Early morning. The small courtyard in the Silent Stone District. The frost had not yet lifted.
Before setting out, Lin Mu sat at the table and ran through his plans in his mind — a cold, meticulous war-game simulation.
He knew perfectly well that the Jia Clan Caravan was enormous.
In a situation like this, trying to skim profit through sheer individual effort was absolutely out of the question. He had to transform that stretch of wasteland south of the city into exactly what he envisioned before the caravan arrived.
And to command a rabble of conscripted laborers and odd-jobs workers, reason was useless. What mattered was the authority he held in his hands.
Lin Mu reached into his robe and secured two cold, hard tokens against his chest.
One was the External Affairs Hall bronze Deacon's token — official, procedurally legitimate. The other was the token that Supreme Elder Lin Zhen had given him some time ago.
The first gave him proper standing.
The second — while he had no intention of actually disturbing Lin Zhen himself — was perfect for invoking a tiger's might on a remote worksite far from the eyes of power. A devastating display of borrowed prestige.
"Let's go."
Lin Mu rose. With Lin Ping — who had been waiting outside the door since early morning — and Lin Wuxie, who followed behind like a silent shadow, he walked out through Black Blood Stockade's gates into the harsh, killing cold of deep autumn.
Thirty li of mountain road. On foot.
By the time the three of them reached the designated wasteland south of the city, the sun had already climbed high.
What greeted Lin Mu's eyes, however, was not the sight of a bustling worksite. It was a scene of desolation and idleness — a pile of loose sand with no shape and no direction.
The wasteland earmarked for the caravan's encampment was a mess of jagged rocks and overgrown weeds.
A large crowd of common laborers, conscripted from the External Affairs Hall's roster, were huddled in worn, sour-smelling winter clothes — leaning against stone rollers and rusted tools in small clusters, dozing or chatting.
Some were blowing smoke. Some were throwing dice. A few had even started fires and were roasting wild rabbits they had caught somewhere.
The attitude of men simply waiting out their days was on full display in that bone-cutting autumn wind.
In the shared understanding of these bottom-rung workers, the great caravan came every year.
The External Affairs Hall Deacons sent to oversee the work in previous years had done nothing more than go through the motions and pocket whatever they could.
"Leveling the campsite" meant cutting the waist-high weeds, clearing out last year's animal dung, and throwing up a few drafty wooden sheds to satisfy appearances. There were no real facilities to speak of.
If it was all just formality anyway, who in their right mind would kill themselves with hard labor in this freezing weather? Just endure the next few days, do enough to look busy, collect the wages, and be done with it.
So when Lin Mu — a new face, conspicuously young — walked into this noisy wasteland with only two people at his side, the vast majority of workers did not even lift their eyes.
The few who noticed the Deacon's robe on his shoulders gave nothing more than a token shift of their backsides before going right back to what they were doing. Their eyes held undisguised contempt.
Lin Mu observed all of this with cold eyes. Not a trace of anger crossed his face.
He walked directly to the tallest boulder at the center of the wasteland and stood atop it, looking down over the scattered workers from above.
He did not bellow himself hoarse the way Hall Master Lin Mao Mao had. He did not deliver any rousing speech.
He simply spoke in a tone of complete indifference — as though announcing something entirely trivial.
"Everyone. On your feet immediately."
"Within one incense stick's time, take your tools and follow the blueprint my attendant is holding. Begin clearing the weeds, leveling the ground, and constructing a three-layer windbreak fence along the outer perimeter."
His voice was not loud, but it reached every single person with perfect clarity.
The moment he finished speaking, the crowd fell silent for an instant — then erupted into a low buzz of muttering and snickering.
"Clear the weeds? And build a three-layer fence? Has this new Deacon lost his mind?"
Several men with thick, brutish faces — clearly the established troublemakers who held sway among the laborers — exchanged glances and sauntered up to the base of the boulder with grins on their faces.
They looked Lin Mu up and down with sideways eyes and began their insolent pushback.
"Aiyoh, young master Deacon, easy for you to stand up there and give orders!"
The ringleader — a one-eyed man — slapped his thigh and cried out his grievances at full volume. "Look at this weather! The brothers' hands and feet are frozen stiff — we can barely lift a hoe! And the tools the External Affairs Hall handed out are all rusted garbage. How are we supposed to dig frozen ground with that?"
A pockmarked man chimed in right behind him.
"Exactly, sir! When Deacon Liu led the team in previous years, we just cut the grass and called it done. The caravan lords bring their own tents — why would they need us to bust our backs building a three-layer fence?"
"You're a new official, sure, but even a new official's three fires can't work us to death, can they? Brothers, am I right?!"
"Right! We're not doing it! It's too cold!"
"Follow the old rules! Otherwise we strike!"
