Under the quiet starlight of Dust-Rock Moon, the gray stone slab near Brick Stack #44 lifted all the way up.
Out hopped a petite girl with snow-white hair, round ruby-red eyes, and two fluffy three-foot-long white rabbit ears sticking straight up from the top of her head! She wore a patched tunic woven from dried silver moss and carried a small stone pickaxe on her back.
Behind her, another ten, then a hundred, then three thousand Long-Eared Moon-Rabbits—some looking like teenagers with fluffy cottontails, others like chubby little rabbit elders with long white whiskers—tiptoed out of the hidden underground lava tube!
“Shh! Keep your ears down, everyone!” whispered Chief Bai Rong, the Rank 5 Peak chieftain of the Moon-Rabbit Spirit Tribe, pressing one long white ear against the ground to listen for footsteps. “That scary giant silver spider who used to guard the main crater is asleep over by the iron caterpillars! Look at these stacks of square silver stones the outsiders baked today—they’re super light and harder than star-iron! If every rabbit carries four bricks back into our cave, we can wall up our tunnel entrance so the Spider King can never poke his legs inside again!”
“Chief Sister!” a chubby little rabbit boy whispered back, rubbing his flat belly as his ears drooped over his eyes. “I’m so hungry my stomach is eating my backbone... We only ate half a mouthful of dry gray moss-lichen three days ago, and the last drip of ice-water at the bottom of…
