At 7:00 AM the next morning, outside the Dry-Well Central Interplanetary Train Station on Planet Canglan, a thousand-foot-long white marble building with a glowing green willow-leaf cross on its roof opened its automatic glass doors for the very first time.
Above the entrance hung a warm golden sign written in Pei Xuan’s own calligraphy:
[DRY-WELL MUNICIPAL PEOPLE’S CLINIC — BRANCH #1] [Mortal or Immortal, Rich or Poor — Swipe Your Citizen Card, Cure Any Illness for 1 Copper Coin!]
Standing outside the glass doors was a huge crowd of ordinary mortal farmers, retired old blacksmiths, and battle-scarred rogue cultivators who had traveled in on the morning commuter trains. None of them dared to step inside first, because for ten thousand years in the cultivation world, “healing halls” and “alchemy pavilions” were places that ate people’s bones without spitting out the skin!
At the front of the crowd stood Old Man Liu, a seventy-year-old mortal wheat farmer from the eastern plains who walked with a heavy limp, leaning on his granddaughter’s shoulder. Next to him stood a one-eyed Rank 5 Foundation Establishment rogue swordsman named Scar-Face Zhao, whose left arm hung limp and withered at his side from an old poison-blade wound he had suffered fifteen years ago.
