Midnight chimed on the brass grandfather clock inside Car #1 of Star-Train No. 1, signaling the daily rollover of Pei Xuan’s RTS System.
Feeling the warm surge of sixty-three billion fresh Loyalty Points filling his system reserve, Pei Xuan stepped down onto the gray stone floor of Dust-Rock Moon’s main crater in his crimson Space-Overalls.
Beside the tracks, the newly recruited Rank 7 Silver-Back Moon-Spider King, Yin Si, had just finished stacking all fifty giant spools of gleaming Star-Silver Moon Silk next to two hundred freight cars loaded with heavy Black-Iron Railroad Tracks and Solar Spirit-Gathering Streetlamps.
“Lord Pei, I just finished checking the fuel gauges on Locomotive Number One,” Abacus Su reported through his fishbowl helmet speaker, tapping his golden abacus with a worried frown. “Even with Boom-Pot Sun’s pepper-pill furnace running at peak efficiency, projecting that temporary five-hundred-mile golden Sword-Qi track from the headlights burned eight thousand Spirit Stones on the trip over! If we run twenty commuter trains a day between Dry-Well Capital and the moon, keeping the headlight-tracks running will eat up one hundred and sixty thousand Spirit Stones a day!”
[Su Suanpan (Rank 6 Early) | Loyalty: 99/100] [Thought: One hundred and sixty thousand Spirit Stones a day just to shine headlights into empty space! That’s like paving a road with gold coins and throwing them away every time a cart drives past! We need a permanent bridge right now!]
