The next morning on Thunder-Peak Planet, warm golden sunshine poured down through the clear, silent sky onto the three-mile-wide Planetary Rubber-Insulated Coop.
Outside the coop, five hundred Star-Iron Golems were happily loading pallets of freshly charged Brick-Sized Thunder Batteries onto Star-Train No. 1, while Old Guo’s kitchen team stirred giant cauldrons of morning beef-wheat porridge.
Inside the coop, however, a chorus of miserable groans and frantic scratching noises echoed from the perches:
Scratch-scratch-scratch! Rub-rub-rub!
All one hundred thousand Thunder-Feather Storm-Hawks were rubbing their backs and wings against the wooden perches, their eyes droopy and their fluffy purple feathers sticking out at crooked angles.
Up on the central King-Sized Perch, Thunder-Hawk King Lei Zhen had both wings drooped down to his ankles like a wet blanket. He was frantically scratching his neck with his left foot like an itchy hound dog, while letting out weak, pitiful sighs.
“It itches... scratch-scratch... by the Ancestral Roc, why does my whole back itch like ten thousand ants are crawling under my skin?!” Lei Zhen groaned, rubbing his fluffy head against the wooden post. “And my wing-joints feel stiff and rusty! I haven’t gone twenty-four hours without a lightning bath since I hatched from my egg three thousand years ago!”
