For three whole days and three whole nights, Captain Mad-Dog Kui sat on his boulder on top of Asteroid #001 like a stubborn stone statue in a neon-yellow vest.
He didn’t swing his pickaxe once. He didn’t drink a sip of water.
Ordinarily, a Rank 7 Mid Nascent Soul cultivator could go for months without eating mortal food by absorbing ambient Spirit Qi from the air.
However, the black-iron Civic Encouragement Collar around Mad-Dog Kui’s neck had a very special setting designed by Pei Xuan: it completely blocked the wearer from absorbing ambient Qi to fill their stomach, and instead channeled all their body heat into a healthy, fast-working mortal digestive system!
By the evening of Day 4, Mad-Dog Kui’s lips were dry, his vision was swimming with little golden stars, and his stomach was rumbling so loudly that the Moon-Rabbit supervisors fifty feet away thought an asteroid was cracking.
GRUUUUUMBLE—ROOOOAR!
Mad-Dog Kui clutched his belly with both hands and glared down at the mining pit below him. “Hold on, stomach! I am Mad-Dog Kui, the terror of the Broken Star Belt! How can a great pirate captain bow his head for a bowl of prison gruel?! Prison food is always watery cabbage soup with sand at the bottom! I wouldn’t eat it even if they begged me!”
