The council hall of the Blood Wolf Fortress reeked of tallow candles, burnt bone-meal, and stale blood.
Elder Gu Hai was down on his belly, clawing the granite flagstones like a dog trying to dig under a fence. His quilted robes were shredded by mountain brambles, his ears were caked in dry muck, and both hands were wrapped in grease-stained linen that seeped yellow fluid. Every three seconds, his forehead smacked the rock with a dull, wet knock.
*...He plants runner beans on Xue Sha's steel!"* Gu Hai's voice was a cracked, wheezing shriek that bounced off the cavernous ceiling. *"The rooster chicks breathe white solar fire when they cough! There’s an eight-hundred-pound, three-headed black hound sleeping on his front rug! Patriarch, by the blood of the first ancestors, we cannot march! That ridge isn't an abandoned exile dump... it’s the private garden of an Ancient Sun God!"*
Up on the dais, framed by a nine-foot throne constructed from nine hundred polished human skulls, Patriarch Nether-Ghost had heard enough.
*SLAP.*
A vicious backhanded whip of condensed crimson spiritual pressure cracked through the air. The shockwave caught Gu Hai square in the ribs, launching the old strategist thirty feet across the chamber. He slammed hard into the petrified ribcage of a fossilized leviathan, coughing up a mouthful of black, curdled phlegm.
"COWARD! PATHETIC, SNIVELING WORM!" Nether-Ghost roared.
The Patriarch’s crimson robes billowed like the wings of an enraged bat. His Half-Step Nascent Soul aura flooded the hall, snuffing out the fat-burning braziers and coating the skull throne in greasy, crimson frost.
"You let an exiled mortal invalid and a cheap Clear Sky phantom illusion scare the marrow straight out of your bones! A Sun God growing snap peas?! Ancient solar beasts nesting on rough hemlock rafters like barnyard fowl?! It’s an ancestral optical illusion! A defensive mirage concocted by old Gu Qing to bluff our grand army into turning tail!"
Nether-Ghost drew himself up, the skeletal joints in his fingers popping like dry twigs.
"The Clear Sky Sect is down to their last pocket of copper," the Patriarch sneered, teeth bared in a feral grin. "They pooled every scrap of spirit jade they had left to ambush Xue Sha’s team in the dark, praying we’d wet our robes and retreat. If we blink now—if we crawl back into the reeds over a painted scarecrow—the other nine demonic sects across the Northern Waste will smell the rot and butcher our bloodline for sport!"
He wheeled around, his black boots ringing against the dais as he marched toward an altar carved from solid obsidian. Resting upon iron supports was a five-foot curved war horn, hollowed from the fossilized thigh bone of an ancient blood titan.
Nether-Ghost leaned over the mouthpiece, pulled a gallon of sulfurous air into his lungs, and dumped the full demonic reservoir of his core into the bone.
*HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORN—!*
The bellow of the **Great Demonic Blood Horn** tore through the subterranean cavern like a localized earthquake.
Out in the open marsh, the black muck began to bubble and boil. Gas vents erupted into twenty-foot flares of purple methane. Ancient mud dykes ruptured, spewing centuries of foul corpse-sludge into the reeds.
From the sunken dry docks beneath the fortress, fifty dark silhouettes rose into the blood-tinted sky.
They were **Blood War Skiffs**—seventy-foot hulls of iron-banded bog oak, draped in tattered battle pennants stitched from cured skin, bristling with heavy soul-piercing ballistas and corpse-fire catapults. Three thousand demonic warriors, clad in red-enameled iron scale, crowded the gunwales, howling blood oaths into the wind.
Leading the swarm at the dead-center was the **Nether-Dragon Flagship**.
Three hundred feet of fossilized abyssal dragon ribcage, reinforced with demonic bronze and driven by ten thousand blood-refined spirit crystals. Mounted at the draconic prow, cold and hungry, was the yawning muzzle of the **Nine-Nether Blood River Annihilation Cannon**—a siege engine engineered to bore straight through mountain ranges.
Nether-Ghost vaulted onto the flagship's forward deck, thrusting his iron-headed staff toward the southern ridgelines.
"WAR ENGINES ADVANCE!" Nether-Ghost bellowed, his voice echoing across the swamp like cracking iron. "DROWN THE SOUTHERN CLOUD MOUNTAINS IN FIRE! TEAR DOWN THEIR GATES! BUTCHER THEIR DISCIPLES! LEAVE NOT ONE ROOSTER OR HOUND DRAWING BREATH UPON THEIR SOIL!"
Fifty war skiffs surged forward in a tight wedge, dark sails snapping, racing across the sky like an armada of armored locusts.
***
Five miles south, deep inside the Clear Sky Sect's inner valley.
*CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!*
Nine frantic, deafening strokes of the **Grand Heavenly Alarm Bell** shattered the morning peace.
Down in the outer courtyards, apprentice disciples dropped their wooden practice swords, scrambling in blind panic. Deacons barked orders through bullhorns.
Up on the high panoramic terrace of the Heavenly Sword Pavilion, Sect Master Gu Qing, Elder Mu Chen, and Chief Elder Zhao stood side by side, gripping the jade balustrade with knuckles bleached bone-white.
