By noon the next day, the giant open square outside the Eastern Customs Gate of Dry-Well Metropole was packed with twenty thousand curious citizens, vegetable farmers, and traveling merchants.
On the left side of the square stood the old, gloomy Three-Forks Ancient Teleportation Hall formerly run by the Heavenly-Lock Array Sect. Its dark stone pillars were covered in mossy cracks, and every time the array used to run, it smelled like burnt sulfur and made half the passengers vomit their breakfast from spatial sickness.
On the right side of the square, however, Ye Guhan’s shovel corps had just cleared a gleaming, five-acre concrete plaza.
In the center of the plaza sat stacks of heavy iron boxcar frames from the royal forge, three barrels of low-grade Spatial Storage Rings confiscated from Joyous-Gold Sect elders, and a thick stack of fresh array blueprints drawn by Mo Xiaoliu—who hadn’t slept a wink all night, fueled entirely by three bowls of Old Guo’s crab-roe noodles and pure engineering joy.
“Lord Pei! All calculations are triple-checked!” Mo Xiaoliu ran up with black charcoal smudges on both cheeks, waving a thirty-foot blueprint scroll. “If we wrap the Spatial Storage Ring runes around the outside of the iron boxcar cabin, the cabin itself acts as a sealed pocket-space bubble during the three-second jump! That means passengers sitting inside won’t feel a single breeze of spatial turbulence—not even a bowl of hot soup on their lap will spill a drop!”
