Five days passed in a flash of flying bricks, steaming Meat-Potato cauldrons, and five hundred voices shouting squat rhymes at sunset.
By the fifth morning, a visitor walking into Dry-Well Village would have thought they had accidentally stepped into a secret stronghold of body-refining monks.
Down in the twenty acres of potato fields, twelve-year-old boys didn't use wheelbarrows anymore—they carried two hundred-pound sacks of giant red potatoes under each arm while walking in the deep, steady Brick-Carrier's Step, humming the Iron-Anvil breathing rhyme under their breath.
Over at the construction site on West Well Street, where the new village granary and bathhouse were going up, the masons didn't even need wooden ladders for the first floor. A bricklayer on the ground would simply squat down, exhale a puff of white steam, and toss a stack of four interlocking gray stone bricks twelve feet straight up into the air, where the man on the roof caught them effortlessly with one bare bronze hand!
The biggest change of all, however, was happening inside the outdoor communal kitchen next to the Sweet-Spring Well.
At ten o'clock before noon, sixty-eight-year-old Grandma Zhang was standing behind a three-inch-thick elm-wood kneading table, rolling out dough for five hundred Meat-Potato flatbreads.
Five days ago, Grandma Zhang had been a stooped, white-haired old woman whose knees clicked whenever the wind blew and who needed her grandson to carry her water bucket.
Now, after drinking Sweet-Spring Well water for a week, eating ten fried scorpions a day, and refusing to miss a single evening of two hundred squats in the front row of the Martial Yard, Grandma Zhang's hunched back had straightened out by three inches. The loose, wrinkled skin on her forearms had tightened into a smooth, healthy dark-bronze sheen, and streaks of glossy black hair were even growing back at her temples!
"Granny Zhang, let me help you knead that fifty-pound lump of potato-wheat dough!" a newly reformed ex-bandit named Scar-Nose Liu offered politely as he carried over a bucket of well water. Five days ago, Scar-Nose Liu had been a fierce horse thief; today, he wore a clean white kitchen helper's apron and had a red paper flower pinned to his collar for good behavior. "That dough is mixed with mashed Meat-Potatoes—it's as stiff as wet clay!"
"Bah! Step aside, young fellow!" Grandma Zhang waved him off with one hand while folding the fifty-pound mound of stiff dough in half like a cotton quilt. "You young men don't put enough waist power into your palms! Did you not listen to Uncle Wei yesterday? The fifth posture of the Iron-Anvil Body Art is The Dough-Kneader's Palm! Breathe in through the nose, sink the Qi from the shoulders into the wrists, and push—HA!"
WHUMP!
Grandma Zhang pressed both palms down into the giant ball of dough. The entire three-inch-thick elm table groaned under the weight of her strike, its four thick wooden legs sinking half an inch into the packed dirt!
Scar-Nose Liu's eyes nearly popped out of his sockets. He was a strong adult man who had nearly reached Rank 1 Early Martial, and even he had to use a heavy wooden rolling pin to flatten that potato dough!
Just then, Old Guo tossed a handful of crushed red chili pepper into his sizzling giant wok ten feet away. A breeze blew a pinch of spicy red pepper dust right past Grandma Zhang's nose.
Grandma Zhang's nose twitched.
"Ah... ah..." Grandma Zhang raised her right fist to press down on the dough one more time, while her breath hitched in her chest, accidentally triggering the full blood-Qi surge of the Iron-Anvil third breathing rhyme. "ACHOO!"
CRACK—BOOOOOOM!
With that single sneeze, Grandma Zhang's right fist slammed straight down through the fifty-pound lump of dough AND the three-inch-thick seasoned elm-wood table!
Sawdust and wooden splinters flew ten feet in every direction!
The heavy elm table split clean down the middle with a sound like a thunderclap, collapsing into two halves on the ground while Grandma Zhang stood frozen in the middle, her bronze right fist buried all the way to the wrist in the broken center plank!
Dead silence fell over the communal kitchen.
Old Guo stopped mid-stir with his iron ladle in the air. Hong Ling paused halfway through counting a string of copper coins. Twenty kitchen helpers and thirty passing bricklayers stared with dropped jaws at the shattered three-inch hardwood planks lying around Grandma Zhang's cloth shoes.
Grandma Zhang blinked twice. She slowly pulled her right hand out of the jagged hole in the wood, wiggled her five fingers, and looked down at her knuckles.
Not only was her hand not bleeding, there wasn't even a white scratch on her bronze skin!
