Bright and early the next morning, a brand-new five-mile-wide industrial wooden barge—Floating Factory Island #11—was towed into place two miles north of the main Warm-Spring Resort by Tie Zhan and Chief Shi Gang’s twin tugboats.
On the deck of Factory Island #11 stood mountains of clear quartz sand shipped from the Red-Sand Wastes of Planet Canglan, fifty thousand tons of freshly harvested Sweet Frost-Berries & Red Tangerines from Green-Sprout Star, and a hundred high-pressure Wind-Qi Compression Tanks forged on Black-Iron Moon.
Boom-Pot Sun walked around the quartz sand piles wearing a white lab coat over his scorched alchemist robes, scratching his frizzy head.
“My Lord,” Boom-Pot Sun said, holding up a ladle of warm ocean water. “The Warm-Spring Medicinal Ocean Water is already safe to drink, and it has three hundred kinds of mild healing herbs in it. Why don’t we just pump it into wooden barrels and ship it back to Canglan as warm herbal tea? Why do we need Wind-Qi tanks and green glass bottles?”
“Because when a blacksmith has been hammering red-hot iron for four hours on Black-Iron Moon, or a farmer has been driving a tractor under the blazing noon sun on Green-Sprout Star, the last thing they want to drink is lukewarm bathwater out of a wooden bucket,” Pei Xuan said with a grin, tapping his glowing blue RTS interface.
