The golden light of Gate #27 had barely faded before Lin Mo stepped through the secondary relay arch marked with the coordinate glyphs of Orchard-Star #33.
The warm breeze of Silk-Star vanished in an instant. A biting, unnatural chill bit into his cheeks.
Lin Mo, Tie Niu, Dr. Gu Qinghe, and Little Guo’er stepped out onto a wide marble esplanade overlooking the rolling valleys of Orchard-Star #33.
Under normal circumstances, this planetary basin was famous across the Silk Road for its ten million acres of Crimson Spirit-Peaches. But today, the entire valley was choked in a sickly, ash-colored fog.
Every tree had turned brittle and black. A crust of obsidian rime frost coated the branches, snapping the thick trunks under unnatural weight.
The ground was littered with rotting, frozen fruit that gave off a foul, sulfurous stench.
Worse than the dying trees were the sounds drifting up from the valley floor.
Tens of thousands of farming families were huddled outside a fortified stone compound marked with the bloody seal of the Blood-Tax Pharmacy Directorate.
