Two hours beyond Warm-Spring Star, the golden Sword-Qi track of the Sky-Rail ended abruptly at the edge of a chaotic, roaring sea of tumbling rocks.
This was World #5: The Gravel-Yard Asteroid Belt.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a single planet at all, but the shattered remains of an ancient mineral star that had broken apart millions of years ago. Ten thousand massive floating islands of stone and metal—ranging from half a mile to twenty miles wide—spun wildly through a three-hundred-thousand-mile ring of space.
Even from inside the front observation car of Freight Train No. 1, Pei Xuan could see the surface of the tumbling boulders glinting with thick, exposed veins of reddish-gold Star-Copper, blinding white Void-Silver, and glossy black High-Grade Spirit-Coal.
BOOM! CRASH! RUMBLE!
Right outside the window, a three-mile-wide asteroid made of solid Star-Copper slammed head-on into a five-mile mountain of Spirit-Coal, sending a shower of glowing sparks and thousand-ton chunks of ore flying in every direction!
In the prisoner flatcars behind the locomotive, the fifty thousand Blood-Skull pirates pressed their glass fishbowl helmets against the safety rails and turned pale.
“C-Captain!” First Mate Scar-Face Liu whispered, careful not to use a single curse word lest his collar tickle-zap him again. “This is the Gravel-Yard Death Ring! Even in the Broken Star Belt, no mining guild dares to send ships in here! Those ten thousand rocks have wild magnetic cores—they attract and smash into each other like crazy grindstones every five minutes! If we step onto those rocks with…
