A little puff of white alchemy smoke curled up from Envoy Lin’s two-foot-tall black afro as the echoes of the six hundred exploding fireballs faded across the hills.
Standing in the center of the blackened circle on the cobblestones, the proud Outer Deacon of the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect looked down at himself.
His gold-embroidered red Daoist robe—which had taken three mortal seamstresses half a year to weave—was gone, reduced to a few smoking black threads hanging around his ankles. All he had left covering his pale, skinny legs was a pair of scorched pink silk underpants printed with little red peonies.
Across the plaza, forty-four thousand people were pointing at his pink peony underpants and laughing so hard that several barbarian warriors had to lean on their axes to stay upright.
Even worse, over by the stone horse-trough, Marquis Pei Zhan saw that the invincible green turtle shell was gone and screamed at the top of his lungs in sheer terror:
“Brother-in-Law Lin! Your shield broke! Don’t just stand there in your underpants! Cast an Immortal spell and kill him before they reload those six iron pipes!”
That shout snapped Envoy Lin out of his concussed daze!
That’s right! Envoy Lin shook his ringing head, spitting out a mouthful of black soot and stinky-tofu residue. Their six-barrel iron pipe just ran out of ammo! And I still have thirty percent of my Rank 4 Peak Spirit Qi left in my dantian, plus three spare flying swords and ten Fire-Crow Talismans inside my Spatial Storage Bag!
In Envoy Lin’s mind, even without his flying sword in the sky or his Jade-Light Shield on his chest, he was still a lofty Rank 4 Peak Immortal Cultivator!
And what was Pei Xuan? Just a mortal martial artist standing fifty feet away!
“You... you dared to blow off this Immortal’s robe and expose my undergarments in front of forty thousand mud-legs!” Envoy Lin’s voice cracked into a demonic shriek as his bloodshot eyes locked onto Pei Xuan. “Three breaths! It only takes me three breaths to chant the Rank 4 Crimson Wind-Guillotine Spell and slice your head off your neck!”
Envoy Lin’s left hand slapped toward the gray cloth Spatial Storage Bag hanging at his waist to pull out a backup talisman, while his right hand pinched a rapid two-finger incantation seal in front of his nose:
“Supreme Crimson Cloud, hear my call! Condense the fiery wind and—”
Fifty feet away behind the smoking Gatling cannon cart, Pei Xuan tilted his head as his RTS Territory Screen popped up a detailed physical scan of the half-naked Immortal:
“Weaker than Grandma Zhang’s left arm, and needs three whole seconds to chant a spell?”
Pei Xuan shook his head with a sigh. “And here I thought an Immortal Envoy would at least know how to throw a punch.”
Envoy Lin was only at 0.5 seconds of his three-second spell chant—his mouth wide open on the word “wind”—when Pei Xuan took his hands off the cannon handles and stepped out from behind the cart.
BOOM!
Pei Xuan’s right boot stomped down onto the flagstones!
Under the terrifying physical explosive force of a Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmaster who had tempered every inch of his skin, muscle, bone, tendon, and marrow with the Dragon-Blood Anvil Manual, the thick granite slab beneath Pei Xuan’s heel cracked into a neat spiderweb!
Inside Pei Xuan’s veins, golden-red dragon-blood roared like a locomotive engine.
Fifty feet of distance—which Envoy Lin thought would take a mortal fighter at least three or four seconds to run across—vanished in two-tenths of a second!
WHOOSH!
A sonic boom of displaced air clapped across the plaza!
To Envoy Lin’s eyes, Pei Xuan simply blurred into a golden-red afterimage.
Before Envoy Lin’s brain could even reach 0.8 seconds of his three-second incantation, a tall shadow fell directly over his smoking black afro!
Pei Xuan was standing less than six inches away from Envoy Lin’s nose, smiling down at him like a friendly neighborhood butcher looking at a holiday pig.
“Hi there, Uncle Lin,” Pei Xuan said cheerfully. “Need a hand with that spell?”
“Gah?!”
Envoy Lin’s heart nearly stopped beating!
How could a mortal without Spirit Qi move faster than a galloping warhorse from a dead standstill?!
