Ten minutes later, Pei Xuan and his core specialists rode the high-speed vertical elevator back up to the 10,000th-floor orbital observation deck at the very top of the Dry-Well Heaven-Pillar Tower.
Ten miles above the green plains of Planet Canglan, the sky was already dark blue-purple, and the bright silver moon of Canglan hung directly overhead like a giant frosted pancake waiting to be buttered.
Dragged along behind Old Wei by a heavy star-steel chain was Debtor #U-0001 Enforcer Xue Sha, dressed in his glowing neon-yellow vest while clomping awkwardly in Old Yellow’s heavy golden dragon-spit ankle boots.
“Wait a minute!” Xue Sha wheezed, looking over the edge of the 10,000th-floor balcony at the thin upper atmosphere and then up at the silver moon two hundred and forty thousand miles away across the freezing void. “You said we were taking an elevator to the moon! The elevator shaft ends right here at the ten-mile roof! Between here and the moon is two hundred thousand miles of airless outer space filled with cosmic frost, void-radiation, and stray micrometeorites! Without my Blood-Bone Galleon—which your giants already chopped into scrap iron—how are you going to cross outer space?!”
“Who said the elevator ends at the roof?” Pei Xuan asked with a smile, walking over to the central launch spire at the tip of the Heaven-Pillar Tower.
