Within fifteen minutes, fifty heavy Scorpion Mining Trucks rumbled up the wide stone avenue of Dry-Well Capital and parked right beside the Star-Gate platform.
Hong Ling hopped off the front bumper of the lead truck, waving an inventory clipboard while hundreds of logistics workers unloaded towering stacks of red-and-white cotton cloth and clinking wooden crates.
“Young Master! Everything is counted and stacked!” Hong Ling reported, tapping her clipboard with a red pencil. “Ten thousand sets of extra-thick Desert Cotton Long Johns—the ones stuffed with three pounds of warm camel wool! Ten thousand Rank 1 Turtle-Shell Breathing Plates from the beginner martial school! And ten thousand round glass goldfish bowls from the Red-Sand Night Market! Total warehouse cost: forty-two Spirit Stones and six copper coins!”
Standing beside the trucks, three former Immortal Sect Artifact Masters—who now worked as supervisors in Dry-Well Capital’s Department of Public Works—stared at the piles of red cotton long johns and glass fishbowls as if their eyeballs were about to fall out of their sockets.
“Lord Pei! Minister Hong!” Master Lu, the former Chief Refiner of the Pill-Fire Sect, hurried forward, his white beard trembling as he pointed at a pair of bright red cotton pants with a buttoned flap in the back. “You... you cannot be serious! The other side of the Star-Gate is the Nine-Heavens Void! Even a Rank 6 Golden Core cultivator’s protective Qi shield will crack in ten minutes under that kind of vacuum pressure and minus-two-hundred-degree star-frost! If you send someone out…