In pure panic, Envoy Lin abandoned his unfinished wind spell. His left hand was still an inch away from the opening of his Spatial Storage Bag, and his right hand instinctively balled into a fist wrapped in a thin layer of red Spirit Qi, swinging a desperate punch straight at Pei Xuan’s nose!
“Get back, you mortal—!”
Pei Xuan didn’t even bother dodging.
With a casual flick of his left wrist, Pei Xuan raised his forearm and blocked Envoy Lin’s punch wrist-to-wrist!
THUD—CRACK!
It sounded like a dry rotten cucumber slapping against a solid black-iron anvil!
Even though Envoy Lin had wrapped a wisp of Rank 4 Fire Qi around his knuckles, the physical bones inside his hand were the soft, un-tempered bones of a pampered fifty-year-old man who hadn’t lifted a bucket of water since he was twelve!
The moment his wrist struck Pei Xuan’s Rank 3 Peak Dragon-Blood Iron Bone, the thin layer of Fire Qi scattered into sparks, and two small bones in Envoy Lin’s right wrist snapped with a crisp pop!
“OWWWWW! MY HAND! MY NOBLE IMMORTAL HAND!”
Envoy Lin cradling his swollen, sprained right wrist against his bare chest, hopping up and down on one foot as tears squirted out of his eyes. “What kind of monster body do you have?! Why is your arm harder than meteorite iron?!”
“Because in Red-Sand Oasis City, everybody does two hundred squats before dinner,” Pei Xuan said seriously.
At the same time, Pei Xuan’s right hand reached smoothly into his wide dark-blue silk sleeve.
Ever since One-Eyed Jack and Abacus Su had upgraded the city’s road kilns last month, Pei Xuan had kept a special souvenir tucked inside his inner sleeve pocket—both to practice his wrist weight-training during walks and for emergencies where a sword was too polite.
Out of Pei Xuan’s sleeve came a rectangular, ten-pound block of pitch-black, high-density stone-iron!
It was twelve inches long, six inches wide, and four inches thick, with neat square characters stamped deeply into its flat face:
`[FUSED RANK 3 BLACK-IRON MUNICIPAL ROAD BRICK — KILN #1 — PROPERTY OF RED-SAND CITY]`
Seeing the ten-pound black-iron brick appear in Pei Xuan’s right hand, Envoy Lin’s eyes widened in disbelief.
He was an Outer Deacon of the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect! Even if he lost a duel, he was supposed to be defeated by a legendary flying sword, a golden spirit bell, or an ancient dharma treasure!
What kind of person pulls a street paving brick out of his sleeve to hit an Immortal?!
“Wait! You wouldn’t dare hit an Immortal’s face with a road brick—!” Envoy Lin shrieked, trying to duck his head.
“Why wouldn’t I? You broke three of Old Guo’s roof tiles, so it’s only fair you test one of our bricks with your forehead!”
Pei Xuan stepped in, planted his back foot, rotated his hips with textbook Iron-Anvil Body Art form, and swung the flat ten-pound face of the [Fused Rank 3 Black-Iron Road Brick] squarely into the center of Envoy Lin’s forehead!
CLAAAAAAAANG!
The crisp, resonant metallic ring of black-iron brick meeting thick arrogant skull echoed all the way from the Sweet-Spring Well to the fifty-foot city walls!
For a full second, time seemed to freeze in the central square.
Envoy Lin stood stiff as a wooden board in his pink peony underpants.
The deep rectangular imprint of the words `[PROPERTY OF RED-SAND CITY]` was stamped backward in bright red relief right across the middle of his forehead!
Two yellow front teeth—knocked loose by the vibration—flew out of Envoy Lin’s mouth in a graceful high arc, spinning through the sunlight before landing with two tiny plinks right next to Pei Heng’s missing teeth by the horse-trough!
Envoy Lin’s eyes spun around in opposite directions like two broken pinwheels.
“Uhhh... pretty... little red birds...” Envoy Lin mumbled, his knees turning to jelly as he swayed backward.
“Hold on! Don’t let him fall asleep yet! He spilled my twelve-hour dragon-marrow broth!”