The crowd in the back erupted into a chorus of agreement, trying to use the weight of "established precedent" and "safety in numbers" to give this soft-looking young Deacon a proper welcome.
Lin Mu looked down at these self-satisfied troublemakers. He did not bother with a single word of explanation.
He simply looked at the one-eyed man who was shouting the loudest — and then turned his head slightly, giving Lin Wuxie, standing at his side, a single cold, expressionless glance.
No words were needed.
Slash.
Lin Wuxie — who had been standing there like a post, with all the presence of empty air — became a shrieking blur in that instant, launching off the boulder.
Too fast.
The troublemakers hadn't even had time to wipe the sneers off their faces before their vision blurred.
Then —
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Several sharp, teeth-grinding sounds of bone snapping rang out abruptly in the bitter autumn wind.
Lin Wuxie's arms — reforged by the Food Path into something as terrifying as a wild beast's — closed around the troublemakers' arms like a pair of merciless iron clamps and wrenched.
"AAAAAHHH——!!"
Agonized screams tore through the noise of the wasteland.
The men who had been swaggering and posturing moments before now had their arms snapped backward at the joint. Pale bone fragments punched through their thick winter clothing. Blood soaked the fabric.
They collapsed onto the frozen mud like dogs with their tendons cut, writhing and wailing, clutching their shattered arms.
The sudden, absolute violence froze every smile on every face in the crowd.
It was as though an invisible hand had seized them all by the throat. Sharp intakes of breath rose one after another.
But that was not enough.
Under the crowd's terrified stares —
Lin Mu slowly drew two tokens from his sleeve and tossed them onto the flat surface of the boulder at his feet with a casual clink — as though discarding two worthless scraps of metal.
The sharp ring of metal on stone cut through the dead silence of the wasteland.
One was the External Affairs Hall bronze Deacon's token.
The other — when the workers with any degree of experience caught sight of it, that token, jet-black all over, with the single character Zhen carved in stark relief on its reverse —
"T-the... Supreme Elder?!"
Someone could not hold back a cry. Their legs buckled. They dropped to their knees in the mud with a heavy thud.
In that moment, every last shred of wishful thinking in the crowd was obliterated.
They finally understood. The young Deacon standing before them was not some soft target they could push around. He was someone whose connections reached all the way to the sky.
Lin Mu looked down at the workers — silent as graves, trembling, not daring to breathe. His eyes held no ripple of emotion.
He clasped his hands behind his back, faced the cold wind, and delivered the true killing blow he had prepared for this land-clearing operation.
"Seven days."
His calm voice drifted across the silent wasteland. "Build this campsite to specification, according to the blueprint."
"If the inspection meets my standards after seven days..."
He paused. His gaze swept across the terrified faces below.
"Every single person here will receive a reward of three Primeval Stones."
Boom.
Those words landed like a heavy explosive dropped into still water.
Three Primeval Stones.
To the Elders and direct-line disciples who looked down from on high, this was perhaps the cost of a single meal.
But to the common laborers standing here — this was equal to several months of hard-earned wages.
Another wave of sharp intakes of breath swept through the crowd. But this time, it was not fear.
Those eyes — moments ago filled with cowering dread — ignited the instant the words three Primeval Stones landed.
Like dry tinder thrown into a roaring fire, they were consumed in an instant by a frenzy that could only be called absolute greed.
Every eye went red.
Lin Mu did not need to say another word. Not a single syllable of further motivation was required.
"I'll do it! Sir, I'll do it!"
"Where's the blueprint?! Give me the blueprint! I'll dig this ground flat with my bare hands if I have to!"
"Get out of my way! Don't block me — I'm signing up!"
The laborers surged forward like a pack of wolves gone mad, scrambling over each other toward Lin Ping at the base of the boulder, terrified that if they were even a step too slow, someone else would claim their spot in this windfall.
Lin Ping was nearly bowled over by the tsunami of frenzied bodies.
His face went pale. He stumbled backward repeatedly, and in the end had no choice but to frantically dig out his roster and brush, shouting himself hoarse to maintain some semblance of order while desperately assigning tasks to the red-eyed mob.
The deep autumn wind was still biting.
But on this wasteland south of the city, an utterly bizarre and almost grotesque tableau had taken shape — fire and ice existing side by side.
On the right: over a hundred laborers with bloodshot eyes, pushing themselves to two hundred percent of their capacity.
Some had even stripped off their bulky winter coats and were working bare-chested, sweat flying, attacking the weeds and hauling boulders with a ferocious efficiency that defied belief.
On the left: the troublemakers who had been made an example of, their arms snapped and useless, lying in the mud and the cold, howling and moaning in despair — ignored by everyone, discarded like refuse the world had forgotten.