touch my boots!”
Ye Guhan wiped the blood from his lips with the back of his sleeve, his jaw clenched tight as he glared up at the sky. Envoy Lin was right—his old injury locked ninety percent of his liquid Qi inside his lower abdomen to hold the crack together. On the ground, he could still kill anyone within fifty paces, but flying three hundred and fifty feet up into the sky was completely impossible right now!
“Chef Guo, Lord Pei... I’m sorry,” Ye Guhan whispered through gritted teeth, his Loyalty bar actually ticking up another point to `69 / 100` out of sheer frustration and guilt. “He climbed to three hundred and fifty feet. If I force a jump now, my dantian will break before I reach two hundred feet...”
Just as Ye Guhan tried to step forward anyway, a warm, solid hand clapped firmly onto his shoulder.
Pei Xuan stepped right in front of Ye Guhan and slipped a golden, meat-scented Rank 3 Stamina & Meridian-Soothing Pill into the swordsman’s hand.
“Sit down on your stool, Brother Ye,” Pei Xuan said with an easy, confident smile. “You already shaved his beard, plucked his bird’s tail, and gave me the biggest gift of the year. Why should our city’s Number One Swordsman waste his breath jumping after a flying bug?”
Ye Guhan blinked, swallowing the warm pill as he looked at Pei Xuan’s back. “Lord Pei, he is three hundred and fifty feet up. Even your Rank 3 Peak Dragon-Blood Fist Wave loses its force past a hundred feet. How are you going to hit him?”
Old Guo also wiped his eyes with his apron and stood up beside Hong Ling. “Yeah, Young Master! That shameless red-robed bastard is hiding way up in the clouds! While he’s up there, I don’t even dare light the stove to boil a new pot of broth!”
Up in the sky, Envoy Lin heard Old Guo’s words and laughed even louder, his shaved chin shining in the sun.
“Boil a new pot of broth? Keep dreaming, fat pig!” Envoy Lin sneered, raising both hands above his head as he drew Spirit Qi from two Low-Grade Spirit Stones in his sleeves. “Since your crippled swordsman can’t fly and your mortal Grandmasters can’t jump past a hundred feet, the sky belongs to this Immortal alone! Watch closely as I stay right here at three hundred and fifty feet and rain fireballs down for three days and three nights until every single house in Red-Sand City is burned to flat dirt!”
Down by the Sweet-Spring Well, Pei Xuan looked at his floating RTS screen.
In the upper right corner, the golden numbers `[CURRENT BALANCE: 620,000 LP]` were shining like a mini sun, and right below them, the three glowing slots of the Rank 4 Fusion Cube were pulsing and waiting for his command.
Pei Xuan grinned and cracked his knuckles.
“Three hundred and fifty feet up, and you think the sky above Red-Sand City belongs to you?” Pei Xuan called out toward the clouds, before turning his head toward the Alchemy Workshop and the deep well shaft.
“Old Dragon Ao Ming! Boom-Pot Sun! General Tie! Get the heavy iron ballista and a shed dragon scale ready!” Pei Xuan laughed, his fingers tapping the air over his Fusion Cube interface. “Brother Ye, sit tight for two minutes. I’m going to show this country bumpkin from the Crimson Cloud Sect what happens when someone enters a modern city’s no-fly zone without a permit!”