Before Envoy Lin could tip over onto the cobblestones, a round, flour-covered figure charged out of the wrecked noodle shop like an angry rolling meatball!
It was Old Guo—Rank 2 Mid Martial Kitchen Master—swinging his three-foot-long, twenty-pound [Fused Red-Hot Iron Soup Ladle] with both hands!
WHACK!
Old Guo brought the flat rounded bottom of his giant iron soup ladle straight across Envoy Lin’s bare left buttock!
“That’s for tipping over my forty-gallon soup pot, you red-robed soup-thief!” Old Guo roared.
“Wait for me! He called my kitchen cleavers peasant knives!”
Fifteen-year-old Hong Ling leaped in right behind Old Guo, spinning in midair and smacking the flat sides of both her heavy black-iron kitchen cleavers against Envoy Lin’s shoulders—CLAP-CLAP!—spinning the dizzy Immortal around like a wooden top!
“And one from the City Defense Guard for unlicensed fireball discharge!” General Tie Zhan stepped up and delivered a booming open-palm slap across the back of Envoy Lin’s smoking afro, launching him five feet forward right into Old Wei’s waiting Rank 2 Blood-Iron Mechanical Arm, which clotheslined the Immortal across the collarbone!
“My turn! He scared my snow-sheep!” Seven-foot-tall barbarian Chief Hulun roared, stepping in from the left and swinging the flat of his giant iron war-axe like a cricket paddle against Envoy Lin’s other buttock—SMACK!—sending the dizzy Immortal bouncing right back toward the center of the circle!
“Wait, don’t leave out the Traffic Department! If I don’t get one hit in, how am I supposed to keep my Star Employee of the Month badge?!” The former Black-Wind Bandit King rushed up in his crisp blue toll-collector uniform, pulled out his heavy wooden parking-ticket clipboard, and whacked Envoy Lin across the chin with a loud CLACK! “That’s for parking your bronze sword in a no-standing zone without buying a manure bag for your crane!”
Even Boom-Pot Sun hopped off the back of the Gatling cannon cart, holding a blackened iron alchemy wrench, and rapped Envoy Lin’s knee twice—tink, tink—just to test if an Immortal’s kneecap made a different sound from a mortal’s. “Hmph! Hollow bones, full of pill-residue! My pressure cooker has ten times better metallurgy than this guy’s legs!”
All around the plaza, forty-four thousand citizens cheered and counted each hit out loud at the top of their lungs:
“ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! FIVE! SIX!”
Behind the stone horse-trough, Marquis Pei Zhan and Pei Heng watched in petrified silence as the high-and-mighty Outer Deacon of the Crimson Cloud Immortal Sect was bounced back and forth like a feathered shuttlecock between a fat cook’s soup ladle, a fifteen-year-old maid’s kitchen cleavers, a barbarian’s axe-flat, and a former bandit king’s parking clipboard!
Finally, standing right at the end of the line, Pei Xuan casually raised his [Black-Iron Road Brick] one more time as Envoy Lin bounced back toward him—and tapped it firmly down on the very top of Envoy Lin’s skull like a carpenter hammering the last nail into a coffin lid!
BONK!
A purple bump the size of a goose egg popped up instantly out of the middle of Envoy Lin’s smoking black hair.
Without another sound, the mighty Rank 4 Peak Immortal Envoy of the Crimson Cloud Sect stiffened, rolled his eyes completely white, and dropped flat on his face on the cobblestones with his pink-flowered backside sticking slightly up in the air—out cold!
Pei Xuan blew a speck of dust off his black-iron brick, tucked it neatly back into his wide sleeve, and placed one clean leather boot right on the middle of the unconscious Immortal’s back.
Silence hung over the square for two heartbeats as forty-four thousand citizens stared at the legendary “cloud-riding Immortal” lying face-down on the road in his pink peony underpants with [PROPERTY OF RED-SAND CITY] stamped backward on his forehead.
Over by the noodle counter, Ye Guhan slowly lowered his teacup, looked at the brick imprint on Envoy Lin’s head, and murmured in genuine awe:
“In my twenty-two years of cultivating the Sword Dao... that is the most terrifying brick technique I have ever seen.”