"Oh dear!" Grandma Zhang gasped, clapping both hands over her mouth as she looked guiltily toward Hong Ling's accounting desk. "Miss Hong Ling! I didn't mean to break the village kitchen table! That pepper dust tickled my nose! Don't take away my evening lamb gravy—my grandson and I can nail the boards back together!"
Pei Xuan, who had just walked around the corner of the well house with Old Wei, looked at the glowing blue tooltip floating over the old lady's head and burst out laughing.
==================================================================== [ CITIZEN TOOLTIP: GRANDMA ZHANG (Head Baker of Dry-Well Village) ] * Cultivation Breakthrough: Rank 0 Mortal -> Rank 1 Early Martial! (Bronze-Hide Stage — Single Fist Force: 550 lbs!) * Loyalty: 94/100 (Die-Hard Gravy Lover) * Daily Point Output: +1 LP/day -> +10 LP/day! * Thought: "Oh no, if the Young Master fines me two spoons of lamb gravy for breaking the table, how will I do 300 squats tonight?!" ====================================================================
"No fine, Grandma Zhang!" Pei Xuan called out, walking over and applauding warmly. "In fact, breaking that table proves you have officially stepped into Rank 1 Early Martial! Hong Ling, give Grandma Zhang an extra five-pound Meat-Potato and replace all the kitchen tables with double-thick Cool-Breeze Stone slabs!"
"Rank 1 Early Martial?!" Grandma Zhang stared at her own hands in disbelief. "Me? A nearly seventy-year-old widow who couldn't even climb a hill last month is a martial artist now?!"
Before the crowd could finish cheering for Grandma Zhang, a frantic shouting broke out from the south end of East Well Street!
"Look out! Clear the road! The big horn-ox went crazy!"
"A red scorpion stung its tail outside the field! The cart has three thousand pounds of bricks on it—the rope snapped!"
Pei Xuan turned his head sharply.
Charging straight down the paved main street toward the crowded kitchen square was the biggest draft beast looted from Scarface Wolf's bandit camp: a twelve-hundred-pound Desert Horn-Ox with bloodshot eyes and two curved iron-like horns!
A stray scorpion from the outer sand dunes had stung the beast on its hind leg while it was pulling a heavy four-wheeled flatbed wagon stacked high with two hundred Cool-Breeze Bricks. In its pain and panic, the giant ox had snapped its leather reins, knocked over its driver, and was now stampeding straight toward the outdoor kitchen where a dozen village children were sitting on small stools shelling beans!
"Get the children back!" Old Wei roared, his hand flying to his saber as he sprinted forward from thirty yards away.
Even at Rank 2 speed, however, Old Wei was thirty yards behind the kitchen crowd, and the stampeding twelve-hundred-pound ox—backed by the crushing momentum of a three-thousand-pound brick wagon—was only ten feet away from the bean-shelling stools!
Right between the charging ox and the children stood Grandma Zhang, still holding her wooden rolling pin in her left hand.
Seeing the giant horned beast bearing down on the children, Grandma Zhang didn't even blink. In her mind, only one fiery thought flashed:
If this stupid cow steps on the kitchen pots and spills Old Guo's noon lamb stew, nobody gets lunch today!
"Hold it right there, you bad cow!"
Grandma Zhang planted her cloth shoes wide on the stone pavement, sank her hips into a textbook Bucket-Lifter's Squat, inhaled a deep breath like a sand-turtle, and swung her bare bronze right fist straight into the charging ox's flat forehead!
THUUUUUUUD!
A dull, heavy boom echoed down the entire length of East Well Street!
The twelve-hundred-pound Desert Horn-Ox didn't send the old lady flying. Instead, it was as if the beast had run headfirst into an immovable iron cliff!
Grandma Zhang's cloth shoes slid back only four inches across the stone slabs, leaving two white friction marks on the rock.
The giant ox, on the other hand, let out a cross-eyed "Moooo?" as all four of its hooves lifted off the ground! Its huge body tipped sideways and crashed onto the street with a bone-shaking thump, tongues hanging out the side of its mouth as it fainted dead away on the spot!
Behind the fallen ox, the heavy four-wheeled brick wagon skidded forward. Grandma Zhang casually reached out with her left hand, grabbed the wooden front axle, and pulled upward—stopping three thousand pounds of rolling stone bricks dead in their tracks!
For three full seconds, you could have heard a pin drop in Dry-Well Village.
On the roof of the new bathhouse across the street, Scarface Wolf accidentally dropped his iron trowel into his mortar bucket.
Down by the well, One-Eyed Jack slowly took off his straw hat and rubbed his single eye three times to make sure he wasn't hallucinating from heatstroke.
"Big Brother..." One-Eyed Jack whispered in a tiny voice to Scarface Wolf up on the roof. "Did that seventy-year-old granny who makes our morning flatbreads just knock out a twelve-hundred-pound wild ox with one punch?"
