At eight o’clock the next morning, when the fifty thousand Blood-Skull pirates woke up and walked out to Asteroid #001 for morning roll call, every single one of them stopped dead in their tracks and rubbed their eyes.
The entire east face of Asteroid #001—which yesterday had been a hundred-foot cliff of solid, unmined Star-Copper—was gone!
In its place was a neat, flat plaza carved deep into the rock, and stacked beside the conveyor chutes were twenty giant mountains of freshly dug, 90%-pure Star-Copper slabs!
Even stranger, sitting on top of his boulder with a pair of bamboo chopsticks still tucked behind his ear and a tiny drop of dried red-braised pork gravy on the chin of his yellow vest, Captain Mad-Dog Kui had his arms crossed and his eyes closed, pretending he had been meditating all night.
“Whoa! Look at Pit #1!” First Mate Scar-Face Liu gasped in awe. “Who dug ten thousand pounds of Star-Copper in the middle of the night?! Did a Nascent Soul mining spirit visit our rock?!”
Up on the boulder, Mad-Dog Kui cleared his throat loudly and looked away. “Cough! Probably... probably the night wind blew the loose rocks down into the chute. What are you all standing around staring at? Go get your breakfast buns and start swinging! Anyone who doesn’t hit a thousand pounds before lunch is a disgrace to our Blood-Skull name!”