A five-mile-wide wall of curdled crimson fog was chewing through the northern mountain passes at three hundred miles an hour. Fifty dark skiffs rode the crest of that red cloud like sharks hunting in a slaughterhouse slick, accompanied by the deep, rhythmic pounding of leather war drums:
*BUM. BUM. BUM. BUM.*
"The Blood Wolf Sect..." Gu Qing whispered, his jaw muscles tightening until they twitched. "Patriarch Nether-Ghost has emptied his vaults. He brought every war skiff, every ballista, every cutthroat in the marsh. They're coming to scour our name from the province."
"Sect Master!" Elder Zhao yelled over the rising gale, his disciplinary staff trembling in his grip. "The Nine-Peaks Mountain Barrier is humming at maximum load, but their dreadnought's cannon will hammer through our outer wards within the hour! What are your orders?!"
Gu Qing took a long, ragged breath. He looked out over the three-thousand-year-old pine groves and the terraced tile roofs of his home.
"Get the junior disciples down into the deep vault tunnels," Gu Qing commanded, his voice cold with fatal resolve. "All Golden Core elders and Foundation disciples assemble at the main pass. Prepare the Blood Sacrifice Array. If the sect burns today, we make them pay for every yard of dirt with a bucket of demonic blood."
"And what about Sunset Peak?!" Elder Mu Chen yelled, eyes wide with terror as he pointed a trembling finger toward the quiet western ridge. "The Ancestral Sovereign is resting up there! If their vanguard skiffs drift across the western boundary and foul His lawn—"
Gu Qing's face went completely bloodless.
"May the ancestors have mercy on us all," the Sect Master murmured, a cold drop of sweat rolling down his collar. "If those demonic madmen disturb His quiet mortal seclusion... I fear not only their fleet, but this entire mountain range will be ground into sand."
***
Meanwhile, five miles west on Sunset Peak.
The morning sun was warm, golden, and dry.
Austin stood in the black dirt patch between his timber lodge and the chicken coop, holding a wooden folding ruler, four pine stakes, and a spool of braided jute twine. He had a pencil behind his right ear and a wooden framing mallet tucked under his arm.
"Three meters on the short side, six meters on the run," Austin mumbled to himself, kneeling in the rich soil to check his diagonal measurements. "Three-four-five triangle for the corners. If the frame ain't square, the raised-bed timbers won't seat flush, and dirt'll spill out every time it rains."
He drove a stake into the corner, pulled the twine taut, and sighted down the string line with one eye closed.
"Carrots along the east flank where they get morning light. Yukon golds along the west. If I keep sixteen inches between the furrows, the gravity-fed line from the rain barrel will cover the root spread without washing out the trench sub-base."
*BUM. BUM. BUM. BUM.*
A muffled, heavy bass vibration thrummed through the valley floor, rattling the loose dirt in Austin's seed tray. A few seconds later came a faint, tinny clanging from across the eastern ridges, followed by the dull, pop-gun crackle of distant explosions.
Austin paused, mallet hovering six inches above the corner stake.
His eyebrows pulled together into a hard, irritated line.
He stood up, wiped the loam off his knee, and squinted over the eastern ridge line.
Five miles off, greasy black smoke was billowing into the blue sky. Tiny red dots were buzzing around the high stone towers of the main sect like angry midges, accompanied by intermittent flashes of green and violet sword lights.
Austin tapped his developer HUD.
A bright yellow banner flashed across the top third of his peripheral vision:
A hard, dangerous twitch kicked into Austin’s left eye.
"You've gotta be kidding me," Austin growled, tossing his wooden mallet onto the dirt with a loud, disgusted clatter. "A global server raid event? Right in the middle of my agricultural layout?"
He planted his fists on his hips, glaring toward the eastern valley with the pure, unadulterated venom of a homeowner whose neighbor just fired up a straight-piped leaf blower at six on a Sunday morning.
"And listen to that obnoxious, repetitive battle track! A four-second audio loop! *Bum, bum, bum, bum!* Sounds like some kid with a blown subwoofer in a rusted-out Honda! Why doesn't this indie engine have a basic volume slider to mute ambient zone music while you're in build mode?! It's basic UI design, people!"
Beside the porch steps, the eight-hundred-pound Cerberus, Pug, hauled his massive bulk up onto his front paws.
All three heads turned toward the eastern sky. Six ruby eyes locked onto the advancing black skiffs. The beast let out a deep, chest-rattling growl that vibrated the gravel pathways, violet arcs of static electricity popping between its seven-inch fangs.
Austin walked over, reached down, and gave the middle head a firm, calming pat right between its velvet ears.
"Stay down, Pug," Austin told the beast in a flat, tired voice. "Don't pay any attention to the public raid. Let the sweaty tryhard guilds finish their scheduled dungeon encounter so the combat soundtrack shuts the hell up and we can get back to planting root crops."
Pug whined softly through three noses, resting his chin on his crossed paws, eyes still tracking the smoke.
Austin picked his mallet back up, wiped the pine handle against his apron, knelt in the dirt, and went right back to squaring his string line.