It had been a long time coming. Days spreading to decades. At times it seemed as if it would never happen. Now? The wink of an eye. Master of all he surveyed.

Remo looked out over his domain.

The tiny North Korean fishing village of Sinanju had been settled among craggy rock and sunken mud flats five thousand years before. It looked as if it hadn't seen a lick of paint or a single straight nail hammered since then.

The crummy little shanty homes of tumbledown wood and moldy thatch were clustered together against the elements. The dilapidated shacks looked like something out of The Grapes of Wrath without the cheery Steinbeck optimism.

With the melting winter snow came the annual rising tide of mud. Thick goop like brown oatmeal filled the crooked little streets and clogged the main town square.

The Mission San Juan Capistrano had the annual tradition of its returning swallows. Sinanju had a similar event, but with a non-avian twist. When the ground thawed, the sleeping snakes of Sinanju percolated to the surface. Remo had seen the first million serpents of spring slithering through the ugly brown weeds the previous week. There seemed to be a lot more with every passing year. The exhausted female snakes of Sinanju apparently spent the long winter months unsuccessfully fending off the amorous advances of hissing, horny paramours.

Remo would have thought the men of Sinanju were slipping the snakes Viagra for laughs if not for two things. First, the men of Sinanju were far too lazy to bother with the effort. Second, if they did have access to the drug, they'd need all they could spare for themselves.

Which brought him to the people of his dominion. The women of Sinanju were shapeless lumps with manhole-flat faces that looked like the south end of a northbound mule. The chronically unemployed men had raised indolence to Olympian heights. With a village stocked to its rotting rafters with ugly women and lazy men, the only good to come from the arrangement was an exceedingly low birthrate.