Up on the roof, Scarface Wolf swallowed hard and looked down at his sixty burly ex-bandits.
"Listen to me, boys!" Scarface Wolf shouted at the top of his lungs. "Tonight at the Martial Yard, nobody leaves until we finish five hundred Iron-Anvil squats! If a seventy-year-old baker granny can one-punch an ox while my First Squadron is still stuck at Rank 0, how can I ever show my face in the village canteen again?!"
"FIVE HUNDRED SQUATS!" the ex-bandits roared back, their eyes burning with competitive fire as they laid bricks twice as fast so they could get to the training yard early.
That evening, the hundred-yard brick square of the Dry-Well Martial Yard was packed tighter than ever before.
Five hundred and sixty men, women, teenagers, and elders stood shoulder to shoulder under the red evening sky, lifting fifty-pound sandstone blocks, carrying stone water jars, and squatting in unison as Old Wei beat a giant war drum on the platform.
BOOM! "HA!"BOOM! "HO!"
After five straight days of eating nutrient-packed Meat-Potatoes, crunchy strength-boosting scorpions, sweet Spirit-Well water, and practicing the zero-flaw [Iron-Anvil Body Art], the accumulated blood-Qi inside the villagers' bodies had reached a critical boiling point.
As the war drum hit its two-hundredth beat, a muffled pop echoed from the front row, where Little Stone's skin suddenly flushed a deep metallic bronze as his muscles swelled!
Then another pop came from the second row—where Refugee Carpenter Zhao Er smashed the fifty-pound sandstone block in his hands with a barehanded grip!
Then another! And another!
POP! POP! POP! POP!
Like a field of spring bamboo bursting through the soil after a thunderstorm, fifty hardworking farmers, refugees, and former bandit bricklayers broke through the mortal barrier at the exact same time, stepping into Rank 1 Early Martial (Bronze-Hide Stage)!
Waves of hot, vigorous blood-Qi rose from the five hundred and sixty practitioners like visible red steam, gathering into the Martial Yard's [Lord's Siphon] formation array and pouring in a roaring golden torrent straight into Pei Xuan's body on the top platform!
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
Inside Pei Xuan's body, every tendon stretched and hummed like a steel bowstring drawn to the full moon. His bronze skin gleamed with a faint metallic luster, and his single-arm strength surged past 1,000 pounds of pure force, pushing him smoothly from Rank 1 Late Martial straight to the absolute ceiling of Rank 1 Peak Martial!
Only one thin membrane now separated his bones from the iron-marrow transformation of Rank 2!
==================================================================== [ MASS CULTIVATION BREAKTHROUGH! ] * 50 Citizens broke through from Rank 0 Mortal -> Rank 1 Early Martial! (Including: Grandma Zhang, Little Stone, Carpenter Zhao Er, Bone-Chopper Ma, and 46 Bricklayers/Farmers!) * Lord Pei Xuan absorbed 5% Shared Training Essence! >> PEI XUAN BREAKTHROUGH: Rank 1 Late -> Rank 1 Peak Martial! << -------------------------------------------------------------------- [ TERRITORY INCOME UPDATE ] * Population: 585 (Loyal 60+: 572 | Doubtful: 13) * 485 Rank 0 Mortal Civilians (x1 LP) = +485 LP/day * 85 Rank 1 Martial Artists (x10 LP) = +850 LP/day * 2 Rank 2 Martial Masters (Old Wei & Scarface Wolf, x100 LP) = +200 LP/day * Village Building & Comfort Bonus = +65 LP/day >> NEW DAILY INCOME: +1,600 LP/day! >> CURRENT BALANCE: 2,600 LP! ====================================================================
Pei Xuan exhaled a long white breath that shot three feet through the air before dissipating.
One thousand six hundred Loyalty Points a day!
Just fifteen days ago when he first arrived at Dry-Well Village, he was only getting thirty points a day from his three loyal servants. Now, his daily income had multiplied by more than fifty times, and nearly one out of every six people in his village was a genuine martial artist!
Just as the villagers were lining up happily around Old Guo's gravy barrels to celebrate their breakthroughs, the brass alarm bell on the wooden watchtower by the front gate suddenly rang out with three sharp clangs!
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Up in the watchtower, a young scout with sharp eyes lowered his brass spyglass and shouted down at the top of his lungs:
"Lord Pei! Uncle Wei! A huge caravan is coming from the northeast sand dunes! Over four hundred people and sixty camels—wait! Something is wrong with them! Half of them are wrapped in bloody rags and covered in red blisters!"