Lin Mo looked at the massive celestial blueprint unrolled across the crystal desk.
“Back during the Spring Festival rush in Jiangcheng,” Lin Mo said, his deadpan voice cutting through the hum of the chamber, “ticket scalpers used to charge triple the price for a hard-seat train ticket. If you couldn’t pay, you spent the holidays sleeping on a concrete train station floor. Middlemen who profit off human longing are a cosmic disease.”
Turning a father’s trip home into a three-hundred-year mortgage is pure extortion. A road is meant to connect people, not trap them.
Master Lu Jian slammed his heavy carpenter’s square onto the table with an emphatic crack.
“They were worse than scalpers, CEO Lin!” Lu Jian shouted, his beard bristling with indignation. “The old Plunder Bank installed toll-barriers at every natural wormhole. They charged ten thousand high-grade spirit stones for a single spatial jump! Families were separated for ten generations because nobody could afford the astronomical fare!”
Master Lu Jian unrolled a second set of technical drawings, pointing at the intricate joints.
“Look at this design,” Lu Jian said proudly. “We are using traditional mortise-and-tenon interlocking joints, carved from living cosmic star-wood. No nails. No artificial glue. The joints expand and contract with natural gravitational waves. Even if a supernova erupts nearby, the bridge arches will merely sway and absorb the kinetic energy.”
